Three Hearts Beat as One (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (2 page)

But Ben did, to the point that no matter how many times she yelled, “I don’t even care if you stay out all night!
Just call me!
” it didn’t deter him from repeating the same thing all over again within a few days. Their marriage had turned into one enormous ongoing fight. Lacey’s best friend, Katrina, had even asked her once, “Do you think Ben is cheating?” And for some reason, Lacey was convinced he wasn’t—that it was all about the partying lifestyle with his wannabe musician friends.

Now, she wasn’t so sure. Who knew how long he’d been cheating while she had her head stuck in the sand?

Since Lacey obviously—unpleasantly—didn’t really have a date for tonight, she still had to haul herself up the inner stairs that led to the apartment she shared with Cal. Cal had been a lifesaver, letting her crash in his spare bedroom.

Lacey had allowed Ben to have it all—the enormous house they rented in a grape vineyard outside of Sacramento, all the furniture, dishes, pretty much everything. She was just done with arguing and didn’t want to haggle over who got the crappy twenty-four-inch TV, the towels, or the clay pot. However, Cal’s bachelor lifestyle was a little thin on the domestic appliances. She really could use that microwave, that coffee pot, those wedding dishes…

What was wrong with her key? Lacey realized her eyes were blurry with tears as she tried to get into her own apartment.
Dammit!
Ben had succeeded in making her cry. His goal, no doubt!

“Let me.”

Gentle female fingers took her key and opened her door. Thank God for Katrina. They had been best friends since elementary school. Lately Lacey had been feeling as though she’d made no progress in her thirty-two years. She still drank coffee with Katrina, still lived in a beaten-up Victorian era apartment on Jack London Street, still worked at the hardware store owned by the guy her mother had married fifteen years ago, Cal’s father, Mr. Zhukov. Where was the progress? She had utterly wasted four years of her life on Ben. She had wanted to be a photojournalist, but being with Ben was priority. She couldn’t travel to Cairo or Syria or the hot spots while maintaining a marriage.

“And now I’m an old maid,” she sobbed as the door shut safely behind her.

Katrina grabbed her by the shoulders. “Listen. You’re no old maid. Thirty-two is hardly old these days, with people living into their nineties.”

Lacey wailed even louder. “Oh, God! You mean I have six more decades of this shit to suffer through?”

“Listen,” said Katrina. “You got any wine? That’ll help.”

“Of course I do.” The idea of wine was already perking up Lacey, and the women moved to the sunny kitchen that had a view of the courtyard and the rolling Sierra foothills, viridian green at this time of year. “My problem, Katrina, is that I’m not a gal who can be alone for long. I just don’t prefer it. If I don’t have that basic foundation of a stable relationship, I’m a loss. A sheer loss.”

“Yeah. I prefer to have a boyfriend as well. That’s probably why I’ve put up with Marco for so long.”

Marco was a strange, sort of disgusting guy who drank about a quart of vodka every day and never seemed the worse for it, but Katrina was devoted to him for some obscure reason. Lacey didn’t know him well. He rarely talked. They had never engaged in the halcyon dreams of double dating with Ben and Marco. Ben loathed Marco as much as Lacey did.

Lacey waxed philosophical before she was even done pouring the wine. “I think it stems from my childhood, Katrina. Everything was so dubious when we were raising ourselves, remember? We had no stability, no foundation at all. We never knew from one moment to the next if we’d be evicted, where the next meal was coming from. If my mother hadn’t married Cal’s dad, we would’ve grown up in a homeless shelter.”

“Yeah.” Katrina sighed and sipped her wine. She looked gorgeous as always, bathed by the warm squares of sun coming in the window. She had an exotic, feline beauty, all long, gangling limbs, like a model. Lacey? Lacey only had to
look
at a cookie and she gained five pounds. She had to suffer on endless diets just to look a reasonable weight, as Katrina did effortlessly. Of course, the past few months she hadn’t had much of an appetite. “But it’s made you strong, Lace! Before Mr. Zhukov came along, remember we had to sleep up in the hills behind my house? Hitch a ride on the back of the bus to school?”

