It’s hard and demanding, his lips pulling at mine, his tongue thrusting deep without invitation.
“Had a long day?” I ask him roughly as I grab him and spin him around.
“Something like that.”
I wrench his shirt out of his dress pants, wanting his hard, muscled core under my touch. I splay my fingers wide across his flexing belly, and cup the back of his neck with my other hand. He stills immediately, my big raging bull.
“Here?”
He nods. “I’ve got lube in my pocket.”
“Gotta be prepared for coffee,” I say, a harsh laugh marking the end of my snarky statement, but he doesn’t care. I think he wants that verbal sparring just as much as the physical one. He has to be on and polite all day long.
Nice to come home and have someone to be a dick to. Give a dick to, too.
But we haven’t fucked yet, and his foyer isn’t the place for it. I’m not so in denial that I don’t know that’s going to be full of fucking feels for me after all this time.
I’ll want to hold him afterward, too.
But lube is good for other things. I take the single use packet from him after I strip off my t-shirt.
I rip it open and squeeze some onto my fingers as I watch him undo his shirt buttons.
“All the way off,” I growl when he lets the shirt just hang open. That’s hot as hell, but I want bare flesh. Big arms, working shoulders I can sink my teeth into. “And then get my jeans open.”
He tugs me closer, unzipping me first, then his dress pants. I’m not wearing anything under my jeans, and he groans as the wet tip of my dick slaps against his hand. He circles my straining head with his thumb, then lifts his hand and sucks it off.
Fuck.
I reach between us and circle our cocks with my slicked-up hand. We both hiss at the first slide of skin against skin. I lean my forehead against his, and he wraps his arms around me, his hands low on my waist, his biceps straining as he frames our bodies. Our secret, thrusting, furtive sex inside his front door.
But the restlessness I’ve felt all week has vanished, and I’m full of a giddy warmth. Our hard breaths, the furrow of his brow as he tosses his head back, the scent of lube and pre-come rising between us…it’s hot as hell, and right as fuck.
I say his name, a whispered groan, and he urges me closer. “Come here,” he breathes.
I slam into him, our cocks pinned between our bodies, and the slide turns into a grind as we kiss, hard and wet. A kiss that tears at any last pretence of civility as we thrust and rock together.
His hips grind up against mine, and I push back with equal force. I want him to come hard and fast. I want him to paint me with his pent-up need that only I can fix. I’ll rub it into my skin as a badge of honour.
He wraps his long, solid fingers around the back of my neck and holds on tight. The harder he grips, the closer I know he is, and the dirtier I get. I slide my hands around from his hips so I can cup his ass. He flexes hard against my invading touch, but I’m having none of it. That tight trench, that smooth pucker.
Mine. All fucking mine.
And when I stroke over his tight hole, he shoots hard, like a fountain in fucking Vegas.
My big, sexy brute.
I slam him back against the wall and reach between us, grabbing his firehose of a cock, trapping it against mine. I point them both to my belly as my own orgasm rips up from my balls.
He lets out a long, satisfied sigh once I let him go. “I needed that.”
“I could tell. Want to talk about it?”
He hesitates, then tips his head toward the kitchen. “Yeah. Coffee?”
I grin and wave at my come covered belly. “Sure. Let me just clean up first.”
The next morning, as I’m dragging my tired-ass body out of bed before dawn because I stayed at Lachlan’s until almost midnight, the pieces of the puzzle finally click into place and I realize what the problem is.
Even though I see them every day, I think I miss Lachlan and Beth. I miss them together. I saw Lachlan last night, and Beth is talking about the weekend…and yet, that’s what the weird feeling in my chest is.
Longing.
Fuck me.
I try to tell myself I’m just missing them. No longing. No big feelings. Because I see them behind masks of propriety that make me want to strip them bare. Because I gorged myself on them, naked and honest, for four days straight over the long weekend.
Because as the seconds tick by, minutes passing and turning into days, I can see last weekend better than when we were in it, and it was perfect.
Obviously, one misses perfection. That’s not a big deal.
Perfection is fleeting, in that desperate, holy fuck kind of way that makes you think all the stars have aligned and you’re having a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Yeah, we’d talked about it happening again, but there was a solid part of me that wasn’t sure that wasn’t wishful thinking. That we’d slide back into the love triangle thing again, instead of the unexpectedly right triad.
So I miss them—us—together.
And so I’m lying in bed, lazily stroking another pile-of-bodies-inspired hard-on.
What I need to do is to stop moping, and lock down a plan if I want to quell the nerves inside me.
I don’t like being nervous about a relationship.
I like to be in control, and that usually means clear definition of what a thing is—and isn’t—before we get too deep.
That didn’t happen this time.
It didn’t happen the first time with Lachlan, either.
But that was foolishness I won’t repeat. No falling in love this time. I’ve learned my lesson.
29
Lachlan
Thursday comes and goes. Gavin snaps at a reporter in a scrum when he’s asked about the clean-up in Beaumont. It’s going slowly and there’s some fuckery going on between the municipal, provincial, and federal levels of government. But the meat of his response—that it’s an exceptional tragedy which requires an exceptional response, and “good enough” is, in fact, not—gets lost and what gets looped all day on the news is his flash of anger instead.
