Country Mouse, #1

by Aleksandr Voinov

  “So how far into those ten years are you?”

  “Uh, about five. Add a couple years to that because the economy has been an absolute nightmare. I should have gone into metal trading or oil and gas. Mates of mine made a pile in commodities, but I didn’t want to shuffle around grain and rapeseed oil futures between here and fucking Winnipeg.” He chuckled. “So, yeah. I’m a deprived workaholic. Doing this BDSM stuff just helps with the stress.”

  “Mmm.” Owen folded his body behind Malcolm’s even tighter. “So how’s your stress level now?”

  Malcolm sighed and went limp in his arms. “What stress?” he asked, and Owen thought that was about right.

  They dozed. The respite from traveling was a welcome change, and just lying there, holding that warm, vital body was almost like a Red Bull and a shot of B12. They woke up and ate day-old bagels, and Malcolm was going to make plans for takeout, but they walked to Leadenhall Market instead. They talked, about everything, just as they had the night before, and Owen discovered that Malcolm really was quick to smile and quick to laugh, and that he enjoyed the give-and-take banter, even when they weren’t dressed to the nines and Owen wasn’t trying to be James Bond.

  They made love after a lunch of broiled chicken and salad, and again after a dinner of stir-fry soy cakes and broccoli. They talked until three in the morning, when Malcolm fell asleep mid-sentence in a story about a client who didn’t know futures from rainbow crystals, and Owen had just enough presence of mind to double check the alarm on his cell phone to make sure it could wake him from where it was charging in Malcolm’s kitchen.

  The morning marched toward them with an inescapable relentlessness they could not hide from, even in sleep.

  * * * * *

  The alarm buzzed Malcolm awake at six, and even though he sometimes didn’t go to bed before midnight, getting up on three hours of sleep was brutal. Especially considering that, for once, he had a guy over on a Monday morning.

  He managed to roll his legs out of bed and sit up mostly with the momentum while he reached for the phone and disabled the alarm. And the next one. And the one after, too.

  He wanted nothing more than to fall back and just forget about Monday, but that wasn’t going to happen, and he knew it. Wasn’t like anybody else would trade his stuff for him. Short of needing CPR, he couldn’t even call in sick. Way too healthy, no sick days since his start day. It was a bit of a crazy, all-masculine competition, too. And sick on a Monday just screamed hangover, and hangover meant he couldn’t hold his alcohol.

  Great. He ran a hand along Owen’s flank, pulled the covers back into place (Owen was fine, but Malcolm felt like fussing, however perfunctorily), and got to his feet. It was inhumane to wake him just to ask when exactly he’d leave. Something about noon? Cab? Something. He jumped under the shower, shaved there, got dressed and sat in the kitchen for five minutes trying to pull his brain together and wake up. Didn’t work that well, so he just grabbed a Post-it from a drawer and a few banknotes from his wallet.

  “Get some breakfast and/or lunch, and a cab,” he wrote, considered it, decided it was too bossy, then decided Owen would read it how he’d meant it. Maybe he’d find the tone funny. Also, there wasn’t that much space on a Post-it. “Please get in touch, okay?” Too late to strike out the needy “okay?” there, so he threw that note away, re-wrote the first sentence, then the second: “Do get in touch.” Much better. Now what? “See you, Malcolm.”

  There. He was happy. He put the Post-it on top of Owen’s phone, and stood for a moment, looking at it with blurry eyes. Sure. The kid would get in touch. He seemed to have been raised right—at the very least a thank you when the suit arrived on his doorstep, right?

  Excellent. He’d just grab his keys and his coat and walk away. Good. Just head for the door.

  Owen stumbled out of the bedroom while he was standing there gazing with sightless eyes at a Post-it.

  He looked up and swallowed. “I hated to wake you up.” His voice was gravelly, and Owen grimaced.

  “A Post-it? Classy, Malcolm.”

  Malcolm swallowed his resentment. “I labored over that Post-it,” he snapped, and Owen looked at him sideways.

