by Robin Gideon
“With those dinged up ribs of yours, better let me handle the ropes and you can take the top wheel,” Caleb said, walking on the boat’s deck, moving parallel to the dock.
Jacob said, “Good idea.” To Bobbi Jo he said, “After we’re underway, we’ll give you a tour of our little toy here. I hope you like it.” He smiled. “It’s sort of our guilty pleasure.”
“I’m sure I will,” she replied, thinking that guilty pleasures were often the best kind. Then, feeling a pang of regret for being so impressed with such an obvious display of wealth, she added in a sarcastic tone, “What’s not to like?”
It took a few minutes to get untied from the dock, and then get the ropes and bumpers all properly stored. Bobbi Jo sat on a long, padded starboard bench seat, occasionally closing her eyes and angling her face toward the sunshine, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the ambience of being on the water. As they got underway, a breeze played with her hair, and Bobbi Jo was pleased now that she had left it unbound instead of pulling it back into a high ponytail, which she usually did for work.
It wasn’t long before Williston and South Williston were in the distance, and fading with each passing second. Being on the water and being away from the cities gave Bobbi Jo a sense of anonymity and peace that she hadn’t expected. In the cities, almost everyone knew the bubbly, friendly blonde waitress at local the wing joint. She was popular, but with popularity came a loss of privacy.
Out here, on the water on a beautiful boat, she was alone with two handsome men. Her feelings toward them individually and collectively were something she had yet to come to terms with. So far, she had tried hard to not think too much about it. It was best that way, she decided.
Looking around, she saw that Caleb and Jacob were in the pilothouse, their heads close together. They were inside the yacht so she couldn’t possibly overhear them, but they were being careful anyway. Whatever they had to say to each other, Bobbi Jo suspected she was the topic of their discussion. She was also the last person they wanted to include in their conversation.
Are they comparing notes on what I did to them?
She turned her face away and looked straight ahead over the bow at the river. Though she loved making people laugh, she hated it whenever anyone laughed at her. The first time she worked wearing a halter top without a bra, it had taken her thirty minutes to find the courage to step out of the back room, and even then the other waitresses almost had to drag her out. Bobbi Jo was convinced she looked awful and that the customers—oil rig workers with plenty of folding money in their wallets—would think she looked ridiculous and laugh at her.
That night, when she counted up the tips she’d made, she realized she’d quadrupled her usual income from tips. Bobbi Jo tried to tell herself that, obviously, the men found her attractive…but insecurities regarding her looks were never far from the surface of her thoughts. Especially if she went without a bra. Her insecurities had no sense of humor.
She heard the engine go from a gentle purr to an idle, and, moments later, Jacob and Caleb invited Bobbi Jo up on the flying bridge, the highest part of the boat, which offered the best view. Bobbi Jo sat on the padded bench. They sat on each side of her, not close enough to be actually touching her, but certainly not keeping their distance, either.
“I love it out here,” Jacob said, combing fingers through his hair. “Peaceful. A guy can get his head screwed on straight out here.”
Bobbi Jo gave him a smile. “Can a girl get her head screwed on straight out here?”
“I don’t see why not,” Caleb said.
He slid over on the seat, moving closer to Bobbi Jo though his thigh still didn’t touch hers. Bobbi Jo felt her heart skip a beat. She fought the urge to move away, but to do that meant moving closer to Jacob. As never before in her life, she felt trapped between two men handsome and charming enough for her to question everything she felt she knew about herself.
“There’s nobody at the wheel,” Bobbi Jo said, trying to sound lighthearted. “Shouldn’t somebody be steering the yacht?”
“Lake Sekakawea is almost one hundred eighty miles long. Right now, we’re just floating along with the current. At this speed, it’d be pretty tough for us to get into trouble.” He looked directly into her eyes. Ambiguously, he added, “We’re taking it slow.”
He reached out and lightly slid his fingertips over her cheek. Bobbi Jo felt the immediate spark of desire. She nearly jumped when she got to her feet.
