Mercury, Karen - The Sublime Miss Paige (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)

by Karen Mercury

  Surprisingly, it was Steffen who shot the bow out of Ronnie’s hands. It was whipped out of Ronnie’s hand, and dropped to the ground.

  Ronnie didn’t seem to notice it was Steffen who shot the bow. He looked in surprise at his splayed hands as though they were bombs that had exploded, then back to the cactus with round cartoonish eyes. “Oh, saguaro!” he wailed. “You’ve been a menace to the west my entire life! And they tried calling me the menace to the west! Saguaro, O saguaro! Show me the true path!”

  And he ran headlong into the giant dinosaur of a cactus, arms open as if to welcome it into his bosom.

  Willow was the first to rush over to the saguaro. Amadeo and Steffen appeared rooted to the spot, amazed. She was just in time to see that some long cactus needles had stabbed Ronnie in the eyes and face. He appeared quite content as he hugged the body of the saguaro, his rubbery mouth turned up in a blissful smile, and only the feeblest trickle of breath seemed to come from him.

  “Willow!” yelled Steffen, suddenly at her elbow. “Get away! You don’t need to see that! That douche bag got what he deserved.” He tore her from the scene, hauling her back up the hill toward the wing of the motel she’d been hiding behind. They passed by the sprinting Amadeo, who jogged toward the cactus.

  She protested, “But Steffen, those cactus needles are long, maybe two inches. It looks like he jammed some through his face!”

  Steffen held her firmly with her back against the building. His natural oaky scent surrounded her, calmed her. Workers were starting to tiptoe down the hill to see what had transpired. “He would’ve done the same to you, filly.”

  “Holy shit!” cried a worker. “He’s glued to the cactus!”

  Willow had to remember how he’d gagged her and cut her throat. Not to mention how he’d shot at them through the window of the Gadabout Cottage. “I know. You’re right, Steffen. We’ll just let the paramedics take care of him. I was going to hand him this just to get him to shut up and go away, but now I guess we’ll never know why he wanted that artifact so badly. I was going to pretend it was what he was looking for. He didn’t seem too sure about what he really wanted.”

  “The cock ring? Hell, Ronnie Dobbs didn’t seem too sure about anything, Willow. He’s crazier than a soup sandwich. Did you hear how he was ranting at the cactus like it was alive, like it was tormenting him?”

  Willow wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. “I couldn’t figure out if he thought the cactus was his father, or it was alive, coming to get him.”

  “He was trying to steal it. I wouldn’t blame it for being pissed off. Well, here come the cops. Let’s get you somewhere safe, back up to your room or something.”

  They started walking against the flowing tide of cops that rushed belatedly down the hill just as Amadeo caught up to them.

  “We won’t need the paramedics,” Amadeo told them. “He’s gone. Some of those needles must’ve pierced his brain or something. He’s just standing there completely impaled through and through, like an iron maiden. What’s up with the cock ring?” Amadeo took it from Steffen.

  Steffen said, “I’ll bet it’s a long time until anyone beats his record of being ‘the most arrested man in the Coachella Valley.’ Hey, Officer Tony. Amadeo here just told us Ronnie Dobbs is down there, expired.”

  Willow hoped one of them wouldn’t be accused of doing the deed. She’d watched too many cop shows in her time. It would be a difficult story to believe, that Ronnie had run into the cactus himself. But the cops knew Ronnie well, so maybe it wouldn’t be such a stretch.

  Officer Tony didn’t seem concerned with Ronnie. “You know what else is odd? Just half an hour ago a guy named Chas White was arrested going like a bat out of hell toward Beaumont with a stolen barrel cactus in the back of his truck. Got taken in for DUI, started raving about how he was in cahoots with Ronnie Dobbs, how they drank mescal and took some peyote so they could get all mystical and go steal some cacti they’d seen at the Searchlight .”

  “Those things are valuable,” Steffen agreed.

  “Right. He said they became afraid when apparently the psychedelic properties started to sink into their brains and they imagined a giant saguaro they were trying to steal had come alive, so Chas White ran. He said he put something back into your cottage that he’d stolen because the giant cactus was lecturing him about it, and then he sped off into the desert. I found a box in Chas’s truck that seems to match the one you said was stolen from one of your rooms. Silk-lined with two circular indentations inside.”

