Love Under Two Adventurers [The Lusty, Texas Collection] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)

by Cara Covington

  This is not the way I imagined this scene would play out. But then what the hell do I know? I’m a painter, not a writer.

  “Becca? Can we all go inside, please, sweetheart? We’re exhausted.” Greg flicked a quick look at Cody. “Seriously exhausted.”

  Rebecca realized three things at once. The first was that she was standing in the light in what could be considered a diaphanous gown. The second was that all her female parts covered by said gown were reacting with hormonal glee at the sight of both men. But the third realization was the one that galvanized her.

  There was something seriously wrong with Cody.

  “Yes, of course. I’ve just made a pot of hot tea…and of course, there’s brandy in the house.”

  “You are an angel,” Cody said. “I thought I recognized you.”

  She wanted to reach forward and help the man, but a lifetime of living in a town populated by super-Alpha macho men had her holding back, and instead leading the way inside.

  “I’ve got the lower bedroom on the southeast side of the house. Why don’t you two take the master, upstairs?”

  “Would it bother you if we bunked across the hall from you, instead?” Greg asked.

  Rebecca blinked and wondered if the request came because he wanted them to be close to her, or if it was to save Cody the stairs.

  Does it matter?

  “No, of course not.” She looked at Cody. In the minimal light in the cabin—they subsisted on battery or oil lights at night—Cody looked pale and in distress. “I’ll get the tea and brandy. There’s a fire burning in the great room.”

  “Perfect.”

  Both men headed off toward the great room and the bedrooms beyond. Rebecca was happy to have something to focus on. Inside, she felt the quaking that only Greg Benedict had ever stirred in her. She couldn’t think about that now. She’d serve them tea, and then likely—very soon after—they’d retire for what was left of the night. She’d have time to shore up her defenses—or plan her strategy, depending.

  She reached for two extra mugs and couldn’t help but notice her hands shaking. This would never do. Every other time, she’d been able to wear that cold-as-glass mantle around the man. She felt confident that she’d done a good job of convincing him she couldn’t stand him. They’d still sniped at each other, as they’d always done when they came face-to-face from the time they were teens—or in her case, a preteen. She supposed to the rest of the family it had appeared the same as ever between them. But she knew different, and so had Greg.

  So she reached for that cold, that armor. And discovered it no longer existed.

  Well, hells bells.

  She loaded a tray with teapot, mugs, and brandy, and carried them into the great room. The men were just coming back from the hall to the bedrooms.

  “Hell of a place,” Cody said.

  Rebecca could see he was drawing on his last bit of strength, and determined to wear his own armor—humor.

  “It’s not much, but we manage.”

  Cody laughed and Greg looked…he looked grateful, and worried.

  “Gentlemen, libations have arrived.”

  Two love seats faced each other, but angled toward the large built-in fireplace. Rebecca had been sitting on one, nursing her tea, when she’d heard the sound of tires on the stones and small rocks outside. She’d been thinking about Seattle, and the fear that had chased her from there, and had simply reacted. She’d flown to the door, grabbed the gun, determined to get into the face of her fear, come hell or high water.

  The men clearly saw her cup positioned on the low table between the small sofas, and sat on the opposite one.

  Rebecca set the tray down before them and then resumed her place. Needing something, she picked up her cup and cradled it in both hands.

  Greg poured out, and put a fair dollop of the alcohol in Cody’s cup. When he offered to pour some in her cup, she held it out to him.

  The brandy couldn’t hurt.

  “You’ll pardon me for saying, but y’all look as if you’ve been rode hard and put up wet.”

  “I love the Texas accent,” Cody said. “Greg’s isn’t as pronounced, but yours, darlin’, sounds like music.”

  “I don’t have an accent, Mr. Harper. You do. And it’s a Yankee one, at that.” She grinned so that he knew she was teasing him.

  “We’ve been on the go since early yesterday,” Greg said. “And we had a longer than expected delay in London.”

  “You flew in from England?”

