Divine Grace (52 page)

Ben said Saturday night was really soft.”

“I’m sure things will return to normal. Do you have to stay till closing?”

“No, I’ll just go in for an hour or so, and then I’ll come home.”

“Would you like me to come with you?”

“That’s sweet of you, but I’d rather you rested. I’ll be home before you know it.”

“What should I wear? Help me pick.”

He released her and turned to her clothing hanging on a lone bar in the closet. “I’m going to get boxes and pick you up one day at lunch. We’ll go pack up the rest of your clothing, okay?”

“Sure, if you don’t mind. I need to bring my hanging fern over here, too.

It’s probably thirsty.”

He removed a turquoise blue top from its hanger and handed it to her.

She slipped into it as he pulled a snug-fitting pair of jeans off a hanger and held them out to her. He got out the boots Adam had bought for her while she slipped on the jeans and a pair of socks. Fully dressed, she stood in front of him and struck a pose.

“That looks good on you. Naked and in my bed would be better, but this is good, too.” He smiled at her with hungry eyes, sliding a hand over her ass as she walked from the closet. He checked his watch. “Shit, we’re busted.

It’s 6:55 p.m. We’ve got some explaining to do.” He chuckled as they walked into the living room. Adam and Jack were seated, watching the news.

“We’ve already called Moe and Bill to let them know we’ll be a little late. Look at this.” He pointed at the TV then turned up the sound.

“Federal authorities were able to arrest eight suspects at the home of the well-known drug dealer, all in possession of narcotics and large amounts of cash. The drugs seized in the bust had an estimated street value in excess of one million dollars. The house was also being used to manufacture methamphetamine and grow marijuana. Three children were found in the house in one of the back bedrooms with another young juvenile. In other news…”

Grace had heard reports like this, but what stunned her was the image of Owen being led from a rundown looking house in handcuffs. His head was down, but she recognized him instantly. He didn’t fight the officer who
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escorted him and said nothing, only hung his head and got into the police van without arguing.

“Did you know this was going to happen?” Grace asked.

“I spoke with Hank several days ago to let him know we were having Owen watched by a friend of ours. He told me to back him off a little because the dealer who bailed Owen out was under investigation. They had an agent undercover in the house and didn’t want the leader getting suspicious. He let me know they’d be springing this trap sometime soon.”

“You had someone watching Owen?”

“Yes. After he showed up at your house harassing you and then again at the shop, we had someone watching him who could provide support if needed, mostly while you were still at home,” he explained. “Are you upset because we did that without asking you?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We didn’t want to worry you. We just wanted to make sure he stayed away from you, then the storm came, and it was no longer necessary. The guy is a witness to Owen being involved in several small drug deals and is going to be giving his account when they go to trial. That would explain why Owen finally backed off. The guy didn’t want money as much as he wanted willing, obligated dealers selling for him. I hope he cooperates with the judge because Owen is going to have a very hard time in the system. Do you still feel like going out, darlin’?”

“Sure I do, Jack. I’d really like to see Moe and Bill before they go home. I knew that Owen would get himself into serious trouble someday.

I’m just glad I extricated myself from his clutches before this happened.

Actually, y’all extricated me. No, I’m not mad, Jack. I appreciate that you went to such lengths to protect me, and I’m sorry it was necessary. But you’re right. I hope Owen cooperates with the investigation because he’d never survive going to prison.”

So it was decided. They met the Travers at O’Reilley’s and had a wonderful supper. A couple of Jack’s friends approached him to congratulate him on becoming engaged, and he introduced them to Grace.

Other than those two encounters, nobody said anything or approached them.

It was a different experience than last Friday night when she’d felt so on display.

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* * * *

After supper, Ethan left to spend a little time at The Pony. The mood in the club felt like that of a typical Thursday night, and Ethan and Ben put their heads together about doing some special events on weekends to draw more people into the club.

The lights were still on when he returned home. He walked in to find Grace sitting on the couch, wrapped in his robe, drinking a cup of cocoa with a legal pad full of scribbles balanced in her lap on a pillow. He put his hat on the hook on the hall bench before he came and sat down with her, leaning in for a kiss.

“The guys already go to bed?”

