by TA Moore
They navigated their way to the stairs.
BRUISES DAPPLED Kelly’s body like shadows against his skin as he stripped out of his clothes. Clayton stood behind him and explored the tender edges of the injuries with his fingertips as he mentally cataloged them. The narrow, stark lines of the sap were mostly on his arms and across his back. The edges had only started to blur as the bruise spread outward, while the boot-shaped splotches of black and blue stained his thighs and forearms.
“Next time,” he murmured as he leaned down to kiss Kelly’s bruised shoulder, “try to avoid some of the punches.”
Kelly snorted and snapped his fingers. “Dammit, I knew there was something I forgot.”
Clayton found an unbruised span of shoulder and bit it, just hard enough to make Kelly shudder. He slid his hands down over Kelly’s stomach, across hard muscle and a sparse scruff of dark hair, to the eager curve of his cock.
“At least this still works,” Clayton mocked as he wrapped his fingers around the shaft and felt it twitch. Under his trousers Clayton felt his own cock thicken in response. His balls were tight and heavy as they pulled up toward his groin. “You’re lucky.”
Kelly leaned back against Clayton’s chest, relaxed as a cat. He reached behind him and cupped his hand around Clayton’s neck and laced his fingers through the short-cropped curls.
“I know how to get beat up,” Kelly protested lazily. He kissed Clayton’s throat wetly, all tongue and the promise of teeth. “You think the short one-eyed kid with the cop dad didn’t get picked on?”
Clayton dragged his hand back along Kelly’s cock in a lazy caress that bunched the sheath of skin under his fingers and made Kelly’s hips jerk. A strangled “son-of-a-bitch” grated between Kelly’s teeth as his fingers dug into Clayton’s neck. His breath was ragged as Clayton stroked his cock again.
“I would have made you cry,” Clayton admitted wryly.
He didn’t add that he would have done it because he was jealous, that he’d have wanted Kelly’s big, affectionate, stupidly named family—a mom who cared enough to theme her brood, not just name them after the guy she was going after for child support. And when he hit puberty, he would have wanted Kelly, with his sunny grin and earnest, easy good looks.
The first time he saw Kelly, he wanted him. There was no reason to think it would have been different if he’d seen him earlier.
Kelly snorted out a laugh and turned around. He pulled Clayton down and kissed him and then murmured against damp lips, “You know, you’re supposed to say you’d have stood up for me.”
The fabric of the eye patch rubbed against Clayton’s cheek. It was an odd smudge of black in the corner of his vision, and it didn’t bother him, but he couldn’t shake the idea that it was a costume.
“If I wanted to stand up for the downtrodden,” Clayton said as Kelly nudged him backward toward the bed, “I wouldn’t specialize in high-asset divorce settlements.”
The mattress was soft, and the sheets were crisp and white. Clayton sat down and caught Kelly’s lean hips in his hands. He tugged him in closer, pressed a wet, leisurely kiss against bruise-flowered ribs, and felt the heat of blood against his lips. He slid his hands down to Kelly’s thighs and across the long tight bands of muscle.
“Says the man who offered to pay my hourly rate out of his own pocket on a pro bono case,” Kelly said as he pushed Clayton back down onto the bed. “You talk a good game, Clayton, but we all know you’re a good guy.”
“That was not idealism,” Clayton said. “That’s a sop to my conscience so I can spend the rest of my time making an hourly rate that would make you cry.”
“Liar.”
There was absolutely no basis for the certainty in Kelly’s voice. He didn’t know Clayton—not really. Clayton could have said something sharp and sarcastic enough to cut through even Kelly’s bulletproof confidence. But before he could string the words together, Kelly slid down onto his knees and wrapped his mouth around Clayton’s cock.
That—soft lips and wet heat around the hard length of him—scattered Clayton’s self-destructive impulse. He propped himself on one elbow and watched as Kelly slicked his cock with spit and tongue as he gripped the base of the shaft.
Pleasure cramped in Clayton’s thighs and stomach. It was hot and heavy, like an overworked muscle. The sight of his cock, wet and shining as it slid between Kelly’s lips, was hot even without the ball-clenching sensation of a tongue flicking across the crown of his cock or the thumb pushed up against his taint.
