by TA Moore
“Gotta admit,” Kelly said raggedly, “I kinda figure your wild side involves shallow graves in the desert.”
Clayton snorted and rocked his hips again, his cock slick and hard as it slid out and then back into Kelly. Each time he worked himself deeper until his balls were pressed against Kelly’s ass and sent a throb back to settle in the hollow of Clayton’s hips. He folded his body along Kelly’s back, hung one arm loose over his shoulder, and bit a kiss against the sweaty column of his neck.
“Not yet,” he said.
He nudged Kelly’s head around and kissed him deeply, the plunge of his tongue a slick mirror of the thrust of his cock. The groan dragged up out of Kelly’s throat and slid into Clayton’s mouth. He pushed into Kelly with long, quick strokes that jarred roughly through both their bodies.
Kelly peeled one hand off the back of the couch and braced his hand against the wall. His body jolted with each rough stroke of Clayton’s hips.
It felt like the heat of it was backed up into Clayton’s balls—a sweet, slippery pleasure that grew tighter with every thrust.
Clayton reached down to wrap his hand around Kelly’s cock. It was heavy and hot against his palm as he jerked it roughly. Kelly whined into Clayton’s mouth with raw, satisfying need.
“God, Clayton, please,” he begged as he pushed back desperately against Clayton.
The tight ball of pleasure in Clayton’s groin popped, and he came hard, his balls wrung out with satisfaction.
He rested against Kelly’s back, all that muscle solid under him, and pressed a wet, breathless kiss against his jaw. Then he pulled out, cock still heavy, and pushed Kelly down onto his back. He sprawled out, lewd and loose against the cushions. His cock thrust up from the sparse curls at his groin and curved slightly up toward his stomach.
“Great,” Kelly cracked. “I get the wet spot?”
Clayton crawled onto the couch and straddled him. He pushed Kelly’s legs apart and ran his hands up his inner thighs to palm the heavy swing of his balls. A quick squeeze left Kelly with no wisecracks as he arched his hips up off the couch.
“You don’t have to always run that pretty mouth,” Clayton said. He leaned down and wrapped his lips around the head of Kelly’s cock. The sharp, musty taste of come bloomed on his tongue as he flicked it over the wet slit. Kelly squirmed under him, so he hooked one arm under Kelly’s thigh and around to grip the sharp jut of his hip bone. He slid his head down slowly, his lips and tongue busy against the hard shaft.
Kelly groaned and raked his fingers through Clayton’s short-cropped curls. He didn’t shove or grab. His hand was just there as though he just wanted to touch. Clayton sucked on his cock and worked his hand back between Kelly’s thighs and pushed his finger roughly against the tight thread of his taint.
“Clayton. I’m gonna—” Kelly choked out the warning as his body clenched around his orgasm.
Clayton pushed his tongue flat against the underside of Kelly’s penis in a long, rough lick. If he hadn’t wanted to taste Kelly, he’d just have used his hands. Another lick, and Kelly tipped over the edge with a strangled noise that could have been Clayton’s name again. Come pulsed over Clayton’s tongue, thick and salty-sharp with a metallic aftertaste of warm pennies.
He swallowed and lifted his head. Kelly’s cock slid out and lay against his thigh. Clayton crawled up Kelly, caught his chin in one hand, and kissed him deeply.
“You have a bed?” he asked. Kelly raised his eyebrows, and Clayton smirked against his lips. “I think I have one more bad idea in me.”
OR, AS it turned out, one and a half.
Clayton opened his eyes as an alarm blared out bad morning-DJ patter and stared blankly at the half-painted ceiling for a second. It didn’t take long for the pieces to slot back into place.
Fuck, he’d spent the night after all. Clayton closed his eyes again and swore to the black insides of his eyelids. He didn’t do that. It was easier to show last night’s company the door when it was your door and you didn’t have to ask where the toilet was or the address to tell the Uber.
“If you’re thinking of chewing your arm off,” a sleepy voice mumbled next to him, “try not to get blood on the floor. S’a bitch to sand out of the wood.”
