Yield: Kinky Cougars, #2

Chapter 1

For a late March day in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, it was beautiful: sunny and just over forty degrees. That meant the side yard by Gabe Adamiak’s inherited farmhouse was a sea of mud, but at least the firewood he was passing along to someone who passed as a neighbor by the standards of farm country outside rural Tinsdale, MA, wasn’t frozen together anymore .

Since said neighbor, Mari Lyndon, was easy on the eyes, as well as the closest thing he had to a friend—as opposed to a relative or a holdover acquaintance from high school—in Tinsdale, the home town he long since left, Gabe was thoroughly enjoying helping her throw the firewood into the bed of her pickup truck.

Until she asked the fateful question: So how did the great family meeting go last night?

Gabe wracked his brain to remember when he’d told Mari about his ill-advised attempt to get his entire family on the same page about the property he’d inherited. Then he realized he hadn’t said anything. You could ask my aunt Fran, who probably told you about the meeting in the first place—her or Stella. Or maybe my cousin Heather? You must run into her at the feed store since she works there. I don’t think you know any of the other million and a half relatives that well. Or were you in school with Peter and Annie? Yet another cousin and his wife. He was leaving out a bunch of them she was less likely to know.

Mari laughed. It had a sarcastic edge, but it still sounded sweet to him. Peter and Annie and I were all in the same grade but we weren’t close then and we’re still not now. Blame Franciszka. I ran into her in the grocery store on Thursday and she cornered me. She was glad you were doing it, but worried about how everyone was going to behave now that they were actually talking about the question of the house instead of around it.

Gabe sighed. The contentment and low-level buzz of lust that had filled him from a morning of outdoor activity with a beautiful woman retreated, pushed back by the memories of last night. She was right to worry about that. My family are basically nice people…

Even Eddie? I can’t say I know him, but from what I’ve seen, he communicates in grunts.

Eddie has the social skills of an irate badger, but he’s all right. He just relates better to his cows than he does to most people. He snorted. It sounded rueful and disgusted and good-humored all at once. He realized it was an echo of his grandfather’s epic snorts and sighs that said more than his words usually did. Did he do that in Boston too, or was it just here? Maybe he’d ask Janice when he got back. No, not Janice. He wasn’t hers anymore. He shouldn’t waste her time with something silly. "But last night he was that bad. Ranting about how our grandparents must have wanted me to sell the place fast and for a good price, or why would they have left it to a smart-ass Boston lawyer instead of…well, he didn’t say instead of him because even he knows his people skills aren’t the best and dealing with real estate takes people skills. But instead of any other member of the family including his newest nephew—and Kara’s baby is only three weeks old."

How many people agreed with him? Damn, she was sharp. Too sharp. Kind of reminded him of Janice that way.

Uncle Paul and Aunt Maureen. Heather. She didn’t actually come right out and say it, but she usually goes along with her parents because it’s just easier.

It would be with Paul and Maureen. I don’t know Maureen that well, but she must be a tough lady or she’d had smothered Paul in his sleep years ago. Either that or a doormat, but I can’t see a doormat surviving in your family.

My guess is that she tried to smother him half a dozen times and my uncle never noticed. Or he thought it was foreplay, because Gabe had a few suspicions about his uncle, who was tough and abrasive with everyone but his wife. "Anyway, Peter and Annie also agreed with Paul—Peter because he’s just like his dad and Annie because she likes needling me. Matt—that’s Fran’s kid from when she still thought she might be straight—waffled, which makes sense. He’s told me before he hates seeing perfectly good farmland being turned into condos for rich people, but he just bought into the Harley dealership and I’m sure he could use some cash. Aunt Fran told them off, and then told me off, saying that her parents would have left instructions in their will if they wanted the farm sold. They must have wanted me to have it. Right… Because every young lawyer needs a dairy farm of their own—a dairy farm with no cows, I might add. Aunt Stella backed her, of course."

Stella was there?

Why not? She’s an Adamiak. Has been for years, but even the stuffy ones like Uncle Paul have to admit it after the big wedding.

I was thinking more of the fact that she teaches yoga and meditation and is about the mellowest human I know. Figured she’d try to duck out of a contentious family meeting.

I think she was hoping to play mediator, though she should know better after a couple of decades with our family. But she got caught up too. Eddie’s dad backed him over Skype from North Carolina but Kara—that’s his sister who lives down there, the one with the new baby and the toddler—agreed with Aunt Fran. Their mom, of all people, was one of the few who thought my idea of putting an agricultural or conservation restriction on the deed was a good one. Along with my mom, but Mom said her piece and then left because she had to be back in Springfield to work. People actually listened to Linda because…you know how hard it is for her to talk after the stroke? If she bothers to give a speech, you bet everyone will shut up and listen.

