by Edith DuBois
The Male Order, Texas Collection
Love Is Hell:
A Valentine’s Story, Book 2
Chocolate, roses, crème brûlée, and vandalism!
After a life-changing tragedy two years earlier, Sherri Blacker is unable to move forward. She pretends everything is okay. She smiles. She eats. She sleeps. She goes through the motions of everyday life, but her loss is buried deep. The most she can do is maintain an even keel. When a graffiti bandit goes on a spray-paint rampage through the neighborhood, however, she and her men find themselves sucked into the mushy-gushy, lovey-dovey V-day drama she’s been so adamantly avoiding.
Benji and Ethan Blacker know their wife hasn’t fully recovered from that day two years ago. They know it’s time to talk about it, and they know it’s time to help her. First, though, as Male Order’s sheriff, Ethan has to find the spray-painting culprit before the whole neighborhood has been desecrated. Can the spirit of love lead them out of trouble and down the road of healing? Or will the graffiti bandit prevail?
Note: There is no sexual relationship or touching for titillation between or among siblings.
Note: This romantic trio was first introduced in A Bride for Two Renegades [The Male Order Collection]. Each Love Is Hell book ends with an HEA for its main characters, although the two books share an external story arc.
Genre: Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Western/Cowboys
Length: 20,056 words
LOVE IS HELL:
A VALENTINE’S STORY, BOOK 2
The Male Order, Texas Collection
Edith DuBois
MENAGE EVERLASTING
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting
LOVE IS HELL: A VALENTINE’S STORY, BOOK 2
Copyright © 2013 by Edith DuBois
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62242-535-8
First E-book Publication: March 2013
Cover design by Les Byerley
All art and logo copyright © 2013 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
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All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
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DEDICATION
For the “Dear Sugar” columns on TheRumpus.net and everything they’ve taught me about love, grief, courage, and humility.
But mostly about love.
LOVE IS HELL:
A VALENTINE’S STORY, BOOK 2
The Male Order, Texas Collection
EDITH DUBOIS
Copyright © 2013
Chapter One
When Sherri Blacker inhaled, she tasted staleness. There was a hint of bleach, too, and maybe it was her imagination, but the fluorescent lightbulbs, with their tinny, almost imperceptible buzz, vibrated on her teeth and tongue and down the muscles of her throat. The flavor of the air here was so familiar to her. The scuffed and dingy tiles, too, with their tan-colored specks and the glossy finish that had been trampled off day by day, were intimately acquainted with the soles of her feet. She walked into this drugstore after work on Monday and Tuesday, on Wednesday and Thursday, and then again on Friday. She walked past the cashiers, past the makeup counter, past the toiletries aisle, and past the seasonal display of candy and cheap decorations and pink paper hearts.
She came to same spot every day, and she stared.
When she’d first started coming, she would pick up a box and read the bits of information as if she were curious, as if she’d never used one before and needed some clarification. She liked the boxes with phrases like, “Easy to understand results,” or “Unsurpassed accuracy.” When she read those phrases, it was almost as if they were meant for her, like she could be just any woman reading them and needing them and finding reassurance in them.
She would sometimes even pick up a second box and read more bits of information as if she were comparing. If any other customers happened to walk by, she imagined them thinking about her. Did they say to themselves, “Go with the store brand. It works just as well and is two dollars cheaper”? Or did they possibly think, “I hope she gets what she wants”? Or did they merely avert their eyes and ignore the boxes altogether?
Eventually though, she would have to put the boxes back on the shelf, and her false excitement would crumble. She’d have to stop pretending she was there to buy anything, and she’d have to walk back outside and drive home.
The employees had begun to recognize her, so eventually she’d also stopped picking the boxes up. She knew it was odd—to come in and look at the same thing every day but not buy anything. And on top of that, holding the boxes and feeling them in her hands, she realized they’d grown too heavy. There was so much potential in every word she read on them. They were all bursting with the possibility of this could change your life.
