by Robin Gideon
Ecstasy in Elk’s Crossing
When Katie Sellers moved from San Francisco to Elk's Crossing, North Dakota, she was leaving behind an abusive relationship, and not looking for anything more exciting than simply a new beginning. What Katie never realized was that small-town cowboys can lead to big-time romance and sizzling sensuality.
Despite the cowboy boots and powerfully broad shoulders, there's a polished charm to Aaron McGowan that the ladies all love. As head of the McGowan clan, he runs a profitable cattle ranch with his three younger brothers, Flynn, Blair, and Garrett. The men all enjoy the innocent flirtation with Katie, the new girl in town, until a simple game leads to romance and seduction, and men who have never had to share find themselves falling in love with the same woman. Meanwhile, the man from Katie's past decides she needs to suffer, just to put her karma in order…
Note: There is no sexual relationship or touching for titillation between or among siblings.
Genre: Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Western/Cowboys
Length: 56,713 words
ECSTASY IN ELK’S CROSSING
Robin Gideon
MENAGE AMOUR
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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ECSTASY IN ELK’S CROSSING
Copyright © 2012 by Robin Gideon
E-book ISBN: 1-61926-551-6
First E-book Publication: April 2012
Cover design by Jinger Heaston
All cover art and logo copyright © 2012 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
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All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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DEDICATION
For Jen, Keith, and Hannah with love.
ECSTASY IN ELK’S CROSSING
ROBIN GIDEON
Copyright © 2012
Chapter One
Elk’s Crossing, North Dakota
Katie Sellers looked at Aaron McGowan and his brothers, and told herself that they’d be nothing but trouble if she was foolish enough to consider them something more than just loyal customers of her grandparents’ saloon. They were all a little too handsome and much too manly to be anything but trouble for a woman fleeing from a man who’d battered her body and broken her heart.
She picked up Aaron’s plate and told herself that he smiled at everyone, not just her, but that didn’t stop her heart from skipping a beat.
“That was delicious,” Aaron said, his tawny, leonine eyes alight with pleasure. “Tell your grandmother she’s all that’s kept the McGowan brothers from starvation.”
Katie laughed softly and replied, “You men provide a hefty chunk of the revenue of the Mountain View Saloon, so it’s a good thing for us that none of you have ever learned to cook.”
“Never had the need to learn.” Aaron leaned back in his chair. His smile was lazy. “First we had Mama cooking for us most days, with your grandma cooking some evenings. When Mama passed away, it just seemed natural to come here for lunch and dinner.”
“How is it four handsome men running a thriving cattle ranch don’t have so much as a single wife among them?” Katie immediately shook her head. “No, don’t answer that.” She felt her cheeks become heated. “I sometimes ask questions that I shouldn’t.”
“You’ve been here how long? About a month now? Seems like in that time we’ve gotten to know each other well enough to ask questions like that.” Aaron turned in his chair slightly to look at his brothers. Katie could tell that all of them were waiting for their older brother’s answer. “It’s not that the McGowans aren’t a romantic lot. Blair fell pretty hard for Betsy Watters, but the instant they got engaged, the first thing she did was start making plans for taking him away from the ranch. The Circle-Square-Circle Ranch needs all four of us if things are going to get done the way they should. Without Blair, we’d have to hire an outsider to take his place, and that just wouldn’t seem right. Besides, Blair and Garrett are twins. They’ve been working side by side and fighting with each other since they were inside Mama’s belly.”
“I’m from San Francisco,” Katie replied. “I’m a city girl through and through, so I’ll have to take your word on what it takes to run a cattle ranch.” She looked at the boys. “Sooner or later they’ll have to split up, won’t they?” She lifted an eyebrow. “Maybe not, I suppose.”
“What about you? Why is a vivacious young woman like you still single? I’d have thought some rich banker would have snapped you up by now.”
Katie felt a warm flush of embarrassment go through her. When her grandfather had fallen and broken his hip, her grandmother had called and asked if she’d help out at the saloon. For Katie, it was all the excuse she needed to leave San Francisco. Arriving in Elk’s Crossing, she’d felt like she’d made a successful escape from prison.
