Ro knew that anal sex was the new black, but she’d never been tempted to try it. And now, all signs pointed to her losing her last bastion of virginity in short order. With not one, but two men. Holy fucking hell. Go big or go home.
After what had happened on the couch, neither man could seem to resist the urge to touch her. Their collective hands had carefully redressed her, and Zach had swept her up into his arms and strode out of the cabin. When she’d protested, Graham had smacked her ass. A blond man, who Ro hadn’t yet met, had been walking by at that moment. Ro’s knee-jerk reaction had been embarrassment, but she quashed it ruthlessly and shot him a look that’d said, eat your heart out, asshole. At least she hoped that was what the look had said. Because, dammit, if she was woman enough to participate in a ménage, then she was going to own that shit. Graham had caught the look and given her a quick—approving?—kiss before striding off.
A few minutes later, she was seated in the mess hall and enduring good-natured ribbing from Alex and Jamie about “The Great Escape.” Apparently her stunt had required Alex to dust off his underwater welding skills, because Graham had ordered grates to be welded beneath the wall to block the entrance and exit via the stream. Ro was apologetic, but was assured that it was better to discover any hole in security now rather than finding out about it—potentially with much more dangerous consequences—later.
After lunch, which had consisted of five-alarm chili and jalape?o cornbread made by one of the guys, her next stop—via Zach’s piggyback ride—was the central command post, where Graham was taking a shift. Zach was off to take his shift on fire watch, and she was hanging with Graham. It seemed that Graham and Zach had made the decision that she would be with one of them at all times. Before he’d left, Zach had leaned in for a kiss and whispered, “Don’t forget, I have first dibs on this sinful mouth of yours later.”
Ro had turned crimson. Zach was definitely no beta.
Conversation with Graham had focused on security protocols of the ranch. Now that she wasn’t trying to escape, he wanted her to understand all of the systems and procedures keeping her and the other residents safe.
“So, wait, how did you know I was coming?” Ro asked.
“We’ve got a few different types of perimeter sensors set up. One of which you tripped.” Graham pointed to a map on the wall. “This is the wall surrounding the inner compound, and this is the outer fence. Outside the fence we have sensors that are set into the ground and detect vibration.” Anticipating her question, he said, “The sensors are set to only go off if the vibration corresponds to a weight that’s heavy enough to be a person.”
“Did you have those set up before? Or did you set them up after the grid went down?”
“After. All of our electronics, or duplicates in the case of the electronics that we used on a daily basis, were locked down in one of the bunkers. They were protected so that an EMP wouldn’t fry them.”
Faraday cages, Ro would bet. Her dad had an entire room in their basement at home lined in aluminum that sealed when you shut the door. In the event of an electromagnetic pulse, the metal skin lining the room would shield the contents from the pulse of energy that blew out unprotected electronics. But Faraday cages weren’t commonplace.
Ro narrowed her gaze on Graham. “That’s not exactly normal, you know. Who got bit with the Doomsday Prepper bug?”
Graham laughed, although it sounded forced. “When you’ve seen what we’ve seen and trained for the things we did, you don’t think in terms of Plan A and Plan B. We’re more into planning for contingencies C-Z.” When he didn’t elaborate, Ro wanted to push, but a glance at his grim features stopped her.
She looked toward the map.
“You said there was more than one perimeter?”
“Yeah, there’s a second perimeter along the outside of the fence line. Those are your standard run-of-the-mill laser sensors. If the beam is broken, it sounds the alarm in here.”
“How do you know where someone broke the beam?”
“We’ve got each side set up as a series of shorter beams. Each beam corresponds to a section of the map.”
“So why bother with fire watch if you’ve got all of these sensors set up? Isn’t that just a waste of manpower?”
“There’s no substitute for two eyes and a gun.”
“Don’t you have a lot of false alarms? Animals breaking the beams?” Ro asked.
“Not as many as you’d think. The beam runs parallel to the fence, only about an inch beyond it. An animal would have to ram the fence to break the beam.”
Graham pointed out the gates that had been set into the fence line, as well as routes taken by the guys on fire watch, which differed during a day shift versus a night shift, and the treestands that doubled as watch posts.