Crave

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…Rising irritation drove me to my feet and to the side of the bed. So much for playing it calm and collected. Every other word that came out of his mouth went dancing through my veins and demanded I do the mamba. “I know you were fucking around with me at Slant. You didn’t want dinner. You wanted something else. Admit it.” Coming to him was a mistake. Those icy eyes locked me into place. “All right,” he conceded. “I admit it.” Victory should have tasted a lot better than it did. It has in the past. This time, though, my mouth was as dry and arid as the I-5 on the way to LA in the middle of August. Everything else about me felt hot, swollen. And no, I didn’t just mean my cock. “The police are going to want to talk to you,” I managed to grit out. “I’ve filed a report. Next move is a restraining—” All my breath suddenly reversed direction and slammed into my lungs when he grabbed my wrist. His fingers easily reached around it, not just because I’m a tad on the slight side but because Duncan was a big fucking guy. And strong. I mentioned the strong, right? It had caught my fist at Slant, and it caught me now, though I hadn’t been doing anything but standing there. “No police.” He wasn’t begging. It wasn’t a request. It was an order, or

sounded like he meant it to be an order, because there wasn’t a hint of coaxing in his silken tone. I tried to yank away, but his grip was resolute. “Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you followed me to my favorite bar,” I said. “You act like trouble, you get treated like trouble…”

ALSO BY VIVIEN DEAN Blood Of Souls Born To Be Wild Bridge Over Troubled Water Ruby Red Rebels

CRAVE BY VIVIEN DEAN

AMBER Q UILL PRESS, LLC http://www.AmberQuill.com

CRAVE AN AMBER QUILL PRESS BOOK This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental. Amber Quill Press, LLC http://www.AmberQuill.com All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review. Copyright © 2008 by Vivien Dean ISBN 978-1-60272-391-7 Cover Art © 2008 Trace Edward Zaber

Layout and Formatting provided by: Elemental Alchemy

PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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CHAPTER 1 The last thing I want when I’m elbow-deep in perforated intestines is to be interrupted. “What do you want?” Everyone in the exam room stiffened, like a single sharp intake of breath nobody wanted to exhale. Someone might have shot a look of sympathy to the nurse who had called out my name from the doorway, but frankly, I didn’t really care. When they had a sixteen-year-old kid bleeding out right in front of them, then we’d talk about how well they could channel their inner Mr. Rogers. Not before. Her soft-soled shoes scuffed along the tile floor. “Someone’s demanding to see you, sir.” 1

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“This is an ER. Somebody’s demanding to see me every damn day I show up.” I looked up for a split second to glare at the intern standing on the opposite side of the bed. He’s one of those kids who grew up being told he’d always be a doctor, but doesn’t have the stamina to manage anything more than the book education involved. Right now, sweat dotted his furrowed brow, but it was nothing compared to the blood dripping from the soaked sponges edging the ragged holes in my patient’s stomach. “If you’re not interested in saving this kid, McKinney, let me know so I can go ahead and sign his death certificate. Otherwise, get me a clean fucking sponge. Now.” Everybody moved. That was their job. When they finished their shifts and went home to their loved ones, they’d likely spend more than a few minutes bitching about the bastard doctor nobody could please, but again, it was no skin off my nose. I wasn’t here to be their friend. I didn’t have any friends. I had patients. The nurse might’ve disappeared then. At least, she didn’t interrupt me again, so whether she grew a brain and went off in search of another doctor who could help her or aliens picked her up and decided to use her for experimentation, I don’t know. All that mattered was my team and I finally got to focus on the boy who’d only wanted to stop his dad from attacking his mom. Nobody deserved a knife in the belly. Especially this particular kid. And I wasn’t going to let him bleed out before an operating room could become available, no matter who was demanding to see me. 2

