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

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

Rachel Billings

MENAGE AMOUR

Siren Publishing, Inc.

www.SirenPublishing.com

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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

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.

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.

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 sculpture 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.