No Place Like Home (Siren Publishing Ménage and More)
No Place Like Home
At eighteen, Cassie Monroe knew she loved Jackson and Markus Lansing, the twenty-one-year-old twin brothers of her best friend Annie. And she knew that they liked to share woman. Because she loved them both, she worked up her nerve to offer herself to them both and was humiliated when they rejected her. Heartbroken, she went away to university and avoided coming home.
But, seven years later, when Annie makes her an offer that's "too good to refuse," the timing's perfect as she's just dumped her cheating fiancé and the twins are working in the big city. What she doesn't know is that Jackson and Markus have moved back as well. This time they don't intend to let her get away. Should she take a chance and give them her heart again, or maybe a fling with the handsome brothers would get them out of her system for good?
Note: There is no sexual relationship or touching for titillation between or among siblings.
Genre: Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre
Length: 24,266 words
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Diane Leyne
MENAGE AND MORE
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage and More
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Copyright © 2013 by Diane Leyne
E-book ISBN: 978-1-62242-597-6
First E-book Publication: March 2013
Cover design by Christine Kirchoff
All cover art and logo copyright © 2013 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,
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www.SirenPublishing.com
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DEDICATION
To everyone who has finished a book and thought “I can do that.” You never know until you try.
Thanks to the great team at Siren for giving me this opportunity.
DEL
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
DIANE LEYNE
Copyright © 2013
Chapter 1
It felt like she’d been driving forever, but it had really only been less than two hours. Cassie’s ancient SUV ate up the miles, bringing her closer and closer to home. Cassie hadn’t been home in more than seven years. She’d left at eighteen to go to university and had never come back, not even to see her parents. Of course, they’d left the week after her. They’d seen her off to school and sold the house and left a week later for early retirement in Arizona.
Cassie loved her folks. And she couldn’t begrudge them their move. Her mom’s arthritis had gotten progressively worse in the damp northwest, making it harder and harder for her to paint. So her dad had retired from the high-power law firm he was partner in, and they’d gone south. All of her school holidays had been spent in Scottsdale with them. Of course, her dad hadn’t been able to relax and play golf for long. He now had a thriving part-time legal aid practice, and he loved it. And her mom’s arthritis was reduced to the occasional twinge, and she was painting better than ever.
And now Cassie was going home to Hope to help her best friend Annie Lansing run Abigail’s Flowers now that Miss Abigail had retired and the business was just too much work for Annie, now that she was expecting baby number three.
No, the move was the right thing for them, and the right thing for her. She felt her face redden when she thought of that last summer in Hope. She’d spent her days working in Abigail’s Flowers and Nursery, like she’d done every summer and after school since she could remember. She loved flowers and plants and making them grow and thrive. She’d been fascinated visiting the nursery for the first time to get a Christmas tree with her family when she was only four. She’d declared right on the spot that she was going to work there when she grew up. Miss Abigail laughed and said that she’d have a job waiting but she was welcome to visit any time. And visit she did. Every time she went to town with her mother, she always visited the flower shop, and it was there, when she was eleven, that she met Annie. Annie was Miss Abigail’s granddaughter. She had come to live with her grandmother after her widowed father was transferred to London. He’d be working twelve-hour days setting up the new office, so it was decided that Annie would stay with her grandmother until things settled down in London.
She had two older brothers, Jackson and Markus, twins, although they didn’t look like it, who had just started university, so Cassie barely saw them, and they chose to spend their summers in London, working in their father’s office and chasing English girls. Annie’s father came back to Hope for Christmas and a couple of times during the year. Annie visited him twice a year, and once, during March Break, Cassie went with her. London was amazing, but Cassie was happy to get back to Hope.
Together they went after school to the nursery to help Abigail. Cassie learned about watering and pruning and propagating and loved all things to do with plants. She had a natural green thumb. Annie, on the other hand, could kill a plant just by looking at it, it seemed, and while she helped with the watering, mostly she kept to the other chores like tidying up and dealing with the customers. Cassie loved it. She even spent her allowance buying up every book she could find on plants and haunted all of the local book stores including the secondhand bookstores, spending all of her allowance on books about plants.