Clayton glanced over to the other side of the bed where Kelly was sprawled facedown on a pillow. The sheets were tangled under his stomach, and the bar of sunlight from the window picked out the vivid colors that flowed down over his shoulder. Give it a few minutes, and the golden rays would make their way down to frame the tanned, now familiar curve of his ass. A twitch of interest in Clayton’s cock reminded him exactly how he ended up there.
The last vestige of last night’s self-destructive “fuck it, then” attitude tried to assert itself with the reminder that he didn’t need to be in the office for another three hours. Clayton squelched it. Last night had been what he needed—to exorcise the ghosts of the past, to finally get Kelly out of his system—but it had also been last night.
“Do I want to ask how you know that?” he asked.
Kelly rolled over and stretched out with a cat’s thoroughness on the bed, all loose muscle and curled toes. The jab of hunger in Clayton’s gut was heavy and insistent. Apparently his cock hadn’t got the memo about them being over Kelly yet. Kelly scrubbed a hand over his face and up into his hair.
“How do you think I was able to afford this place?” he asked with a sly grin.
Clayton paused for a second as he tried to work out if Kelly was telling the truth or not. He decided it didn’t matter. It wasn’t likely Clayton would ever have any reason to come back to the sunny little house. If he did, he wasn’t going to make it upstairs.
Not, the bad-idea vestige muttered the reminder, that it mattered. Downstairs had worked fine last night.
“I do need to go,” he said.
Kelly scratched his stomach, yawned, and nodded toward the bathroom door. “You can use the shower first if you want.”
It made sense and would save Clayton a sticky drive back to his apartment. But the image that flashed into his head and dried out his mouth was of steam, white tiles, and Kelly shoved wet and willing against them. Clayton definitely never did that. The morning alarm, usually his own but the point stood, was the cutoff point for one-night stands. After that, he moved on to the next day.
“Thanks, but I’ll shower at the office,” Clayton said with a glance at his watch. “I’ll need to get an early start if I’m to fit Nadine’s hours into the day. Look—”
Kelly waved him off. “No, don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get started on chasing up the info you need today, and I’ll give my cousin a call. If I tell her what’s going on, she’ll get the safe house cleaned up and stocked up by tonight.”
“Ah, yes. I need the financial information as soon as possible,” Clayton said, briefly on the back foot as his brain switched tracks from “awkward conversation” to “work.” He scratched his head, the short curls sweaty under his nails, and laid the course of Nadine’s case out in his head. “I don’t want all James’s assets to suddenly up and disappear.”
Kelly shrugged. “That part is up to you,” he said. “I’ll get you the ammo, though.”
He rolled over onto his side, braced his weight on his elbow, and grinned down at Clayton.
“I needed last night.” He leaned down and kissed Clayton with a quick buss that was considerate of morning breath and the taste of last night still on their tongues. Then he pulled away before Clayton could give in to the urge to kiss him back. He flashed a grin. “I think I got a smile out of you once too.”
“You’re an idiot,” Clayton growled.
That just got him a shrug as Kelly rolled out of the bed and headed for the bathroom. The urge to follow him jabbed at Clayton, tempted and tightened his balls. He ignored it and got out of bed to pad downstairs in search of his clothes.
It turned out they were just where he’d left them—on Kelly’s floor. Clayton tugged his trousers on and found his
shirt. He frowned at the wrinkles worked into the fabric, but since he wasn’t about to ask Kelly to borrow a T-shirt, it would have to do.
He’d just shrugged it on over his shoulders and was halfway through ordering a car when he heard someone put a key in the front door.
“Fuck’s sake,” he muttered under his breath. The woman on the other end of the line huffed at him. “Not you. Sorry. Ten minutes is perfect. I’ll be waiting.”
He hung up, but before he could do anything, the door opened and a small, neat woman with a cloud of dark, curly hair and a fussing baby in her arms let herself in. She stopped when she saw him and cocked an eyebrow up from behind her large black glasses.
“Well, hello,” she said with a slow, wicked grin. “I’m Aggie. And you’re… new, aren’t you?”
Clayton cringed. He did not need to meet the… babysitter or friend or whoever Aggie was. He gave her a tight smile as he finished buttoning his shirt.
“Very new,” she said, still with that grin.
