Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Table of Contents
Choice of Cages
Copyright & Credits
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
About the Authors
Other Books by these Authors
Copyright & Credits
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Choice of Cages
A Contemporary BDSM Gay Romance
by
Parker Avrile & Alec Stark
►▼◄
Thorne is a gifted cat burglar who relieves the wealthy of their fine gems and paintings.
Lane is the idealistic prosecutor who'll do almost anything to keep from sending Thorne to prison.
When Thorne falls into the perfect trap, Lane offers to handle Thorne's punishment himself. Thorne suspects Lane intends to handle a lot more than that...
A gay BDSM romance between two men on opposite sides of the law.
Copyright & Credits
All Rights Reserved
Text & Cover Design © 2017 Paris April Press
Editing by Ellison Dream
Shirtless Model © artofphoto via Can Stock Photo
Suited Model © prometeus via Can Stock Photo
Prison Photo © Taken via Pixabay under a CCO license
Except for brief passages quoted for reviews and/or recommendations in magazine, radio, or blog posts, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to anyone, any time, or any place is not intended and is merely coincidental. The cover model appears for illustration purposes only and has no relationship to any events in this story. Brief mentions of real persons, places, or products are used fictitiously and in accordance with fair use. All trademarks remain the properties of their owners.
Parker Avrile offers a free spicy bondage & role-playing story called, “The Cabin,” to new members of the Parker Avrile Reader's Group. Sign up right here for your chance to read free stories and get the latest information on our sales and new releases.
Chapter One
LANE
“Thorne,” I said. “I'm sorry to see you under these circumstances.”
“Are you?” He had a direct gaze, proud and fearless. Unblinking. You'd wait a long time if you were waiting for him to blink. There were flecks of gold in his deep brown eyes, flecks I'd noticed before. It wasn't the first time I found myself in a staredown with Thorne Raynaud.
Twenty years ago, at age thirteen, I'd seen those same dark eyes in the face of a merlin unbowed. Fierce, proud, unblinking. Her talons curled around my gloved arm, every toe an unsheathed dagger.
She didn't blink, but neither did I.
You won't defy me, I thought then. The same thing I was thinking now.
“It isn't defiance,” the falconer said. “It's pride. A man can't break her will. He can only prove himself worthy to be her master or unworthy. Her choice. Her decision.”
Thorne too was proud. Thorne too would have to make a decision.
The only light was a harsh blue fluorescent curlicue in a cage far overhead. Located on the opposite side of the steel bars, it cast a sinister stripe of shadows on his face. His spine was straight and his chin lifted, but his defiant posture couldn't erase the facts. He stood before me dressed in a cheap jumpsuit faded and torn from endless laundering, his wrists cuffed in stainless steel at the small of his back.
“Are you really sorry? Or is this what you wanted all along?” He glanced around the claustrophobic walls of the cramped cell.
“I warned you,” I said. Hell, everyone had warned him. The judge, the chief of police, his parents. “How could you think anybody would want this for you?”
He took a step closer, and a prickle of awareness sent a tingle down my spine. The deputy had locked us in and walked outside, leaving us utterly alone in a cell that was little more than a steel box in the abandoned wing of the sheriff's complex. When I gave the order, the deputy lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug, his way of registering disapproval. Nobody was going to tell the district attorney of Angelina Parish how to run his interrogation, but he knew it wasn't standard operating procedure to bring anyone here.
The deputy and I were sworn to uphold the law, but sometimes a rural prosecutor creates his own law. You tell yourself you'll never cross that line. Until you do.
“I think you like seeing me in a cage.” Thorne's voice held a dare. “In handcuffs. You get some kind of sick pleasure out of that.” Daring me to admit it or daring me to deny it?
We were face to face, virtually eyeball to eyeball. The jumpsuit was open, unbuttoned to his navel. No doubt he'd made some smartass comment before he'd even finished pulling it on, and they'd retaliated by cuffing his wrists behind his back before he was ready.
Yes, that was Thorne all over. He somehow always found a way to make things harder on himself.
I thought again of that merlin from all those years ago. She was small, but she was still a falcon, and I couldn't stop thinking of the way she flew from my glove—an arrow streaking across the field and gone and back again. My summer camp buddy meant to film the hunt but it was over before he could figure out where to point the lens. Twenty years ago was an eternity in camera technology but even today he'd have trouble capturing that streak on video.
Thorne wouldn't be flying. Not today. Not anytime soon.
There was no reason for the cuffs, not when he was already in a cell, and I made a mental note to speak to someone about it.
Soon. Soon but not now.
“You can't possibly believe I take any pleasure in seeing you like this. You always knew it would end here if you didn't change your game.” I was thirty-three to his twenty-two, hardly any huge gap in age, but I felt much older. “I gave you a thousand chances.”
