Their Lusty Little Valentine [The Lusty, Texas Collection] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)

by Cara Covington

  “Our cousin, Howard Jessop, has a garage just outside of town. However, it’s closed on Sunday,” Charles said. “But I’ll tell you what, we’ll give him a call and see if he’ll at least tow your car to his place today. I’m almost positive he’ll agree to do so—we’re quite good friends.”

  “I would appreciate that. Once Mr. Jessop has the car, if you’d direct me to the nearest motel, I’d be grateful.”

  “There really isn’t one very close by at all, so let’s just wait for a bit on that, and see what Mother has to say.” Preston hoped Samantha didn’t press him on that last point.

  They’d reached the driveway and Samantha stopped and looked up. The building towered above them. Preston remembered thinking, as a boy, that it reached up into the sky.

  “You have a very pretty house. It looks like…” Samantha’s voice trailed off as if she’d been afraid to say what was on the tip of her tongue.

  “It looks like a Virginia plantation home,” Preston said.

  “Yes!” Samantha said. “That’s exactly what I was going to say. Not at all what I would expect to see here in Texas.”

  “We call it the New House—to distinguish it from the Big House.” He pointed behind him to the other very large residence in Lusty, which was the home of his Benedict cousins.

  Samantha turned around to follow his gesture. “That is pretty big, but it looks to be about the same size as your house. So, that one is big but this one is new?”

  Preston grinned. “‘New’ is a relative term. Our great-grandfathers built this house in 1881, specifically in the antebellum style, for our great-grandmother, who was from Virginia.”

  “Wait a minute. You said it was new…but it was built in 1881?”

  “As I said, ‘new’ is relative. We’re not certain when the Big House was built. It was already standing when the Benedicts moved in.” He saw the perspiration on her face, and understood that was from the Texas sun. Since she was a Northerner, he doubted very much she was used to this kind of heat. “Come on, kitten, let’s get you inside and into the modern wonder of air-conditioning.”

  His brothers took the steps up to the front door and had it open so that their woman didn’t need to wait for even a moment to step inside.

  Their woman. One look in his brothers eyes and he knew they felt the same way about Samantha Kincaid as he did.

  The door closed solidly behind them. He grinned at her heartfelt sigh as the cooler air surrounded her.

  “Boys? Come into the kitchen, we’re having lunch.”

  Charles grinned. He leaned in closer to Samantha. “We’re twenty-seven years old, but our mother still calls us ‘boys.’ Of course, our grandmother does, too.”

  Taylor nodded. “We don’t correct them. Our fathers and our grandfathers call us ‘men,’ so it more or less evens things out.”

  “Wait…your fathers? I thought you were brothers. Actually, I thought you were triplets.”

  “Oh we are brothers and triplets,” Preston said. “We just happen to have one mother, and two fathers.”

  Overheated and now confused. Preston thought there was probably something to be said for keeping Miss Samantha Kincaid off-balance. Off-balance, but not in distress. “Mother? We’ve brought a guest home with us.”

  “Wonderful!”

  Yes, it certainly is. Grinning, he led Samantha Kincaid toward the kitchen and her first encounter with his family—who were also, if he had his way, going to be her future in-laws.

  * * * *

  Samantha tried to figure out just when, precisely, she lost control of the situation. Looking back over the last two hours, she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment, but she thought it might have been when she was still in her car and laid her eyes on those tall, dark and handsome Kendalls for the first time.

  “Our eldest son, Northrop, is over in England at the moment. He has a bit of a wanderlust about him, I’m afraid.” Miranda Kendall, mother of the brothers Kendall, led her into the third room on the right in the upstairs hall. “But that is fortunate for our purposes at the moment, as he is not likely to need his room anytime soon.”

  “It’s lovely. I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful but I really do hate…”

  “You hate to impose. I know. Allow me to assure you once again that you’re not.” She grinned. “There’s a bathroom here that is only for this room, so you’ll have plenty of privacy. As soon as the boys come back from seeing your car taken to Howard’s garage, and getting your things, I’ll have them bring everything up here.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Kendall. You’ve been very kind to me.”

