Maxwell, Brandi - Colleen's Desire [The Lost Collection] (Siren Publishing Menage Everlasting) Read online

  The Lost Collection

  Colleen’s Desire

  At the age of twenty-three, Colleen O’Malley has learned that falling in love with a man can destroy a woman’s reputation. She has vowed to never again be foolish enough to listen to a man’s silken, seductive words…but then, she never thought that Marc and Frank, two of Golden Valley’s wealthiest and most charming rogues, would unleash their sensual skills on her. Can a single night of erotic intemperance lead to a lifetime of loving commitment?

  Genre: Ménage a Trois, Western/Historical

  Length: 60,084 words

  COLLEEN’S DESIRE

  The Lost Collection

  Brandi Maxwell

  MENAGE EVERLASTING

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting

  COLLEEN’S DESIRE

  Copyright © 2010 by Brandi Maxwell

  E-book ISBN: 1-60601-999-6

  First E-book Publication: September 2010

  Cover design by Les Byerley

  All art and logo copyright © 2010 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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  Regarding E-book Piracy

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  www.SirenPublishing.com

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  COLLEEN’S DESIRE

  BRANDI MAXWELL

  Copyright © 2010

  Chapter One

  Golden Valley, Montana — 1874

  While crossing the hard, arrow-straight road bisecting the bustling boomtown of Golden Valley, Marc Andollini glanced over at his best friend, Frank Bishop, then nodded off to the left. When Frank’s gaze moved in that direction, he couldn’t resist a smile.

  Standing in the shadows on the opposite boardwalk, in the shade beneath the awning of the Second National Bank of Golden Valley, stood Samantha Marks. Her father owned the bank, as well as one profitable gold mine and three unprofitable ones.

  “Samantha’s looking ready for this evening, and it’s hardly past noon,” Marc commented. The undercurrent in his tone suggested his emotions weren’t entirely complimentary.

  As her father’s only daughter, Samantha got whatever she asked for, and her wardrobe was the stuff of legend. Even so, it was too early in the day to be wearing such a robin’s egg blue skirt with a white silk blouse and matching, waist-length blue jacket.

  Marc wondered just how long it took Samantha to get ready to leave the house each day, and a shudder went through him. “You think she’s looking to upgrade from Zachery Singer?”

  “Wouldn’t take much to do that,” Frank replied, his contempt unconcealed. “Zachery’s a rattlesnake and always has been.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, my friend,” Marc replied, stepping up out of the street and onto the boardwalk in front of the Morning Rooster Restaurant. “A rattlesnake warns a person before he strikes. Seems to me that Zachery Singer’s a backstabbing dry-gulcher. He doesn’t warn anybody before he strikes.”

  Frank nodded and scratched his chin. “Now that I think about it, I see you’re right.” He made a sound of disdain in his throat. “Zachery doesn’t have the stones to fight a man face-to-face.”

  “But he’s got Samantha, so I guess that’s something.”

  “Maybe.” Frank’s tone was as ambiguous as his words. “Maybe not.” His gaze met Marc’s. “We’ve both had some fun times with Samantha, and we both consider ourselves lucky men to have walked away unscathed. That says something, too.”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” Marc replied, his voice low. “Why in hell I walked into her spider web, I’ll never know.”

  Marc watched as Samantha moved out of the shade of the bank’s awning, her fair skin protected by the French parasol, and headed down the boardwalk. She walked with a stride that suggested purpose, as she often did, and Marc felt a twinge of apprehension in the pit of his stomach. As one of a short list of Samantha’s ex-lovers, he felt a certain obligation to converse politely with the girl. There wasn’t a person with any standing or wealth in Golden Valley, Helena, or Virginia City who didn’t know that Samantha had set her sights on marrying a rich man. Most any rich man would do.

  “Think she’s still mad about you splitting up?” Frank asked. He had courted her prior to Marc, so his exit from her bedroom was no longer a matter of contention.

  “I’m pretty certain of it.”

  “Me, too.”

  Marc reached into the inside pocket of his jacket for his rolling papers and pouch of tobacco, then stopped himself. Samantha had said she liked the scent of his tobacco smoke, and he didn’t want to do anything that might draw an angry response from her. For the hundredth time since telling her that they couldn’t be bedmates any longer, Marc Andollini, one of Golden Valley’s most notorious rakes, wished that he’d never let himself get blinded by Samantha Marks’s delicate good looks and soft, enticing voice. After all, it wasn’t as though he’d ever had a shortage of beautiful and willing women wanting to share bedroom time with him. So, as he’d told himself many times since the acrimonious end to their shared sexual activities, he should have known better and shown the good sense to avoid Samantha Marks
from the very beginning.