“A hundred eighty miles?” Bobbi Jo knew it was a silly thing to say, but she couldn’t keep herself from babbling. These men had the ability to unnerve her as no other men ever had. “I’ve lived here my whole life and I didn’t know that.”
Actually she did know that. The question had been on the high school’s geography test for the past hundred years. To make her embarrassment even more profound, she knew that the men had taken the test, too. They’d simply taken it several years before Bobbi Jo had.
Both men stood, keeping Bobbi Jo between. When Jacob got to his feet, he winced a little. Bobbi Jo suddenly felt very small and feminine. She also felt vulnerable, but somehow the emotion didn’t frighten her. Not with these men, anyway.
“Bobbi Jo…” With his fingertips, he turned her face up and toward him. “We’ve wanted to talk with you, and this boat seems to be about the only place we can really have privacy.”
He started to bend down, and when he did, suddenly clenched his teeth and let out a quick, low groan of pain.
“Your ribs,” Bobbi Jo said quickly. She touched his bandaged ribs very lightly through his shirt. “You’ve got to be more careful.”
He smiled down at her. “But I wanted to kiss you, and as short as you are, it’s easier for me to get down to your level, then the other way around.”
Bobbi Jo’s gaze darted from Jacob to Caleb, and then back again. “What made you think I’d let you kiss me?”
His smile was the one that had caused many women to joyously remove their panties. Bobbi Jo saw it, knew it for exactly what it was, and guessed that he’d told Caleb what she’d done for him when he was injured and in bed.
“You’ve been talking,” she said accusingly, her gaze dancing left and right. “You shouldn’t have. You know you shouldn’t have.” She put her face in her hands. “I’m so embarrassed. I’m so ashamed of myself.”
“Don’t,” Caleb said, grabbing her left wrist and forcibly pulling her hand from her face.
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Jacob said, his long fingers wrapped around her right wrist, pulling her hand to the side. “You’ve done nothing shameful.”
Bobbi Jo searched his face, wanting desperately to believe he was telling the truth, and not just saying the things she wanted to hear.
“I mean it very much,” he said as though reading her mind. “Every word of it.”
She looked at Caleb, and he said, “We wanted to talk to you out here on our boat so that you couldn’t get mad and run away. Out here, you can’t get away from us.” His smile was pure rogue. “I have to tell you, from the first moment my brother suggested it, I knew it was a perfect idea. No need for Plan B.”
Bobbi Jo brow furrowed. She wasn’t quite certain what these men were up to yet, and she was terribly suspicious that she wasn’t going to like it.
She wanted to stay silent, but curiosity forced her to ask, “What was Plan B?”
“Get you somewhere quiet, tie you up hand and foot so you couldn’t get away, then drive out on country roads far enough so that no matter how loud you screamed, nobody would hear you.”
Bobbi Jo’s eyes widened. “Plan B was to tie me up and kidnap me?”
Caleb shrugged his shoulders. “We’re desperate men. Desperate men are willing to do anything.”
Bobbi Jo tried to pull her wrists out of their collective grasps, but both men held tight. She watched a muscle twitch in Jacob’s jaw, and she knew that his ribs were bothering him. Even with the broken ribs, he was countless times stronger than she. The
grip he had on her wrist was on the verge of bruising her pale skin. She found it disquieting that she wasn’t more disturbed by his forcefulness.
Bobbi Jo said quietly, “You’re starting to scare me.”
“You have nothing to fear,” Jacob said, smiling boyishly, “other than social scorn and being ostracized by people who really aren’t worthy of you anyway.”
“On the upside,” Caleb continued, “there’s a world of wealth and leisure and pleasure, if you choose to accept it. There’s admittance into a new and exciting world, a secret society where a thousand people want to join, but only a handful—literally, just a handful—are allowed to pass through the sacred threshold.” He smiled. “Violate any of the rules and you’re banned for eternity. Follow what few rules there are, and a lifetime full of excitement and the world’s most entertaining debauchery are yours for the taking.”
