Three Hearts Beat as One (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (14 page)

Lacey knew she was going to have to talk about her new fling sooner or later. The problem was, she was so filled with mistrust of men, she doubted this new ménage would last long enough to discuss with anyone. And it would mortify her worse than anything, and perhaps send her into a tailspin, to have citizens pitying her that her first foray post-Ben had ended in failure. “Oh, it’s nothing, really,” she said lightly. “We just sort of fooled around a little that once. This morning.”

Katrina lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “And gave you three hickeys?”

“Oh, please, Katrina, we’re not in high school,” said Lacey, feeling her neck. Did she really have hickeys? “All right,” she admitted, all in a whoosh. “We’re…a
thing
, I guess.”

Katrina’s jaw was slung low. “But…but…aren’t they
gay?
”

Lacey had to giggle at that. “Apparently not. Katrina, they weren’t just bidding on me to be nice charitable guys. Although I’m sure my sobbing about how only a Folsom inmate would bid on me tugged at Devin’s heartstrings. No, they were really looking for a third woman to fill their ménage, and they decided on me, apparently.”

“They
bought
you? They’re switch hitters? So now you’re their slave? Oh,
kinky
! Do tell!”

Lacey rolled her eyes. “If that was the case I obviously wouldn’t tell you, Katrina! But of course that’s not the case—that would be illegal.”

“So what’s their end game? Just a massive, wild threesome?”

Lacey frowned. She really didn’t know herself. What had Devin said when he’d given her the ring?
This ring is to symbolically cement our relationship
. “I don’t know, really, to be honest. For now I think it’s the best thing for me. To help cleanse me of Ben’s cheating, lying influence.”

“Oh, you said it, sister! I couldn’t agree more. But…do they come as a team, as a package deal?”

Lacey narrowed her eyes at the woman who had been her partner in crime for twenty-five years. They had played with dolls, gone cardboard sliding, not inhaled marijuana, stolen food together. But this would take things to a whole new level. “What exactly are you implying?”

Katrina nudged her elbow in Lacey’s direction. “
You
know. I mean, do they want a fourth?”

“Ew, Katrina!” cried Lacey. “Hell, it’s difficult enough me getting over being in the same bed with two men at the same time. I certainly don’t want to see your boobs jiggling around!”

Katrina looked aghast. “That’s not what I meant! Ew! No, I meant, are they willing to break off into couples?” She looked idealistically at the sky. “Marco’s getting kind of tiresome. The other day I had a yeast infection and Marco wanted to—”

“Oh,
please
, Katrina! No. Just no. In the first place, you’re still with Marco.” Lacey shuddered to have to say his name. “In the second place, why would I want to give up one of my men? Who knows how long it’ll last. I’ll be lucky to have a week with them before they decide—well, that they prefer just being a couple. Who knows, really, Katrina. I have no idea why they’d even pretend to want fat, dumpy, divorced me. I just want to savor this thing while it lasts, you know?”

Katrina put out a calming hand. “I know, Lace. I was just kidding…mostly. You’ve got to admit. They probably
are
the two most strapping hunks in a two-hundred-mile radius of Hell’s Delight. It doesn’t really matter
how
you scored, just that you did.”

The women whipped their heads to view Chase up on the hill by the fence. He was hollering at them through a cupped hand, and Devin was galloping downhill toward them. If Devin’s manliness set Lacey on fire before, the sight of him gallantly zigzagging down the slope at full tilt was enough to make her spontaneously combust. Yes, he wore the cowboy hat she had imagined in her dreams, and rather large spurs he said were a holdover from the days when Spaniards ruled the cattle ranches. Going one beyond her wildest dreams, Devin had clothed his beautiful, muscular thighs in chaps, which he’d explained were pronounced “shaps,” short for
chaparrejos
. These protective and sexy leg coverings were to protect the legs from the endless chaparral, in the foothills consisting mostly of sharp manzanita bushes.

