Page 33 of Tiger Queen

“What?”

He looked around the table. “Y’all don’t want to tell her?”

“Tell me what?”

Jake shook his head and poured more whiskey for himself. “All this time and you’re still embarrassed about it.”

I looked to David, then Anthony. “What’s he talking about?”

David kept a cool expression, but I could tell this was a sensitive topic. “About six years ago… The three of us shared a girlfriend. She worked here at the zoo. Lara.”

“Really!”

Anthony looked uncomfortable.

“Yep,” David said simply. “Anthony was a senior in high school, and Jake and I were in our early twenties. That’s about the gist of it. We don’t need to discuss it.” He gave Jake a pointed look which went unnoticed.

“Lara was great,” Jake said. The whiskey was making him more conversational than I had ever seen him. That, or he liked embarrassing his brothers. “Worked with the tigers. Sexy little thing, always wearing short-shorts with her ass hanging out when she worked at the zoo. We all had a thing for her, and it just so happened that she had a thing for us. Instead of choosing which brother she liked the best, she decided to have all three.”

“That just sounds like three times the opportunity to be sexually disappointed,” I teased. The whiskey was going to my head.

Jake leaned across the table and grinned. “No problems there. We made sure Lara was always satisfied.”

Anthony laughed nervously. “Heh. That’s real funny. Memories, am I right? I’m going to see if dad has any cookies or dessert or anything…”

“How would that work?” I asked. “Logistically, I mean. Did the four of you go on dates together?”

“We spent time with her individually,” David said.

“Not always,” Jake said, gesturing with his whiskey glass. There was a naughty look in his eyes. “We did some group activities too.”

It was clear what he meant by that. My imagination jumped into the driver’s seat and I pictured David, Jake, and Anthony in bed with a woman. Taking turns kissing her, caressing her, bending her over and putting their lips all over her body…

The thought made me tingle.

“No cookies in here!” Anthony called from the kitchen. “Um. We’ve got some ice cream and chocolate syrup if anyone wants that…”

“Baby brother’s still embarrassed about it,” Jake told me. “Like we did something wrong. You ask me, Lara’s one of the few things the three of us ever did right.”

“If it was so great, then what happened?”

“Dad fired her,” David said in an emotionless voice. “He found out she was with all three of us and accused her of trying to sleep her way to the top. He put her on a Greyhound bus back to New York. One morning we woke up and she was gone.”

“New Jersey,” Anthony said in the doorway to the kitchen. He had a gallon tub of ice cream under one arm and a stack of bowls in the other. “Lara was from New Jersey.”

Everyone was quiet as he opened the ice cream. I accepted a bowl and ate it slowly, grateful for something to distract me from the awkward silence.

“I can’t picture the three of you sharing anything, much less a girl,” I said.

“Why not?” David asked.

“Because you all fight too much.”

Jake snorted and swirled his whiskey around in the glass. “Things used to be better back then. Between the three of us.”

“What changed? Did it have to do with Lara?”

I realized from their expressions that I had pushed them too far. For whatever reason, that was too personal of a question to discuss tonight. Which was surprising since they had just admitted to me that they shared a girlfriend.

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