by Adira August
“Snow should have sent you a map of the park by now. Twee will arrive shortly. Jeffco has an officer on stand-by. There’s a PEV, a plug-in electric vehicle, inside the screen with a body in it, according to patrol.”
“You haven’t seen it?” Merisi asked, surprised but still poised to write.
“Your scene, Merisi. I haven’t done anything but confirm the body with patrol, notify the team, and stand by,” Hunter said.
“One piece of advice. Twee is an exceptional crime scene tech, and she’s been to a lot more homicides than you have. If it were me, I’d consider following her lead in certain situations. The final decisions are yours.” Hunter paused to see if Merisi had questions.
“Is it just Twee and I, then?”
“I called for a couple uniform cars to assist, they should be here shortly. Natani will be available by phone at all times. I won’t. You comfortable with that?”
The young detective really wanted to know what could be so important Hunter Dane couldn’t cancel it to handle this crime scene. Maybe he was testing Merisi. It was the kind of thing he’d do. “I’m okay with that.”
“I imagine you are. Anything else?”
“Why isn’t homicide handling this? I mean, why us? Is the victim someone important?”
“You’ll tell me in the morning, Detective. Don’t be late.” Hunt left him there.
Hunter would have preferred someone more experienced than Merisi, who’d only been on the street three years and on his team for four months. But Mike was the only other certified police officer on the team. He was smart and good and ambitious and being on his own didn’t scare him.
That last was something Hunter knew could be a problem if his apparent confidence disguised a streak of arrogance. Yet neither Hunt nor Cam could be involved. They might be too involved already. Or, this victim and PEV might have nothing whatsoever to do with Asher Gamble.
“You get the map to him?” Hunt asked Cam when he slid in behind the wheel of his Bronco.
“On his cell and his car computer,” Cam said, eyes still on his phone.
Hunt left the park and headed for Morrison. “I told him we’d meet at eight. You, too.” Cam just nodded.
“Are you doing something case-related, right now?”
Cam nodded again. “Yeah, I’m checking - hey!”
Hunt had plucked the phone from his hands and tossed it into the backseat.
“We have left the scene. I’m taking you to dinner. Dead people are not invited.”
Cam cocked his head. “You’re kinda hot when you do masterful.”
Hunt kept his eyes on the road curving up and over the hogback.
“So are you.”
“YOU ORDERED TOFU,” Cam smirked when their server, who was also the manager, left with their order through a bead privacy curtain.
“Poker night. Need the blood in my head, not my gut.” He reached over and picked Cam’s hand up off the table, opening it to expose his palm.
Cam watched Hunt’s slender, elegant fingers trace the lines and shapes of his hand. Hunt lowered his mouth, gently sucking and nipping at skin calloused by the torque of countless ski pole handles. A shock of Hunter’s dark brown hair fell softly over Cam’s wrist, tickling him slightly with the movements.
Hunt held Cam’s hand loosely, trapped only by the promise of a bet on a rocky hillside.
“Hunter.”
Hunt looked up into eyes veiled in arousal, pupils wide in the muted light of their private table. “Anything you want, Cam.”
Camden Snow, shy boy in real life, confident king on the slopes, merciless Dom in the club, looked quickly away when his eyes filled, shocking him.
Hunt sat up and back, keeping Cam’s hand between his own, still and safe.
“Why?” Cam asked, coming back.
“Because you give me everything I want,” Hunt answered. “Except one thing.”
“What?”
“You keep yourself in check. You …. calculate what I need. You leave yourself out of the equation. But I want you. I never wanted anyone before, not some specific person. I don’t do halfway any more than you do. I want you to let go. To trust me.”
He smiled and stroked the back of Cam’s hand, smoothing the gold hairs over his fair skin. “I’m breaking you down, you see.”
“You’re assuming,” Cam said.
“So are you.”
Camden Snow had great talents. He was, for such a young man, incredibly insightful. Of himself as well as others. He knew how dark some of his desires were. He calculated what each man could take. He never abused their trust.
But at that table, marveling at how deeply satisfying it felt to simply have his hand in Hunter’s hands, Cam wondered if being in love had skewed his judgement. If the possibility of losing the man he’d wanted for so long had made him doubt himself.
“You’re thinking you might scare me away,” Hunter said. Hunt and Cam had always had this connection, this understanding of one another. “You also thought the HD would scare me away.”
Fear had definitely clouded Cam’s perception, then. Fear that when Hunter knew Cam had Huntington’s Disease, the idea of a future with a man slowly dying while losing control of his limbs and mind and every bodily function would defeat any burgeoning feelings of affection he had. Hunter Dane was, after all, famous for not connecting at an emotional level.
But Hunter hadn’t left.
Cam stared at his hand on the table. “What if I can’t stop?”
“It’s gonna be really ironic if I’m the one explaining the nature of love to you, Cam.”
Cam turned the hand on the table palm up. Hunter covered it with his own.
Bernie came through the curtain with appetizers and bread and sauces. The men fell on the food and didn’t speak for a while.
“Do you believe you’re psychic?” Cam asked.
The hesitation of the fork moving a fried mushroom to Hunter’s mouth was so fleeting Cam wasn’t sure he’d seen it.