  “No, we started in Ankara,” Greg said.

  Beside him, Cody had quietly sipped his beverage. Now, he carefully set it on the table.

  “I think I’ll go to bed now.” He got to his feet, and when Greg moved to do the same, Cody put his hand on his shoulder. “No. You stay and finish your tea…and other things.” He looked up at Rebecca then, and the smile he gave her touched her heart.

  Clearly in pain, and beyond exhausted, the man seemed determined not to let either show. Rebecca was an artist and accustomed to seeing what others thought they’d masked.

  “Thank you for the hospitality. I look forward to getting to know you better, tomorrow.”

  “Good night, Cody.” Rebecca looked at Greg, and knew she’d raised her one eyebrow. She got the gesture from her mother and every once in a while, it emerged.

  Greg seemed to get the message. He got up and easily slid his arms around his lover.

  Cody sighed. Clearly grateful for the hug, he returned it, though Rebecca thought his stamina was damn near depleted. But it was Greg’s expression that captivated her.

  Greg Benedict clearly was in love with Cody Harper.

  Cody ambled off toward the bedrooms and Greg remained standing, his attention focused. When he nodded, Rebecca guessed that Cody had entered their room. The soft sound of a door closing confirmed it.

  Greg turned back to her and resumed his seat. “Thanks for not fussing over him.”

  “Maybe I’m not the fussing sort.”

  Greg snorted. “You’re the most sensitive and caring member of the families, period. Well, except maybe for my grandmother.”

  The silence stretched between them. Silence, when she experienced it on her own, felt soothing. When sitting across such a small space from the only man she’d ever loved, a man who’d arrived on her doorstep with another lover, that silence felt oppressive.

  She battled the need to fill it with chatter—or worse, by digging at him, as she usually did.

  Then she looked up at the exact same moment he did, and their gazes locked. Her little imp, the one that usually got her into trouble, decided to wake up and begin shouting. You were going to try, remember. What other signs do you need that this is the time? You didn’t even have to traverse the globe to find him. Karma brought him—and Cody—right here to you. What the hell more do you need, dummy?

  She said, “What happened, Greg?”

  “When, baby? Then, or now?”

  She saw then what she’d missed because she’d been focused on Cody. Greg Benedict looked…world-weary. She might even say he looked shattered, but just thinking that hurt her heart. “Either. Both.”

  He nodded. “Both, yeah. Because I seem stuck in a weird kind of time loop, where some things feel like they keep repeating, and I think it’s because I made a mess of things, before. All the way around.”

  “Maybe it’s time for us to have that conversation we never had, before.”

  “I think maybe it is.”

  “So tell me.”

  * * * *

  “We never found his body.”

  Greg slowly emerged from the corridors of the past he’d walked, needing more than anything to tell Rebecca everything. At some point during the telling, Rebecca must have gotten up from her spot across from him because she was beside him now, and their hands were clasped.

  “I am so sorry. I wish—I really wish I had known what you were going through, then.” She gave a half laugh, but Greg knew there was no humor in it. “I
wish I’d been mature enough to look beyond my own selfish need and pain.”

  “No, baby. You weren’t being selfish.” Greg had spent a great deal of time thinking about things. He was older and wiser than he’d been then, so he knew what was what. “You were a young woman who’d just taken her first lover—but not any first lover, one she’d been in love with for a long time. You deserved a hell of a lot better treatment than what I gave you.”

  “I imagine that when you woke up you were attacked by guilt. Because you’d had a fight with Daniel, but you hadn’t broken it off with him. In your mind, you would have considered that you’d been unfaithful to him.”

  “I was unfaithful to him.” Greg sighed. “Daniel would never have welcomed a woman into our relationship. He didn’t have a very nice opinion when I told him about the family, either.” Greg sincerely hoped she didn’t tug any harder on this particular thread. Only in the last couple of weeks had Greg begun to look back on his relationship with Daniel with new, fresh eyes.

  There was a tendency to build up deceased loved ones, sometimes, as being almost super human. He realized that, to a certain extent, he’d done that with Doctor Daniel Montrose.

