Three Men and a Woman: Evangeline (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (6 page)

He gave her a couple breaths. Knowing he waited, she opened her eyes to him. Watching her intently, he slid his hand down her leg until he reached her foot where she’d dug it into the bed at his side so she could whale away on his cock. He grasped her, bringing her leg up and resting the sole of her foot on his chest.

He had her spread then, unbearably open to him. He lay toward one side, his hip pressed into her other thigh, securing her there with his weight. Leaning in with his shoulder, he pushed her leg higher, making her open even further.

In the center, he had her impaled, unable to move. He circled his arm around her thigh and took hold of her nipple.

Those green eyes burned hot, his expression harsh. “I have you now, don’t I?”

“Yes.”

He liked that—her quick submission. “You’re mine.”

“Yes.” She always had been. Always.

“You want me to fuck you.”

“Yes.” This time she said it out loud. “Always.”

He flexed his hips, grinding harder into her. She knew he was about to fuck her and that it would be wild, beyond anything he’d done to her so far.

But she couldn’t help it. Even just that one motion had her coming. She was so filled with him, so stretched and taken by him. She fought against it, her breath hitching out, trying to suppress the spasms.

She couldn’t stop it, and he knew immediately what was happening. He growled in feral victory and started fucking her. He slammed into her, deep, hard strokes that lifted her up off the bed, bringing her up so he could fill her even more. His hand jerked with each thrust, pulling at her nipple. He tightened his grip to keep hold.

She screamed, arching back into the bed, lost to it. She was barely aware, except to know that he owned her, drove her. He fucked her harder and harder, grasping and clutching at her, more and more, until he was coming, too. Until he roared and seized, spilling into her with hard, wrenching jerks of his cock.

He let her leg down and fell over her. He had his weight on his elbows, his hands holding her head. Fiercely, he gazed into her eyes, even as he struggled for air with harsh, panting breaths.

“Evvie,” he finally said. “Evvie. Jesus God.”

He lifted off her as his breath slowed, went to her side, and curled her against him. He pulled the covers up over them both, wrapping her in warmth and the night, the doors still open to the terrace.

His face nuzzled into her head, his breath in her hair. “I have to fly to Scotland in the morning, Evvie girl.” His voice was soft, sleepy.

“I know.”

“Come with me.”

“No.”

She wasn’t sure he heard her answer. He was already asleep. And in the morning, she left before he woke.

Evangeline had a wedding to go to in Cartersville, of all places. She’d meant to be home the previous evening, with only a couple hours’ drive to make on Saturday afternoon. As it turned out, home was more than five hours away. She’d have time for only a quick stop there to change clothes and pack an overnight bag.

But she could in no way regret the turn of events that had kept her from home last night. Not in the least little bit. And she enjoyed the ride as she drove up the Hudson, through the Sleepy Hollow area of the Catskills and then west, along the Mohawk River. The lush countryside was pretty with the fresh green of spring. Peaceful. Calming.

She generally didn’t have many quiet moments in her days to contemplate her life. She had time for it now, appropriately. She was headed to her childhood home—that site of soul-crushing misery tempered by salvation in the form of four young boys. With one of whom—in his adult, extremely manly form—she’d just fucked the night away.

Not to put too fine a point on it.

She thought of them now—scruffy, sweaty, seven years old.

Her boys. Evangeline loved them so. She always had. They’d saved her, truly. Even in that last year of high school when she’d never seen them, or in the years since Shepherd’s funeral, she still loved them.

And they still saved her. They’d given her her first hope, her first sense of self as something other than a nuisance, a burden. A sense of herself as someone valuable—loving and loved, bright and worth something. The foundation that grounded her even now had come from them.

They’d given her family, more than they would ever know.

She accepted, of course, that Shepherd had forced the three of them into it. They’d have disdained her in their careless way as a baby and a girl. But they loved Shepherd, just as she had, and would do anything for him. And once she was one of them, she was theirs.

She loved them all. She’d fondly watched Briggs’s career, not the least surprised that he published his first novel while still in college and was now both critically and popularly adored. She knew he spent a lot of time in Hollywood these days working on screenplays for his first space fantasy series. She expected blockbusters and even more fame and fortune for him.

Giovanni had finished college on the hockey scholarship Shepherd had always wanted for him. But his calling was to the skies, ever since his first job as a hangar boy pumping gas and washing planes at the little local airport. He was an airline pilot now, she knew, transoceanic.

Chase had surprised no one except his own family by going on to medical school. She knew he’d done his residency at Penn in emergency medicine.

She hadn’t kept close tabs on them, but she’d always known where they were.

Her life had been full in the years since Shepherd’s funeral—busy and happy. But she hadn’t been with a man, hadn’t even had a date since that night.

Because she was already in love—with them.

She didn’t need to see them or be with them. She just needed to know they were there, sharing the same world with her.

She had to admit that would be harder now, after the extraordinary night she’d just spent. Having a real, living man in her arms, in her body, had been astonishingly different than just holding the memory of them in her heart.

She would add this new memory and make sure it was enough. She would have to. She wouldn’t see Briggs again.

She hadn’t expected to see any of them again after the night of Shepherd’s funeral. The hours she’d spent with Briggs were moments out of time. Something she would have and hold, close in her heart, but not a part of her real life.

As anticipated, her home was empty and quiet when she took the long drive up to the old farmhouse. Her heels—dropped alongside her cell phone on the shotgun seat next to her for the long road trip—echoed on the hardwood floors. She showered and dressed for the wedding, putting away the fuchsia silk for some future occasion she couldn’t even imagine. She’d bought it specifically for the awards ceremony. Working from home, her usual wardrobe consisted of worn blue jeans and tees.

