Three Men and a Woman: Evangeline (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read online

  Three Men and a Woman: Evangeline

  At age six, Evangeline "Evvie" Charles falls in love with three boys. They’re seven—Briggs Henriksen, Giovanni Diorio, and Chase Gregory. They befriend her and give her the only real family she’s ever known. At twenty-one, on a night of grief and loss, she meets each of them at her door. One at a time, she gives them the comfort of her body.

  Now it’s eight years since she’s seen them. Over the course of a long weekend, she runs into them, those men who saved her, who she’s loved forever. Finding a certain destiny about it, she spends one night of wild passion in each man’s arms.

  One night isn’t enough for any of the men. They find her and discover her secret—a seven-year-old girl who surely belongs to one of them. The men all want Evvie, and they all want Maisy, too. Evvie could never choose—she loves them all. The only solution is to share their love.

  Genre: Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quarte

  Length: 75,471

  THREE MEN AND A WOMAN: EVANGELINE

  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: EVANGELINE

  Copyright © 2014 by Rachel Billings

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62741-173-8

  First E-book Publication: January 2014

  Cover design by Harris Channing

  All art and logo copyright © 2014 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,

  If you have purchased this copy of Three Men and a Woman: Evangeline by Rachel Billings from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.

  This is Rachel Billings’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Ms. Billings’s right to earn a living from her work.

  Amanda Hilton, Publisher

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  www.BookStrand.com

  DEDICATION

  To all the women—and men—professionals and patients alike, from whom I’ve learned so much about what makes women happy and healthy and fulfilled. I’m pleased that, for some, at least, a little journey into sexual fantasy might add to all three of those states.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  THREE MEN AND A WOMAN: EVANGELINE

  RACHEL BILLINGS

  Copyright © 2014

  Prologue

  He was the first.

  It was dusk, pouring rain and blowing cold, just like it should when you’ve spent the day burying one of your best friends, one of those who made all the difference in your world.

  Evangeline Charles didn’t know to expect him, but she wasn’t surprised, either, when she opened the door to his angry, pounding knock. It could have been any of them, any of the three. She thought it might be all of them before the night was over.

  It was a welcome thought.

  He stood drenched, shivering in only shirt and jeans, his hands stuffed into his pockets and his shoulders hunched.

  She took him in, her fingers pulling at his cold shirtsleeve, into her arms. The wet and cold of his body soaked through her T-shirt, tightening her breasts and bringing her nipples to peaks.

  She was twenty-one. She’d been in love with this man since she was six.

  She didn’t know anything about sex, though she was going to learn something about it this night.

  But she did know she could give comfort.

  Chapter One

  Eight Years Later

  Briggs Henriksen wandered around the estate outside the mansion, mostly unaware of his surroundings, while he labored on a plot in his head. He was a bit creeped out by the pet cemetery, having to work some to imagine that generations of children who’d grown up in this little lap of indulgent luxury really cared about visiting the graves of Buddy and Holly. No, he just made that up. There was a Buddy, though, and a Rex—the insipid names no doubt a tribute to the inbreeding of high society a century and more ago. But he did like the stone grotto with its little waterfall and ancient, twisty, flowering vine thing that had nearly taken over the structure in a way that was both eerie and cool.

  He was out of Manhattan, most of the way to Poughkeepsie, of all places—way out of his element. At least, the element that had become his over the course of the last decade, during which the thing he loved to do most—hang out in his head with interesting characters from make-believe planets—had turned into a lucrative career.

  That was why he was there at a remarkable, somewhat ludicrous tribute to too much wealth. The estate’s most recent and deceased owner, Howard Bennett, had been a huge fan of space fantasy novels. Upon his death, his assets had gone to establishing and housing the Multiverse Fantasy Fiction Guild. The MFF annual awards had become a bit of a big deal. Briggs was somewhat embarrassedly pleased to own a couple of them himself, not the least because old Howard had commissioned the design of a way cool crystal kind of supernova sc
ulpture to accompany the award. It wasn’t an Oscar. He wouldn’t admit it out loud, but he was saving a spot in his display case for that eventuality and figured he was only one good screenplay away from it. And that was the screenplay he was working on now. But still, the Benny was cool.

