4-Bound By Danger (12 page)

Mike sighed. “Jace, we need more from you if you’re ever going to get your cousin free.”

Making a deal with the Feds was the worst thing Jace could’ve done, but desperation did funny things to a man, especially when family was involved. “I’m trying, but if I push, it’s too obvious. Kenny’s not trained enough to play it right. I’ll get the intel, but it’s not my full-time job. You knew that—and I gave you good intel about that first warehouse.”

“The CIA moved on it first.”

“That’s not my problem—you sat on it for three months. Don’t sit on those dates—you’ll catch the Colombians through the guns.” Jace didn’t give a shit about the Colombians—and this intel he just gave Mike would keep the Feds from the new warehouse and some possible DEA and CIA undercovers.

“We want something bigger.”

“Fine.” He blew out a harsh breath. “They’re doing cage fighting. You can arrest some of them there.”

“We’re not interested in that.”

“Maybe there are people out there who are,” Jace pushed back.

“If you try to get out of this—or get another agency involved—we’ll expose your cousin,” Mike told him, almost pleasantly.

“I don’t like threats, Mike.”

“Think of it as a promise. Because if Kenny’s known as a Fed snitch, don’t you think the club might look at you differently?”

Jace knew that was coming—the Feds could be brutal with their witnesses if it helped them meet their ends. Tying Jace to Clint—especially his alias of Tomcat—could get the man in trouble with the CIA, as Clint had already mentioned to him. Clint had done several things the CIA wouldn’t be happy with, first and foremost revealing his undercover status.

Jace hung up the phone without saying another word.

Sawyer had gone from Jace’s couch to his house, where he packed quickly and headed out to a special training assignment in Coronado for the next month. It had been planned for a while, and Sawyer threw himself into the training for the first week, learning a new and complex set of rifles they were testing for accuracy.

He’d just gotten back to his private quarters around midnight and collapsed onto the shitty cot when his phone rang.

It was Rex. He stared at the phone for a long moment, wondering if he’d actually dreamed the last call that had him jerking off while Jace and Clint fucked upstairs. At least he knew there was no way they’d heard him.

He answered with a “Hey.”

“Do you remember where you were?” Rex started.

Sawyer decided that there was no reason to hold back, at least not over the phone. He’d had a long day, his muscles were like jelly and the two beers he’d had gave him that nice semi-sleepy feeling. “Fuck yeah, I remember. Can’t stop thinking about it.”

Rex paused, and then he gave a low laugh, like he approved. “I hope your pants are off.”

Sawyer shucked them quickly, got under the covers enough so he could pull them up and over him in case someone busted down the door. There was music playing from his next-door neighbor loud enough to make him comfortable. “They’re off. I’ve been hard since I saw it was you calling.”

“Good. Tell me where we were.”

He closed his eyes and he was back there instantly. “I’d just come—in your mouth. You were kneeling in front of me in the shower.”

“You’re still hard, Sawyer.”

“You get off your knees and you kiss me. I wish I knew what that felt like…” Sawyer trailed off for a second and reflected on the night Rex pressed him to the wall, wished he hadn’t been so goddamned thrown so he could’ve enjoyed the feel of the man’s body against his more.

“It would be good, Sawyer,” Rex said quietly. “Really good. What happens next?”

“God, Rex—it’s so fucking good, and I came again while we were kissing. I couldn’t help it, and you knew. You’re rubbing the come on my chest and stomach while you’re kissing me. And then you’re playing with my ass, and Jesus…”

“Don’t you come yet, Sawyer.”

“I won’t.” He grunted a little and then continued, “You turn me around so I’m facing the wall and you kick my legs apart. And I think you’re going to just bend me over and fuck me…but you sink to your knees instead.”

Jesus H. Christ. Was he going too far?

“Is that what you want, Sawyer? Me kneeling between your legs, eating your ass until you scream?” Rex asked, his honeyed drawl husky now, and no, not too far at all.

Sawyer’s breath hitched. “Yeah. You bury your face in my ass, and I’m embarrassed but I fucking love it. I’m biting my hand so I don’t yell out and wake anyone up, and your tongue is…”

“Inside your ass, moving in and out until your balls tighten,” Rex said. “And you taste nice, Sawyer. I can’t get enough of your ass, and I’m eating you until you’re begging me to stop or go—you don’t know what you want. But I know how close you’re getting…”

“Rex, please.” His cock was leaking, and he was barely holding on.

“You taste so goddamned good, boy. I could spend hours worshipping you like this.”

Sawyer couldn’t do much but pant at this point, and he knew that if Rex could do this to him with mere words, the real thing would be incredible.

“You’re worried someone will catch us, right?” Rex asked.

“Uh-huh,” he managed.

“I wouldn’t care. I might invite them in to do just that. It would be a damned good show, watching you helpless, embarrassed at how much you love me licking your ass…”

Sawyer forced himself not to come. Delaying gratification would make everything that much sweeter.

“What if someone else wanted a turn, Sawyer?”

He heard himself actually whimper in response, and Rex chuckled lightly.

“Come, Sawyer. Right now,” Rex said, and he did, harder than he had the last time, biting down a yell that could’ve easily escaped since he’d lost all touch with his surroundings for the past moments. When he came back down to earth, he heard Rex’s harsh breaths and knew the man had come, too.

For a while they lay there, recovering, together but still apart, and then Sawyer asked, “What you said, about letting someone else…”

“Fantasy, boy. I don’t like to share, but I’m all for talking about it just to get you to make those sounds. Get some sleep, and come home soon,” Rex said.

Sawyer actually swore he heard Rex smile through the phone.

Sawyer slept with the phone next to him for the rest of the night.

