I lie, curled into a ball for a very long time, drained and numb, not sure how to move past this. The photos of Kai, Maddox, and me back in Dublin are still on the coffee table, mocking me with their images of happiness.
The box containing the collar is on the couch next to me. Tomorrow morning, I’ll start to pull the shattered pieces of my life back together. Noon will come and go, but Kai and Maddox won’t be swinging by to pick me up. We won’t be headed to Club M. All of that is over.
I fucked up.
“Avery, wake up.”
I blink and rub the sleep from my eyes. Kai and Maddox are standing in front of me, and for a second, I wonder if I’m dreaming. “What are you doing here?”
“Your building’s security is appalling,” Maddox replies. “Someone let us into the lobby, and your front door was unlocked.”
“Oh.” I can’t bring myself to care. I’m just too drained. “I talked to my parents,” I tell them wearily. “And you were right about everything. They’ll send back the money I borrowed from you, and I’ll pay you back.” I swallow the lump in my throat. “Every time I walk into your lives, I seem to ruin it. Once the money’s in your account, I think it’s probably best that we don’t see each other again.”
“Avery,” Kai says bluntly. “Shut up and let us talk.”
I’m jolted into silence.
“Get on the floor,” Maddox orders. “On your knees with you. Spread your legs for me, sweetheart. I want to see my pussy.”
My heart starts to hammer in my chest. If they’re giving me orders, does it mean they’re staying? That there’s a way forward through this tangle?
“We went to see Lowell,” Kai says.
“Kai punched him,” Maddox adds with a smirk.
“You’re a surgeon,” I gasp, forgetting that I haven’t been given permission to talk. “Your hands…”
Maddox’s eyes narrow. “I believe your instructions were quite clear, Avery.”
Ouch.
Kai flexes his fingers. “I’m not saying it’s the smartest thing I’ve ever done.” He looks like the cat that swallowed the canary. “On the other hand, it might have been the most satisfying.” He reaches for the box containing the collar. “We realized something, Maddox and I, while we were chatting with Lowell. All our fears and doubts stem from something that happened ten years ago. I’m tired of the past, Avery. I’m far more interested in our future.”
Joy blazes in my chest. “I’m sorry. I should have told you about Victor earlier.”
“Yes,” Maddox agrees. “And we should have listened better, and we shouldn’t have walked out of here tonight,” Maddox says. “I’m sorry too. I won’t leave again.”
“Crawl over here, Avery,” Kai says. His voice is stern, but there’s so much love in his eyes that I think I’m going to cry all over again. “And ask us to put this collar on you.”
I do exactly as I’m told, shivering as Kai and Maddox fasten the twin clasps of my collar. “I love you, Avery Welch,” Maddox whispers. “You belong to us. Not for fourteen weeks. Forever.”
“Yes.” Some roads are more convoluted than others, some paths longer. But as Kai and Maddox lock my collar in place, I know I’m exactly where I want to be. With them. Together.
Epilogue
Avery:
Three months later…
The sun is shining through my window when I wake up, stretching like a cat, wincing a little. We’d been especially energetic last night, and my muscles are sore. Whatever Kai and Maddox have planned at the club today, I hope it’s low-key.
I roll out of bed and clean up, wondering where the hell Kai and Maddox are. It’s December, so I doubt that they’re in the backyard. Maybe they went to get me breakfast? I hope so; I’m starving.
The last three months have been so great.
Victor is gone. He’d threatened to press assault charges against Kai, but then Nadya had stepped in, and I saw why Maddox calls her a barracuda. She’d promised she’d leak the tape of us at dinner to the British tabloids. “Along with the fact that you’re harassing your ex-wife about her engagement ring,” she’d added. “You’re already a topic of gossip in London, Baron Lowell. You’ve had one failed marriage and two broken engagements. The British media is always intensely interested in the peerage, aren’t they?”
Faced with the prospect of being under public scrutiny, Victor had caved. No charges were pressed, either against Kai or against me.