  “That’s it. Hey,” said Amadeo, holding up the cock ring. “It’s funny how this showed up right after I busted Chas lurking around in the Gadabout Cottage, right before you came up.” He turned it around, holding it up to the light, peering inside of it.

  “That doesn’t surprise me.” Suddenly Carl Bogart was there, acting equally as confident and bold as ten minutes earlier he’d been cowering in terror. “I always knew Chas was a taco short of a combination plate. I’m telling you, once he showed up for work as drunk as a drag queen walking on a fence. He got stuck in the portable toilet because he couldn’t figure out the handle and started yelling that we’d locked him in there. Finally he knocked it over from inside. Now, that’s a sight you never want to see.” Carl chuckled with the memory. “That’s when we started calling them ‘Port-a-Poppins.’ Because Chas was thrashing around so wildly the thing was practically flying.”

  Steffen squeezed Willow with the arm he had like a vise around her shoulders. “Tony, if you don’t mind, I’m taking Willow back up to her room. Come get us when you need a statement.”

  Carl said, “We all saw the whole thing. We can vouch that Dobbs is crazier than a dog in a hubcap factory, shooting at that poor cactus. He had some weird arrows that he fitted with heads that exploded like bullets. Shot out the cottage window, too, when these three were—ah, inside.”

  Willow frowned. “Carl, I saw you. You were hiding behind that potted palm.”

  Steffen gave her a little shake and began to drag her off. “Willow, he probably saw most of everything.”

  “That’s right.” Willow remembered the blinds had been halfway up during their play session, so Carl could have seen a lot, indeed. She should not try to rile poor Carl, who was probably already traumatized by the day’s events.

  “I’ll get your statements later,” said Tony casually as he started down the hill with Carl.

  Willow heard Carl yammering at Officer Tony. “Once, there was an earthquake when we were out in Indio in a construction trailer. Both Chas and I tried to get through the same door at the same time. Course we got stuck. People were piling up behind us, pushing on us, starting to panic, but Chas wouldn’t relent. He kept trying to squish through the door, scared as a sinner in a cyclone. Man, talk about ignoring ‘women and children first.’ There was a pregnant secretary in the trailer!”

  Tony said, “But you were trying to get through the door, too.”

  Suddenly Willow was very tired. “I wonder what I’ll do about the cactus. I know it can be saved, but isn’t it kind of a morbid reminder of Ronnie?”

  “It’ll be a tourist attraction,” Steffen suggested. “You don’t want to kill a hundred-year-old cactus just for the sake of one asshat.”

  “That’s true.” Willow sighed. She leaned her head against Steffen’s bare shoulder as they walked toward the lobby. “The cactus did save everyone from that ‘menace to the west.’ Kind of poetic justice that it lobotomized him.”

  “Hey, look at this,” said Amadeo remotely as they entered the shelter of the breezeway. He returned out into the direct sunlight in order to squint at something on the inside of the leather cuff. “Something is engraved in here, stamped or etched or whatever you want to call it.”

  Willow looked up at Steffen. “Maybe Ronnie did know what he was looking for.”

  Amadeo read, “’My beloved Bobbie. Forever yours, Cesar. April 1960.’”

  Willow’s jaw dropped. “Cesar? How is it spelled?
The usual way Caesar is spelled, as in Julius?”

  Amadeo shook his head. “Nope. C-E-S-A-R.”

  Willow spoke in a hush. “That’s how Cesar Romero spelled his name. Amadeo! Steffen! This is the memorabilia Ronnie was looking for! He was right for once!”

  Steffen took the item from Amadeo. “Yeah, but…Cesar Romero’s cock ring?”

  Amadeo shrugged. “Maybe it’s not a cock ring. It could easily fit on the wrist of a woman named Bobbie if you used the inside snaps. Short for Roberta.”

  Steffen said, “Or the cock of a man named Bobbie. Ronnie could have been trying to blackmail Romero’s estate, to make money off exploiting something people might think was sordid.”

  “Whichever the case,” said Willow, “we’re not going to exploit it. I might put it in a display case, but where no one can see the inscription and without labeling it.”

