by Amy Lane
But not this time.
Jackson twisted his fingers hard, nailing Ellery’s prostate. “You’ll lie facedown on the fucking bed—”
“Face up!” His back arched, his cheeks flushed, and he pushed against Jackson’s shoulders with his feet like he meant it and, more importantly, like Jackson could take it.
“Ass hanging off the bed,” Jackson finished, spreading his fingers and teasing Ellery’s banjo string with his tongue.
Ellery spurted precome, sweat popping out on his stomach, his forehead, his thighs with the fight not to come.
“Deal!” he cried. “Lube’s in my suitcase.”
Jackson pulled his fingers out abruptly, hoping the absence would leave Ellery hollow and aching, like it did when he pulled out of Jackson.
Ellery’s suitcase lay on the rack in the closet, and Jackson wiped his hand off on his towel before he rooted through the neatly rolled pairs of boxers and black dress socks. There—a small kit, with lubricant. “And a cock ring and a plug?” Jackson wondered, standing up with the lubricant only.
“Do you think you’re the only one with a hotel room kink?” Ellery asked archly.
He lay on the bed, as ordered, propped on his elbows, his feet braced against the edge, the robe falling off his shoulders and draped under his body. He was flushed pretty much from his toes to his nose, his eyes half-hooded and sultry. Ellery had probably never been a club bunny, never seduced guys for fun, but right now he could make a dead man hard.
Jackson was so damned glad he wasn’t dead.
“These aren’t the toys for a man with a one-night stand,” Jackson noted, striding to the bed while slicking up his own aching erection.
Ellery fell back against the mattress, smiling wickedly. “That right there was for my wild nights alone,” he said, shivering, in anticipation or recollection, Jackson couldn’t tell.
“I’d like to watch you have one of those sometime,” Jackson whispered. He didn’t thrust in right away, because Ellery’s small brown nipples called to him. He settled between Ellery’s thighs, bent his head, and teased.
Ellery groaned and bucked up against him. “Hard and real this time,” he ordered. “God, Jackson—I need real from you.”
Jackson was too aroused to sigh. He grunted and pushed himself up to his knees, hauled at Ellery’s thighs until they were draped over his shoulders, and thrust into Ellery without delay or ceremony.
Ellery sobbed hard, his ass contracting, rippling around Jackson almost immediately.
“You wanted this?” Jackson demanded.
“Yes!”
“Wanted me?”
“Needed, asshole. Fucking needed. Hard—augh! Yes! That!”
Jackson couldn’t hold back—apparently wasn’t supposed to. Ellery didn’t want finesse, didn’t want seduction. Just wanted Jackson, thrusting hard, fast, while Ellery’s hand blurred on his own cock.
“God, what you do to me!” Jackson gasped, closing his eyes against the picture Ellery made, debauched, cock spitting pre, eyes closed, biting his lip as his body rocked with pleasure.
“Please,” Ellery chanted. “Please, please, please, please….”
“Oh!” Oh no! So fast! His skin tingled—everywhere. His swollen groin contracted, his taint, his asshole, his stomach. He roared, trying to stay upright, but Ellery dropped his hips and he slid out.
“Dammit!”
Ellery kept his hips down and spread his thighs. “Down here,” he ordered, shoving a pillow under his lower back and ass. “Balance on your good arm. Closer. Kiss me first.”
Jackson needed back inside him so bad, he’d follow any order. He lowered his head, their chests brushing, and kissed him hard, their tongues meshing, tangling, the momentum in their bodies building again, harder, until Jackson blindly positioned himself and thrust in one more time.
The lube was running thin, and they both moaned slightly with the friction. Jackson scrabbled on the bed by Ellery’s head, looking for the lube. Ellery grabbed his wrist and groaned.
“Hard, fast, dry—fuck me. Now.”
Jackson spurted precome, just enough—it was the only way he could thrust his way in. Ellery moaned, head back, eyes closed, while Jackson pistoned his hips, lost to the rhythm, the dance, the overwhelming hunger that swamped him, drove him again and again into his lover’s body until Ellery spasmed around him, gasping softly, then crying out, his voice pitching at the end as his cock spat come over his own fingers.