  He was, of all things, the invited keynote speaker this year. He had the job of giving a little talk and then announcing the MFF book of the year winner. That was the highlight of the event, the final entry on the program. As he nosed around the grounds awaiting his cue, commendations were being given for best short stories, new writer, editing, et cetera.

  Not knowing what to expect of traffic, he’d arrived early. He had some time, and so he spent it in his favorite way. He was present on the estate enough to know that azaleas were in bloom and to learn he didn’t like the cloying scent of lilies of the valley. But mostly, his head was on the planet Northgaard.

  Things were getting hot between Queen Lariniah and her conniving and lewd stepbrother when Briggs became idly aware that the parking lot had filled up. Then his attention wasn’t so idle when a pair of very shapely legs emerged from a little sedan. They were balanced, in that way women had that defied the law of gravity, on a pair of sexy red stilts. He didn’t generally care much about women’s footwear one way or the other, but he had to like what these particular bits of impracticality did for those legs.

  Then the legs morphed into a lovely woman, and his heart stuttered. Petite shapely figure that would drop to five five without the heels. Long, shiny black hair that fell to her waist and, he happened to know, was a throwback to a little Seneca nation heritage that was so common in her western New York roots. That pretty face—narrower than he remembered, except for those wide, full lips. And the surprising contrast, given the ebony hair, of those bright-blue eyes.

  “Evvie girl.” He wouldn’t have realized he’d said it out loud except her step faltered and then halted. Evangeline Charles turned and looked.

  And paled, which was a thing that shamed him.

  The last he’d seen her, he’d taken comfort in her body that he’d found nowhere else. He and his buddies Chase and Gio had just buried the best of them—a fourth friend Shepherd, who’d been heart of the group. At age twenty-two, he’d been on a ministry rebuilding homes for earthquake victims in a Mexican village when a roving gang had murdered him for his watch and the little bit of cash in his pocket.

  Shep had found his first ministry with his three friends. He’d collected them in Cartersville, a dot on the map in western New York, halfway between Buffalo and Rochester, just north of the Thruway. First he’d picked up Giovanni Diorio, a transplant from the Bronx with an accent so thick his second-grade classmates, all strangers, could barely understand him. Then angry, rebellious Briggs, whose father was drinking away his grief after his wife, Briggs’s mother, died of leukemia. And finally Chase Gregory, privileged on the face of it, but sent to live with his grandmother while his parents ruthlessly gutted each other in a scandal-ridden, high-stakes divorce.

  For that first year it was the four of them, with Shepherd in his innately kind and gently determined way making better people of them. Through the school year he harangued them to do their homework and behave at least civilly toward others. In the winter he got them playing pond hockey, because, he said, Gio was a natural-born goalie and would need an athletic scholarship for college, and Briggs needed to hit something he couldn’t hurt, and Chase, too bright and a bit nerdy, needed to toughen up or the school bullies would find him a ripe target.

  That summer, they commandeered an out-of-season deer blind, built into the branches of an old oak like a tailor-made tree house. It became theirs for the next ten years. From there, they spied on the neighborhood, the tree house affording them great views of the local trailer court and the titillating comings and goings at the Charles home there. They read books and comics. Shepherd introduced Briggs to his first space fantasy, thereby creating a genre addict and then a successful author. They also pored over the occasional girlie magazines Gio stole from home, though the three of them were careful to keep those hidden from Shepherd. They smoked their first—and last—cigarettes there and, on one highly entertaining summer afternoon when they were eleven, generated their first beer belches, thanks to a six-pack Gio lifted from his partied-out uncle.

  But that very first summer, their numbers became five.

  Fancy Charles kept her bleached-blond self in booze and who knew what else by entertaining men from town who’d had fights with their wives or long-haulers who came off the highway to spend the night at the local truck stop. Her daughter Evangeline was left to fend for herself.

