“I’m sure. Please, please, make me finish.”
Seth pumped into her and Jason followed, their cocks taking turns driving into her and pulling out. There was never a moment when her body felt empty, and the friction their cocks created between her legs and in her ass built and built, higher and higher, until she writhed and screamed. Her fingernails dug into her restraints, and her breasts jiggled with every hard thrust into her body. She begged them, pleaded with them to please, please let her come, but they kept her on the edge of the chasm.
“Damn it!” she screamed. “Please, make me come! Jason! Seth! Please. I can’t take it anymore!”
Jason’s fingers dug into her hips. The tip of his tongue ran over the shell of her ear. “You’ll come when we say you can.” He surged heavily into her ass until he seated himself to the hilt. Edie felt so full, so complete. “Look at yourself. Look at how beautiful you are when you’re like this, so hot and wild.”
His deep voice compelled her, controlled her, and she turned her gaze to the mirrors. Surely, the woman with flushed cheeks, wild hair, and bruised lips wasn’t her. The person reflected in the mirror undulated her hips to catch the heavy, lust filled thrusts of her lovers. She begged and pleaded for more, barked out orders, called out her passion so loudly that her cries echoed around the room. This woman she saw was sexually liberated and adventurous, sure of herself and her abilities to sate the lusts of the feral men fucking her.
Edie Bishop as she knew herself disappeared. Jason and Seth transformed her into the sensual woman she always longed to become. Their intensity, passion, and their love for her made her more than she ever thought she could be. She wanted to tell them and let them know that she loved them, too, and that she hoped she completed them as much as they did her.
“Jason, Seth,” her voice warbled and shook with her passion.
“I—”
“Shh.” Seth bent his head and took her nipple into his mouth.
“Come now.” Jason’s command and the feeling of Seth tugging erotically at her breast pushed her over the edge. She fell into the precipice they created for her and then she let them catch her, absorb her cries, help her ride her passion out as she screamed her release between them.
Chapter Ten
Edie woke feeling blissfully sore. She stretched her legs and arms, and her whole body collapsed back against the pillows.
Wait a minute.
Silence surrounded her, and the bed was cold.
Her eyes popped open and she sat up, clutching the sheets to her chest. She scanned the room for any trace of either Jason or Seth, but she could not find anything. No clothing lay scattered on the floor, their cell phones were not sitting on the dresser, and their boots did not wait by the door.
How odd. She understood when they could not stay the whole night whenever they came to see her at The Sweet Spot because they had their ranching duties so early in the morning, but they had ranch hands to take care of things on the weekends.
Edie could not fight the strong pull of disappointment. She felt certain they would be there with her when she woke up. Especially after last night. It was the first time they really gave themselves to her without holding back or worrying they would hurt her.
She loved it.
Especially when they woke her up in the wee hours of the morning to kiss all the parts of her they may have been too rough with. Her pussy clenched with the thought, and she felt a rush of wetness between her legs. Edie decided to get out of bed before she reached into the bedside table and used one of the vibrators on herself. If anything was going to make her come, it would be her men.
Edie rifled through the dresser until she found one of their undershirts to wear. She slipped it on over her naked body and could not help but smile to herself when it reached the middle of her thighs.
She went downstairs and walked into the kitchen, hoping to see Jason and Seth there, but the only sound she heard other than the sound of her own breathing was the clock ticking.
She glanced around the kitchen and saw that they brewed some coffee. She touched the pot. Still warm. Where could they have gone at—she glanced at the clock—nine in the morning?
She peeked outside and noticed their trucks still sat next to the side of the house. Without even thinking to put on shoes, Edie walked outside and decided to take a look around. She noticed they could use some landscaping. Sure, their grass was a nice, thick green, but they needed more floral notes to really make their yard pop—
Edie stopped in her tracks.
