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

by Rachel Billings

  Evangeline choked on a laugh. Yes, that was what it would be. If, in the end, she chose one of them, the others would be Maisy’s uncles. Like they were three brothers, an essential truth.

  “Yes,” she said. “That would work. We’ll wait a bit for you to meet her.”

  “We’ll open an account for Maisy, Ev.” That was Chase, the group’s most grounded, practical member. “And one for you.” He cut her off even as she started her objection. “We owe it to both of you. Certainly, you can’t object on Maisy’s behalf, and, as for you, well”—he looked around at the others—“you may need to cut back on your work hours.”

  She started to protest once more, but Briggs squeezed her arm to silence. “You’re going to be busy. You’ll have three men coming to your home.”

  “Or you come up to Chase’s place, right, man?” Giovanni looked to confirm the invitation with Chase. “He’s got a bigger bed.”

  She so didn’t need that visual.

  “Yeah, sure. Anytime. Get me your phone, Ev. I’ll put our numbers in it.” Chase already had his phone in his hand. “And I’ll want you to e-mail me your schedule and Maisy’s. What will she be doing over the summer?”

  Evangeline felt like a runaway train had caught her up. Or, no. That was her three men. “Day camp,” she said vaguely.

  Chase lifted his head. “Nothing sleepover?”

  “No, but…”

  Three men waited alertly for her next words. “The Victory families do Saturday night sleepovers, all the kids at one place. Maisy is included.”

  “I love the Victorys.”

  More than one of them had volunteered that.

  Evangeline smiled. She’d always been a bit lonely on sleepover nights at the other homes. She guessed she wouldn’t be lonely anymore.

  “So,” the ever-practical Chase went on, “I’ll want to know when you’ll be alone and when you’re not pressed with work. I imagine you have deadlines, just like the writer here.”

  “Yes. That’s right.” Evangeline said.

  Chase looked like he was about done with her phone. “Are we good, then?”

  “Yes,” she said again, her heart full of hope and, she had to admit, a wicked thrill of excitement.

  “All right.” He walked closer, kind of nudged Briggs out of the way. “So I’ll work out a schedule and let you know. We’ll move forward and see where we get. Okay?”

  “Yes, okay.”

  “What we’ll expect is that this will work itself out, right? That, within a few weeks or months you’ll settle into a relationship with one of us that you want to keep. When that happens, the other two will back off.” He gave the others a look that was meant as a command. They didn’t seem impressed.

  Like the good little girl she’d always been, Evangeline nodded to please him. But she didn’t necessarily mean it. More like she didn’t believe it would ever happen, and so her agreement cost her nothing.

  “If you get pregnant,” Chase continued, “we’ll get testing. The father of the baby will marry you, and that will be that.”

  She wouldn’t give him a nod this time. There was likely no “if” about that particular deal. She’d already calculated it. She’d been pretty close to the middle of her cycle during that sex-fest weekend. When she’d said the timing was good, she’d meant it, though not in the way they’d assumed.

  “It might be better to use contraception until things settle, don’t you think?”

  “No.”

  Chase’s brow lifted, and she let him see. She wasn’t that needy girl anymore, willing to agree to anything in order to be loved.

  He inspected her at length then finally gave a wry smile. His little girl had grown up. He managed to look both annoyed and pleased.

  With that smile still in place, he cupped her head with his hands. She reached up and twisted a finger into those curls she loved. He pulled her close and kissed her, long and sweet. “All right, then,” he said, before another kiss. “All right.”

  Giovanni came next, taking her mouth much more carnally—or maybe that was just the way he slid his hand up under her skirt, along her ass. He lifted his head to stare down at her when he discovered she wasn’t wearing undies. He didn’t share the fact with his friends. He just pressed in, watching her as he found her most sensitive spot. Okay, and then, maybe her other most sensitive spot. He circled there, and she had a little trouble with her breathing.

  “You know what I’m going to be thinking about?”

  She was too dazed to answer, could barely breathe, what with that thing with his fingers.

