Sharing Beauty (Possessing Beauty Book 3)
Page 14
Con and I both laughed as she joined in with her own musical giggle.
Connor grinned down at her with a sly smile. “Well, you’ve definitely taken care of the down payment, babe.”
I slipped my hand up and down her thigh, stroking her supple skin, and Abby looked up into my eyes. “Stay,” I said quietly, swallowing the lump in my chest. I looked over at Connor, who nodded.
“You should stay, baby,” he said, stroking her arms.
Abby turned to look at him before darting her eyes to mine. “For- for how long?”
“For forever,” I said without hesitation. “Stay forever, because honey?” I glanced at Connor before I looked her right in the eye. “I fuckin’ love you. I love you more than anything I’ve ever felt before.”
Her eyes went wide as the flush crept into her cheeks.
“I love you too, Abby - we both do, unconditionally,” Connor murmured, stroking her face with his hands and leaning in to kiss the top of her head. “You don’t have to say a damn thing back, but just say you’ll stay.”
Abby closed her eyes and took a deep breath for single second before she slowly opened them back up. “Okay.”
My jaw dropped. “Okay like you’ll stay?”
She bit her lip. “Okay like I’ll definitely stay, as long as you let me say one more thing.”
“Anything,” Connor growled.
“I love you too - both of you.”
Epilogue
Abby
With River and Jacob, we all had a pretty good idea whose father was whose. River had Jackson’s shocking blue eyes and blonde hair, while Jacob turned out to pretty plainly have his father’s darker hair and complexion. But when Matthew was born, it got a little tougher.
I loved that.
I loved all three of our kids, of course, but it was Matthew - our third - that you really saw the ambiguousness of all three of us, which was perfect. Sure, there were paternity tests, but honestly, it never mattered to any of us after that first night under the desert moon. After that, we were one unit - one family, however different, and however unlike the norm.
So our children were just that - our children, and they were fortunate enough to have two amazing fathers each.
As you may have guessed, I stayed in Parker, and we’ve been here ever since. Anywhere else, and the three of us living who we were out in the open may have caused a lot of problems, but people in Parker were a different sort. Here, people just wanted to be who they were. Plus, despite their outlaw ways, it turned out Connor and Jackson had a bit of a reputation as “Robin Hood” type figures around these parts. Sure, they’d lived outside the law their whole lives, but they never forgot where they came from, or the town that helped them both when they’d found themselves without families too young.
Joe went to prison, and once they found out how high in the food chain he was, they hit him with everything they had. He’s up for parole in about fifty years.
If Con and Jacks had their way, we’d have stayed in that house out in middle of nowhere just fine, but I’d like to think I brought a little civility to the relationship. We weren’t going to move right downtown or anything, but we did find a place not quite so isolated. It even had a three-bay garage, and soon enough, Outlaw Engines became the place in the entire southwest to get a bike tuned up, if you were in the know.
Yeah, my two men turned in their criminal tendencies for a little stability. I never asked them to do that, of course, but I know all three of us had the same idea about where we wanted to be in life.
Besides, behind closed doors, I can assure you that they are both still very very bad.
In the best way you can imagine.
We might not be the model family, or the cookie-cutter mold of what everyone says we should be, but it works. And honestly? Normalcy is for suckers, and I can’t imagine a more perfect happy ending than the one I’ve got with my two outlaws.
The End
Breaking Her Innocence
Breaking Her Innocence
She’s sweet, forbidden, never-been-touched temptation. Now it’s our job to break her.
Johanna
I thought it was just a job - I’d go work on a stranger’s ranch to save my aunt and uncle’s farm.
Except that was a lie, and now I’m a prisoner, being groomed to be sold to whoever can pay.
It all seems lost, until I meet the two men charged with guarding me.
Dominant, gorgeous, and rough - the two rugged cowboys look at me in a way that sends dirty, filthy, forbidden thoughts through my head and heat through places in my body it shouldn’t.
Something about them makes me want to let them take me any way they please, until I’m begging for more.
But I’m their captive, and this is all wrong. I definitely shouldn’t feel this way, and I definitely shouldn’t moan when they put their rough hands all over me.
A good girl like me shouldn’t want them to claim my innocence.
Both of them…
Roman/Colt
She doesn’t belong in a place like this. She’s too sweet, and too good.
Too innocent.
But something about that untouched purity brings out the beast in us, and makes us want to claim her as our own.
It’s our job to guard her. It’s our job to teach her, and train her - make her the perfect plaything for some rich pr*ck when he comes to buy her.
But now that we’ve laid eyes on her, there’s no way we’re giving her up.
Now we’re obsessed, and if we want to save her, we have to break her.
She’s never been touched, but we’re about to put our filthy hands all over her…
Breaking Her Innocence is a quick and filthy book involving two utterly obsessed alpha heroes, one sassy heroine, and enough insta-love, steam, and sugary-sweetness to make your Kindles melt. This mfm romance is all about her – no m/m. If you love over-the-top, slightly unrealistic, and wildly dirty stories, this one’s for you! HEA with NO CHEATING!