“Yes, I was too keyed up to sleep, so I decided to stay up and do something productive with my time.”

“What are you working on?”

“I’ve been thinking of every wedding I’ve ever been to, remembering the things I liked about them. I’ve made a list of the people I want to invite.

I also made lists of the elements I can’t live without, as well as some of the stuff I’d like to skip altogether.”

“What’s something on your list that you couldn’t possibly live without?”

“Dancing with all three of you, one at a time, in whatever order you want me.” She chuckled and her eyes twinkled. He rolled his eyes and groaned, realizing the connotation of the words.

He grinned at her. “And what’s something that is absolutely unnecessary?”

“The removal of my garter while everyone watches. Not because I’m shy, but because it excludes you and Adam. I’d prefer to spend that time with the three of you alone, trying to get me unlaced from my white satin corset and G-string. I could also totally do without throwing the bouquet so I don’t have to watch my girlfriends go all WWF over it.”

Her words had him laughing and smiling. She had a point about the garter. He liked the way she thought, but he knew who would win that bouquet toss. His feisty sister, Erin.

“I’d rather give them all flowers than do that,” she continued, picking up the list.

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“When are you and Charity going wedding shopping?”

“We set a date for Friday after next. She really is planning on taking me to every bridal shop within a hundred mile radius of here. Thankfully, that’s not that many. At least she’s calling around to see if they have plus-size gowns in stock for me to try on, so we don’t waste a trip.”

“Do you want one of us to go with you?”

“No, if I find anything that I really love, I’ll put it on hold and have the two of you take me back to try it on again. Charity and I will have a fun girls’ day. We’ll probably have lunch in some prissy tea room, but the actual wedding attire I’m going to purchase with y’all.

“My lingerie will all come from an online source because even if we shop for lingerie in the mall, the chain stores won’t have much in stock for someone with curves like me. You can shop online with me and help me pick that out, too. Y’all can plan the honeymoon while Charity and I go out.

I’m really looking forward to those shopping excursions. But it’s all just the means to an end for me. I want to be your wife.” She quietly looked into his eyes. The warmth in her sweet blue eyes was like an actual physical touch.

The soft lighting from the lamp beside her left her partially in shadow, and he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known.

“I want to be your husband. Are you sleepy?”

“Yes, writing it down, then talking with you about it really put it all in perspective. I want it to be as simple as possible and still make your moms and grandmas happy. I want to start off on the right foot with all of them.”

“You’ve already done that by making their fondest wishes come true.”

“What’s that?”

“By falling in love with their sons and being a woman who could make all three of us fall in love with her. By being a real lady and loving us all unreservedly. You have no idea how precious and rare you are.” He palmed her blushing cheek and kissed her. “They will all adore you.”

“Adam called all of your parents and invited them over this Saturday evening. Jack also said y’all have something to show me that afternoon. I work the early shift from ten until two, and I’ll be free after that. Juliana doesn’t have me scheduled for Sunday at all.” She tried to hide a yawn.

“We’ve booked a touring band to come play at The Dancing Pony next Friday night. They are supposed to be the next big thing in country rock music. The following Friday is going to be ladies’ night, complete with male

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dancers. We’ve never done anything like that before. If it goes over well, we may have to do another one sometime.”

“Strippers, hmm?” she said with a smirk as she rose from the couch, stretching her arms over her head. His robe fell open to reveal she had nothing on underneath. She smiled softly at him, when he caught his breath at the sight.

“Bad girl. I love seeing you in my robe. The caveman likes it, too.”

“I wanted it because I knew it would smell like you. I wanted it around me, warming me. Does the caveman like knowing that, too?” She smiled seductively and reached for him, not bothering to close the robe.

“He’s practically pounding his chest, roaring ‘Mine!’” he replied as he lifted her up in his arms.

“My gosh, you are strong, Ethan Grant! I love it when y’all do that!” she said in a shaky voice as he carried her to her room.

“Is it just us tonight?” he asked, noticing the empty bed as he entered.

“For now, at least. We’ll see if I can sleep. It didn’t take me long to get used to having y’all snuggled all around me.”

“I’ll get them later if you need them. They won’t mind. I know I didn’t last night. Anything for my woman. I’m going to shower real quick. I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll warm the bed for you.” She giggled as she climbed under the covers.