  Steffen suggested, “Put it in a case next to your framed menu from the Sunset Palomino Ranch.”

  Willow tilted her head. “In the lobby or in the cottage?”

  Steffen continued herding her toward the stairs that led to the Ocean’s 11 Room. “Come on. We can figure that out once we’ve got you all nice and safe.”

  But Willow already felt safe. She would always feel safe as long as she was between her two men. Suddenly she felt a glorious future open up in front of her, as supersonic and out of sight as the airy and light-filled architecture the three of them loved.

  Or, as Steffen would say, sublime.

  Epilogue

  “The slate contractor just left,” said Amadeo.

  Restoration to the Sunset Palomino Ranch house was nearly complete. Amadeo posed next to the built-in barbecue looking like a James Bond figure in his Hawaiian shirt, holding a scotch on the rocks glass. In fact, the house had been used for a Bond movie decades ago, with bikini-clad vixens posing on the boulders the house was ingeniously built around. The house had been excavated out of natural boulders in the surrounding desert ridge, built by Amadeo’s father. They had renamed Lone Palm Ranch as the Sunset Palomino Ranch to give kudos to the defunct bordello that had brought the three of them together. Willow, who had enthusiastically joined Steffen’s Modern Committee, had convinced them to allow public tours of the one-of-a-kind house once refurbishment was complete.

  Steffen executed some cool laps in the sixty-five-degree night air around the indoor-outdoor pool. The moveable glass partitions had been mechanically opened to the refreshing October desert air, so Steffen could stroke from the very edge of the pool, elevated thirty feet above the desert floor, to the other end. Here the gigantic UFO-like domed concrete roof that covered the circular living room also protected the indoor part of the pool, where Amadeo had apparently just made a drink at the wet bar.

  “But the sealer isn’t dry yet,” Steffen assumed, treading water. The dramatic original black slate tiled floors had been cut around massive groups of boulders in the living room. But ages of cowboys treading dirt and shit across them had worn them dull, and the contractor had just polished and sealed them.

  “No,” confirmed Amadeo, striding over to the outdoor portion of the patio, luring Steffen to swim back over there with the. “We can’t walk in there until the morning. We’ll have to go through these sliders into the bedroom or the kitchen.”

  Amadeo didn’t even resemble a cowboy anymore. He’d taken a more managerial role in the cattle ranching side of the business after his father had passed two months ago, thus the Hawaiian shirt and khaki slacks. Although of course he still wore jeans and chaps out on the range, Steffen liked this new look on him, and as he stroked naked through the warm, airy water, his dick got hard.

  As Steffen rose from the water into the shallower part of the pool like a Bond actor, his hands dangled at his sides. He didn’t care that the myriad of nighttime pool lights cast another myriad of enormous penis-shaped shadows all around the walls of the pool. Steffen was proud of his hard-on, proud of his lust and love for the virile cattle rancher. Everyone he worked with at City Hall knew he lived with a man and a woman. Even the ones who frowned upon it didn’t dare to make that known anymore. Not in today’s day and age.

  Amadeo grinned that crooked grin as he sat on the edge of the steps. Already barefoot, he put his drink down and started to roll up his pants legs. But Steffen was in a feisty mood. Knocking Amadeo’s knees apart with his hips, he took one knee in each hand and brushed his lips against Amadeo’s full, bowed ones.

  “I want you, you big, hunky thing,” he snarled. “Only tonight, guess who’s going to claim your ass?”

  "You are?"

  Steffen felt Amadeo grin against his mouth. More and more the past few months they had been switching. The game they’d played in the Gadabout Cottage the day Ronnie Dobbs had shot the arrow-bullet through the cottage window had lingered in Steffen’s mind long after. Binding the robust stud until he was helpless, feeling the smack of his stiff flesh against his palm when Steffen whipped him, and drilling the tight, muscular ass until he accepted his gushing load, it had all taken Steffen by storm.