  “Tell me about Cody. He’s been hurt, hasn’t he?”

  “Fuck, yeah.” Greg laid his head back against the love seat. Then a thought occurred to him. “How did you know about Cody? Did Robert tell you?”

  He was looking at her so he saw her shock. “Robert knows about him?”

  “Well…hell, I’m not even sure now if I mentioned his name, or not. I called Robert about a week ago, told him I wanted to come here, to the cabin. I told him that I was bringing a friend who needed to recuperate, and that since I knew he was familiar with gunshot wounds that I wanted to bring my friend by the clinic, too.”

  “Why that arrogant, bossy Dom!”

  Greg raised one eyebrow. He didn’t know that Rebecca knew her brother was a Dom. She must have taken his look for one of confusion about her outburst itself.

  “I’ve been living here for a few months, which he very well knew when you called him. I bet he didn’t tell you that.”

  “No, he didn’t.” Clearly, Robert had engineered things so that he and Rebecca would be together.

  He owed the man one. And since Robbie had gone out on a limb with his sister—so fiery at times he swore she should have been a redhead—he decided to make his case for them all to stay right where they were.

  “I’m glad you’re here. Maybe Robert was being an arrogant, bossy Dom—though, baby, I have to tell you that’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one.”

  Rebecca chuckled. “Well, he and David are the only ones I know, and David wouldn’t have done this.”

  Greg kept his opinion as to whether David Jessop was a true Dom, or not, to himself.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he said again.

  “Tell me about what happened to Cody.”

  “As soon as you tell me how you knew his name.”

  “I ran into Freddy Maxwell a while ago, back when I was living in Seattle.”

  “Ah.” Freddy was a friend of Greg’s from his college days, and someone Rebecca knew as well. He and Cody had run into him at the release party for Cody’s book that his publisher had hosted for him in New York City a couple of months before.

  It feels like that was a lifetime ago.

  “Just after that book release party,” Greg said, “Cody was made an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

  “I think we all need to be aware, we humans, if we are presented with such a thing that we should run, not walk, away.” Rebecca also relaxed back against the sofa.

  “Amen.” Greg decided to take a chance. He released her hand and put his left arm around her. Instead of stiffening against him, she laid her head on his shoulder. He took up her right hand again, with his right.

  “The publisher who’d published Cody’s book, Aftermath, wanted him on another project. Drummond Pierce, former talking head for the All News Network, had been signed to write a book on the Arab Spring slash summer slash fall.”

  “He’d been their chief foreign correspondent, hadn’t he? Pierce? For a lot of years, if memory serves.”

  “Yeah, the fucktard.”

  “Oh oh.”

  “Oh, oh, indeed. Of course, Cody said yes. So we all headed off to Turkey. The best way to gain access into Syria is through Turkey. I have to tell you, I didn’t like Pierce on first meet.”

  “What happened?”

  “We had to cool our heels while the great journalist made arrangements. It was all hush-hush. He guarded his contacts as if they were the fucking crown jewels. It was Pierce’s plan to meet with some of the rebel factions in Syria, the ones working to end the Assad régime. While there, I hooked up with some folks I know doing relief work in the region, a charity group I’ve worked with before.”

  “Which one? Doctors Without Borders or Maria’s Quest?”

  Greg smiled. “Maria’s Quest. I’ve come to know quite a few folks working with both groups.” He shrugged, not really wanting to toot his own horn. “I usually get in touch with both groups when I land somewhere I know they’re active. No big deal, I just help when and where I can. Anyway, the day came when Pierce finally announced he had a meeting set up. A member of one of the factions was going to pick them up and drive them into Syria, to the super-secret meeting place. I had a shipment of medicine and supplies that also needed to find its way to a small town outside of Damascus. So we went our separate ways. Pierce assured Cody that they’d only be gone at the most, overnight. But the next night came, and they hadn’t returned. Or the next. On the third day, Pierce showed up—looking no worse for wear, I might add—and claimed they’d been kidnapped. He’d escaped, but whatever group had taken him still had Cody.”

