The Grass Is Greener [McQueen Was My Valley 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)

by Karen Mercury

  Rowan knew he was the best cocksucker on the island, but that blond beauty had treated him like dirt. Fernando knew the entire populace of cocksuckers was at his beck and call, but he’d elevated Rowan to the status of a mentor. Rowan was in charge of running the operation but the cockteaser was more fluent in Spanish than he, so there was a very subtle tug of war between the two men. Rowan often caught Fernando with other men, sometimes sitting in their laps, sometimes letting men toy with his prick. He often thought Fernando teased him on purpose, because when enraged he gave better whippings, and Fernando liked to be fucked brutally, to have his cock and balls spanked.

  Fernando liked to feign protest, as Rowan was now doing. He knew that his useless squirming was only corkscrewing his dick more firmly down Perry’s throat. He threw his head back, exposing his vulnerable jugular as a sign that he was submissive. Perry was doing fantastic things with his mouth, and already Rowan was on the verge of orgasm, thrusting his cock in and out like that.

  He knew Perry was nothing like that cockteaser, Fernando. After their affair was a month old and Rowan had caught Fernando in the arms of at least ten different men, Fernando’s assignment had ended and he had simply vanished. Rowan knew he worked for Hawkeye Corp, too, and it would be a snap to track him down—that was part of their job description, after all—but he managed to refrain, after a few agonizing, drunken weeks of anguish.

  Perry wouldn’t just vanish, if only because he seemed to live in this cabin. There were touches that were uniquely Perry—Native American junk, sleek dark pottery, lumps of turquoise and malachite that Sasha would probably go ape over, some skulls and a few animal skins tacked to the wall. It was undoubtedly Perry’s cabin, the space of a grown boy who loved collecting found objects.

  “Oh, God!” Rowan cried when Perry’s lips cleared his cock’s corona. Perry tongued the slit while fondling Rowan’s ball sac, and one enormous shudder wracked Rowan’s body as Perry teased his orgasm from him. He could feel Perry gulping down the jism as he spurted jet after jet into the warm mouth, and the quivering of his hips jiggled his prick ecstatically in the mouth. He had thought that, it being Perry’s first time, he might spit it out like some did, but he swallowed the salty stuff hungrily.

  Perry even knew when to back off, leaving Rowan gasping, his chest heaving, needing air to clear the tiny bubbles from his vision. “Holy hell,” he muttered, his head lolling around on the leather couch’s back.

  When he finally opened his eyes and sat erect, Perry was sitting cross-legged between his thighs like the cat that ate the canary. “Did I do all right?”

  Rowan didn’t want his lover getting a swollen head. “It was all right,” he allowed.

  But he already wanted Perry to do it again.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sasha had started something of a clinic in the office of Cass Cameron, the director of the front office and bestie to both her sisters.

  Her first patient was a child who had fallen down, trampled by some unseeing Furry in a giant-headed fursuit. There wasn’t much she could do but soothe the child, but the soothing it did for the parent was tremendous.

  She was about to leave Cass’s office when again she was confronted with a medical request. This time a fursuited fox had really broken her arm while trying to get out of a bathroom stall. Again Cass opined the stall doors should be removed. After rebreaking the arm to set it, Sasha had to MacGyver up a cast from a paint can wooden mixing stick and a half a mile of gauze tape. The lodge was big enough to have its own medical doctor, but his attendance was so sporadic that he was vacationing at the Grand Canyon right now. All of his supplies were locked carefully away.

  “I’d best get over to the Bait and Switch,” said Sasha. The Bait and Switch was the Horowitzes’ elaborate and newly built estate that was a mile or so down the lip of Prism Canyon. The wedding would be held there tomorrow and there were a ton of things to be seen to. Cass was maid of honor, but she was oddly reluctant to leave her post and head on over there. It appeared there was one more patient to be seen—Adrian Kinsey, the groom.

  Sasha hadn’t spent much time talking to her future brother-in-law. She’d been so caught up with her two lovers she hadn’t nearly spent enough time with her real family, and now the guilt got to her. So she found herself standing next to Cass’s desk watching her muscular, redheaded brother-in-law take off his shirt. Cass was so intimate with them, apparently, she merely stood by, observing.

