Three Men and a Woman: Haidee (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)

by Rachel Billings

  She stiffened up like a nun, met his gaze good and hard, and then turned and walked away. She went upstairs but was back in, like, two minutes, hardly enough for his temper—or his cock—to cool. He tried to keep his attention on the dishes, but he had to look. And then, he had to laugh. Or at least, bite his cheek hard to avoid it.

  She wore another pair of Danny’s sweats, a pair she hadn’t taken a scissors to. They apparently were his change-the-oil-in-his-Wrangler and toy-with-his-Scout’s-engine pair, all grease-stained and torn. Though it went without saying his brother never filled them out in exactly that way. She also had Danny’s college hoodie on, which really fit her no-way, no-how.

  He tried to scowl, but he thought it might have come out as a pained smile. He stepped back from the sink but kept his hands locked on it, his head hanging, and tried to force his dick to stand down. After a couple breaths, he turned his head to look at her again. “If you don’t run right now, I’m going to kiss you.”

  “I’m not going to run—”

  That was as far as she got before he lifted, turned to face her, and took a step.

  She stopped him with a stiff arm planted firmly on his chest. “I’m going for a walk,” she said in what she probably thought was a stern voice. “I was going to invite you—”

  “Yes,” he said, stopping her.

  She eyed him for a minute, just like she knew she was facing that caged tiger. After a bit, she lifted her hand an inch off his chest. When he didn’t move, she dropped it and stepped back. “Okay.”

  “We can stick to the road if you want. If you’d like me to show you a trail along the rims and up to the top, you should change into your boots.”

  He thought she’d be tempted, and he was right. “Are you sure you’re up for it?”

  “Yes,” he said again. “Are you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll get my boots.”

  “You can wear what you want,” he allowed. “But you should keep your legs covered—it’s pretty rough up there.”

  She nodded and turned to go back upstairs. He’d already planned a hike, so he was dressed for it. He was filling water bottles at the sink when she came back. She’d changed to a pair of Prana hiking pants and wore light Smartwool socks on her feet. She had a pair of boots in her hand—brand new ones.

  She gestured to them. “These aren’t my boots.”

  He gave them a glance but kept working on the second water bottle. “They’re your new ones.”

  “They’re exactly the same as my old ones.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He’d made a point of it. They were high end, good boots, and he’d fucking had to drive to Bozeman to get them. “Except for the burns and the blood.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  Good. She’d known he’d done it, not Danya or Lev. He dried his hands and faced her. “I went shopping.” She wouldn’t necessarily get that was a thing he normally avoided.

  “I know how much these cost.”

  So did he. “If you try to give me money, I’ll burn it.”

  She seemed to believe him. She took a deep breath. He could see what that did to her breasts, since she’d changed out of Danya’s hoodie into a fitted, long-sleeved tee. Working hard, he kept his gaze mostly on her eyes. “Thank you,” she said, pretty soberly.

  He nodded. She hopped up onto a stool to put them on. When she worked the first one onto her foot, he lifted it to rest on his upper thigh and tied the laces for her. Their gazes met when he finished the second one. “Good?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  They hung their water bottles on their belts and went out. They picked up the trail off the corner of the driveway, and she let him hold her hand until the way became too narrow for them to walk side-by-side. He took it easy at first, but she was in good shape and her burns didn’t seem to bother her, so he moved to a pretty good pace. They went along the base of the rims for a couple miles to a bit of a gully where sandstone boulders had tumbled down, leaving a way to clamber up to the top.

  He reached to give her a hand over the worst of it, but she backed him off. She might have been concerned about his injuries, but he figured she was an independent sort regardless.

  They rested and hydrated up top, quietly enjoying the view. He pointed out the surrounding landmarks. “South Hills over there,” he gestured. “The Indian Caves are there, with pictographs a couple thousand years old.” He pointed further west. “Those are the Beartooths, with Granite Peak, where you went with Lev, and Froze-to-Death Mountain.”

  They sat close enough that their shoulders touched when he gestured again. “Straight south are the Pryors. There’s a wild horse preserve that’s kind of famous, and the Bighorn Canyon, and a bunch of cool ice caves. From Dry Head Lookout, you can see half of Wyoming, including Medicine Wheel Mountain. The natives called the Pryors Hitting Rock Mountains, because there’s a lot of flint they chipped into arrowheads. The Crows believe there was a tribe of Little People who lived there, eighteen inches tall.”

  Vashi became aware Haidee was watching him more than looking where he pointed. He shut up and looked back at her. She was pretty good competition for the view, but there was something going on in her head. He lifted a brow, and for some reason that made her smile.

  “You guys love this land, all three of you.”

  He shrugged, willing to follow whatever conversation she was comfortable with, and just happy that their shoulders still touched. “Well, we fly over it a lot. And our dad took us out when we were young. He spent a lot of time with us.” He looked off to the Pryors again, remembering the black cold of one of the ice caves Matsin took them into. “Probably he wouldn’t have,” he went on, coming back to the present, “if his wife had given him sons. But, by the time I was born, five years after his second daughter, it seemed clear, I guess, that wasn’t going to happen. So he gave us his name and treated us as though we were his legit sons.”

