The Cowboy's Secret

by Riley Knight

  “Look at me.”

  At first, Malcolm wasn’t sure he had heard the words at all, which had been said in a very quiet, intense tone of voice. But when Kyle didn’t go back to sucking him, when his finger stayed buried only that little bit inside of him but no more, Malcolm knew that he had heard what he had heard. He whimpered softly, not sure that he was strong enough to look into Kyle’s eyes. Or maybe Kyle would be able to read Malcolm’s feelings in his gaze. Malcolm had been told before, by people who knew him very well, that he might seem cold and emotionless on the surface but anyone looking into his eyes would be able to tell.

  Slowly, reluctantly, he did let his eyelids part and looked down into the wide, round, beautiful dark eyes of this man who had come to mean too much to him. Far, far too much.

  And it was that intimate connection that made Malcolm shoot off before Kyle even had a chance to get his lips back around his cock. He was less than an inch away when it happened, and Malcolm embarrassed himself forever, coming like he was a teenager again, no control at all.

  Humiliated, Malcolm watched as his own dick twitched, pointed directly at Kyle’s sweet, soft pink lips. Pearly white fluid spurted out of him and onto Kyle’s lips, some of it even going between them since Kyle had been prepared to start sucking him again.

  Watching his release paint Kyle’s lips and chin was, yes, intensely embarrassing. He had shot off like some idiot kid. But it was also deeply arousing like he was putting a claim on Kyle. It wasn’t true, and it was a dangerous illusion, but he couldn’t say that it wasn’t there, just for a split second.

  Then, as he watched, stunned and amazed by what his own treacherous body had done, Kyle’s pink tongue darted up and licked up Malcolm’s come. Despite his recent orgasm, despite how sensitive he still was, his dick twitched at the sight. He hadn’t even had a chance to soften much, and instantly, far faster than he had ever experienced before, he was ready to go again.

  “Do you have condoms?”

  Malcolm’s voice was a bit shaky, but he got the words out, and he was almost relieved when he saw Kyle shake his head. Kyle hadn’t brought condoms, although Malcolm knew that safe sex was important to him. Which meant, he thought, that Kyle wasn’t sleeping with other people. Or was that just what he wished it meant?

  “Okay. Wait here. Don’t move,” Malcolm demanded. He shimmied out from under Kyle, snagged his jeans off of the floor and stumbled his way into them, then sprinted out of the room to his own, glad that he had a box of condoms in his bedside table, just in case. He grabbed them, and a tube of lube just for good measure, then rushed back just as quickly. He was in good shape, but he still arrived out of breath and panting, that was how fast he had gone.

  Kyle was still there, sitting on the bed, his cock swollen with obvious need that made Malcolm feel better about the fact that he still needed this man as badly as he did. He tossed the supplies on Kyle’s bedside table, shucked off his jeans and then pretty much launched himself onto the smaller man, shamelessly pinning him down with his own body as he nuzzled at his neck and shoulders and then their lips found each other as they lay pressed against each other along the whole length of their bodies.

  Kyle tasted of Malcolm’s release, but that didn’t bother him as much as he might have thought. Actually, he sort of liked it, it was a reminder of what Kyle had done to him, how insane he had driven Malcolm. He liked, too, pinning Kyle down, hearing the little gasps and moans that came from his lips as they rubbed against each other.

  He had been so sure that he would never see real desire from Kyle. That Kyle, smooth, sarcastic, cruelly intelligent Kyle, would never really let himself go with Malcolm. But he was finding that he was wrong, it was clear in the way they kissed, in the way that Kyle’s leg came up to press between Malcolm’s and rub against his swollen cock, still exquisitely sensitized from his incredibly intense release before.

  Kyle’s knee parted Malcolm’s legs, and nudged him into place, surprisingly strong for such a small man. Malcolm found himself straddling Kyle’s hips, his ass rubbing right against Kyle’s thick erection, and the very urgency that Kyle felt actually felt sort of reassuring to Malcolm.

  He wasn’t in this crazy, passionate, intense situation on his own. Kyle was there, too, and Kyle wanted Malcolm, it was clear, just as much as Malcolm wanted him.