  “It’s this raised patch of bumps,” said Adrian.

  “I can see. Does it hurt?”

  “Yes, very. I don’t even like to put my arm down—sort of keep it away from my side. What is it? Spider bite?”

  “Poison oak,” said Sasha.

  “Poison oak, eyew!” cried Cass, cringing back. “That’s highly contagious. I had a kid make me a bet that it was—I thought it wasn’t—so she rubbed her arm against me. Boy, was I sorry.”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed Sasha. “Once in a while we see those morons who put whole branches of poison ivy on their campfire. There is probably calamine lotion in the gift shop, but I’d like to give you a prescription for corticosteroid pills. Where’s the nearest pharmacy?”

  “Blanding,” said Cass, “fifty-four miles away.”

  “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” said Sasha. “What do you do in an emergency? Never mind, I’ll make the drive. It’s the least I can do for my brother-in-law, as I’m sure you’ve got a hundred more important things to do.”

  “Yes,” said Cass, a mysterious shadow coming over her face, “Adrian is a special ops merc, just like your Rowan O’Shea.”

  “Oh, he’s not ‘my’ Rowan.” Sasha should confide in these people. They were family, after all. “In fact, last night I told him I can’t see him anymore. You must understand that, Adrian. Being in such a dangerous profession that involves travel most of the time, how can most of these men ever hope to get the house with the chickens?”

  Adrian looked mystified as he put his shirt back on. “Chickens? I didn’t have much of a problem altering things to be with Brooke. It was really a no-brainer. I was tired of the itinerant lifestyle anyway and met Brooke at just the right time.”

  Cass put her hands on Adrian’s strong shoulders. The six-foot-tall woman almost dwarfed the man sitting on her desk. “Yes, just at the right time. Brooke had already decided to move here, and now Adrian just flies out when there’s a specific antiquity that needs to be looked at, evaluated. He doesn’t do any of that dangerous stuff anymore, right, Adrian?”

  “Right,” Adrian said cheerfully. “My wife would kill me, for one. But it’s just really lost its appeal. I’ve done my time, paid my dues. And Rowan’s ten years older than me, so he’s been doing it longer. I imagine he’s burnt out as well.”

  Adrian’s words tugged at Sasha’s heart. All night long she’d been feeling that she’d made a huge mistake in pushing Rowan away, but what option did she have? She couldn’t very well relocate to DC, and anyway, Rowan wanted out of his current position anyway. And how could they give up Perry? They seemed to have been settling into a comfortable ménage relationship that brought out the best in everyone. That was another thing Sasha mourned giving up. She had never dreamed of entering into a ménage a trois, but there she was, two men lavishing attention to her starved body. It had been nice while it lasted.

  She knew the feeling she’d made a mistake was just her heart—or perhaps her pussy—wanting more of the attention, the lavishing, the sex. She must crave it after being starved for emotion for so many years. It had been all she could think of all night long, and she’d had to take a sleeping pill to get any damned sleep at all. Visions of Rowan and Perry swam on the insides of her eyelids all night, and the phrase “the grass is greener on the other side of the fence” floated in and out. For years she had told herself to suffer in silence with Colin Whitbread because the other choices weren’t necessarily better. They just appeared to be better from afar, because she didn’t have to live with them. Of
course every man looked better when she didn’t have to listen to his noisy tics or clean his bathroom sink.

  Now Sasha was thinking perhaps the grass was greener, at least in the case of Rowan O’Shea. She knew his “flaws,” his temper, his self-doubt, his arrogance, and she embraced all of it. Nothing was a deal-breaker with Rowan—or with the sweet-natured Perry. Perry, in fact, was the only one who wasn’t mobile. He couldn’t exactly transfer from the high desert of southeast Utah to the wilds of Charleston in his job. Sasha, however, could be a doctor anywhere. This place, for instance, seemed like it could use one. She’d never considered being a country doctor and she’d have to wait for the proper opening, but…

  What am I thinking? The way she’d blown Rowan off, she wouldn’t blame him if he never wanted to lay eyes on her again. He was doing her a favor, looking for El Zeub on his own time and dime, and this was how she repaid him? She had just been so terrified of intimacy! That was exactly what her counselor had told her once. She chose inappropriate men with whom intimacy was never possible, and the ones who were better-equipped to provide her with true love and affection, she shoved away. Is that what she’d done again?

