Cowboy Cravings

by Morgan Ashbury

  COWBOY CRAVINGS

  Morgan Ashbury

  MENAGE AMOUR

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Ménage Amour

  COWBOY CRAVINGS

  Copyright © 2009 by Morgan Ashbury

  E-book ISBN: 1-60601-662-8

  First E-book Publication: October 2009

  Cover design by Jinger Heaston

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2009 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  DEDICATION

  As ever, to my biggest fan, David.

  COWBOY CRAVINGS

  MORGAN ASHBURY

  Copyright © 2009

  Chapter 1

  Jesse Conrad wondered if Annie’s nipples were coral-tipped, or a dusky rose. He wondered if her breasts would feel soft and supple in his hands, if they would taste sweet and addictive to his tongue. He wondered how it would feel to sink deep inside her, to have her hot tunnel convulse and squeeze his cock.

  Most nights, wondering about Annie Rutherford followed him into sleep, where that wondering fueled his dreams in living, breathing Technicolor. Lately, his dreams had shown him what it could be like to have Annie spread out on his bed, gloriously wild and wet while he and his best friend, Grant, feasted on her.

  Those dreams always brought him awake with a raging hard-on that he needed to get rid of the only way he knew how.

  Turning his head, he focused on the glowing green numbers on his bedside clock. At four-forty-three on a Sunday morning, it was way too early to get out of bed, and he was way too horny to even try.

  Reaching down the front of his body, he fisted his stiff cock. The need for an orgasm was an almost constant state of being these last few months. He didn’t worry that he’d somehow morphed into a sex addict. He knew the where and the when and the why of this near constant state of arousal.

  With the first rough stroke on his dick, he closed his eyes and thought of Annie. He imagined her there with him, leaning over him as she caressed his cock with her soft, hot hand and whispered kisses across his face and down his neck. He imagined the brush of her silky hair against his chest as she nuzzled his nipples, nipping lightly as she teased and aroused him. He inhaled, breathing in her woman scent, her passion a musky aroma of heat and need. In his mind’s eye, he ran his hand down her bare back, caressed gently around the curve of her naked ass, dipped his fingers into her slit, testing the moisture of her passion. She dripped for him, for the both of them. The image formed, Grant sprawled out on the other side of Annie, head propped up on one hand, watching her, watching them.

  “I want to taste you,” her words, soft as a summer evening breeze, brushed his belly as he felt her ease down his body. Her hot, moist breath bathed his flesh as she pleaded, “Let me take your cock in my mouth. Let me drink your pleasure.”

  “God, yes.”

  Jesse groaned as his seed erupted, as the power of the climax surged out of him with a speed that would have embarrassed him if Annie really had been in his bed.

  As he reached for the box of tissues on his bedside table, he gave thanks that this infernal waiting was nearly over. He wanted Annie.

  Want. What an insipid word for the burning need that ran hot through his body for that woman. No, he didn’t simply want her, he craved her, in the same way a parched man in the desert craved a drink of cold, clear water.

  Her sweet, round face, those hazel eyes that could smile in a heartbeat, and the way her auburn hair seemed to flicker red in the sunlight all combined to intrigue and delight him. Her appearance caught his attention, but the whole of her captured him, heart and mind, body and soul. Her gentle nature and wounded spirit were matched by a quick wit and a keen mind. Everything about her touched everything in him with a kind of simpatico he never believed in before meeting her.

  He knew his best friend, who had been more like a brother than friend to him all his life, felt exactly the same way. He and Grant Douglas had seen her for the first time together. They’d both fallen instantly and hard, together. And together, they’d made a pact. Since they were best friends with no intention of ever letting anything come between them that could ruin that friendship, Annie would be off limits to them both. As they got to know the lady, as both of them decided to be her friends if they couldn’t be her lovers, they discovered their pact had more or less been moot.

  The lady, already widowed nearly a year when she arrived in their part of the country, let it be known she had absolutely no intention of having a relationship with any man or getting married ever again.

  Jesse didn’t need to look at the calendar to know the day Annie had arrived in town and settled in his heart was exactly one year ago today. In that year, neither he nor Grant had dated anyone. Neither of them had wanted to.

  Then, just a few weeks ago, sitting out on Grant’s front porch, enjoying a few beers at the end of a long, hard day, they’d spoken quietly, honestly, about their feelings for Annie, and especially about the woman herself. About all the little pieces of her past they’d gleaned over the last year. In the soft glow of the Wyoming sunset, with the Western wind kissing them and their land, they’d come up with a plan. Since they saw each other every day, they honed that plan, looked for flaws. There really was only one: the lady herself might say no.