“Kelly will be down in a minute,” he said. “If you want to—”
She handed Maxie to him. Clayton scowled down at the armful of baby, who scowled back up at him from under a fluffy crop of downy black hair.
“I’m not—”
“Kelly!” Apparently you didn’t get to finish a sentence around Aggie. She leaned around the banister and yelled up the stairs. “Did you forget I was coming over?”
Upstairs the shower cut off, and Clayton heard Kelly groan, “Fuck.”
Chapter Seven
WATER DRIPPED on ugly floor tiles—he meant to get around to changing them once he painted downstairs—as Kelly scrambled out of the shower. He grabbed a towel from a rail and gave himself a quick wipe down as he hopped toward the door.
“’Course not,” he lied down to Aggie as he dropped the towel on the bedroom door and hunted around for his jeans. “Just lost track of time.”
“You and Mr. New getting acquainted?”
Kelly rolled his eyes. He loved Aggie—she was the only relative he had who busted his balls over his sex life as much as she did his brothers—but she was incorrigible.
“His name’s Clayton,” he yelled down. His jeans were, of course, downstairs. Crap. He grabbed a cleanish pair from the laundry and scrambled into them, and dry denim caught on his damp legs. “Be nice. He’s still a flight risk.”
“He’s holding Maxie. We can get an APB out on him if he runs.”
Guilt tried to poke him over the whole “forgot about the baby” thing, but he shoved it back into its box. It wasn’t as though Maxie were his son. If anyone should feel guilty, it was Byron, if he ever worked out how.
Kelly finally got his jeans up over his hips. He left them to hang there while he finger-combed his hair back from his face and checked his eyes in the mirror. Old habit, that, but you only ever want to freak out one boyfriend that way—or freak out whatever you called a one-night stand that had been a really fun bad idea. Just this once Kelly figured he could rebound without letting Catholic guilt turn it into a three-year relationship.
Clayton, said the office gossip mill, didn’t do commitment. His longest “relationship” had supposedly topped out at a couple of months, which was just what Kelly needed right now. Between Maxie and his mom, he had enough complications in his life without adding Clayton in any long-term, doomed-to-end-badly way.
He loped downstairs into one of Aggie’s hugs. It was all unexpected strength—she was a pathologist, and Cole liked to boast that she could deadlift more weight than a firefighter—and the smell of baby powder over pomegranates.
“I like him,” she hissed in his ear, not particularly subtly. “He’s hot, and he knows how to hold a baby.”
Kelly glanced over her curls at Clayton and grinned at the vaguely trapped expression that had settled onto his stern, sharp-boned face. Clayton held Maxie with cool competence in the crook of his arm and looked on the verge of chewing off his own arm to get away. A dull throb of interest caught in Kelly’s balls, along with the pleasant ache of last night that still settled in shower-loosened muscles.
Not exactly the time, though.
“He’s married,” he told Aggie with cheerful mendacity. “Two kids, a mortgage, a time-share in the Caribbean. I’m just his bit on the side.”
That little bit of character assassination made Clayton glare at Kelly. Apparently he didn’t want to be thought of as either husband material or a cheating asshole.
Aggie stepped back and looked thoughtfully at Clayton as she tapped her fingers against her chin.
“So what you’re saying is that he owns property,” she said.
Kelly shrugged an “I tried” at Clayton from behind her and then took pity on him. His family were hard enough for him to swallow sometimes. It wasn’t fair to drop Clayton in with no warning, first thing in the morning.
He took Maxie from Clayton and tucked the baby into the bend of his arm. Maxie sneezed and waved his fists in the air in some sort of ineffable baby protest about his life.
“You should go,” he said. “Your wife will wonder where you’ve gotten to.”
Clayton gave him a hard look and then turned to extend a hand to Aggie. She took it with a dimpled smile.
“It was nice to meet you,” he said pleasantly. A muscle jumped in his jaw, and he added firmly, “And I’m not married.”
Aggie laughed throatily. “Oh don’t worry. Nobody takes Kelly seriously. He’s the joker of the family. It was lovely to meet you, Clayton.” She paused and gave Kelly an arch look. “Maybe I’ll see you again at the barbecue next weekend.”
