Daye, Rainey - An Unconventional Love (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (14 page)

They found the scene where the men of the camp were drunk and dancing around a bonfire in the mud entertaining, and when Ben drunkenly bought a wife from a passing Mormon, they were both laughing out loud.

By the time the town council decided to legalize prostitution and Ben set off with some others to kidnap five “French tarts” bound for a nearby mining town, they were thoroughly enjoying Maggie’s movie selection.

They laughed over Ben and Pardner’s fight when Pardner confessed that he had “deep feelings for Elizabeth,” and when she admitted that she was in love with both men and they decided that the best solution was to share her, the guys looked at Maggie with sudden, new insight into her psyche.

They guffawed right alongside Maggie at Ben’s line, “Welcome to hell, Parson,” while he thrust a bottle of whisky in the man’s hands. But they each grew somber as the end credits rolled and Elizabeth wound up with Pardner while Ben moved on to the next gold strike.

“Well?” Maggie asked excitedly when it was over. “What did you guys think of it? You liked it, didn’t you? I heard you laughing. Don’t try to deny it.”

“We thoroughly enjoyed the movie, Maggie,” Jess assured her.

“But?” Maggie frowned. “I hear a ‘but’ in your voice.”

“We didn’t care much for the ending,” Alex admitted.

“What?” Maggie cried. “How could you not love it? The ending was brilliant. They built their perfect town, and then they sunk it!” She laughed.

“No, not that part,” Alex said. “That part was hilarious.”

“It was the part that came afterwards,” Jess clarified.

“Afterwards?” She frowned, at a complete loss.

“When Ben left their ‘happy little triple.’”

“But that went along with the whole movie, too,” she pointed out, still not understanding. “Ben was born under a Wand’rin’ Star. He never was the type to settle down. And he even told Elizabeth on their wedding night that he would stay until the gold ran out or the first snow of winter, whichever came first, and that’s exactly what he did. For all his faults, Ben was a man of his word where she was concerned.”

“You really don’t see any parallels between us and them?” Jess asked point-blank.

Maggie blinked in surprise as she realized the guys were reading way too much into this. “No,” she said seriously as she stood up from her chair to face them. “Unlike Elizabeth, who eventually let the men go, I will not allow either one of you to walk away from me! I will tie you up while I beat some sense into your thick skulls. Do I make myself clear?” she finished with a growl.

“Yes, ma’am,” they answered in contrite tones.

“Good.” She nodded decisively but then couldn’t resist adding, “Besides, you’re both young studs like Pardner was in the movie, not lecherous old men like Ben.”

And as she had hoped, they both laughed at that.

* * * *

While they were having a late breakfast the next morning, Alex cleared his throat to get Maggie’s attention.

Looking up from her notes that she was going over since the professor of her 2:30 p.m. class loved giving pop quizzes, she gave him her attention instead.

“Jess and I were talking,” he began.

“Not again,” Maggie groaned.

“What?” he asked.

“Every serious conversation with you two begins with you ‘talking.’” Disgruntled, he glared at her before Maggie laughed and patted his hand. “Note to self. Alex is a grump in the morning. Do not tease him at the breakfast table.”

Jesse laughed. “She’s right, Alex. You are a grump in the morning.”

“Fine, then,” Alex grumped at them, “I’ll just sit here and grumpily drink my coffee while you tell her what we were talking about, then.”

“Okay,” Jess agreed good-naturedly. “So, Alex and I were talking,” he began, and Maggie burst into laughter while Alex’s lips twitched as Jess looked nonplussed and seemed unable to continue.

“No, no, it’s okay. I’ll behave, I promise,” Maggie said once she managed to get her mirth under control. “You two were talking…”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “And now that you’ve decided to date us and vice versa, we were talking about how that was going to work out.”

Maggie silently waited, apparently having wondered that very thing herself.

“And we both agreed that any and all dates between us should take place away from where our fellow college students normally hang out, especially the bars.”

“To save my reputation,” she stated, repeating Jess’s words from the previous morning.

“That’s not the only reason,” Jess corrected her.

“Oh?”

“It’s because I told him how you like to be demonstrative in public, and we would like to be that way with you, too, but are so used to being reserved around campus that we don’t think we can break ourselves from that habit. So if we begin to frequent other places together, it should be easier for us.”

“Oh,” Maggie breathed.

“Tell her the full truth, Jess,” Alex said.

“The full truth?” Maggie repeated.

“Yeah. The truth that we openly trolled all the campus bars for one-night stands before you came into our lives,” Alex said. “Some of those same one-night stands either started to warn their girlfriends about us when they saw us enter the bar or would warn the woman we were currently trying to pick up while we were standing right there, even if they didn’t personally know who we were hitting on.
Or
they bragged about us to their girlfriends, who would then approach us on their own. We’ve made quite a reputation for ourselves in those bars, and we truly don’t want the stigma of those reps to rub off on you.”

“Alex!” Jess growled at him.