She had already learned so much today—spurs were called “chihuahuas” in the Old West—but she’d learned the most about Devin himself. He galloped up so romantically like that, his handsomely frowning face shaded by the Stetson’s brim. His nicely-packed crotch rode between the worn leather of the chaps, and the swell in Lacey’s chest nearly overwhelmed her.
Am I falling in love with this man?
Lacey tried to quickly think back on when she’d first met Ben. Were there similarities? It felt the same, yet different…

“Katrina!” yelled Devin before reaching them. “Chase wants you up there. Wants to show you something about a trap.”

“Oh,” said Lacey, “the coyote trap? I want to see, too!”

Devin cast her a look that she didn’t immediately interpret. “Chase thought Katrina would be interested in it.”

Katrina had to explain to the obtuse Lacey. “Because I work at the county clerk’s office, more than likely.” Expertly spurring her mount, Katrina charged up the hill, leaving Lacey gaping at the horse’s swishing tail.

“Why would her working at the county clerk’s—”

“Come with me,” said Devin, already riding toward a stand of pine trees.

Lacey managed to get her horse to follow, and their hooves crushed beds of fallen pine needles. Lacey’s nostrils bloomed with their scent, and she began to be intrigued by this odd mission Devin led her on. Occasionally he’d look back across his shoulder and grin at her, but her horse doggedly followed his through this mystical grove of pines.

The brightness emanating from the far side of the grove told her that it let out onto a valley of some kind. She’d lived in Hell’s Delight all her life but wasn’t familiar with these hidden, concealed valleys miles from any paved road. It must all be part of Hardscrabble Ranch. When they emerged from the cover of the trees nearly onto a rocky promontory, Devin dismounted manfully. He tied his mount to a pine then came to assist Lacey.

She didn’t want him to see how awkward she was in dismounting. But the cowboy boots were brand new and stiff as cement, and she nearly twisted an ankle in the stirrup. She didn’t want him to see her frustration for fear it would scare him off. Devin wouldn’t want any wife who was averse to horses! Then she giggled at how silly she was to already be thinking the words “Devin” and “wife” in the same sentence.

“I wanted to show you,” he said, taking her by the hand and leading her on a grassy path through the enormous boulders. She even stumbled on a couple of small rocks because her soles were so stiff, and she was beginning to despair of ever being a suitable mate for Devin.

All her doubts evaporated when they circled round a giant slab and the valley floor below was revealed to her. It was like one of those Garden of Eden paintings complete with shafts of radiant sun lighting up the scene—the grazing cattle like little toys from so far away, the gnarled oaks like fluffy trees one could pick up and move around. A dazzling creek even crawled through the valley floor, and Lacey caught Devin’s arm.

“Your cows,” she surmised.

She had never seen Devin look prouder. “Yep,” he said, already taking on more of a western twang. “
Some
of them,” he corrected. “We’ve got another herd closer to the hacienda where we can demonstrate you some roping skills.”

Emotion clouded his eyes now. He didn’t seem to be thinking about cows anymore as he steered her toward the nearly vertical quartz-veined boulder that had shielded the valley from her. Pressing her against the sun-warmed rock, he urgently kissed her, as though they only had a few minutes. “Lacey,” he whispered between soft, wet kisses, “bringing you into our lives was the best decision we’ve ever made.” He took her lower lip between his teeth and bit gently. Leaning his hips into her, he clasped her by the ribcage, hands supporting her tits.

Lacey found that if she squirmed her lower back against the granite slab, the pressure of Devin’s hips would lift her. Now the toes of her boots barely grazed the ground. “I’m glad you made that decision,” she whispered against his mouth.

Without much formality, as though they were schoolchildren grappling in the playground, Devin yanked up her jean miniskirt and slid a hand down the front of her cotton leggings. Lacey discovered if she hooked the toes of one boot into the back of Devin’s calf-high cowboy boot, she could easily give him access to her pussy. And that was his intent.

His talented fingers found her bulging clitoris in a fraction of a second. At least two fingertips flicked back and forth against its engorged length. His rope-roughened fingertips against her slick clit made her jump, as though she would have some kind of odd, electrical, premature orgasm just from a few of his strokes.

