Cole McGinnis 05 - Down and Dirty (5 page)

A siren cut into their heavy breathing, and Ichiro slowly pulled into traffic, losing himself in the steady stream of cars and delivery trucks filling up the boulevard. Chancing their safety, he turned toward the theater, driving by its street entrance as police cars began to pull up in front with their sirens and lights going full blast.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Jae collapsed into the Jeep’s cushioned seat and grinned mischievously over at Ichiro. “See? Told you we wouldn’t get caught.”

“You’re going to get me killed one day, Kim Jae-Min.” Ichiro’s breath was still coming hard and fast, and he wondered if his heart would ever slow down its skipping beat. “Fuck, my knee hurts like a son of a bitch. I can’t believe you jumped on me.”

“I wouldn’t have had to do that if you’d been watching the front.”

“We wouldn’t have gotten out of there if I
hadn’t
been there to catch you. How were you going to get from the balcony to the floor? They were through the door like rabbits.”

“True,” Jae agreed, his eyes bright with energy. “But it was fun. Does your knee really hurt?”

“Badly,” he murmured, bending it slightly to test its flexibility, then wincing as the joint protested loudly. “Yeah, okay it hurts a little bit. I probably just strained it.”

“Come to the house, then. We can put ice on it and get something for inflammation. My car’s safe at your place. I can get it later.” Jae settled back, extracting his camera from under his arm. “Besides, Cole wanted you to have dinner with us.”

“And Bobby,” Ichi grumbled. “Maybe I should have let the cops catch me.”

“Bobby isn’t bad.” Jae shrugged off Ichi’s muttering dissent. “When I needed him to check on Cole, he was there. During—when things were going bad between us. He’s a good friend to Cole. As long as you don’t go to bed with him, everything is good.”

“That bad in the sack?” Ichi teased. “And how would you know?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care,” Jae sniped back. “He’s bad for the heart. He goes through tons of… men… over the past few months. The longest I’ve seen him with someone was three weeks, and that’s because I think he was actually twins—one good and one naughty. He’s a good friend just bad for the heart, I think. Not for you.”

“Not like I’m planning to go to bed with him, Jae.” He eased the Jeep into another lane. “Yeah, nice to look at but—you don’t need to warn me off. Look, don’t touch.”

“Just don’t ever let it go beyond that, or things will get very messy. I don’t need to know who Cole would choose, you or Bobby, and if things go as they always do with Bobby, Cole’s going to end up having to make that choice.”

Chapter 3

N
EVER
IN
the history of man had one barbeque been so torturous. There’d been other feasts that ranked up there in the crimes against civilization—any dinner invitation from Vlad Tepes came to mind—but sitting at a picnic table groaning with food while directly across of Ichiro Tokugawa sucking on a rib bone had to qualify for at least waterboarding, if not bamboo slivers under his fingernails.

With a possible chaser of hot sauce in his eyes and coarse jalapeno salt rubbed into his wounds.

“That’s my brother you’re staring at there, old man,” Cole muttered into Bobby’s ear as he sat down beside him. “No need to try to get him pregnant with your eyes.”

“A guy can look, Princess,” Bobby shot back, digging into his potato salad with a plastic fork. “Maybe you should tell your baby brother not to suck that thing off like he’s trying to remove chrome from a tailpipe. Might give a man the wrong idea.”

“He’s not—”

One of the neighborhood flotsam invited to the casual dinner made a hungry noise despite the mound of food she’d just shoveled into her mouth, and Bobby grinned up at his friend. “Maybe even give a woman the wrong idea too.”

Cole shook his head at Bobby’s teasing, picking at the label on his beer bottle. As long as Bobby’d known the man, Cole’s effervescent nature shone through even the darkest of moods. The man’s skin vibrated with energy, his gold-green eyes sharp with intelligence. Long months of pain and stress left a faint hint of crow’s feet at the edges of Cole’s slightly turned-up eyes, but it did little to detract from his strong cheekbones and handsome face. His thick brown-black hair was almost shoulder length again, more from neglect than any attempt to grow it out, and a few strands tangled into his long lashes, falling across his nose.