“Steal the milk that was left out for the school kids.” Lacey was feeling better. Between the wine and Katrina’s reminders, she was starting to feel that she could make it through this miserable period in her life. “You’re right. My childhood toughened me up. If I made it through that, I can make it through this.”

Katrina nodded enthusiastically. “I mean, what an asshole Ben is. Imagine the gall, coming in here flaunting that ugly tattoo? He must be awful desperate and insecure to need to do that to pump his own ego.”

Tears flooded Lacey’s eyes again. “Oh,
God
, Katrina! Why’d you have to mention that damned frigging tattoo? I can’t
believe
the gall of that asshole! I wish we could somehow keep him out of the store. Set up a nuclear device that zaps only him if he tries to come in the door.”

Katrina was giggling. Sure, maybe
someday
they would look back and laugh about Ben’s lame-ass tattoo and his attempts to make Lacey jealous. But today wasn’t the time. “Oh, jeez, Lacey. Cal just told me what happened. Did you see how badly drawn that that was? It looked like one of those things you get in a cereal box. And the name ‘Brittney,’
please
. What is she, eighteen years old?”

That wasn’t helping. Lacey already felt like an over-the-hill old maid. Ben was thirty-five, too old to be romancing teenagers. “Do you know anything about Brittney?” Lacey dared to ask. Maybe Marco had told Katrina.

“All I know is she works at the lingerie shop over on Grist Mill Street.”

Lingerie shop. It figures.
That was one of the drawbacks to living in a small town like Hell’s Delight, a former gold mining camp. It was very difficult to avoid bumping into people you didn’t want to see. Lacey didn’t know if she should dare ask the foremost question in her mind. “How old do you think she is?”

Katrina hemmed and hawed. “Uh, she looks fairly young. Real immature. Guess Ben couldn’t handle a
real
woman. Speaking of, what’re you wearing to the Valentine’s auction?”

Now Lacey really did feel about to break down. She had been dreading that auction ever since walking out on Ben. She sloshed some more wine into her glass. “I’m wearing a damned chicken suit, because no one’s gonna bid on me anyway.”
 

“Earth to Chase. Come in, Chase.”

The green-eyed monster reared its ugly head when Devin Jonas caught sight of his lover, Chase Moran, staring wistfully at the swaying behind of a shapely blonde gal as she left Chase’s shop, Positive Vibrations. It was an odd field to be in, the business of selling sex toys, but Devin felt accustomed to it by now and rarely threatened. And not all Chase’s customers were tight, pert young blondes like that one. Far from it. But sometimes it was the men Devin felt he had to worry about. Men could be a lot more predatory than women.

“What?” Chase’s eyes cleared and he shook his head. He smiled sheepishly and banged the cash register drawer shut with his hip. “Wasn’t looking at her. Just looking in her direction.”

“Awfully curvy direction.”

Chase smiled that ingratiating smile he’d probably learned in his modeling days. Chase was only twenty-eight and could still easily model underwear, but to prove his loyalty to Devin he’d opened this shop instead. It was a much less dangerous profession, handling dildos and butt plugs all day long for middle-class tourists from the Bay Area. Underwear modeling was about as hazardous as being a Navy SEAL, for all the assaults one had to fend off. Whenever Devin felt insecure having such a drop-dead gorgeous lover, he reminded himself that it could be worse. Chase could still be in the cutthroat modeling world. Now he mostly sold strap-on dildos named First Mate and Captain Silicone to lesbians. There were lots of lesbians here in Hell’s Delight, or passing through on their way to Lake Tahoe.

“Fuck off, Devin. You know me. I like them well-seasoned, like you.” Chase was always riding him about being ten years older. Chase’s cheeks dimpled. “And well-hung. That gal’s just a young airhead. I think she’s banging that yogurt shop guy, Ben Pearson. He came in with a new tat that said he hearts Brittney. She’s the only Brittney I know.”

Devin frowned. “I thought the yogurt guy was married to the hardware girl. Now, she’s more my type. Real feminine. Well-rounded, voluptuous. Reminds me of Kate Winslet. I can picture her in cowboy boots on horseback.”