Another car sat in the driveway, a black Audi Cabriolet. Oh, no. They had a guest. No wonder they weren’t in the house. They probably did not want to have a guest over when she could just come ambling downstairs naked. The breeze picked up at that moment and brushed over her bottom, reminding Edie that only a flimsy undershirt covered her nudity. She pulled the hem down over her legs and turned to go back in the house when the sound of a familiar female laugh reached her ears.
Edie swiveled around on the balls of her feet and stuck her ear out into the breeze, listening. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.
The laughter came to her again.
Cassandra.
Fury coursed through Edie’s body in boiling bursts of heat that made her hands shake and her heart pump furiously against her ribs. The nerve of that woman to show up here when she probably knew Edie was here, too, and trying to steal her men right out from under her nose when she slept in their bed.
That bitch.
Edie stomped barefooted to Jason’s FJ40, opened the door, and pulled his shotgun out from under the backseat. She had a moment of What the hell am I doing? But then she glanced over to where they stood under the big oak tree by the side of the house. Cassandra drew little circles over Seth’s chest with her fingertip, then pulled him into a kiss. Jason’s usually impassive face went white, and his mouth flapped open.
“Oh, that’s it!” Edie kicked the FJ’s door closed and stalked toward them. If Cassandra thought she could throw herself at Jason and Seth and get away with it, Edie would show her she was dead wrong.
“Cassandra!” Edie walked within five yards of the other woman and tucked the butt of the shotgun into her shoulder and aimed it at her. “Step away from them right now.”
Cassandra lifted a glossy eyebrow and positively looked down her nose at her. “Well, look at you. Don’t you look so put together this morning.”
“Hey—” Jason tried to cut in, but Edie stopped him.
“Cassandra, get away from them right now.”
The other woman took half a step back.
Edie pumped the action bar and the racking sound made Cassandra’s eyes go wide. She took a huge lunge backward.
Edie had one of those out of body experiences then. This was not the first one she ever had, but it was, by far, the most intense. Part of her, the sane part, left her body and zoomed out like a camera pans out of a scene at the end of a movie, only this time, it was in real life. There she stood in a see-through white undershirt, completely bare-assed, pointing a shotgun at a perfectly coiffed and manicured woman who looked at Edie as if she were insane.
The zoomed out part of Edie had to agree with Cassandra. The other part of her—the crazy, gun-slinging Amazon—really did not give a flying shit what Cassandra thought. Edie wanted that woman to pack up her designer luggage and get her ass straight out of Texas, or the possessed form of herself would hunt Cassandra Barrett down.
Jason and Seth put their hands over their heads.
“Uh, Edie?”
“What, Jason?”
“What in the hell are you doing?”
“I think the right question here is what the hell is she doing?”
“What the hell are you doing with a gun pointed at me?” Cassandra screeched.
Edie gripped the gun tighter and looked down the sight at her. “I’m showing you that I’m not messing around anymore. I believe in letting things go because eventually karma makes its cycle. But you k
now what, Cassandra? This is your karma for pissing me off. I tried to be nice and civil, but you’re the type of person who takes kindness as weakness, which speaks badly about you as a person.
“So I’m telling you in the only way you’ll ever understand me. Cassandra, if you ever, and I mean ever, pull a stunt like the one you just pulled, or anything similar, I will not hesitate to pull the trigger.”
Edie looked at Cassandra’s pale face and trembling lips and knew that, finally, she got her message across.
“Now get in your car,” Edie gestured toward it with the barrel of the shotgun, “and leave. Now. No looking back, no air kisses, none of that bullshit unless you want shrapnel in your ass.”
Cassandra skulked toward her car, her eyes on Edie the entire time. Edie could see the fear, fury, and jealousy in her eyes, but she did not care. Cassandra was not the type of woman who respectfully backed off. She cheated, stole, connived, and lied her way into getting what she wanted, and there was no way in hell Edie would let her get away with it this time.
Wimpy, peace-loving, PETA-supporting hippy, her ass!
This will be the last time that woman underestimates me.
