Here's what I'm thinking....
The 2 chaps in the USA could easily link to a hosted pbx such as offered by either link2voip or voipstreet. Either company can provide you the DIDs you need and host a pbx in their datacenter for a relatively low monthly rate. Your employees in the USA can simply point their phones to the pbx and it will be like they're in the same office.
Depending on what you have for a pbx in the UK (if you have one) you may be able to link it to the USA pbx via SIP. This would allow all your employees to be local extensions to each other. Link2voip does offer DIDs in the UK so they might work for you but you might be better off with a UK company for those. You could also consider installing an Asterisk based PBX in your UK office and linking the USA DIDs and phones directly to that location but it would increase the latency on the calls.
As far as hardware goes I've dealt both with aavoip.com and with voipsupply.com among others but I'd recommend either of these. I would suggest going with fairly decent phones. Polycom has a nice product but they can be difficult to get working behind firewalls. We've had good luck with the better Aastra phones.