It was a very happy few years. Annie’
s dad came back as often as his firm would let him, and after three years overseas, transferred back to the Seattle office. But Annie loved Hope and stayed with her grandmother, seeing her father on weekends. She didn’t see much of her brothers. They were seven years older, and never had time for a little kid, so she didn’t really miss them. Cassie and Annie were like sisters. Life was good.
And then came the summer when she was fourteen, and Jackson and Markus had come home for the summer. They’d just finished their bachelor’s degrees and were spending a few weeks at home before starting Harvard Law School. Of course, they weren’t spending the whole summer, not in a dull little town like Hope, not when they could be in London or New York or some other big city when things were happening.
Cassie had met them before, but never spent much time with them. She was the same age as their baby sister and, thus, beneath their notice. Which was okay with her. She had no interest in boys other than the normal crush on a pop singer. That changed when she was fourteen. She and Annie were coming back from the greenhouse, dirty and dripping with sweat when Annie took off at a run to throw herself into the arms of the two tall young men walking with Abigail.
Cassie approached slowly and cautiously. She was conscious of her tank top, damp with sweat, clinging to the budding breasts she’d just developed in the last year and how her hair was dirty and pulled back from her face in a ponytail that had partially come down. And she’d never felt so self-conscious of the differences between her and them. Annie was tall like her brothers. It was already clear that she was going to be tall. She was five seven and not finished growing. At the same age, Cassie was barely over five feet tall, and her figure could best be described as “sturdy.” And her fiery red hair could never be tamed. The best she could do was grow it long enough to be tied back and out of the way. Annie loved feminine things and had recently begun experimenting with makeup and fashion, but she hadn’t “blossomed” yet and envied Cassie her breasts. Cassie could have done without them being so prominent. They brought her unwanted attention from boys and just got in the way when she was crawling in the dirt working with the plants.
By the time she got there, Annie was standing between her brothers, an arm around each. But they weren’t boys any more. They were men. Jaw-droppingly handsome men. They were both several inches over six feet. Jackson had dark hair and the same startling blue eyes as Annie and Abigail, but with the dark hair, they stood out even more. His shoulders were broad, and his arms corded with muscle. Annie had told her both boys were competitive rowers, and it was easy to see the effects on their bodies. Markus was a shade taller than his twin, and blond rather than brunette, but had the same easy grin and blue, blue eyes.
As Cassie slowly approached, all eight blue eyes turned to her. Two sets were happy and excited, and two were slightly amused as they took in her disheveled state. Never before had Cassie cared what she looked like or what a boy thought of her, but right at that moment, she wished the ground could have opened up and swallowed her rather than approach those mocking blue eyes looking like she’d been crawling around in the dirt, which she had been. Why couldn’t she look like Annie who looked like she’d been sitting around sipping tea in a drawing room rather than rooting round in the dirt? She realized she had dirt underneath her nails and her hands were dirty, so she thrust them into her pockets. She tried to escape, mumbling her excuses, but Annie wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted Cassie stay for lunch like she always did.
Cassie washed up, realizing that she had a big dirt smudge on her cheek and her hair looked like she’d stuck her finger in an electric socket. But she cleaned up as best she could and joined the others. And by the time the meal was over, Cassie was in love. Head over heels in love with Annie’s brothers. They were smart and funny and smart. They teased her, much the same as they did Annie, seeing her just like their kid sister. But that was okay with Cassie. Her feelings confused her, and she needed time to sit and think, particularly since she seemed to have them for both the Lansing brothers.
It was the longest week of her life. She’d tried to avoid the boys, but, of course, they had picked the weekend to come home that her parents were out of town and she was staying with Annie and Abigail. She found herself taking special pains with her hair and making sure her clothes were flattering. But they always treated her just like a second kid sister. When meant they pretty much ignored her.