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I kept my hands in him until the orderlies finally showed to transport him to the third floor. My shoulders ached, and my eyes stung. I had to blink a couple times to see the blurry face of the clock on the wall. Jesus Christ. Forty-eight minutes. I could have kept him on the ward and done it myself if they were going to take almost an hour to clear a room. That’s the one thing I hate most about working in an underfunded hospital. The mayor of Oakland himself might have been dying in my emergency room, and he still would have had to wait his turn simply because we lacked the resources to do too much. But if I wanted easy, I would’ve gone into private practice. I live in one of the richest areas of the entire country. I didn’t have to commute to Oakland to head an ER that saw too much violence and not enough money. The smart move—the move most of my graduating class at Berkeley had taken—was to park myself in Stanford, or Burlingame, or San Francisco, and overcharge for Viagra prescriptions. Maybe I’m not as smart as I tell everybody I am. Nights like tonight made me wish I was. If only because then, I’d have a guarantee the boy would make it. “Dr. Coen?” Her voice was behind me again. All I had to do was look up and into the mirror over the sink, and I’d see her, but there was still blood stuck beneath my nails that no amount of digging was getting out. I hadn’t even had time to glove up when they’d brought the boy in. Administration was going to love that if they heard about it. 3

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“What do you want this time?” “I wanted to apologize—” “Fine. You’ve apologized.” The nail brush tore at my cuticle. Fresh blood welled up in the scratch before swirling away in the running water. “But—” “You’ve apologized.” I snapped off the water and reached for a paper towel, finally looking back to see her hovering in the doorway again. I didn’t recognize her. That didn’t mean anything. She was young, and she was still a little pretty, and her type never lasted long in this department. They always got transferred to someplace safe, like maternity. I’d learned a long time ago it was a waste of my energy to learn all their names because they didn’t stick around long enough to make it worthwhile. Actually, few people fell into that category, no matter what they did for a living. This one looked like a crier. Large eyes like one of those Precious Moments figures stared at me from across the room, trying to will me to take pity on her and absolve her from making a rookie mistake. I finished drying off my hands and tossed the towel into the trash. “I don’t like to dwell on mistakes,” I said. “Not mine, not yours, not anybody’s. Standing here, trying to Dr. Phil with me? Just pisses me off.” Her mouth opened and closed, opened again only to shut a second time. Taking a deep breath, she gave me a curt nod and backed away, disappearing down the corridor. I almost smiled. 4

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This one could apparently be taught. She just might last, after all. My stab wound was the most exciting case I got for the rest of my shift. Two hours later, I stood at the desk, signing off on my case files, when a familiar shape appeared at my elbow. I say shape because, well, Dr. Lewis Lampley has the most distinctive one in the building. Forget the curves of half the nurses, or the orderly in oncology built like a linebacker with a tight end ass. Lampley always made me think of that Seinfeld episode with the man bra. Fully naked, I imagined he was an apple of a man, but dressed, there was a cinching at his chest that looked like too many women who wear underwear for bodies they wish they had, not the ones they actually did. I couldn’t see straps, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover he wore something similar. If he wasn’t the most congenial man in the hospital, I might’ve asked about it. But everybody liked Lampley, even me. All the way down to his soft, pudgy hands. “I heard your knifing came through surgery just fine,” he said to me, handing a case file to the nurse behind the counter. “Price was impressed with how well you got him together before they took him up.” Checking on the boy had been at the top of my list of stuff to do when I clocked out. It was a relief to be able to tick it off, though I’d probably run up just to look over the notes anyway. “No thanks to McKinney.” I leaned on my elbow to face Lampley. “Is someone going to talk to him and tell him he’s in 5