“Now you can give me a thousand and one.” His gaze remained level, his tone cocky. He wore a drop or two of some expensive men's cologne I'd only smelled on cards in glossy magazines with names like Worth and Wealth.
This close, he wouldn't see my nostrils flaring to inhale more of that fragrance and the musk of the man behind it. This close, all we saw of each other were the eyes.
Too close. Focus. Take control.
“You were caught red-handed. You leave us with no options but to prosecute.”
“I was deceived. I was led to believe the alarm was disengaged. A clear case of entrapment.”
Eyeball to eyeball. Toe to toe. Very little room in those cramped cells, one of the reasons the 1880s-era jail had been condemned some years ago. Oddly, even though I was the one who held all the power, it was my back against the cold bars of the cage's outer wall.
A merlin weighing half a pound may consider herself the equal of a man weighing two hundred. So it was with Thorne. He was a cuffed prisoner in a jumpsuit, and yet he carried himself with a compelling sense of his own worth.
I liked his spirit, but I couldn't, wouldn't back down. I stepped away from the bars, which shoved my body forward against his, and now he was the one forced to step back. His calves found the iron bench of the old jail cot, and he sat hard and suddenly.
I made a point of towering over him. Of looking down as I spoke. “You must realize that isn't a particularly compelling excuse for being found inside the Angelina Parish Art Museum with a Clementine Hunter in your backpack.”
Thorne shrugged. A beautiful shrug from beautiful shoulders. His driver's license described him as five feet eleven, one-seventy, brown hair, brown eyes. Never had a state document so poorly captured the actual physical presence of a man. Trim waist, defined arms, long legs... None of that showed in the over-exposed official photograph.
“I don't think you understand how much trouble you're in.”
He still looked directly into my eyes, but his unblinking gaze wasn't as powerful from a sitting position. “Get these fucking cuffs off me, and then we'll see who's in trouble.” The first hint of bluster, which was the first hint of weakness.
“I can't do that.”
“We both know you can. We both know who my father is, and we both know you're going to let me go after you've put a sufficiently good scare into me, so why don't we cut to the chase and get a move on? I have a date in New Orleans tonight.” A three-hour drive.
“I'm afraid you're going to have to miss your date.”
“You're really starting to annoy me, Mr. Lacompte.” He stood up and stepped forward again in one smooth motion, graceful despite the cuffs. There was no place for me to back up, and anyway I wasn't going to. He bumped himself boldly into me. “Is that a handgun, or are you just glad to see me?”
I wasn't going to dignify that with an answer. For all his wealth and family power, Thorne was still only twenty-two.
Our bodies much too close. The intoxicating scent of him in my nostrils.
No, I didn't move. If anyone was going to back down, it needed to be Thorne.
So close we could feel each other's hearts beating. So close we could feel the swell of those alleged handguns. He meant to tease me, to use his looks to get what he wanted the way he'd always used those looks to get what he wanted, but I wasn't the only one being frustrated here.
It was an unspoken victory for my side, and we both knew it.
I didn't need to speak, to lecture, to scold. I was silent, letting the situation speak for itself.
At last, he swallowed, his Adam's apple wobbling in his long smooth throat. “It's time to let me out of these cuffs. You've made your point. I've been a very bad boy.”
“It isn't going to be that easy. It isn't up to me this time.”
“It's always up to you.”
“No, not this time it isn't up to me.”
More of the weighted silence. He didn't want to beg, but I wasn't going to fill that silence.
Somewhere, off in the distance, a siren warbled. A black-and-white going out to a scene. The real police station wasn't so very far away.
“You're the prosecutor,” Thorne said. “You make the decisions. Don't play me now, Mr. Lacompte. You can't scare me with your bullshit.”
“You've taken advantage of my good nature time after time,” I said.
I've always been troubled by the inability of the system to protect gay prisoners. Most decent people in the criminal justice system are. To deprive a proud man of his freedom should be enough of a punishment. Beatings, rape, torture... none of that should be happening in our prison system, but we all know it does. I don't prosecute cases against gay defendants without a lot of thought.
Thorne knew that. Hell, he'd taken advantage of it. Time after time after time.
“We both know you're too in love with this pretty face to send me up the river.”
The love crap was something else I wasn't going to dignify with an answer. People make jokes about attorneys who use the “too pretty for prison” argument but, under our current system, there's actually something to it. You don't throw a cockapoo and a pit bull in a dogfighting pit and call it a fair fight.
Hell, you don't even throw two pit bulls in a dogfighting pit and call it a decent society.
Something's wrong with the way we do things, and I was just one man trying to make changes. Unfortunately, my past leniency with Thorne had come back to haunt me, because it had encouraged him to test my limits.
