“I’m so”—Blake huffed out—“pressing charges.”
“For what? Making you run?” I panted.
“You’re such an asshole, Crowley,” he heaved out. “And I’m going to make sure that you’re never mayor.”
“Who told you I wanted to be mayor?”
He rolled his head to look at me. “Don’t you?”
I smacked his abdomen with the back of my hand.
“Crap, Oren said you did.”
“Oren is paranoid, you stupid ass,” I gasped.
He looked genuinely surprised, like our current mayor’s mental state was not something he had ever thought of before.
“This is such small-town bullshit,” I muttered as Arad Hadjian suddenly appeared beside us.
“Gentlemen,” he said dryly.
“This is all Crowley’s fault,” Blake was quick to offer.
AS JAILS
went, Mangrove’s was where you wanted to be incarcerated. The floors were made with the resin finish that looked like it had glitter underneath, the interior of the cells was washed with a lovely jade, and the bars were more of a hunter green. The bench I sat on was padded, and at the moment, I was listening to a sort of bouncy bossa nova beat piped in through the audio system. It was like being put in timeout at an amusement park.
“I can’t believe this,” Blake complained from the next cell over. “How come I’m in here too?”
“Because it’s called disturbing the peace, you stupid prick,” I muttered as I lay down, lifting my knees so I could stretch my back.
“What about you trying to kill me? Attempted homicide and all that?”
I grunted.
“Hutch!”
I sat up as Mike came rushing into the room, slipping around Arad to make his way into the holding area.
“Hey,” I sighed, really happy to see him.
He rushed up to the bars and grabbed hold of them, staring in at me. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Come here.”
I got up, felt a twinge from where I’d flipped over the railing, and pressed my fist to the small of my back.
“What’s wrong?”
“I went over that railing from the boardwalk down to the sand,” I replied, smiling as I thought about it. “Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but you know—heat of the moment and all that.”
He nodded as I reached him, taking hold of the bars on either side of his hands.
“So what was this all about?” he asked, scrutinizing me, checking me over.
“Blake screwed with the community center.”
“You’re having another problem with that?”
“I know, right? I mean, when are they gonna stop?”
He cleared his throat. “You need to hire Mia Renaldi and have her on speed dial until this thing is over.”
“Agreed. Will you call her for me and see if she’ll take the job?”
“She’ll take the job, and I really like her. She got the money with my in-laws all squared away.”
“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 bushes, 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.