It was easy to see a resemblance between the brothers, even though Cole’s shoulders were wider, and his features bore the stamp of his Irish father. Both men had their mother’s mouth, a full, rich shape made for kissing or biting.

Thing is, he’d never wanted to bite Cole, whereas Ichiro was beginning to look mighty tasty.

“Remember, Dawson,” Bobby muttered through a mouthful of salad. “Vlad’s got nothing on a pissed-off Cole.”

“What?” Cole jostled into Bobby’s side, their elbows doing a quick dance for space. “Going crazy? Talking to yourself now?”

“Yeah, well, if I want intelligent conversation with you around, talking to myself is my best bet.” He made a show of looking around the yard, taking in the small clusters of brightly dressed people scattered about. “Who invited Greenpeace? You or the boyfriend?”

“We’ve come to an agreement. A détente. For the good of the neighborhood.” Cole flashed a quick smile, brightening the shadows in his eyes. “Besides, they brought dessert. The cake’s awesome.”

“Never thought you’d show belly over a cake.”

“It’s chocolate,” he shot back. “I’d show belly, dick, and the inside of my butt crack for a good chocolate cake. I’m thankful as hell Jae doesn’t bake, or I’d be up shit creek.”

“I think you’re already there, Princess.” He shot another quick look at Ichiro, who’d ambled over to where Jae was poking at what looked like tofu chunks on the new grill’s griddle attachment. “Any word about Sheila?”

He’d dug far enough to strike molten rock, or maybe the anger in Cole’s eyes was merely simmering on the surface, because a green fire lit in their depths. A piece of chicken on Cole’s plate suffered from an intense plastic tine stabbing before Cole shook his head.

“Nothing yet.” Cole’s attention roamed over the yard as if he were searching through the shadows for his dead partner’s wife. “I don’t like that she’s out there. And I really don’t like that I can’t find her.”

“She’ll show up.” Bobby hoped he sounded encouraging, but the odds of them finding the woman were slim. Los Angeles had a way of hiding its deadly secrets, and most didn’t surface until it was much too late to do anything about them.

“Yeah, so I keep saying, but so far, nothing.” Cole must have grown tired of pushing his food around because he shoved his plate across the table. He turned sideways until he straddled the bench to face Bobby. “Talk to me about what you’ve been up to.”

“Getting touchy-feely with me, Princess?”

“Look, life’s good for me—well, except for waiting for Sheila to go all say-hello-to-my-little-friend on me. Talk to me about how horrible your life is skipping from boy to boy.” Cole sipped his beer, rubbing his fingers through the condensation on the glass when he was done. “And how come you never bring anyone around for dinner? You can, you know.”

“I barely get their names. I don’t want to actually feed them. Twinks are like stray kittens. Feed them and they stick around, thinking they can move in. Look at what Jae’s stuck with.”

“Hey, I don’t think food had anything to do with it,” Cole protested softly. “It’s… good between us, you know? Different. Kind of nice. Well, more than kind of. Really nice.”

“Hell, what’s the going price on a white picket fence?” Bobby snorted as he peeled off a piece of skin from a grilled chicken breast. “Want it?”

“Skin’s the best part.” Cole took the crispy curl and popped it into his mouth. “And white picket doesn’t go with the house. I’d say we could go get a minivan and a dog, but I don’t think Jae’s a minivan kind of guy.”

“I don’t think Jae’s a dog kind of guy,” he remarked with a laugh. “Maybe you should get one anyway. Just to change things up.”

“If I want to change things up, I just get different stuff for the bedroom. Or buy a new piece of furniture. Easier than taking care of a puppy.” Cole shuddered. “Okay, sexy times and dog got way too close together in this conversation for my liking.”

“How good is it?” It was like poking a sore tooth. Bobby didn’t want to know what Cole and Jae were doing, but the happiness on the Korean’s face shone, and the wall Bobby’d always sensed in the man seemed to have crumbled down if not totally away. “He’s okay with wearing the pink triangle out in public now?”