Exasperated, I shook my head. “It's bad enough that you stole the painting but did you really have to get in a fistfight with Ray Shelvin?”
“Dude's a douche. There was no fistfight. My elbow accidentally made contact with his belly when he tried to grab my ass.”
I actually kind of believed Thorne. Shelvin outweighed him by a hundred pounds, and Thorne wasn't the kind of guy who got involved in fisticuffs in the first place. Unlike ninety-nine percent of career thieves in Louisiana, he didn't bring a weapon along. He was an old-fashioned cat burglar. In and out. Nobody gets confronted, nobody gets hurt except the insurance company.
But something had gone wrong, an alarm that was supposed to be off called the cops, and Shelvin had somehow ended up on his fat ass. Assault on a police officer, Shelvin called it in the report.
“This is unproductive,” I said. “The painting was not removed from the museum, and I have no intention of wasting the taxpayer's money by dragging you into court on a theft charge, but Shelvin isn't backing down on this.”
“I have the right to an attorney.”
“You can exercise your right to an attorney at any time, and she's going to advise you not to say another word to me. Is that how you want your future to go?”
Another long heartbeat. We both knew if we went the official route, he'd be getting booked into the parish jail.
“So here's the problem. If this case gets in front of a jury, and they find you guilty, then the judge who sentences you is not going to be happy with you, and he sure the hell isn't going to be happy with me, and your father isn't going to be happy with any of us, because it's going to be a minimum of a year. There's voters to think of. They have expectations.”
Thorne unblinking. Unafraid. For now. In prison, how long could it be until those bold eyes were turned into sneaking ones always on the hyper-alert? “You're not going to do that to me.”
“It won't be my decision,” I said. “It will be yours.”
Still unblinking.
“There's an alternative prison system. A private one. I can arrange for your transfer. That's the best I can do.”
“That's bullshit. I'm not going into any prison system. Public or private.”
“You're delusional, Thorne. All you have now is a choice of cages.”
“I don't believe you. You're bluffing.”
Because it was the abandoned wing, because it was the condemned jail instead of the new jail, because I hadn't gone through search before I stepped into this cell, I had my phone in my pocket. It wasn't quite legal to record our conversation, but I'd had the voice recorder turned on anyway. Now I pulled it out in the open and texted the deputy.
“I'm sorry, Thorne,” I said. “We'll talk again tomorrow.”
Chapter Two
THORNE
The esteemed district attorney of Angelina Parish had crossed the brid
ge to the dark side. Everybody involved knew Lane Lacompte didn't have the right to take me here. The deputy who held my elbow had a way of looking everywhere except at the stripes of tape.
The yellow tape: Crime Scene. Do Not Cross.
The red tape: Danger. Condemned. Do Not Enter.
The old jail smelled of black mold, damp, and misery. The cells were so small a man couldn't extend his arms without touching the walls. A historical building, some said. The tourist commission kept making noises about having it turned into a museum, probably the only reason it hadn't already been knocked down. You had to wonder why people would want to remember that kind of history.
I knew my rights, but I didn't put up a fuss. I wanted to see where Lane was going with this. Believe you me, I was in no hurry to be booked into the real parish jail.
The tiny cells were metal boxes, suggesting there was a period when the jail was crumbling but still held prisoners who might dig their way out of the rotten wood. The deputy locked Lane and me inside for our little chat, and the heat between us insisted I couldn't be imagining what he felt about me. Still, when I stepped too close, he pushed me down on the cot. Ouch. For a moment, I sat looking up at him. Wondering why fate put us on opposite sides like this.
He was a big guy. Six two or thereabouts. I could have looked up the statistics online if the arresting cops hadn't taken my phone, because Lane was a former college football player. A lot of those guys go to fat in their thirties, but he was rock hard, which meant he still worked out. If you saw him as a stranger in a bar, you'd think he was a soldier, rather than a lawyer.
Hot, sure. Smoking hot.
I used to think it was my good luck the district attorney was gay. Oh, he wasn't out, not in this parish, but I could tell. He didn't want to put me away, and I took advantage of that. There were some old oil families in this parish. Rice and sugar too. Big money but quiet money. Valuable art, antiques, even gemstones. It was a safe place. Tough on crime. A territory other professional thieves avoided.
A highly profitable territory I'd staked out for my own.
Until now.
The deputy came back to turn an old-fashioned metal key in the rusty lock. The key stuck for a moment, and he had to jiggle it, a dent of frustration forming between his eyes. The new jail had the latest electronic locks complete with slots for key cards and buttons for secret codes. There was a hospital-grade generator to make sure the power to those locks never went out. I suspected I could find a hack to open those doors.
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