But it was a possibility that no longer belonged to her. Everything she held in her hands was no longer real. Not for her, and not for her husbands, Ethan and Benji. So she didn’t pick up the boxes anymore. Coming here was torture enough. It caused her hours of pain. It was senseless. It was weak
and useless. She berated herself time and time again for continuing to come.
But she couldn’t stop.
She had to come here. She had to stare at the rows and rows of boxes—pink and white and blue and purple.
She had to imagine, just for those few short minutes every day, that everything in those boxes was real for her. Even more so today she needed the strange, dark comfort this aisle brought to her. She didn’t want to think about what it would mean to stop coming here, to completely leave all possibility behind her, to give up. Because that was what it would mean if she stopped coming.
It would mean she had abandoned all hope.
It would mean utter and devastating failure.
It would mean she and Ethan and Benji would never get what they wanted most—a child.
She couldn’t face that. She had no idea how to face that.
So she came here day after day and stood in the same spot and stared at the same home pregnancy tests, and she prayed for the same thing over and over again. She begged for some sign or direction that would point her out of this mess. She needed to move on from what had happened two years ago. Her little girl had never been and would never be alive. She couldn’t change that fact. She also couldn’t change the fact that because of her miscarriage, her uterus was no longer able to support the life of a fetus.
These were things she could not change, no matter how much she railed against them. She should accept. She should move on. She should spend her days in love with her husbands.
But she couldn’t.
She just could not.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was Benji. “Hello,” she said quietly.
“Hello, beautiful. Are you almost home?”
“I’m running a little behind.” She looked down at an odd red mark on the tile. She couldn’t look at those boxes. She couldn’t tell her husband the truth. “I should be there in about half an hour.”
“I can’t wait to see you.”
Would he say that if he knew where she was? She had no answer, not for him and not for herself, so she was silent.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Sherri.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in a bit.”
She ended the call and slipped the phone back in her pocket. It was time to go. The young girl behind the makeup counter with a name tag that read “Rose” waved to her on the way out. Sherri caught a glimpse of the rose tattooed on the girl’s wrist. She thought the flower fragile and beautiful, so she waved back.
Then she walked outside, got in her car, and drove toward Male Order, Texas.
By the time she got there, her smile and her laughter would be fixed and in place. She would kiss Benji and hug him. And when Ethan got home later, she would kiss him and hug him, too. As far as appearances went, she would look healthy and normal and happy.
It was all she could do.
* * * *
Benjamin Blacker swiveled back and forth. He spun in a clockwise circle. He spun in a counterclockwise circle. He rolled across his office from the desk to the door. Then he rolled back across from the door to his desk. His gaze was fixed on his iPad as he tried to read the latest script Jimmy Duren, his manager, had sent him. It was for an action film with aliens called Third Sunrise. The audition was in two days. He was supposed to have read through it already to let Jimmy know if he liked it or not. He had three more scripts to go through, yet he’d been stuck on the first page of this one for the last hour.
Sherri had sounded so odd when he’d called her earlier. He knew she didn’t like Valentine’s Day. She thought it was a meaningless, consumer-driven abomination of a holiday and refused to celebrate in any form or fashion. He’d been joking when he wished her a happy Valentine’s Day, but she hadn’t given him a hard time or called him one of her endearing nicknames or launched into a diatribe like he’d expected.
It sounded like her brain was in a fog, like she didn’t really hear him or process his words. Normally he wouldn’t think anything of it, but this kind of thing had been happening more and more over the past few months. What he’d been thinking about though, what really had him worried, was that he knew precisely when this fogginess had started. He could pinpoint the exact date.
The date was December 1, and it was exactly two years after the most devastating, heartbreakingly horrible day Benji had ever lived through.
So he knew this was somehow linked to that day.
What he didn’t know was why.
It had been two years. Of course he still mourned the loss of their little girl. Sometimes he had dreams, so vivid and so sharp, of what she’d look like now. For some reason he always pictured her with strawberry-blonde curls. In his dreams he put his cheek to the curls atop her head and felt their perfection on his face.
They’d named her Jessica Marie, and there was still a small, dark hole inside his heart that perfectly fit the shape of his daughter. Nothing else in the world could ever fit or fill it. That hole would always be there.