I guess I could have kept the ring, but I didn’t. I asked Nadya to send it to Victor’s lawyers. “I never want to see that damn thing again,” I’d told her. “He can keep it.”
My parents, as I predicted, returned the five hundred grand I’d sent them. It was never about the money for them, it was about control. Except they can never control me again. I’ve cut off contact with them, and I’m happy to say that it’s one of the best things I could have ever done.
“Up at last.” I hear the front door open, and Kai and Maddox walk in. “I tried waking you,” Kai says, “But you rolled over, pulled the blanket over your head, and told me to go away.”
My lips twitch. “How disrespectful of me. I really should get spanked for being such a bad girl. Tonight at the club? I want to try the knotted flogger.”
Maddox groans. “Avery, you’re killing me here. Sorry to disappoint you, sweetheart, but we’re not going to the club today.”
“We aren’t?” Funny, they hadn’t said anything about it last night.
“No, I thought we’d do something different.”
Something in his tone alerts me. “Like what?”
“I thought we’d check out some houses,” Kai replies. “And maybe the three of us could buy one together?”
My pulse starts to race. “Is that your way of asking me to move in?”
“We’re not going to make it easy on you,” Maddox warns me. “You’re going to have to decorate the place. You have a great eye for color.”
Pleasure runs through me at the compliment. “You’re a world-famous photographer,” I point out. “I very much doubt I have a better eye for color than you.”
Maddox smiles at me. “Ah, but I have no experience putting down roots,” he says. “I’ve never wanted to. Until I met you. I turned down a job yesterday,” he says. “And I’m making it clear to everyone I’ve freelanced for. No more trips longer than a week.”
“That’s going to restrict you quite a bit.”
He shrugs, unperturbed. “Avery, I’ve traveled all over the world,” he says. “I don’t want to be away from you for long stretches of time. I love what I do, but I love you more.”
“Taking a leaf out of Maddox’s book, I’m going to back off work a little bit too,” Kai says. “Not too much, nothing radical. Just enough that I can come home for dinner every night. Jayla was right; life isn’t all about work.”
“She’s going to be quite smug when she finds out.” Our friends and family had taken a little bit to get accustomed to our threesome. For about a week, Maddox hadn’t been sure if his mother was going to talk to him again, but then she came around. “I grew up during the sexual revolution,” she’d said to him wryly. “I’m just going to have to get over it.”
Gage and his fiancée did break up. Knowing what I do of him, he’s probably prowling around for another heiress.
“She is,” Kai agrees ruefully. “That’s a risk I have to take. So, what do you say, Avery? Want to get dressed so we can see what’s on the market?”
I jump to my feet, anticipation dancing through me at the idea of coming back home every night to them, eating dinner together, curling up on the couch and watching TV. Just normal, boring, lazy stuff. It sounds pretty amazing. “Yes,” I beam widely. “Absolutely.”
It might have taken us ten years to piece it together, but it’s all worked out in the end.
Thank you for reading Taming Avery! The next book in the Club Menage series, Keeping Kiera, will be released in the second half of 2018. If you’d like to be notifi
ed when it’s available, please sign up to my newsletter and I’ll send you a note when it’s live.
If you enjoy menage romances, may I suggest my Dirty series? The series is set in the small town of New Summit (which is much more gossipy than Goat, Oregon.) Each book features a smart and sassy heroine, and a pair of men who fall in love with her, and each book in the Dirty Series is a standalone MFM Menage romance.
Flip the page for an extended preview of Dirty Therapy, the first book of the Dirty series.
A Preview of Dirty Therapy by Tara Crescent
My O is missing. Two therapists are going to help me find it.
Two hours after Dennis proposes, I find my fiancé with his d*ck buried in Tiffany Slater’s hoohah, and he has the nerve to suggest it’s my fault.
Because I’m frigid.
Sure, I’ve never had an orgasm with him, or with anyone for that matter, but relationships are about more than good nookie. (Not that it was ever good. Adequate is more like it. Okay, who am I kidding? Dennis couldn’t find his way down there with a flashlight and a map.)
