Chasing Emily [Duoterra 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage and More) Read Online Free Page A

she closed the door after him and leaned back against it.
    “Men! Thank goodness there’s no one who has a hold on me.” She then felt tears welling up. By not allowing anyone to get close she was also rejecting real intimacy and affection of the sort that Brianna had with her husbands.
    Steeling herself, she left her rooms to go back to the bar where she could put on a role of Emily the bar owner, who provided laughs, flirted with everyone, and had sex with the young guys—and then went to her lonely bed comfortless.

Chapter Four
     
    “Blue man, blue man, blue man three.
    Three times they were up,
    Three times she went down,
    On blue man, blue man, blue man three.
    But two moons rose,
    And the day was done,
    For blue man, blue man, blue man three.”
    Finn was singing a very bawdy song about three aliens and an Earth-woman. It was a dreadful song, he thought. It didn’t even rhyme, but it had a catchy line that people loved singing. He understood that it had been written by those original colonists, who had been excited by the idea of finding aliens on the planet but hadn’t expected to since the survey party had not reported any.
    The evening was about two-thirds over when he’d started singing some of the coarser songs in his repertoire. The older ladies in the room were swiftly removed by their husbands, much to his amusement. It happened every time.
    He already knew from the conversation he’d overheard outside the stable earlier in the day that there were no unmarried young women left in the town, but most of the younger married women had persuaded their husbands into staying, judging by the cajoling and seductive moves going on around the room.
    Grinning broadly, he finished the song with a flourish on the drum he was beating. The inhabitants of the planet hadn’t been able to make a decent string instrument, let alone a more complicated mechanism like a piano that he had only heard about from school lessons, so the musical culture had revolved around drums or simple woodwind instruments. But he couldn’t sing and play his flute at the same time, so he generally used a drum to accompany himself.
    “Okay, folks. I need a rest.”
    As he grabbed a mug of mulled ale—for once not made from the ubiquitous moss bark, but from a shrub which grew rampantly in this part of the continent—he glanced around the room. His gaze was quickly drawn to Emily, who was walking over to a blonde girl he thought was called Brianna, who stood with two of her husbands, all brothers. Now that was an interesting marriage. Even though polygamous contracts were now allowed, there weren’t that many that he knew of.
    But what made that relationship even more intriguing was that the bar owner, Emily, had been dancing furiously with one of the brothers called Curt. Finn had heard mutterings about Emily having been involved with this Curt, but from what he could see, Brianna was quite happy for her husband to take off with Emily while she danced with the youngest brother. The elder one had stood watching them, all the while keeping an eye on his baby daughters who, amazingly, had been sleeping in a cot at the edge of the room throughout the evening without a murmur.
    He chuckled to himself. He wasn’t sure if that meant they were tone deaf or if his singing had lulled them to sleep.
    Finn caught Emily’s eye as she passed by and winked at her. The corner of her mouth went up, but other than that she ignored him. Instead he continued to gaze over the other occupants of the room, and his eyes came to rest on Robin, the man who had stormed out of the bar earlier that day when Finn had arrived and had enjoyed flirting with Emily.
    Another fascinating couple, he pondered. But even he could see that the guy was much too young for Emily, who needed an older man to keep her out of trouble. Finn snorted. Yeah, like that is going to happen with anyone. The woman is danger on legs. He sincerely doubted if anyone was man enough for her.
    He