  Reaching over, Malcolm pulled a condom out of the box and tore open the foil. He shifted just enough to free Kyle’s cock, then rolled the sheath down over it. He didn’t mean for it to be more than functional, but his fingers did caress over the rigid length, and he wasn’t exactly heartbroken when he saw Kyle’s beautiful dick twitch in response.

  It only took a few seconds, but to Malcolm, it felt like too long. He did take the time to drizzle some lube hastily over Kyle’s sheathed cock, just to make things easier on himself, but when that was done, all bets were off.

  Immediately, he straddled Kyle again, and this time, there was no reason at all to hold back. He lined himself up and, even though he had never done this, not in this position, it was like his body knew exactly what to do simply based off of instinct. He drove himself down onto Kyle, utterly merciless with himself, his back arched and a cry of pleasure on his lips as he completely engulfed Kyle inside of himself.

  Part of him had thought that there was no way that it would be as good as he remembered it being on their one and only previous time together. Memory was always suspect, not usually completely accurate, and he found that that was true in this case, too. Just not in exactly the way he would have expected.

  It wasn’t as good as he remembered. It was better. Far, far better.

  The position meant that Kyle’s impressive dick was pushed even deeper inside of himself, and it seemed to drive it right against Malcolm’s prostate in a whole new way. Gravity pulled him down, and Malcolm gasped, his back arching, his hips grinding down to try to get Kyle completely buried inside of him even more than he was.

  He wanted that link. He wanted that connection. Damn it, as ridiculous as it was, he wanted to crawl right inside of Kyle and have the two of them become one person. How had it come to this? How had he lost himself so completely to this completely hopeless situation?

  His hands were on Kyle’s chest, and he could feel the other man’s heart beating under his fingertips. It was sappy of him to notice and stupid of him to care when he did notice, but Kyle’s heart, he realized, was pulsing at exactly the same time as his own.

  I love you.

  He didn’t say the words, in fact, he leaned down and clamped his lips onto Kyle’s so that they didn’t have the faintest chance of escaping. They would ruin everything, they would make Kyle run so hard and so fast away from this situation. And Malcolm, through some bizarre twist of fate, found that he wasn’t ready to let go of Kyle yet. Once, it had been nearly all he thought about, getting rid of the man, but not anymore.

  Kyle came first, which made sense since he hadn’t come yet and Malcolm had. For just a moment, Malcolm had the ridiculous desire, something that was so unsafe that he had never even imagined doing it before, to have Kyle take off the condom so that he was filling Malcolm up, linked to him fully and truly with no impediment between them. Bare skin to bare skin, linked in all ways, that was what he wanted and what he knew logically that he could never have.

  Even through the condom, Malcolm could feel it as Kyle twitched and shot his release inside of Malcolm, and that was all he needed to shove him over the edge himself, even with having had an orgasm so recently. Malcolm cried out and his back arched as he rode Kyle, gazing down into those gorgeous brown eyes and trying to convince himself that he didn’t see the affection in them that he knew that he did.

  It was bad enough that he had these feelings for Kyle, but he could have resisted that all on his own. Knowing that Kyle was feeling the same things, being able to see that in his remarkably expressive eyes, but knowing, too, that it didn’t actually change anything between them, that made it that much harder.

&nbs
p; It was all so hopeless, and while Malcolm had always felt that way about his hidden attraction to men, that had never mattered to him as much as this did now.

  FIFTEEN

  The sexual relationship between himself and Malcolm, Kyle was now having to admit to himself, was going to keep on going until Kyle left. It was probably better if he let himself acknowledge that it wasn’t a one-time thing, had never been anything that either of them could resist.

  In a very real way, they had both been doomed from the moment that they laid eyes on each other.

  The plan was clear enough in Kyle’s mind now. He had been struggling before, trying to figure out how he was going to do his job around the intense feelings he was having for Malcolm. Now he knew the answer to that, and it was so simple that it almost hurt.

  He wasn’t. He just wasn’t. He couldn’t do it. He was far too emotionally involved.

