by Mary Winter
Adrian picked up a rag. Then again, when you didn’t have many toys to begin with, you cherished every one you had. He pushed away the melancholy memories of a poor childhood as he polished the figure’s skin. A quick scrub removed what appeared to be ink stains on its remaining good hand.
He took his time with the lower legs, carefully replacing the pegs. A pair of clamps held the joints together, a third one at the elbow keeping the fresh repairs stable. Normally he waited twenty-four hours before dressing the figure and putting him up for sale in his shop.
Looking at the toy’s stubbled face and deep blue eyes, Adrian couldn’t quite bring himself to put this particular toy on sale. What would it hurt to keep it for his private collection? Sure, the date was far too new for the toy to be of monetary value. That didn’t mean he couldn’t keep it anyway, right? Just in case its value appreciates.
He shook his head as he mentally tried to talk himself into keeping the toy. “It’s silly,” he muttered as he cleaned up some excess glue around the pins. “It’s just a toy.”
“How can I be just a toy if I talk to you?” the voice asked.
“Okay. Wait a fucking minute.” Adrian set the figure down on the workbench as if it were a hot potato. “You’re made of plastic. You’re a toy. And I’m talking to you so that must make me the crazy one.”
A bit melodramatic, but probably true. “So I’m going to go upstairs and take a shower. Maybe I’ll fantasize about Captain Jack Harkness and at least in my dreams I’ll get a little. Deal?”
“You got Captain Mack right here.”
“But you’re no more real than Captain Jack is,” Adrian replied with a sigh. He removed the clamps from the figure’s joints, wiped off the last of the excess glue, and left him on the workbench to dry. His gritty eyes told him more than the slight ache in his neck that he needed to rest. A full night’s sleep before he faced his friends and business partners and told them the bad news.
He flipped the light switch off.
“Thanks, buddy,” the male voice said.
Adrian stopped, hand poised over the doorknob. He glanced over his shoulder, barely able to make out the figure on the table. “You’re welcome.” He pulled the door closed behind him.
He walked down the hall to his bedroom, where he stripped and left his clothing in a pile. The attached master bath offered a large, sunken whirlpool tub. He started to fill it, dropping in a sandalwood and musk scented bath ball. Immediately the ball began to fizz, filling the room with its spicy aroma. He started the jets and stepped into the warm water.
Muscles tense from sitting hunched over his computer relaxed with the pulsing hot water. Memories of other times and other soaks filled his mind. The oval-shaped tub was easily big enough for two, and there had been several occasions when the water had been enjoyed by more than one. A soft smile curved his lips. Leaning back, he rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. But that had been a long time ago. He figured it’d be a while before it would happen again.
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Adrian’s eyelids flew open. He glanced around the bathroom, reassuring himself he was alone. When he left the toy on the workbench, he had expected the voice to stop. “Yeah, it does,” he replied.
His cock twitched with memories. In the warm water, his shaft hardened. The jets pulsated. Swirls of water hit him in just the right places. He bit back a groan. Resting his arm along the edge of the tub, he curled his fingers around the cool marble, not wanting to reach beneath the water’s surface to stroke himself.
He took a deep breath. It was only a hallucination brought on by too many nights alone. Dean had teased him about weighing the balance sheet on his relationships. This time, it had brought him one too many lonely nights. Adrian frowned.
“You think too much.” The rough voice washed over him, wrapping around his cock and squeezing. Long fingers curled around his shoulders, massaging them with firm strokes.
Adrian leaned into the invisible touch. He didn’t bother looking over his shoulder. Just chalked the sensation of the deep tissue massage up to his very active imagination. He slid further down into the tub. Water swirled around the middle of his chest. He bent his leg, his knee breaking the water’s surface. He stretched out his arm and rested his wrist on his exposed knee.
“Yeah, just like that,” he murmured as the strokes dropped over his pecs. The tips of phantom fingers stroked his nipples.
The touch slipped away.
Adrian waited, lips parted, uncertain if he should turn around, say something, or simply sit there and wait for the next act in this invisible seduction play.
