Marking What's Mine (A Marksman's Tale Book 1)

by Gianni Holmes

  Beside me, Paulie wolf-whistled as Mac walked on stage. He wasn't the only one. I’d never considered myself a possessive person before. If I were, I wouldn’t have taken back Jackson after he got caught in bed with someone else. However, hearing the heated comments around me about Mac’s physique had me clenching my teeth. I had the urge to climb the stage and usher him off, but knowing the debacle that would cause, I refrained. He was doing this for a good cause. What did it matter that he was really good at the way he teased the crowd? He snapped his suspenders and winked at women in the crowd.

  I was on the edge of my seat, my leg bouncing in frustration when the bidding started.

  “Holy shit!” Paulie exclaimed when a woman yelled out a thousand dollars for Mac and destroyed several of the competition, leaving her and another woman who glared at each other from the opposite end of the room.

  “Two thousand dollars.”

  My head snapped around at the new voice. No way in hell. Miller had dropped out of participating in the auction when I had assigned him to desk job duty for two weeks because he abandoned his post with Mac. He was still unable to account for the time he'd been on his own. I frowned, wondering how the hell he had so much money on a cop’s salary to be bidding two grand on Mac. I didn’t like the women bidding on him, but I’d take them any day over Miller. Nothing would happen between Mac and the women, but Miller always flirted with Mac low key.

  “Do I hear two thousand one hundred?” the auctioneer asked, and everyone glanced from the two women to see who would challenge Miller’s offer. Both women took their seats in defeat.

  “That’s two thousand dollars,” the auctioneer repeated. “Going once. Going twice and —”

  “Three thousand dollars.”

  A hush fell over the auditorium as I surged to my feet. What the fuck was I doing? I saw the shock on Mac’s face which must have reflected mine. I hadn’t meant to act on impulse, but that I had done, and now it was way too late to rescind my offer. I didn’t dare look at Miller and see his expression. If the earth had opened up and swallowed me whole I would have been grateful. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mac and the way he gaped at me.

  “That’s three thousand dollars. Going once. Going twice. And sold to Captain Marks!”

  I was too stunned to move until Paulie tugged at my hand. “Dude, that’s three thousand dollars. What did you do that for?”

  I looked from him to Mac who was leaving the stage, walking slowly as though in shock. I wished I could answer Paulie’s question, but I was also searching for answers.

  Even knowing how foolish I had been in bidding three thousand dollars on him, I still felt triumphant that I had won. Tomorrow I would deal with the questions and what those around the office would speculate.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Two days later, walking into the police station, my gravely ill decision to bid on Mac still haunted me. The chatter I walked in on immediately stopped, and nobody was willing to look me in the eyes. Usually, I would be met by jokes and a hearty good morning, but all I now saw were guilty expressions as they still roasted me amongst themselves, speculating what was between Mac and me. They all knew I was gay, and Mac hadn’t exactly made it a secret what his preference was either. I was certain they had already made all the connections. There was something going on between Mac and me. They even had a bet going on about who was right that Mac and I were in a relationship. They had no idea I knew, but our office wasn’t exactly huge, and news carried.

  The rumor started with Miller. I couldn’t prove it, but I was pretty certain. I saw his smirks as I passed his desk. He thought he was getting back at me for giving him desk duty. I hadn’t addressed the rumors for one reason. No one had approached me about it, and as far as rumors went they kept it pretty decent, having more fun with it than being malicious.

  “Morning,” I greeted loudly on my way to my office. A chorus of ‘good morning, Captain’ went up followed by quiet. The door to my office was barely closed when they started up the chatter again.

  After checking my internal email, I pulled up the information we had on the murder of the woman on Bonito Crescent and called Detective Johnson into my office so we could go over the case. We spent almost all morning going over the little details we had, trying to determine a cause of murder which we still hadn’t been able to come up with.

  “Speaking with the neighbors didn’t help much,” Detective Johnson remarked, just as frustrated as I was. “Nobody had a close relationship with our victim. Mrs. Ellis from next door did report that the woman didn’t work as far as she was concerned. She lived alone but have had one or two male friends on a regular basis.”

  “Would she be able to identify them?” I asked.

  “She said no. They always came dressed in dark clothing and low hats that covered their features.”

  “Shit. With all this suspicious activity, no one called to have an officer drive by?”

  He frowned. “She did say there was a police officer who was there a couple weeks before the victim died.”

  “Hmm. We don’t any report recorded of one of our officers being by the house. Have any idea what that was about?”

  He shrugged. “Beats me. I guess we’ll never know.”

  The only new information emerging from our discussion was a missing police report of being at the victim’s home. Since we had nothing else to go over, Johnson returned to his desk, and I turned to paperwork. I was almost finishing up to go for lunch when the phone rang. I picked it up and answered.

  “Captain Marks.”

  “Connor, it’s Mac.”

  “Mac?” I asked, surprised that he was calling me. I checked my watch. He should have been off duty now.

  “Yeah, are you busy now?”