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over his head? We’re not doing him any favors by covering his ass. He’s going to finish this rotation and think he’s ready to be a real doctor.” “We were all green once. I’m sure he’ll be fine.” “You’re only saying that because you haven’t worked with him yet.” Lampley smiled. On anyone else, it would’ve looked condescending, but I knew with him, he meant every word that was about to come out of his mouth in the best possible sense. “Not everybody’s a wunderkind like you, Pete. When was the last time you slept?” This was not a conversation I wanted to have again. “I sleep. I wouldn’t function if I didn’t.” “But let’s face it. You don’t need nearly as much as the rest of us mortals. Comparing kids to your standards isn’t always fair.” My mouth tightened. I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to say that patients didn’t care about fair when it was their lives on the line, and that I never said I wasn’t as mortal as the rest of the staff. I didn’t. Lampley wouldn’t hear it. He clapped a friendly hand on my weary shoulder. “Go home and be glad your knifing didn’t ruin your perfect record. Don’t think about the rest of it.” Picking up a new file from the to be reviewed stack, he flashed me one last sympathetic smile before turning away. “It could’ve been worse. You could’ve had the angina Nurse Streeter tried to collect you for. Then you wouldn’t be able to say you’d never lost a patient before.” 6

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I frowned, trying to figure out what he was talking about. “What angina?” “The one that came in after your knifing. Older fella, complained about pains before falling unconscious. His boyfriend was tearing up the ER trying to find you to get you to look at him.” Oh, so that was what the interruption had been all about. I hadn’t felt guilty about not stopping earlier, and now I felt even less so. “I’m guessing he didn’t make it.” Lampley shook his head, his smile fading. “His heart just gave out. Never woke up again. It’s not that it was surprising. He was sixty-two and forty pounds overweight. Third attack in the past month. But his boyfriend didn’t take the news very well. Stopped everybody speculating on why they were together in the first place. You don’t grieve like that if you don’t have genuine feelings.” “Why would there be speculation?” This was the Bay Area. Finding gay couples here was as surprising as finding a redhead. “You didn’t see the boyfriend. Thirty years younger than his partner and had all the nurses swooning.” Thus endeth my interest in the subject. As a gay man without a partner, gorgeous or not, the last thing I enjoyed hearing about was someone else’s true love. “Get some sleep,” Lampley called after me as I headed for the elevator. I pretended to nod and wave. Just like I knew he pretended to believe that I would. 7

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*

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I worked in Oakland, but I lived in San Francisco, a commute I hated more and more each time they fucked with the bridge. Long shifts did more than exhaust me. It put me on the road long after other commuters were in bed. Those who don’t know me well would say that’s a good thing; someone with my low tolerance levels shouldn’t be put into road rage scenarios. Things might get ugly. I liked the night drive for other reasons. I own a motorcycle. A Honda VTX 1300R. Black. Sleek. Wonderful. If you want to go off-roading, it’s not the bike for you. But for my purposes, for driving long stretches of highway with air whipping around me and power between my legs, my bike is perfect. I get a new one every other year. My one true indulgence and fuck anyone who tries to take it away from me. Blasting down the highway without having to worry about idiot drivers who didn’t see me coming is my idea of nirvana. Especially after a double shift and muscles that screamed for release. You know the other great thing to help relax after a long day? Beer. Rather than go home, I pulled into the lot of a small bar around the corner from my townhouse. Slant wasn’t exactly a gay bar, but as you can probably tell from the name, it was gay friendly, which meant that occasionally, even I got lucky. No bouncer, no cover charge, no annoying bands trying to impress 8

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you with how good they think they are. The bar has ring stains, and two of the stools are wobbly, but the beer selection’s the best in the Bay, and it doesn’t cost a kidney to get two glasses. It cost a kidney to get three, because this is still San Francisco, but if working my ass off in medicine doesn’t afford me a few luxuries every once in a while, I’m totally wasting my time. When I walked in, the bartender took one look at me and went straight to the taps to pull me a pint of Guinness. The real stuff. As far as I know, nobody but me ever bought it, but that never stopped him from having plenty on hand. Alex Garner was somebody else on the short list of those I genuinely liked. He’d owned Slant and worked behind the bar for two decades, with no signs of retiring or passing the place on to a nephew or anonymous buyer. As far as I could tell, he never slept. Sometimes, he made me feel like a slacker with how many hours he put in. “You got lucky,” he said, sliding the pint glass toward me when I sat down. “Weather said it was going to rain tonight.” I smiled. “You think a little rain would ever stop me?” The Guinness was room temperature, liquid bliss as it soothed my throat. I drank half of it before putting the glass down. It wouldn’t take long for the other half to follow. Alex moved off to wash up at the other end of the bar, leaving me in peace. He wasn’t really a talker, which normally I loved, but tonight, something crawled under my skin, begging for release. It happened every once in a while. And I couldn’t really blame the guy because all of a sudden I wanted 9