The throb of hunger between his legs curled Clayton’s toes against the wooden floor and twitched back to his ass. He bit the inside of his cheek and reached down to lace his fingers through Kelly’s hair. It stuck up between his knuckles in unruly tufts and tangles as Kelly let Clayton’s cock slide out of his mouth and licked his way back down the length of it. He stroked his hands along Clayton’s thighs, his thumbs rough as they traced up to the thin creases of skin at his groin, and mouthed wet, eager kisses against his balls.
“Fuck,” Clayton groaned and pulled Kelly’s head back from his cock. The whine of protest from Kelly, his full lips flushed and sticky with precome, made his balls twist again, and he had to chew his cheek until he tasted blood to hang on to control. “Not yet.”
Kelly crawled up onto the bed and sprawled on top of Clayton, all heavy muscle and bone. His thick insistent cock nudged against Clayton’s thigh as he bruised kisses across Clayton’s shoulders. Clayton kicked his trousers off—the stray thought that Heather was going to kill him if she had to make any more runs to the dry cleaners slid through his head—and caressed the sweat-damp slope of Kelly’s shoulders.
“I don’t want to fuck,” Kelly said.
“Could have fooled me,” Clayton said. He bit back a groan as Kelly reached down between their bodies and grabbed his cock for a squeeze. “Got the wrong end of the stick entirely.”
“You know what I mean,” Kelly said. “I have a bruised ass, and besides, it feels weird with Maxie just down the hall.”
Clayton cupped the ass in question and rolled over onto his side. He kissed Kelly and tasted himself. “You worried he’ll hear?”
A wry smile tugged the corners of Kelly’s mouth out of the kiss. Clayton chased them as though he could catch it with his lips.
“More worried that I’ll have to look a cop in the eye and tell them a coyote got my baby,” Kelly said. He rubbed his thumb along the underside of Clayton’s cock, and a sliver of hot sensation dragged under the skin. “Well, Byron’s baby. That’ll just make it worse.”
Clayton tightened his grip on the ripe curve of ass and slid his thigh between Kelly’s legs until it pressed against his balls. A low, strangled sound escaped Kelly, and he thrust his hips forward, his cock hard and hot as it ground against Clayton’s stomach.
“But this is okay?” he asked.
“Didn’t say it made sense,” Kelly said raggedly. “But yeah. This is fine.”
Clayton laughed against his throat, ignored his grumble, and dragged him closer. The sheets tangled under them and caught under their hips as they moved against each other. Sweat tasted salty against Clayton’s lips as he smeared hungry kisses over Kelly’s mouth, jaw, and shoulders, and their cocks bumped and slid past each other with each thrust. Under him, Kelly moaned and clutched at his hips and the backs of his thighs with eager hands.
The tease of grazed contact, satin hard cocks, and the rough brush of body hair caught in Clayton’s balls and pulled. He needed more.
He pinned Kelly down on his back against the now-crumpled sheets. Somehow the eye patch made Kelly’s face look softer, dazed and distracted with the pleasure that flushed pink across his cheekbones and parted his damp, kiss-swollen lips. Clayton wrapped his hands around Kelly’s wrists and pressed them down into the mattress. He rolled his hips against Kelly’s in slow, hard thrusts that pressed their cocks against each other hard enough that the throb of it almost hurt.
Kelly arched his hips up into each th
rust. His body was tense and tight under Clayton’s, the muscles clenched under pale Irish freckled skin. He gasped Clayton’s name as he came. The come spilled slick and wet across his stomach and smeared over Clayton’s cock with each thrust.
Clayton lowered himself onto his elbows, mindful of the patchwork of purple and blue over Kelly’s ribs, and kissed him deeply. He could still taste himself—cock and the thin musk of precome—on Kelly’s tongue as he came roughly on his stomach.
“Fuck,” Kelly groaned.
Clayton grinned and dragged a kiss along Kelly’s rough stubbled jaw as he rolled off him. His hand trailed through the sticky mess on Kelly’s stomach. “Bit late to change your mind.”
