Three Men and a Woman: Haidee (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)
Three Men and a Woman: Haidee
Flight nurse Haidee Wells escapes a broken heart by taking a temp job in Montana. Though she’s sworn off men, she can’t help the attraction as she meets one, then two, then three hot pilots. She’s sure she can resist them until the moment she learns of her former lover’s final betrayal. Vashi is there, and, reeling, she lets him take her to his wicked play room.
Haidee is lost in Vashi’s dominant sexual power when suddenly, Lev is there too, his body hard against hers. Mindless, she gives herself up to both men.
Then Danya arrives and rescues her, and she learns the three men are the Vanchenko brothers. Sweet Danya loves her, but powerful Lev and domineering Vashi… aren’t done with her.
The three brothers know how to share, and soon it’s not just her body, but her heart they all want. Find her courage, they urge, and accept the three men she loves. How can she deny them?
Genre: Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre
Length: 68,003 words
THREE MEN AND
A WOMAN: HAIDEE
Rachel Billings
MENAGE AMOUR
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Amour
THREE MEN AND A WOMAN: HAIDEE
Copyright © 2015 by Rachel Billings
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63259-943-8
First E-book Publication: November 2015
Cover design by Harris Channing
All art and logo copyright © 2015 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
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DEDICATION
When I became a nurse, the first flier in my life, my father, wanted me to be a flight nurse—until one was lost in a high Montana lake. To nurses, who do good and sometimes risky work no matter whether they’re in the air or on the ground. They are often some of my favorite people.
And to pilots. Confident, competent, cocky—they make perfect heroes and heroines.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
About the Author
THREE MEN AND
A WOMAN: HAIDEE
RACHEL BILLINGS
Copyright © 2015
Chapter One
Vashi Vanchenko cursed as the bitch stomped up the stairs. She hadn’t even put her stupid-high heels back on—they were dangling from her fingers by their tiny little straps—yet still she managed to stomp. Well, good riddance. She wasn’t nearly as sexually engaging as she thought she was.
Thinking he ought to make sure she found her way out the door, Vashi tucked himself back into his jeans, buttoned most of the way up, and followed her up the stairs. But the door slammed as he reached the living room, pretty much answering the question.
“Another satisfied customer?”
Shit. With a quiet sigh, he turned around. His brothers were watching the drama from the kitchen, the open floor plan of the house they shared giving them a great view. Lev had his ass planted on a stool on the near side of the island counter, spun around so he could watch, and Danya looked up from the far side where he was constructing a sandwich. They both had a White Bear within reach and matching smirks on their faces.
“Hell,” Vashi said, giving in to the inevitable and joining them at the counter. By the time he got there, Danny had already pried the top off another bottle—a Lvivske for him, none of that lager crap. “She had a mouth.” Though she wasn’t all that skilled with it. “She coulda just said, if she objected to what I was doing.”
“Could she?” Danny asked, still not stifling his smirk. “I thought you gagged ’em. Solves the problem of all that bitching and whining.”
Vashi shot him a look but knew it wouldn’t quell the boy. At twenty-eight, Danny was the youngest of the three and had the lightest heart. Everybody loved him, a fact that had protected him from more than one beating. Not that the kid couldn’t defend himself—he could. He just didn’t have to very often.
Anyway, Vashi did gag them sometimes. Or bind them. Or both. He just hadn’t gotten around to it yet with this particular woman. He’d already kind of figured she was a no-go, and he regretted now he’d even made the attempt. He should have left her in the bar where he found her. Feeling all of his thirty-four years, he sighed again as he grabbed a stool next to Lev and took a long slug of the stout. “No game tonight?”
It was the middle of August and the majors had some interesting races heating up. In Billings, Montana, a guy didn’t exactly have a home team. Denver sucked, nobody liked the Twins, and Kansas City was just too Midwestern. Their dad rooted for the Mariners, so the brothers had chosen the Dodgers. The blue crew were having a pretty good year but they didn’t have it locked up yet.
“Nah, the
y’re traveling. Phillies tomorrow night,” Danny said. “But we just got back from the ’Stangs game. We beat the damn Owlz.”