Copyright © 2017 Madison Faye
All rights reserved.
Editing: Sennah Tate
Cover: White Rabbit Creative
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations used for review purposes.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organizations, actual events or locales is entirely coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademark status of products referred to in this book and acknowledges that trademarks have been used without permission.
This book is intended for mature, adult audiences only. It contains extremely sexually explicit and graphic scenes and language which may be considered offensive by some readers. This book is strictly intended for those over the age of 18.
All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older. All acts of a sexual nature are completely consensual.
Chapter 1
Johanna
I awoke to the smell of straw and hay. Suddenly, it was all coming back to me, though it’d been near dark when I’d been brought in the night before. I remembered the men coming to collect me at my parent’s farm, my aunt and uncle keeping stoic, forced faces as to not worry my little cousins. I’d known it was coming, and I’d been sitting on the porch steps with my bag ready to go when the pickup truck had rolled up our dusty drive. Sure, I was scared, and I didn’t even really get what was going on even as we drove off — the two dusty cowboys riding in the truck cab, with me sandwiched between two bales of hay in the back of the truck. But, I knew it was something I had to do. I just wished I’d known what it was I was going off to do exactly.
The crops had been doing pretty poorly for a few years, but I guess Uncle Jim just hadn’t let on how bad things had gotten until the bank man came out to give him his final war
ning in person. That’s when my aunt Mary had cried, and I’d hid my little cousins out in the barn and distracted them with hair braiding while my aunt and uncle had the big blowout. That was a rough night. I may have only been nineteen, but I was old enough to know that whatever was up was bad, and that we might have to move.
The man from the farm came the next day, right after breakfast.
I’d been up since first light, doing chores, milking our cow, and tending to the chickens, and I remember peering up and squinting as he drove up the dusty drive. He’d pulled up out front of the house, around the side from where I was working near the barn, and I scampered to the corner of the house to peer around at the stranger who’d come calling so early.
I’d had a bad feeling instantly, feeling my stomach sour and my skin crawl a little just as soon as I’d seen him get out of his truck. He was tall, and broad-shouldered in a way that should have completed that whole dashing cowboy look, especially with the jeans, the boots, and the big ten-gallon hat. But it was that sneer on his face — the way he’d spat in the dirt of the driveway when he’d stepped out. It was the way he’d turned instantly and looked right at me, as if he’d known I was there all along. I shivered — not in a good way — at that mean, smug look on his face.
There were two other men with him, but they stayed in the truck cab, faces obscured by cowboy hats.
I’d not been allowed inside when he and Uncle Jim talked, but as I’d tried to listen from outside the kitchen window, I’d certainly heard my name enough times, along with things like “only temporary,” “only option,” and “owe more than just the bank.” Still, it wasn’t enough to let me know what was up.
Eventually, the kitchen porch door opened, and he stepped out, followed by my uncle, looking ashen-faced.
“So, this must be Johanna!” He’d smiled that dark, cold smile at me, making me shiver again as his eyes wandered over me pretty freely.
“I’ve heard a lot about you Johanna, and I gotta say, you’re every bit of what I’ve been told.” He winked at me, and I felt my stomach knot.
“Jo, this is Mr. Pike, and he has an offer for yo— well, for us. For the family.” Uncle Jim was anxiously looking everywhere but my face as he stammered. “He’s got this fa—”
“I run a farm of sorts, little miss,” the cowboy said, cutting off my uncle. “And you can call me Jeb.”
“A farm?”
He seemed more a cowboy, less an actual working farmer.
“It’s — well it’s a might different that some of the other farms y’all might be familiar with. But honey?” He turned that chilling smile back to me. “Oh, I think it’s going to be a perfect fit for you.”
I frowned, looking at my uncle for answers.
“He wants you to work for him, Jo, and he’s gonna pay us all well for it.”
My eyes went wide.
Uncle Jim was my dad’s half-brother, and I’d been with him and his wife Mary for the last five years, after my parents had died in the car crash. There wasn’t a whole lot of family on either side, and as it turns out, Jim and Mary — as distant and as relatively strangers as they were to me — were the closest thing I’d had to family. They’d taken me in and given me a place to live and grow up after the crash, and in exchange, I worked on their farm and helped take care of my three much younger cousins. It wasn’t the warmest of Hallmark family situations, but it worked, and it’d certainly been better than God knows what I would have done without them. Plus, it kept me in the country, where I’d always been.
I looked at my uncle, my face falling. “You mean, leave here?”
“Tell you what, little lady,” Jeb said in his overly-friendly, yet cold-sounding voice. “What if you were to just come out and try it out? You come on out, be my guest of honor for a few days, and see if it’s for you. If it ain’t, I’ll bring right on back home.” He winked at me, and his eyes momentarily flitted from my face down to the open top button of my plaid shirt.
I shivered, and he winked again.
“I promise.”
