by Mary Calmes
“Oh yeah?”
He nodded. “Yeah. She explained to them that trying to prove I’m nuts, though easy, would take a lot of time and well… money.”
I chuckled. “Nice.”
“So yeah, she’s on a roll. I’ll give her a call as soon as we get home.”
“No, call her now. I don’t think I’m gonna be out of here for hours yet.”
“No, you’re getting out right now,” he insisted. “All you needed was someone to take custody of you. Roark’s coming to take Blake home, and I’m here for you.”
“Oh, that’s great,” I sighed, smiling at him.
He reached up and threaded his fingers through my hair. “You have sand in this. You gotta take a shower when we get home.”
“And after that, I’m gonna put a heating pad on my back. I feel like I’m bruised.”
“Turn around and let me see.”
I did as he instructed so he could reach me.
He gently lifted the lightweight Henley I was wearing, and when I felt his warm palm slide over my bare skin, the sound I made was carnal and not friendly in the slightest.
“Okay, get him out!” Mike yelled, startling me with his fury.
I pivoted to face him and watched as he swallowed hard.
“I need to talk to you,” he whispered. “We need to go home right now.”
“Yeah. I need to talk to you too.”
“Oh? About what?”
I grimaced as Arad reached the cell and unlocked it.
“Speak,” Mike ordered as the door rolled sideways.
“I think it might be time for you to move out.”
He nodded like he was taking that in. “Okay.”
I was surprised. “Okay?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll move out of the guesthouse and into your house, no problem,” he said, following Arad out the door and into the main area of the police station.
I stood there, confused, then turned to look at Blake through the bars.
“Mike’s moving in with you?” He appeared as befuddled as I felt. “Why did I think he was straight?”
“Because he is.”
“Clearly not,” he said dryly. “He wants to live with you.”
“That makes zero sense.”
“I’m probably not the one to be discussing it with,” he said, pointing after Mike.
“Yeah… I….”
“And I won’t press charges for you making me run.”
“You’re really a prick, Blake.”
“As are you, Hutch.”
We left it at that and I went after Mike.
I was only a few moments behind him, but by the time I reached the booking area, Mike already had my possessions and was standing at the door waiting for me. I thanked Arad for some stupid reason, like being on autopilot, and was outside seconds later.
“So let’s talk,” Mike said, grabbing hold of my wrist and dragging me around the side of the building, into the bushes where no one could see us.
“What’s going on with you?”
“A lot,” he said right before he crushed me into the stucco wall and then covered me with his hard, muscular body.
I caught my breath, and he stared at me, into my eyes, and as we were both six foot tall, there was nowhere else to look but at each other.
“I have a theory,” he said gruffly before he leaned in and kissed me.
Everything stopped.
My heart, my pulse, the blood rushing through my veins, everything in me stilled and savored and coalesced into one aching, drowning, devouring need.
I wanted Mike Rojas desperately.
He pulled back, and I saw the look of confusion come over his beautiful sharp features, and it hit me that in my discovery of the meaning of life, I’d forgotten to kiss him back.
“You…,” he began hesitantly.
“No-no,” I corrected quickly before I took hold of his face and kissed him, hard, so he could feel it down to his toes. I mauled him, opening him up, used my tongue to explore his mouth, all of it, missing nothing.
The sounds he made, the husky moans, made it impossible not to touch him, pull at his clothes, tug the button-down oxford shirt out of his jeans, and get my hands on his hot, sleek skin. I traced over the bumps and dips of his chiseled abdomen as I stroked his tongue with mine, taking and tasting, coaxing him forward into me, until he was the one with his back against the wall and I had him there, at my mercy, as one hot, wild kiss became another and another.
“Fuck,” he growled, shoving me off him, panting hard, dragging in air.
All I could do was stand there, taking deep breaths as I waited to hear if the swearing was a good or bad development.
“Couple months back,” he said hoarsely, “I was standing in the backyard at the grill, and I looked up and you waved to me and I had this feeling that I used to get when I walked into the house and saw Janey… like I was home.”
Anything I said would be wrong, so I stayed quiet.
“And I was pissed, right, because what the hell? You’re not her. You can’t take her place! If she hadn’t died, I’d still be there in San Francisco with her, so what the fuck?”
I nodded.
“But that’s not what happened. She died and I lived, and we used to talk about it all the time and back then I thought—” He took a breath. “—my wife is crazy maudlin.”
I would have probably thought the same.
“But now I gotta wonder if somehow she knew. She was always so sure we were never going to have kids, so sure we’d never grow old together… and I always said you’re nuts, this is forever, you and me, but….”
I put a hand on his cheek, and he turned quickly and kissed my palm, my skin feeling branded by the simple press of his lips.
“I told her if I died she had to find a man to love her as much as I did, and she always said she’d find a person to love her. A person. And I’d tease her and say, you’re going to become a lesbian, and she said she didn’t know, couldn’t say for certain. Because maybe it would be a woman, after me, that would fill her heart, and maybe it would be a man for me.”
