First Chapter: ILYBSM

About ILYBSM:

Everyone has secrets. I’ve kept some big ones from my two best friends, and I know they’ve got a few of their own. After all, Embry and Adam never told me why they stopped talking to each other the night we graduated college. For my part, I’ve never told them that I’m bi—or that I’ve been in love with both of them for years. I’m also definitely not telling them I’ve mismanaged my family’s tree farm so badly that it’s about to go out of business right before Christmas.

But when I crash off a ladder hanging up holiday lights and break my wrist, they come running like Santa’s elves. They’re both very grumpy about seeing each other again, but I can’t be sorry to finally have an excuse to get them in the same place. Wait until they find out we’re all sleeping in one bed…

At least their feud is put on hold when they discover what a mess I’ve made of my business. Soon the three of us are scrambling to pull off a Christmas miracle and save the farm. And maybe it’s the magic of the holidays, but a whole lot of feelings and long-buried truths are coming to the surface—and our friendship is starting to become something much bigger.

Will we survive the season? Or are all my dreams about to be crushed this Christmas?

ILYBSM is a sweet and steamy contemporary holiday m/m/m polyamorous romance about three former best friends. It stars Jeb, a sweetly oblivious farmer who’s the hottest mess to ever grow trees in Vermont; Embry, a mechanic who can fix any engine but not a relationship; and Adam, a graphic designer and organizational whiz who irons his sheets. It features truths that slip out thanks to homemade eggnog, a demon goat who looks fabulous in a Santa hat, and an unconventional happy ever after.

AMAZON (US) | AMAZON (UK) | AMAZON (AU) | AMAZON (CAN)

CHAPTER ONE

Jeb

I stare at Embry’s text from two minutes ago, my mind slowly processing the message through the haze of painkillers in my brain.

Embry

I’m on my way. Be there in about two hours. Don’t worry about anything, Jebby! I’ve got your back.

Embry’s on his way to visit right now? He’s on his way to my farm? I sit up farther on the couch and squint at my phone, then read the display again, as if that somehow might make the words change or rearrange themselves.

Have I done… what I think I’ve done?

Millie bustles into the room with a large mug of something—probably tea, knowing her—and a protein shake. “I stocked your fridge with these,” she tells me, blowing her long, dark brown bangs out of her eyes in between words. “You’ll need to keep your strength up while you’re healing. I got them for Seth when he hurt his back, and—why are you staring at your phone like it’s Sherbert?”

Sherbert is the very angry goat I accidentally adopted a few months ago. His owners were tired of him beating up every cow on their farm, and I was determined that I could help him find love in the world. So far all he’s found are my shins, which are now very black and blue.

“I, um, think I screwed up.” I wince as a sharp pain stabs through my wrist. I’d never broken a bone before yesterday, and it hurts a lot more than I thought it would. Even through the painkillers.

Painkillers that may have just caused a lot more harm than good.

“How could you have screwed up? You’ve barely been coherent since we brought you home from the ER last night. You’ve been too drugged up to do anything but stare at your phone.”

I gulp. “Um, that’s the problem. I, uh, didn’t just stare at it.”

“Uh-oh. Spill, Jeb.” Millie sits down on the coffee table across from where I’m lying and crosses her arms.

“You know my friend Embry, right?”

“Sure, of course. You guys went to college together. You brought him over for dinner the last time he came to visit. The mechanic, right? The one who lives in New Hampshire?” Millie lives next door on a dairy farm she runs with her partners, Seth and Maya. I’ve been good friends with them since they took over the place a few years ago, and we all help each other out.

“Yeah, that’s Embry. Well, when I was all doped up last night, I must’ve texted him about what happened. And now he says he’s on his way.”

“Okay,” Millie says slowly. “Why’s that a bad thing? He’s your friend. And you are going to need help around here, aren’t you? I mean, you know Seth and Maya and I will do whatever we can…”

But they have their own farm to run. Millie’s already missed two milkings to stay with me, and the three of them sure can’t keep my tree farm and their dairy farm going simultaneously. “No, that part’s fine,” I tell her. “I’m really glad Embry’s coming. The problem is, um, that he’s not the only person I texted.” I hold up my phone, and her eyes go wide.