Oh! Jackson felt it, every ripple, every muscle in Ellery’s body, clamping around Jackson inside him. Eyes still closed, lips half-parted, Ellery raised his hand to his mouth and licked the white ejaculate from his fingers, and that sent Jackson crashing into orgasm.
He screamed, his body taking over, leaving his will behind, and Ellery arched off the bed, then pulled him down into an embrace while Jackson rutted inside him, spilling hotly into Ellery’s clenching ass.
He moaned then and collapsed against Ellery’s chest. In the aftermath he could hear the faint whirr of the ceiling fan above him. Stealthily his headache threatened to crawl back up his spine.
“God,” he panted, eyes closed because his body was apparently done for the day. “God, you made that hard.”
Ellery’s throaty laughter told Jackson he took that at pun value. “I hope so.”
With a little sigh, Jackson rested his head on Ellery’s shoulder while his cock popped out of Ellery’s ass. “That’s not what I meant.”
Ellery dropped a kiss on his hair, the tenderness at odds with the bossy little shit he’d just been. “I know what you mean. You mean you seduce me and give me the mighty gift of your cock, oh endowed one, and you feel like you’re out of debt.”
Jackson grunted. “That’s not—”
“That’s exactly how you think about it when you do that,” Ellery returned. “And sometimes it’s okay. Sometimes I like it when you woo me like you owe me hearts and flowers, because I fucking like hearts and flowers.”
“But now?” Jackson’s eyes closed. Dammit. They really did have stuff to do, but apparently his head thought he got one more day of naps.
“You owe me staying alive,” Ellery whispered, like this hurt him. “And you owe me acting like you want to live.”
Jackson grunted. “I’m never going to not want this,” he said, raw and wanting this resolved before he fell asleep. “Are you saying your ass is something to live for, Counselor?”
“Damned straight.” Ellery chuckled. He kissed Jackson’s forehead. “C’mon—let’s get you under the covers. I’ll wake you in a couple of hours and you can make your calls.”
It was the promise that Ellery would wake him, wouldn’t leave him out of the important stuff, wouldn’t sideline him when their lives and home were on the line that let him get up, still dripping with sex, and crawl back into bed.
Ellery joined him until he fell asleep, still tapping on his phone.
“’D I say I love you?” Jackson asked before he completely lost consciousness.
“With every touch,” Ellery told him softly. “Love you too.”
JACKSON WOKE up about two hours later, surprised by the quality of the sleep. Ellery had ordered room service while he’d been out, but the roast beef sandwich the night before had been an anomaly—relief, perhaps, about being freed from the hospital. Ellery nagged like a bitter fishwife—but for good reason.
Jackson had lost maybe twenty-five pounds since November.
“Eat,” Ellery muttered without looking up from his computer.
“No,” Jackson said shortly, hauling himself up and blinking into the dimness of the hotel room. The late-afternoon shadows stretched long from the patio, and Jackson tilted his head back for a moment and scented the sea nearby. Ellery—dressed in sweats and a T-shirt, which was probably a good thing because Jackson wanted round two already—looked over his shoulder, dark brows knitted, product-less hair falling forward into his eyes. Jackson loved him best like this, usually curled up on their couch or
sitting at the dinner table with a glass of wine Jackson couldn’t pronounce. He’d taken to buying pinot grigio because it tasted like fruit juice and that was Jackson’s favorite. Jackson would join him in the ritual, wondering why it was at these moments that Ellery looked relaxed and without artifice, but Jackson felt the most vulnerable.
“Please—”
“We can go out for dinner,” Jackson said, smiling a little. “You can order wine.”
Ellery bit his lip and lifted a shoulder. “Only if you eat a slider,” he said. “We can leave in a couple of hours.”
“Okay. Yeah. Let me make my phone call first. And then I need to text Crystal and Jade. Too much shit I left alone. Needs to be done.”