By the end of the day, he’s laid down the law—tomorrow he’s going to the Beaumont Elementary School and he’s going to be fucking helpful.
I’m not sure it’s going to go like that at all, but we pull together a functional travel plan. We’ll drive, because it’s only two hours away, and we can bring our own security so we aren’t a drag on local resources. I send an advance party with a two-fold assignment: find a place for the prime minister to meet with displaced residents and hear directly from them what they need in the next seventy-two hours; and report back the early intel on that question so he can bring something with him.
It’s a decent plan.
It gets derailed before it can even get off the ground by three drunk, entitled young bucks in suits who decide to piss their frustration with the government literally onto the Parliament buildings.
So Friday begins a few hours after Thursday ends. I’m dragged out of bed at three in the morning with an apologetic call from Corinne Smith, my former partner at RCMP HQ—and our hockey team’s goalie, when we actually get a chance to play. The Ottawa police made the decision to hand the suspects over to us, and she’s giving me the heads up. One of the guys under arrest is too stupid to shut up about how much he hates Gavin, and it starts to sound like he’s threatening the prime minister.
That jams up my plans to accompany the prime minister’s convoy today, so on my way in to question the drunken idiots, I wake some people up.
“What’s up?” Hugh answers the phone with gruff sleep dripping off his greeting. I shouldn’t be thinking about how good his voice sounds or how much I’d like to have woken him up by rolling over instead of hitting the call button.
I fill him in. “I need you to shift over to the PM’s detail this morning.”
“On it.”
I hesitate. So much I want t
o say, but it’s easier to keep it professional in moments like this. “Thanks.”
There’s a beat on his end, too. “Yeah, of course. Later.”
At the RCMP headquarters, I head to the interview rooms and talk to Corinne first. She apologizes for the early morning wake-up, but I agree with her that it’s better to be safe than sorry.
And once I get into the first interview room, I realize two things pretty quickly.
One, these jackasses are no threat to national security.
But two, I don’t give a fuck, because they’re jackasses who think the world should be served to them on a platter.
So if they need to think they’re being investigated as national security threats to make them quake with fear…that’s just fine with me.
The guy I talk to first is the one the investigator feels was more of a follower. Weak, and easily flippable, although I’m not in the mood to give him that carrot just yet because I don’t like the garbage spewing out of his mouth. I don’t spend much time with him before I leave him to sweat and move on to the next.
Craig, douchebag number two’s name is, and he’s pissed.
When I walk in, his face shifts into forced politeness, but it takes effort on his part. “Bro,” he says. “I have rights. I’ve been waiting forever to call my lawyer.”
Bro.
I grab the chair across from him and spin it around so I can straddle it. The stupidest shit disarms idiots. “The way I understand it, you’ve all had a chance to make a call and they’re on their way in.”
“That bit—the other cop won’t let me talk to my attorney.”
“It’s four in the morning, man.” I give him an easy shrug and ignore the fact he was about to call Corinne a bitch. Rising to that bait wouldn’t get me anywhere. “It takes some time for people to put on pants. But I didn’t see any lawyers on my way through the building. Although maybe this is good for us. We can clear this up before they come in and make you stay quiet.”
“Make me?”
“You don’t want to be turned into a free speech martyr, do you? Have this come back on you at work?” There’s a fine line here. I can’t threaten him, even though I want to. “The investigation into your threats is going to take some time. Better for you if it stays quiet.”
“I didn’t make any threats.”
“You said…” I flip open the folder Corinne gave me. “Someone needs to teach that treehugger a lesson he won’t forget.”
“That was a joke.”
“Do I look like I’m laughing?”
He scowls and slumps lower in his chair.
“I’m going to talk to your friend next door. Think about what kind of attitude you want me to ask your boss about when I go in and tell them you’re not going to be coming to work today.”
“We just—”
I stand up. “We take threats seriously. Excuse me.”
The third guy is still too drunk to talk. I don’t think this is going to court in a serious way, but just in case it did, I wouldn’t want to risk questioning someone whose words might get tossed.
Instead, I head to the break room and grab a cup of coffee from the machine. It’s hot, and that’s all that I can say about it.
Corinne finds me there and jerks her head back to the interview rooms. “Lawyers have arrived.”
“Good.” I drain my cup and toss it into the recycling bin. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
The defense attorneys they’ve hired aren’t that familiar to me. In the year that I’ve been at Parliament Hill, I’ve only had to come down and do this twice. But one of them recognizes me, and knows that I’m the PM’s chief of security.
It helps if they know we’re taking this seriously.
“What do you want here, Ross? You don’t really think this is a security risk, do you?”
I give the lawyer a bland shrug. “I don’t presume to know anything more than what the evidence tells me. Your client’s words were inflammatory and dangerous. So far I’ve heard a whole lot of excuses and not a lot of self-reflection or comprehension of the severity—”
“Okay. Give us twenty minutes to talk in private.”