“Oh, fuck,” she says. “Isn’t that your other BFF? The one who isn’t speaking to Embry?”

“Yup, that’s him.” I flip the phone around again to stare at the text from Adam O’Connor, my other best friend from college.

Adam

OMG holy shit! You poor thing! I’m getting on a plane. You can’t be alone at Christmas with a broken arm!

Millie purses her lips like she’s trying not to laugh. “So, um, let me get this straight,” she says. “You asked your two best friends, who haven’t spoken to each other in years, to come help you convalesce? While you were too drugged up to notice that you were texting them both?”

I set the phone down in my lap and close my eyes against the pulsing pain that’s now in my head as well as my arm. “Yes, Millie. That does appear to be what I’ve done. Fuck. This is a nightmare. The two of them have hated each other ever since— Never mind, it doesn’t matter.” I don’t like talking or thinking about the day a friendship I thought could survive anything exploded right in front of me. “What the hell do I do now? Tell Adam not to come? He’s probably already in the air. And I can’t tell Embry to turn around. What would I say?”

“You could tell him the truth,” Millie says. “They both know you never stopped speaking to the other one, right?”

“Yeah. But it’s been complicated.” I scowl at the mug of tea. “It’s like being the kid of divorced parents—I mean, I think it is.” My parents have been married for thirty-five years, so I can’t say that for sure. “My friends have joint custody of me, I guess. When Adam comes to visit, we don’t talk about Embry. And if he accidentally comes up, Adam gets all snarky and pissy and goes off to iron my sheets.”

“People iron sheets?”

“Adam does. And when Embry and I talk, I definitely never mention Adam, because he starts growling, and if he’s here, he usually ends up changing the oil in every piece of equipment I own.”

“Remind me to mention Adam the next time he’s over. It takes me days to get engine oil out from under my fingernails,” Millie says.

“Funny. The point is that it’s all awkward as hell, and I fucking hate it. This is straight-up FUBAR,” I tell Millie. “They’re going to be so pissed. They’ll probably both stop speaking to me, too, and then the 3way will be completely dead forever.”

Millie’s eyes widen. “Excuse me, did you say the 3way?”

“It’s what we used to call our group chat. Why, is that weird?”

Millie blinks at me. “Um, no, sweetie. Nothing strange about that… at all. So. I get that you’re panicking here. But what if you just… didn’t?”

“Didn’t what?” I lift my mug and blink back the tears that I’m trying really hard not to let fall right now. It’s been a long twenty-four hours. Actually, it’s been a long eight months since my parents signed Stock Tree Farm over to me and retired to Florida. All I’d wanted for so long was to run this place and have it as mine. But it turns out running a farm that’s over seventy acres with seventeen animals on it—eighteen now, thanks to Sherbert—all by yourself is a lot to handle.

And it’s not even Thanksgiving yet. Soon hordes of Christmas tree buyers will descend on the farm, looking for the perfect tree-shopping experience to kick off their holiday season with their families. Correction: I need hordes of buyers to descend on the farm. Otherwise, I’m going to be in a very, very bad situation with the Devon Falls Farm Credit Union. “What the hell was I thinking?” I close my eyes and rub my temples.

“I’m not sure I know either. What were you thinking, trying to hang up those holiday lights without help?”

Of course Millie thinks I was talking about the lights. I’ve been very strategically not telling her, Seth, Maya, or my parents—especially my parents—about the farm’s financial situation. I can’t believe I almost spilled that secret all over the pillow pile holding up my broken arm. Wow. These painkillers are definitely getting to me. I give Millie a weak smile. “I know. I should’ve asked one of you for help.”

“You should have!” she scolds. “Never climb a ladder that tall without a spotter, Jeb. You could have been hurt so much worse than you were.”

She’s right. I wish now that I had called one of them. But Millie forgets that she’s got two partners right there whenever she needs someone to watch her climb a ladder or cook dinner for her or help her with a feeding. Over here? It’s just me. And while I knew yesterday that anyone from Polyam and Proud Acres would have come over and helped me hang the lights if I asked, I was tired of asking. I ask them for help constantly. I’m waiting for the day when they finally get sick of me and stop answering my phone calls.

