Authors: Emily Ryan-Davis
“It’s Saturday. They don’t have to be at school.” Liam disengaged from Hunter and Kat’s hands and sank back against the cushions of the sofa. “I could call CPS.”
“You don’t want to do that.” Kat shifted off Hunter’s knee and settled beside Liam. She tucked herself up under his arm and kissed the side of his neck. “We’re not doing that.”
Hunter stood and stretched the stiffness out of his legs. The muscles had just started to burn from holding position for so long, balancing his weight as well as Kat’s. He locked his hands behind his neck, tilted his head back and said, “I guess we’re staying in with cartoons and a box of Lucky Charms.”
Kat snorted softly. “Two men and two adolescent boys. We’ll need a lot more than a single box.”
“So one of us will go to the store.” Hunter dropped his arms and held his hands out to Liam and Kat. “Let’s go. None of us have slept. We need to pass out for a couple of hours or those kids will eat us alive.”
“You’re a perky bastard at four o’clock in the morning.” Smirking, Liam clasped Hunter’s wrist and hauled himself off the sofa.
“Practically giddy,” Kat concurred, rising on her own. She ignored Hunter’s hand and walked straight into the wall he and Liam presented where they stood side by side. Hooking one arm around each of them, she squeezed until they were all pressed together.
One strong triangle.
Chapter Nine
Liam was wiping a puddle of juice off the kitchen floor later that morning when someone rang the doorbell. He tossed the wet towel into the sink before heading for the front of the house. Jen’s kids were watching TV in the living room while Hunter and Kat were still upstairs sleeping. Kat had stirred while Liam dressed, offered to pull breakfast duty, but he had urged her to sleep late.
His responsibility to deal with. And he welcomed the time to process. Until Brady had arrived with his siblings in tow, Liam hadn’t realized how badly he’d wanted to rescue that unborn baby from the life Jen would have provided. After leaving Jen to her painkiller rage, Liam spent a couple of hours driving the beltway, trying to untangle his emotions. Grief would have been an easy one. Expected. But grief wasn’t it. Failure was. While trying to protect Kat from the pain of loss, he had brought it upon everybody else.
When he finally got home, he expected to be standing alone with his mistakes. Hunter had surprised him, and hell if that didn’t give Liam other things to think about. Like why he had been distancing himself from Kat and Hunter instead of actively holding them close, pulling them closer.
He still didn’t have an answer for that.
The doorbell rang again as Liam flipped the dead bolt to unlock the door. A blast of bitter cold greeted him, along with the big man standing on the porch. Broad shoulders filling out a gray coat with a white oval patch sewn on the chest, the word “Mike” embroidered in blue. Older than Liam by a good fifteen years, if the gray in his stubble and the grooves at the corners of his tired, bloodshot eyes could be trusted. Mike wore a black knit hat pulled down over the tops of his ears and a grim slant to his lips. Somewhere behind Liam, Trina started shrieking and giggling. Mike’s hard mouth gentled, his gaze shifting past Liam’s shoulder for a second.
“So they are here,” he said.
When Liam didn’t step aside and wave Mike inside immediately, Mike focused and stuck out his hand. “We haven’t met. I’m a friend of Jen’s.”
“A friend?” Liam grasped Mike’s work-roughened hand and shook it.
“I’m too old to be somebody’s boyfriend and that woman hates herself too much to let me be anything more. So I’m a friend.” Mike shoved his hand back into his pocket. “I had a buddy drop me off so I could take the kids and Jen’s car home. Can I come in?”
Liam moved, filling the doorframe with his body. “Listen, Mike, I appreciate you coming over, but you should have called first. Or had Jen call me. I can’t release these kids to you. It wouldn’t be right.”
Rocking back on his heels, Mike said, “I respect that. Jen’s not in any condition to come on her own. But you know that, from what I heard when I got off my shift this morning.”
“Yeah, I know it.” The wind kicked up again, blowing debris down the sidewalk. Liam rubbed his hand over his face, then said, “Listen, get the car seat out of Jen’s car and take it. I’ll follow with the kids, just to keep my conscience clean. Does that work for you?”
“It’ll do.” Mike brought a heavy ring of keys out of his pocket, started to turn and stopped. “That wasn’t the only reason I came. I had something to say to you too.”
“I’m listening.”
Mike nodded and released a breath. “I know she puts herself on you, and you probably think she’s your job, her and those kids. But they don’t have to be your responsibility. I have—I’m trying to take them on as my own. You step in, and you give Jen someone she can turn to when she wants to put me in my place, as she sees it.”
“You want me to back off,” Liam said.
“I do. You have a wife. Take care of her and leave me to manage my family.” Mike bounced the keys on his palm and closed his fist around them. “No offense meant.”
