Free Torn: Between Two Brothers (Taboo MMF Menage Erotic Romance) by Vanessa Wilde

Anne let out a long, low sigh, and wiped at her forehead with her forearm.
     
    It was barely 10 in the morning, and already the day was hot: stuffy bordering on uncomfortable.
     
    She took a quick drink of water from her flask, and went back to packing up the tent. It didn't make her feel any better about it that she was the one who had brought it – a relic from old family camping trips – and no one except her had ever been able to figure out the obscure art of setting it up and taking it down.
     
    She sighed again. She had the weirdest knack for making rickety, half-broken old things work well enough to keep ticking along, long past the point when they should have simply fallen apart. It was true of this old tent... and it had been true of her relationship with Arnold.
     
    Well... I guess one more good thing about breaking up is that I'll never have to call anyone “Arnie” ever again ...
     
    He had been the very model of a good-for-nothing knock-about – something her friends had never tired of mentioning to her at every opportunity. With hindsight, it was almost unimaginable she had been able to convince herself otherwise for so long.
     
    “Arnie” had briefly been hot property – for a few months in her freshman year of high school, his junior year, when he had been in a band, and his older brother had thrown a party which almost the whole school had gone to. That had, apparently, been enough for her stupid, 14-year-old self to fall head-over-heels for him, in that first blush of love and self-discovery every girl only gets once in her life. It was just her bad luck that she had drawn the worst card in that first shuffle...
     
    And she had stayed with him for the next five years, as he had to repeat a grade, then dropped out entirely, stopped practicing the guitar, and laid about at her place, playing Xbox and making excuses as to why he hadn't sent his résumé anywhere that month.
     
    Anyway, that's quite enough of thinking about him! The whole point of going hiking like this was to distract herself from that waste of time of energy – the last thing she needed was to spend the whole trip going over her mistakes a hundred times in her mind!
     
    As luck would have it, she didn't have to wait long for a distraction.
     
    And what a distraction it was, too...
     
    “'eya, Annie!”
     
    Kyle van der Wald emerged from the thicket of trees, pushing wet hair out of his eyes with one hand, like a model in some swimsuit ad. Except, of course, for the fact that he wasn't wearing a swimsuit. In fact... it appeared he was wearing nothing but a pair of ripped jeans.
     
    No shirt. No shoes. And, from what Anne could make out through a small but indiscreet rip near the top of his thigh... no underwear either.
     
    As stated before: ... distracting .
     
    Anne looked away, all rather belatedly, with a bit of an inaudible huff.
     
    She was stuffing the last, knobbly folds of the tent into its carrier bag when she heard him walk up somewhere behind her, and sneer. Well, she supposed there was no way she could really have heard him sneer – but she knew he was sneering anyway, even before he spoke.
     
    “So how's our happy little homemaker coming along with the packing up?”
     
    Anne's mom had always told her she should never answer a question with a question. But Anne's mom wasn't the one who had to deal with Kyle's constant taunts.
     
    “Where's Noah?”
     
    She didn't even look up at him; only turned around in her squat, and started putting the washed pots and bowls from breakfast into the backpack.
     
    “Woah... looks like someone woke up on the wrong side of the sleeping bag this morning... Would it kill you to be any friendlier?”
     
    When she just ignored him, he continued.
     
    “He's gone out scouting ahead. Said there was a really pretty mountain lake in the general area which he wanted to show you, but he couldn't quite remember where it was, so he went to go find it. Typical, really. Always