STORY EXCERPT

Ariel looked at the three men sitting in chairs in her employer’s office and thought, My God, those are handsome men. To her employer, the lawyer Anson Anderson, she said, “You asked to see me?”

“Yes, Ariel, please come in.”

There wasn’t an empty chair, so Jacob Wilson, Willy Blue Cloud, and Sam Carson immediately stood and offered her their chairs. Ariel shook her head but was pleased with their sense of chivalry. With the men standing so close to her, Ariel felt vaguely intimidated by them even though none of them had ever done anything aggressive toward her. She often saw them drinking beer, playing pool, and eating the sumptuous wings at Wings & Things, a tavern in South Williston.

“I have an assignment for you that will take some time,” Anson said. “Jacob, Blue, and Sam are consolidating their ranches to form one big corporation. In order for me to handle the legal aspects of the consolidation, I need a video recording of everything each man owns.”

“Everything?” Ariel asked, shock showing in her tone. The three men, she knew, had sizeable ranches on the north side of Lake Sakakawea. “That’ll take…”

“I’m guessing two weeks. I need you to make a video record of everything they own, then provide the written account for me.” Anson smiled. “Well, you did say you wanted to take on more responsibility, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.” Ariel smiled, very much enjoying the fact that her employer was now seeing her as something a little more than just a receptionist or secretary. “Do you want me to work a straight eight-hour day, or do you want me to finish this as quickly as possible?”

“I know your propensity for putting in overtime, and in this case, it’ll help. The sooner we get their arrangement legal and proper, the better. But what’s most important is that you keep accurate records, and that you miss nothing.”

“I understand.” Ariel looked at the seated men and felt her pulse quicken slightly when she realized that she’d be spending hours with them in the near future. With some difficulty, she turned her gaze away from them and toward her employer. “When do I start?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like you to start immediately.” He looked at his gold wristwatch. “It’s nine fifteen now. If you work a little overtime, you’ll do more than a full day.”

Jacob smiled. “I like a man who doesn’t dawdle. I knew we picked the right law firm when the three of us decided to join forces.” He turned his attention to Ariel and smoothed his moustache with the side of his finger. “You’re sure you don’t mind doing this for us? You’re used to spending your day working in a nice, clean office, and now you’re going to be walking through barns and pastures and whatnot. Among the three of us we’ve got beef and buffalo and more acres of hay and grassland and fences than you’d ever want to walk.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Ariel said, her gaze lingering on Jacob’s mouth longer than she had intended. She wondered what his moustache would feel like during a kiss, and another warm flush went through her. “Should we get started?”

“We’ve got a brand-new snazzy digital video recorder in the truck.”

“I’ll ride with you, then,” Ariel said. “If you don’t mind, of course.”

“No problem at all.”

* * * *

Only it actually was quite a problem, Jacob reflected as he walked behind Ariel toward Blue’s Ford pickup. Ariel was ahead of him, and he was watching the sway of her nicely rounded hips and the movement of her thighs beneath the hem of her skirt. With reddish, strawberry-blonde hair that came down nearly to the small of her back, an array of freckles on her face, and standing just a few inches under six feet tall, she didn’t have the typical female physique that he was normally attracted to, but seeing her now was making him change his opinion concerning the feminine ideal.

He’d known her about six months, nearly from the time that she’d moved to South Williston from Boston. They’d spoken many times, and he and his best friends even flirted with her while having a beer at Wings & Things. A romance might have progressed past the flirting stage, but Ariel had made it abundantly clear that she was staying in the North Dakota oil and cattle fields only long enough to bankroll a move back to Boston, where she grew up. Since she obviously wasn’t the sleep-around type, Jacob and his friends had turned their amorous pursuits toward women more likely to satisfy their libidos.

Those heels have got to be four inches high, he thought, but she knows how to walk in them. Some women totter around like they’re on stilts. I wonder how smooth and warm those thighs would feel pressed against my ears while I went down on her.

As soon as the libidinous thought entered his head, Jacob forced it away. No matter how attractive he found Ariel, she was working for the lawyers hired to oversee turning three separate ranches into one rather significantly sized agricultural corporation. The last thing in the world that Jacob needed was a new complication in his life. All the old complications were difficult enough to deal with.

ADULT EXCERPT

God, he knows how to kiss.

It was another uncomfortable revelation for Ariel, especially when she found herself dancing her tongue against his, drawing the kiss in deeper, adding her own emphasis to the expression.

She felt callused but deft fingers first press into the mound of her left breast, then begin unhurriedly and skillfully unbuttoning her blouse. He acted as though he had all the time in the world. Momentary panic struck Ariel, and she tried to twist out of the multiple arms that held her. She twisted her shoulders so that her back was against the steering wheel while Blue’s hungry mouth continued to devour hers in the most deliciously erotic manner. Her efforts at escape were both ineffectual and halfhearted. She felt dizzy and disoriented by a lust that shocked her with the swiftness with which it had taken over her senses.