Edie followed her every moment through the gun’s sight. Cassandra skirted around her, barely three inches away from the end of the shotgun when Cassandra’s hand shot out, pushed the gun hard to the left, and wrangled it out of Edie’s grip. Edie stumbled, her shock and confusion making her clumsy and her limbs heavy. When she finally righted herself, she was on the wrong side of the gun and Cassandra’s eyes, sparkling with a crazed, obsessed light, stared at her with feverish glee. Her hair, usually coiffed to perfection stuck out in random patches, making her look like a rabid poodle.
Jason and Seth started, pale-faced and wide-eyed, rooted to their spots.
“You know, for a while I wanted to kill you.” Cassandra tucked the shotgun higher into her shoulder and brought the end of it to point directly over Edie’s heart. “You are everything I can’t stand, darling. So sweet and sugary and honest. Who in the hell cannot tell a Goddamn lie? Who? It sickens me, really.”
Edie tried to swallow past the thick lump of sheer terror, but she couldn’t. Even breathing was difficult. Her fingers twitched, and her whole body shook uncontrollably. Hot and cold sweat burst over her skin, but somehow she couldn’t feel it. Any of it. All she knew was the crazed glittering in Cassandra’s eyes.
“But the biggest thing I can’t stand about you is how you can just love. You just love everything.” Cassandra waved the gun around when she said the last few words. Edie had the distinct impression that if she hadn’t been holding a gun, Cassandra would have flailed her arms about wildly. “People like you come from love. Your parents loved you, your friends loved you, I’m sure even all the butterflies and birdies loved you, too. But people like me didn’t have that when we grew up. We don’t have that ever, and we hate people like you.
“I never felt anything close to what you so freely give to everyone until I met Jason and Seth. And you cannot imagine how addictive it was for someone like me to have them touch me, kiss me, love me.”
Nausea hit Edie with the subtlety of a professional soccer player kicking her in the stomach. The idea that her men ever spent a single second with someone like Cassandra did terrible things to her insides.
“When things ended, I was devastated, naturally,” Cassandra continued. “What woman wouldn’t be? And then I come back here, years later, because I cannot stop thinking about them, and here you are. Taking everything that was mine.” Cassandra advanced on her, taking the two steps separating Edie’s chest from the barrel of the gun. The cold metal burned her skin.
Edie gulped air in like a drowning fish, but it only made her dizzier, more confused. Her mind still reeled from the shock of having someone admit they wanted to kill her. Sure, she deserved it after pulling the same stunt only moments before, but Edie had no intention of actually shooting the other woman. She didn’t think Cassandra would offer her the same courtesy, especially when Cassandra’s wide-eyed, no-sniveling tears tracked silently down her expressionless face.
“Cassandra, please,” Edie quietly pleaded. Her words were soft enough that the wind stole them from her lips, but when Cassandra’s eyes hardened, Edie knew she heard. “Just put the gun down. We can work this all out.”
“No, darling, we can’t.” In a blur of movement, Cassandra flipped the gun, pointing it upward, and settled the barrel on the fleshy underside of her chin.
Even though she know Cassandra would not be able to pull the trigger because it was out of Cassandra’s reach, Edie gasped in horror, her hands reaching out to the other woman in supplication. “Cassandra, don’t! Just put it down. Don’t do this.”
Cassandra laughed at her. “Even now you don’t want me to hurt myself. I’m sure you would even give up your relationship with Jason and Seth if I asked you to, just so I wouldn’t kill myself. But you see, that’s the only way to really solve this little issue we have here. If I kill you, then you automatically win. You’d be dead, of course, but they would never want to look at me ever again, and that’s if they don’t strangle me with their bare hands first.”
She tightened her grip on the barrel of the gun. “But if I kill myself, your time would be tainted by my memory from here on. I would win. Because they’ll never give you up. I know that now. I see the way they look at you, and I know they never, ever looked at me with a fraction of that love they have for you. And I hate you for it.”