  “You are his legit sons.”

  He smiled a little. “Not legitimate.”

  “Was that hard for you?”

  He suppressed a shrug this time, but was aware of her touch anyway. “Well, we had our mom, which was by far the better part of the deal. And we had each other.” He looked at her. “We’re tight, you might have noticed.”

  She didn’t take that bait. “You’re in business with your father.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a bit of a sigh. “There is that. But it was my grandmother who taught me to fly, who taught all of us. The business was hers, too. Dad was just a part of it.”

  “He must love you, though.”

  Vashi wanted to be done with this conversation, but, well, she was a girl, after all. “He does. I, we, love him, too. He’s done right by us, done the best he could for the circumstances he was in.”

  “He could have divorced his wife and married your mother.”

  Looking away again, he nodded. “Yeah, well. He married money. We all benefitted from that. His wife, Amanda, probably had the right to choose. She chose to stay married. I don’t know that my dad ever pushed the issue. I know my mom spent some years unhappy about it, but I think she’s comfortable with how things are now.”

  “She’s got you three,” Haidee said. “You make her happy.”

  Vashi nodded. Magdalena had come by the house every day to check on her patients. He knew the two women had taken to having tea out on the deck. It made him just a little nervous. “She likes you.”

  “I like her.”

  He looked over, catching her gray eyes. “She thinks you’d make one of her sons a fine wife.”

  She stood up to his gaze, looking back at him for a good long time, but disappointed him in the end. “We should get back.”

  Suppressing a sigh, he nodded and stood, extending a hand to help her up. She took it just for that moment, and then followed him down to the trail. When he got her to the house, he was done playing by her rules. Beside the door to the kitchen, he turned and pushed her up against the wall. Pressing
his body hard against hers, he cupped her face and kissed her. He wasn’t gentle about it, not timid. He was greedy, like he’d been longing for her for days, which was the damn truth.

  She didn’t resist him and, after a while, she responded. She lifted her hands to his waist and grasped him lightly. She opened her mouth and let him have her, and used a little tongue herself.

  Dammit, he thought. He loved her. And, because he did, he kept his hands off his zipper and hers. But it was a close thing. He had no trouble at all imagining lifting her up and filling her right there. It was private enough, and he didn’t care that much about who might be watching anyway.

  But he backed himself off, acknowledging that he was playing for higher stakes than a good, hard fuck. She was breathing very satisfactorily, rough and urgent, when he stepped away and went into the house.

  Chapter Nine

  Haidee wasn’t sure she knew what she was doing.

  Well, she kind of understood what she was doing. She seemed to be taking Lev’s advice. She was doing what she felt like doing, what seemed right at the time, and trying not to stress about it.

  So she was living in a house with three men—men who all blatantly, unabashedly admitted that they wanted her. She could, if she wanted to act like she wasn’t playing with fire, claim that she was living with one man, Danya, who just happened to live with his brothers.

  To claim that, though, she’d have to pretend to discount the hot kisses dealt out by said brothers.

  But the kisses were definitely hot and, therefore, very difficult to discount.

  They’d developed a bit of a pattern, at least as much as a group could who lived by such irregular schedules. On average, two of the pilots were home in time for a latish dinner. Haidee had a couple more days before she expected to be cleared for work and so she’d taken over grocery shopping and dinner prep. The guys made clear that they didn’t expect it at the same time they very obviously enjoyed it. She thought it wasn’t the food so much as her presence there, in their home, making it for them that they loved. There was always enough left over for the last straggler-in, and, whether there was a straggler or not, the leftovers were gone by morning.

  Generally, they all went to work around the same time bright and early, though sometimes flights were overnighters and one of them was missing in the morning. They made their own breakfasts on most days, though they made a game of wheedling her into it. They definitely fixed their own coffee—they drank it black and extremely strong. “Go-juice,” Lev had called it one morning.

  “I thought go-juice was gas,” Haidee said.

  “Fuel,” he corrected. “It’s fuel when it’s in the tank of a flying machine, and you can never have too much...”

  She finished the old fliers’ joke for him. “Unless you’re on fire.”

  He nodded his approval, his gaze not failing to let her know he remembered who’d most recently been on fire. “It’s coffee when the pilot drinks it. There’s no situation in which you have too much of that.”

  Whoever was home in the morning kissed her good-bye. Kissed. No ’bye-honey-have-a-good-day little peck. These were mouth-open, spit-sharing, tongue-probing all out kisses. Often, they happened while she was backed up against a counter, and there was a hard cock pressing against her belly before it was over.

  Also often, there was a second—or third—brother watching and waiting for his turn with her.

  It didn’t seem to bother them at all, that she’d barely caught her breath—or not even that—before the next one stepped up to her. Generally, Danya was the last, and it happened more than once that, by the time he got his mouth on her, she was an overstimulated hot mess. He took care of her, once just reaching inside her panties to diddle her to orgasm, and another time moving her quickly, bending her over the table, baring her ass and filling her from behind. He’d watched both his brothers kiss her that morning and had been a bit of a hot mess himself. He’d fucked her hard then left her there wordlessly, bare-assed and collapsed on the table.