Turning her face sharply to the side, Ariel eventually managed to escape Blue’s tantalizing kisses long enough to whisper frantically, “We can’t do this!”

“Of course we can” was Blue’s smooth reply as he kissed the corner of Ariel’s mouth.

“You’re clients! You hired my boss!” Ariel felt the last button on her blouse come unfastened, and a burst of desire was accompanied by an emotion short of terror but only by the width of a hair. “I’ve never done anything like this. Please, can’t you see that I—”

Blue’s commanding lips captured her mouth again, silencing the protests that she was certain had to be spoken.

She felt the tip of Blue’s tongue slide along the crevice of her lips, prodding her to open them. Against her better judgment, her lips parted and Blue’s slick, enticing tongue slipped deeply and erotically into her mouth. With a trembling sigh, Ariel gave in to the desire that the kiss prompted, despite the warning bells clanging rancorously in her head.

The move was done with such ease that Ariel knew instinctively it had been done countless times before. She felt Sam slip his finger inside the cup of her bra and slide from the center to the side, and in doing so, eased the fabric beneath her breast to expose it. An instant later, when a magnificently warm and wet mouth closed over her areola and nipple, Ariel involuntarily arched her back as though she’d been given a high-powered jolt of electricity. She made a sound into Blue’s mouth that was a mixture of an exploding libido and a frightened response to the scope and breadth of her own acceptance of the unprecedented things that were happening to her.

I can’t let this happen! I can’t! I can’t!

Ariel suddenly realized that her right foot was out of the open window of the passenger-side door, and her left foot was down on the floorboards. Her legs were spread wide—obscenely so, she was convinced—but instead of initial embarrassment, her first thought was to question herself on her choice of lingerie for that day.

The pink Victoria’s Secret set.

She immediately cursed herself for her instinctive concern for attractiveness rather than modesty, and for her vanity in spending an inordinate amount of her income on clothes and undergarments when she should really be bankrolling as much money as possible for her return to Boston.

She felt moist lips on her knee. Her first impulse was to clamp her legs together, but the hands holding her legs apart were much stronger and more determined than her will to resist. A moment later, she felt a pleasingly wet tongue begin sliding up the inside of her thigh.

Damn you, Jacob, don’t do this to me.

There was little conviction behind the thought.

As Jacob’s teeth nipped lightly, almost teasingly, at the soft flesh of her inner thigh, Ariel felt Sam’s mouth close around the tip of her exposed breast. She had always suspected that her nipples were unnaturally sensitive, but when she felt Sam’s hot, wet mouth sucking her breast deeply into his mouth, all doubt was removed from her mind. It just couldn’tbe natural to have her nipple sucked on and feel this sensational.

Blue continued to hold Ariel’s wrist so that she couldn’t resist effectively, but it was his mouth, and the kisses he delivered to her, that did the most to suppress her resistance. In Ariel’s mind there was no doubt—none whatsoever—that Blue was the finest, most effective kisser the world had ever known. At that moment, his tongue was deep in her mouth, exploring, probing, stripping away inhibitions against sexual intemperance that she’d had drilled into her consciousness since she was a very young child. And he seemed to be doing it with such effortless ease.

She was dancing her tongue against Blue’s, and making a minimum effort to free her hand from his grip, when she felt the crotch of her bikini panties get pulled to the side, then felt the tip of a skilled tongue touch her clit. Ariel’s entire body flinched as though given a powerful shock, and a sound of surrender came out of her throat, though she continued to kiss Blue passionately.

Ariel trembled, her body reacting to the hot, wet mouths that seemed to devour her, even though her better judgment rebelled at the idea of being sexual with three men simultaneously. Ariel tried to tell herself that she’d never been with two men at the same time, much less with three men, and therefore she shouldn’t be enjoying herself to the extent that she was, but this rationalization shattered like glass against concrete when she felt the onrushing pressure of an approaching orgasm begin to coil inside her pelvis.

They’re going to think I’m such a slut.

This thought annoyed her, but it did not in any way diminish the orgiastic satisfaction of having a handsome man kissing her mouth, another handsome man sucking on her nipple, and a third handsome man—gorgeous, she decided, was a more appropriate word than handsome—sucking ever so erotically on her clit while he slipped a single finger between the lips of her pussy.

Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck! I’m not the kind of woman who does this kind of thing!

But she was that kind of woman, and her desultory and halfhearted attempts at ending the seduction told her as much, even though she desperately wanted to deny the truth.