His wife was an angel and I’d always have to remember that.
“I used to laugh at her,” he husked. “A man… for me… are you high?”
God, I really hoped it would be a man for him. “And what did she say?”
“She’d say, whoever loves you with their whole heart, don’t turn them away.”
“Yeah,” I whispered. “Don’t do that.”
He grabbed hold of my face and pulled me forward, into him, and his mouth settled hard and hungry over mine.
I kissed him back as passionately as he kissed me, over and over, until I could feel the trembling excitement of need wash over me. I shook with it, with the idea of what I could have from this man, what I could take and give in return.
We parted gently the second time, each caught in the other’s gaze.
“I thought maybe I just needed to get laid,” he confessed.
I grinned at him even though he was trying to be so serious. “I see. Now all the women make sense—you were running away from me.”
“I was trying to see if I was just lonely.”
“Or you hoped that if you slept with enough of them, you wouldn’t think about sleeping with me anymore.”
“That too.”
“And what did you figure out?”
He inhaled sharply and I saw the fear on him. “That sleeping around isn’t going to help me when the only person I want to be with is you.”
“How come?” I pressed.
The scowl was adorable.
“Mike?”
“’Cause you love me, right? I mean, you do.”
“Do I?”
“Yes,” he said quickly, irritably. “I don’t see you lighting all up when other people smile at you or touch you. There’s a difference.”
Yes, there was. “Clearly,” I agreed, stepping into him, my hands around his neck as I attacked him again, in the b
ushes, kissed him breathless until the sweet, urgent moans made me ready to get on my knees in the dirt.
We tore free of each other, and he pointed to the parking lot. When we emerged—flushed, hair tousled, clothes rumpled, lips swollen—Coz and Arad were there talking, leaning against their cruisers.
“I thought you two were gone,” Arad stated in his superserious cop voice.
“We’re going,” Mike informed him, taking my hand and tugging me after him.
“You’re not worried about this?” I asked Mike as we started for home, squeezing his hand, not wanting him to pull away from me.
“Worried about what?”
“You’re holding my hand.”
“I am.”
“And what if people see?”
“I suspect that most everyone who does see will say the same thing that Kelly Seaton did when I passed him on the way to the jail.”
“Which was?”
He started walking faster. “He asked me, ‘Are you going to the jail to get your man out?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I am.’”
He was going to kill me with how possessive he was being.
“And he said, ‘Once you get him out, you keeping him?’”
Kelly Seaton was both a blessing and a curse.
“And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m keeping him,’ and he said, ‘That’s good, because pretty soon, somebody else will.’”
“That’s crap,” I said with a chuckle as I started jogging to keep up with how quickly Mike was moving. “Nobody wants me; I’m a joke in this town.”
He stopped so suddenly, I almost got whiplash.
“You’re not a joke,” he snarled, hands on my face, making sure I couldn’t move as he glared at me. “You’re smart and funny and so fuckin’ sexy… I mean, do you even know what you look like when you grin when you’re tired? Or how husky your voice is when you first wake up in the morning?”
I couldn’t have spoken to save my life. No one ever noticed anything about me. Not me. I was the guy who hit on everybody; I was available and desperate and no one took me seriously.
“You think you’re like this sad little man who everyone just humors, but Jesus Christ, Hutch, do you ever actually look in the mirror and see yourself?”
“I don’t—it doesn’t matter,” I told him. “What do you see?”
“I see everything I want,” Mike said raggedly. “My heart stops when I look at you.”
I nodded. “Okay, so… let’s go home.”
“Why do you think I’m hurrying?” he replied grumpily, glancing around, figuring out where we were since I was too out of it to know where the hell I was, and yanking me after him.
No one ever manhandled me and I found that I liked it quite a bit.
It was hot that, when he got to the front door of my place, he used his key, opened the door, showed me through, and then ordered me not to move while he put Benny outside.
I stood there in my own living room at four in the afternoon wondering what I should be doing.
When I heard him coming back, I turned in time for him to gently take my face in his hands and kiss me.
It was different now that we were in the house—more intimate, of course, but also there were no rules. We could combust and become anything we wanted to be.
I whimpered when he kissed me back into the wall, shoved my arms up, and then yanked my Henley over my head and off. Our lips parted for mere seconds before I recaptured his, nibbling and licking, ravaging, wanting all of him.
He spoke to me in broken whispers as my hands clutched at his broad back, slid into his thick, coarse hair to hold him close, anything I could do to keep kissing him, to prolong the feel of him, his taste. When he wrapped his arms around me so tight, clutching me to his heart with his bare skin plastered to mine, I gave up any concerns I had about air.
He broke the kiss, and I saw it then, the lust all over him.
“You want me,” I whispered.
“More than anything,” he vowed before he dragged me off the wall and started kissing me, hungrily, all over again.