She held his jaw in her hand. “You don’t need to—”

“I need to,” he murmured. His lips clamped down over hers as if to shut her up, and his free hand snaked up her ribcage under her sweater. Lacey felt lush, shapely, feminine beyond belief with this muscular stud rubbing up against her. She knew her tits were large—men had sometimes assumed she’d had a tit job—and pronounced, jutting proudly. But she had never felt so womanly as when Devin released one of them from the stricture of the bra cup, causing it to poke out even more proudly, and ran his thumb over the nipple.

Because Lacey had worn the nipple clamps for so long, his touch was like nails on a blackboard. Lacey felt Devin smile against her mouth when she practically scrambled up the face of the boulder backwards, like a panic-stricken cat. “
Oh!
” she cried—almost a screech.

His hand diddled her clitoris, driving her up the rock wall. He would not relent. His thumb against her dented nipple eased up a bit, but his humping against her hip held her up above him against the rock, so high up their mouths met at an equal height. “That’s it,” he encouraged. “Relax. Let me bring you off. Your nipples are sensitive from the clamps and your clit is swollen from your ass being filled with the plug. But it feels good, doesn’t it?”

“Too…much…” Lacey gasped.

It had occurred to her that he was planning to finish off what Chase had been unable to do with his fingers. Poor Chase—he was just unused to fiddling with women. It wasn’t his fault. There was a vast difference between jacking a man and fingering a woman, bottom line.

But the ecstatic pleasure Devin was coaxing from her core overrode whatever competitive motivation he may have had for accomplishing the task. Devin had clearly not forgotten how to ride the bike once he’d fallen off it, and Lacey could tell by the superior, victorious gleam in his eye that he knew it. He knew he was skilled, and he knew he was coaxing one hell of an orgasm out of his girlfriend.

Girlfriend
.
Am I Devin’s girlfriend?
Blissful explosions wracked Lacey’s pelvis, completely erasing any words or thoughts from her brain. Her head banged back against the rock and she clung to the lapels of Devin’s sheepskin jacket as though she wanted to strangle him. Spasm after spasm gripped her inner canal as Devin devilishly played a little allegro against her button. He grunted as he humped her hip like a feral dog.

He even seemed to know when to slow his fingering. If she didn’t take a few breaths now, she would faint, so Lacey tipped her head forward, her nose touching Devin’s. She must have knocked his cowboy hat off in her assault upon him, and his spiky hair stood out every which way.
Good God in heaven, he’s thoroughly gorgeous.

Yet she knew, even as the orgasmic contractions ebbed and sanity was restored to her gray matter, that Devin had done this to best Chase. She set her boots on the ground and pulled up her leggings. “You did that on
purpose
,” she said, with lower lip stuck out.
Why am I protesting? Who cares what his motivation was?

“Course I did.”

Devin surprised her by freely admitting to it, so she really had no comeback. “Oh. Well, that’s not right.”

“What’s wrong with it? I’m a dom—most of the time, anyway. Think of us as pack dogs. When you sucked Chase’s cock, I started losing my footing as the alpha dog. I knew I had to regain my dominance. What had Chase failed to do? Make you come. Ah. Now
there’s
an area where I will
always
excel.”

For lack of anything better to do, Lacey punched him. She only punched his hearty, hale chest under about two inches worth of leather and sheepskin, and it didn’t knock the grin from his face. “You two are so competitive! How do you expect to ever get along, you know, in mellow synchronicity?”

He frowned, and stooped to swipe up his hat. “Who wants mellow synchronicity, missy?” Standing erect, he slapped the hat against his thigh. “Synchronicity is boring. Chase and I get along so well
because
we have competition and friction between us. Each is always striving to have the upper hand. The secret is we don’t pitch a cow if we’re forced to lose the upper hand. We take it in stride. We know we always have a fresh chance to beat the other fellow into submission.”

“Oh yeah? You take it in stride when you lose the upper hand, eh?”