“Shhh,” Kelly told her. “You’ll scare him off.”
He left her to snigger to herself while he grabbed Clayton’s shoulder and led him to the front door.
“Give me a while to get Maxie sorted,” he said as he opened the door to let Clayton out. “Then I’ll get to work on pinning Jimmy’s finances down. Don’t worry about Aggie. She’s not going to track you down. She could—she has access to CODIS—but she won’t.”
Clayton stood on the doorstep, lean and awkward in second-day black, and folded his cuffs back along his wiry forearms.
“Is there anything in LA that your family doesn’t have their fingers in?” he asked dryly. “Look, Kelly, about last night….”
Kelly grimaced. He really didn’t need his sister-in-law to hear him get the “it’s not me, it’s you” talk on his own front step. There was some dignity he’d like to hang on to. He grabbed Clayton’s shirt and tugged him in and down for a quick, rough kiss that scraped stubble and lips.
Temptation tugged at him for a second, but Maxie’s squirm of protest interrupted the kiss before Kelly could turn it into more than just a distraction tactic. Kelly casually bounced the baby in the crook of his arm as he leaned back.
“Was fun,” he finished for Clayton. He grinned. “I always figured it would be. Good to know I was right.”
Clayton licked his lips with a slow swipe of his tongue over his lower lip and glanced quickly over Kelly’s shoulder. Whatever Aggie was doing—probably peeping around the door—seemed to convince him that he could let Kelly down gently later on.
Or maybe it was the car that pulled up on the road, double-parked behind the neighbor’s rusted-out Chevy, and honked its horn.
“Let me know when you find anything about Nadine’s situation,” Clayton said briskly. He tilted his head to see into the hall and dipped his chin in a brief, sardonic nod. “Nice to meet you, Aggie.”
“You too,” she called out, unfazed at being caught peeping. “Remember the barbecue. I’m making a very nice Japanese restaurant deliver sushi.”
“Ignore her,” Kelly said. “It’ll be burned hot dogs and raw ribs. Go while you can.”
Clayton’s mouth twitched with amusement, but he did as he was told and headed down the path toward the Uber. From behind the wheel, the driver watched with the bland apathy of someone who’d already seen six far more interesting walks of shame that
morning.
There was, Kelly mused, probably something he could do about that.
He leaned against the doorframe, bare-chested and barefoot with a baby on his hip, and tried to look sultry.
“Have a good day, baby,” he called after Clayton. “Call me. Okay? The kids miss you.”
The driver looked a bit more interested. Clayton didn’t look back, but he did give Kelly the finger over one shoulder as he stalked over to the car.
Kelly laughed and went back into the house. He closed the door behind him and grinned at Aggie, who frowned at him from the doorway.
“What?”
“He seemed nice. Now you’ll never see him again.”
“You mean he seemed hot,” Kelly countered. “You don’t know him. He’s not that nice.”
His conscience pricked at that a bit. Nice wasn’t the first word that Kelly would use about Clayton, probably not even the fifth. It was too… soft a word, and nothing much about Clayton Reynolds seemed soft. Certainly not, Kelly’s brain sniggered and nudged at him, last night. But Clayton was a good person, even if it was only for free.
“I mean, it just wasn’t a meet-the-parents sort of thing,” Kelly said. He looked down at Maxie and offered him a finger to gum. “You get it, Maxie. Sometimes your uncle just needs to have a bit of fun, right?”
Maxie sneezed and looked horrified by himself in answer. That could be agreement in baby, for all Kelly knew.
“You can’t fuc… fun away your feelings,” Aggie told him, her tongue tangled on the midsentence childproofing as she picked his clothes up off the floor on the way to the kitchen. “I saw the way you looked at him. When you were a little fat kid, you looked at Rice Krispies treats the same way.”
Kelly snorted. “You’ve been married to my brother too long,” he said. The fat-kid phase had only been for a couple of years, before he accepted that he wasn’t going to burn it off with a growth spurt. “Ever considered divorce? I can recommend a good firm.”
The pause from the kitchen was long enough that Kelly wondered if he’d actually offended her. He was just about to apologize when Aggie quietly responded in a calm voice, “Sometimes.”