The brothers had season tickets to the Billings Mustangs, more in support of the minor league team than a reflection of the number of games they managed to attend. And the Owlz had been the “damn Owlz” ever since the three of them had gone to a game in Orem and found out you couldn’t get a beer in the stadium there. Every time the Owlz got beaten, the guys figured it was their just deserts.
“Where’re we flying tomorrow?”
Lev answered this one. The brothers all worked for the family business, Van’s Flying Service. Lev had the business degree and the suits and did most of the management. They all flew.
In a state as big as Montana, folks who could afford it—or were just in a big, fat hurry—liked to fly where they were going. And big airlines didn’t service the state adequately. Van’s had been established by their grandmother, of all things. It was the oldest and best-regarded flying service in the region.
If they hadn’t wanted to keep it in the family, it would be the biggest, too.
Van’s specialized in two things—ambulance and rescue, and what they called vanity flights. They had both helos and fixed-wings for rescue and ambulance, and they took it seriously. Each of the brothers were rescue and EMS-trained, and if some idiot rock climber or extreme skier had to be hauled out of the mountains, or a critically ill patient needed an air ambulance to Denver or Seattle or Mayo, everyone knew to call Van’s.
Once their grandmother flew her last crop-dusting job, ambulance and rescue had been Van’s mainstay business.
The vanity flights were more recent and Danny’s baby. The kid had seen it coming and got the service prepped for it. Their dad, SOB that he was, had sent them all to flight school and whatever other kind of training they wanted. Danya, facing down the raised brows and head scratching, went to hospitality school, which turned out not to be as girly as they all thought.
It had worked. Folks with more money than sense—Hollywood stars, business tycoons, politicos—all had a hard-on for a bit of land in Montana. Or they wanted to be dropped from helos to ski or hunt or climb. They just didn’t get that travel to their little piece of the last, best place from L.A. or D.C. or wherever could cost them two days.
Unless Van’s came and fetched you in their small jets and then dropped you off on your own grass landing strip with their Cessnas or delivered you to your destination in one of their helos. Each of which were decked out—Wi-Fi for work, champagne or whiskey and gourmet food for relaxation, and, in some cases, a private bed for…whatever.
Those people with more money than sense ate it right up and did not mind paying for it. In fact, they seemed to like paying for it.
They also liked that Van’s “uniform” consisted of a leather bomber jacket, button-fly blue jeans, and cowboy boots. The brothers were all six-one or -two, broad-shouldered, and, if Vashi had to say so himself, filled out their 501s pretty good. If they swaggered a little in their boots and moved like they’d all trained in martial arts—which they had—well, it just added to the mystique. Vashi was pretty sure he wasn’t the only one who’d had a little bimbo time in the bed on one of their jets. Or even in the pilot’s seat.
That wasn’t all of their business—there were always the oil and coal companies, and this time of year, the Forest Service kept them extra busy—but it was a big chunk of it.
Lev ran their schedule off like it was stored in a computer in his brain, and Vashi had to wonder again if his brother was having enough fun. Business school had sobered him. “I’ve got you taking the Citation down to LAX for Bill and his wife and kids.” Bill Riley was a movie producer who’d finally figured out he was too old to enjoy the kids his trophy wife had given him. He liked to set them loose on the small ranch he had outside of Bozeman.
The trophy wife also thought he was too old, Vashi had reason to know. But the brothers agreed they’d never fuck their customers’ wives. Groupies, yes. Wives, no.
Lev went on. “I’ve got a heart transplant patient going to Mayo. I’ll take the 510. Danny’s got a couple short runs—some smoke jumpers need a ride up to Helena, and there’s a group of rock climbers coming home from the Beartooths in the afternoon.”
That was their usual. They always kept at least one pilot close to home in case of an emergency run. Their dad, Matsin, was sixty-five. He didn’t fly much anymore, but he could take one of the short flights if someone got called up.
Like now. Danny was their on-call pilot, and his cell phone buzzed its pager signal. They all paused as he opened his phone with one hand and emptied his beer down the sink with his other. “It’s Danya. What ya got?”
He wandered out of the kitchen as he listened. In a routine they all could do half asleep, he hit the head then collected his flight and overnight bags, both restocked before they’d been stowed, and grabbed his keys—likely for his Indian Scout. It was a good night to speed a motorcycle up Zimmerman Trail to Billings Logan International Airport.
