Woman on Top [McQueen Was My Valley 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (6 page)

BOOK: Woman on Top [McQueen Was My Valley 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)
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Gabriel waved like a giant upright bear. He swished to a stop before the two of them. “A skier up at Camp Walden saw me putting up a flier. He told me about a cougar in a cage trap that he saw around the same time, day before yesterday out on Tropic of Capricorn Ridge. That’s two ridges over, about a forty-minute drive in an SUV,” he clarified for Brooke. His expression changed abruptly. “You know, you look familiar. Where might I have seen you before? Are you a Furry?”

Brooke frowned. “What the hell is a Furry? No, I’ve only been at the lodge a couple of weeks. I’m from Charleston, South Carolina.” She had a feeling she knew where Officer Verona had seen her before, but didn’t want to bring it up. Men always got hard-ons when she talked about her modeling. She didn’t want these men getting hard-ons because her sister would get angry, but she was very interested in the cougar. “The same one you said people saw earlier?”

Gabriel shook his head. “Can’t be the same one if it was trapped forty-eight hours ago. Adrian, I’ll have to bail on that dinner. I’ll have to go find that trap, see if it’s tagged, then stake it out, see if the poacher shows up.”

“You do that for animals?” Brooke blurted. “That is beyond sweet. That’s downright caring.”

She noted Adrian’s eyes flickering, perhaps with jealousy. “You’re kidding me, Verona. You sit all night long next to a goddamned
trap
?”

Gabriel frowned. “Well, it may not be as glamorous as your jet-setting lifestyle, Kinsey. But it’s what we do. We’re the last line of defense between these critters and extinction.”

Gabriel turned and began skiing off, across the bowl toward Camp Walden, where the gondola took visitors back to the Triple Play. “Wait!” cried Brooke, skiing off after Gabriel. “I want to help you with the critters! Let me come with you on the stakeout. At least I can keep you company—keep you awake.”

“Wait,” echoed Adrian. He skied on the other side of Gabriel, all three of them furiously striding ahead through the powder. “You don’t need a massage therapist sitting surveillance with you. You need someone experienced in ISR.”

Brooke flashed Adrian a look of ingratitude. “What’s that?”

Gabriel answered. “Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. You’re right, Adrian. I could use you. But don’t you think Brooke here will help us stay awake? I intend to wait and see if the jerk comes back to check his trap. By law they have to check their traps every forty-eight hours so captured animals don’t suffer. I want to see who he is, find out more about him. I suspect him of being the deer poacher.”

Brooke skied abreast of the men. She cast Adrian meaningful glances. Suddenly she wanted to go on this stakeout more than anything. She knew she was an impulsive girl, but her life had always been full of adventure that way. She had to give up her former wild life, she knew, but did it have to be replaced with empty desks and mindless chitchat with guests? She was in the great outdoors now. Such a place should be rife with adventure.

Adrian nodded. “Of course,” he said, somewhat reluctantly. “Female company would be greatly appreciated.”


Yes
!” cried Brooke, practically fist-pumping in her excitement. “You guys won’t regret this. I’ll get Leif to give us some appetizers to go.”

“You don’t need to bring your makeup and your hair dryer,” Gabriel cautioned, but Brooke knew there was a glint of mischief in his eyes.

Oh, holy shit. Here I go again.
She was blowing off responsibility to have an adventure with two relatively strange men. Joy surged in her chest. It struck her as odd that it felt like much more than the usual lust for the men, or lust for life in general.

She genuinely wanted to make sure Gabriel got his poacher. She genuinely cared.

Chapter Five

 

“There was a proposal recently,” Gabriel said cheerfully, “to change the mandatory trap check law from forty-eight hours to one week. Some said forty-eight hours isn’t enough time for a hunter’s scent to leave the trap, so they weren’t bagging the coyotes they hate. It was voted down as unethical.”

Adrian couldn’t believe he was sitting in a damned SUV at midnight—actually
hiding
behind an enormous sandstone steeple, parked in a pocket canyon, watching a cougar trap with night vision binoculars. This was not the type of surveillance Adrian was accustomed to. Why didn’t he have anything better to do? He seriously needed to get a life.