  “I’m going to be thinking about how one woman can give pleasure to three men.”

  “Oh,” she said. And, “oh,” again, as she got the significance—helped along with a little dual action happening under her skirt. With an erotic shudder, she stepped further into his embrace. He was hard, and she moaned a little, and then more when he palmed her breast.

  “She’s fucking hot, Chase. Are you sure we have to leave?”

  “What time does Maisy get home, Ev?”

  She was pretty sure Chase asked the question twice before she heard it. “What? Oh. I leave here to walk down to the bus stop at two forty.”

  “Then, yeah, cowboy, we have to leave.”

  Giovanni hadn’t really let go of her mouth—or anything else—when he spoke. “I want to be first up,” he said, “on your damn schedule.”

  He was toying with her clit extremely effectively. It hadn’t taken him long to learn her.

  “Rein it in, Diorio. You’ll get your turn. I’m pretty sure you’re about to be a dozen time zones away, right?”

  “Shit. Yeah.” He slowly eased back from her, showing a gratifying regret about it. “I’ll see you soon, sweetheart.”

  Giovanni stepped away, and Briggs moved in. He took her mouth softly, but she was already so turned on she melted into it.

  “I’m not a particular fan of schedules,” he said when he lifted up. “I’d like to come tomorrow, bring my laptop, and sit on your front porch and work. Would that be all right?”

  Evangeline smiled and said, “Yes, of course,” at the same time Giovanni protested loudly, “Hey!”

  The two men looked to Chase to referee. “Why not?” he said. “We’re working it out as we go along, right? And Evvie has final say.”

  Giovanni came back and nudged Briggs back a bit to cup her face. “That’s all right. I know he won’t satisfy you the way I can. And, you’ll miss me, right?”

  “Yes,” she said with a grin. “I will.” She meant it, too.

  Then Giovanni kissed her again—deeply, hotly, and not enough—and they were gone.

  Chapter Eight

  Briggs pulled alongside Evvie when she was a couple hundred yards up the drive on her way back to the house after the bus stop walk with Maisy. He’d called her the night before—after he was pretty sure Maisy would be in bed, after the three guys had drunk their last beers and hammered out the best plan they could for going forward with whatever it was they were doing with Ev.

  He hadn’t really needed to call—from the beginning, he planned to be there to watch mother and daughter come down the hill. If he hadn’t learned the bus schedule, he’d have just shown up at sunrise and sat in his car for however many hours it took to get what he wanted. He wanted to see Maisy, really, really wanted it.

  It was an odd thing. He’d expected that one day he’d have children. That meant a wife, of course, and so he expected he’d have one of those, too. But it had never been more than a vague, assumed thought for some time in the future.

  Now, he discovered in himself an urgent need—to know Maisy, to touch her, hold her, claim her. And to have another—more than one other—child. To have Evvie pregnant, to share with her this time the trials and triumphs of pregnancy and birth and the raising of a child.

  To have Evvie. Period.

  For better or worse, he wasn’t alone in that.

  Chase had about driven him and Gio nuts a few yea
rs ago when he went through his short psych rotation in med school. Briggs really marked that as the time Chase stopped being fun. Though that was a bit of an overstatement—Chase was still fun, it was just that the balance between his fun times and pain-in-the-ass times started to tip the scale in the wrong direction.

  So, yeah, they’d each of them had some serious “issues” growing up. None of them had been raised by parents who particularly took to the job—there wasn’t a single star among them, and, God knew, slutty Fancy Charles was the worst of the lot.

  During that rotation, Chase had obsessively analyzed the effects of their screwed-up parenting. He not only had to talk about it, but he wanted Briggs and Gio to “share” their “feelings.” They’d nearly had to toss Chase from the group. As it was, they spent a few months avoiding him in any circumstance that might give him an opportunity to expound on his latest theory.

  Baseball game, no—too much time to talk. Hockey, yes—too loud for a real conversation. Loud dance bars, yes. Quiet restaurants, no.

