Trey didn’t know how long he’d have stood there, stupid and dumbstruck, if Rebecca and Zane hadn’t led him to the empty guest room across the hall. The windows there overlooked the front lawn and the long tree-lined drive. Everything outside was peaceful: just another gracious country estate in rural New England.Ignoring the allure of the air conditioning, he yanked up the window sash. Real air swept in at him, warm and grass-scented. Rebecca and Zane rubbed his back from either side.“I don’t care if people know who I sleep with,” he said as steadily as he could. “I just don’t want the world to view me as a victim. I want to choose who I share my past with.”He turned to rest his hips on the windowsill. Rebecca and Zane looked worried but not overcome with pity. Maybe they were downplaying their concern, or maybe they gave him credit for not being made of glass. A smile pulled at his lips without warning, prodded by a sense of humor he wouldn’t have thought he’d recover this quickly.
ZANE led Rebecca, whose heart was beating like a cornered rabbit, to the back of their huge closet.“We need to be seen,” he said, “as a threesome, as openly and boldly as possible.”He opened a double-door wardrobe with swirling exotic wood. Rebecca expected—or maybe hoped—to see suits for the men inside. Instead, a rainbow of expensive women’s dresses hung on the rack.“Holy crap,” was all she managed to say.Trey snickered behind them. “Zane has his obsessive side. He couldn’t help shopping for you in the hopes that you’d hang around.”“I’m supposed to wear one of these?” She touched a long silk gown in pale peach. It was even fancier than the silver slip thing he’d bought for her. “These dresses are beautiful, but I’m not sure they’re me.”“They’re you,” Zane said sternly. “The you you haven’t met. Think of them as uniforms for billionaires’ girlfriends.”She burst out laughing, which she hoped was okay. She looked at Zane to make sure. A muscle ticked in his chiseled jaw. Okay, ma
“Damned heels,” Rebecca muttered, holding tight to their hands. “I hope you two are giving me brownie points.”She forgot her grumbling the moment she saw the illuminated mansion behind the iron fence. The noise of nighttime Manhattan was all around them: the rush of traffic, the machinery of tall buildings. Other guests of the event stepped out of taxis and limos, chattering with their companions. Zane watched all of that fall away for Rebecca. Her face lit up at the fairytale house before her, her lovely eyes going wide.“Wow,” she said, her delight instantly becoming his. “This is cool!”The turreted Whitney-Moeller Museum had once been a residence. Back in the twenties, the family donated it to the city, along with its extensive art collection and period furnishings. Today, it was a popular venue for charity events, thanks to its magnificently preserved turn of the century ballroom.To escort her to it, Zane and Trey each offered her an elbow. The place was too packed for this arra
Rebecca and Trey snagged a small stand-up table to sample the hors d’oeuvres. She’d meant everyone to share it, but they seemed to have disappeared. Most troubling, after Mystique’s big entrance, Zane had strode across the ballroom in the same direction.Rather than give in to paranoia or jealousy, Rebecca frowned at the cell phone she’d just shut off.“That was weird, huh?” she said to Trey. “Who knew the wildlife people were such pranksters?”“Mm,” he said, attention focused where the well-dressed crowd might be concealing Zane and Mystique. He didn’t seem worried, but like he was distracted.“They had to hack everyone’s phone to do it.”“Maybe they had people’s numbers from their fundraising.” “They didn’t have mine.”Trey finally looked at her. “We’ll get you a new one, with better security.” “I’ll get me a new one. Don’t you remember what you pay me?”He smiled with soft eyes and a hint of wickedness. “I’m sure I barely scratch the surface of what you’re worth.”A ripple among the
REBECCA deserved a medal for not attacking the men in the car. They seemed to expect it. Both had erections when they got out.“We’ve done the garage,” she said airily, though her body was simmering. “Please follow me to the house.”Zane chuckled behind her. “Have something in mind?”She didn’t answer, just smiled to herself. Inside, the mansion had its usual nocturnal hush, twinkling with just enough tasteful lights to see by. She was carrying her heels and consequently dared to add an extra sway to her hips. It would have been a shame not to. The formfitting dress was made for it.“Look out, Trouble,” Trey said, apparently liking what he saw. She stopped outside the elegant period elevator.“Have you swept the place?” she asked Zane.His focus took a second to travel back to her face. He’d been distracted by the dip of her neckline, in which the key now hung. “You mean for surveillance? Yes. Top to bottom. Nothing’s here apart from the security that should be.”Smiling, she turned to
Again the men groaned like they were the same person. “So pretty,” Zane said as Trey pulled her nipples out.If she’d had breath left, she’d have said the same when Trey leaned across her shoulder and slid his mouth down Zane’s shaft. He got Zane wetter than she had, sucking him harder and more noisily. He undid the waist fastening to Zane’s trousers, exposing more of him to work on. Rebecca decided that was good. His drawn up scrotum was perfectly in reach.Zane made a pleasure-pain noise when she squeezed it.“God,” he moaned, hips twisting to get closer to both of them. His body arched like they had it on a rack. It seemed to be a good rack. He didn’t ask them to stop until he couldn’t stand anymore.“Please,” he said then. “I need a breather.”Trey drew back and panted, his cock hard as stone inside her. Zane wasn’t the only one on the edge. Trey hadn’t moved in a while. With a reluctant groan, he pulled out of her.“Me?” Zane asked. “You,” Trey acquiesced.Zane released the rail a