  At six, Evvie wasn’t doing much of a job of it. She got on the school bus with hair that looked like it was in yesterday’s badly done braid, and she wore the same clothes several days running. When Fancy had a man in the house, Evvie was set out on the front steps, which really were nothing more than an uneven pile of cinder blocks. She had nothing to do but look around her, and that was how she discovered the tree house.

  Briggs remembered the moment she caught him looking. He held binoculars to his eyes and had been watching when Evvie was put out on the step like a nuisance cat. The sun must have flashed off the lenses because, suddenly, while he was looking at her, she was looking back.

  In a couple minutes, she stood and started walking through the cornfield that separated them. It was end of June, and the corn was up nearly to her head, so when he hissed an alarm to the others, they had trouble picking her out.

  Gio, Chase, and Briggs all voted to keep silent. She was small for her age so they didn’t think she could make it up to that first nailed-on step on the tree trunk. If they were quiet, and she couldn’t get up there to confront them, she couldn’t prove they were there.

  Good-hearted Shepherd wouldn’t have it. He went down the ladder himself and gave her a hand up. She looked at the four of them with those sad, too-big-for-her-little-self blue eyes and became theirs.

  They taught her to read. She was a bright one but too shy—too much unwanted—to speak up at school. She eagerly listened to Briggs’s stories. Within a few months she was reading them. And then she was editing them, because she was soon great at spelling and he was, well, not bad so much as not very careful about it. His ideas got going faster than his pencil could manage. That was true even now, with his fingers on the keyboard unable to keep up with the finer points of grammar and spelling when he was on a writing roll. God bless his editor.

  She was a part of them for seven years. By the time the guys got to be fourteen and she was thirteen, their friendship became awkward. Conversations halted when she climbed up the ladder, and the guys had to shuffle things around to hide the nudie magazines, now that even Shepherd had started to show some interest.

  If anyone had finely tuned senses to know when she wasn’t wanted, it was Evvie. Nothing was said, but she came around less and less often and then not at all. The four guys still looked out for her at school, but they didn’t actually talk to her. They were all glad when Miss Victory, an English teacher at the high school, took Evvie under her wing. By eighth grade, Evvie started wearing clean clothes, had new shoes every season, and learned to take care of her hair.

  That was good. She needed them less.

  They graduated when Evvie was a junior. As far as Briggs knew, none of them saw her again until the month after they’d finished college when they all looked at her from across an open grave.

  That night, in the cold and rain, Briggs had gone to her. He’d knocked on the sprung door of that piece-of-shit trailer. Evvie was alone then—rumor had it that Fancy had run off with a trucker the minute Evvie turned eighteen, or, more probably, several minutes before that.

  Evvie had lost a friend, too, the best of friends. Without saying a word, she’d taken him in out of the cold. Into her warm—hot—body.

  It wasn’t his finest hour. He’d made hasty, needy love to her. It had felt good, so goddammed good, though he didn’t k
now if it had been good for her or not.

  He’d been her first. He’d realized it too late, of course, to take the care she deserved. And it hadn’t felt just good but remarkably hot. So much so that he’d lost himself in it, driving himself to a quick, harsh orgasm that was entirely self-centered.

  But more than anything, for him, it had been incredibly comforting. And he hoped like hell—then and now—that the same had been true for her. Since then, Briggs had acquired some significant experience with women, but those pitifully few minutes he’d spent inside Evvie had meant the world to him.

  He hadn’t even used a condom. He’d never spoken to her again—not that he’d spoken that night. He’d never bothered to make sure she was okay.

  Things could have happened.

  It was way less than his finest hour.

  He didn’t blame her if she didn’t like looking at him now.

  But that pale face didn’t seem so much disgusted with him as—scared?

  And then she smiled and warmed.

  “Briggs,” she said. He held out a hand as he walked toward her, and she met it soon enough to keep him at a little distance. He took her hand rather than shaking it, though, and held on.

  They looked at each other a moment.

  She’d become a beautiful woman. And she was nervous.

  Unless she was just, like, put off.

  He wouldn’t believe it. That moment that wasn’t his finest had occurred on the worst day of his life and likely hers, too. The Evvie he remembered had a sweet, giving heart, and she probably wouldn’t hold his behavior against him all that much.