Love for the Cold-Blooded (2 page)

A short beat of silence followed this pronouncement. There was a distinct judgmental cast to the narrowing of Andersen’s eyes. Pat probably shouldn’t have grinned, at least not quite as broadly as he did, but he couldn’t help it. Total debating slam-dunk.

“You’re blond,” Andersen said abruptly. “Also, you’re short.”

“Wow, rude much?” Rich people really did think they were an entirely different species, didn’t they. “For your information, I’m 1.78, which is considerably above average. You, on the other hand, are freakishly tall. But good call on the hair. Stellar observational skills there. I can tell the tales of your intellectual prowess aren’t exaggerated at all.”

Andersen gave a disgusted snort, like he was being the bigger man or something. “Never mind, it’s fine. What’s your name?”

The inept way Andersen was leading the conversation was actually pretty amusing. Obviously the dude didn’t get out much, at least not when he wasn’t dressed all in silver and wrapped in glittery force fields. Gallivanting around smashing things didn’t give you much of a chance to hone your social skills, looked like. “Pat. Pat West. Actually Patrick West, but I like Pat, you know? Everyone calls me Pat. Most of the time I don’t even feel like people are talking to me when they call me —”

“Pat,” Andersen said, in exactly the same kind of flat tone he might have used for
shut up
. “My name is Nicholas.”

“Yeah, I know. Nick.”

That netted him another
‘if I was pyrokinetic I would set you on fire with my mind, and if you bug me some more I will spontaneously evolve to become pyrokinetic by sheer force of will’
stare. “Nicholas.”

No nicknames, huh. Pat might (or might not) have rolled his eyes the tiniest bit. He suspected he needed a bit more practice at the ‘serving humbly and invisibly’ part of this job, but in his defense, Andersen — Nicholas — was making it pretty difficult to take him seriously. Pat’s parents had taught him better than to take superheroes seriously anyway, and right now, wearing that vaguely confused, vaguely pissy expression, the man looked constipated more than anything. It was neither a very imposing nor a very heroic look.

Of course, Pat supposed superheroes got constipated just like everyone else. It just wasn’t the kind of thing you usually associated with them. Unlike awesome powers and booming voices and bulging muscles, and being all one-dimensional, judgy and prone to blasting first and asking questions later.

Anyway. Pat rallied and tried a pleasant smile, gathering himself into an agreeable nod. “Sure thing, bro.” Clearly Andersen — Nicholas, whatever — was never going to get to the point if left to his own devices, so Pat would have to step in and help him along. “So, Nicholas. What can I do for you?”

Apparently, the answer to that was ‘stand right there while I take off my sweatshirt, my t-shirt and then my jeans, and in case you were wondering, yes I do work out a lot, thank you for noticing’.

“Uhm,” said Pat. The bulging muscles stereotype clearly existed for a reason, although ‘bulging’ was kinda the wrong word. Pat would have chosen ‘perfectly sculpted’. You know, if anyone had asked.

“Well?” said Nicholas.

Which — was that him asking? It certainly looked like the guy was expecting a comment of some kind, considering he was standing there in his boxers, staring at Pat as though Pat was the one behaving like a confirmed nutcase.

‘Perfectly sculpted’ jumped to the tip of Pat’s tongue. He bit it back just in time. No need to give Silver Paladin’s civilian alter ego a swelled head. Gorgeous broad shoulders and ridiculously lickable abdominal muscles notwithstanding.

Pat hmmed thoughtfully, trying hard to look unimpressed, as though people suddenly threw off their clothes around him all the time. “Not bad, I guess. Congratulations on the abs. Nice home gym and personal trainer.”

Honestly, Pat hated to admit it on principle, but the man seriously deserved to be congratulated for — well, his everything, basically. For all his faults, he sure wasn’t hard on the eyes. Pat couldn’t be blamed if his attention caught a little on the subtle trail of hair beginning just beneath Nicholas’s navel, leading the eye down over his perfectly flat stomach to where his boxers obscured the view. Or the vague outline visible beneath his underwear’s soft fabric. Or the long, lean line of his legs. Or…

When Pat managed to drag his gaze up to the man’s face again, Nicholas was rolling his eyes. Seriously? Dude, spontaneously undress in front of a guy and even crazy rich superheroes had to expect a little ogling.

Still, in a way, Pat’s familiarity with that particular expression — caught halfway between complete exasperation and reluctant amusement — was almost comforting. Familiar and comforting, in fact, in exactly the way the next words out of the man’s mouth were not. “Are you going to have sex with me or what?”

