Country Affairs Bundle

The country was quiet. The women were not.

Three standalones. Older men. Open country. No shared plot.

-Poor Signal: A Highland Affair

Esme takes the night train north to get away from her wedding. Pete stays in London. David Stanton is already in the lounge car: fifty-eight, widower, her father's oldest friend, still wearing his wife's ring. So is she. His cabin latch is off. The Skye cottage falls through. He has an east room that was never spare. Poor signal. Hiking, she tells Pete. She came off the pill for the wedding cycle. He asks once. After that he stays in. One night the call connects for twenty seconds. Pete talking. David does not stop. She says I do in October with David three rows back. By spring Pete has both hands on the bump and calls it theirs. She knows whose it is.

-Bred by the Rough Farmhands: A Married Wife's Dirty Secret

Elena bought quiet land and found Jax and Boone in the crop instead: raw, rough, nothing like the gentle husband at the house. A moment in the shack becomes the week she cannot stop repeating. Filled. Claimed. Bred. She goes home and lies.

-Sown by the Groundsmen: A Lady's Rural Breeding

Impotent husband. One discreet heir. Lady Evelyn Montfort takes the problem to the men who work Montfort Grange. Woods. Greenhouse. The lawn under his window. Breakfast, still leaking, while he praises her colour. One heir is never enough.

Three doors. Three country. None of them went home empty.