  So he would do exactly what he had told Skyler that he would. He would call Wyatt, and he would tell him that he was coming home and that he wasn’t going to be able to make Malcolm sell. If he got a chance, he would even tell him that he didn’t think there was any point in trying to make him do so. His allegiance had changed, and he didn’t even want to try to force it anymore. In a way, it had always seemed wrong to him, and the more he knew the people in this house, the better.

  He intended to do it, too. But after a long morning spent in bed with Malcolm, driving each other crazy over and over despite Kyle’s hangover, it seemed like time just got away from them. He had a nap while Malcolm got some work done, and the next thing he knew, the time had gotten completely away from him, and the light was slanting in through the window with that particularly golden hazy glow that he knew meant it was mid-afternoon, trending steadily down toward evening.

  And noises were coming from downstairs. It was actually the sound of the car driving up that woke him up. His first thought was, of course, that it must be Skyler coming against Kyle’s wishes, and he swore as he jumped out of bed. And he was so disturbed by the thought that he just grabbed the clothes that he had been wearing the night before, which was a sign of how freaked out he was since he didn’t ever do that.

  Pushing his legs hastily into the jeans, he stopped to run his fingers through his hair in a futile attempt to straighten it out. It was a lost cause though, and he gave it up and headed for the stairs, his head pounding dully with the last remnants of his hangover. The sex had helped a lot, but he had still drunk far too much the night before.

  When he got down the stairs, he saw something that he wasn’t used to seeing at this time of the day. Usually, everyone would be out and about, doing their own respective things, but in this situation everyone from Mary Anne all the way up to her mother, Anna, was standing in the front entryway, everyone talking at once. He recognized Derrick, the prodigal son returned from school, but there was another man there that he didn’t recognize.

  Probably the biggest man he had ever seen, and that was saying something because Malcolm wasn’t exactly a shrimp and even Derrick might be more slender, but he was very tall. But this man was broad, about the same height at a couple of inches over six feet as Malcolm was, but built like a brick wall. How was it even legal to have shoulders that broad, or arms that looked like he could crack walnuts just by flexing?

  Obviously this man was not Skyler, who probably weighed about a third of what this guy did.

  “Oh. Kyle. Hey.” Malcolm gave him a secret little smile, one which Kyle was pretty sure he was the only one to notice, which was nice. An acknowledgment of something which would never get more than that, not in public, anyway.

  “Kyle? Who the hell is Kyle?” the newcomer demanded, and Kyle looked up into a set of brilliant, but dark, blue eyes. Logan had blue eyes, too, but these eyes were a different shade and filled with secrets, so it seemed to Kyle. This man had been through some things. He could tell that just by looking at him.

  “That’s complicated,” Malcolm commented, and that did get a few surprised looks from the rest of the people because Malcolm had no reason not to tell this man exactly who Kyle was. But it seemed that Malcolm couldn’t make himself be quite as acerbic as he had before. Which, Kyle reminded himself firmly, meant nothing.

  “Kyle Mercer,” he introduced, trying not to be intimidated by someone who towered over him and could probably pick him up with one arm. Without even particularly trying. He offered his hand, preparing himself to have it squeezed half off.

  “Craig Hart.” Craig accepted Kyle’s hand and shook it, but he was far more gentle than Kyle would have imagined, despite his craggy features and his brutally short hair and his penetrating royal blue eyes. He shook firmly, but he didn’t try to squish Kyle’s fingers.

  “Hart. You’re the last Hart brother,” Kyle replied, and he was rewarded with a surprisingly beautiful grin from the other man. Clearly, he’d guessed correctly, and that was strange because he had never thought to meet either of Malcolm’s brothers. From what he had understood, he shouldn’t have to. He should have been done with his job so quickly that it never even came up.

  “Yeah, check out the brain on you,” Craig teased, and Kyle would have bristled if most people spoke like that to him, but for whatever reason, he found that he didn’t mind when this guy did it. Craig had come off pretty solemn and serious in the first few seconds of knowing him, but the moment he smiled it was like the sun came out from behind the clouds.