“Hot, luscious piece of ass who can suck a golf ball through forty feet of garden hose seeks rippling-ab’d firefighter who has a tongue that thrums like a hummingbird and enjoys painting my toenails and eating Ben & Jerry’s out of the carton while watching Mad Men.”Laura Michaels stared at the online dating site’s registration screen and frowned. That’s what she really wanted to write. Here was the truth:“Needy, insecure, overweight twenty-six year old Business Analyst with three cats, a corporate job with pension and no debt seeks Mr. Impossible for way more than friendship and lots of ice cream. I’m desperate for some physical affection and oral sex with a guy who doesn’t view it as some sort of favor he’s granting me, and then expects to be praised like he cleaned my toilet. One night stands are better than nothing as long as you brush your teeth. Call me!”Her best friend, Josie Mendham, punched her in the bicep. “You can’t say either of those!” Josie was Laura’s opposite. Where
Ding! The little chat box on the online dating site lit up like a Christmas tree. Laura sucked the last mouthful of her coffee and gaped at the screen. You have got to be kidding me, Laura thought. Already? She clicked and read a message from “9inluvr”:Hey, babe. I live in the city and so do you, so let’s hook up for some FWB action.She snorted. Oh, sure. Just like that. Yer a catch, Bud. A real romantic.Ding! This one was from some guy named Dylan. Before she read the chat she looked at his profile.Well hellooooo there, Mr. Firefighter. A thin line of drool formed at thecorner of her mouth, an instant response to the picture before her. It was a professional picture, the guy wearing no shirt, a fireman’s hat perched at a jaunty tilt. Like a stripper’s picture in a firefighter’s role. Oh, God. I can’t date a stripper, she thought. He’d have nicer g-strings than mine.But no—he was a real firefighter. The picture, he explained in his profile, came from a charity bachelor auction he
Mike’s bronzed chest, with a sprinkling of sun-kissed hair, felt familiar and foreign under her finger tips, his hands lifting up under her thickened breasts, face gazing down and marveling, as if looking at a work of art for the first time. When his eyes met hers they were smiling, and he touched her lips with one finger. “I do love you.” Hand on her belly. “And her.”A lump in her throat made it hard to speak, Dylan’s hard, muscled form behind her, leaning against her back and ass. Heady from the touch of both, she tipped her face up and drank in Mike’s words. “I love you, too.” His smile, his mouth, their tongues touching as she was enveloped by manflesh, manskin, the two men who completed her—it made her feel truly, madly, intensely loved.Cherished.Dylan’s words were a trigger for so much more as he nipped her ear and whispered, “I love you, too.” Mike released her and she spun around, arms lifting over his shoulders, his muscled forearms on her back
A palpable tension sat between him and Mike on the car ride up the mountain, a third partner who wasn’t nearly as appealing as Laura. Unresolved emotions, unspoken words, and a sense of uncertainty made the air thick, kept Dylan’s nerves on edge, and finally forced him to blurt out, “I was a total douche. I should never have made us wait to tell her about the money, and I almost blew it, and now here we are with maybe—kinda—sorta—a chance with her, and I don’t want to fuck it up again.”Cringe.“If you’re a douche, I’m a bigger one. Mega douche. Thor the Douche,” Mike bantered back, his voice jovial, but his face serious. Eyes on the road, he seemed to feel the change in the car. They were talking. Really talking, once again.“How do we make this right with her?” Dylan’s words had an urgency, a plaintive tone he could hear in his own voice and hated.Mike shrugged. “I think this time we actually listen to her and Josie and do what Laura wants.”
Mike held the smartphone’s camera up and surveyed the soot-covered room slowly. Laura’s apartment building had just been opened for him and Dylan to come down, the fire investigation completed enough that they permitted residents to remove vital items. The conclusion: an electrical fire that started in the breaker box in the basement, directly under Laura’s place.She was damn lucky. A few more minutes and...well, he wouldn’t be holding a camera streaming live video to her on her smart phone, her sweet face asking questions and giving directions as she rested under a down throw on his couch, looking relaxed and healing nicely.His couch. At the cabin. When the fire investigators told her she wouldn’t be able to go back to her apartment for weeks, if not months, the structural damage too great for people to live there, the news had seemed to crush her. Quick to offer help, he and Dylan had both tried to get her to move in. Cabin vs. apartment?She’d chosen
Barely four hours had gone by since Dylan’s phone call, and Mike had to absorb his first encounter with Dylan since their fight four months ago, seeing the two loves of his life endangered by fire, and now he had just learned that Laura was pregnant with their baby. Their baby. All three of them. He didn’t want to view it as his, or Dylan’s. But he had no idea Dylan felt the same way!Pointing at Dylan, he said, “You, too?”The smile on his partner’s face was so telling, impish and serious all at once in a way only Dylan could pull off. “Me, too. She’s ours. Not yours. Not mine.”Would Laura agree? Mike wasn’t sure. Seeing her there, on her side, radiant and scared, made him want to bar the door and protect her from whatever the world threw her way. Radiant! Hah! Now he knew why she seemed to be glowing when he saw her yesterday at Jeddy’s, through that window.A happy pregnant woman, full of life. Full of his child.His daughter.