Now I’m determined to find my missing O with the help of two of the hottest men I’ve ever set eyes on. Therapists Benjamin Long and Landon West. If these two men can’t make me come, then no one can.
I shouldn’t sleep with them. I shouldn’t succumb to their sexy smiles. I shouldn’t listen when their firm voices promise me all the pleasure I can handle.
I can’t get enough. But when a bitter rival finds out about our forbidden relationship, everything will come crashing down.
CHAPTER 1
Mia:
I’m going to sum up the suckitude of my life with a three-point list.
Though I haven’t had sex with my boyfriend for over a month, he proposed last night in an extremely crowded restaurant, and I said yes. Because everyone was looking at me and I didn’t want to be the girl that broke his heart in a public setting. Even though I wasn’t really sure I wanted to marry Dennis.
Once I got back home, I started thinking about whether we were doing the right thing. So, I went over to his place to talk to him, and I found him plowing his dick in Tiffany Slater’s willing pussy. That wasn’t good.
I started yelling. Instead of groveling, he yelled back. “You’re frigid,” he accused me. “I’ve never been able to make you come.” Right. As if it’s my fault that I have to draw him a map to my clitoris.
(Okay, I lied. This is a four-point list.) Worst of all, when I threw his stupid engagement ring at his pasty-white butt, I missed. Big dramatic moment—ruined.
“So there you have it,” I finish reciting last night’s humiliating events to my best friend, Cassie, while unpacking a new shipment of cocktail dresses. “Can my life get any worse?”
It’s eleven in the morning, or as I like to think of it, ‘Treat Time.’ Usually, this is my favorite part of the day. The store is quiet, and I can arrange the clothing neatly on hangers, organizing them by color and function. I can fiddle with the display cases of costume jewelry and make sure that everything is perfect.
Cassie, who runs the coffee shop next door, is my supplier of treats. She’s watching me now, her eyes wide. “Dennis never made you come?” she asks, honing in unerringly to the most embarrassing part – the lack of orgasms. “Mia, the two of you dated for a year.”
“I know.”
She takes a bite of her muffin. Chocolate chip, if I know my friend. “Why on Earth did you keep going out with him?” she demands. Crumbs fall on my ornately tufted vintage velvet loveseat. Normally, I’d shoo her out of the way and bust out my hand-vac, but today’s not a normal day. “The guy’s not a looker, and he has the personality of a wet towel.”
I feel strangely compelled to defend my ex-boyfriend, but then I remember Tiffany, and I clamp my mouth shut. “I tried to tell him what turned me on,” I mutter, my cheeks flushed with humiliation. “At the start. He called me a pervert.”
Cassie’s eyebrow rises, and she gives me her ‘what-the-fuck’ look. “He called you a pervert?” Her voice is dangerous. “And you still dated him after that?”
Worse, I almost married him.
I avoid Cassie’s gaze. This situation would never happen to my friend. She’s bold and uninhibited, and she has every guy in our small town wrapped around her finger. Me? I’m the boring one in the corner, grateful for any scrap of attention that comes my way.
“Anyway.” Cassie dismisses Dennis with a shrug of her shoulder. “Forget Dennis. You dodged a bullet there. Let’s get you back on the horse. Friday night happy hour at The Merry Cockatoo?”
Normally, even the mention of The Merry Cockatoo would get a giggle out of me. The newly opened bar is on the same block as my clothing boutique and Cassie’s coffee shop. My landlord, George Bollington, has been waging a low-grade war with the woman who owns the bar, trying to get Nina Templeton to change the name.
“We’re a family-friendly town,” he grouses every time he sees me. “What kind of woman calls her bar that name?” Mr. Bollington is so uptight he can’t even say Cockatoo out loud. Because I’m the town’s resident good girl, he thinks he’s got a sympathetic audience in me. I get to hear him grumble about Nina, about the sex therapists who’ve just opened a practice in town, about people who chew gum and listen to loud music, about people who litter… you name it, and my landlord probably disapproves of it.