We went down the hall, unbuckling belts, hopping on alternating feet to pull off shoes—his steel-toed work boots that he wore when he was moving pallets in the warehouse nearly made a hole in my floor—bumping into walls, knocking things over, and repeatedly making pictures rattle until we stumbled through the doorway of my room and crashed into my bed.
When he lifted free to laugh, I followed, not wanting my mouth parted from his, but he bent to help pull my left wingtip off so my jeans and briefs could follow.
“Here, lemme help you,” he said under his breath, moving his hands down my thighs to my knees, then gently over my calves to my ankles and feet.
He was massaging, his hands creating circles of welcoming heat, and I was quivering as I never did, wanting to drink in each touch, absorb it into my body.
“I’ve seen other men and thought they were handsome before,” he said, kicking his jeans away before taking off his briefs and adding them to the pile of discarded clothes. “But I’ve never wanted to hold another man’s dick in my hand.”
“I was at the right place at the right time,” I informed him, reaching out and taking his hard, heavy uncut cock in hand and stroking him from balls to head.
His gasp of pleasure made me bold, and I pulled harder before I went to my knees.
“No,” he practically yelled, grabbing my arms and powering me up beside him before he shoved me down on the bed. “That’s not what I want for the first—you don’t even understand how much I…. Hutch.”
I turned and looked at him over my shoulder.
“God, look at you.”
It was him, though, not me. His body was a work of art, powerfully muscled under the deep, dark tanned skin. I wanted to touch all of him. “Holy crap, Mike, you’re—”
“Michael,” he corrected, and when his gaze slowly and with difficulty lifted from his perusal of my form and locked with mine, I understood how I had wanted to be looked at in bed from the very first time. That… how he was doing it… like he wanted to both devour and cherish me at the exact same time—was it. That was how your lover was supposed to stare, where you could feel the heat and desire and dangerous, razor-edged longing rippling just there below the surface. “No more Mike.”
He was Michael to me now, as he’d been to his wife, as he was to his family, and I was included, the circle extended to me because I was part of them, the sacred trust he shared with only a few.
I rolled over on my back, sprawled out and ready for him to do with as he pleased, and when he climbed onto the bed, I reached for him.
“I’ve dreamed about this,” he told me as he crawled over me, lying down between my legs, his hard, leaking shaft sliding along mine as he pinned me under him.
“Oh yeah?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
“I dream about all kinds of things with you,” he rushed out, wrapping his arms under me and burying his face in the side of my neck.
His jolting shiver made me smile.
“You needed me.”
“Like fuckin’ water—yeah.”
Michael’s answer made me brave. “You were wasting your time on anyone who wasn’t me,” I said as I pushed his thick black hair out of his face, savoring the feel of the cool texture against my suddenly hot skin, trailing my fingers up and down his spine, wanting to hold him tight, never let go, willing myself to not show him how frantic my desire was.
“I know.”
He knew!
“I won’t do it anymore.”
“Your family—what will they think?”
“They’ll think ‘If he loves him, then so will we.’”
Michael loved me.
It wasn’t right place–right time, it was simply me.
Me.
He loved me because I’d been the one to drag him back into the light.
I was the one who’d insinuated myself into his life, under the tripwire where everyone else got trapped, and danced
around inside of his dreams.
I was the one who made him care about food again and take pride in its preparation, which touched on his childhood and his family and was the reason he was back on the phone with his mother asking for recipes.
All roads led to me.
I was it, the man he loved.
“Did you hear me?”
The tears were ridiculous; I never cried over anything, ever, but there they were, because I didn’t have to tiptoe around what I wanted, what I could say.
“I want your mother to lose her mind over me because mine is gonna adore you,” I sighed, more happy than I could ever remember being.
His smile was so warm as he lifted for my kiss. “We’ll go see them, my family, as soon as you sort out your latest community center debacle.”
“Oh, you heard about that,” I growled, because of course he had. The stupid town was only so big, and he had picked me up in jail, after all.
He laughed and scrambled free, flipping me over on my stomach and hauling me to my hands and knees.
“Well, now, Michael, what is it you want?”
He kissed down my spine and I shuddered beneath him, letting my head drop as he kissed over my right cheek and his hands spread me open.
“You should let me shower or—”
“No, I like the way you smell… and taste.”
The strokes over my puckered hole went from tentative to teasing to deliberate so very fast. “You’ve been thinking about me for a while,” I said, nearly vibrating with happiness. The idea that I had occupied his thoughts made it hard for me to even form words.
“Yes” was all he said before his thumb slipped inside, eased by the saliva dripping between my cheeks.
“Michael!” I yelled, pushing back against him. “Get the lube.”
“Where?”
I pointed at the nightstand and he stretched for it, pulled the drawer out, dumped it but got the lube. We could collect the television remotes, mechanical pencils I did the Sunday crossword with, and lip balm later. The only thing I cared about at the moment was having Michael Rojas inside me.
“Did you fuck anyone without a condom?” I was afraid of the answer, and also, there was suddenly a niggling doubt in the back of my head. I didn’t know what about, I was just anxious.