So I didn’t call. And now, propped up on this couch with my wrist stuck in a thick cast for at least four weeks, I’m definitely regretting the choice.

“Anyway,” Millie says, “we got sidetracked. My point was, instead of panicking, what if you didn’t tell either of them the other is coming?” She tents her fingers together like some sort of movie villain and waggles her eyebrows up and down.

“Okay, first of all, that’s very weird, what you just did there.” She rolls her eyes. “And what are you actually suggesting? That I let my two best friends show up at my farm and force them to talk to each other for the first time since our college graduation?”

“Exactly!” She beams. “It’s the plot of The Parent Trap!”

“That movie with Lindsay Lohan?”

“Wrong. That movie with Hayley Mills. But never mind; that’s not the point. The point is that you have a unique opportunity here—the chance to reunite your best friends!”

I haven’t seen The Parent Trap in a very long time, and I’m not sure who Hayley Mills is, but what she’s saying kind of makes sense. I’ve thought for a long time that if Adam and Embry would both stop being so stubborn and just talk to each other that they could probably fix whatever happened between them pretty easily. The three of us used to be so damn close. We bonded instantly when we moved into our first-year dorm room together, and we were inseparable for the next four years. We did everything together. The owner of the campus bookstore used to call us the Three Musketeers. “I could fix our 3way,” I murmur.

Millie coughs. “I still can’t believe you chose that chat name,” she mutters.

“What? There’s three of us, and we used to live together in the Way Dormitory. The name made sense.”

“If you say so.” Millie gasps. “But wait—this means you’re thinking about it! You’re going to do it!”

I wince when my arm jabs a particularly hot poker through my nervous system, and Millie moves to grab my painkillers from the end of the coffee table. I eye them warily. “I don’t know. I think I want to. But, Millie, there’d barely be room for the three of us here with how things are right now.”

Millie shakes two pills into her hand and thrusts them at me. “I’m still not sure why you decided to renovate your family’s house right before the holiday season.”

That’s another secret I’m not telling the P and P crew. Only the credit union knows the real reason that large portions of my family’s creaky old farmhouse are currently down to the studs while I live in one small section. And thank goodness my parents decided to go to Europe for the holidays. Dad would have a panic attack if he saw the shambles that this place is in. “Pride of ownership, Jeb,” he used to tell me whenever we’d work on fixing up part of the house or barns together. “That’s all a person really has to show for themselves in this world.” If he knew what I let happen to his beloved study, the one he and Mom spent years filling with books and soft furniture and pictures of the three of us, he’d probably take the deed back from me.

“But maybe the house-renovation thing will help,” Millie muses as she watches me throw the pills into my mouth and choke them down with tea that’s now lukewarm. “You know, close quarters. They can’t avoid each other like they could if this whole place was habitable. They’ll have to talk. Won’t they?”

The more I think about it, the less terrible the idea sounds. I’m tired of lying to Embry about who I’m really texting when he comes to visit and complains that I’m not paying enough attention to him. I’m tired of telling Adam I’m going on dates on Friday nights, when really Embry and I have a standing game of Mario Kart Tour we play together online. I’m tired of making up names when Embry asks me who’s doing the new design and branding for the tree farm or helping me pick out clothes.

Basically: I’m tired of being a child of divorce.

“Okay,” I tell Millie. “It’s on. Let the Broken Arm Trap commence!” I thrust my non-broken arm in the air excitedly just in time to remember that sharp, fast movements are not my friend right now. “Ow! That fucking hurt!”

Millie pats my head soothingly. “Poor Jeb. Well, whatever happens, it’s probably not a bad idea to have two people here helping you out. Because no offense, sweetie, but you’re kind of the hottest mess that ever grew trees in Vermont right now.”

I’m not sure I can argue with that. And she doesn’t even know the half of it. I sigh as she tucks blankets around me on my couch nest while I close my eyes and let the painkillers do their work. Hopefully they’ll take me to one of my favorite dreams.

Me, Adam, and Embry. Together again.