  “Please call me Miranda. Now, if you like, you can rest. A combination of the Texas heat and the somewhat overwhelming antics of three male Kendalls would be taxing, I’m quite sure, for any woman.” Miranda chuckled. “Their fathers certainly were all of that in their younger days, and there were only two of them.”

  “I’m not at all tired.” She couldn’t help but smile back at her hostess. Miranda Barnes Kendall, as she’d been introduced by her sons, might look like a delicate lady, but it was clear to Samantha the woman had learned how to carve her domain out amidst so many men. She and her mother-in-law, Chelsea, were two women living with seven men, but they were clearly the ones in charge.

  I think I should take notes.

  Miranda tilted her head to the right. “You seem like you’re made of sturdy stuff. I like that.”

  Samantha had been given a lot of compliments in her twenty-one years. She’d been told she was beautiful, exotic, had mesmerizing green eyes. All those were nice, but nothing tickled her the way that compliment just given to her by this woman did.

  Lunch was a memory and the dinner hour approached. She could smell beef roasting in the oven. By her calculations—if not by her experience, having been an only child—the number of people to be fed tonight would be more than ten.

  That was a lot of mouths to feed.

  She brought her attention back to her hostess. “Thank you for that. Since I don’t need a rest, I’d like to help you with your dinner preparations.”

  “Wonderful! Let’s go have some hot tea first and see what needs to be done. My mother-in-law always insists on helping, of course. I would never dream of discouraging her, but I do worry sometimes that she tries to do too much.”

  Samantha had been astounded to discover that the older woman at lunch was in fact eighty-nine years old. Her own grandmother was only in her early seventies and had become quite frail in the last year.

  It hadn’t taken Samantha long to discover Chelsea Benedict Jessop-Kendall didn’t know the meaning of the word “frail.” As she’d watched Miranda with her mother-in-law, Samantha was also astounded by the genuine love she could see between the two women.

  Her own mother got along with her father’s mother, but she wouldn’t say, necessarily, that there was a love bond between them. One thing Samantha noticed within moments of entering this very impressive house. It was truly a home, filled with love.

  She and Miranda stepped into the kitchen to the sound of the kettle whistling, and the older woman in the process of making a pot of tea.

  “Mother, you read my mind.”

  “It’s that time of day.” She nodded toward Samantha. “Good. I didn’t think you’d need a rest. Come and sit, child. I’m sure you have a lot of questions about this strange family you’ve suddenly stumbled upon.”

  Samantha did have questions. Always curious, there was nothing she enjoyed more than learning about new places and new people. At the same time, she was a product of the 1960s and tended, purposefully, not to do or say anything that would sound as if she were passing judgment on anyone.

  Still, the kind of questions she wanted answered were more personal than any she would normally consider asking of older women, and even more so of older women she’d just met.

  “I imagine that you might feel a bit awkward asking the questions you have. So how about, instead, I tell you a story?”

/>   Samantha grinned. “That sounds like a fine idea.” Hopefully, Samantha would learn everything she wanted to know without having to ask anything awkward.

  Her initial impression had been that the two elderly gentlemen were the paternal and maternal grandfathers of the brothers Kendall. And then two middle-aged men had entered the kitchen, both giving Miranda a not quite chaste kiss, and Samantha had realized that she needed to toss all her preconceived notions about family out the nearest window.

  The feminist in her had been pleased. She’d heard about various religious traditions around the world that sanctioned a man having more than one wife. How refreshing to come upon a place where women had more than one husband.

  She brought her attention back to the elderly, though quite spry, woman.

  Chelsea tilted her head as she met Samantha’s gaze. “A body gets used to something, and sometimes it’s hard to remember that what you’re used to is really quite unique. So, I’ll start my tale at the beginning. My mother’s name was Sarah, and she was born in Chicago, in 1866. She told me more than once that she recalled the great Chicago Fire of 1871, even though she was only a child of five at the time.”