“I don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about, and the more you talk, the less I understand. And the more nervous I get.”
Jacob looked at his brother and said, “We should have rehearsed what we were going to say. We’re stumbling all over the place.”
“Well, it wasn’t like we had a lot of time to plan for this. Didn’t we just sort of think it up and act on it?”
“Yeah. We’ve really got to start thinking these things through first.”
“Will you guys please stop talking about me,” Bobbi Jo said, her voice rising, “as though I’m not here?” She tried to pull her wrists free, and accomplished just as much as she had previously—which was precisely nothing. “And will you please let me go?”
Jacob gave her a look of annoyance. “No, as a matter of fact, I’m not letting you go. Not now, and not anytime soon.”
“What?” Bobbi Jo exclaimed.
“Listen,” Caleb continued, “I know you’re a girl—“
“Woman!”
“Fine.” Caleb rolled his eyes expressively, which in no way softened Bobbi Jo’s mood toward him or what was happening. “I know you’re a woman accustomed to making your own decisions. You’re going to live your life the way you want to, and be damned anyone else who says any different. Particularly, be damned any man who says any different.”
“But, you see,” Jacob conversationally said, sliding in smoothly, “we have discovered that, to one degree or another, we have both been intimate with you.”
Bobbi Jo closed her eyes and stopped struggling. “This is it,” she said quietly. “This is my greatest nightmare, and now I’m going to live it as a reality. One night of weakness and the rest of my life goes right down the toilet.” She sighed. “I never, ever wanted that to happen. What a fool I’ve been.”
“Since the oil wells came in on our land,” Jacob said, his tone very businesslike, “every woman I’ve ever encountered wanted something financial from me. They never ask for money for sex, but it is always clear they want to improve their standard of living by fucking my brains out. Unfortunately for them, I fuck with my cock, not my brains. That has always enabled me to see them for exactly who and what they are, and to understand why they desperately, hungrily, passionately wanted my cock. All they really wanted was beneath my beltline. My cock and my wallet. The rest of me was pretty much superfluous.”
“I can’t believe that,” Bobbi Jo said, shaking her head. “Good God, you’re one of the most handsome men I’ve ever set eyes on. You’re intelligent and charming and decent and you’ve never, ever, ever made me feel subservient to you even though I’m just a waitress in a wing joint and you’ve got millions of dollars in the bank.”
“But it’s a wing joint that makes really unbelievably good chicken wings.”
Bobbi Jo couldn’t keep from smiling. “Yes, we make really unbelievably good wings there.”
“All this talking has made your lips dry,” Caleb said to Bobbi Jo. “Let me moisten them for you.”
With his free hand, he took her chin and turned her face toward him. Bobbi Jo resisted, but it was more symbolic than effective. Caleb’s lips sealed over hers briefly, and then the contact lessened, and the tip of his tongue traced the circumference of her mouth. The first trip around her mouth was slow, but the second was even slower, simultaneously more leisurely and yet more sensual.
Bobbi Jo felt the nectar of her passion moisten her slit, preparing her for penetration, even though a sexual encounter was one of the things she had promised herself she would not allow.
She felt fingers smoothing through her hair, easing it off her face even as she continued to kiss Caleb. At first, she had thought it was he who caressed her, but after a moment, with what little part of her brain was still capable of coherent thought, she realized that it was Jacob who was moving her hair—moving it so that he could watch his brother kiss her.
She purred. Purred like a contented kitten, and then stopped the instantly she realized the sound she was making. Women like her didn’t take sublime sensual pleasure in kissing a man while his brother watched. Women like her—a waitress in a saloon that sold ice cold beer, strong drinks, burgers the size of any of the minor Greek islands, and baskets of chicken wings tasty enough to bring tears to the eyes of grown men—didn’t belong on new forty-foot yachts bought by millionaire brothers.