Why had he been so eager to volunteer for this mission, anyway? Adrian couldn’t explain why he seemed to have fallen so hard for the brutal game warden who had fucked him with his police baton after handcuffing him and threatening to arrest him. How did Gabriel know that Adrian had really enjoyed it? For all Gabriel knew, Adrian was a die-hard, militant straight man who would knock his block off at being handcuffed, sensually or not.

Well, maybe it had been Adrian’s attitude, his reaction that had given Gabriel the go-ahead. A guy who was truly protesting wouldn’t swivel his hips erotically while his prick exploded in another guy’s mouth, that was for sure. Adrian had no doubt that Gabriel wouldn’t have cuffed him in the first place without knowing intuitively that Adrian was amenable to his treatment. His unflagging prick was probably a dead giveaway.

That was another thing. Why
had
Adrian responded so ardently to such treatment by another man? He’d never even participated in a circle jerk before, much less savored the ministrations of another man’s mouth. It had taken a few minutes for it to sink in that
another man is making love to me with his mouth
, and that’s when the panic attack had set in. Being bound and unable to struggle had freaked him out, reminded him of Damascus. He’d been chained to the ceiling and beaten for information about his company. That’s why he’d whaled upon Gabriel. It was much too soon after his prison experience for him to be chained up again.

But even then. They’d ridden back to the lodge together and had been constant companions ever since. Well, Adrian
liked
Gabriel. He was so noble in his pursuit of poachers, his love for animals and the outdoors. Who could find fault with that?

Not Brooke, apparently. “I should
say
it’s unethical! Imagine a poor animal suffering in a trap for an entire week! I know from listening to my stepbrother Doug how much coyotes are hated for their livestock attacks, but the traps must also snare other critters that aren’t so heinous. Like the cougar we just released.”

The big cat had walked into the live trap to eat the bird bait. His weight had tripped the sensor and the cage door had closed on it God only knew how long ago before the skier had seen it. They had released the cougar, but Gabriel wanted to wait around and see if the poacher returned to check the trap. They had no idea who he was, since the trap wasn’t tagged. They could confiscate the trap because it was untagged, but the best case scenario would be citing the asshole who set the trap.

Gabriel said, “Ethical cattle ranchers just trying to get coyotes would let the cats go and shoot the coyotes with a twenty-two. These slimy poachers, they set so many traps they can’t possibly run around checking them all within forty-eight hours.”

“It’s too bad you can’t arrest the asshole,” Brooke said heatedly. She sat between the two men on the bench seat of the SUV. As in Adrian’s wildest imaginings, she was the perfect snow bunny in a hooded, fur-lined parka. Her hot breath came in little icy puffs, as it was probably below freezing inside the truck.

“Not unless he’s a habitual offender, which I suspect he is. A week ago I found a broken glass meth pipe next to one of the deer carcasses, and poaching and drugs often go hand in hand. Chances are he’s got prior drug offenses if he’s our man.”

Brooke was eating up Gabriel’s bleeding heart line. “That is just so heroic and noble of you,” she gushed. She squirmed her pretty tush on the seat till she sat on one butt cheek, facing away from Adrian, all the better to gush over the game warden.

Gabriel had been watching the empty trap with his night vision binoculars. They had closed the trapdoor to prevent any more critters from becoming prisoner, and if the poacher drove up and saw the door closed he’d be more liable to jump out to inspect the trap. So there was no real reason for Gabriel to be studying the trap.

Was Gabriel gay? How could a man sit two inches from the shapely thigh of Brooke McQueen and look through some fucking binoculars at an animal trap? Adrian felt relieved that Gabriel might be gay. Gabriel wouldn’t compete with Adrian for Brooke’s affections. Then Adrian realized he
wanted
Brooke’s affections.

Abruptly, Gabriel put the binoculars on his lap and fixed Brooke with a quizzical gaze. “I recognize you. You looked familiar to me when I first saw you at the lodge’s front desk, and now I know where I’ve seen you before.”

“She looks familiar to me, too,” put in Adrian, but no one was paying attention to him.

“Really?” teased Brooke. “That happens to me all the time. I must have one of those faces.”