Mari nodded. But did they listen-listen or just hear her out?

How the hell am I supposed to tell? They’ll tell me to my face I’m an arrogant little prick who thinks my law degree means I’m better than the rest of them, but they’re not going to be mean to Linda. She stopped the argument, but it wasn’t like we reached a consensus. Another snort. Stupid of me to expect us to. Consensus is not what this family does. But I’d hoped. Now I think I’m stuck with coming up with a plan that everyone can live with even if they hate it, and presenting it as a done deal.

Like what?

He flailed his hands like a confused Muppet, partly to lighten the mood and partly because he felt like a confused Muppet about this whole problem. I have no clue but I’d better come up with something fast. I want to do my grandparents proud and I know how much they loved this place. But they also loved the family. When Aunt Fran dumped her husband and came out—I wasn’t even born, but I’ve heard stories—or when Peter and Annie declared bankruptcy, or when I was a high school idiot with a chip on his shoulder, getting into fights all the time and losing, they helped us. So maybe they’d want me to sell and share the money. I thought a rider on the deed might be a good compromise. We’d find a buyer who wanted a hobby farm, get a decent price, and still preserve our heritage. But God knows that if a developer were willing to pay us buckets of money, it would help everyone out, including me—law school wasn’t exactly cheap, and I don’t want to be paying off school loans when I’m ready to retire. So I don’t know what to do.

I couldn’t say. But I do know your grandfather would say we’re burning daylight and we still have work to do. She pointed to the remaining stack of firewood. Maybe we should get back to it.

It had felt surprisingly comfortable to rant about the farm situation with Mari. But it was far more comfortable to fall into a rhythm of tossing wood into the truck with her, chitchatting a little, then falling silent for a while. Even though they hadn’t known each other long, the silences didn’t feel awkward, more like the easy quiet between friends.

After a while, Gabe took a break to take off his jacket and throw it aside. It’s practically balmy!

Mari threw another chunk of split hardwood into the truck bed. Don’t get too used it. Forecast calls for more snow, maybe as soon as tonight. That’s part of why I appreciate the firewood.

I’ll enjoy the warm weather while it lasts. He stretched. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that warm, but it was sunny. He’d take it. He’d missed the memo about snow, but it wasn’t that much of a surprise. New England winters always insisted on a last hurrah. And spring’s coming. There are a few of those little purple flowers—crocus, maybe?—near the back door.

Yup. I’ve seen daffodil shoots on the south side of the stone walls. And the first kid dropped a few days ago.

Let me guess—that night with freezing rain?

She nodded.

Baby goats are just like calves. Calves already arrived at the worst possible time, as he recalled from his years living with his grandparents.

Baby goats are way cuter than calves. She grinned in a way that made her look like a teenager, instead of the forty-something Gabe knew her to be.

I don’t know, he mock-argued. Calves are adorable, even if they grow up to be cows. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a baby goat except in a couple of viral videos online.

Another one of those terrific smiles. You need to visit me at Goose Hill Farm and meet the goats. Seeing is believing.

Her smile made him want to read something into the invitation. Made him want to imagine getting to her farm only to find Mari dressed in leather, ready to order him to strip and kneel. Then she added, Even your grandfather fell for the goats, though it took him a while to admit it. The geese were another story.

Right. He and Mari were becoming friends in their own right, and face it, he was developing a bad case of the hots for his weekend neighbor, but he’d first met her as a late-blooming farmer his grandparents had taken under their wings. Mari was so not going to be interested in him that way. She first knew him as Joe and Ellie’s mostly absent Boston-based grandson, who as far most people knew had left Tinsdale and the farm after high school and never looked back until his grandparents got sick.

Wasn’t quite true. He’d looked back, but only on beautiful spring days when he missed the smell of greenery, damp earth, and manure, and crisp fall ones when he’d have given a lot to be outside and not in the law-firm office he’d worked so hard and paid so much to find his way into. And he’d come back for holidays sometimes, though he didn’t stay long. But Mari, a Tinsdale native who saved her pennies earned working elsewhere until she could come back and buy a farm of her own, probably would think that didn’t count.

Probably thought that he’d become a city boy through and through, which he suspected was not her type.

Which would a damn shame, because she was his.

Even in her baggy farmer jeans, her long brown hair pulled back in a simple ponytail, Mari was one of the better views in the scenic Berkshires. Where women were concerned, he appreciated all facets of beauty, but especially the strong, steady type Mari represented. Functional strength.

He kept moving wood but watched her as he did. Damn… She moved gracefully but economically, every movement weighted with purpose. He’d forgotten how appealing that was.