Danny was off the phone by the time he got back to the kitchen. “Baby going to Denver,” he said. Lev and Vashi nodded. Those were always tough ones—a sick baby, often a preemie, and brand new parents who were scared shitless, one of whom had just given birth and ought to be recovering in her own hospital bed.
Lev was already on the phone, instructing their hangar crew to set up the Citation. No doubt, by now, he had tomorrow’s schedule reworked in his head. The Citation would be best for getting an incubator with a baby, the parents, and the flight nurse where they needed to be with only a single pilot. Danny would take a layover in Denver, since the emergency would be over once they landed and the baby was in the hands of the hospital staff. Likely, Vashi would fly their bigger jet, the Lear 55, to LAX, and Matsin would take the right seat.
That was fine. The 55 was a sweet ride. And their dad wasn’t that big an asshole, once you got him up in the air.
* * * *
Haidee Wells took report from the nurse practitioner at the NICU. The baby was full-term but had been diagnosed with meconium aspiration. He needed ECMO, a last chance treatment for babies whose lungs were giving out. They’d nursed him along on a respirator in Billings for two days, but he was losing ground. And for ECMO, he needed a ride to Denver or Seattle. Denver had room for him.
She’d already met with the parents. The mom, two days postpartum, was in stable shape physically. She’d gotten through labor without difficulty. But of course she was a wreck now, and her husband was more bluster than help. He was a physician himself and used to being in charge, to having all the answers. His training in endocrinology wasn’t helping him all that much now.
It would be a good, challenging transport, though not her favorite sort.
Haidee was a certified flight nurse. She was an emergency nurse practitioner with certification in prehospital trauma support, critical care, pediatric advanced support, and cardiac life support. It was a lot of training to have at the age of twenty-eight, but not impossible when you’d started nursing school at seventeen. And had a powerful determination to succeed. To exceed.
She’d grown up in Arizona. When she was ten, she’d watched from the backseat of the wrecked family car as her father was cut out from behind the wheel and airlifted to a trauma center in Phoenix. It was the last she’d seen him, and the flight nurse who’d strode from the helicopter had made an impression. She’d tended her critically—fatally, it turned out—injured patient efficiently and effectively, but still took time to meet Haidee’s eyes with compassion. She’d been the one to make certain that Haidee—her broken arm splinted against her chest and a bandage wrapped around her head to stem the blood from the laceration there—had a chance to say good-bye to her father.
Haidee had been determined to be a flight nurse from that day. The best flight nurse.
Trauma was what she loved. She wasn’t an adrenaline junkie, she swore she wasn’t. And that made her a bit out of the
ordinary, for the trauma field was loaded with them. But she loved the quick decision-making that was so critical, the potential to have so much impact.
But this was cool, too. The baby needed constant monitoring and the mom could use a little warm support and encouragement. This wasn’t her fault, but Haidee could see the guilt lurking on her face.
The parents took their own car to the airport while Haidee rode with baby Henry in the ground ambulance. This was Haidee’s first flight out of Billings, and she briefly glanced out the window as they drove up the airport road that was cut out of the Rimrocks. The “Rims” were sandstone cliffs and rock formations that ran for miles along what had been the edge of a great sea a few million years ago. These days, the city of Billings was below them, and the airport was on top.
Haidee had driven in from Arizona a week ago. Between moving into a new place and starting a new locum tenens job, she hadn’t explored the Rims yet, or even seen the airport.
The driver knew his way, though, and took them right up to the tarmac outside a flying service hangar. A small jet was being readied for flight—she could see a couple seats had been pulled out to make way for the transport incubator. A hottie—tall, muscled, blond, and really quite hot, as she got a closer look—was circling the jet. Presumably he was the pilot starting his preflight checklist, but Haidee would have to confirm that later. At the moment, it took all her attention to help get the incubator across the tarmac to the jet door and secured inside. With some of the seats out, there was adequate space in the cabin, and a wall panel opened to reveal a neat system of clamps and tie-down straps. The EMT with her had clearly used the setup before, so she left it to him while she helped the baby’s parents get settled into their seats, too.