  I groaned. “Jesus Christ, Mac. Why didn’t you call my cell?” Maybe he didn’t have my cell phone number, but he should have known better than to call me on the office phone. What if someone was listening to the conversation?

  “It’s of professional nature, sir,” he answered and I heard the strain in his voice. I cringed in embarrassment that I had immediately assumed it was personal.

  “What is it?” I asked him.

  “I’d rather you come down and take a look,” he answered. “I’m over at the house on Bonito Crescent, the one where we found that woman.”

  “What? Why are you there? You’re not on the case Officer MacKenzie.”

  “I’ll explain. Just get down here.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there in ten.”

  I hung up and swore as I grabbed for my blazer and holstered my gun. I hurried from the police station and headed for Bonito Crescent, wondering what Mac had discovered. What the hell was he doing back there anyway?

  He was leaning against his squad car when I drove up and parked behind his. I got out of the vehicle and frowned at him.

  “What are you doing here?” I gestured toward the house which still had the yellow police tape around the yard. The deceased woman didn’t seem to have anyone who wanted the property. We had only found one living relative, an older sister who hadn’t spoken to her in years. As far as I saw it, the state would have to bear responsibility for the body.

  “My shift is up,” he established. “I was driving by when I decided to stop. I never got over the way I reacted that day. I wanted to walk through the house again. I did, and I found something.”

  “What’s up with all the mystery, Mac? Just spit it out.” I was aware of how surly I sounded, but we hadn’t really exchanged words since the auction so the whole debacle still hung between us, unresolved. I had walked away from the auction three thousand dollars lighter and nothing to show for it since I had no intention of cashing in.

  “It’s best if I show you.”

  He set off on a quick, excited gait, and I followed him with a frown. The crime scene investigators had been thorough in their examination of the house when we found the body, so I didn’t think there was anything that was of importance he wanted to show
me. Boy was I wrong.

  Mac closed the door behind us as I took in the sight of the carpet in the hall peeled back to reveal the board floor beneath. The boards had been pried apart.

  “You did that?” I asked Mac.

  “Yeah.” He walked over to the open floor and stooped. He beckoned for me to follow him. I knelt on the floor and peered under the boards.

  “Holy fuck.” Beneath the floorboards were re-sealable zipper storage bags which looked to have wads of cash inside.

  “I was walking toward the kitchen where we found her,” Mac explained. “I noticed the floor felt uneven, but I ignored it. After walking through that day in my head and trying to make myself come to terms with it, I was leaving when I tripped over the unevenness in the floor. I pulled the carpet back and saw that someone had been busy. It seems that a great portion of what’s been hiding beneath the floorboards have already been taken out.”

  “Yeah,” I concurred because there was a void to where the rest of the bags were. I removed my penlight from my pocket and shone it into the hole in the floor, pausing when I picked up a small trail of white dust. “Bingo. There was more than money here. I’d take a wild guess that this is meth. It’s what’s been populating the streets here, and I think we discovered one of our dealers.”

  I glanced at Mac, my eyes full of excitement. He smiled at me. “Man, am I glad I decided I needed to get over what I saw here that day.”

  “You need to see a shrink about it?” I asked him with a frown.

  He shook his head. “No, I’m handling it. Coming back here helped.”

  I reached out a hand to cup his face then thought better of it and allowed my hand to drop between us. “Right. We need to get a team out here to photograph and document this stuff for analysis. Hopefully, whoever did this left fingerprints behind.”

  We rose to our feet and walked out of the house to my squad car where I radioed in for the relevant personnel to meet us at the house. I hung up the phone and turned to Mac.

  “Thanks to you we finally have some answers.”

  “Just doing my job,” he answered. “I should get going unless you want me to stick around.”

  “No, that’s fine,” I told him. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Fine.”

  Despite our agreement that he would go on home since his shift was up, Mac didn’t move. His gaze flittered across to the house next door.

  “Listen, Mac.” I couldn’t stand the suspense anymore. “The night at the auction, forget about it. All that mattered is that I made the donation to the hospital.”

  He glanced back at me then. “I can’t do that. I owe you twenty-four hours of service. If you just tell me when and what to do, I’ll be there.”

  Sweet, Jesus, he was really putting images in my mind that weren’t appropriate. “Really. I expect nothing. I did it to support the children’s hospital.”

  He scoffed, his eyes widening in disbelief. “At least have the decency not to lie to me, Captain. You bid on me because you didn’t want Miller to win.”

  “That’s crazy.” I tried to glare at him, but he made it hard because he was smiling at me knowingly. “Okay, dammit. You can get that smirk off your face. I didn’t want Miller to buy you. Are you happy now?”

  “Not quite.” He placed his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. “But, it’s a start. I’ll be over tomorrow. Decide what you want me to do. I’m sure you can come up with a thing or two that I may like.”