Nothing happened. Adrian sensed someone standing beside the tub, looking down at him, weighing, measuring, just like he did. And he realized he didn’t like it. He wasn’t a piece of meat on the auction block. He was a man. He started to rise from the tub.
Water sloshed over the side. Waves undulated over the surface of the bath, almost as if someone as if someone climbed into the tub in front of him. Strong hands spread his thighs as an imaginary somebody settled between them. His knees poking from the tub, Adrian leaned back on an inflatable bath pillow. With the jets pulsing at his back, he let his fantasies take over.
A masculine hand curled around his erect cock. Beneath the water, he stroked it, base to tip, rolling his palm over the flushed head. A drop of pre-cum emerged from the tip, quickly washed away by the water. Adrian groaned. He’d had hallucinations, indulged in his own share of fantasies, but nothing like this. His eyelids fluttered closed.
A second hand curled around his balls. Those talented fingers fondled him, reaching to stroke the sensitive skin just behind. Adrian gave himself over to the pleasure. His dick throbbed with a heavy pulse. His breathing grew ragged. It’d been ages since he’d put himself in such talented hands.
“You ain’t felt nothing yet. Kneel.”
That whisky-rough voice tightened his cock even more. The words pulled at him, promised him a hot, wet mouth and a long, slow fucking in the ass. Adrian frowned. He hated being ordered around. The jets pulsed against his sore muscles. Reaching back, he rubbed the back of his neck, reluctant, even with fingers stroking his cock, to move.
His balls tightened. A familiar pressure started just behind them, a pulsing that threatened to erupt. He’d be damned if he came in this stranger’s hand like an untried teen. Succumbing to the fantasy, Adrian grabbed the edge of the tub. He rose to his knees. Water rocked back and forth, splashing onto the floor. The jets stilled and Adrian smiled.
A hot, wet mouth curled around the head of his cock. The tongue toyed with the slit, coaxing more pre-cum from him. For a hallucination the invisible man gave good head. He drew Adrian’s shaft deeper into his mouth. Had he been real, Adrian had no doubt he could look down and watch the man’s cheeks hollow. Nothing turned him on more than watching someone give a blow job.
Adrian’s breathing grew ragged. Automatically, he reached for the back of the man’s head and his fingers slid through empty air. A bit disconcerting.
The sucking intensified. The man’s tongue stroked the length of him base to tip, along the sensitive veins on the underside of his shaft. Just behind the head, the oh-so-talented tongue played with the knot of nerves.
Adrian allowed his eyelids to drift closed. The analytical, number-crunching part of his mind told him that he’d simply been too long without sex. Conjuring hallucinations was the only way he could get laid.
Two fingers stroked the crease of Adrian’s buttocks. Gentle pressure from a wet finger pressed against his back entrance. It was as if this stranger could read his mind to know exactly what turned him on. Inside the very real and very invisible mouth, his cock jerked.
Of course he knows. You conjured him. Even Adrian’s snide mental comments couldn’t decrease the pleasure. Air chilled his damp skin. The sandalwood scent hung in the room. It clung to him, made him think of nights when he and a lover had tumbled into bed, both wearing the delicious aroma.
The man’s fingers danced across his skin. His other hand stroked Adrian’s ass, pressing against his opening, but never deeper. Adrian rocked his hips back and forth. He lost awareness of individual touches. His world faded down to touch, caress, heat, wetness and suction. Pressure built, threatening to erupt, and Adrian wished it would last.
It’d been too long, and the stranger was too good. Adrian groaned raggedly as his cock erupted. The invisible mouth tightened, throat working to swallow Adrian’s come. His body spasmed, his balls so tight it was painful. Muscles rigid, he tensed, half afraid he’d fall into the water.
The hand on his buttocks stilled. The mouth loosed, but didn’t completely leave. A few, final licks, then water sloshed and the man was gone.
Adrian sank into the tepid water. He yelped, the cooling liquid too much on his overheated flesh. He flipped the drain plug, then stepped out, grabbing a fluffy towel from the warmer. Whoever that was, whatever that was, he’d needed it. The next time, he hoped he’d have a real man and not a figment of his imagination.
