Page 168 of The Widow and the Wanted

I push back when he thrusts into me. “Okee, please.”

“Please what?”

“Don’t stop.”

He smiles down at me, playfully biting my shoulder.

“At this rate, you may never be allowed to speak again, my love.” He slows to a stop, letting me feel the stillness.

I push back, chasing it like a desperate fool ready to fuck myself senseless on his perfect cock.

I curse enough to serve ten consecutive life sentences, and from the kitchen a spoon clatters against a bowl.

Then Lula calls, “Boone Maddox, are you being murdered or indecent?”

“His ass is being murdered,” Okee shouts.

One of the perks of having our only neighbor be a whorehouse is that you can scream things like that with no one asking any questions.

From the kitchen comes a long, loaded silence. Then Lula says, “I am standing over a pot of beans.”

Okee’s mouth brushes my shoulder, and I can feel the bastard smiling.

Her footsteps cross the kitchen. Slow. Measured. Dangerous. She appears in the doorway and her eyebrows lift. “Well,” she says. “That explains the hollering.”

It comes out sounding interested, not shocked.

Then her mouth curves, slow as honey off a spoon.

“You’re going to make me burn my beans,” she says, biting her bottom lip.

Okee starts moving again, slow and shameless, because now he has an audience and the devil in him has always enjoyed proving a point.

“Oh,” I cry, louder than what’s dignified. “Just like that.”

“You like that, love?” he teases. “Like Lula watching you?”

Heat rises to my face the way it does. Though I know I got no reason to be shy, there’s a special kind of vulnerability, bent over, stretched wide and full.

“Yes.”

“Well if I stay, I’m not standing around like parlor furniture.”

Okee stills behind me, his grip firm on my hip.

“You want her to join us?” he asks, low enough it’s only mine.

I ought to say something smart. Something easy. Something that makes this feel less like standing bare-hearted in the middle of our own sitting room.

Lula waits in the doorway, no coyness in her face now. Just heat. Just patience.

“Yeah,” I manage. “If she wants.”

“I do,” she says.

Simple as that. Like she’s answering whether she wants sugar in her coffee. Like wanting us is ordinary. Like there ain’t a thing in this room that needs hiding.

The trouble with three, I reckon, is a man starts counting hands.