But in the two years that had passed he’d managed to build a little insulation around that dark hole in his chest. He got through each day as it came. He still had his wife and his brother. Throughout everything, they’d clung to each other. They’d held tight to one another through the dark, screaming misery of those first few months. Sherri had been the strongest of them all.
God, she was so brave and beautiful.
He honestly didn’t know how she’d done it. How she’d kept herself together, kept herself sane and functioning and human.
He heard her singing softly in the kitchen now. It sounded like a Kid Cudi song. Yep, he definitely heard the strains of “Pursuit of Happiness” coming from the kitchen in her sweet, angelic voice.
When she’d returned from work a little while ago, she’d hugged him so tight. And then she’d shot him one of her radiant smiles. Ever so slowly, that beam of sunshine on her face melted and morphed into liquid heat.
With her eyes on his face, Sherri slipped her hand between his legs. It was all the invitation he needed. Quickly, he unzipped her pants. She unzipped his. Her fingers circled his cock and tugged on him hard. Grunting, he placed his hands on her hips, turned her around so that she faced the kitchen table, and put a hand between her shoulder blades. Gently he forced her down. She submitted so beautifully, wanting his authority, needing its promise and security.
Then he lined up his cock to the entrance of her pussy and pushed inside. Sherri moaned. He didn’t give her much time to adjust before pulling out and thrusting back in. She stretched her arms out and held on to the edge of the table, moving her ass so that she met him thrust for thrust.
God, it felt amazing to be inside her without a condom. Every squeeze of her muscles, every spasm of pleasure, he felt them all along his cock with exquisite clarity. He only needed a few more strokes, so he reached around to caress her clit. At the touch of his finger, Sherri whimpered, pushing herself hard against him. Her body shuddered, and he could feel her cunt squeezing tight around him. A pink flush washed over her back, and Benji knew she’d reached her end. She whimpered as orgasm swept over her.
The wet tightness around his cock had him coming even sooner than he expected, and his muscles trembled as cum spurted out of him and into his beloved wife. Nothing would come from his seed. He knew that, and he’d come to terms with it. He adored Sherri. That was enough.
After he pulled out of her, she turned and smiled at him, kissed him, hugged him, then zipped her pants back up, murmuring something about needing to start on dinner.
For a moment he’d felt relief. He hadn’t known what to expect upon coming home, and her beaming face, her lovemaking, her eager movements beneath him had filled him with warmth and reassurance that everything was okay, even after the strange phone call. He’d almost believed it, too.
He’d let her go, released her from his embrace, and just as she’d turned away from him toward the sink, he’d seen it. The sadness in her eyes was so utterly unmistakable that his body twitched at t
he sight of it.
But she quickly blinked and turned toward the window, asking about what he wanted her to make for dinner as she washed her hands. His mind didn’t have time to process what he’d seen. He only knew that he had seen it.
And now, in his office, as he thought over it and over it, over the conversation he’d had with her on the phone, and over the past few months of strange behavior, he realized two very important things.
One was that his wife had been hiding this sadness from him and his brother for months. He’d known she suffered. How could she not? But she’d also seemed to be moving on, just as he and Ethan were moving on. From what he’d seen on her face today, he knew this was not true. She’d buried her pain so deep. Impossibly deep. Dangerously deep.
The second was that it couldn’t go on. He would not let her keep this to herself. She would have to tell them. She’d have to give them everything. It was the only way to get that sadness off her face and out of her body. It was the only way to make her healthy again.
The house phone rang, and he heard Sherri pick it up in the kitchen.
When Ethan got home later, they would discuss it. He hated to see her suffering. He couldn’t allow it.
With that decision made, he went back to the script in front of him. A few minutes later he’d just gotten through about ten pages to a scene where one of the aliens planted its larvae into a minor character named Private Clark by inserting some jellyfish-like tentacles up into his brain and swishing them around a bit. A loud banging on his office window ripped his attention away from the script, and he looked up to see Sherri. She motioned for him to come outside.