Chapter Thirteen

Clint was on three assignments back to back which had him in Yemen, Bosnia and then Afghanistan, and now, two weeks later, he was back in his apartment, which still wasn’t much of a home. He’d come to associate that with Jace’s house. Wondered if Jace would care if he broke in and stayed there.

He read back over the texts Jace sent him, the one that read,
You fucked me because I saved your life? That’s the worst excuse ever for being horny,
making him smile every time.

Every time he tried to put some distance between them, he realized how weak he really was. He worried about Jace nearly nonstop, scanned the news for any hint that something was wrong in the world.

The worse something was, the more of a likelihood that Jace would be there.

Jace had been gone for a week—texts were few and far between from him, but Clint did as promised and texted a check-in daily. Checked the phone for messages several times a day, just in case, although he knew the boy wouldn’t have time for calls wherever he was.

It could go on like this for years. Right now, Clint was pretty confident that when the two of them made plans to get together, Jace would show.

One day, he wouldn’t. And one day, Clint was sure Jace would have another man or woman’s name on his lips, when Clint couldn’t give him the kind of life he wanted.

The last thing Clint wanted to do was hurt Jace. But he never really expected Jace to fall in love. He refused to think about his own goddamned feelings on the subject, because he shouldn’t have them.

Now, the emptiness of his apartment nagged at him more than ever. He picked up some catalogs and thought about ordering things like couches and tables, anything beyond the Spartan bed and TV stand he had going on. But hell, he was renting this place, had for the past year, and only now was he thinking that maybe he should own something permanent.

Spies were taught not to do that while they were active in fieldwork. Anyone or anything that you valued too much made you weak, vulnerable, and gave the enemy something to take away from you. Something to hold against you or over you.

Jace was becoming that for Clint, no matter how hard he tried to deny it, and he did. Ignored the lectures that ran, over and over, in his mind. His handlers would tell him to end it.

And his father, well, fuck, he’d broken the rules and then he’d tried to go back and pretend his family didn’t exist. Did a great job of it, too.

Goddamn, he hated thinking about his past. He’d pushed it so far back so that he never had to think about it, afraid it would rise up and bite him in the ass at some point.

His father had worked for the CIA. He was what they referred to as a legacy—and, at times, Clint had a lot to live up to. Carl Masters had been a brilliant man, an even better spy, who’d died doing a job he’d loved more than his family.

There was no other way to say it. And although Clint followed him into the CIA after the military because it was the only kind of life he knew, he never had a true family.

His mom left him and Carl when Clint was thirteen. Fed up with no husband, she met a man who gave her attention, wanted her but not a teenage boy.

“You understand, don’t you, Clint?” she’d pleaded, leaving him no choice but to do so. His father had always told him to man up, take over when Carl wasn’t around. And Clint did.

It could’ve turned bad for him in so many ways. Many sons of CIA operatives got themselves in deep trouble. Sometimes it was due to a sense of entitlement or a need for attention from fathers who seemed to give more of it to total strangers than their own families.

Clint had gone the opposite way, studying history and every book ever written on covert ops and the military, and he went that route to get college paid for. He’d applied for Delta to help him learn what his father refused to teach him.

“Be a self-starter, Clint,” Carl would boom. All Clint could really remember from those few-days-a-month visits was Carl imbibing too much whiskey and lecturing Clint about shit he had no right to lecture him about. Responsibility.

So Clint held it together all by himself from a too-young age, paid bills, bought groceries, cooked and did laundry, kept up in school as well as keeping up the facade of having a father with him. It entailed staying out of trouble and a lot of creative lying, keeping himself out of anything resembling trouble so as not to get caught. Blowing the ruse would’ve meant letting down the old man and maybe getting shoved into the foster-care system.

He was a lost boy—Styx called him that once they’d gotten to know each other. There were a lot of them in the CIA, Clint discovered quickly—the wall the job put between them and the rest of the world a perfect way to ensure they’d be great at their jobs and never let real life interfere.

Nature of the game
, his friend James used to tell him.
We’ve got the best of both worlds.

It was true—as a gay man, a traditional relationship wasn’t something he was looking for, and neither were most of the men he’d hooked up with over the years.

Until now.

Goddamned fucking real life in the form of a SEAL named Jace, whose expression when he came was something Clint couldn’t erase from his mind.

Maybe you don’t want to.

Just the thought of letting someone in made him uneasy. But Jace was getting in, bit by bit, no matter how Clint tried to stop him. It was like Clint never had a chance—and maybe Jace knew it. He was cocky experience and innocence all wrapped up in one tantalizing package.

The ringing phone interrupted his reverie, and he thought back to the last time he’d seen Jack, even as the man called for the third time that week. It had been the night of the explosion when Tomcat died, and he’d planned on celebrating the end of that mission the way he always had—no-strings sex with Jack.

Jack was shorter than Jace, rougher looking but still handsome. Jack had also worked for the CIA for years, and he and Clint had been fucking on and off since the beginning.

It had always been just that for him and for Jack, too, he’d assumed, since they both understood that working for the agency meant no ties.

It was tough watching Jack getting harder after each meeting. Clint used Jack’s behavior as a yardstick for himself. He called the man less and less, and when Jack had begun kissing him, he’d remembered why—he’d been with Jace only one weekend, texted back and forth with the boy for months…owed him nothing and still wanted to give him everything.

He’d cursed himself for doing this—for texting Jack in the first place—and yet the explosion had gotten him all twisted up. He’d fucked Jack, and then afterward he pulled away and practically jumped off the damned bed, like he knew he’d done something bad.

“What’s wrong?” Jack had asked, still breathing hard from the sex.