And she tried push Jackson and Markus out of her mind. Of course Miss Abigail kept her up-to-date on their exploits, their successes at school, and their sporting triumphs. She was a proud grandmother and, secretly, Cassie soaked up every word. When no one was looking, she found herself staring at the photos Miss Abigail kept on the wall. And she waited to grow up so they would notice her. And Annie talked about them all the time. She hero-worshipped her big brothers and was always talking about their exploits such as the time they almost got kicked out of school when they both got caught naked in the bedroom with the wife of the headmaster at the prep school they’d gone to, or the time they both dated the same girl “at the same time” Annie had shared in a shocked voice, although Cassie wasn’t exactly sure of what she meant by that and didn’t care to ask.
And as she got older, she tried dating. She’d “blossomed” early and always had boys interested in her, but she hadn’t returned their interest. But Joe Stevens seemed nice, and on her sixteenth birthday, they’d gone out. But all he wanted to do was grab her breasts and stick his tongue in her mouth. She quickly put a stop to that. Of course he didn’t like that she’d blackened his eye in the process and had started rumors about her “putting out.”
But after trying dating twice more, with the same result, she decided that it was overrated. And that the crush that she’d had on Jackson and Markus was kid stuff and she was too busy to date. She was going to get a scholarship to university, so she had to buckle down and work her ass off. Mostly, she didn’t miss dating even if she envied Annie’s easy way of handling boys. It seemed like none of them ever tried to manhandle her, and even when she moved from dating one boy to the next, they never had hard feelings and they all stayed friends.
But sometimes, lying in bed at night, she remembered Joe’s mouth on hers and the feeling of his hand on her breast, but in her dreams it was Jackson or Markus. And once, it was both of them. She was some kind of freak, she thought. Until she found “the book,” as she thought of it on one of her bookstore visits. She’d gotten a call from the owner of Barton’s Books. He’d gotten a big load of books in from an estate of an elderly librarian who had apparently been hoarding them for years. Not all of them were in great shape, and there were far too many for his bookshelves. He knew Cassie’s interest in “flower books” as he called them and had boxed up a bunch, some in good condition and some in not so good condition and had offered her the whole box for a huge discount, just to get rid of them.
It was a treasure trove, from a nineteenth-century book on botany to a modern university textbook on landscape architecture. And then down at the bottom of the box she found it. It was called The Blossoming of Violet, and the cover art was a big bouquet of violets. But when she flipped through it, it seemed like it might be fiction rather than a botanical book. She tossed it aside and didn’t get back to it for weeks, but one rainy night when she couldn’t sleep, she remembered it and decided to check it out.
Turns out Violet was a young woman. She loved flowers and plants and two men. And the “blossoming” was her love affair with the two men. In parts, shocked and intrigued, she found herself unable to put it down. Of course, she knew about sex, but the notion of sex with two men, of love with two men...Maybe she wasn’t a freak and it was possible for her to love both Jackson and Markus. She’d heard of episodes in the past, such as the headmaster’s wife, of them both being with the same woman, but could they both love her, or would she always be like a little sister to them?
Which led to the most embarrassing incident in her life. She was eighteen and getting ready to go off
to college. They were twenty-five and back for a few weeks. They’d finished school and were taking the summer off before heading off to the working world, Jackson as an attorney with a high-powered law firm and Markus as a prosecuting attorney for the DA’s office.
She remembered that day as if it were yesterday. She’d set up a picnic down by the lake and invited them to join her. She might have implied that Annie was coming, too, but it was just her and them. She had everything ready for seduction. A beautiful and private location. Good food and good wine, wine that she’d swiped from her father’s wine cellar that morning. And she’d dressed for seduction, wearing a tight white tank with no bra underneath, and some low-rise cutoff shorts. Her hair was under control and she had, very subtly, applied enough makeup to make her green eyes look enormous and her lips red and inviting.
When they arrived, they were surprised that it was just the three of them, but they stayed and dug into the food and they laughed and talked and had a great time. But no romance. They didn’t even seem to notice the fact that her nipples were hard points and poking through the thin fabric.
And then the sun was going down and she knew that this might be her last chance, so she got up on her knees and leaned into the nearest twin, Jackson, and kissed him full on the lips. Then she turned and kissed Markus. Not giving herself a chance to think, she grabbed Jackson’s right hand and Markus’s left hand and placed them on her breasts. “Make love to me.” It came out as more of a plea than a demand.