  “I bet you did,” he said, shedding Malcolm’s bad temper like so much water. He walked up to Malcolm in his boxer shorts and caught Malcolm’s chin in his thumb and forefinger. “Kiss me like a man, Malcolm, and tell me to have a good journey, or my feelings will be hurt, okay?”

  Malcolm closed his eyes. “It’s a good thing you’re going,” he said gruffly. “That much emotional honesty would fucking kill me in a week.”

  Owen’s breath—still rank from sleep, not like Malcolm cared—brushed his face. “You’re tougher than you think,” he said, and brushed his lips softly against Malcolm’s. Malcolm’s body woke up, though his brain was still mush, and he raised his hands into Owen’s haystack of hair and pulled him closer, because he didn’t care about morning breath and he suddenly didn’t care about looking calm and in charge—he just cared that Owen was leaving, and that his throat was almost too tight to breathe.

  The kiss grew hard, grew brutal, and Owen pulled back from it and wrapped those long arms around Malcolm and held him, his whole body taut and fighting the embrace. Owen just stood there until Malcolm accepted it and sagged into him, a little bit of misery seeping out.

  “I’d hate to hurt your feelings,” he whispered.

  “I’d die before I hurt you,” Owen whispered back.

  “Have a safe journey, Yank. Call me. Come visit. Send me a fucking Christmas card. Something.”

  He ducked out of Owen’s arms then because he couldn’t do this anymore, and strode for the door, grabbing his keys and wallet from the counter and his coat from the coat rack and fleeing the apartment before he could make an ass out of himself and ask for the impossible and the ludicrous from a man he’d known barely sixty hours.

  * * * * *

  Owen swallowed as he watched him go, then headed for the shower in this stranger’s apartment. He had four hours before he had to be at the Eurostar terminal to meet Jenny, and they stretched out in front of him interminably. Forever. Years.

  Okay, basics. The three S’s: shower, shit, and shave—every man could do that in his sleep.

  So he did.

  He managed his complete morning routine in a mental and emotional coma. It wasn’t until he went back into the bedroom to make the bed and scan for any last thing he’d left that he turned around and saw the suit, neatly hung in the closet, his address on a Post-it safety-pinned to the bag.

  He sat down on the now neat bed and looked at it and swallowed against the tightness in his chest. Malcolm had run out of the flat, just run, as if afraid of what he’d do next. As if terrified he’d say or do or show the wrong thing, and Owen had watched him go, thinking, You can’t go. I’m the only person on the planet who knows who you are.

  And Malcolm was the only person on the planet who could see him—son of a hippie, starving student, recently graduated IT guy from the backwoods of California—in a suit like that.

  And Malcolm had tried to leave him by Post-it note because . . . Because that last kiss in the kitchen had hurt too much, he thought with a swallow. And who wanted to face that if they didn’t have to?

  Fucking suit. Fucking suit, fucking Post-it, fucking Brit, fucking trip to see the world.

  Fucking wish that this apartment, spare and modern as it was, could possibly be his home too.

  * * * * *

  After a huge coffee—half a liter of cappuccino, plus extra shots because all that milk just didn’t do anything—Malcolm made a game attempt at breakfast during the morning call while his Bloomberg terminal booted. Pile of papers and printouts on his desk, the whole trading department a labyrinth of flat-screens, assembled into three pairs per desk. Six screens had seemed excessive when he’d started—surely trading wasn’t like flying the USS Enterprise, and Sulu only got one screen—but that was before he’d known some traders used eight.


  Normally plenty of feed was coming in to keep himself busy. Client calls, getting a feel for the Asian market based on the Bloomberg headlines. Just a quick scan to catch the mood in the frantic white noise that was the capital markets.

  But he couldn’t concentrate. He realized that when he kept staring at Bloomberg and the tidy rows of information streaming across, which usually formed his lifeblood and his heartbeat, looked as alien and meaningless as love poetry from Jupiter. Nothing even left so much as dew on his brain. What on earth was going on in the market?