“Define the term.”
Cam frowned, surprised at the request. The demand meant Hunter would say yes or no depending on how Cam meant the term. How did he, was the question he asked himself. He took some time reframing his question.
“Are you able to acquire knowledge—information—by means other than the five traditional senses?”
“Yes.”
Bernie came through the curtain and cleared some dishes, asking how they were doing so far. He served their main course from a rolling cart, admonishing them that the plates were hot.
When Bernie withdrew, Hunter started in on his dinner.
Cam picked up his cutlery. “Explain.” He sliced into his buffalo.
“Explain what?” Hunt asked around a mouthful of vegetables and rice.
“Are we playing games, now?”
“You’re a research virtuoso. You can find out more about psychism on your phone in a few minutes than I’ll ever know.”
“That’s what you have? A bunch of anecdotal crap online?”
“More assuming.”
Cam finally put the buffalo into his mouth and promptly made a sound of extreme pleasure.
Hunter grinned. “Better than sex?”
“And I’m not assuming,” Cam insisted. “If there was any proof, people would know. There’d be press releases. It would be news.”
“Many people do know. There were press releases,” Hunter told him. “But until you stop being such a bigot about this, I don’t think we should discuss it.”
“How am I a bigot?” He was affronted.
“A bigot is someone who will not consider any point of view but their own.”
Cam frowned. “That’s not what a bigot is.” He reached for his phone and then remembered, Hunter had thrown his cell into the back seat. “Are you sure?”
Hunter nodded.
“Okay, I’m listening. Could you just tell me about it?” Cam drank some water.<
br />
“Think of psychism as a human trait. Like, everybody can sing. Some people are opera divas and some are tone-deaf, but most everyone can sing.”
“You’re saying everyone is psychic,” Cam stated.
“Pretty much,” Hunter told him, laying his silverware across his empty plate.
“But I’m not.”
“You said you were. In a car in an alley during the matchstick case. Or have you forgotten using my own cuffs on me?”
Cam leaned back, opened his pants and freed his erection, pulling Hunt by the hair until his mouth was directly over Cam’s erection.
He shoved Hunt’s head down. “Take it.”
Goddamn it. Hunter clamped his mouth shut. Cam made a rough noise in his throat and gushed precum against Hunt’s lips.
“You’re a glutton for punishment tonight, aren’t you?” Cam smiled. “Any way you want it.”
Somehow, Hunt had forgotten who he was with. A champion. A full-metal Dom. Clever sadist. Perfectionist. Who would know better what to do with handcuffed wrists?
Cam reached and lifted. Hunter screamed, the sound choked off by Cam’s fiery length slamming all the way into his throat.
Cam withdrew and thrust again. Fucked and used and kept pressure on Hunt’s arms, the agony in his shoulders his punishment for disobedience.
And through it all, the thing most there was not a cock in his mouth or metal biting into his wrists or the fire in his shoulders. The world was Cam. This was the sadist in his element. Loving what he did to Hunt because of what it did for him. Powerful, merciless, grunting in extreme arousal at Hunt’s helplessness, while fulfilling Hunter’s need to shred everything that kept him from himself.
Cam slowed, savoring every millimeter and moment. He started to pant, hard. He was close.
“Bitch,” he breathed. “You sonuva … bitch … You … own me.” The last words a sob that segued into a snarl. His cock pulsed and throbbed; wave after wave of cum poured down Hunt’s throat, open and paralyzed by Cam’s girth.
Cam spasmed a last time and pulled out quickly. Hunt gasped, throat raw, greedy for the cool air.
Cam unlocked the cuffs. Hunt reached a trembling hand down and eased his aching erection to a less painful position.
And he knew who the killer was.
In that moment, Hunter Dane appreciated Camden Snow more than any person he’d ever known. He was perfect.
“How do you always do that?”
“You mean force you to take what you need?” Cam pushed damp hair off Hunt’s forehead.
“Know what I need.”
Cam grabbed him by the tie and kissed him quickly. “Sexual psychic.”
“That’s not what I meant. Obviously.”
“Why obviously?”
“It was a joke, a tease,” Cam said, the eyeroll in his voice.
“No, it wasn’t.”
Anger flashed across Cam’s face. Hunter ignored it. “Explain how you knew in that car how much I needed you to take over, take everything from me, so I could see what I should have seen all along.”
No answer.
“Explain,” Hunter said again. “Explain how, when I knelt at the club, you knew exactly what to do. Things no one had ever done. That I never heard of in a BDSM playroom, before.”
Cam’s lips pressed; he remained stubbornly silent.
“Goddamnit, Camden Snow, answer me!”
Cam was caught in Hunter’s fierce gaze. His knife and fork clattered to the plate. “God, I want to beat you and fuck you over this table right now.”
Hunter didn’t soften.
“It’s body language and microexpressions or whatever,” Cam said. “Observation and reputation around the club. It’s a million unidentifiable but not mysterious things. I never give anyone permission to kneel for me until I know what they need.”
“How do you know that’s what it is?” Hunter asked. “Those are possible explanations but not facts.”