“Sure. We’ll use that time to draft warrant requests for their social media accounts.”
Nineteen minutes later, we’ve got carefully coached apologies and a plan to get them back to the city cops, who will process them for indecent acts.
“You understand we’ll still be monitoring your behaviour going forward? We’re not going to close this case until we’re confident it was a one-off nuisance event.”
We get a round of chagrined nods.
Corinne’s mouth is twitching as we walk back to her desk.
“What?”
“I was expecting you to be harder on them.”
“Spending the day shitting themselves that their bosses will find out they almost were arrested for uttering threats is punishment enough. Ideally, I’d like them to learn something from this.”
“You think that’s going to happen?”
I shake my head. “Probably not. But I don’t want to harden their hatred for the prime minister, either.”
“You’ve gotten soft up on the Hill.” But she winks, softening what otherwise would be a stinging indictment.
I laugh. “If they were an actual threat, I wouldn’t have hesitated to take them down, don’t worry.”
“I wasn’t that concerned. Sorry to drag you out of bed.”
“Nope. That’s my job.”
My phone is full of messages when I hit the parking lot, so I head straight to the Hill. The convoy is underway, and the advance team has reported in. The town is being inundated with stuff—donations of clothing, toys, food that will likely spoil, unfortunately. What they need is shelter.
Gavin’s chief of staff, Stew, is waiting for me when I get back to the office. He waves me into the conference room. “Looks like we’ve got a good plan,” he says. “The army’s got mod tents that aren’t bad. Big enough for a family of eight. No privacy, but spacious and heavy duty.”
I nod. “Yeah. I’ve seen those on bases.”
He introduces me to a team from the Department of National Defence, who go over the rapid deployment option Gavin can offer the town today, so people can move out of the school gymnasium.
It shouldn’t have taken four days, but it’s a solid plan, and the prime minister will like it.
I stop in at Beth’s desk to say good morning when the meeting breaks up.
“I heard you didn’t get much sleep last night,” she says quietly.
I shrug. “Happens sometimes.”
“Will you want to hit the hay early tonight?” She asks it innocently, but the small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth is asking a lot more. Are we still on for the weekend?
“I’ll be fine,” I say under my breath. “I’ll catch a second wind. Hugh should be back in time for dinner. We can cook at my place.”
“Sounds perfect.”
I steal one of her pencils and wave it goodbye at her before I take my leave.
Downstairs in my office, I turn on the news and watch my team do their job. The coverage is more glowing than earlier in the week, and Gavin—as he always does—comes off as genuinely concerned about the situation on the ground, and the long-term impact it will have on the residents of Beaumont.
He’s got his jacket off and his shirt sleeves rolled up, and the cameras catch part of a conversation he has with a teary single mother. She leans into his side as he gravely tells her he’ll make sure the insurance companies live up to their obligations.
And just like that, he’s taken back the news cycle.
After lunch, I get a visitor. Ellie knocks on the door to my office, then pokes her head in when it swings open a bit.
“Is this a good time?”
I wave her in. I don’t miss that she’s got one of Beth’s purple file folders in her hand. “Wedding stuff?”
She nods. “I’ve got the final guest RSVPs he
re. Beth is going to email them to you, but I had a couple of notes you should be aware of…”
On her side, she has an uncle who had a bad run-in with the RCMP as a teenager, and forty years hasn’t tempered his dislike for us. That makes me laugh. Sure, we can handle some dirty looks.
The other notes were just as easily dealt with. This wedding coordinator gig has proven easier than I expected. “You getting excited?”
She beams. “Yes. And thank you for your email outlining the precautions about paparazzi. That made me feel a lot better.”
“Any time.”
We spend another twenty minutes going over the last of the to-do list items. It’s pretty short now, but all of that added work pushes my day longer than I would have liked. When I look up from lunch, I realize it’s already four in the afternoon.
Even though my day started thirteen hours ago, I want tonight to be good. I swear under my breath. I haven’t been shopping all week, and I still have at least an hour or two of work to do.
I grab my keys and jog upstairs. Gavin should be back soon, but right now the office is quiet. Beth’s not at her desk, but I hear the photocopier working in the room around the corner, so I look for her there.
She’s wearing a pencil skirt today and a buttoned-down blouse. The skirt is dark grey and the blouse is light blue. It’s an entirely appropriate work outfit, so I blame my lack of sleep for immediately jumping to a filthy librarian fantasy as she leans over to pick up her papers from the side basket.
I shake my head to clear the lusty haze, then clear my throat to get her attention. “Hey.”
She twists around and gives me a warm smile. “Hey.”
A now-familiar spark leaps between us. I want to kiss her so much it hurts. I glance at her mouth and she presses her lips together. No, I know we can’t, even before I drag my gaze back up to her sparkling eyes. “Tonight,” I promise instead.
She presses her fingertips to her lips. “Definitely.”
My heart hammers in my chest. “Uh…” I tighten my hand into a fist, and the sharp edges of my keys cut into my palm. Right. I hold them out. “I need to do some shopping for dinner. Feel free to let yourself in.”
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