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to turn into Chatty Cathy. My best bet would be to find a onenight stand and work my frustrations out that way. That didn’t happen nearly as often as you’d think for it being San Francisco. I have a tendency to talk myself out of casual hook-ups before they ever happen. Don’t ask why. I have no idea. Looking around Slant, it didn’t seem like there was anybody around who’d fit the bill anyway. There were only two other customers, and they were huddled over a tiny table near the bathroom, quietly arguing about something on a piece of paper in front of them. I stared at them for a couple minutes, silently rescripting the words I couldn’t make out, and decided it wasn’t worth the effort of moving closer to find out what was so interesting. People are excellent at making their own drama. It’s rarely as interesting to anybody else as it is to themselves. I only had an inch of Guinness left in my glass when he walked in. I glanced at the doorway out of habit, and all the blood in my body went shooting south. He would’ve gotten attention whether Slant was packed to the gills with customers or not, but the fact that he stood there for a few seconds without anything to distract from staring at him was definitely a bonus. The first thing I saw was tall. Taller than me, and I’m not a slouch at six-feet. He was broader, too, which is a lot easier to beat. The most generous way to call my body is a swimmer’s build, but I lack the shoulders most of the gorgeous young athletes do. This guy didn’t. He didn’t lack the flat trim 10

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stomach, or the powerful legs packed away in faded blue jeans. His dark brown hair was long on top and disheveled in an it’s-not-a-wind-machine way, and he had a narrow moustache and goatee that brought full attention to a full mouth complete with cupid’s bow. Then he turned his head toward me. Any attention I’d been focusing elsewhere went zooming in on the iciest, bluest, clearest eyes I’ve ever seen. I don’t impress easily. I was born and raised in the Bay Area. I came out of the closet when I was seventeen to absolutely zero fanfare from my family. I’ve been on my knees, on my back, and in almost any other position you can imagine with enough guys to make me feel really old some days, even if most of that happened when I was still in college. But this guy…this guy made me shiver. Hard as a rock. And fucking terrified. I turned back to my Guinness and toyed with the glass, rather than immediately gulp the rest of it down and hightail it out of there. Alex glanced at me with a quirk of a brow, but he didn’t say a word, didn’t even look in the newcomer’s direction before resuming his cleaning. That meant whoever it was wasn’t a regular. Alex treated his regulars like gold. In the mirror behind the bar, I watched the man approach and shifted uncomfortably on my stool as my hard-on got worse. He didn’t walk. He prowled. Like one of those wild cats penned up in the zoo where they go back and forth along the fence, watching those on the other side. Why wasn’t anybody else noticing this guy? Everything about him shouted 11

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danger. But nobody did except for me. The couple in the corner was still arguing, and Alex seemed intent on erasing any spot on his glasses. The newcomer came to a stop at my side and rested a long hand on the bar. A heavy gold ring on his index finger glinted in the dim light. The dark blue stone in its setting was murky, with multiple sharp faces that made me think he’d just carved it out of the wall five minutes ago. From the strength in his roughened fingers, I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t. “Dr. Coen?” Forget the shivers. The man had a voice that any phone sex operator would kill for. The British accent was the bright red cherry on top. And he knew my name. The shivers came back. “I’m sorry,” I said without a smile. “Do I know you?” He held out his hand, the one with the ring. “Duncan Burgess.” What was I supposed to do, ignore it? Well, maybe, but we were in public, and this guy was bigger than me, and it was hard enough to think straight with the lack of blood flowing in the direction of my brain. I shook his hand, taking note of the calluses I’d seen. His grip was as strong as I suspected, too. I’m not sure what was so wrong with mine, though. His dark brows pulled into a tight line, and he looked down at our clasped hands like he’d expected them to do tricks and they’d failed to live up to his commands. It took every ounce of control I had not to yank mine 12