“Funny.” Kelly stretched and winced as the bruises caught under his skin. He folded his arm behind his head, under the pillow, and closed his eyes. His eye, Clayton supposed. “You’re still a liar.”
Maybe he was, Clayton supposed as he ran his hand down Kelly’s heavy thigh. His cock was limp and sated, but it twitched as Clayton’s fingers passed it. As much as he didn’t want to be a little bit in love with Kelly, lust didn’t make you want to taste someone’s smile.
Probably not what Kelly meant, though.
“You’re a good guy,” Kelly said. He blindly reached out, tucked his hand under Clayton’s head, and tangled his fingers through Clayton’s short, sweaty hair. “And I like when I make you smile.”
Just a little bit in love.
Chapter Eleven
THERE WAS nothing like baby sick on your shoulder to remind you that you weren’t really a sex god. Kelly rolled the dice on a repeat performance and shifted Maxie to his other shoulder. He grabbed a wipe from the box and reached back to clean the hot barf off before it dripped down into his boxers.
“Okay, we’ve discussed this before,” he said as he tossed the wipe into the bin. “This is your last chance. If you need to be sick, you put up your hand and ask me to take you to the toilet. Deal?”
Maxie frog kicked his legs and burped.
“My client will consider the offer and get back to you,” Clayton said from behind Kelly with lazy amusement in his voice. It sent a trickle of awareness down Kelly’s back, from the nape of his neck to his tailbone. “In the meantime he’d like to ask for a raise in his diaper allowance. The quality is not what he’s used to.”
Kelly snorted. “Don’t give him ideas,” he said. “Mom already bought Egyptian cotton towels to clean him with.”
He leaned over to carefully put Maxie back in his crib. He was more confident than he’d been when his mom first handed him the gremlin-looking Maxie, but he couldn’t quite shake the fear that one day he’d just let the baby slip out of his hands and fall on his head.
“He’s obviously well-cared-for,” Clayton said. “Your brother is lucky to have family who can help out. What your other brother, Cole, said yesterday… if I’ve caused any problems, I’m sorry.”
Kelly snorted. “Byron’s one good point is that he doesn’t care who I sleep with,” he said. “Cole was just…. He’s the eldest. He thinks it’s his job to manage us all, make sure we don’t do anything to upset Mom and Dad. The fact that we’re all grown now seems to have escaped him.”
The question hung in the air, just begging to be asked. They studiously ignored it. That was what Kelly liked about lawyers—they knew when not to ask questions. Like “Did you do it?” or “Are you going to lie on the stand?” and “Does who you sleep with upset your mom and dad?”
Kelly wound the mobile back up and turned it on. It started to twist, and the primary-colored plastic cartoon animals bobbed on the end of their strings to the tune of “Hush, Little Baby.” In the crib, Max watched it with wide, curious eyes and flapped his arms and legs about as though it were a Jazzercise class.
The thing was supposed to help him sleep, but Kelly wasn’t sure it did.
He left Maxie to it and turned around. The sight of Clayton propped elegantly against the doorframe flash-dried his mouth. Last time, he hadn’t had a chance to appreciate Clayton’s morning-after presence. It had been sex, sleep, and then awkwardness.
Now he had the opportunity to really appreciate the sharp, handsome face and the long, lean body, still smudged and marked from Kelly’s mouth, hands, and cock. Not that Kelly didn’t appreciate the suits. He’d spent a lot of time appreciating the suits, the way all that expensive tailoring made Clayton… sharp enough to cut yourself on. But a half-naked, fresh-from-his-bed Clayton was something new to appreciate. He looked just as dangerous, somehow, but there was a warmth you didn’t always see through the obscenely expensive suits.
Maybe that was just the hair, irrepressibly bouncy once the product had sweated out of it.
“Hey,” Kelly managed once he realized he was staring. “Surprised you’re still here. After last time, I thought you’d have snuck out before anyone came to visit.”
Clayton looked amused. “Maybe that’s where I was going.”
“Yeah? Well, in that case, you forgot your pants,” Kelly said. He nudged Clayton out of the room and closed the door behind him. “You probably do need to go soon, though. I can make you coffee?”
“Huh,” Clayton said.
