It had been a week since our very public outing as a quad, and as expected, it had kicked off most of the gossip and bullshit again. We weren’t blindsided by it this time, though. We rode it out. I threatened to pull the company's sponsorship from the IceCaps, which wasn’t a whole lot of money to someone like Monderra, but his board of directors saw it differently. The guys stood their ground against the coaches and the exec team, and their teammates backed them up, under the urging of Ludo and Muss.

We didn’t open our phones, or social media, or even turn on the television for a week. We just enjoyed each other's company, and that of Rigby’s parents, for the full week. Every night, one of us would return with Nova to her apartment, and make love to her all night.

I was so fucking happy; tonight was my turn, and I had so many things planned. I was going to woo the hell out of Nova Stone.

I got the brief report from my public relations team, whose job it was to keep me apprised of the general vibe of the drama and let me know if I needed to step in. The lawyers had been working overtime sending cease and desist letters. In my opinion, the amount of extra money I was spending in overtime and billing hours was money well spent. It was an investment in happiness, and they were the best kinds of investments.

My time got lost in numbers and bottom lines, and all too soon, my 10 a.m. appointment was here. Daria strolled in, waggling her eyebrows at Tom as if she’d personally love to devour him like a black widow spider.

“Stop eye-fucking my personal assistant, Daria, and come in. Tom, can you grab Daria a drink? Water? Soda? Coffee?”

“Double-shot espresso. Black. Like my heart,” she cooed at him, and he visibly gulped before nodding and scurrying away. Yeah, Tom had some self-preservation skills.

“Don’t scare the poor kid,” I chastised, though it amused the hell out of me. Daria was an interesting character. She was Middle Eastern, I think, her skin golden like warm sand but her hair a wild halo of curls that she didn’t even try to tame. Nope, like her, she didn’t try and make it anything else. You either accepted her how she was, or you got the fuck out of the way. I could respect that.

And arguably, she was beautiful. In another time, she might have been a fertility idol, all wild hourglass curves, pouty lips, and soft freckles across her nose. She wasn’t the socially accepted standard of beauty, but I’d once seen a man trip over a barstool when she bent down to tie up the laces on her Doc Martins, allowing the thigh-high split of her long, tight black skirt to show a little more thigh than intended.