  About the same thing happened last night. Chase got all hot trying to psychoanalyze the deal. He talked about Evvie’s need for love, her natural inclination—given Fancy’s behavior—to mistake sexual desire for loving feelings, the important shared history of the four of them, the communal blow of Shep’s death, blah, blah, blah. Blah.

  Briggs had started making eye contact with Gio, and they were about to toss Chase out of his own house.

  Gio had found his own, blunt way to deal with it. “Keep going, doc,” he’d said. “Talk all you want. I’d be perfectly happy if you rationalize it all away. Go ahead and bow out.

  “Me, I want to fuck her. I want to fuck her and love her and fuck her some more. I’ve never experienced anything near that hot. Not just fucking her myself, which was fucking something, but freaking watching you guys fuck her. That was a freaking hot fucking turn-on.

  “You guys are my brothers, like blood to me. I never thought I’d say a thing like this, but if you want to fuck her and love her, too, I’m okay with that. I’d be happy with her alone, if she were to choose me, or if the two of you were to give up on it. I’d be more than fine with that.

  “But I gotta say, it’s nothing but hot to think of sharing her with you. I can see us all happy doing it, and my opinion is, why the fuck not? We never had a normal life, never really had family but each other. We can make a family with us and Evvie and all the kids she’ll give us. I see nothing wrong with that, abso-fucking-lutely no downside. The last thing I’m gonna give a fuck about is how it looks to others.”

  But for Maisy and any other kids, Chase argued. There would be another baby soon, he pointed out. Evvie could already be pregnant—most likely was. How would it feel to their children?

  Gio hadn’t cared. Probably half of Maisy’s peers had stepdads or moms or whatever. They could even make it official, he said. They could marry her, one by one. Have a technically legal divorce in between, and still all be together. It was a thing now, he said. People got divorced and still lived together—for the kids or financial reasons or whatever shit.

  Mostly, he said, he just didn’t care what others thought about how he lived his life, and why the fuck should he?

  It was tougher for Chase. He had the most conventional upbringing and job. But Briggs figured he’d come around on it. Chase loved his work, but Briggs didn’t think he had political ambitions of the sort that benefited from a wife who devoted some of her life to her husband’s career. It wasn’t like Chase wanted to be department chair or anything. It was the work he loved, not the job.

  Chase also had a bug up his ass about Evvie being pregnant. Briggs guessed that was the doctor thing, that Chase felt responsible for everything all the time. Or maybe it was just his more traditional personality. He would think Ev should be married before she had another baby.

  Either way, Briggs had started to hope that Chase would be able to walk up to it—a ménage—because it was beginning to sound extremely attractive to him. Gio was right. He and Chase and Evvie had made up his family, even in the years that he hadn’t seen Evvie. He belonged there, among them, as he did nowhere else.

  He wanted more. He wanted Maisy to be theirs if not his.

  And more kids after that.

  He was going to do his part to make that last thing happen. Today, if Evvie was agreeable.

  So he drove up behind her—in no real hurry, because watching that sweet ass swing as she walked alone back up her long drive was fine—and put his window down.

  “Need a ride, honey? I’ve got candy for you.”

  She smiled at him and kept walking. “My momma said never get into a car with a man—for just candy.”

  “Cookies?” he asked, driving slowly alongside her. “Cupcakes?”

  She laughed, and they both came to a stop. She leaned in and put her lips to his. If she thought it was going to be just a touch, she’d guessed wrong. He slid his hand behind her neck and made a thing of it. A really, really nice thing.

  She liked it, too. Her eyes were pretty glazy when he let her up.

  “God, that feels good, doesn’t it?”

  Evvie nodded, too affected, he liked to think, to reply otherwise.

  He looked at her another bit until her eyes cleared. Tilting his head, he beckoned her to get in, and she circled around the car and joined him. He took her hand and held it while he drove up the mountain.