  But still, hadn’t Marc always been susceptible to lovely young women of wealth who whispered suggestively of the things they were oh-so-willing to do to him?

  Samantha approached, keeping to the boardwalk, a sunny smile curling a mouth that had lips a touch too thin to elicit fantasies among the more jaded members of Golden Valley’s wealthy young bachelors. Marc thought it perhaps her only unattractive physical feature. Her deficiencies in intellectual and emotional qualities were quite another matter. This was a fact which he had discovered, but only after having spent a rather significant number of hours passionately in bed with her and an almost entirely similar number of depressingly boring hours in bed with her postcoitus.

  That she wasn’t universally considered the most beautiful debutante in the territory was a source of some consternation for Samantha. She didn’t like to think of herself as second to anyone, at anything, under any circumstances.

  “Good afternoon, Marc.” She looked at him, then with a certain dramatic flair, looked directly at Frank. She had found his family fortune to her liking, but his nearly indefatigable sexual energy rather less so. Samantha had made it clear to him that physical exertion, of any sort, was unpleasant to her. “Hi, Frank. Been a while since I’ve seen you.” She adjusted the angle of the parasol to keep the sun from touching her face. “Will you men be going to the Freedom banquet this afternoon?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Marc replied. Looking at Samantha reminded him of why he’d ignored his better judgment and had become romantically involved with her for a three-week period. She really was a beauty. It was everything else about her that set his teeth on edge. “How could we miss the most important social event of the year?”

  “Important, yes,” Samantha replied. “My father was president of the Sons of Freedom two years ago.” She laughed softly. Marc could tell it wasn’t a real laugh. “What a silly name for such a prestigious organization. Sons of Freedom…whoever came up with such a pompous, self-important name?”

  “My father was on the committee that came up with it.” There was a pregnant pause before Marc added, “As you well know.”

  “No offense intended,” Samantha replied. “It’s just a silly name. That doesn’t mean your father was a silly man.”

  Not for a second did Marc believe Samantha. He knew she meant to be offensive, and it took an act of willpower for him not to tell her so.

  She turned toward Frank. “You will dance with me tonight.” It was a casual declaration. Samantha was accustomed to giving orders to adults, even those from prominent families and of significant incomes, as though they were mere servants in her world. “The orchestra for tonight has been brought in from St. Louis, and I understand their repertoire of waltzes is quite acceptable.”

  In Samantha’s parlance, “quite acceptable” meant second to none.

  She turned her attention toward Marc, and he felt that twinge in his stomach once again. “You must dance with me, too. Your behavior has been dreadful, of course, but fortunately for you, I’m a forgiving woman.” She smiled, clearly feeling that her business had been conducted and concluded successfully. “Until tonight, then.”

  Samantha ambled off down the boardwalk, her stride no longer decisive now that she’d accomplished her objective. Marc had the strangely exhilarating sensation of being a man who had been shot at and missed. Watching her walking away, he wondered briefly whether her hips were swaying just a bit more than normal, then decided they were. Samantha was a woman who knew instinctively when men were looking at her ass while she walked.

  In a voice that was as serious as the crypt, Frank said, “Don’t think about it, buddy. That’s a girl with nothing but poison in her veins, and she’s nothing but trouble from the top of her curly blonde head down to the tips of those dainty little toes. She wanted my fortune, then she wanted your fortune, and now it looks like she’s going to settle on getting her hooks into Zachery Singer’s fortune. But any way you look at it, that girl’s no more trustworthy than a hungry she-wolf.” He made an unpleasant sound in his throat. “The only difference being, of course, is that a she-wolf makes a good mother. I’d be willing to bet that she won’t give a rat’s ass about whatever children she brings into this world.”

  Marc grinned at his best friend, then shivered in dramatic fashion. “It scares me just thinking about how stupid I was to think that a little sex with that woman would be harmless.” He shivered again. “Someday, I really hope I figure out that my cock’s supposed to follow my decisions, instead of the other way around.”

  Coming into town from the west was a buckboard wagon, pulled along by a single large Belgian gelding that did not have many years left in him. Even from a distance, it was easy to see that the woman in the front seat of the buckboard, though wearing a wide-brimmed, rather masculine felt hat, had a profusion of hair that wouldn’t be easily tamed into a tidy coiffure by ribbons or clips.

