Ménage Material [La Belle sans la Bete Ménages] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read online

  La Belle sans la Bête Ménages

  Ménage Material

  Realizing there’s a third person in her marriage, Devvy Jacques is stunned. Discovering her husband’s lover is a man, she’s horrified. Learning that man is Alexei Ivanov, the internationally renowned scientist behind the cure for cancer, she’s…Horny?

  Being part of a ménage wasn’t in any of her fairy tales as a kid, but the more she’s with hubby, Sebastien, and new lover, Alexei, the more she realizes it’s a dream come true.

  Around them, between them, under or above them, Devvy flourishes, becoming the woman she was meant to be before life did a number on her.

  With the ménage flourishing, and love growing every day, it takes a twisted blackmailer to derail it all. Raking up past secrets Alex wants to remain hidden, and exposing their unusual household to the world’s eye, the trio face enough challenges to unravel apart.

  Will life work its mischief or will they still have what it takes to be perfect Ménage Material?

  Genre: Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Older H/h, Romantic Suspense

  Length: 99,342 words

  MÉNAGE MATERIAL

  La Belle sans la Bête Ménages

  Serena Akeroyd

  MENAGE AMOUR

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Ménage Amour

  MÉNAGE MATERIAL

  Copyright © 2014 by Serena Akeroyd

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-63258-545-5

  First E-book Publication: November 2014

  Cover design by Harris Channing

  All art and logo copyright © 2014 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,

  If you have purchased this copy of Ménage Material by Serena Akeroyd from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.

  This is Serena Akeroyd’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Serena Akeroyd’s right to earn a living from her work.

  Amanda Hilton, Publisher

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  www.BookStrand.com

  DEDICATION

  Forgive the award-ceremony list of thanks, but this day has been a long time coming.

  To Mum and Nanna. No words, not even a thank-you, is an adequate dedication. So, I’ll say this: I might have looked like I wasn’t listening, but I always was. I might have rolled my eyes, but I took your advice. (And it almost always was the right thing to do. In fact, delete the “almost.”) I might have been a pain in the ass, but I was your pain in the ass. :D Cheers, my dears.

  Granddad, I didn’t know you. You were taken from me far too soon. That doesn’t lessen the influence you’ve had on me. Mum made sure she passed along your teachings, you know, always having ten bags of sugar in the cupboard. Just in case. I love you, and I wish we’d had more time together.

  To the people who have helped me along the way. Katrina, Caryn, Nicole…and to those of you I haven’t mentioned—THANK YOU. I’m humbled by your help.

  And finally, to Trever, for smelling, snoring, and insisting on stinking bits of dried tripe—no soap in the world gets rid of that stench from your pinkies. You may be just a dog, but there’s no just where you’re concerned.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  MÉNAGE MATERIAL

  La Belle sans la Bête Ménages

  SERENA AKEROYD

  Copyright © 2014

  Prologue

  Your money.

  Your wife.

  Or your LOVER.

  100,000 euros to keep quiet. To keep your sick secret hidden from the papers.

  You have five weeks to figure out which means more to you.

  Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

  I’ll be in touch. And I’ll be watching.

  -An interested third party.

  Chapter One

  Devvy Jacques was no idiot.

  She held a PhD in cosmetic science, and while it could be said her line of study was more of a pseudo-science than a legitimate field, she was also a botanist, studying plants and their pharmaceutical uses. Still, her choice of careers never entered into arguments of her intelligence. After all, it wasn’t as if she had to be a member of Mensa, which she was, to see that something was wrong in her marriage. She knew, point-blank knew, her husband was having an affair.

  Okay, point-blank might have been a slight exaggeration, but a woman knew, didn’t she? She could sense it, and every ounce of female intuition Devvy possessed was screeching a red alert.

  “This is what happens when you aim high, Devina Jacques. You should have stayed in your own sphere. Stayed among the pond scum and not aimed for Darwinian perfection.” Her voice was glum as she stood in her home laboratory,
combining witch-hazel with tea tree oil to a solution that would eventually become a bar of facial cleansing soap aimed at teenagers with acne-prone skin.