“None taken. Thanks for being straight with me. I’ll have the kids in the car and on their way home shortly.”
“You know how to install a car seat?” Mike asked.
Liam shook his head. “Never done it.”
“There’s a trick to it, and the model of the car makes a difference. If it’s okay with you, I’d rather stick around to make sure baby girl’s seat is secure, and then I’ll head out.” Mike turned and jogged down the steps to the walk. When he reached Jen’s car, parked on the street, Liam finally closed the door.
Movement in his peripheral vision caught Liam’s attention. Hunter stood halfway up the stairs, leaning against the banister and staring intently at the wedding pictures Kat had hung on that blank wall. He was barefoot, wearing jeans and the wrinkled blue button-up he’d worn the night before. His dark hair stood in short, finger-combed spikes and day-old beard darkened his jaw. Mike’s words rattled around in Liam’s head, weighty and uncomfortable in their importance.
Liam leaned back against the door. “You catch all that?”
“Enough of it.” Hunter looked away from the photos and came down the stairs to sit on the fourth step from the bottom. He leaned forward, braced his forearms on his knees and said, “The better question is, did you?”
“I don’t ever want to have that conversation with somebody about the three of us,” Liam said.
“You won’t have to. We have our problems, but Jen’s run deep and wide and don’t really have anything to do with the way she loves other people. What fu—” Hunter paused, glanced at the nearby living room with its high-pitched cartoon voices. “What screws her up is the way she doesn’t love herself.”
Straightening, Liam moved away from the door. He stood at the foot of the stairs and gripped the banister beside Hunter’s knee. For a moment, he let himself just be there, absorbing the physical proximity that was, for a change, easy. Hunter didn’t tense up or sidle away. He didn’t roll his shoulders back and introduce a neutral topic to steer the focus away from intimacy. Hunter just was, and God, Liam needed that.
“I’m finished with her.” Liam met Hunter’s eyes and held. “I’m done. I thought I was the only one getting fucked by running to her rescue all these years, but I wasn’t. Kat was right.”
Hunter inclined his head. “She’s a sharp lady.”
“Always has been.” Some of the darkness of the day lifted. Liam glanced past Hunter’s shoulders, up the stairs. “Damn, do I wish we could go back to bed and wake her up.”
“You have something to do first. And when you get back...” Hunter’s voice trailed off but his eyes kept talking, unexpected promises as his gaze roamed over Liam’s chest and on south. “When you get back, things are going to happen in a certain order.”
Heat punched Liam in the groin and flared out, spreading into his limbs like wildfire. The words did some of it, yeah, but the look in Hunter’s narrowed eyes—hungry, making promises—and the hot, heady scent of him as he leaned forward, those burned Liam right up. Before Liam could get his head back onto his body to formulate a response, Kat appeared at the top of the stairs. Liam tore his attention away from Hunter’s intent face and looked up at Kat.
“Well.” She raised her eyebrows and glanced between Liam and Hunter. “It’s a wonder the smoke detector isn’t going off.”
“That’ll happen soon enough,” Hunter said.
A high voice piped from the entry to the living room. “What will happen? Who are you?”
Liam flinched before taking a step back from Hunter. Talk about a bucket of cold water. Jen’s middle kid, Baker, nudged a pair of wire-frame glasses up his nose and studied Hunter.
“He’s a friend of mine and your Aunt Kat’s,” Liam said.
“Oh. That’s cool. I need to use the bathroom but he’s blocking the way.” Baker did a two-step dance that looked kind of urgent. When Hunter stood and cleared the path, Baker bolted up the stairs.
“What’s the plan with them?” Kat asked.
“I’m rounding the up and taking them back to Jen’s. Her man came to pick them up but I’m not cool with just turning them over. He’s waiting outside, ready to drive Jen’s car while I follow. Just need to get them all ready.” Which was what he should have been doing as soon as he closed the door, but then he would have missed out on that blistering connection with Hunter.
“I’ll take them.” Kat joined Liam and Hunter at the bottom of the stairs. She stopped between them, checked both their faces and nodded. “Yeah. You two stay here. I think that would be best for everybody.”
“K-K.” Liam brushed his fingers over her jaw, then dropped his arm to his side, discovering he didn’t know what else to say. He knew in his bones she hadn’t laid everything out there at four o’clock that morning. He also knew this wasn’t the time.
“I’m going to run the kids home and then I’m going to do a few errands.” Kat leaned close and rocked up onto her toes to kiss him. “I love you. We’ll talk later. Maybe a lot later,” she said with a half smile aimed at Hunter.
“We should have a meeting.” Liam looked at Hunter for support, but it was Kat who answered.