  He mumbled a “good morning” as his colleagues arrived and logged in, bragging over exploits of the weekend. Alcohol consumed, sexual practices, one guy was gloating over his ex-Royal Marines personal trainer as if the guy’s toughness was somehow to his personal merit. Usually, he liked that, but he really wasn’t in the mood today.

  “Hangover?”

  Yep, predictable at that. Best response—no response. He made a few trades, did some client business, but he couldn’t get into the headspace. It took as little as looking at his neighbor’s desk (which had a photo of his wife; at least he assumed she was a wife) to shock him out of the place he went where the decisions happened.

  From between getting an order and fulfilling it, he couldn’t remember the most basic thing. He ended up totally botching a trade—yep, last time we checked, Malcolm, buying is not the same as selling, arsehole, and thank God you put in all the right numbers at least—and the entire world was skewed only two hours into the trading day. Then there were rumors about the European Central Bank possibly mulling an interest rate hike, and obviously the market went completely apeshit.

  He was staring blankly at the red and green numbers when suddenly everything turned red. He couldn’t work out what it meant, or how to respond, or why it was important at all. Those slim windows of opportunities in which to recover from a drop like that, he just didn’t see them. Or he did, but they weren’t numbers at all; every opportunity boiled down to him walking out the door, leaving Owen alone in his flat, watching him go. He lifted his hands gingerly away from the keyboard.

  “What’s wrong with you, mate?”

  Migraine sounded too much like drinking-related. “I think the Chinese yesterday was a problem.”

  Not great either, considering, but the best he had right now. He got up and went to the head of trading, made up some bullshit about Chinese food and prawns, and was duly snapped at and then dismissed for the day. Thank God. He managed to slink out of the bank like somebody ill, then dashed around the corner to snatch a cab.

  When he arrived at home, though, Owen was gone. His footsteps in the empty flat rang like a cathedral bell, and for moment, he was back in the church with Owen, who had closed his eyes so trustingly. He was gone. That young man was gone. Oh hell. When had he left? Only recently? Fuck, why hadn’t he paid any fucking attention to the departure time? St. Pancras. Owen was headed for Paris and Brussels next, right?

  He looked around frantically for a clue, but there wasn’t any, so he ran back downstairs, and the ten minutes it took to secure another cab were almost worse than arriving with Owen gone. He only wished that elevator feeling in his stomach was bad Chinese prawns.

  When the taxi ended up in a traffic snarl not far away from St. Pancras, he overpaid and dashed out to run the rest.

  The station was fucking enormous, people milling around, and it felt as if he had to traverse the whole fucking station to get to the Eurostar terminal tucked away in a side entrance between a coffee shop and a supermarket.

  Owen was taller than pretty much everybody else—okay, minus that enormous Nigerian and his wife over there—so it shouldn’t be too fucking difficult. But Malcolm didn’t see him, and his stomach roiled some more. Oh please . . . please please please please let his oversized Yank be in this crowd!

  He checked the screen, but there were several trains to Paris on there, and the people manning the gates to the Eurostar terminal looked at him, bored and impassive. He peered past them, to where some people were just going through the security check. He didn’t think any of them was Owen.

  He couldn’t have missed Owen. He couldn’t have. His only option after this was taking a flight to the States to the address tacked to the damned suit. The phone. He reached into his pocket, but didn’t find it. Checked the other pocket. Empty. He must have left it in his flat. Had he taken it off the charger this morning?

  Back to the main concourse. He almost ran past the coffee shops. Thankfully, they were all completely glass-fronted and There! There was the familiar brown muddle of hair and the hooded college sweatshirt and the almost impossibly wide shoulders. He’d nearly run right past Owen because he wasn’t used to seeing him with a girl. Well, young woman. Tucked away in a corner, having breakfast.

  Thank God. Thank fuck. He rushed into the cafe and almost ran over a Latino waiter who had materialized to show him to a free table. “Oops. I’m with . . .” Malcolm gestured in the vague direction of Owen. “Friends. Just meeting friends. Thanks. No. Sorry.” Get out of my way, arsehole.

  He skidded to a halt in front of their table, almost too crazed for words. “Owen?”