Gabriel was pulling something that looked like a catalog from the side pocket of the truck door. In the dim light from a couple of cell phones and radios in a dashboard compartment, Adrian saw Gabriel brandishing a lingerie catalog.

Holy shit.
Gabriel thumbed through the catalog as it dawned on Adrian that he felt he’d known Brooke, because in a way he had. What red-blooded man, especially one usually sent to such hellholes as Damascus, Lagos, and Khartoum, didn’t jealously guard his rare and enviable copy of this lingerie catalog? Whenever Adrian used to be forced to listen to Nathan and Rory go hard at it, he’d slunk away to beat off to fantasies of these women. And now Gabriel was trying to say Brooke was one of them?

Yes, she looked mighty coy. She practically fluttered her eyelids as she glanced down at the catalog. “You found me out.”

Adrian’s hand acted before his mind had half a chance. “Give me that!” He whipped the catalog from Gabriel’s fingers and flipped through it.
Holy crap.
There she was in a bra and panties, leaning seductively back against a pillar of some sort. Nobody really cared about the pillar of course—hell, nobody cared much about the bra and panties, as Brooke and her magnificent body were center stage. She looked like a sensuous Snow White with her nearly black hair coiled in ringlets against her milky skin, skin almost as alabaster as Adrian’s.

Adrian barely had a chance to gape in awe before Gabriel tore the magazine from his paws. Adrian had nowhere else to look but at Brooke’s face, her perfectly coiffed brows framing sultry brown eyes. She looked at him expectantly, probably waiting for some kind of panting, drooling response. As a lingerie model she was no doubt accustomed to being lusted after, and Adrian wouldn’t give her that satisfaction.
Women
. The pretty ones had been kowtowed to all their lives and had come to expect it. They knew they could get any man they wanted, and Adrian wasn’t about to contribute to that.

“I’m not supposed to be flaunting that lifestyle,” Brooke said by way of explanation.

Adrian didn’t know what that meant, but he cursed his dogged cock that was already lengthening and expanding inside his jeans. “Have to go,” he muttered, and fumbled his way out the passenger door.

He tried not to be a bumbling Bigfoot as he looked for a suitable bush to pee behind in the darkness. Miss Brooke McQueen riled him more than he cared to admit. What did that mean, “I’m not supposed to be flaunting that lifestyle”? The lingerie modeling lifestyle? What was wrong with the modeling lifestyle?

Adrian was nearly out of his mind with confusion. He’d responded to Gabriel’s lovemaking techniques—oh, boy, had he responded. The second the officer had tickled the baton against his prostate, he’d shot a massive load, as though he hadn’t come in months. That had led him to believe that perhaps he was only capable of responding to men now. His fiancée Lyla had stabbed him clean to the heart while he was busy dangling from the ceiling of a blood-splattered cement room, so he obviously wasn’t the best judge of feminine wiles. Maybe he’d developed a hatred for
all
women, so his attraction to Gabriel made sense.

Now Brooke. He’d been drawn to her since he’d walked past her at the spa desk several times a day. He’d thought he was just appreciating her beauty, as a man might appreciate a nice painting. Of course he would never mess with her—she was a woman, one of the enemy. He’d responded physically when she had touched his bare ass, his prick plumping to an embarrassing length. That was one reason he’d reacted—overreacted, more like it—and run out of the room. He didn’t want her to know he was getting hard at her touch.

Now he’d asininely agreed to sit all night in a truck with them—not one but
two
people he was attracted to, and one of them a lingerie model.
This is fucking ridiculous. I came to the Triple Play to help Nathan with that coin, and I stayed to relax and forget Damascus. It worked for awhile. I had plenty of massages and saunas and mostly succeeded in forgetting my torture. But now I’m being tortured by these two. Maybe it’s time to go back to New Canaan and my empty house.
It was starting to feel like hanging around these two might be more painful than returning to Syria.

Only one who has met with great persecutions can be said to have mastered the Lotus Sutra.
At times like this he liked to recite Buddhist sayings in his head. It helped calm him, keep him on track.
By undergoing repeated persecution, I can erase the grave offenses of my past. The greater the hardships befalling me, the greater the delight I feel, because of my strong faith.

BOOK: Woman on Top [McQueen Was My Valley 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)
11.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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