She pulled another seldom-used item of clothing from the back of her closet—an evening dress of silver lace. It was short and tight fitting, revealing the shimmery satin slip underneath. She packed toiletries and casual clothes for Sunday. The wedding was to be held at a golf resort on Lake Ontario. She had a room so she could sleep there after the reception, attend the wedding brunch provided in the morning, and then drive home.

She would stop in Rochester on her way back. She’d meant to do it today, before the wedding, but had run out of time now. Miss Victory’s sister, Aunt Winona, had been moved from assisted living to inpatient hospice. She’d promised the Victory family she would visit.

She slipped her feet into comfortable sandals for the drive, then grabbed her bag and the spike-heeled, strappy silver sandals she’d wear for the wedding. She might be willing to make the sacrifice to look good when the occasion called for it, but she had no one to impress on the car ride.

As she drove, she thought again of her childhood. The tiny, decrepit trailer with a single bed her mother shared with her—or not, on the frequent occasions a man took her place. There were so many of them, spending a night or a week, seldom so much as a month, that the trailer took on the scent of them. Not any particular man, but a mishmash of male odor—sweat and deodorant, beer and whiskey, and the nauseating overlay of cheap cologne that was meant to cover it all.

Evangeline got an occasional postcard from her mother, a strange anachronism in the day of electronic communication. It seemed that Fancy just took a notion sometimes, making a random connection to her daughter. She traveled about, never settling in any one place. And once in a while, apparently, a cheap postcard brought her daughter to mind.

Over time, it had become a little easier to look at Fancy sympathetically. She’d been a child herself, just seventeen when she’d given birth. She’d spent her pregnancy in a county home for teen mothers—the only thing, Evangeline imagined, that saved her fetal self from the harm of alcohol.

Then Fancy had been on her own, raising a baby when she could hardly care for herself, depending on booze to get through her day, sharing the meager favors of her body for another bottle or help toward the rent.

Evangeline could no longer hold against her mother the limitations of the person she was, the abysmal failure she was as a parent. She could only be thankful—and she was, to her bones—for that single flash of light she’d seen when she was six. Sitting on her front step, trying very hard not to hear the ugly sounds of mean sex going on inside the trailer, she saw it. Like a bright ray from heaven. Salvation.

* * * *

Giovanni Diorio leaned against a pillar on the back terrace of the somewhat pretentious, swank old clubhouse and smiled. His night had just gotten a whole lot more interesting.

He seldom came back to Cartersville anymore. It had been divorce that took him there as a kid. His ma had given up on his dad and escaped to a brother who’d left Brooklyn a decade before and had a decently successful construction company near Buffalo.

His dad had been no bargain, though better as a father than as a husband. Gio had loved him, and Pop had loved Gio best. But for his mother, who’d grown up as the princess of her family, there was no living with a man whose inclination to stray became just too obvious. For his father, there was no living with her. It turned out princesses didn’t make great wives. Gio didn’t think his mother cared all that much about her husband’s wandering eye, but she needed to be able to hold her head up in church.

Gio’s younger brother worked with their uncle in the construction firm and then drank beer in front of ESPN. Their sister Iz had married and was raising a couple kids, two boys he liked okay. But Izzy was like their mother, ever angry about losing the princess status she’d had as a girl.

He’d remember that, if the time ever came. Raise no princesses. Don’t marry one, either.

His ma was a great cook and loved all her children, but she’d never accepted that Gio spent time with his dad in New York. All in all, the whole crew in Cartersville were a cranky, unhappy bunch. A couple good homemade meals just weren’t worth it.

He’d determined that a single phone call a week would have to keep his mother satisfied. When he showed up at the house, like he had last night, things inevitably ended in tears and bitter regret.

This morning, in the accusatory silence of his mother’s home, he’d made a call and found a room at the resort for the night. He’d go to his cousin’s wedding—he hardly liked the bastard, but his schedule had the opening, and he hadn’t had the sense to say no to the invitation. At the reception, he’d have as many beers as he wanted, which wasn’t so many these days, as the short high just wasn’t worth waking up not at his best.

How often did it happen that he didn’t care if he felt like shit when he woke up? He liked his life now. He’d worked hard to get it that way. He didn’t want to go through it drunk or hungover, unlike most of the family he’d see today.

After a couple cold ones, he’d have a quiet night to himself and head to Buffalo Niagara in the morning. He had a redeye out of JFK that night.

He hadn’t really known the bride. She’d been a year behind him in school. Evvie’s age, in fact.

Which explained—

He hadn’t seen her at the ceremony itself. He’d hung toward the back, not big on all the pomp that went along with the rituals of a big wedding. He figured the marriage to be a short-lived one in any case. Unless the bride really did care for a bully and a drunk.

But here, at the reception out on the terrace facing the lake, with music from the dance floor that had been laid under a gaily decorated tent, he’d spotted her. Just a glimpse at first—a flash of silver and that sleek, black hair. His heart had recognized her even before his brain and had given him a jolt. He felt a sudden pleasure, warm and pure and—

Not so pure. She was freaking hot. She was walking back up from viewing the lake, chatting with a small group of women who’d likely been in her class. He didn’t recognize any of them.

Evvie was the standout. She managed the grassy terrain in those ridiculous, absolutely stupendous fuck-me heels she wore, striding along swaying her curvy hips. Her dress fit tightly, and a little vee formed as her thighs moved with each step, right at her—

Jesus God.

She had beautiful breasts, too, nicely displayed by the low cut of her dress and the tiny straps that held it up, against gravity and all odds.