Edie’s mouth flapped open and closed as she tried to grasp for something, anything, to say to keep Cassandra from doing the unthinkable. Inarticulate sounds sputtered from her mouth. Useless, empty sounds. She felt powerless. She would do and say just about anything to keep Cassandra from taking her own life, yet she selfishly feared Cassandra would ask her to give Jason and Seth up and walk away. She would do it to save another person’s life, but she shied away from the very real possibility that she would, indeed, be doing just that. Just the merest thought of it made something inside of her achy and hollow.
“Cassandra, enough. Put it down,” Jason commanded in a calm, steady voice.
Cassandra slowly turned to face Jason, her hands trembling enough that the gun shook in her grip. Edie took the first real breath she took in the past few minutes. Jason’s gaze swept over her for a split second, warming her, reassuring her, and then his face hardened when he turned back to Cassandra.
“Stop this. Now.”
“You always were such a heartless bastard!” Cassandra screeched. “Do you know how hard I tried to make the two of you love me? How hard I tried to get you to feel just an ounce of what I felt for you? Why wasn’t it enough? Why?”
Jason held his hands up and slowly approached her. “Cassandra, it just...it just wasn’t meant to happen, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care about you.” His voice was low and hypnotic, his eyes gleamed like the sun streaming through an icicle, and he moved with a calm precision Edie never saw before. “We want you to be happy and we want the best for you. But it’s not with us, Cassandra, because we’re not the ones for you. That’s all.” He shrugged a meaty shoulder and reaching out ever so softly, wrapped his hand around the barrel of the gun and pulled it out of Cassandra’s grasp.
Just like that, the spell he wove was broken. Cassandra shrieked and lunged for the shotgun, but Jason had already tossed it to Seth, who caught it and unloaded it in one fluid motion. The shells landed with soft, dull thuds at his worn cowboy boots. When Seth glanced up from where the shells landed, Edie winced and took a giant step back. Pure murder was in his eyes, and she was scared of him for the first time.
His boots landed in heavy, crunching thuds on the grass as he stomped his way toward Cassandra. His brows pulled low over his eyes, and his mouth was set in a firm, unyielding line. Seth wrapped his hand around Cassandra’s upper arm and forcibly yanked her toward her car.
Cassandra struggled against his hold, kicking and squirming, and she lost a stilett
o in the process. “Wait! Stop! Get your hands off—”
Seth pulled her roughly to face him. “Cassandra, get in the car before I do something I won’t regret.” Seth’s angry words hissed out like venom. Then he spun her around again and shoved her into the car, slamming the door shut even as she moved to stop it. “Cassandra, leave now, or I swear on my fathers’ graves that I will—”
Jason walked over to Edie and pulled her into his protective embrace and turned so that she could not see or hear Seth and Cassandra without having to rise to her tiptoes. Edie breathed in his musk and sweat and leather scent. There was something desperate in the way he held her, almost clutched at her, that told her not to complain or pull away when he squeezed her a little too tight. She buried her face in his chest as he nuzzled her hair, and his lips moved against it in a silent benediction she could not understand. It was not until she pulled her head away from his body that she realized he kept saying “I love you.”
He took a step back and took her shoulders roughly. “Don’t you ever scare us like that again.”
“I don’t plan on—”
“Christ, Edie,” Seth exclaimed, cutting her off. He rubbed his palm over his chest as he walked toward them. “You nearly gave me a fucking heart attack. What in the hell—”
The sound of tires on gravel made Edie glance up. Cassandra sped out of the driveway like the crazed woman she was.
“She’s finally gone, then?” she asked.
Seth looked over his shoulder and met her eyes again. “Yeah. She is.”
She blew a few loose strands of hair out of her eyes. “Thank goodness. I didn’t know what to expect or think for a few minutes.”
Jason grunted. “Tell me about it.” He smoothed a hand over her face and pressed a soft kiss to her mouth. “All I knew was that I had to get that damn gun out of her hands. What were you thinking, Edie?”
As the shock faded, she felt a mortified blush making its way from her chest to her cheeks. “Oh my God, what was I thinking?” She buried her face in her hands. “I cannot believe I actually pulled a gun on someone.”
Edie Earns Her Saddle Page 17