Aaron’s voice was low when he took Katie’s hand, gave it a squeeze, and said, “Hey, there’s nothing that says you’ve got to answer that.”
The heat of Aaron’s hand seemed to go straight into Katie’s blood. She tried to smile, found she couldn’t even fake one, and said, “No. You were honest with me, so I should be honest with you. The truth is that I was in what’s called a long-ter
m relationship, but it went sour. He got very, very possessive, suddenly demanding that I tell him everyone I talk to, everyone I associate with. I was working at a high-end steak house as the lunch hostess, so I greeted people every day.” She eased her hand out from Aaron’s. “But suddenly he accused me of being unfaithful, of flirting, of being a...”
Her words died away. After several seconds, she cleared her throat softly and continued.
“I was in love with him, and I told him as much, but he didn’t believe me. He started showing up at the restaurant, showing up just to keep an eye on me. He’d show up at my apartment at three in the morning, just to make sure that I was alone. I know it sounds incredibly stupid, but I put up with his behavior. I did because I just couldn’t believe how completely he’d changed. I guess I kept hoping he’d return to being the man he was when I first met him.”
“What was the final straw?” Aaron reached out and took her hand again, giving it an affectionate squeeze. “You’re here, so I’m guessing that at some point he had to have gone beyond the pale.”
“He demanded to see my phone. He wanted to read my text messages to see who I’d called. I refused, and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor with an eye that was swelling shut and starting to turn black.” A shiver went through Katie as she remembered the incident. “He said he’d kill me before he let anyone else touch me. That’s when I called the police. The restraining order didn’t faze him. One day he came to the restaurant and slapped me around. That got him arrested, and the judge gave him ninety days in jail. The judge was a woman, and he called her a cunt, right there in court. One of the sheriffs in the court was a woman, and he spit on her then punched her in the face. The judge gave him an additional six months in jail. In less than a year he went from being an investment analyst making a six-figure income to an unemployed convict who had to file bankruptcy.” Tears formed in her eyes, but she willed them away. “The first day out of jail, he showed up at the steak house. He said that it was all my fault he’d lost everything, and that he was going to make me pay for destroying him. I looked in his eyes, and I knew that the man was totally insane. If I stayed in San Francisco, he’d kill me. But that first night he was out of jail, my grandmother called and asked if I could help out here while my grandfather recovered. I was in my car and driving out of the city that night.”
“If any man ever raises a hand to you,” Aaron said quietly, “he’ll answer to me.”
“And me,” Blair chimed in.
“And all of us,” Flynn said quickly.
The brothers nodded and voiced their agreement with Flynn’s declaration.
Katie looked away, fighting against the tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks.
“I could kiss each and every one of you,” Katie said softly. “There isn’t a one of you that doesn’t impress me more than you can imagine.”
“Kissing? At last this conversation has taken a rather pleasing turn for the better,” Aaron replied, his grin roguish. He squeezed Katie’s hand again. “But there’s no need for you to worry about my brothers. Kissing me should be your first and foremost concern.”
“That statement would have more validity,” Katie replied, “if you didn’t spend so much time kissing other women.”
Aaron put his hand over his heart in theatrical sincerity. “But that’s only because you’ve never kissed me.”
“You’re handsome as sin, and I’ll grant that you and your brothers are awfully tempting, but at this stage of my life, men are on my list of things I need to avoid. Avoid like the plague.”
From behind the bar, standing near the grill where all the food was cooked, Katie’s grandmother called out, “Order up!”
Katie was grateful for the interruption. She hadn’t intended on sharing her heart with the McGowan brothers. For the past month, they’d been talking, flirting a little, and sometimes flirting a lot. But it had always been light banter between them. Never had either side opened up so much.
She started to leave, but Aaron caught her apron, stopping her.
“If you said that all I had to do to get a kiss from you was stop the earth from spinning, I’d do it.” His lips curled into a half smile, and his tawny eyes sparkled. “And I’m sure that every one of my brothers feels exactly the same way. We all adore you.”
“You’re a flatterer,” Katie replied, tugging free her apron from his large, callused hand. “I’ll admit, it does this woman’s bruised ego a world of good.” She cleared her throat. “My heart skips a beat every time you touch me. But I’ve got to be honest with you, holding my hand is as far as anything’s going to go. Once you’ve been a man’s punching bag, you start looking at all men very carefully.”