  More and more often now, Amadeo was content to play the bottom, probably relishing being worshipped. Amadeo knew that the more compliant he seemed, the more power he actually wielded. The sight of a squirming, hairless, muscular stud begging to be oiled and reamed was a sight to arouse the dullest tool in the shed. All Amadeo had to do was to lift his arms and thread his fingers together at the back of his neck and Steffen was on him like a wolf, suckling his nipples, licking his underarms, and massaging his cock. Amadeo turned his head and submissively showed his bare throat and Steffen was on top of him, humping him madly. In a way, Amadeo had Steffen by the short hairs, though nominally, Steffen was now the Dom most of the time.

  Steffen closed his mouth over Amadeo’s in a bruising kiss. He adored making out with this Latin lover. He spiraled his tongue around Amadeo’s, clutching him close by digging his fingers into the globes of his ass. Their stiff pricks rubbed together as they ground their hips against each other. “I’m going to drill you,” Steffen murmured between sloppy kisses.

  Amadeo smiled. “Take me,” he growled in that low, resonant voice that never failed to send Steffen over the edge.

  He detached with a loud smack of the lips, fixing Amadeo with his eyes, panting. “I love you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Amadeo said, like a flirtatious teen. “I managed to seduce the quarterback. I’d say I’m doing pretty good for myself.”

  Steffen frowned and slapped the cock that poked out at him impudently. “Don’t get so damned full of yourself!”

  “Not until I’m full of you,” Amadeo said.

  It was both corny and brilliant at the same time, and all Steffen could do was slap the cock some more. He barely remembered Amadeo as the unruly musician who would rather toke on a bong than a big juicy cock. Now he’d buffed up, filled out, come into his own. Steffen liked the ripe, mature Amadeo. He wouldn’t have liked the guitar player in the plaid shirt—although Steffen did sometimes wish he had met Amadeo earlier in the dungeons of the Racquet Club.

  “Turn around,” Steffen ordered.

  Amadeo took his sweet time, arrogantly displaying every angle of his carved physique as he did so. Steffen spanked the rounded ass to hurry him up, knowing this would only slow him down. Amadeo held onto the rails of the pool steps, the water coming to barely lap at his swaying ball sac. Spreading his feet on the steps, he gyrated like a pole dancer. The panoramic view of Palm Springs, with Last Chance off to one side, spread out beneath them, a city of tiny lights. Tiny auto horns in the far distance sounded like toys. More immediate was the rustling of royal palm fronds and the lowing of a nearby cattle herd, and sometimes the scent of cowhide wafted to them. But hey, they were ranchers. And being ranchers had built this prime example of architecture where Steffen could imagine spending the rest of his years.

  “Take me,” Amadeo said again, looking coquettishly over his shoulder. He wagged his ass, as tho
ugh Steffen needed any more temptation. “Fill me with that big dick of yours.”

  A handy bottle of suntan oil greased up Steffen’s cock. He didn’t dare fist his own meat too ardently, though. He poured a palmful of oil and rubbed it into Amadeo’s puckered anus. He covered the other man’s back with his torso, murmuring, “I’m going to impale you on my dick, Amadeo. How do you like that?” He rubbed his cockhead against the entrance until he had to gasp and stop.

  “I never knew the quarterback like to pound other boys up the ass. You have so many girls. Why do you want to hump another boy?”

  “Because,” Steffen grunted, breaching the tight ring and burrowing his cock deeper in his lover. “Other boys are bigger, meatier. They understand what real fucking is.”

  “Oh, goddddd, yeah! Fuck me, you big athletic dickhead!”

  Steffen could practically feel the immense shudder that ran down Amadeo’s spine as he was penetrated. He had to slap the curvy ass several more times just to distract himself, to stop himself from coming immediately. “Stand still, you fucking stoner,” he snarled, playing the high school game. “I’m gonna violate you and ream you from top to bottom. You won’t even know what happened.”

  “Fuck me, you nasty jock.” Amadeo obscenely swiveled his hips, fucking the air. “Do me like you do all your girlfriends.”

  “You boys need a cheerleader? It appears you’re doing just fine on your own, but maybe the stoner could use a pair of tits to suck on.”

  Abruptly the two men stopped moving, gasping in air.

  Willow stood there on the terrace, wearing one of the low-cut minidresses she’d been favoring of late. Her arms crossed in front of her bosom only served as a shelf to lift and buoy up her tits, and Steffen gaped with desire.

  Then he smiled. “Sure. Cheerleaders are always welcome.”