  It was all right telling herself it had been a dumb move to marry Sebastien Jacques, but actually coming to terms with it was another thing entirely. Unfortunately for Devvy, she loved the man, had loved him ever since she’d first set eyes on him at a cosmetics convention in the city that would become her marital home, Paris.

  Sebastien was the owner of the only international brand of cosmetics free from animal testing, made with one-hundred percent natural products, and marketed around the world. What had started as a small business in a tiny suburb of Lyon had exploded into one of the fastest-growing cosmetic companies France had ever seen.

  La Belle sans la Bête beauty line was a hit among the socialites and the struggling single mothers—it breached all of society’s barriers and was popular with every income bracket. The snazzy name, Beauty without the Beast, said it all. The brand combined nature’s bounty with reasonable price tags while producing products that actually worked, more so than the chemical-laden glop most women slapped on their faces, and all without animal testing.

  Sebastien’s success was legendary in the industry.

  At forty-five, he was nearly twenty years her senior and even though two decades separated them, he was still a nine out of ten on the gorgeousness scale, whereas Devvy, with no amount of help from the La Belle sans la Bête product line, only just brushed a seven.

  And that was on a good day.

  When, at the Parisian cosmetics convention, Sebastien had headhunted her and offered her a dream role at his company, she’d dived right in. Not because she believed in his brand, even though she did and had admired his work for a long time, but because of him. Sebastien.

  Nearly a foot taller than her own five six, onyx black hair with salt and pepper at his temples, olive skin that gleamed with vivacity and augmented the stunning amber-brown of his eyes, Sebastien was a hunk. Or, as the French said, a bellâtre. He was masculine beauty personified and to Devvy, who from birth had been a skinny, geeky non-entity, he’d been a total cliché.

  Adonis, in the flesh.

  Hell, scratch that. He’d been a walking advertisement. He might as well have had a sign on his head—female orgasm distributor. No BOB could ever match a guy like Bastien Jacques. Damn his gorgeous hide.

  It had taken all of her reserve not to stutter in his presence. Not to flush or stammer or wring her hands with awkwardness whenever he was near. She’d been utterly beguiled by him. From the almost feminine curve of his mouth, to the lines that crinkled at his eyes whenever he beamed a grin her way. She’d fallen hook, line, and sinker for the man.

  So, when he’d approached her with a contract that would take her from her sunny Californian hometown to Paris, the city for lovers, she’d been hard-pressed not to leap at him, to snatch the papers from his hands, and sign on the dotted line before he could retract the offer. She’d managed to hold back. Just. Her pride hadn’t even twanged with self-importance at the fact he’d selected her for his company, when his choosiness at staff selection was as world renowned as his product line. She hadn’t cared on a professional level. It had all been very, very personal.

  Two months into her contract, he’d asked her out. Four months after their first date, he’d proposed. And Devvy, existing on cloud nine ever since he’d deigned to ask her out for a coffee, had nearly wept at the idea of actually being married to the man.

  She should have realized there’d be a catch.

  No man with looks like Sebastien could settle for someone like her, not unless he wanted something. In this instance, it had to be her brain, and the many cosmetics formulas she’d developed over the years.

  He probably thought he could marry the non-entity and have a decent woman in his bed outside of his wife’s knowledge. It was a very Gallic attitude. Almost par for the course.

  Just not Devvy’s course.

  While he’d probably prefer it if she were unenlightened as to his extra-marital activities, she knew something was wrong. No amount of regrets, of wishing she hadn’t been so damned foolhardy as to leap into this life with Sebastien—a life that had taken her away from everything and everyone she’d ever known, as crappy as it had been—would change a damned thing.

  Oh, she could settle. Endure the shame of having a husband who needed a lover to see to his needs, because his ugly duckling of a wife couldn’t satisfy him.

  Or, she could fight…. Retaliate.

  With her eyes focused on the solution in her glass beaker, for a moment, she allowed herself to think of fighting. And winning. Of having the courage to face her husband, of making him admit to her she wasn’t enough to please him.

  Then, her shoulders slumped.

  Devvy was about as confrontational as a Koala bear. In fact, they had a bit more gumption than she did. She was a geek. She loved her science, her work. Before Sebastien, she’d lived for it. Now, it was only one aspect of her days. Sebastien had filled every other part. Such a pathetic admission shamed her but she couldn’t help it.