  “The bastard left Cody behind?”

  “Yeah. He claimed he didn’t know where Cody was, and there might be some truth to that, because Cody says after they were ambushed, and driven to the first place they were held, they were separated.”

  “You don’t believe him, this Pierce character.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I think Pierce didn’t even give a single thought to Cody. Hell, maybe he even hoped he was dead.”

  Rebecca wrinkled her nose. “Why, for God’s sake?”

  Greg knew he was a lot more cynical than most of his family. He guessed that was a natural result of having lived so much of the last decade out in the wider, uglier world. “Would sure as hell put a premium on his book, wouldn’t it?”

  “That’s just sick.”

  “Baby, it’s the way a lot of people in this world think, and operate. For his part, Pierce didn’t stick around and try to find Cody, either—which kind of lends credence to my theory. He was on the next fucking plane out, headed back to New York. I think he was hoping to put a rush on finishing his book, then getting that book out to soak up on the publicity following the death of an up-and-coming photojournalist.”

  “How did you get Cody back?”

  Greg shrugged. He wasn’t one to boast, ever, and this wasn’t that, exactly—even if it did feel like it.

  “I’m not a stranger to that part of the world. I’ve lent a hand, now and then, with more than one relief agency, as I said. As well, a couple of times when the rebels in that area were in need of medicines and other supplies and couldn’t get any, I stepped in and got them some.”

  “So when they heard a friend of yours had been kidnapped, they put their ears to the ground?”

  “More or less. Six days after he was captured, my contacts found him. Cody says there was firefight, and he didn’t know what was happening at the time. They’d…” Greg needed to take a moment to steady his voice, to beat the tears that threatened.

  Christ, I’m more exhausted than I thought.

  “They’d moved Cody around a couple of times, and the last move, they’d shoved him into what he thinks was a basement cell. He�
��d been shot the day of the kidnapping, but they hadn’t tended to his wound at all.”

  “Oh, my God. That’s horrible!” Rebecca hugged him, her left arm slipping around his waist.

  He wrapped both arms around her and held tight.

  “Yeah. They brought him to me, and we rushed him to one of the clinics. The doctors got the bullet out, but he’d developed an infection. We nearly lost him.”

  “But you didn’t. He’s here, and alive. And well?”

  “Getting there. He keeps saying he’s fine, and he hasn’t really talked much about what happened.”

  “I hear a huge ‘but.’”

  “You really are one of the most intuitive members of the family, you know? And yes, you heard a large ‘but.’ But, he doesn’t sleep well, and he has nightmares.”

  “That’s why you wanted to be here. You figure staying in this cabin, away from noise and civilization, can help him.”

  “This cabin, yes. And Lusty. And the family. And you. Especially, you.”

  He moved, then, so that he could look into her eyes. “Daniel was gay. He never would have been interested in or even considered a ménage. But Cody and I are both bisexual. Before this—before he was kidnapped—we’d discussed the possibility of finding a woman to be with. I hadn’t told him about you yet, but in my mind and in my heart, you were the only woman I wanted. You still are. I know I’m asking a lot.”

  “Will you kiss me?”

  Greg thought he understood her request. The last time, when he’d moved on her, when he kissed her, it had been like the Fourth of July and the millennium’s New Year’s celebration all rolled into one. He couldn’t blame her for wondering if it would be like that again.

  He laid his lips on hers, his touch tentative, gentle, because he wanted to cherish, he wanted to treasure. And he found himself yanked down into a vortex of wild, churning passion and heat.

  Her flavor hit his system, awakening his heart, thickening his cock, and making his blood race and his body shake. She was sweetness and light and every good thing he’d ever known in the world.

  She was also as deep into him, as awakened and turned on, as he.

  It took every bit of strength he possessed to end their kiss. He eased back from her just a little and ran his thumb over her lips. “What do you say, Rebecca?”