“What?”
“So this is what it’s like on this side of the bum’s rush.”
Heat flushed Kelly’s face. He scratched his head and snorted out an uncomfortable laugh. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…. I’m just not used to casual. Usually by now I’d have gotten you a toothbrush and a key. I might have overcompensated.”
Clayton tucked a knuckle under Kelly’s chin and tipped his head back. The kiss was soft and close-lipped, but Kelly still felt the tingle of it all the way down into his cock.
“I’m not going to climb out the window if you ask me to stay for breakfast.”
Kelly hooked his fingers over Clayton’s hipbones. “How about if I ask you to come back to bed?”
That didn’t need an answer.
Back in the bedroom, Clayton sat down on the bed and pulled Kelly into his lap. He ran his hands down over the tight curve of Kelly’s ass to grip the back of his thighs.
“So this.” He leaned in and pressed his lips to the spray of bright ink marked over Kelly’s collarbone. It had taken two sessions to finish the parrot and color it in, and the collarbone and the point of his shoulder had hurt the most. “Anything to do with the eye?”
Kelly had almost forgotten. He reached up and scratched at the edge of the eye patch where the glue had irritated his skin.
“Yeah, I used to be really into pirates,” he admitted.
“I’ve seen that stack of DVDs downstairs,” Clayton informed him as he bit sharp kisses along Kelly’s collarbone. It reminded Kelly briefly of a slowed-down version of that old ink-gun pain, only wrapped in honey. “You’re still into pirates.”
He twisted his fingers in Clayton’s curls and leaned his head back. He could feel the interested nudge of Clayton’s cock against his ass, and maybe the bruises weren’t that bad.
“I used to be more into them,” he corrected. “Not exactly a whole lot of one-eyed role models for a kid, you know, so my dad worked with what he had. Pirates. The cops of the sea. Only had one eye, but it never slowed them down.”
Clayton gave a low, rough laugh that Kelly felt vibrate through the hinge of his jaw. “Did he regret that once you got the tattoo?”
“That’s probably the least of his regrets about me,” Kelly said. The guilt pinched almost immediately, because that was ungrateful. His dad wasn’t always great, but there were worse parents in the world. “Besides, he’s got a pint of Guinness tattooed on his thigh, so he can’t really talk.”
“I haven’t met your dad, but I’m going to go ahead and not imagine that,” Clayton said.
“Good call.”
A phone rang—two phones, one a beat behind the other. The clash of ringtones rattled through the house and set off a cat-wail of indignation from Maxie.
“Fuck.”
Kelly
rolled off Clayton’s lap and reached for the dresser where he usually left his phone. Empty. He turned to scan the room.
“Downstairs,” Clayton said as he grabbed his trousers and shook the phone out of his pocket. He unlocked it with a swipe of his thumb. “Daniel?”
Baker. That wasn’t good. If your boss called you at three in the morning, it was never good. Kelly grabbed a pair of sweats from the back of a chair and loped downstairs. It smelled like old pizza and beer. Kelly skidded on the wooden floor in his bare feet, caught himself against the couch, and spied the glow of his phone under the table.
He grabbed it and checked the display on its way up to his ear. Larry. When your partner called you at three in the morning, it wasn’t good either.
“What?” he said.
In the background he could hear an alarm blaring officiously and a dog barking furiously. “We have a problem,” Larry said.
Someone knocked the door with the hard, determined rap of someone who expected you to get up out of bed to answer them.
“Hold on,” Kelly said to Larry.
“It’s the safe house,” she said. Whoever was outside hammered the door again.
“Fuck.” Kelly scrambled gracelessly into his sweats on the way to the door. The elastic waistband caught under his cock and then bounced over it. “Is anyone hurt?”
There was a grim pause. “Not yet.”
“Wait. Let me get rid of whoever this is,” he said. “A minute?”
She sighed but didn’t argue. Kelly pinned the phone under his chin and yanked the door just before whoever it was could hit it again.
“What?” he snapped. The young red-haired cop on his doorstep looked familiar, but he blanked on the name. One of his mom’s matchmaking projects. Cathleen? Cara? Something with a C. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to….”