But it wasn’t just her looks he liked. Her laugh was soft and husky, not because she was trying to sound sexy, but because that was her natural, unaffected chuckle. And she laughed a lot. He sensed depth there the few times they’d chatted about anything beyond how her hens and goats were doing and what work he’d done on the house. Her gray-green eyes didn’t miss a thing, and the faint lines around them just accented her beauty.

Or maybe they were a pleasant, sexy reminder of Janice, who’d also been older than he was and who had helped mold him into the man he was today. She hadn’t been the love of his life or anything like that—he knew that now, though if you’d asked him a year ago he might have said something different—but under her influence and that of her friends, he’d gotten an inkling of the woman who might be that love.

His Lady, the one he’d serve and suffer for as she chose.

His cock twitched at that thought, conjuring images of Mari’s strong, callused hands with their sensibly short, unpolished nails holding a riding crop or a whip, those gray-green eyes appraising his naked, bound body. No, he wouldn’t be bound; she’d expect him to hold still and obey….

Oh God, so hot, but don’t go down that path. Mari might be around Janice’s age, but chances were she wouldn’t be like Janice in any other way. Female Dominants were rare even in big cities; the odds that his closest neighbor to the west happened to be one were so slim as to be nonexistent. He’d appreciate her for who she was, an attractive, helpful neighbor, and eventually see if she had interest in anything besides chatting and low-key companionship. Maybe ask her on a date first. Maybe not even a date, but something they might decide was a date later if it went well.

He wouldn’t promise he’d never let himself spin his unlikely fantasy out to its hot, painful, kinky imaginary conclusion, but not, dear God, when she was around.

With that whole friendship-that-might-become-more thing in mind, he asked, I need to run inside for a minute. Want some coffee?

He was rewarded with that lovely, deep chuckle. Yes, please! That sounds heavenly. Black, no sugar. Your grandpa was right about you, she added with a grin. You’re a good boy.

Depends on what you mean by ‘good’. That could only be said with a smirk. "I’m polite and I try to be useful, which should count for something. But good might be taking it too far. And I bet he forgot I’m over thirty now, though someone in his eighties who basically raised me can call me a boy if he wants to." He thought he’d managed to sound as if someone who wasn’t all long legs and take-charge attitude had called him a good boy. Oh, sure, part of him was entirely down with the eye-roll and the teasing comeback, especially the part about not being a boy. Mari wasn’t that much older than he was, but the fact she’d known his grandparents first would make it easier for her to think of him as a kid.

Of course his grandparents thought of him as a child, but he didn’t want Mari to see him that way, for a whole host of reasons.

Including the scenario in which she called him a good boy in a smoky, sultry bedroom voice because he’d done such a great job fulfilling one of her long-cherished fantasies, under loving and precise direction.

That had about the same odds of happening as those of the lottery ticket he’d bought while getting gas and milk being a multimillion dollar winner, He didn’t even know if she liked guys in a clothing-optional way.

He mentally shook himself. If he wanted to make a good impression on this hard-working woman, the first step would be to work, not daydream about sex. Having a friend here, someone who’d gotten to know him as the man he was now, would totally fail to suck. He’d lost touch with the people he’d known in high school, except his cousins, but he bet they all remembered the old, angry Gabe. That Gabe had been an asshole even by teenage boy standards.

He’d grown up since then. The problem with a small town is no one might ever believe it. With Mari, he had a clean slate.

As long as he continued to make a good impression, which meant he’d better get moving and get her that coffee.

He’d just handed the mug to her when his smaller barn exploded.

Chapter 2

The ground shook. The barn’s roof, already precarious, caved in. That wasn’t as dramatic as it sounded, or as the boom suggested it should be—more a slump than anything. Pieces of weathered wood, the paint long worn away by harsh winters and summer rains, burst up and out .

Mari dropped the coffee and hit the ground, pulling him with her. In his stunned state, his body reacted to the tackle, to her strength and decisiveness, as if they were doing a takedown scene. He struggled, not because he wanted to get away, but because his nerve endings and instincts would rather focus on her body pinning his to the cool mud and interpret it as a sex game than deal with exploding barns and a hot woman who reacted to an explosion like a combat veteran.

Which she might be. It hadn’t come up in conversation.

It’s going to be all right, Mari whispered. You’re safe. We’ll deal with this.

He wanted to believe her, wanted to accept that calm, level voice, but things seemed anything but safe and all right. A place he used to play as a child—a place he’d dragged some more junk into last night before the family meeting, to get it out of the way until he could make a dump run—was engulfed in flames.

His heart was pounding a fast, staccato rhythm and his stomach churned. He didn’t think he was going to be sick, but that had more to do with pride and not wanting to barf in front of Mari than it did with the state of his nerves or belly. Explosions were about a thousand times more frightening in real life than they were in movies, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

But what was up with Mari? She wasn’t even breathing hard as she lay on top of him. His cock thought that was a damn shame