April, Dani - Superstar (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (9 page)

Slowly, she took off her shoes and socks and held out her bare feet in front of her on the floor. They had gone a funny red and were so numb she couldn’t feel them even after bending over and attempting a vigorous massage.

“Your turn to fix dinner, bro,” Ethan told Scott.

“I made breakfast,” Scott protested.

“Not for me you didn’t,” Ethan teased him, leaving him alone in the kitchen to start the meal.

Ethan came out and joined Chrissie in front of the fire. She gave him a smile, still never sure when he was going to be nice. She was still rubbing her feet, and as she rubbed them more, they started to hurt. In fact, they were hurting all the way up past her ankles.

“What did you do, Chrissie?” Ethan asked, kneeling down next to her on the floor and inspecting her feet with his gaze.

“My feet got wet outside.” She showed him her socks. “When I took these off, they were soaked. I didn’t even realize it until I got back inside. I guess I was having too good of a time.”

He picked up one of her legs in his big hand and laid it across his lap. He took her hands away and took over the massaging for her. She leaned back on her elbows and decided he was probably giving her an awesome foot massage. If only she had any feeling left in her feet, she would probably be in heaven along about now.

Then he ran his hands up her ankles and to her calves, folding back the baggy jeans to see the rest of the damage to each of her feet and lower legs. He gave her an angry look. Why couldn’t he ever just be nice to her like his brothers were?

“You know if you get frostbite out here where there isn’t going to be any medical help, it would be real serious,” he admonished her.

“I guess I didn’t think about that.” She looked down at her feet and winced in pain as he brought more blood into them with his fingers.

Ethan whistled over to his brother. “Hey, Brad, go out there and boil up two really warm pans of water!” Then he turned back to Chrissie. “Take off your pants,” he ordered her.

“What?”

“You’re going to need to take these off,” he held up the leg of her jeans. “Come on, I won’t look. Anyway, that sweatshirt you’re wearing is as long as a dress on you.”

“Ow!” she cried out as he brought more blood flowing into her sore feet. “Ethan, that really hurts!”

“I’m sorry. Just hold still and take your pants off.”

She shrugged and decided she trusted him enough to do whatever he told her. She undid the cinch around her waist and reached up under her shirt and unbuttoned and then unzipped the jeans. Hiking up first one knee and then the other, she pulled down the pants and threw them aside. As she took the rough material over her calves and ankles, more pain shot through her nerves.

She quickly brought her sweatshirt down past her knees and noticed that Ethan had a wicked smile curving his mouth. “What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a woman’s legs before?”

“I’ve seen plenty of legs. But I must say you have a nice pair.”

“Everybody tells me that…” Chrissie sighed as he went back to rubbing her feet.

“I was just smiling because it seems I always find a way to get a woman’s pants off her.”

“Sounds like you’re proud of that.”

“Everybody’s got a skill.” He laughed and ran his palms along the bottom of her feet.

“Ethan, that still hurts,” she squealed.

“Relax. That’s a good sign. If it didn’t hurt you, I’d be really worried along about now.”

Brad brought out the pans of water and set them down in front of her. “I’m going to lend you my snow boots, Chrissie,” he told her. “So when you go out tomorrow, this won’t happen again.”

She reached up and took his hand in hers as Ethan picked up her feet and gently set them down into the warm water of the pans. “You guys are all so good to me,” she told them. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t met you.”

“Believe me, Chrissie, the pleasure is entirely ours.” Brad cupped her hand with his other one and smiled down at her, a kind and sexy smile all at the same time. “When we started the drive up here, none of us would have believed that we’d end up spending time with a girl up here, certainly not one as special as you.”

“Now that’s really starting to hurt, Ethan,” she called down to him.

She tried to remove her feet, but he wouldn’t let her, holding them down beneath the warmth of the water in his strong hands, making her feel small in his grasp. Also, there was that other feeling she had been getting from all the guys, that of being protected and cared for in a way that she had never known until this moment.

“Coward,” Ethan taunted her. “Keep your feet in there, or I’ll cut them off.”

She laughed and squealed. “You big bully!” she yelled at him. “Help me out here Brad. Your brother is murdering my feet.”

Brad kneeled down behind her, still holding her hand. She used him as a backrest, leaning back into the muscle of his body. Ethan’s hands were working wonders on her feet beneath the water, reviving the feeling in them and massaging away the pain. Before she even knew what she was doing she had pulled Brad’s arms around her shoulders.

“God this feels really good…” Her voice was almost sleepy as the guys met her every need. “If you all do this for me every day, I’m going to see to it that I get frostbite every time I go outside.”

“Now we’d have to ground you if you did something like that,” Ethan told her in his stern voice.

Scott had gone over to the stereo and was flipping through a collection of music he had. A quiet dance tune came over the speakers by a girl she knew and had developed a friendship with when she was out on tour.

“Stay on that one please, Scott,” she called over her shoulder to him. “I know her, and she’s got some really mean stuff.”

Scott did as she told him, and the light music was soon adding its touch to the room along with the fire and the men. The cold wind howled outside, and Chrissie thought it even sounded nice right now. At that moment, everything was just perfect.