Ellery nodded like he was just going to let it drop, but he wasn’t fooling Jackson in the least. Jackson got out of bed, their sex still on his skin, and walked naked to the bathroom to wash up. When he came back, he put on a brand-new pair of underwear and a clean pair of Ellery’s sweats, since his own had apparently not passed muster to pack. The T-shirt was his, though, a gift from Jade. It read “I am currently unsupervised. I know, it freaks me out too, but the possibilities are endless!”
Jackson found the shirt hilarious, but Ellery had just narrowed his eyes and shaken his head. Well, they’d established from the very beginning that Jackson needed a keeper and was too ornery to keep one around.
The room had a small couch, denim-colored, and Jackson grabbed his phone off the charger and shoved back into it and stretched his legs out in front of him before he found the number on his phone. Ace was a prickly sonovabitch, and Jackson silently debated whether he was going to need a sweatshirt or a sports jacket or a pair of cast-iron jockey shorts before he hit that call.
He decided on a hooded sweatshirt, got himself settled again, and hit the number.
“Garage.”
Jackson recognized the voice on the other end of the line—nearing college age, Latina, and just as prickly as Ace. The girl had looked like any bored receptionist anywhere, but the way she’d defended her employers at their last meeting told Jackson everything he needed to know about family.
“That’s it?” he asked. “You’re just going to say ‘garage’? Not Sonny’s Place—”
“Who in the fuck are you?”
“I need to talk to Ace,” he said, glad that the niceties were over.
“And you are…?”
“We met before in September—”
“You’re the guy who had to use the bathroom.”
Yes, he was—and he’d learned a whole lot talking to people while Ace had stonewalled Ellery in the garage.
“And you’re the smart girl studying science. How’d you do in that class, anyway?”
“An A,” she said reluctantly. “I got a 3.8 last semester. My mommy cried. It was beautiful. Why do you need to talk to Ace?”
Well, shit. “Because someone who fucked with Sonny back in the military might be the key to a general badass fucker all around. I need to talk to Ace because I’d like to talk to Sonny, and I know one won’t happen without the other.”
The girl grunted. “He won’t let you talk to Sonny.”
“Then maybe he’ll talk to me. I’m not a cop, sweetheart. He meets me someplace nearby, like Barstow, we have a soda, some conversation, we see what we see. I don’t want to arrest anyone, and I damned sure don’t want to kick your little nest. Just want to chat.”
“You don’t sound completely stupid,” she begrudged. “Give me your number.”
Jackson was grateful it was a burner phone.
He hung up and leaned back and sighed.
“So, you’re meeting him?” Ellery asked, still not looking up from whatever so absorbed him on the laptop.
“Nope. That was just the screening.”
Ellery actually turned his head. “Who’s screening his calls?”
“Alba. The girl who was in the clerk’s office last time.”
“She’s what? Sixteen?”
Jackson returned his gaze levelly. “Don’t fuck with smart girls,” Jackson said, meaning every word.
Ellery nodded and returned glumly to his screen.
“What are you looking at?”
“An email from Arizona talking about pressing charges against Janie for obstruction of justice unless she goes on record saying who hit the woman at the crosswalk.”
Jackson caught his breath. “Jesus—are you fucking kidding me?”
“Langdon forwarded it while you were asleep. I’ve been looking for ways to get her out of it—or at least ways to not make it worth Arizona’s time.”
“Wish Lacey would go after her for a change,” Jackson grunted. He had no fondness in his heart for Arizona Brooks, the ADA Ellery dealt with on a regular basis. Ellery said she was just doing her job, but that summer her job had been to finger Kaden for a murder he didn’t commit. That autumn her job had been to blow off Ellery and Jackson as they tried to get her to go after a serial killer. Apparently now her job was to go after an innocent girl who would rather go to jail than let the children in her care get hurt. Jackson thought the world might be a better place if Arizona wasn’t so bloody good at her job.
But Ellery was staring at Jackson like he’d reinvented butter. “You know,” he said, his eyes going to his right in that way that told Jackson he was about to create a really interesting strategy. “I think you’re right. I think I should tell Arizona it was Karl Lacey. I think I should tell her everything.”