“Yes,” said Pat’s mouth, completely without intervention from higher brain functions.

Wait. What?

A moment later, Pat’s mind had caught up with his vocal chords. He boggled in what couldn’t have been a very attractive or intelligent manner (there might have been some bugging eyes, even). Fortunately, Nicholas had turned to the side to fiddle with a control panel of some kind, and so entirely failed to witness the display.

See, the thing was: Pat had no game. Like, no game at all. He had a good excuse for his lack of dating prowess (in fact, he had a bunch of excellent excuses all lined up and ready to go, just ask him), but the whys and wherefores didn’t really signify when it came to end results. Basically, the cold hard bottom line of his 24 years of life experience so far had been that Patrick West sucked rocks when it came to getting laid. He wasn’t ugly or anything, but nobody was ever so eager to fuck him that they spontaneously volunteered.

And now a mostly naked hot guy came right out and asked if Pat was going to have sex with him? Come on, how was that even fair? What was he supposed to say?

Okay, if you wanted to be pedantic about it, Pat guessed that he was pretty definitely supposed to say
no
. It wasn’t even the Silver Paladin thing, although sleeping with a superhero was plenty skeevy (his mom would disapprove like whoa). It was more the thing where Pat was Nicholas Andersen’s night manager.

Some of the pages of fine print in Pat’s 300 pages of instructions no doubt had a thing or two to say about sleeping with the rich employer (always called ‘the principal’ for some reason, maybe to make Pat feel like he was back in high school). Fraternizing, or whatever, seemed pretty unprofessional. Plus there might be ethical stuff to consider. Plus Assistant House Manager Suze was really keen on having Pat develop what she called a serving heart, and Pat gathered that the serving heart was a loyal and sincere, but politely distant kind of heart. Not, Pat suspected, the kind of heart that was so hard up it would eagerly seize its first chance to jump into bed with its hot employer. (Principal. Whatever.)

Maybe it hadn’t even been a real question — more a hypothetical thing, like the one about the cavemen and astronauts. Sure, it was weird, but for all Pat knew, the nakedness might be purely incidental. Just another weird-ass thing billionaires did that everyone pretended was totally normal, like asking for their gourmet food to be served in take-out boxes.

Except that when Pat trailed after Nicholas to a door in one of the walls not covered in screens, he discovered there was a bedroom attached to the lab, built on the same ridiculously huge and opulent scale as everything in this ridiculously huge and opulent mansion. The bed alone could have hosted a soccer tournament.

Nicholas turned around too quickly for Pat to get his eyes back up front and center. It was possible Pat had been staring at his ass a little while he walked. It was a spectacular ass, round and muscular and definitely worth a lingering stare or two.

He’d never wanted to develop a serving heart, anyway. To be honest, it sounded kinda off-putting. An ‘effortless studying’ heart would be way more useful. Or maybe —

Nicholas stepped right up to him, grabbed two handfuls of Pat’s t-shirt, and unceremoniously dragged it up to tangle about Pat’s head. Pat squawked a little in surprise, but not very loudly, and anyway he was half-smothered in shirt at the time. So really, it was fine. And this was definitely a sign that things were heading in the right direction, where the right direction was the one that included Pat getting laid.

There was a brief, graceless interlude in which Nicholas almost managed to suffocate Pat with his own t-shirt before Pat could struggle free. His baseball cap was knocked off in the process, and he hastily raked his fingers through his flattened curls to fluff them a bit. Maybe he should find the time for a haircut one of these weeks.

Nicholas didn’t seem bothered by Pat’s lack of perfect hair. He was looking at Pat’s bare torso with a narrow-eyed concentration that had Pat nervous for a second — just a second, though. He worked out four times a week and swam almost every day. Plus, his sisters were all gorgeous, so it was obvious he had good genes.

Instead of hunching in on himself, Pat straightened up, chest out and shoulders back as though he were waiting through the university anthem before a swim meet. Pat was pretty sure that his body had never been a contributing factor in his lack of game. He might not be as built as Mr. Silver Paladin here, but he had no reason to hide.

“You’re in good shape,” Nicholas said, a hint of approval coloring his tone. If he sounded more like a trainer or doctor than a guy who’d just all but torn Pat’s head off along with his clothes, then hey. Pat wasn’t a critic.