“The caveman likes that, too.” He pounded his chest a little.

When he returned, she had the bed warmed up, and she was as well.

Ethan took his time with her, making her come twice before she ever even saw his cock.

* * * *

True to his word, Ethan picked up boxes and took Grace to her house during the week to pack up her clothes, shoes, and other necessities. They even had time to empty out the refrigerator and put the trash out. She thought the house looked great, except for the blue tarp, which would be removed on Wednesday when the workmen returned to do the shingle work.

Angel came home from the hospital on Saturday morning. When she pulled up beside the ranch house after work on Saturday afternoon, she saw him in
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the barn walking around and inspecting everything, albeit at a slow pace.

She went down to the barn to visit with him briefly and he told her how happy he was to be home. He mentioned to her that Teresa and Michael had been by the day before to visit him. Grace noted happily the sappy smile on his face when he talked about them both.

After returning to the house, Grace changed into more casual clothing—blue jeans and boots—at her men’s request. Once she was dressed, they hopped in the SUV and drove out to the Warner ranch. Jack had gone into town while she was at work and picked up a bunch of pretty silk flowers, literally bunches and bunches of them. She understood once they made it out to the Warner family cemetery. They wanted to put flowers at all the women’s headstones. Grace sat on a bench, removing tags and fluffing the bouquets, while Jack took a trash bag and started collecting the old faded ones from the vases and flower holders at each grave.

She watched her sweet men as they tidied up the cemetery and placed flowers in each vase, securing them with small rocks so they wouldn’t blow away when the wind kicked up. She noticed that Jack had purchased all bright jewel tones and vibrant colors, which would look more cheerful than pastels, but need to be replaced more often because the sun would fade them.

They must do this on a regular basis.

The grass had been cut and a weed eater used recently, so when they were done, the small cemetery was a very cheery place. Once they were finished, they dusted off their hands and knees and came to collect her.

They took her around and told her about the ancestors and grandparents that now rested in that small plot of land. The ranch had been in their family for
five
generations. After the tour and the rich history her men told her about, she understood why their families were so excited.

“You are all very distantly related, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Jack said. “Our great-great-great-great-grandmothers and one great-great-great-great-grandfather all came from Ireland together on a boat with their parents, Adam and Rebecca. All three of them settled on this land.

I don’t know if you knew that all three of our family’s ranches adjoin on one side, but they do. This is the reason why. They bought the land together and divided it between the three siblings, Rachel, Ethan, and Eve, wanting each

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child to have a piece of land to raise their families on and make a life for their future children.”

He led her over to a large headstone. She read the names, Caleb, Rachel, and Thomas, and the dates of death all hovered close around the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds.

Jack said, “These are my great-great-great-great-grandparents.”

Adam led her to another large headstone that read Adam, Mary, and Ethan.

Adam said, “These are mine, same generation, Ethan and Rachel were siblings.”

Ethan led her to another headstone—Charles, Eve, and Titus.

Ethan said, “And these are mine.”

They took her around to other headstones in the cemetery, but she quickly got confused because of all the different last names.

“We have it all written down at home,” Jack said. “One day, when we were young kids roaming around on our summer breaks, we played in the cemetery and discovered all the multiple headstones. We knew we were distantly related. We didn’t know about our families’ histories of polyamorous groupings. We asked our moms and dads and grandparents, and they told what they knew of the family history. Traditionally, each woman married the older of the two men. Some of our ancestors were real characters. A few died very young. Some lived to be over one hundred. We became intrigued with the idea that there might be one woman out there that would want us.”

Looking for common ground, Grace asked, “Are there any women in your family tree that were wife to three husbands?”

Jack replied, “Adam had two brothers who died in Ireland. Rebecca was married to him, but was wife to all three. Life was hard back then, and a full widow on her own with children and no man to take care of her and provide for them was more than our ancestors could bear to think of. In several cases, the husbands were brothers. If one of them died, she still had a provider and husband to watch over her and the children. They were a long way out here back then, and it made life easier for everyone. The family unit was more likely to survive if there were two men to look after the family.

Financially, it also made life easier, since more providers meant more stability.”

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“Why no multiple wives?” she asked.