  I groaned as he got into his car and drove away. I really needed to set some boundaries between us. I couldn’t see a relationship between us ending well. The thought had me freeze. Was I classifying what we had a relationship now? We were slipping down that slope fast, and I’d run out of traction to stop what we had. All I could do now was to go along with it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Holy shit.” I felt like a pervert but couldn’t stop myself watching Mac from the kitchen window. He had stopped by almost an hour ago to render his twenty-four-hour service that I had bought at the auction. I had thought to punish him a bit for not accepting the easy way out that I had given him. I didn’t expect him to do anything for me, but after putting him off for a few days, he had popped up on my porch today. My stupid luck I hadn’t checked to see if he was off today. Now we both had the day off, and I had no excuse to give him when he had shown up and asked what he could do for me.

  All sorts of thoughts had popped up in my perverted mind when he asked the question, all involving him naked, but not necessarily beneath me. He could be in whatever position he wanted, as long as he was naked. I’d tried coming up with something that would keep him out of the house, and that was when I had seen the state of the lawn. Paulie was supposed to have mowed the lawn, but as was expected, he hadn’t which wasn’t surprising since I already had it that he would be late for his own funeral.

  Mac had his earphones in while mowing the lawn, and it was such a pity he was almost done. I could watch him all day in those low riding jeans of his. As though realizing just how much I was enjoying the peepshow, he stopped mowing and tugged his damp tank top over his head. Slinging it over the partition to the neighbor’s yard he continued mowing, a gloriously sweaty naked man. I had never been turned on by sweat before. I could have sworn I liked my men clean, but seeing Mac, the sweat dripping from his body, I had never been more turned on that I could remember. I wanted to set my tongue in the path of every sweaty drop so it didn’t go to waste. Could the man torment me any more?

  “Like what you see?”

  I startled at Paulie’s voice behind me. Shit, I’d forgotten he was around. I spun around to find him grinning at me. I scowled at him.

  “What do you want?” I asked, observing him from head to toe. He was dressed to go out. “You’re a working man now so I know you’re not hitting me up for cash.”

  “Nope,” he confirmed. “Besides, I’d be cruel to ask you for money after you spent so much on Mac.”

  My face blazed in embarrassment. “The money went to charity.”

  He rolled his eyes at me. “When are you going to admit that you like him?”

  I straightened and willed myself not to glance back out the window as I heard the lawn mower getting closer. “He’s a likable guy,” I replied.

  “You’ve been at this game longer than I have, Connor. You know what I mean. I see the way you look at him.”

  I frowned at him. “What way?”

  “You want to bang his brains out,” he answered with a grin. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to be embarrassed. I get it. He’s hot. I even wanted to bang his brains out too before he told me how he felt about you.”

  “What?” His words got my attention. “He told you how he felt about me?”

  “That’s what I said, and I’m not adding a word more. Except that go with your gut-feeling, man. He’s a really nice guy. Not a piece of shit like your ex. I think he’ll be good for you.”

  “I’m almost twice his fucking age!” I growled at Paulie. “How the hell is that going to work?”

  “You have so little faith in the people who care about you,” he answered. “Just know that he’s a committed type of guy. If you’re not inclined to be with him then be clear about that because he’s…” He trailed off, then continued. “Let’s just say that it would be better for him if you are open to him about not being interested. But, you are interested in him, aren’t you?”

  A shadow fell in the room, and when I glanced up at the entrance to the kitchen and saw Mac’s flaming cheeks did I realize he’d stopped mowing the lawn. From the way he avoided my eyes he must have caught some of what Paulie had just said.

  “I think this is my cue to go,” Paulie announced and walked out of the kitchen. He squeezed Mac’s shoulder as he left.

  “I’m finished with the lawn,” he stated, his eyes shifting everywhere in the kitchen but at me. He reminded me of that first night I had met him and how nervous he had been. I had a whole lot of questions to answe
r, and the most pressing was whether or not I wanted Mac in my life. I found my answer in my reluctance to let him walk out of my life. I’d had the opportunity to turn down his advances and flirting so many times, but I never did. I may have stopped it at a particular moment, but I’d never put a finality to it. Neither did I want to. I had to be a sucker for repeating mistakes, but I wanted Mac in the worst way. I always did. I just never wanted to be selfish about it. But, if Paulie was to be believed, Mac really wanted this relationship as much as I did.

  “You need a bottle of water?” I asked him when I realized we were both standing in the kitchen, not saying anything.

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  “Room temperature or cold?”

  “Cold, please,” he answered. “It’s so damn hot out today which is why I started so late. I wanted the sun to go down a bit.”

  So much for my theory that he’d waited to put on a show for me. I passed him a bottle of water from the fridge then watched him as he drank and the way his throat worked with each swallow. I immediately thought of him swallowing my cum.

  He made a sound that was a cross between a sigh and a purr when he finished the bottle of water and dropped it in the recycle bin. “Is there anything else you want me to help with?” he asked.

  “That’s it,” I told him. “You’ve done your duty.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded. “Although, there is one thing.”

  He inhaled deeply when he saw the way I was looking at him. He was still bare-chested, and there was a bead of sweat slowly inching its way down his body that had my name written all over it.

  “What is it?”

  I moved forward quickly as the sweat found a quicker path and plunged toward the waistband of his jeans. I was before him, my tongue on his skin as the salty liquid pooled right where I wanted it to rest. My hands splayed over his back, and he gasped.