Cam shook his head and drank some water.
“You told me once that the first time you saw me was the first time you ever came to SANH. We passed in the doorway. Remember what you told me?”
Cam reached out and put a hand on the side of Hunter’s neck, his thumb skating lightly along the jawline and down, across his larynx. Cam’s hand tightened - scarcely, definitely - and withdrew.
“Kneel for me when you’re ready,” he said. And was gone.
“You knew me less than a minute,” Hunt reminded him. “No reputation in the club you could have known. No body language to observe. Thirty seconds in a doorway and you told me to kneel. It wasn’t permission; it was an order. How did you know?”
Camden Snow wasn’t a man who lied to himself. Becoming a champion required a blunt and brutal candor, to know when and how he failed, to know when good enough simply was not. He believed his explanation was correct. But, in fact, he did not know it was.
“I’m not sure. Like I told you before, I knew you needed me. Even then, I could see it. Right there in front of me. How beautiful it would be to make you suffer and how easy to get lost in your pain. What I do know is you were different for me from the beginning. It was like you were in some kind of spotlight. I saw you so clearly.”
“And I really didn’t want you to see me,” Hunt said. “Until I needed you to. The way I need you to see me right now.”
Captured by the raw hunger in Hunter’s eyes to abandon himself totally to anything and everything his Dom was or wanted, rendered Cam both powerless and indestructible. He felt something dissolve inside himself. Something old and hardened.
“You already know,” Cam said.
“Know?”
“What I am. Want.”
“Yes. … And?”
It was a very steep slope and a long way to fall, but Hunter had made Cam invulnerable. “You want it, too.”
Hunter smiled.
MIKE MERISI AND Carol Twee met the Jefferson County Sheriff’s deputy in the small parking lot for the Mount Morrison Trailhead. Twee had led them to it, following a faint trail of dirt and pebbles embedded in the tread of the PEV and leading down the road to the trailhead.
“We hope we don’t have to climb it all,” Mike told the deputy as all three trained their flashlights on the narrow, packed-dirt path up the hillside.
Deputy K.D. (“Call me Wes.”) Weston squinted up the rocky slope as far as his beam would reach. “Why you interested in it?”
“Dirt and rocks from the vehicle treads track back here,” Twee said. “I found a faint imprint that looks like a match to the tire about fifty feet up the trail.”
Deputy Wes stared at Twee as if she were an alien species. It was a common reaction the first time a law enforcement officer met the tiny black slash of a tech with the sweet lisp and pixie face. But even a hardened officer soon appreciated her ability, intelligence and willingness to work in locations those same men dreaded.
But Wes hadn’t yet learned to appreciate Twee and ignored her comment, talking over her head to Merisi.
“The PEV had to come from somewhere up there, some intersecting road,” Merisi said. He was aware of the slight to his team member, but right now, he needed the deputy’s cooperation.
Wes spit into the dirt. “Side-by-side or street legal?”
“HighRoad Ram, XL 1200,” Twee said without checking her notes.
He narrowed one eye at her. “What else you find in the tires?”
“Black cinders, no tar,” she said, returning his stare.
“Which is?”
“Athletic field running track.”
He grinned. “Almost. You ride with me,” he said, opening the passenger front door of his unit for Twee.
“Thank you.” She got in. “We have to stop back at the scene so I can grab my case.”
“Not a problem.” He closed her door. “You ride in back,” he told Merisi.
Merisi went around him and opened his own door.<
br />
They all fell in love with Twee.
“WE CAN’T LEAVE now,” she told Max. “The police could already be on the way.”
He didn’t pace or panic. It was not in his nature. “It was supposed to be closed. It was closed.”
“Help me get to the porch,” she said. “I need someplace dark. If they see me like this …” She laid the cold packs aside she’d kept on her face, neck and shoulder for the last few hours.
“Oh, my God,” he said when he saw how swollen and black she was from her captor’s brief torture.
“Don’t,” she snapped. “This will heal and I don’t need the sympathy. This is my fault. People are hurt, dead and in jeopardy because of me. Because of pride and stupidity.”
She let him take her good arm and help her walk slowly toward the door. “Did the boys go?”
“They refused. It’s a code, you know. ‘No one left behind’.”
On the porch, she got herself into the big round chair that swung from chains. She had to ask for help to cross her legs and get back pillows adjusted.
“Get my afghan, please, Max. And shut off these lights. In fact, remove the bulbs. I have an idea.”
8:37pm - Gaming
* * *
In the Scene and Not Heard parking lot, Hunter wrapped the straps around his shoulder holster and stowed it in the lock-box hidden under the passenger seat. This necessitated reaching down between Cam’s knees. He had become quite adept at doing this chore single-handed over the last few months.
“Do you want to go in first and I’ll wait out here for a while before I do?” Cam asked.
Hunt shook his head. He secured his weapon before he got out and walked around to open a very surprised Camden Snow’s door.
“Well, c’mon, then, I’m not handing you out like a British princess.”
“We’re walking in together?” Cam had often fantasized entering the club with Hunter on his arm. It was part Alpha ego, showing so many Doms he’d won the prize they lusted after. Camden Snow liked winning.