I agree with him on the litter, but the rest of it is Mr. Bollington being a grouchy old man. Except for the sex therapists. That’s professional jealousy. Mr. Bollington is a psychiatrist, and he’s grown accustomed to being the only option in town. He now has competition, and he doesn’t like it.
Speaking of Mr. Bollington, the door bells chime, and my landlord walks in. When he sees Cassie sitting in my store, he frowns. Cassie is another person Mr. Bollington doesn’t approve of. “Mia,” he says, ignoring my friend, “I just saw your window display.” His forehead creases with disapproval. “It’s very unsuitable. This is a family-friendly town.”
Last week, I’d received some incredible hand-made silk lingerie from a small French manufacturer. Each piece was so gorgeous that it should have been in a museum. I’d spent most of Saturday setting up a window display for the bras, panties, and slips. I should have known Mr. Bollington would get his knickers in a knot about it. (Ha ha. See what I did there?)
“Mr. Bollington, I run a clothing store.” I try and keep my voice firm. “Window displays are an important part of my marketing strategy.”
He’s unmoved. “Need I remind you about the morality clause in your lease, young lady?” he demands. The threat is unmistakable. Take the offending display down, or my landlord will make trouble.
Cassie snorts into her muffin once he leaves. “One day,” she gripes, “I wish you’d stand up to him and tell him his stupid morality clause isn’t legally enforceable. You’re going to take the lingerie down, aren’t you?”
“Probably.” I’m a people-pleaser. I want everyone to like me. And it seems easier to give in to Mr. Bollington’s demands than fight him. It’s just a window display, after all.
Cassie lets it go. “Back to more important things,” she says. “Friday night. We’ll get drinks, get tipsy, and go home with unsuitable men.” She winks in my direction. “The kind that will have you screaming with pleasure. The sooner you forget about limp dick, the better.”
I feel my cheeks heat. “Yeah, about that,” I mumble. “Dennis might be right.”
She frowns. “Right about what?”
Oh God. It’s mortifying telling Cassie the truth. “I’ve never had an orgasm with a guy in my life.”
Her mouth falls open. Thankfully, she’s finished chewing her muffin. “With any guy?” she asks, her voice astonished.
I think back to the three men I’ve slept with. Brett, my high-school boyfriend, who I went out with for two weeks before he dumped me to date Gayla, a big-breasted blonde cheerleader. Tony, my college crush, who slept with me once before confessing that he preferred
men. And of course, Dennis, who buried his cock in Tiffany’s twat less than two hours after proposing to me. “Nope.” I lower my voice. “There’s something wrong with me, isn’t there?”
“Apart from your horrible tastes in men, no.” She gets to her feet and muffin crumbs cascade to the floor. “Friday. Meet me at six. Prepare to party your brains out.”
Once she leaves, I stare blankly at the rack of beaded and glittering dresses and think about my ex-fiancé. Even at the beginning of our relationship, I’d never felt the kind of passion for him I read about in books. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I am frigid.
Cassie isn’t going to tell me the truth. The best-friend rules clearly state that she’s supposed to say supportive things.
But there’s another way to get the truth. As I vacuum up chocolate chip muffin residue, I make a decision. I’m not the kind of girl who sleeps with a guy she picked up at the bar. Even if I wanted to have sex with a stranger, they never tended to notice me. That kind of attention is reserved for Cass.
No, I’m going to solve my orgasm problem the responsible, adult way. I’m going to see a therapist. Not just any therapist. I’m going to see the sex therapists that Mr. Bollington hates. Benjamin Long and Landon West. Maybe they can figure out what’s wrong with me.
CHAPTER 2
Benjamin:
It’s been two months since Landon and I opened our practice in this small town, and I can’t say that I’m enjoying it so far. While the pace of life is a lot more peaceful than Manhattan, I’m used to the anonymity of the big city. In New Summit, everyone has their noses in our business all the time. Given what we do, that’s a problem.
Taming Avery (A MFM Menage Romance) (Club Menage Book 2) Page 19