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away. I settled for simply pulling back, grateful when he didn’t put up a fight. “That still doesn’t answer my question,” I said. “Where have we met?” Slowly, he sat down on the stool next to me, his legs angled so that his knees touched my thigh. Not a straight guy pose. Too much contact. The fact that he didn’t move when I pointedly looked down at his thighs only proved it. Damn. He was big all over. His faded jeans hid absolutely nothing this up close and personal. “Your hospital, actually.” That British accent was going to do me in. “You took care of a friend of mine.” “Oh.” For some reason, this made me breathe a little easier. I’d never lost a patient, an uncanny and impossible record I refused to question. My irrational fear of this guy dissipated slightly. “I’m sorry, I don’t recognize you. I see a lot of people.” He smiled. Just a little one, no teeth, but the curve of his mouth made mine water unexpectedly. “People only see me when I want them to. I have a tendency to blend into the background.” I guess my snort of disbelief was more audible than imagined. His brows lifted. “You don’t believe me?” “Not really, no. But hey, what do I know? I didn’t recognize you, so maybe there’s some truth there.” His heavy ring clicked against the bar as he absently tapped his fingers. He didn’t blink very often. For a second, I 13

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wondered if he wore contacts. That would explain both the lessened blinking and the odd intensity of his eyes. “Would you let me buy you some dinner?” he asked. I shook my head. “Slant doesn’t serve food. Unless you’ve got a thing for peanuts.” “I meant someplace else.” He hooked a thumb toward the door. “I’m sure we can find something open in the city.” In this town, a guy like Duncan Burgess didn’t have to worry about silly things like closing times. People would let him in on the power of his accent alone. People would do a lot of things on the power of his accent alone. As hard as I was for the man, something still screamed inside me to get as far away from him as I possibly could. “No, thanks.” Did I really sound that calm and assured? My throat felt like it was waging its own private war, and I picked up my Guinness and downed the last two mouthfuls. “I’ll see you around, Alex,” I said, tossing a ten onto the counter. Duncan grabbed my arm when I tried to walk past. Instincts took over. I’m not proud of the fact. He caught the fist I swung just inches from his jaw and held it immobile as he frowned down at me. I couldn’t move my arm. I couldn’t pull it back, couldn’t complete the throw, couldn’t do anything but stand there and grit my teeth against the pain now shooting through my clenched fingers. “I just wanted to try and convince you to join me,” he said. He seemed to be waiting. For what, I had no clue. “Touching a guy without an invitation isn’t the best way to do 14

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that.” His lashes ducked. The stretch of my arm had pulled my shirt up so that it no longer hid my erection. “That’s not an invitation,” I ground out. “It’s a biological reaction. Did you see my lips move? Did you hear any words come out except for no?” I stumbled from how swiftly he released me. Over his shoulder, I saw Alex tense, one of his hands beneath the edge of the counter where I knew his panic button was. Before I had a chance to shake my head, Duncan held up his hand. “You don’t have to call the cops,” he said without turning around. “I’ll go.” “I’m going first,” I announced. I wasn’t willing to risk letting him slip out and be somewhere outside, waiting to follow me. “Alex, give me five minutes.” “You got it, Pete.” I did a weird sidestep thing to get to the door. The need to keep an eye on Duncan, like he still might try something, still burned through my veins. Part of me kept expecting him to say something. That’s what bad guys did, right? Last words of defiance before they make another move. But this one didn’t. I slipped back into the night with my lungs ready to explode and my skin ready to crawl off my body. I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding my breath at the end there. My keys were in my hand before I ever reached my bike, and I tore off down the street, going too fast considering I only had to go around the corner to get home. 15

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I watched outside my window until dawn broke. All I saw was the clouds getting lighter as the sun rose behind them.