* * * *
Two hours later, sitting in a saddle he’d had for more than a decade, Aaron was looking at a herd of nearly four hundred prime Angus cattle, though all his thoughts were of a voluptuous blonde in her midtwenties who had recently moved to Elk’s Crossing. She was the one with the infectious smile that, just seeing it, made a grown man feel like a teenager. And at the age of thirty-two, Aaron didn’t particularly like feeling so young and naive.
Blair, on his buckskin quarter horse named Jupiter, cantered over and came to a stop. He pushed his sweat-stained Stetson back on his head, gave his brother a smile, and said, “How long have you been thinking about Katie?”
“Is it that obvious?” Aaron wasn’t thrilled to know that his thoughts were so easy to read, especially from a distance.
“Uh-huh. I practically had to tie the boys into their saddles to keep them from floating away.”
“A little light-headed, were they?”
“That’s the understatement of a lifetime. They think the sun rises and sets on Katie.”
“The boys” were Garrett and Flynn, the youngest of the McGowan brothers, and twins. The first time they had seen Katie at the Mountain View Saloon, she had been wearing a white silk blouse with a black skirt, stockings, and high-heels. She’d smiled at them in welcoming, and both young men had simply stopped dead in their tracks and stared at her. The blouse had been modest enough, perfect attire for a hostess at a high-end steak house in San Francisco. But in Elk’s Crossing, North Dakota, to unexpectedly see such a voluptuous woman in a silk blouse had quite taken the breath away from the two twenty-one-year-olds.
“How angry did you get,” Aaron asked, “when she said some guy used her for his personal punching bag?”
“It would have been a real bad time to get my blood pressure checked.”
Aaron took his hat off and combed his fingers through his auburn hair. “About the first lesson I can ever remember Papa giving us was to always show respect to Mama, and never to lift a hand against her or any other woman.” Aaron felt a clenching in his stomach and a sudden pounding in his temples, which he quickly willed away. It wouldn’t do him any good to get furious about an injustice he had been powerless to prevent. “She pretty much lights up the whole room when she smiles, doesn’t she?”
“That she does, big brother. That she does.”
* * * *
David Haynes stood outside the apartment building waiting for one of the tenants to enter. He had been unable to slip past the security system, but maybe someone would recognize him and let him in. It hadn’t always been dreadful with Katie. In their early days, she’d made him quite happy.
But as he stood in the doorway across the street, avoiding the light, drizzling rain, David felt the anger welling up inside him once again. Things had been good, but only at first. Katie had said she loved him. He had a high-paying job as an investment analyst at one of the more prestigious financial firms in the city, and his future looked to be an unending series of successes.
Then Katie changed. She got independent and forgot her place in their relationship. She never should have gone to the cops because he had every right in the world to straighten her out.
First there was the restraining order. What a joke that had been! No goddamned judge was go
ing to tell David where he could go or who he could see. If he wanted to talk to Katie, how was that any business of the court?
David closed his eyes and tried to forget about those moments in the courtroom, when it was announced that he was now a felon in the State of California, and that, though most of his sentence was being suspended, he’d still spend months behind bars.
The rest seemed to have happened so fast he could hardly fathom it. Some dumb-ass clause in his contract allowed his boss at the financial firm to give him the boot out the door. David had always been a high flyer, a man who made a lot of money, but he spent a lot of money, too. Having lost his six-figure income, and being unable to earn anything behind bars, he lost his condo and his Porsche.
And to make matters worse, all his so-called friends sided with Katie against him.
To hell with all of them. David pressed himself a little tighter against the building to avoid the drizzle. It’s Katie’s fault. I had money, friends, a great job, a hot car. I was at the top of my game. I had it all. Then she took it from me. She’s going to pay for that. I’ve got every right in the world to make her pay. Every right in the world.
From the apartment building, a young couple got halfway out the door. They were laughing and kissing playfully. Apparently the young woman was saying good-bye to the young man, but neither wanted to be the first to turn away. David hurried across the street, being as unobtrusive as possible.
“Don’t mind me,” David said as he slipped past the couple and into the building.