  It had nothing on Malcolm’s smile, though, as rare as it was. Craig was handsome, yes, there could be no doubt about that, and he was exactly Kyle’s type. He wasn’t even going to try to deny that anymore, not when he was finally, after so many years, coming to accept that he was not the straight man that everyone around him would probably want him to be.

  But Craig had nothing on Malcolm. Kyle might be, and yes, he was still barely whispering this to himself, but he might be gay or close to it, but it wasn’t just any gorgeous man who could turn his head. Logan hadn’t been able to, and neither had Craig or even Derrick. There was exactly one handsome cowboy in the whole world that he was interested in.

  “Well, good,” Malcolm said suddenly, and there was an edge of sharp, wicked steel in his voice that had Kyle immediately looking away from Craig. “You’re all here now. Kyle, you should get along great with my brothers. You’ll probably want to talk to try to figure out how you’re going to get me to sell the goddamned ranch.”

  Before Kyle could fully process that, Malcolm had turned and stormed away. Logan shot Kyle a shrug, gave Derrick a deeply thoughtful look, and then walked after his best friend deeper into the house.

  And that was when Kyle really, truly realized that he had fucked up. He had thought that the most important thing would be to talk to his boss first, but events had a way of getting out of his control around here. Not something he was ever a fan of. He should have told Malcolm because now Malcolm really thought that Kyle was going to plot with Malcolm’s brothers, the other Hart boys, to take away the one thing that Kyle knew meant the most to Malcolm. To the man that Kyle had fallen in love with.

  “What did he mean by that?” Derrick asked, and Kyle was struck by the restless intelligence showing in Derrick’s eyes. This wasn’t a man who missed a lot, that much was apparent right off the bat, and that only became truer the longer Kyle was around him.

  “You know why I’m here,” Kyle replied slowly, every word coming out like it weighed about a ton, like his mouth could barely handle it. He couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from the direction that Malcolm had gone, up the stairs and into the main part of the house. Away from him.

  Malcolm had been reminded why Kyle was a bad person for him to be with, but Malcolm didn’t know everything. Would he ever give Kyle the chance to explain? Or had he just lost the only person he had ever met who, as sappy as it sounded, made his heart sing? Made him feel like there could be more to life than booze and work and money?

  “I don’t.” Craig’s voice was plaintive, and Kyle shook his
head but couldn’t help a slight smile as he turned back to look at the other two, away from the door which had closed, literally but also, he was afraid, figuratively, between himself and Malcolm.

  “I’ll leave you alone, then,” Anna announced, and she slung her arm around the shoulders of her fascinated teenaged daughter, who was looking back and forth between all of them and clearly didn’t appreciate being pulled away. But she was a good girl and she went along with her mother without so much as a whine of protestation.

  Kyle could relate. He had always been more interested in what his parents thought of him than in getting his own way. Which made him wonder, just for a moment, who he would be, what he would be doing if he hadn’t been so afraid? He had never wanted to think about it like that before, but it was legitimate. His parents loved him that he knew and had always known, but what he didn’t know was if they would love him if he didn’t do what they wanted.

  But his brain was skipping all over the place. It was probably a sort of panic mode, spurred on by Malcolm’s dramatic departure. Kyle pulled himself together and took a deep breath, looking at the two men who were so closely related to the man that Kyle was falling for. They both looked intensely confused, and while part of him wanted to charge off after Malcolm and demand that he listen, that was probably not going to be useful right now.

  “Let’s go talk outside,” Kyle suggested because he could take five minutes or so of his life to give them at least some answers. He was pretty sure he caught the two brothers exchanging looks with each other before they followed him out into the late spring afternoon, not too unpleasantly hot because the sun was already drawing down toward the horizon. In the summer, though, Kyle had the idea that this place would be intense for his Seattle born-and-raised body.

  Not that he would still be here by then.

  The important thing now was to focus on this conversation, and mostly, he had to admit, he was killing time before he called his boss to quit. He had never wanted to work for the repulsive Wyatt Hart, but now that antipathy had changed. He couldn’t work for him. He couldn’t make himself do it, and to be honest, he hadn’t even really been trying. Almost from the beginning, he had undermined himself, because he had fallen in love not only with Malcolm but also with the ranch far too quickly.