  Chelsea pointed to one of the kitchen chairs, and Samantha obeyed the unspoken request and sat. “Is that why her family moved to Texas? Because of the fire?” she asked.

  “Not at all.” Chelsea sat down, and Miranda poured out the tea. “Her family didn’t move here. Her father, a man by the last name of Carmichael, had lost his wife—my mother’s mother—when my mother was ten years old. He hired on a servant by the name of Colleen O’Reilly to be a live-in housekeeper and to raise my mother. Then, when Mother was eighteen, he remarried. His new wife was a younger woman with a taste for, shall we say, the finer things in life. It didn’t take the new Mrs. Carmichael long to run through a great deal of her husband’s money.

  “Carmichael had a business acquaintance, one who hailed from Texas and who, he believed, was very well off. So he made an arrangement for this man—his name was Tyrone Maddox—to marry his daughter, in exchange for a lump sum payment. It was a business decision, pure and simple, an investment by Maddox, as it were. You see, my mother, when she reached the age of twenty-five, stood to inherit a great deal of money left to her by her maternal grandfather.”

  “It was a different world then,” Samantha said. She’d noticed that Chelsea didn’t claim the man—her mother’s father—as kin. That’s telling. She was pretty certain that she was in the company of ladies with their own feminist leanings. Still, she decided to tread carefully. “Not to excuse the callousness of a man selling his daughter into marriage, but I’ve studied history some, so I know such arrangements were commonplace in the last century.”

  “They were indeed commonplace and many a good marriage was made that way.” Chelsea picked up her cup and sipped. Her hands, the fingers thin, the skin nearly translucent, were not the pampered hands of an heiress or a rich woman. They were hands that had known work.

  Samantha wasn’t stupid. She could see the kind of home she was sitting in, and knew the value of the furnishings, and even the clothing these women wore. Rich the Kendalls might very well be, but idle they most certainly were not.

  There was not a servant in the house that she had seen so far. Samantha bet they didn’t use them at all.

  “However, the man Carmichael selected, Tyrone Maddox, had no desire for a wife. He was, according to those who knew him, only interested in men, sexually. Now here, I have to pause in my tale and tell you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.”

  “I quite agree.” She found it refreshing an older woman would hold that opinion. “So he truly only married Sarah for her money?”

  “Indeed he did. But he had no intention of waiting six years for the cash from her inheritance. You see, he’d been able to discover the complete terms of the endowment left to my mother—an inheritance which, by the way, she didn’t even know about at the time of her so-called marriage. Those terms stated that if she married, and then died before the age of twenty-five, the bequest would go either to her surviving child—women in those days sometimes died in childbirth—or, if there was no child, then her widowed husband would inherit the entire estate.”

  Samantha understood immediately what Chelsea was saying. “Oh my God! He married her and then tried to kill her?”

  “He did, may his black soul rot in hell.”

  Samantha listened, enrapt, as Chelsea told her that Sarah’s marriage to Maddox had never been consummated—he really didn’t care for women in that way at all. And then Chelsea told her of a couple of gunslingers named Benedict, hired by Maddox to escort his bride from Chicago to Texas. He’d believed that being gunslingers meant they were men without honor, that they wouldn’t protect Sarah when the bullets began to fly. “That,” Chelsea said, “was his fatal mistake.”

  Wishing to appear a truly well-married man, and to throw suspicion off himself once his new wife’s death was discovered, Maddox had taken the steps of making out his own will, leaving everything to Sarah, should he pre-decease her.

  “I’m getting shivers just hearing about this,” Samantha said.

  “It’s a shocking tale, but a true one,” Chelsea said. “In the end, Maddox’s vile plan was found out. My fathers kept my mother safe with the help of their friends, and then, they, with the help of my husbands’ fathers—one of whom was a Texas Ranger—set a trap for Maddox, hoping to get him to incriminate himself in the attempted murder of his wife. But he proved a villain to the end. He pulled a gun on my father-in-law, Warren Jessop, a man he hated, a man who had rejected his crass sexual advancements. My father, Joshua Benedict, was forced to kill the bastard.”