A fireball was in her crotch, pushing hard, so hard, to come out. Laura couldn’t breathe, scratching at her neck, trying to claw open her trachea to get air, air, air. Oxygen was gone, her throat spasming as her vagina split open, divided in two, and out came an enormous, glowing-orange sphere, shooting across the surgical room and catching the wall on fire.Screaming, she opened her eyes to find a nurse pushing buttons on some sort of box, a man in scrubs holding her arm down, and six very worried eyes watching her from a few feet away.Eyes she knew.She was on her left side and the nurse had her face in both hands, eyes boring into her. “Laura! Laura! I need you to breathe slowly, to focus. We can’t find the baby’s heartbeat— ”Baby! Heartbeat!“—and the more you panic, the harder it is to get the monitor hooked backup.”Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The nurse took her through the motions, andLaura calmed
Wah wah wah wah 345 wah, Somerville, Dylan heard, his ears ringing as he sat up fast, the cold night air hitting his bare chest when the down comforter slid to his waist. The dispatcher’s words sounded so familiar.When she repeated the address again, his blood ran cold. Then the words:multi-unit fire.If you had told him even a year ago that he could move that quickly, shove on pants and boots and a jacket, be down God knows how many sets of stairs and out the door and in his car in less than two minutes, he’d have told you were a fool.Tonight? Not tonight, though, because that was Laura’s address the dispatcher just announced, followed by the words multi-unit fire. Blood pumping hard, he fumbled for his phone (thank God it was still in his pants from yesterday) and as he peeled out of the garage he tapped through his Contacts list to Mike.Multi-unit fire.Weaving across two lanes, he sped to her place, the drive inching by s
She snorted. Funny how there already was a third.The lie mattered, but what also mattered was that she had been ready to think about kids, to imagine pregnancy and birth and babies and toddlers and all the roly-poly love that came with them. If she was pregnant—she allowed herself to think in hypotheticals, her hands mechanically shampooing her greasy hair, the feeling of rinsing like a baptism, washing away the past month of dysfunction—then it would be OK.Everything would be OK. To be more precise, it would all work out in the end because she absolutely, positively, undeniably was not pregnant. And couldn’t be. It just wasn’t true, and as long as she willed it to not be true, she didn’t have to face any of the long term consequences of having a billionaire baby daddy.Or two.A quick rinse was all she could manage as her legs and arms felt like jelly, her body shivering no matter how much she turned the shower faucet for more hot water. Time t
“Wakey, wakey, sleepyhead!” Josie shouted, yanking open the curtains in Laura’s bedroom, the pink cloth swaying in a pattern that made Laura’s stomach queasy. Ugh. Bad enough she was exhausted; did Josie really need to make her nauseated, too? The coarse sun blinded her with too much, the glare off the world striking her as so harsh, too unyielding. Give her a nice, grey day with white cloud coverage so she could dip herself back into life.Let her suckle her depression, for it gave her so much comfort. Being a victim meant never having to think through your own actions, not reflecting on regret, and it definitely gave her ample excuse for eating entire pints of ice cream and wallowing in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” marathons.It had been a month since the guys...well, there wasn’t an easy word for what they’d done to her. The Big Reveal? The Big Not-So-Reveal? Laura’s Public Humiliation? Whatever you called it, a month had passed and somehow she’d survived
The sight of Mike’s back as he began to run away was unbelievable. Dylan stared, mouth open, the keys loose in his palm. The guy was running home? It was at least ten miles, which was nothing for Mike, but he was dressed in jeans, a polo shirt, and Merell shoes—not exactly runner’s clothing in August in Boston. He’d turn into a puddle of goo by the time he crossed the Charles River.Maybe that was the point.Right now, though, he really didn’t have a spare ounce of caring in him for anyone but Laura. How could he have been so callous? Man, he had totally misjudged how she perceived him and his every move. The “It’s always complicated” joke not only fell flat, it seemed to have been the nail in the coffin of any chance they may have had to rewind their botched attempt at waiting for the right moment to tell her about their money. Ego be damned; he could admit when he was wrong. He was man enough. And boy, oh boy, was he wrong.Mike didn’t even want to be in