Chapter Two
Adrian rubbed a hand across his stubbled jaw, wishing he had the answers to the two questions that had plagued his sleep. What could he do about his store’s profits, and was the fantasy he’d conjured up a real live person? No one he knew gave head like that. His cock throbbed, his morning hard-on so intense it bordered on painful. If he had that man with him right now, he’d roll him over and give him the fucking of his life.
Adrian groaned. “Get up, get coffee, get to work,” he muttered to himself on the way to the bathroom.
While he completed his morning ritual of showering and shaving, his worries raced through his mind. Mingled in with them was the image of a certain stubble-cheeked action figure. “Maybe a little fun this morning before I work.” He grinned with the thought of getting back to his workshop. The glue would have dried overnight. Checking the details under a strong light and then completing the restoration by redressing the figure would be the perfect start to his morning. With a plan in mind, he grabbed a pair of jeans and pulled them on. He padded barefoot down to his workroom.
Adrian cracked open the door.
“Thought you’d never get down here.”
Adrian froze. That voice. It’d stiffened his cock and given him a hard-on that wouldn’t quit. Even now, behind the fly of his jeans, his shaft pounded. At least he hadn’t bothered to put on underwear. Easy access had its good points.
He pushed the door the rest of the way open. A shirtless man leaned against his workbench, muscled arms crossed over his broad chest. Dragging his gaze upward, Adrian focused on the chiseled lips nestled among the stubble. A straight nose and deep blue eyes that made him think of drowning. Adrian licked his lips.
How had this guy gotten into his house? He’d locked the doors, or at least he thought he had. “Who are you? Dean, you can come out now.” His friend had always played practical jokes, but this one might have gone a bit too far.
“I don’t know who Dean is, but if you want him to join us…” A corner of that sexy mouth quirked upwards.
“Dean’s a friend of mine, as I’m sure you know. Who are you?”
“Mack.”
Just one word, and yet it rolled along his nerve endings like a carefully calculated caress. He’d been calling the figure Mack. The man leaning against his workbench looked like Mack. He sounded like the voice in his head. If he asked the man to suck his cock, he bet that it would be exactly like last night, too.
“Step away from my workbench, please,” Adrian ordered. He had to know. He needed to know.
Mack grinned as he made room for Adrian.
Stepping forward, Adrian half-dreaded what he would see. Even from his vantage point a few feet away, he saw the empty workbench. Only a few tools littered the surface. No figure. No clamps. Not even the bottle of glue.
“I hope you don’t mind. I put a few things away.”
Adrian stared. A thousand thoughts, none of them tangible, raced through his mind. How? Why? He could capture only one. “How did you know where everything went?”
“I explored a bit,” Mack said. His gaze unabashedly roamed over Adrian’s bare chest and down to the fly of his jeans.
The intensity in Mack’s perusal stole Adrian’s breath. He flashed back to last night, fingers curling around an invisible head, feeling a mouth around his dick. “You didn’t answer my questions. Who are you?”
“I’m Mack. And I’m here. Where I come from doesn’t matter, does it?”
“I wake up to find a strange man in my house and the action figure I was restoring gone. My tools are also miraculously put away, and no one touches them but me. All of this isn’t supposed to matter? Look, if Dean put you up to this, it’s not funny anymore. So come on. Who are you, and where the hell did you come from?”
The longer Adrian stared at Mack, the more uneasy he grew. Things didn’t add up. A part of him wanted to leave and check the doors. But if he’d broken in then the alarm would have gone off. And the figure was nowhere in sight. Dean had the code to his alarm. All the guys did. Mack looked exactly like the action figure. Toys didn’t come to life. Did they?
Adrian’s breath whooshed from his lungs. There was no way in hell Mack could be an action figure come to life.
Nervous laughter bubbled from deep inside him. Adrian pressed his knuckles to his lips in a futile attempt to stifle it. At the moment he didn’t know whether to be angrier at the stranger for playing this cruel joke on him or for rummaging around in the workroom to put everything away.
“You should have left everything out. I was in the middle of a project.” Adrian gripped the edge of the workbench to keep from reaching out to Mack.