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CHAPTER 2 When I can’t sleep, I do one of two things. I mainline TCM or I go to work. The day after I met Duncan Burgess, there was a Jennifer Jones marathon. Work won. Since it was my day off, I avoided the ER and went straight to ICU. I’d called ahead to double check, but at the nurses’ station, I had to flash my staff badge at the aide behind the counter and ask again. She stared at me blankly. “The knifing?” I repeated. “Teenaged boy, multiple perforations, almost didn’t make it because there wasn’t an operating room available?” The aide brightened, her dyed black hair swinging around 17

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her shoulders as she nodded. “Oh, you mean Adam?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask his name. I was too busy sticking my hands in his gut to try and keep him together.” My annoyed tone didn’t seem to bother her. She just turned to the cart of hanging folders at the end of the counter and rifled through until she found the one I’d asked for. Adam Begley. Age sixteen. Stab wound to the lower left quadrant. Condition critical but stable. It left out the part about the asshole father, though the illegible signature authorizing further treatment made me wonder who had shown up to see to the kid. A neighbor had brought him in, with promises to call the mom. I hoped that was the case, and she’d just been too shaken about the events of the night to do anything more than a scrawl. I made a mental note to check with the cops about whether or not the dad was locked up. At the very least, I could make sure he stayed away from his son. I wasn’t scheduled for a shift in the ER, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be useful. I went downstairs and found the stack of reports from the previous night, waiting to be filed. Though hospital policy was for dead files—those patients who were either discharged or didn’t make it—to be cleared in twelve hours, that never happened. The mouthpiece who made that policy didn’t know how insane our ER got. If they were gone in a day, it was considered a miracle. Dead files also contained a short stack of written notes on patients that got transferred. Someone on admin transcribed 18

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those into the computer for other departments to have access to immediately, rather than wait for doctors who might be busy with other patients to dictate them. After they were in the system, they got delivered to whatever department the patient was in, and the hard copy was placed in the file for crossreferencing. Bureaucratic ass covering at its finest, but it was a system that worked for us. My notes on Adam Begley had phone numbers I’d demanded the neighbor write down. I wanted to make a few calls and see for myself what was going on. I might be able to find an empty computer and go searching for them electronically, but there was no telling how the transcriptionist had noted them. Since they wouldn’t be in my handwriting, I’d recognize them at first glance if I saw them on paper. As I flipped through the stack, a red sticker on one of the tabs caught my eye. Red refers to heart-related matters. Considering it was one of the few in the pile, I wondered if it was Lampley’s, the one whose boyfriend had been asking for me. I pulled it free and flipped it open. Yeah, this was the one. I didn’t recognize the name. No surprise. The notes said everything Lampley had, too. He’d been a heart attack waiting to happen. It wasn’t likely anybody could have saved him. That was a shame. I was about to close it and stick it back with the rest when the permission signature jumped out and caught my eye. The script was strong and slanted forward, thick, bold strokes that were easy to read. Too easy. 19

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Duncan Burgess. I shivered. As if he was standing right next to me. But my blood didn’t run cold. It scalded through my veins and behind my eyeballs, making the page blur. My hand trembled, too. I could’ve sworn the file shook. I rested it against the counter in order to steady it, but who the hell knows if that actually did anything. Duncan Burgess. What had he said to me last night? He’d claimed I took care of a friend of his. But Lampley had seen his lover. Lampley was the one who called time of death. Another friend? That would explain why he wanted me. I’d probably saved somebody else he and his boyfriend knew, and he latched onto the only name in the ER that he knew. My gaze leapt to the top of the page, and the sinking of my stomach plummeted even further. The patient lived in Half Moon Bay. Getting to Oakland meant coming over the San Mateo Bridge, then north on 880. That was a forty-five minute drive on a good day. Why come so far if he was having a heart attack? They must have been in Oakland for some reason. That was the only logical answer. It didn’t explain what Duncan was doing in San Francisco. Especially after his lover had died. Following me home? Now, I’m as self-centered as the next guy, but that sounded too paranoid and egotistical, even for me. It had to be 20