  She admitted, “Yes, Rowan has talked about being tired of it. He wants some country home with chickens.”

  Cass asked, “Are you too much of a city girl? Why don’t you just take a break for a couple of months and check out Bird in Hand? I’m from Salt Lake myself, and I never thought I’d find a place to call home in the middle of nowhere out here. But I have.”

  “Maybe Sasha doesn’t want to move to the middle of nowhere,” said Adrian, standing. “It’s not for everyone. I have to admit, I like the contrast between my travels, and returning home. Without the travels, the home part might eventually get to seem dull.”

  “Oh, I’ve thought about living in the country for years,” said Sasha. “It’s very attractive to me. Xandra tells me her and Nathan have been BASE jumping and that intrigues me. I’ve been known to jump out of a plane or two in my time. And the geology of this area! Well, let’s just say I could just roll around in a pile of malachite and azurite, I love it so much. And your lodge seems to have a hopping social atmosphere.”

  Cass rolled her eyes. “Hopping, that’s for sure. Never a dull moment around here. If it’s not the animal psychic convention it’s the Fluffies.”

  “Furries,” Sasha corrected her friend.

  Cass waved a dismissive hand. “Whatever. I’m about ready to tell the women Fluffies to go to the bathroom in the men’s because there aren’t as many stalls. And they keep running into walls. They must be so bruised underneath their fursuits. And someone found a used condom in the elevator.”

  “So you gave Rowan his walking papers? He was unnaturally quiet this morning at breakfast in the restaurant.”

  Sasha found herself longing to see Rowan, actually jealous of Adrian because he had seen Rowan and she hadn’t. “Oh, he’s a tough merc, right? He’ll get over me. I’m just a plain, mousy doctor.”

  “He’s tough all right,” Adrian agreed. “He’s well-known in our circles as being the man who thwarted the bombing of the Hilton Miami a couple of years ago. When the dogs found the bombs, they estimated at least two hundred people might have been killed. Before that he took down a jihadist cell that were this close to flying a private plane into the Chrysler Building. You just never hear his name—the names of any agents who thwart plans like that. We work under the radar for obvious reasons and never get any kudos.”

  “Right,” agreed Cass. “Even the conservation officers get awards, but you guys don’t exactly collect the trophies.”

  Adrian said, “You might want to give him another chance. If you truly care about him, that is. I know we’re an irascible bunch and not easy to love, but give us a chance.”

  “Wouldn’t he get bored in a place like this, though? Like you said, if you didn’t have your trips once in a while, you’d be bored, too.”

  Adrian shrugged. “That, and I have the horse ranch Brooke runs to keep me occupied, too. You know, it’s not that difficult to make the adjustments, if you’re truly in love with someone.”

  Adrian left Cass’s office, cool as a cucumber, but Sasha felt Cass’s censorious eyes on her. “Well? Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “In love with Rowan.”

  Sasha sputtered. “I…I…Why, yes, I suppose I am! But that shouldn’t affect my future, should it? I need to be practical.”

  Cass closed her eyes patiently. “You need to be stupid.”

  “I resent that, Cass! I’m the medical examiner! I report to the FBI, chiefs of police, heads of universities. I’d be consorting with the very sort of man that I’m accustomed to cutting up!”

  “Not really. Adrian just told you, Rowan is the good guy, Sasha. You’re both on the same side when you really look at it. Yes, the doctor’s office is open. Come on in! Oh, my. Who are we? Let me guess. My Little Pony.”

  “Yup,” said the gruff fellow. He wasn’t wearing so much a fursuit as a pink body stocking. His long pink horse’s tail swished, and his little pink ears looked cunning. His mane was a wig of sleek pink dreadlocks, his face heavily painted pink with sky-blue highlights, like the tip of his nose. “I’m a Brony, all right. Dr. McQueen. I’ve heard good things about you doctoring us furry fans.”

  It struck Sasha as odd that he’d immediately turned to her. Maybe he knew Cass from before, so ruled her out as the doctor. “Yes. What seems to be the problem?”