“Their purpose was to protect the women and children,” Ethan said,

“not have a harem to serve their needs. More women would have meant more children and more need for support and protection. Plus, they believed it might lead to jealousy among the women. The only men who became part of such a marriage were men who were close friends or brother to the other man in the group and able to share with no rivalry. You see how we are with you, and you said yourself how you would be in a grouping with another woman. I remember you saying it would be like swallowing razor blades to see us with another woman. We believe that it’s in our nature to be like this, just like that inability is part of your nature, overriding even your submissive tendencies.” Ethan removed his hat and ran his fingers through his long brown hair before he put the hat back on.

She chuckled. “Yeah, there’s no way I could be happy with another woman in the house. I remember having a mental image of another woman walking from one of your bedrooms, fresh from having sex with you, and just like then it makes me feel nauseated and cold to think of it. If that’s what y’all had wanted, I’d have run from you screaming the first day.”

“For us, there’s no way we could be happy without sharing you,” Jack said. “We might each have individually found a woman to be happy with, but it wouldn’t have been the same, and it wouldn’t have been what we dreamed of all these years.”

“So there is a history of polyamory in these parts I never knew about?”

she asked.

“This area was very sparsely populated back then. None of our parents were polyamorous. Neither were my grandparents,” Ethan replied. “Either because they were worried about the social stigma attached to polygamy and bigamy, or because the right people never came along or were too scared.

Jack and Adam’s grandparents and my great-grandparents were the last groupings we know of. None of the polyamorous groupings were exclusive to bloodlines, so we believe there were many other polyamorous groupings from those times in related families throughout the area.

“Because we had so many family members all together in one place I think is the only reason we put two and two together. Nowadays, family members are spread out and don’t know much about their ancestors.

Outsiders probably would have thought that a triple headstone meant a wife

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who had two husbands, married to one, widowed, and then married to the other. It’s not the kind of thing that could have been listed on a marriage certificate.”

“What about cousins, and…you know…”

“Inbreeding?” Ethan answered, chuckling.

“Yeah.”

“They were very fastidious about not intermarrying between cousins and viewed intermarrying too closely the way any other normal person would. There is none of that in our family, and you’ll notice,” he indicated two very small but carefully crafted headstones situated side by side, “the only infants in the cemetery both died in 1918, during the Spanish influenza pandemic, so there were no babies born with birth defects or abnormalities that died from them and no one that we know of that lived who was deformed. Our three bloodlines are very distinct and separate. There is more likelihood that we’re closely related to you than to each other.” He slipped a hand around her hip and kissed her cheek.

“So how often do you come here to make the cemetery look so pretty?”

“It’s always been done two or three times a year, plus sometimes seasonally,” Ethan replied. “My mom loves poinsettias, so she comes at Christmas and decorates the headstones with bunches of bright red and white poinsettias. Jack’s mom loved lilies, so she always decorated at Easter. What’s your favorite, Gracie?”

“Roses, of course.”

“If you wanted to decorate on Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day,” Adam told her, “that’s how it would work, if you wanted to. Not everyone likes to come out to the cemetery. For some people, it’s just too painful. We do what we can.”

They came to stand in front of the still freshly covered grave of Rose Marie Warner. They had removed all the dead flower arrangements that had been left after the funeral, and the mound of recently turned earth looked bare and somehow raw in the summer sunshine. Only the profuse and brightly colored silk arrangement Jack had placed at it remained. It reminded her of a fresh bandage on a quickly healing wound for some reason. Life went on.

“I wish I knew more of Rose Marie’s story. Did she know your dad’s grandparents or Adam’s grandparents, Jack?”

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“She was very good friends with Rose, Adam’s grandmother, and even vaguely remembered a very elderly Callie Grant, Ethan’s great-great grandmother. Mom and Dad lived with his parents right after they got married. Mom’s mother died when she was little, and so my Grandmother Regina was like a mother to her, and grandfathers Robert and Daniel treated her very well, better than her own family did. She loved being a part of the Warner family.”

“Now I really wish I knew more of her story.”

“Ask Dad sometime, and he’ll tell you what he knows of it,” Jack replied, smiling. “We’d better get home soon. People are going to start coming over at six.”