  The look on Owen’s face was . . . amazing. It was a slow, sunshine realization, and for the first time since Malcolm had run out of his flat that morning he could breathe again.

  “Yeah?” Owen’s brown eyes were just as tired and just as sad as Malcolm had felt all morning. Owen stood, which sucked because it meant Malcolm had to look up, but suddenly Malcolm didn’t care.

  “You can’t.” It was all he had.

  “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t . . . can’t just go away. Can’t just . . . You can’t get on that train and charge out of my life. It’s not fair. I can’t work, dammit! I . . . I made a bad trade. I made a bad trade. How dare you? How dare you walk into my flat and . . . and then just . . . just walk out again? How can you even—” His voice was shaking, and Owen, blessed, blessed Owen, didn’t make him suffer.

  Those arms—those long, muscular arms—were suddenly around his shoulders, and now he could do more than breathe again, he could think again.

  “How could you just let me?” Owen asked, his voice as ragged as Malcolm’s.

  “I’m the emotionally repressed one,” he said against Owen’s chest. “You’re the one who’s supposed to know better.”

  “What now?” Owen dropped his head to nudge Malcolm’s temple with his chin. “How does this work?”

  “You stay. You have a visa—”

  “A work visa, actually.” Malcolm looked at him, a little shocked, and Owen shrugged. “I’ve got a degree in computer engineering, Malcolm; I’m not completely helpless over here, you know.”

  Malcolm found himself laughing, surprised, shocked out of his desperation by simple, everyday good fortune. “Good. If you want to work, you can. I mean, I wouldn’t tie you to the bed or anything, I just want you to stay. Work something out that’s good for both of us. I mean, my flat’s enormous, you wouldn’t need to—”

  “You’re babbling, Malcolm.”

  “God forbid,” he groused. “Just . . . just stay. Don’t go. I’ll pay for the rest of your trip if you can’t stand me after a week. I’ll come with you for the rest of it, if you can wait until my next holiday. Whatever. I don’t care. Just stay. Walking away from you was like walking away from the best part of me. I almost didn’t recognize him.”

  Owen laughed and cupped his face with those long, encompassing hands. “Please tell me he’s the guy I loved last night, and not the guy who made me drink vodka.”

  “Yeah,” Malcolm agreed, falling into that wonderful embrace and forgetting that pride had ever been a thing. “That’s the one.”

  “Good,” Owen said, and kissed him, hard and with possession and with promise. Behind them, the blonde girl with the expensive tits stood up and patted Owen on the back. “Thanks a lot for sending me to France alone, asshole,” she said, and then walked away and left them, drag
ging her flowered carry-on with her. Malcolm didn’t care, and Owen didn’t stop the kiss until they were good and ready.

  When it ended, they pulled back, resting foreheads together. “And here,” Owen breathed, “I thought you weren’t going to remember my name.”

  “Owen,” Malcolm said. It was familiar enough to feel like his own. The blizzard of St. Pancras station whirled about them, but it felt like Owen was the only other person on earth. Malcolm, the big bad Dom, clung to his sweet country mouse like Owen could shelter him in any storm.

  The End

  Also by Aleksandr Voinov

  Return on Investment (Return on Investment #1), also available in audio

  Risk Return (Return on Investment #2)

  Dark Soul I-III

  Incursion (Incursion #1)

  Exile (Incursion #2)

  Dark Edge of Honor, with Rhi Etzweiler

  Witches of London – Lars

  Witches of London – Eagle’s Shadow, with Jordan Taylor

  Witches of London – Shadows Watching

  Gold Digger

  Nightingale, also available in audio

  Deliverance, also available in audio

  Skybound, also available in audio

  Burn, also available in audio

  The Lion of Kent, with Kate Cotoner

  For a full list, go to www.aleksandrvoinov.com/bookshelf.html.

  Also by Amy Lane

  The Little Goddess Series

  Bitter Moon Series

  The Green’s Hill Werewolf Series

  The Promises Series

  The Talker Stories

  The Green’s Hill Series

  Johnnies

  Truth in the Dark

  Hammer & Air

  If I Must

  Christmas With Danny Fit