  There was only one woman in Golden Valley with hair the color of dazzling burnished copper. It was a woman who had, at least thus far, resolutely rebuffed the advances of both Marc and Frank.

  “Here comes Colleen O’Malley.”

  “No another woman in the territory has hair like that,” Frank replied. In a tone of voice he’d never before used with Colleen, he said, “She’s the kind of woman with looks that are hard to mistake.”

  “You suppose she’s been invited to tonight’s banquet?” There was a hopefulness in Marc’s tone. He made a point of unleashing his debauchery and charm almost exclusively upon wealthy and jaded women who knew precisely what they were getting involved in and wanted nothing more from him than the multiple climaxes he was so capable of inspiring. “It’s been hard to strike up much of a conversation with that woman.”

  “She’s probably been invited, but the invitation is to work, not to attend.” Frank shrugged, accepting the social stratification caused by Montana’s gold rush as the way of life. Since he was at the very top of the ladder, he saw no reason that anything should change. “She’s a chicken rancher, and she sells milk and cheese and eggs. There’s going to be a lot of rich, hungry people at the Sons of Freedom banquet tonight. Probably here to make a little extra money. Her income’s been cut pretty sharp since Allen decided she wasn’t marrying material.”

  Frank’s blunt assessment of the facts hit Marc with an almost physical force. The recent discoveries of valuable minerals, most notably gold, had made some men enormously wealthy in a very short period of time. The biggest profits were in gold, but fortunes had also been made mining silver and tin. But for every one man who suddenly became a millionaire, there were several thousand who languished in poverty, eking out a marginal living however possible, existing on the fringes of a wealthy society that looked condescendingly down upon them.

  In a voice both gruff and soft, Marc replied, “I suspect you’re right. Worse luck, that. Happened to her a couple years ago, and still she’s suffering for it.” He scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “I’ve always wanted to get a little better acquainted with that woman.”

  “As in bedroom acquainted?”

  Marc shook his head. “No, just get to know her a little. It always seemed to me that she got dealt a pretty rotten hand by Allen Carpenter.”

  As the buckboard moved closer, Marc smiled. Colleen’s distinctive hair was tucked beneath a hat, but tendrils had already fallen free. In the buckboard was a large series of wire cages for chickens that filled the wagon completely.

  “Looks like we’ll be having chicken at the banquet.” Marc stepped out into the street, his smile widening. “Afternoon, Colleen.”

  “Good afternoon, Marc.” Her tone was familiar. The men had known her for a decade, though they did not socialize in the same circles. “In town a bit early, aren’t you?”

  With a sweeping glance, Marc assessed Colleen. She wore gray trousers with the pant legs tucked into her boots like a man, but also a feminine blue cotton blouse. The right shoulder of the blouse h
ad been repaired with care. The cuffs of both sleeves showed signs of age. It seemed terribly unjust that she should have had to pay such a heavy price for having fallen in love with a cold-blooded snake of a man like Allen Carpenter.

  “Had to go to the surveyor’s office,” Marc said.

  “Buying up more mining plots?” Colleen arched an eyebrow. “Pretty soon you’ll own all of the Rocky Mountains.”

  When he glanced over at Frank, he saw that his friend was looking at the voluptuous redhead with a warmth in his eyes that suggested more than just neighborly friendliness. It surprised Marc since he and Frank were notorious for keeping their libidinous amusements among Montana’s nouveau riche. And there certainly was no riche in Colleen O’Malley, new or otherwise.

  “Not likely,” Marc replied. “The Smoky Mountains alone have over a million acres of land that hasn’t been surveyed, and the Smokies constitute only a tiny fraction of the Rocky Mountains.”

  “Always so precise!” Colleen laughed, and Marc thought it a sound he would like to hear more often. When she laughed, her breasts moved tautly beneath her blouse, and Marc felt a certain tightening in the pit of his stomach. A small voice in his head whispered that she’d already been hurt by a man, and he didn’t want to be the next in line to make her miserable. “I’ll bet you’ll grow your daddy’s fortune fifty-fold before you turn thirty.”

  “Well, since that’s only five years away, I’d better get to work.”

  “And since I’ve got work to do myself, I’d better be getting along,” Colleen replied. “These chickens won’t clean or cook themselves. Bring an appetite with you to the banquet tonight. There’ll be roasted chicken and fried chicken and some of the finest cheese you’ve ever tasted.”