“We will, but I think we all need to work some things out before we sit down at a table together. The tension just complicates things that don’t need any more complicating. Besides, I promised Hunter something. Plans changed but I think this will do for now.” She squeezed Liam’s biceps, brushed her lips over his one more time and left him standing there with Hunter. A moment later, Kat went into the living room to explain the plan to Brady. Baker came back downstairs and wandered in after Kat, rejoining his siblings.
“Coffee,” Hunter said. His fingertips pressed lightly against Liam’s back, steering him toward the kitchen. The touch lit Liam’s circuits all over again, because it was voluntary. Because it wasn’t driven by lust or fury or need, or any of the other emotions that had prompted Hunter to make first contact in the weeks behind them.
Thoughts racing, Liam led the way to the kitchen. While he ran a measure of fresh beans through the grinder, Hunter leaned against the counter and flipped through the seed catalog Kat had left on the table.
“Kat gardens?” Hunter asked.
“She wants to. She’s all about moving when you go, but she’s disappointed about parts of it. Like the garden plans. Not that she’ll admit it out loud.” After starting the coffeemaker, Liam faced Hunter. “I’m not going to pretend this isn’t confusing the hell out of me.”
“Just wait.” Hunter glanced at the hall and the sounds of Kat herding Jen’s kids out the door. Kat was efficient. The coffee had barely started dripping through the filter basket when the front door closed, leaving the house silent.
Enough waiting. “Hunter—”
That was all he got out before Hunter closed in. Hunter slid one hand behind Liam’s neck and the other over his shoulder, pulled him close and silenced everything else with a soft, seeking kiss. Liam stood shell-shocked long enough for Hunter to wrap an arm around his waist, but as soon as Hunter drew him in, Liam’s senses came back on board.
That kiss. Christ.
Mint slid cool across his tongue, delivered by way of a deep, shockingly tender exploration. Hunter worked his fingers through Liam’s hair, holding steady as he coaxed and teased. After a moment, Liam yielded. How could he do anything else?
Hunter didn’t move anything except his mouth, leaving Liam to bring them closer. And Liam did exactly that. He worked his hands under the loose tail of Hunter’s shirt until he touched hot skin and the hard muscle beneath. Hunter’s abs flexed but he remained steady, an unmovable mountain of promise.
A mountain.
Liam pushed against Hunter’s stomach and turned his head aside, breaking the uncharacteristically luring kiss. “What do you want?”
He thought he knew, but he had to ask. Needed to hear it.
Hunter’s nostrils flared at the rasp in Liam’s voice. His throat worked and even though he didn’t speak immediately, Liam thought he could see the words tumbling around behind Hunter’s eyes as he struggled with them. With Kat, Liam would have teased her silence by making suggestions of things
he
wanted, but that was a playful game. This, even though Hunter wasn’t advancing aggressively, was not a playful moment. So he waited.
Eventually, Hunter’s breath hitched and he answered. “You.”
“Me.” The word came out even, which was more than Liam expected. His insides jolted with a need so deep, he ached. “You say you want me, but you’re not taking. You’re standing there waiting for me to come to you, like some damn pile of rock too strong and too stubborn to move.”
Something flickered in Hunter’s eyes. Instead of hiding it, Hunter let it be. He let the emotion stand and, God, it took Liam’s breath away.
“I’m not waiting for you to come to me,” Hunter said. The words were slow, measured, like he didn’t want to speak them out loud.
Liam didn’t doubt for a minute that Hunter wished he would never have to say the words. They didn’t come easy to some men, even to men who hadn’t been fighting their desires as long as Hunter had fought. The sensitive thing to do would be to acknowledge them now, to let Hunter know Liam heard him and understood, but Liam wasn’t feeling very sensitive. He wanted to hear the words. He wanted to watch Hunter squirm inside his own skin, because once they crossed that line, there wouldn’t be much foreplay. This was hotter than any stroking and petting they could administer each other, anyway. If the short, choppy sound of Hunter’s breathing and color spreading across his cheekbones was any indication, Hunter agreed.
“Say it,” Liam prompted.
Hunter’s jaw flexed. He swallowed. And he said it. “I’m waiting for you to take me.”
Even though Liam expected it, he wasn’t ready. Small words, immeasurable impact. This time, Liam slid his hand behind Hunter’s head and drew their mouths together. Liam was neither gentle nor coaxing. He forced his way past Hunter’s lips and fucked Hunter with his tongue, declaring the entirety of his intentions. Hunter’s groan beckoned Liam closer so he crowded in until they made a solid line from chest to thigh. Hunter’s cock strained against the front of his jeans. Liam angled to connect with that hard ridge, to grind their dicks together through the stiff layers of their clothes. Beside them, the coffeemaker beeped its ready signal, reminding Liam where they were. He wasn’t a man to turn down a fuck on the kitchen floor, but that wasn’t what he wanted for this first time.
Breaking away, Liam muttered, “Upstairs.”