  As he got out of the car, he handed her a bag of pastries. “I stopped for coffees. I don’t do the caramel-skinny-latte-whipped thing, so if that’s what you like we’re gonna have trouble.”

  She was already peeking her nose into the bag when they got to the front porch. “Coffee’s good. I have my own caramel latte stuff I can add. You want some?”

  She had a little devil in her—but drank her coffee black.

  They sat in the wicker, which was stronger and more comfortable than he expected. She had a lovely view—misty blue mountains, bits of the lake—but the view he liked the best was sitting right next to him.

  He sat back, enjoying it all, when he’d eaten more than his share of the pastries. He sipped his coffee. “I do need to work,” he said. “But I’m also intending to make love to you today.” He didn’t see any objection in her face. “Which shall I do first?”

  She looked back at him, entirely serious. “Do you have Aulandreo safely off of Hebredus yet?”

  He grinned. “I wouldn’t reveal that to my own mother.” If he had one.

  She stood, but didn’t bother to suppress a sexy little sinuous motion as she did it. If he didn’t fuck her now, he was going to spend the morning thinking about it. He started to stand, too, but she gestured him back.

  “You’d better get to work, then.”

  The bitch sashayed—there was no other word for it—her way into the house.

  If he’d had a hat, he’d have tipped it.

  Well played.

  * * * *

  Briggs had taken her seriously, apparently. He had his head on Hebredus, or somewhere else in the multiverse. Evangeline liked to get up and move when she worked, so she left her office often and, today, took little peeks out to the porch when she was up.

  For himself, Briggs appeared not to move at all when he was writing. Every time she looked outside, he was totally concentrating. His gaze and his fingers didn’t leave his laptop, except for the occasional moment he took to reach for his coffee.

  She refilled his cup for him once, and he gave her nothing more than a distracted nod. It was a couple hours into it before she caught him staring off into the distance, and by the time she looked again, he had his eyes back on his screen.

  His way of writing seemed not to have changed. He had those intense, abstracted moments of thought, when she was sure his mind was in his story. She could almost see him as Aulandreo, dashing through flames, risking his life to save the princess.

  Then he’d write it, in his careless, frantic way, getting words down as fast as his fingers could
move.

  Despite what she’d claimed when they were at the Wallkill, she was jealous of whomever it was who got to read his work first, have that initial glimpse into his raw story, so far away from the polished, exquisite work that would make it to the bookshelf.

  He was so much there—Briggs—in those rough turns of phrase, incomplete thoughts, and sentence fragments. She’d always thought his characters were at their best then, too—in their most basic form, in their essence.

  She watched him work, wishing that she could stand beside him and tangle her fingers in his hair. Perhaps she could—he worked with such intensity, he might not even notice. He didn’t used to, back in those days in the tree house.

  Maybe another day. Maybe, at another time, she would be his first reader again. She wanted that almost as much as she wanted him. Well no, not really. Not nearly that much. But still, it would be way cool.

  He’d brought breakfast, so she took care of lunch. She had local eggs and Amish bacon and bread, so she made hearty egg salad sandwiches. She tossed early snap peas with cashews, green onions, and a light dressing. It was too early for fresh berries, but she had frozen peach slices from last year she baked into an upside-down cake.

  She and Maisy ate out on the porch often, so she had a small table there. With a tray and a couple trips, she had the table set and food laid out. Then she went to stand in front of Briggs.

  She could tell by a grumpy twitch he made that he knew she was there—or possibly, that was Aulandreo trying to resist Hebredian sand torture. Either way, in a couple minutes, his fingers paused, and he looked up in annoyed question.

  “I’ve got lunch on the table if you want.”

  He looked at her like she was a stranger for a long moment—she remembered that look. Then he glanced over at the table where she was pointing. “Oh. Yeah. Thanks.” He looked back at her. “Can you give me a couple more minutes?”

  Whether she could or not, he was taking them. And more, because, apparently, on Hebredus, or wherever Briggs Henriksen was, two minutes were like dog years. So she brought her own laptop to the table and worked for a half hour before he joined her.