Thomas jerked. “You kissed her?”
Zach sneered at him. “Scream it louder, why don’t you?”
“What the fuck have you guys been doing?” Thomas demanded, collapsing into the chair beside Zach. “This is her first goddamn day, and you two are angling for a class-action lawsuit.” His words seemed to echo around us. “Seriously?” he pressed. “What the hell is going on? How many beautiful women have we worked with over the years? This has never been a problem before.”
Shame curdled in my stomach. He was right, of course. We’d all worked with an attractive woman from time to time, and it had never been a problem to not notice it. Sure, I might think about that woman later, at home, but work was the best set of blinders.
But knowing how Alex feels beneath me? To know how her mouth tastes? I couldn’t stop thinking about it. When I walked into Thomas’s office and saw her, a literal shock went through me. “Alex and I slept together before she ever interviewed for the firm,” I said. “We haven’t shared a dozen words or more since then.”
Thomas scoffed. “Yeah, because barely being able to look at her is just fine.”
I flipped him off and then looked at Zach. “Did you tell him what you told me?”
Zach shook his head. “I didn’t want anyone to overhear,” he said. “Alex told me that she has feelings for more than one man who works here. I made the assumption that it’s Jake, me, and you.” His eyes flicked over to Thomas. “I would have thought Trevor, but I watched him hit on her in the breakroom, and she looked like her skin was going to crawl off.”
Thomas sneered. “Trevorhit on her? He’s so fired.”
“She doesn’t want him fired,” Zach said. “Just put the fear of God in him.”
“Done.”
I wanted to punch something. “So, what are we going to do about this?” I demanded, pulling their focus back to the topic at hand.
“What can we do?” Zach asked. “Fight over her? Make her feel even worse?”
I hadn’t told them about Ryan’s family situation. They knew he’d gotten married, but not that there were four grooms to one bride. Granted, I wasn’t sure how it all worked. When Ryan had told me, I was pretty skeptical about it. What man wanted to share his woman? How did they take turns?
But the idea of fighting Zach and Thomas over Alex, like she was some kind of prize to be won, made my stomach twist horribly. “There’s another option,” I said.
They turned to me. “I don’t think outright ignoring her is going to go well for any of us,” Thomas said. “It would be the smartest damn thing we could do because if anyone knew we were even having this conversation, we’d all be up for disciplinary action, but I am a weak man, and I acknowledge that about myself.”
I shook my head. “That’s not what I meant.”How the fuck am I going to say this right?“When Ryan got married, he wasn’t the only groom.”
“I thought Ryan was straight?” Thomas asked.
“He is,” I said. “He and Tinsley knew each other from college, and they reconnected on the movie set, but he wasn’t the only one in her life. He and three other men from the set share her, basically. As far as I know, they aren’t romantic with each other, just her.”
Zach’s forehead wrinkled. “How the hell would that even work?” he asked. “How do they not get jealous?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It wasn’t something that Ryan had broken down for me.
“Do they date other women?” Thomas asked.
I shook my head. “As far as I can tell, no.”
“Would you honestly want to be with anyone besides Alex?” Zach lobbed at him, almost accusingly. “If you had the chance to touch her, would you want to touch anyone else?”
“No,” Thomas spat at him. “Of course not, but how the fuck would that work? Would you honestly be okay with one of us taking her home at the end of a date and excluding you? I’m not sure I could handle that.”
I wasn’t sure that I could, either. In the past, I had been accused of being possessive and jealous, all the ugly things that could come from love. The nature of my job also kept me busy most of the time, and I had been accused of not being present enough in a relationship, so to be jealous but also not present had driven many potential great loves from my life. Maybe it was time for something different.
“How much time per week could you dedicate to a relationship?” I asked.
That stopped whatever squabbling Thomas and Zach were doing. “You can’t treat a relationship like a job,” Thomas scoffed.
“Seriously,” I said, “how many times have you been broken up with because your job came first? What woman wants to be told that a career takes precedent?”
Zach’s face twisted at that, and I knew my words had hit the mark. Of the three of us, I had the more high-profile clients, but Zach usually had a larger volume of clients. He was the first one in the office, and he was usually the last one to leave at night, and I knew that his relationships in the past had suffered to the point that he hadn’t mentioned a woman in years. The fact that he’d kissed Alex was huge. She meant something to him, even if he didn’t know exactly what yet. “So, between the three of us, we would be one good boyfriend for her?” Thomas asked, ever the smartass.