“What? We’ve agreed to a true-confessions policy with Maggie, and that includes being open and honest with her about our pasts concerning other women. We’ve been lucky so far that she’s never gone to the bars we used to frequent or run into any of those women around campus where they could fill her head with stories about us. Or perhaps unlucky, since it fed the illusion that we were gay for so long and might have outed us to her sooner than we outed ourselves,” he mused. “Anyway, we both agreed that we should be open and honest with her as much as possible, so here I am, being open and honest.”

“There is such a thing as being
too
open and honest,” Jess reminded him. “We’ve already confessed to her that we were no saints. There is no need to remind her that our past conquests were numerable or that our names are legendary in some bars.”

“I actually didn’t know
that.
” Maggie pointed Jess’s slipup out to him, causing him to groan in chagrin and Alex to briefly entertain thoughts of inventing a mouth censor for Jess to use.

“The ones who have bragged about you to their friends,” Maggie wanted to know musingly. “Have any of them reapproached you for another go-round?”

“Sometimes,” Alex answered, “though we never took them up on it, no matter how good it had been.”

“Why not?” she asked, curious.

“Because hooking up with the same woman again could be misconstrued by her as a sign that we were open to having a relationship of sorts with her, even if it was just as mutual fuck buddies. That would entail swapping phone numbers and late-night booty calls and such.”

“Have any of the women from the bars approached you on campus?” she asked in an overly innocent tone that caused Alex to instantly be on edge.

“Does that matter?” Jess asked before Alex could warn him to stop and think about his response carefully before replying. “We’ve already told you that we’ve never taken them up on it, not once.”

“That’s beside the point,” Maggie said in too light a tone for Alex’s peace of mind as she turned to Jess. “Yes or no? Have any of the women you picked up at the campus bars approached you in the light of day on campus?”

“No,” Alex lied through his teeth vehemently in what he hoped came across as sincerity instead. He rushed on before Jess could contradict him and made a quick slashing motion across his neck, along with a warning look at him to indicate that Jess should shut the fuck up, and breathed a prayer of relief when Maggie turned her head back toward Alex for his explanation instead. “Since Jess and I would hit the campus bars with only one goal in mind, we took great care to dress for the part. Nothing at all like how we usually dress on campus, so the odds of some random woman we hooked up with in a dark bar who we then took back to a dark motel room recognizing us are slim to none.”

“Oh,” Maggie breathed, mollified. “That makes me feel a whole lot better.”

Alex was thankful that he had thought to lie to her in this one instance. She had actually interrupted them both a couple of times on campus, in the beginning, when she had first moved in with them while they were fending off the advances of a previous one-night stand. Since she was convinced at the time that they were gay, she had more than once even jokingly informed them after the woman had moved on with a throaty “call me” that she had been coming on to them and blessedly had no clue that they had fucked that woman in the recent past. And they truly didn’t want to remind her or hurt her over their unsavory pasts and wanted to put those same pasts behind them, thus their desire to not revisit those places with her. Praying that she would never remember those past scenes on campus, he tried to redirect her thoughts back to the conversation of figuring out how they were going to date each other.

“So, as Jess was saying earlier, we really do want to grant your wish of public displays of affection, either individually or the three of us together, so we thought it would be best if we confined ourselves to places where our classmates didn’t normally frequent.”

“Like?” she asked.

“Well, we need to know what type of things you enjoy doing, first,” Jess said. “For instance, since Alex and I are both huge sports fans. We’ll occasionally go catch a game together. It’s a date for us, but to the casual observer, it’s simply two buddies taking in a game together. But we were also wondering if perhaps you would be interested into turning that into a group date.”

“Well, if I’m going to be your perfect girlfriend, then I guess I should at least give it a try and see if I enjoy them, right?”

“Right,” Jess agreed with her, visibly relaxing.

“But I have to warn you right now,” Maggie continued as if a thought had struck her. “I draw the line at car shows. My dad tried to take me to a couple of them when I was a kid, and I just couldn’t seem to get myself worked up over them.”

“Well, no one’s perfect,” Alex said philosophically while fighting a grin.

“God, can you imagine Maggie as one of those car-show models, though?” Jess asked wistfully.

Alex moaned as he suddenly imagined it. “Oh, yeah,” he sighed. “I can picture her now in a gold lam
é
bikini while she poses seductively next to a car as it slowly revolves around on its turntable.”

“Guys.” Maggie laughed. “You’ve strayed off topic and into the realm of fantasy here.”

“Can’t blame a guy for fantasizing about you, Mags,” Alex pointed out.

“We were talking about future dates,” she reminded them when their eyes continued to roam all over her body in a hungry, apprising way.

“Okay,” Jess finally said, giving his head a shake as if to clear it of provocative images of Maggie. “Give sporting events together a try, check.” He leaned down and made a mark in the notebook that was sitting open in front of him on the table.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“Trying to work out the logistics of all our dates.”

“What, you have ‘dinner and a movie’ written down in your notebook?” she asked, craning her head to look at what he had written.