“Baby steps. Not like I’m a big PDA kind of guy.” His friend cocked his head, a smile touching his mouth. “Okay, a little bit of PDA, but not too much. Jae’s still… working on some things, but he’s happy, Bobby. You know? It’s like he can breathe finally. It’s nice.”

“He seems better. More open,” Bobby admitted slowly. “It looks good on him.”

“Feels fantastic, even if….” Cole trailed off, shaking his head. “I wish his mother didn’t draw so hard a line, but his sisters seem okay. Tiff’s come around, and he’s got support from Mike, Ichi, and Maddy. Scarlet’s great. Shit, without her—I don’t know how we would have made it. I need to buy her a car or something.”

“She doesn’t drive.” He had to think about whenever he’d seen the Filipino man Jae called his
nuna
, but for the life of him, he couldn’t think of a single time he’d seen Scarlet behind the wheel of a car. “Does she even know how to drive?”

“She says she can, but Jae tells me she’s bad at it.”

“Hell, if Jae says someone’s a bad driver, that scares me she even gets
into
a car.” They laughed together, and Ichiro glanced over, catching Bobby’s gaze. His chuckle died in his chest, and the lust springing up from his groin set his insides on fire. Breaking the contact, Bobby reached for his beer, hoping the cold brew would quench the burning in him.

“Really, dude, I’m serious, though. If there’s someone you ever want to bring over, just let me know. Don’t feel like you can’t drag someone around, okay?”

“Trust me, Princess. There’s no one I want to drag around,” Bobby said through a gulp of his beer. “And there’s never going to be.”

“H
OW
IS
your arm?” Ichiro slipped into Korean as he smiled at a frizzy-haired woman going on about lavender and organic lemonade. “You look stiff.”

“I’m okay. Sore a bit, but I caught Cole in the shower, so I’ve got an excuse if I get bruises later.” Jae rubbed at the back of his neck. “We also need a new hanging thing in there—the shampoo bottle thing. I think I dented the other one we had with my head.”

Lacking the words in Korean, Ichi switched back to English. “Did you tell my brother you were almost arrested?”

“What Cole doesn’t know, he doesn’t worry about,” Jae grumbled back.

“It’s supposed to be what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” he corrected.

“He banged his back against the hot-water knob because he didn’t know about it. It still hurt him.”

“Very American 1950s of you. Distracting my brother with sex.” A flash of red caught his eye, and he turned to watch a young woman toss a Frisbee over to a bearded man wearing a porkpie hat. “Do you have two twin beds in the room too? Sleep with one foot on the floor? Isn’t that how it was back then in old television shows?”

Angled toward the table, Ichiro found Bobby’s attention wandering away from Cole and focusing on him. As the man’s eyes narrowed they raked over Ichi’s body, and something hot and wild burned in their brown depths. A part of him wanted to go over to the older man, shove him up against the picnic table, and use Jae’s method of distraction to get rid of the hot itch growing between them.

A very vocal part.

There was something undeniably sexy about Bobby Dawson, a something-bad-to-tangle-with sexy that set warnings off in Ichiro’s common sense each time the man was near, but with every brush of their hands or the rough scrape of Bobby’s voice over his skin, Ichiro knew he was going to end up in deep trouble.

Bobby Dawson was built raw and handsome, definitely a man raised up among the stone and blood of a violent environment. He’d come out of it with a twist of sardonic humor and an iron will with a thread of unshakeable authority, which probably served him well when he wore a badge and a gun.

Yes, Bobby Dawson definitely looked like someone who was born to hold a piece of hot steel in his hand and to part a crowd with a single booming-bass shout.

And it certainly didn’t hurt that the man was sculpted from stone, his broad hands scored with rough breaks of skin and blunt fingernails, and had a lived-in face with open promises of hard, fast sex dirtied by filthy words and sloppy kisses.

Ichiro’d definitely done stupider things. In fact, that very afternoon’s run from the cops after breaking and entering into a historic building wasn’t even at the top of his list of insane things he’d done in the past year alone.

Tangling with Bobby Dawson suddenly didn’t seem as far-fetched as it was a few seconds ago.