I bit my lip, my eyes darting to my uncle, who was carefully looking away.
“But, I’ve got a pretty good notion that you’re gonna love it there. You’re a perfect fit for the place.”
I shifted again under his roaming eyes. Yes, part of it was that I wasn’t used to men looking at me, since I pretty much spent all time way out here on my aunt and uncle’s small farm. But it was also the icy intensity of his gaze — the way it felt like he was sizing me up, like Uncle Jim did when he went to market to buy a new calf or something.
“It’ll let us keep the farm, Jo,” Uncle Jim finally said, his voice stoic. “I mean, Mary and I have done a lot to take you in and all.”
This was the line he and my aunt both used when they wanted me to do something. Like I owed them something, despite being family. I mean, I got that they had helped me out, and that they hadn’t been expecting a fourth kid to look after, but it always felt like they were trying to leverage me or something.
“You really want Karen, Amy, and Susie to have to move away from their home?”
I looked down, feeling my gut twist at the thought of my three little cousins leaving the only place they knew as home.
“Okay,” The word tumbled from my lips before I could even think, and I saw my uncle swallow heavily and exhale slowly.
“Atta girl, little lady.” Jeb grinned broadly at me before turning and clapping my uncle strongly on the shoulder. “Mr. Carson, pleasure doing business with you.”
I frowned. Business?
“We’ll be by in a few days to collect her.”
I started to open my mouth to ask what exactly I was going to be doing for this man, but just then, the truck pulled around to the side of the farmhouse. The engine idled, the doors opened, and suddenly, the two men who I hadn’t really got a look at before stepped out.
Whoa.
You could chalk it up to me being only nineteen. You could say it was because I basically spent all my time out here at my aunt and uncle’s farm, or that with being out here and with all the chores I had, I’d barely spoken to boys, let alone done anything else with them. But whatever you want to blame it on, I know one thing: when those two stepped out of that truck, I felt something like fire course through my whole body.
Every inch of it.
It was the two sets of piercing blue eyes, the two perfect sets of lips set into chiseled, square jaws covered in just enough to stubble to spark something aching inside of me. It was the way I could see arm muscles and broad shoulders and chests ripple and strain beneath plaid work shirts tucked into tight denim jeans.
It was the way both of them just stared at me with this intense, hungry look.
Jeb had looked at me too, but where his eyes had made my skin crawl, these two made my body come alive. I swallowed quickly, sucking my bottom lip between my teeth and feeling my pulse skip a beat.
The two of them just stared, eyes flashing and handsome, chiseled jaws tightening.
“See you in a few days, little miss.”
I pulled my eyes away from them at the sound of Jeb’s voice. The two gorgeous cowboys seemed to also pull away, both of them suddenly kicking their boots against the side of the truck, nodding at my uncle, and getting back into the cab.
Jeb started to turn to walk back to the truck when I cleared my throat.
“Uh, mister? What, uh, what sort of farm is this?”
His smile went wide, his eyes piercing into me like a shark spotting prey before they dipped back down to the open button of my shirt.
“It’s a perfect place for a girl like you. That’s what kind of farm it is.”
And with a final wink, he tipped his hat at me and walked back to his truck, leaving me drowning in questions.
Chapter 2
Johanna
I cleared the dishes after dinner that night, scraping them into the trash while I waited for the hot water in the old sink to heat up. My aunt and uncle had been q
uiet during supper, but I could hear them now in the other room, speaking in hushed but fierce voices. My aunt Mary kept saying it “wasn’t right,” and that this “shouldn’t be on her.” But my uncle was insistent, and I definitely heard the word “money” enough to know what was at stake here.
Besides, what was the harm in going? After all, I’d spent my whole life on a farm — my parents’ one before, and now my aunt and uncle’s place. I’d certainly milked my fair share of cows, and mucked out enough barns, and fed enough chickens to know what I was doing. So, I’d stay a few days at Mr. Pike’s farm and see what it was all about. And yes, this arrangement might’ve been made behind my back and without asking me, but then, I did owe Jim and Mary a lot, and if working for this other man would help them keep their farm, who was I to complain?
Another deeper, darker part of me shivered in giggly excitement, thinking about the two other men from earlier in the day. The two rough-looking and yet totally gorgeous cowboys. I wondered if they worked on the farm too, and felt my face grow hot at the thought as I finished drying the last plate.
I went to bed that night feeling almost like I was buzzing, I was so anxious. I was excited for whatever newness this was, even if I was also more than a little nervous. I’d spent my whole nineteen years pretty isolated — first on my parents’ remote farm, and then the equally isolated farm that my aunt and uncle ran. Schooling had been at the tiny one-room school at the community center in the next town over. College had never actually been on the table, mostly for money reasons, but also because Mary and Jim needed me to work.
So really, this was me stepping out for the first time ever, and that idea both terrified and excited me like nothing else.
As I fidgeted, I slowly began to realize that my nervous excitement was quickly turning into something much more. And I knew why.