  “So Sarah would have inherited Maddox’s estate, as well as the one from her grandfather.”

  “Yes, and her being, officially, a widow, meant she didn’t have to wait to turn twenty-five in order to inherit her grandfather’s legacy, either.”

  “You said she was officially a widow?”

  “Because Maddox didn’t consummate the marriage, it really was not a marriage, legally—but no one saw any need to report that little fact to the courts. Because her marriage had never been consummated Sarah’s conscience was clear and she felt free to declare her love for my fathers—Caleb and Joshua Benedict—before the blackguard died. Once he was gone, then they, of course, became her husbands. Well, Caleb became her legal husband, but she considered Joshua to be her husband, too. Growing up, I had two fathers, equal in my heart and in my home and in my mother’s affections.”

  “Sarah’s cousin, Amanda, came from Virginia to visit her, a woman she’d never met, and to put space between herself and a man who wanted her dead.” Miranda picked up the story. “She was a private investigator at a time when women didn’t generally have careers, and she’d uncovered a major fraud ring operating in Richmond. When Amanda met Adam Kendall, who was a Texas Ranger, and Warren Jessop, a lawyer, she fell in love with them—despite that the two men were already, themselves, committed lovers. In the end, she married Adam, but like her cousin, considered herself wed to both men. Between the six of them—the Benedicts and the Jessop-Kendalls, they came up with an idea, a way to ensure they could live as they chose, and a way to provide a sanctuary for future generations.”

  In the 1800s towns had more autonomy than they did now, and Samantha found herself admiring the legal mind of Warren Jessop. By ceding land into a town trust, the founding families of Lusty were able to establish their town, and ensure they could never be bought out and subsequently pushed aside. No one could buy land in the town itself, they could only lease it. And the town was then and continued to be surrounded completely by private property—land owned either by the Benedicts, or the Jessop-Kendalls.

  Samantha saw the pattern, and understood the reasoning. The concept of ménage relationships wasn’t unheard of, and certainly wasn’t something new. She’d encountered more than one “commune” in Connecticut and New York where polyamory thri
ved. “So Sarah married two men named Benedict, and Amanda married Adam Kendall and Warren Jessop,” Samantha said.

  Chelsea nodded. “And I married two of Amanda, Adam, and Warren’s sons, whom you met at lunch—Jeremy Kendall and Dalton Jessop.” Chelsea nodded. “My mother-in-law didn’t like the fact that she could only legally marry one man—she married Adam because he was the oldest, and Warren already looked up to him as being the head of their family. So she named her sons Jessops as well as Kendalls—and in those days she could do that. I followed her example, but such is not quite as easily done any more today.”

  “And the tradition of a single woman marrying more than one man has continued here?”

  “There are some who’ve not cottoned to this way of living and who moved elsewhere,” Chelsea admitted. “Some of my nephews—all of my brothers James and Jacob’s sons, in fact, have left Lusty. One, Edward, we lost in the Second World War. Two—Howard and Lincoln—stayed in England after the peace was made. And two more left to make their own way—Emerson settled in Montana and then Christopher went to New York. But of those who have stayed in Lusty, yes, we’ve tended to ménage marriages. Of course, people who live here are free to live as they choose—that was the whole point of founding the town in the first place. Not every family is the same as ours, or the Benedicts.”

  Samantha had seen in her own lifetime the hypocrisy of those who touted the country as being the land of the free while at the same time doing all they could to usurp the freedom of others. “I like that idea—that here is a place where people can live as they choose without judgment. I’m surprised that your town has been able to grow and thrive, unimpeded by the outside world since it was founded so long ago.”

  “We’ve mostly just tended to our own business, living quietly,” Chelsea said. “We don’t rub anyone’s nose in the way we live. When we go to Waco, or Houston, or Dallas, we go as ordinary families. What’s private stays private. But we have been blessed.” There was a twinkle in her eye. “And being of means, of course, helps. This is Benedict County, and those who understand where the wealth lies tend to respect that, and us.”