“You and your Kate Winslet fantasies. I wonder if the yogurt guy broke up with her. There’s something off about him, Dev. I can’t put my finger on it. Too much of a partier, maybe. I know his dad just bought him that shop to give him something to do, to keep him out of trouble, but he doesn’t spend much time there.” Chase was very professional in his standing as a Jack London Street merchant. He took it all totally seriously. He had to, to counteract any snooty suspicions citizens might have about a sex toy shop.

“Yeah, he’s been at pretty much every party I’ve ever been to, yet I’ve never seen his hardware wife with him.” Devin luxuriated in a few second’s worth of revelry, imagining the Kate Winslet hardware gal straddling a sawhorse, perhaps handcuffed. How her tits would bounce when slapped with, say, one of those wooden sticks used to stir paint. He could tickle her neck with a feather duster and her lush lips would part slightly with the shivery ecstasy…

“Speaking of hardware,” said Chase, “let me put away this new shipment. There are just those three customers left before I can lock the door.” Chase carried off a box of cock rings called Shrieking Os while Devin gave the Vulcan mind-meld to the three customers.

Leave. Leave.

The trio of women was examining some beautiful glass dildos.
Leave. Leave. I want to suck my lover’s cock
. Surprisingly, that worked. The lesbians suddenly jumped as though electrified and practically ran from the store. Devin was nearly as fast in finding the proper key among the dozens that jangled at his waist and locking the front door with a snap of his wrist.

Devin had been wondering when his intense attraction to Chase would wear off, or at least plateau out. They’d known each other for two years, and wasn’t that past when the honeymoon usually was over? True, they’d only been sexually involved for the past year. The first year Devin had spent flirting with Chase, competing with the bevy of other bi or gay men who courted the model-turned-merchant. As a single cattle rancher who lived fifteen miles from Hell’s Delight, Devin found it difficult to come up with reasons to keep visiting a sex toy shop, so he was glad when he started seeing Chase around the country and western bar where Devin sometimes played guitar and sang for the hell of it. That’s when things had really heated up between them.

Devin cornered Chase in the back storeroom where he was just putting the box of cock rings up on a high shelf. Plastering his crotch to Chase’s rounded ass, Devin squeezed one cheek while stilling the box with his other hand. He brushed his lips against Chase’s smoothly shaven neck and murmured, “Let’s try one of those out.” Sliding his hand around Chase’s tightly-packed crotch, he wasn’t surprised to feel the long, fat cock instantly expanding at his touch.

“Too late,” purred Chase, cupping Devin’s hand in his palm.

Devin knew that due to Chase’s admirable girth, it would be next to impossible to slip the ring on his erection. And he knew Chase’s tenacity. There was only one way his prick would deflate in the slightest without having an orgasm. Squeezing the plump cock again, he whispered, “Get out one in your size.”

While Chase eagerly fumbled with the carton of solid cock rings to find one in his size, Devin took several long strides to the refrigerator. He chuckled as he snatched up an ice pack, priding himself on knowing his lover so well. By the time he returned to the shelf of sex toys, Chase had unwrapped the black rubber item and was leaning back against a shelf, feet spread apart in anticipation.

Devin plastered his body to Chase’s and undid the buttons of Chase’s jeans, grinding his own erection against his lover’s. “How’d I get to be so damned lucky?” It was true. Devin had scored landing Chase. And he’d thought he was straight until the day he laid eyes on the delicious stud going into Positive Vibrations. He’d assumed Chase was a customer, never the owner. One look was all it took, and Devin was playing for the other team. It was that simple. Kissing another man was something he’d fantasized about only occasionally, yet suddenly it occupied all of his waking thoughts.

Chase had that unbelievably seductive, lazy grin as he wrapped a hand around the back of Devin’s neck. “I’m the lucky one, Devin. I never knew how empty my life was until you came into it.”

Chase’s hot, thick cock lay like a heavy limb in Devin’s hand, but he paused for a split second. “Then maybe we should rethink inviting a woman into our love? I mean, it’s perfect the way it is, right?”

Although he had halfheartedly gone along with it, the idea had been bothering Devin since Chase had brought it up. They had such a strong, unbreakable bond, yet they had to face that they were both bi. Chase was curious to know how adding a woman to their relationship would enhance it. It sounded good on paper, but sometimes, in moments of self-doubt and insecurity, Devin wondered if it just wasn’t a recipe for disaster.