Slowly, sensually, there was a hand on her breast. Bobbi Jo didn’t know if it was Jacob or Caleb who was touching her, and the most chaotic thing for her was that it made her clit itch and tingle just a little more than it otherwise would by her not knowing. Strong, masculine fingers closed in on the plump mound, forefinger and thumb pinching a very sensitive nipple through blouse and bra.
Then Bobbi Jo felt two hands on her body while she kissed Caleb. She had, of course, had two hands on her at the same time before. Men, after all, have two hands. And Bobbi Jo was not entirely unfamiliar with men. But until this moment, the two hands had belonged to the same man. Now one belonged to a too-handsome-for-his-own-good man, and the other belonged to his equally enticing brother.
After several seconds, Bobbi Jo turned her face aside, ending the kiss. She felt dizzy, emotionally disoriented, ravenously hungry for sensations that, on a more temperate emotional plane, she felt were wrong to desire.
“Guys…guys, wait,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. She tried once more to pull her wrists free from their grasps, and once more their effortless display of greater strength was put on display. “I’m not sure what you’re suggesting. I know…I know I’ve made some mistakes in the past, but they are mistakes that will never happen again.”
“You’re wrong on so many different levels,” Jacob said. “You’ve made no mistakes, and what happened before most definitely will happen again.”
Caleb added, his voice low and dictatorial, “Repeatedly.”
“No,” Bobbi Jo said, the single word coming out nearly as a plea for mercy. “It can’t.”
Jacob said, “It will.”
And Caleb added, “It is destiny. Our destiny. Our collective destiny. You’re no more capable of stopping what’s happening than Jacob and I.”
“Let me go,” Bobbi Jo said quietly. “I have to think…and I can’t think when you touch me…kiss me….”
She was surprised, but grateful, when they simultaneously released her wrists and set her free.
Chapter 9
They had gone miles from the yacht club in South Williston, drifting slowly with the current, saying little to each other. The yacht was lavishly supplied with liquor, and marginally supplied with food. Liquor doesn’t spoil with age, Jacob had explained, but food does. With the brothers’ chaotic work schedule, there were times when they used the boat almost daily, and other times when they went a couple weeks without setting foot on it. And taking Bobbi Jo to the yacht was a spur of the moment decision.
Bobbi Jo sipped her second cocktail, a vodka and tonic made with a squirt of lime juice, not a real peel of lime, yet still tasted made to perfection by Jacob. When he handed the drink to her, his fingers lightly grazed against hers. It took
an act of superior willpower for Bobbi Jo to not throw herself into his arms at that moment. She wanted him. All of him. She didn’t just want his cock, she wanted his heart—but if they came as single units, she really wasn’t interested. She even wanted his soul. But she also needed to get the hell out of Williston. It wasn’t a place where she could ever be happy. Not truly happy. She might find some laughs, but laughter was a momentary thing, and real happiness was something much deeper and long lasting. It was also infinitely more meaningful.
When they had tried to talk with her about what they wanted in the relationship, she had refused to listen. What they had suggested, ever so briefly but with great sincerity, were heretical to everything that Bobbi Jo believed. She couldn’t allow them to continue speaking because the words they spoke were so enticing, yet so potentially destructive, that she couldn’t listen to them.
They were still just drifting with the current. They had gone down from the flying bridge to the deck, and had done a tour of the interior cabins. Now Jacob was at the wheel of the flying bridge, not the pilothouse. Bobbi Jo looked up at him, standing confidently, handsome and secure in himself and his world. She wondered how any woman could resist him. What wasn’t there to love about the man? Nothing…expect the fact that North Dakota was his life, his blood, his soul, and the one place on the planet he never intended to leave for anything more permanent than a vacation.
Bobbi Jo climbed the small ladder up to the flying bridge. When Jacob looked at her, she forced herself to remember that discipline and willpower were the keys to happiness, and sexual indiscretion and transitory sensual pleasures were the roadmap for unhappiness.
“We’d better turn around now,” she said, keeping her distance from him, thinking him more handsome than ever now that she could see him at the wheel of his own yacht. “I’ve got to get back to work.”