  They would do their best to convince her to say yes. Jesse thought it might not be as impossible as they feared. He felt pretty sure Annie was aware of them both as men. He’d caught the odd glance when she didn’t realize he was looking. Once in a while, when he drew her attention back to him when it wandered, a sparkle would light her eyes and a faint pink color her cheek. He bet she felt an attraction to them both regardless of her determination to remain single.

  Jesse threw back the blankets and bounded from the bed. He’d shower and eat. Then he’d head on over to Grant’s, wake him up out of a sound sleep if necessary.

  Today was the day they’d chosen to put their plan into action. He couldn’t wait another day.

  * * * *

  Annie Rutherford opened her eyes to a brilliant day. The bright yellow light of
sunrise washed through her window. The sunspot that formed midway down her bed felt warm and comforting.

  Birdsong sailed on the ever-constant breeze, drifting over the bed to serenade her. A year of living in the small town of Branchton, Wyoming, population six hundred and twelve, and she still found it strange, at odd moments, to accept the total lack of city noise.

  She’d never aspired to be a country girl.

  No, I aspired to be a wife and mother and look how that turned out.

  Annie shook her head and pushed away the melancholy. Enough of melancholy, enough of mourning what could never be. This date on the calendar represented the first anniversary of her arrival here, the day she officially ‘started over’. It was time she allowed herself to fully acknowledge her new beginning.

  There were still times when the enormity of what she’d done astounded her. She’d never made any bold moves before, never dared to reach out and take something just for herself. Until one year and one month ago.

  After her husband’s death, she spent some months healing physically and getting used to being free for the first time in her life. She had no idea what would come next. She could return to her part time job as a clerk at De Luca’s, a small dollar-type store in Queens. Life could go on as usual, different, but following basically the same path as always. That would have been the easiest choice, but the image of trudging through the same old, same old just didn’t feel good. Then one evening, casual surfing on the Internet led Annie to wonder about retail stores in other parts of the country. Through the vagaries of cyberspace, she’d landed on a ‘for sale’ listing for a general store in Branchton, Wyoming.

  The sale of the business included the building that housed it with an apartment on the upper floor. Meeting the seller’s price would eat three-quarters of the insurance settlement she so recently received.

  Annie bought it, sight unseen.

  A month later, she’d cut all ties to both her own family and to her late husband, Jim’s. Without a moment’s hesitation, she burned all her bridges behind her. She bought a used car, packed it with her clothes, a few books, and her childhood teddy bear, Mr. Tinkles. Everything else she left behind. The five day journey west brought her farther than just the eighteen hundred or so miles she traveled.

  Annie had never looked back.

  Sliding out from under the blankets, she stood, stretched, and wandered over to the window. The air smelled different here in Branchton than in New York City.

  Pushing the window up all the way, she inhaled deeply. She recalled the first morning she’d smelled this very fragrance from this very window. She tried to identify the scent because it brought back wispy memories of being a little girl, of walking with her mother to the park in on the outskirts of Albany, where she grew up. Then she realized that the scent was fresh air.

  Outside her window, Branchton slowly began to come awake. Somewhere near the edge of the small town, a dog barked. Annie smiled. That would be Elmo, little Judy Fraser’s two-year-old Golden Retriever. Judy got the dog as a puppy for her sixth birthday from her maternal grandfather, who brought the animal all the way from his ranch outside Boulder, Colorado. Elmo always wanted out first thing in the morning, and always barked at any small creature that came within sniffing range.

  Some of the townsfolk would be heading into Laramie for Sunday services. Some would just spend a lazy day at home, maybe doing yard work, maybe catching a football or baseball game on television. In New York City, Sunday had been just another day. Here, Sunday actually was a day of rest.

  Sunday was also the only day she didn’t open her store. Her usual day-off routine consisted of tidying and laundry. She didn’t really have much of either since she lived alone. Annie wished she could find something more to do, more to keep her mind busy so it couldn’t dwell, as it had been doing lately, on how sterile her life had become.

  She winced, wondering why her mind chose to think that word, specifically.

  Turning, she reached for her robe, intent on following her usual routine of shower, dress, and eat.

  The cry of a wild eagle cut through her thoughts, and her eyes were drawn once more to the world outside her window, a world she never imagined would ever be hers.

  Sometimes, she thought she didn’t really deserve this fresh chance she’d taken for herself. She didn’t deserve the laughter she enjoyed from time to time, the friends she’d made here, or the peace she found.