“Project’s completed.” Mack held out his hands.
“No. No. No!” Adrian yelled. “Where the hell did my figure go?” Whirling away from the table, he stormed across the room. Numbers. Columns. Profit and loss. If he could feel it, touch it, and calculate it, he knew it was real. This man standing in front of him wasn’t real. A hallucination maybe, but not real.
Adrian bolted for the door. “I’m going to go to the kitchen, have a nice cup of coffee, and when I come back you’ll be gone. There will be an action figure on my workbench and none of this will have happened.” Adrian wondered if he walked past his bedroom would he see himself himself fast asleep having one crazy ass dream?
“It’s been a while since I’ve had coffee. Can you bring me a mug? Black.”
A slight rustle forced Adrian to turn. Mack leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his broad chest in a casual male pose.
Once more, Mack’s gaze caressed him from head to toe, and he straightened. “Tell you what. Why don’t I come with you? Don’t suppose you’d have a muffin to go along with the coffee?”
Adrian shook his head.
“Banana? I’m starving, man.”
Yeah, well, so was he, but Adrian wouldn’t say that out loud. And he wasn’t hungry for a muffin or a banana. At least not one of the yellow variety. The longer he stood in Mack’s presence, the more his body reminded him how long it’d been since he’d had real sex. The fantasy kind like he had last night had been all right. Spectacular even, and he’d comforted himself with it for far too long. Adrian jerked his head toward the door. Might as well play this charade out to the end. “All right,” he muttered. “But I want answers.”
“You’ll get them. I just hope you’ll listen, because I have a feeling you’re not going to like them,” Mack replied.
Adrian shrugged. With the exception of the rugged man half-naked in his workroom, Adrian hadn’t liked much about this morning. He doubted it’d get better.
* * *
Mack stared at Adrian’s broad, naked back as he followed him down the hall. He couldn’t explain how he’d gotten here any more than Adrian could. One minute he’d been wincing at the pain of his injuries, the repairs hurting a lot more than the initial removal of his feet had. The next, he’d been curl
ed on the floor in the fetal position, wearing the same pair of pants he’d had on for the last five years. Luckily, they’d been on him less than a day as a human, otherwise he figured he’d stink to high heaven.
Memories filtered back to him, of a squad in Vietnam, men under his command. Exploding land mines, gunfire, screams. It seemed like a distant memory, though, and not something that had happened to him. Yet, he sensed it had.
The guys were more familiar. Sawyer with his crazily painted face. Talon. Brice. He remembered them as his brothers-in-arms. They’d vowed to fight, and die, for each other if the need arose, and apparently it had, because he was here and the guys were gone.
He stared at his bare toes, still not quite believing he had feet. He’d been without them for so long, had gotten used to sitting and crawling. Sunlight shining through the windows stung his eyes, too used to the dark at the bottom of a box. He remembered lying inside a cardboard box and waiting. For what, he didn’t know, except that eventually, the box would open, and he’d be brought out, ready for another mission.
Until he had lost his feet. Then the Toymaker had given him a second chance. He’d been repaired, and now he was here -- and able to chase his own mission.
Mack shook his head. His fingers itched to curl around the stock of a rifle or the grip of a pistol. Put him behind the wheel of a personnel carrier, and he’d evade the cagiest enemy’s bullets. As a human, he wasn’t quite sure what to do.
“You going to sit down?” Adrian’s harsh question cut through his musings.
“Yeah, sorry. Just thinking.” Mack crossed the cool linoleum, curling his toes into the chilly flooring. He pulled out a wooden chair from around an oak dining table, just now taking in his surroundings. The table looked expensive, polished to a high gloss. Stainless steel appliances were visible through the open area leading to the kitchen, the counters granite. Large windows overlooked the fenced-in back yard. A huge grill sat on a concrete patio, the stainless-steel contraption looking like something from the space shuttle. Only the propane canister, and the apron hanging nearby that read “Kiss the Cock” with a huge rooster on it, made him recognize it as a grill. Patio furniture created an outdoor living area, accessible through the wide French doors. Whoever this guy was, he had money.