Three Men and a Woman: Evangeline (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read Free Page A

the lake.”
    “We?” He’d checked her ring finger in, like, the first nanosecond he’d seen her.
    “Victory Farms. Miss Victory’s three nephews run it now. They each have wives and children and homes built on separate parcels of the property.”
    There’d been no pause as she’d answered his inquiry, but she hadn’t made eye contact, either.
    “Do you have a man, Evvie?”
    Now the pause came. “No.”
    He didn’t think she’d lie to him, but he was pretty sure she’d considered it. If the answer was no, why would she have thought about saying yes? To put him off?
    She looked like she’d eaten all of her dinner that she was going to. Her hand rested on the table, and he put his over it.
    “I’m so sorry, Evangeline, for that night.”
    She left her hand passive under his, but looked up at him. “I wasn’t sorry. It meant a lot to me. So much.”
    “I took your virginity, and I was careless about it.”
    “I wanted it to be you.”
    He shook his head, rejecting her forgiveness. “I didn’t protect you. Even worse, I never went back. I never checked to make sure you were okay.”
    “It took a long time, probably, for all of us to be okay, didn’t it? We were all so hurt to lose Shep.”
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    She nodded, but wasn’t looking at him again. “I was okay, Briggs. Really, okay.”
    He looked at her in inquiry and waited. He was a writer and some might call him sloppy, but he did know punctuation, and it mattered. Not the punctuation, but how she’d felt. When she didn’t meet his gaze, he had to nudge her. “I have to know if there was a comma in there. Do you mean really, truly, you were okay? Or that you were very okay?”
    It took a moment for her to look at him. He was sure he was right that she wouldn’t lie to him, and so she considered her answer. But the corner of her mouth quirked up at his question.
    “Really, truly, I was okay.” She smiled a little more. “Very okay. You didn’t have to worry or feel bad, then or now.”
    “Will you spend the night with me?”
     
    * * * *
     
    Evangeline took her hand back from under his, now that it had tightened on her skin and felt hot instead of comforting. There was heat in his gaze, too. The green of those eyes, like an Ireland spring, smoldered into dark emerald now. She’d seen it earlier when he’d first taken her hand those moments in the parking lot. There was sexual interest, and he was a sexually confident man.
    She’d steeled herself to see him. Of course she knew he would be there. Even if she hadn’t seen the program, every congratulatory word her colleagues had given her about the Benny had been tagged with the excited observation that she’d have a chance to see Briggs Henriksen, maybe even meet him. Though they hadn’t posited that she’d have a chance to sleep with him. Maybe some of the women had thought it. Or men, for that matter.
    Briggs was quite the darling of the trade. He wasn’t the hermit some writers were, disdaining any involvement at all in the industry that made them wealthy and famous. He took part in events like the one today and interacted reasonably with his fans. She knew for a fact he was flying to Scotland in the morning, keynote speaker again at an international science fiction convention.
    But he also didn’t cash in on his star status as he could, as some did. Whatever his personal life was, he kept it quiet.
    Evangeline could keep up with his writing from a professional point of view. She knew each time he changed publishing houses—not often, and not in years now. She knew his agents and his editors and that he was professional and friendly in those relationships.
    She could know all that without knowing personal details of his life. They weren’t splashed on the front of celebrity magazines or news shows. She didn’t have to know—and didn’t—if he dated actresses and super models with wild excess or if he was quietly and happily married and the father of a