  Each night she went to bed with Danya. Danya alone, she reminded herself, as if that made the rest of the craziness okay. He was sweet with her, very sweet. He was generous with loving words and more than that with his body. With his body, he was aggressive, rough, and wild. She would be overwhelmed, taken thoroughly, loved powerfully. It was like he was claiming her for himself, in the only way his brothers had left him. It worried her sometimes. She’d begin to think he was taking her out of desperation rather than love, and then, at just that moment, he’d make love to her so sweetly—gently, adoringly—that it made her heart ache.

  The two of them picnicked for lunch one day in Pioneer Park, when Danya helped her move more of her things from her apartment. He took her canoeing one evening, a gentle glide around the edges of the Big Horn Reservoir. He insisted that she rest while he paddled, still concerned about her injuries.

  Almost, and most of the time, she could pretend that what she was doing was normal.

  Though she didn’t stand a chance of that the night Danny got called out on an emergency airlift trip just minutes before he’d meant to be home for dinner. Both Lev and Vashi made it home that night. It was the first time she’d shared a meal with just the two of them.

  She felt awkward and uncomfortable, and they didn’t help. Every effort she made at normal conversation fell flat. October was approaching now, and, via the local news, she’d seen widespread interest in hunting season. But they weren’t cooperative with talking hunting, or weather—she’d noticed that pilots paid at least as much attention to the weather as farmers—or even football. Their interest was on her.

  Vashi started it. He sat across the table from her, looking at her rather than at his meal and, in short order, withdrawing entirely from conversation. Lev noticed it eventually, looking from Vashi to her and back, and then setting his fork down. Suddenly more than just nervous, Haidee pushed back from the table and stood. “There’s dessert in the fridge if you want it—”

  “I do.” Vashi was on his feet, too, moving more quickly than she could believe to block her exit. “I want dessert,” he said. “I want—”

  He tangled his fingers into the hair at the back of her neck and put his other hand at her waist. Then his mouth was there, kissing her like he did, so skillfully, so effectively, so knowingly.

  “You,” he said into her mouth. “I want you.”

  Then Lev was there, too, behind her, sliding his fingers under her shorts to run along the curve of her ass. His other hand slid between her body and Vashi’s, resting low on her belly. He was pressed up against her, and she could feel the hard rise of two cocks.

  Haidee held her hands out to her sides, not quite able to either push away or fall into their seduction. But she couldn’t deny the way her nipples tightened against Vashi’s chest or that her pussy moistened in need. Finally, much too late, she tore her mouth away from Vashi’s and turned her head to the side. She was panting.

  “This is going to happen,” Vashi said, his own breath unsteady. “Let’s go to my room.”

  “No,” Haidee said, but she knew she was lying. If she stayed one minute more—well, she wouldn’t. At the very least, whatever crazy thing she was going to do, she wasn’t going to let it happen in Danya’s absence. “No,” she said again, making more of an effort to sound like she meant it.

  She turned enough to get a hand on both male chests. She pushed a little until they acquiesced and took a step back each. “Not—” They both watched her intently. “Just, no.”

  Moving away, a little too afraid to turn her back on them, she inched toward the stairs. “Good night.”

  No one answered as she went upstairs to Danya’s room. She wondered if she’d have locked the door, but since there wasn’t a lock, she didn’t have to make that decision.

  * * * *

  No one was talking the next day when Danya flew in from Denver, but he was aware that something had gone down. His brothers were cranky. That wasn’t unheard of, e
specially for Vashi, but even Lev was grumpy and avoided eye contact. He was more concerned that Haidee had ducked his call from his hotel last night—the same one where they’d stayed the night they’d met—and had sounded distracted when he called her at noon just after he’d touched down in Billings. She’d instigated a plan that they’d have dinner out together at the end of the day. He liked the thought of having her to himself, but he had to wonder what—or who—she was trying to dodge at home.

  He put her on the back of his Scout then drove to Torre’s and fed her the Lupita special. They went for a ride after, the old road to Columbus that was fun on a bike, running along the river and winding up the Absaroka foothills.

  Haidee greeted him sweetly and, if she clung to him more than was usual for her, she didn’t seem to want to talk about it. He asked her over dinner and again as they watched the sun set if something had happened while he was away, but she just shook her head.

  Vash’s Silverado was in the garage when they got home. Danya would have hunted him down and shared a beer with him, but Haidee wanted to go up to their room instead, and he wasn’t so stupid he wouldn’t follow her. He figured maybe he could get her talking over a drink out on his deck, so he stopped in the kitchen to fix a couple Jack and Cokes. When he turned back to the stairs, he saw Vash standing there, ass propped against the rail at the stairs going down, watching him.

  Danya nodded, his hands full of drinks. “All okay?” he asked.

  Vashi nodded back. “Yep.”

  Haidee had something different on her mind than drinks and a talk when he got to the room. She was up against him even as he came through the door, her hands in his hair and her lips on his.