  “I…” He looked fearfully sideways at Cass. “I seem to have run into some piece of metal, or something, sticking out of somewhere.” He pointed to his side. “It just gouged an enormous pathway through my side.”

  “Let me see,” said Sasha. “Is your top separate? Take off just your top.”

  “Piece of metal?” Cass frowned. “We try not to have pieces of metal sticking out around here. Where was it?”

  “I was pretty drunk,” said the pony. “It was last night in the Neon Cocktail. We were all drunk. Don’t worry, I have no interest in suing over something I can’t remember. It was all my fault, Miss Cameron.”

  “Well, that’s nice to hear,” said Cass. “Sasha, will you be all right? I’m going over to the Bait and Switch, see if Brooke needs anything.”

  “I’m fine. I know she wants more of those plastic champagne glasses. That bartender guy set a case aside for her in the Neon Cocktail.”

  “I can fit those in my van,” said Cass, and left.

  “A wedding tomorrow?” asked the pony.

  How did he know it was tomorrow? “What’s your name?” Sasha said conversationally, assessing the wound. Yes, something had gouged a regular channel through his side, and it was still oozing blood. It appeared to have occurred longer ago than last night, as the bleeding was extremely minimal and the soft tissue had already begun the healing process and bruising around the wound had already set in. The tangential wound had lacerated subcutaneous tissue.

  There was nothing much she could do, really, other than clean it and apply a loose bandage—in her case, gauze taped down with masking tape. It was frustrating not to have the right tools. Luckily the good lodge doctor hadn’t locked up his Neosporin, and Sasha applied this now while the pony winced.

  “Sam Underwood. I come from Atlanta to attend this FurFest. You don’t attend to patients in a suite? Why do you have to use Miss Cameron’s office?”

  “I’m not really the lodge’s doctor. He’s on vacation.”

  “But you’re a very good doctor.”

  Sasha frowned. “How do you know?”

  “I mean, I assumed you’re a very good doctor. Ow! Boy, us Bronies sure know how to party, don’t we? A whole herd of us were drinking Sea Breezes because we liked the bright colors. The problem came when we switched to Singapore Slings. Now, I’m not blaming any of my fellow Bronies.”

  “Do any of them recall how you got this wound? It’s quite…unusual, for something to happen inside of a cocktail lounge. It
almost looks as though you were struck by a high velocity ball or something. From behind, from the looks of the exit wound. Is anyone here angry with you?”

  Sam chuckled. “You wouldn’t believe the backstabbing that goes on at a FurFest! The fur flies, as we say. What kind of music are you having at the wedding tomorrow?”

  This Brony certainly was an odd one. Wanted to know if she saw patients in her suite, and was overly interested in the wedding tomorrow. Still, music seemed a harmless topic. “You know, that’s one thing we have to work on. My sister was putting together a playlist for Brooke—she’s the one who’s getting married.”

  “Has she included any Elton John?” What an odd question! “You’ve got to have Elton John at a wedding, that’s why I ask. If you don’t happen to have any Elton John CDs, you’ll have to go all the way to Blanding to find a music store.”

  Sasha had to go to Blanding anyway to pick up the corticosteroid for Adrian, so she made a mental note to ask Brooke again about her music preferences. Anything Brooke wanted could be downloaded, anyway, but it was a good idea to get the playlist together. “Why Elton John? He doesn’t strike me as terribly romantic.”

  “Oh, he’s swooningly romantic, all right,” Sam assured her. “That song ‘Levon’ is just spine-tingling.”

  Sasha frowned, patting her makeshift bandage. “Didn’t Levon sell cartoon balloons in town? He was born on Christmas Day when the New York Times said God is dead? That’s not terribly romantic.”

  “Something like that,” said Sam, unconcerned now with the song he had just proclaimed was so beautiful. “If you have any Elton CDs, you’ve got to have that one.”

  “All right, you’re set. I’m sorry but this was the best I could do until this doctor returns and unlocks his supply cabinet.”

  “Oh, no problem,” said Sam, sliding back into his pink spandex shirt. He made sure not to muss his shiny pink dreadlocks as he slipped the shirt over his head. “It’s worth it just to be around such a pretty lady as you. So you’ll be around later today? A bunch of us are going out to the desert to do some frolicking in Equestria.”