“Are you this friendly to everyone, Chrissie? Or is it just us?” Brad asked her. She thought he sounded halfway serious.

Of course there was only one answer to his question. “Just you three guys,” she whispered back to him, her eyes still closed as she gloried in Ethan’s foot massage and Brad’s strong arms around her.

“Well, Chrissie,” Ethan told her giving her feet one last squeeze. “I think you’ll live this time, but don’t let it happen again.”

“That feels so good. Rub my feet for me for another ten minutes please?”

He looked down at her. She knew he was thinking about it. Then he just gave her a playful pat on her knee and got up. “Hell no!” he told her. “It’s time to eat.”

“Dinner is served, oh masters and mistress,” Scott called to them from the kitchen.

Brad nuzzled the top of her hair with his chin. “Come on. Let’s go eat,” he whispered to her, letting his hands linger for what amounted to a caress of her shoulders.

Regretfully, she let him release her from out of his strong grip and allowed him to help her back to her feet. He handed her the beer she had been working on and took her by the hand to lead her to the table. Dinner did smell good, and she was hungrier than she’d ever been in her life.

She also found that being in the presence of these guys made her heart beat like crazy in her chest and sent constant warmth down low in her belly.

* * * *

Dinner was simple, beans and hash, and of course beer. A few days ago Chrissie wouldn’t have liked this. She wouldn’t have thought it even good enough for Peaches and Cream. Now, however, it tasted just right to her, and she ate with a ravenous appetite. She asked for seconds and then thirds. Back home, her trainer had her on a strict diet, and she would probably have come up with some horrid punishment for Chrissie if she could see how she was eating tonight.

The four of them set about the table and talked, and it was as if she had known them her whole life, or rather as if she should have known them her whole life. She made some gaffe about sports since she neither liked or cared about sports, and the guys ribbed her about it for the rest of the dinner. Chrissie laughed, really laughed, not the fake laughter she had to put on for a dinner party back home.

For desert they had Twinkies. Yes, that was right. These guys served her Twinkies for dessert. Chrissie loved them, though as she ate her Twinkie and sipped her beer, she couldn’t help but smile to herself when she thought about how naive these guys were about some things.

She watched the guys as they engaged in rough horseplay all throughout dinner and got into a huge argument as to which one of them would wash the dishes. Every minute she was learning something new about one of them, and she found herself mesmerized by their world and wanting to know everything about it.

Scott was unemployed, was shy around women, and was a whiz at computers. He had an associate’s degree in information technology and more than a dozen professional certifications. He wanted to be a graphic artist, but the job market was bad and he wasn’t trying very hard to find work. Scott was the same age as Chrissie, and their birthdays were within two weeks of each other, with Chrissie being the older.

Brad had been engaged until a few months ago. It had been a long-term relationship and had ended in a broken heart for Brad, although he seemed to be holding up well due to his constant good nature. He worked for their family’s contracting company. He was a foreman and part-time architect. He had been badly injured on a job last year and almost died. At one time they didn’t even know if he would walk again. He had just about fully recovered, and Chrissie couldn’t even tell that he had a limp, but she gathered he was still in pain at times. His fiancée had found another man while he had been convalescing, and she had broken things off.

Ethan was the oldest of the three and definitely the darkest. He was the leader. In his whole life, he had apparently never had a serious relationship, but many women back in their hometown in Arizona seemed to flock to him. As Chrissie watched him at the dinner table, she could understand why. Ethan could never make up his mind about a single woman and frequently juggled two or three women at the same time. Somehow Chrissie didn’t think the women minded very much. Ethan had taken over management of the family business after their dad had died a couple of years before, and he had also started his own business on the side, so he must have been as busy in his professional life as he was in his personal life.

“We’re going to watch a movie after dinner, Chrissie,” Brad announced. “You get to pick it out. We actually have a pretty decent collection of DVDs over in the cabinet.”

“I promise I won’t pick one of mine,” Chrissie teased.

“That’s good.” Ethan came back at her. “Because I don’t think we have any of yours.”

Ethan was over by the sink doing the dishes. He had lost whatever game it was the brothers had played to see who got the honor. Chrissie made a face at him and ran out to pick their movie with Peaches and Cream at her feet.

She was still not wearing her pants, but the long-sleeved sweatshirt fell to her knees, so it was very modest and it was comfortable.

She raised her eyebrows as she flipped through the DVD collection. The guys had a hefty assortment of porn, their covers filled with naked girls in every sexual position imaginable. These weren’t Chrissie’s types of movies. She laughed at them. As she went further through the collection, she found more traditional movies.

She looked over her shoulder, making sure the guys hadn’t noticed her brief embarrassment at their porn DVDs. They were all doing their own thing and had given her charge of the night’s entertainment. She guessed boys just were always boys no matter how big and hunky they got.

She chose a B-grade slasher film simply because there was no one in the production who she personally knew. On all the big films, she knew either the actors, the directors, or producers, and most of them she didn’t like. The film she picked was low budget and she had never heard of any of the people in it, and even though it wasn’t that good of a movie, it was still a joy to watch a film that she could be completely detached from.