  Every once in a while, a little voice inside her said she didn’t deserve to heal. Annie was getting better and better at silencing that little voice.

  She’d made one bad choice when she was far too young to know better, just one bad choice. In a bid to escape from her father’s house and the emotional battering he heaped on her for the crime of being born his daughter and not his son, she ended up marrying a man who turned out to be just like him. For the next ten years, she endured more of the same verbal and emotional abuse until that one terrible day when her world shattered.

  When she awakened from the coma, she learned her husband had been killed at work during an attempted robbery. His employer carried insurance as an employee benefit, something Annie hadn’t known about until the check arrived a couple of months later. She considered it an act of cosmic justice that handed her the means to escape. Released from the hospital, free from verbal abuse, she discovered the jagged pieces of her self-respect and finally began to put those pieces together.

  Hot water showered down on her, and Annie closed her eyes and focused on trying to relax. As she felt the tension leeching from her muscles, as the grip of the past eased, the sense of loneliness that was never far from her conscious thoughts took its place.

  Annie didn’t often waste time on thinking about what might have been. But since coming to this new and interesting place, she’d had time on her hands, time she filled primarily with reading and thinking and, she guessed, healing. She tentatively made a few friends. She met and liked sleek, sophisticated, worldly Veronica, who had arrived from the east coast just a few months after Annie. She was assistant manager of the local branch of the Hopkins-Wyoming Bank.

  Incredibly, the two people Annie considered herself closest to were men. Despite the fact she felt a hum of attraction for both of them, she hadn’t dated either one. She didn’t really plan on dating anyone, ever. It didn’t seem to make any sense, starting a relationship that had nowhere to go.

  As far as sex was concerned, while she couldn’t claim to actually miss it—her late husband hadn’t been at all interested in her pleasure—she couldn’t help but wonder, now and again, just what she had missed. Jim said she was frigid, but as she managed to give herself an orgasm or two since coming West, she figured he probably lied about that as another means of beating her down. She’d begun to really understand in the last few months that he’d lied to her about everything, really.

  Maybe she was better off not knowing what she’d missed. She wished she could turn the wondering off the same way she turned the shower off.

  Besides, if she got into some kind of a relationship and started having sex, sure as hell the man involved would start to act as if he owned her. No. She’d sworn off relationships and for sure sworn off marriage. Best to leave that door closed.

  Grabbing a towel, she blotted the water from her skin and did her best to blot thoughts of what she might have missed from her mind.

  Maybe she would take a drive into Laramie and look for a used book store. She might grab a bite to eat before she came home. That would be a much better use of her time than thinking about the sex she wasn’t likely to have anytime soon, or what might have been if she had made different choices in the past.

  Neither would she allow herself to think about the stray images assailing her at the oddest times, of actually getting close to either of the two men she called friends.

  Surely, if either Jesse or Grant had been interested in her in that way, they would have said something by now. Since they hadn’t, she best concentrate on the he
re and now. Housework and shopping. She would leave her focus on those and leave it at that.

  To do anything else would just be borrowing trouble.

  Chapter 2

  Rick Rutherford hated the sound of the buzzer, hated it with a passion. That one sound symbolized his life for the last two years, two months, and twenty-one days.

  If he got his way, he would never have to hear it again.

  “I’d wish you good luck, Rutherford. But I’m laying odds you’ll be back here before the year is out.”

  Rick turned to look at the guard whose job it was to escort him to the gate. His sentence was served, every last stinking day of it. He flashed his legendary smile, the one his mother once said was a blessing and a curse. He said, “Fuck you, asshole.”

  It felt good to call that screw Kowalski that and know he wouldn’t be getting a club in the gut for it. He was free, finally. He planned on staying that way. In fact, he planned on more than just being free.

  Before the year was out, he would be living like a king on some Caribbean island. He didn’t give a flying fuck which island, either, as long as there was plenty of warm sand, cold drinks, and hot pussy.

  The steel mesh gate creaked as inch by inch it slid back, creating an opening, a clear path between incarceration and freedom, between then and now.

  Rick walked slowly, relishing the transition. According to the laws and statutes of the great state of New York, his debt to society was paid in full.

  Society could go fuck itself, too.

  His gaze tracked to the parking lot ahead, and the man leaning against an aging Chevy. He hadn’t seen Squirrel since he’d gone inside. He would never tell a soul he was half afraid when he woke up that morning that he would have to hoof it to the nearest town once released. He wouldn’t have been able to hitch-hike. There were signs on the interstate warning drivers against picking up strangers, and the good state of New York sure as hell wouldn’t waste gas trucking his ass to town.