“Yeah, well.” Pat couldn’t help puffing up a little, although he did make a serious attempt not to look too smug. “I am on the varsity swim team.” His times weren’t as good as he would have liked, what with working to pay the bills and trying to actually study on top of that, but even so. He’d been all about swimming for years before urban design had come along.

Nicholas blinked, looking up from his appraisal of Pat’s physique in obvious surprise. “Really?”

Okay, what the fuck? “Dude. Why shouldn’t I be on the swim team? I’m an awesome swimmer. I have a life, I don’t exist merely for your convenience.”

Nicholas blinked several more times in rapid succession. Wow, the man was hopeless when it came to people. “I know that,” he said at last, speaking slowly, clearly feeling his way through a potential minefield of social blunders. “I didn’t mean to imply — it was merely —”

Yeah, yeah. Pat made a ‘yadda-yadda’ gesture with one hand, rolled his eyes and decided to move events forward a little. This conversation wasn’t heading for a good place, and besides, talking wasn’t actually what Pat wanted to be doing with a mostly naked hot guy interested in sex.

Nicholas’s shoulders were warm and solid to the touch, powerful muscles shifting beneath Pat’s palms as he ran careful hands over them. He almost got stuck then because he didn’t really know how to go on; in the end, he shrugged to himself and slid his hands down Nicholas’s chest, simply because he’d wanted to touch it from the moment he saw it.

Smooth and hairless like a swimmer’s, not too bulky, muscles bunching beneath Pat’s exploring touch. Nicholas’s nipples were small and hard; his heart beat steadily, but swiftly. Pat was pretty sure his own heart was nowhere as steady.

Nicholas was staring at him, breathing shallowly through his mouth. His eyes really were very dark. When Pat slid one hand down further, over rigid abs to the silken-soft fabric of his boxers, Nicholas’s gaze caught Pat’s own and wouldn’t let him go again.

The weight of his cock lay warm and heavy against Pat’s palm. Nicholas wasn’t all the way hard yet, but he was getting there, and when Pat touched him, he exhaled a long, slow breath. Pat curved his fingers around him experimentally, the boxers’ fabric dragging against his fingertips.

It was a surprisingly stereo experience, so much more than just his hand on someone else’s cock. When he’d imagined this kind of thing, Pat had never thought of adding in the closeness of another man, how he just kind of loomed near, all muscle and warmth and intensity. How Pat could feel Nicholas’s breath on his cheek, smell a faint hint of expensive cologne. The way Nicholas’s breathing was adjusting to match the slow movement of Pat’s fingers on his cock…

How much better would this be without Nicholas’s boxers in the way? Pat was about to find out — except that before he could, Nicholas pushed him away, stepping out of reach. “Get undressed and get on the bed.”

Seriously? This dude had less game than Pat.

Pat was pretty solid on the fact that tearing off your clothes, asking your date (or whatever) if they were going to have sex with you or what, and then ordering them to strip and hop on the bed was not an acceptable way of seducing someone. Not that he claimed to be an expert — his idea of hook-ups was pretty much entirely theoretical, and strongly influenced by a combination of romantic comedies, porn and bragging fratboys (and, okay, maybe a couple of supernatural romances). But he’d grown up with three older sisters. If anyone else in the entire city had as large an inventory of cautionary ‘date of horror’ tales as him, Pat would be very surprised.

By rights — or, to be exact, by the time-honored West Sister Dating Rules — Pat should have collected his shirt and cap and slammed the door on his way out, preferably vowing bloody vengeance, though that part was optional. What Pat actually did was kick off his sneakers and struggle out of his jeans in preparation for getting on the bed.

Turned out Pat had tragically low standards. Sad, but hardly a surprise.

Whatever, Pat could deal. He’d start working on developing a more lofty set of standards once he’d gotten a good amount of sex in first. Right now, his philosophy was that if low standards were going to get him laid, he’d be there with bells on.

“This is a whole lot like bad porn, you realize,” Pat said, stepping out of his boxer briefs. He sometimes had trouble shutting up, especially when he was nervous. Not that he was nervous now — except, well. The downside of low standards was that the guy he found himself unexpectedly naked with was kind of a douche, and was presently occupied with prowling slowly closer, staring at Pat like this was one of those wildlife shows where something intense and toothy pounced on something cuddly and harmless. “You know, rich playboy orders pizza and thoroughly debauches innocent delivery boy. Well. Innocent for a certain value of —”