  He was a force to be reckoned with and under his protection, Devvy knew she’d flourished. In their two years of marriage, her experiments had consisted of success after success. In his environs, she bloomed. Until now, he had made her happy. How could any woman not be affected by that? Happiness was more addictive than sugar. Except now, it was starting to taste like saccharine, bitter.

  The glass-stirring rod tinkled and sang as it scraped against the beaker in her hand. She made the stirring motion absentmindedly. Her eyes switched focus from the anti-acne solution to the herb garden upon which her lab faced. Fronds of lavender, pungent leaves of basil, and rampant sticks of mint as well as dozens of other plants perfumed the air, but behind the window, her nose had to rely upon sensory memory to remember the rich scents of her garden. There was a calm to be found from Mother Nature’s treasures, but no amount of sniffing could make Devvy feel calm at the moment.

  Two years, she’d been married to Sebastien. Two years in which he’d actively encouraged her to work from home, where she was happiest. Reproducing a small but highly advanced laboratory on their land, she’d taken the gift as a compliment. The amount of money he’d spent on ensuring her happiness…it could only have been a present for a woman who was loved.

  But now, she wondered if it was to keep her out of the way. Tucked up at home, he could do what he wanted at the office. Maybe he was having an affair with his assistant, Adéle. With Devvy at home all day, he could fuck his personal assistant to his heart’s content on company time, and without his wife being any the wiser. He could take solace in the curvy beauty that was his aide, try to imprint Adéle’s looks on his retinas so he could pretend it was her when he deigned to take Devvy to bed.

  The thought had her choking back tears and she slammed her hand down, shattering the beaker containing the plant extracts she was preparing. The astringents sloshed over the counter as the glass exploded into hundreds of tiny shards, some shrapnel digging itself deep into her palm. Even the pain of the cuts, combined with the sting as the witch-hazel and tea tree solution went to work on cleaning the wounds, didn’t bring a halt to her train of thoughts.

  “I’m not the Hunchback of Notre Dame,” she told herself, pushing the discomfort of the cuts to the back of her mind. “I’m no Marilyn Monroe but I don’t need to be hidden away like some kind of goddamn savage.” Her lower lip trembled at the very idea. “I don’t deserve this. I don’t.

  “He doesn’t touch me, hardly talks to me. He’s so goddamned uptight all the time…!” She sucked in a breath. “It could be work,” she muttered to herself and to the labs’ walls. They were used to her one-to-four conversation. “You don’t get where he is without a lot of stress and tension invading his life. Just because we haven’t slept together in…” She groaned as she did the math. “Four weeks? That isn’t possible. The last time was after we went to Marie de Haviland�
��s god-awful soirée…” With her hand still weeping blood and giving her floor a crimson, polka-dot makeover, she strode over to her wall calendar and looked back over the few occasions they’d had to go out. Sebastien hated high-society events more than she did. And that was saying something.

  “Oh God, it’s worse than I thought,” she mumbled. “Five! Five weeks!”

  Eyes flooding with tears, she fluttered her lashes in an attempt to hold them back. She managed. Barely. Sucking in some harsh breaths, she forced herself to be calm, and then, when her breathing was back on track, moved to the sink where she methodically cleansed the small cuts on her hand.

  The only reason she’d started thinking about Sebastien being with another woman was because this morning, she’d been—as much as she hated the goddamn word, it described her to a T—horny. Being horny was not a state she was accustomed to. Sebastien liked sex.

  A lot.

  A lot, lot.

  There were days they’d make love in the morning, before he had to leave for work. Sometimes, he’d take her in the shower after breakfast. He came home for lunch at least three times a week—something else he’d ceased to do over the last two months—but when he did come home, he’d usually take her then. Before dinner, after dinner, after he finished his work in the study…any spare time at all was used by them sharing mutual orgasms on whatever piece of furniture happened to be close to hand!

  How could he go from being, well, rampant to nada? Zilch?

  After a minimum of once a day—and just once was unusual—for the last two years, she’d never had to wait so long before, and her body was going nuts. Shit, she was more accustomed to being sore down there than needy! Going five weeks without made her feel like a nun.