“Except Sonny and Ace,” Jackson reaffirmed.
“Oh yes. Except them. I think Arizona should make the decision to pursue this to the military. I mean, we’re here. We’re going to do our thing. But if suddenly the DA in Sacramento is poking around, what’s the one thing Lacey isn’t going to be looking into?”
“Us,” Jackson said hopefully. “We’re just two private citizens who made a phone call, after all. She’s the DA.”
Ellery smiled, all teeth. “Indeed she is.”
But Jackson couldn’t celebrate too soon. “Should we warn her?”
And to his credit Ellery said, “Yeah. I’ll warn her. You didn’t shoot the fuckin’ planter that landed on your head. We’ve got witnesses. And you know what else I’ll do while I’m warning her?”
Jackson held out his hand, inviting more.
“I’ll ask her what in the fuck she did to get Lacey up to Sac in the first place. That’s been nagging me for four days now. Why would he even have been in town to be speeding through a residential zone? The bugs in our house, the office, they’ve probably been there since Thanksgiving and they’ve got a system in place to re-up the batteries. What made him step it up so Anthony was putting a tracker on the car? We park in a public lot—why this weekend? What is going on that made the super paranoid military mind manipulator get super extra fucking paranoid right the fuck now?”
Jackson frowned. “Usually the thing that lights a fire under someone’s ass is money. Think maybe Lacey has a contract that’s about to get called?”
Ellery’s eyes grew wide. “You know who I could ask about that?”
Jackson rolled his eyes. “Is there any pie your mother does not have a finger in?”
“No.” He sounded proud of his mother—as he should be—but Jackson would never know how Ellery could not find her terrifying as well.
“Then by all means, call Lucy Satan and ask—whoop! There’s Ace.”
Jackson picked up the buzzing phone and figuratively adjusted his steel-plated underwear. “Jackson Rivers speaking.”
“This is Ace Atchison, out in Victoriana, sir. You called me?”
And Jackson had to close his eyes and count to twelve. The good ol’ boy dripping from Atchison’s voice could be softened, mixed with garlic, and slathered on bread. Didn’t mean Ace wasn’t lying his ass off—just meant butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
“Ace, I am on a secure phone, but I don’t know if you are. I need to talk about someone from your and Sonny’s past, and I need the
information soon, and I don’t want to handle it from here. I’m not a cop, I won’t bring any cops to the meet, and I don’t want to fucking pussyfoot around. We’ve got an innocent girl and the family she cares for depending on us, and somebody bugged our goddamned bedroom. Will you talk to me?”
A stunned silence echoed in Jackson’s ear for a moment. When Ace spoke again, his voice was flinty hard and not sweet and not slick and not lying in the least.
“Sonny and me don’t visit the past.”
“This isn’t the past, Ace. This is serial killers and military people who aren’t doing what they fucking should. This is here and now—and don’t think it can’t reach out and grab you when you’re not looking.”
“I’ll call back tonight.”
The line went dead, and Jackson figured that was as good as it was going to get for a little. He looked over to where Ellery was composing an email with all the zeal of a mad maestro and stood and stretched. Ellery had packed his wallet, and he grabbed it from his duffel and swapped out the sweats for a pair of jeans.
“Where you going?” Ellery asked without even looking up.
“Walk. Got three more calls to make—might as well make them while moving.”
Ellery frowned, finished a word, and turned to look at him. “Eat.”
Jackson sighed, put a hand on his shoulder, and leaned over to grab a tiny hamburger from the plate stashed behind Ellery’s computer. “Happy?” he asked through a full mouth.
Ellery refused to be distracted, putting his hand on top of Jackson’s. “What’s bothering you?”
“Say we get him. Lacey, that is. Get him how? How much do you know about military law?”
“I know the Geneva convention,” Ellery said blithely. “Training people to kill outside military guidelines is illegal—”
“Cut the bullshit, Counselor.” Jackson pulled away and tossed the rest of the slider in the trash. “We can’t prosecute a case against him—we can only make the case and turn it over to the DA. And not the Sacramento DA, the state’s district attorney, who is someone neither of us know.”