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coincidence. Or a different Duncan Burgess. Or any of a dozen other reasons to explain it all away. Still, I took the file over to a free computer and sat down with it, ignoring the curious glances from the day shift admin. The more I knew about this guy, the better I was going to feel about it being a coincidence, and I could go on with my day without feeling like I had to watch over my shoulder every other minute. My fingers flew over the keyboard. The stories about doctors being technical idiots and incapable of doing anything without the help of a secretary are myths. We’re not exactly dumb, you know. There’s just a whole slew of lazy ones that give the rest of us a bad name. Because the patient wasn’t local, I didn’t really expect to find the reports of his previous attacks, but there they were, staring back at me from the monitor less than a minute later. Both times, he’d been brought in with chest pains and failing life signs. Both times, he’d been stabilized and released by the end of the night. By me. I didn’t remember this guy. At all. But clearly, Duncan remembered me. For very good reason. His cornering me at Slant now made perfect sense. And scared the shit out of me even more. When the admin looked over at me for the fourth time since I sat down, I carefully clicked to print the screen. For all my years working in ER, something like this had never happened to me before. I kept a careful distance from my patients. It was another reason why I liked the ER. I saved 21

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them, and then they left. I didn’t have to worry about longterm treatment, or developing attachments to them. My interest in Adam Begley was purely practical. What was the point of saving a teenager if he was just going to end up on the wrong side of his dad’s knife as soon as he went home? But this was different. This creeped me out. Everything about my encounter with Duncan Burgess now felt premeditated, and I needed to notify the police as soon as possible so I had legal grounds in case anything started getting ugly. Or scary. Scarier. I logged out and stood up, taking the copy from the printer as I returned the file to its stack. I needed to go see Alex and let him know what was going on in case Duncan turned up again. When I filed a report, the police would want to talk to him to corroborate my story. Alex and I had known each other for far too long for me to surprise him with that. I bypassed anyplace in the hospital that might slow me down and headed out to the parking structure, folding the papers into a tight square that fit in my back jeans pocket. Police first, or Slant? Alex wouldn’t be open yet. He didn’t open until four. He might be around doing inventory or office work, but I ran a risk trying to track him down first. I had no idea if Duncan knew where I lived, and the sooner I reported him, the safer I was going to feel. Police, then. I’d call from home. Traffic was an expected bitch. Stop and go and far too much time in my head. I couldn’t shake the image of him looming in Slant’s doorway, how big he’d been, how hard I’d 22

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gotten. He was British. Was he a citizen or here on a visa? If I reported him, that might affect his status. On the other hand, could he even be touched by American law if he wasn’t a citizen? I had no idea how these things worked. Deportation could be the only punishment he could get, but that would be more than enough for me. All I wanted was to be able to practice in peace. I didn’t need grieving boyfriends or angry family coming after me because I didn’t manage to save the person they loved. There was a line to be drawn, and Duncan Burgess had crossed it. If I had to shove him back to the other side with both hands and a host of cops behind me, then so be it. *

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You know what? If you’re not hurt, or don’t have a criminal in hand, the police take their own sweet time coming around to take a report. I suppose I shouldn’t blame them. They have a job to do. They have to prioritize. I understand that. I do it every day. It sucked being on the other end of it. They showed up around five, right after I’d placed an order to the local Chinese restaurant. There were two of them, Phipps and Velasco, both in their forties, both big enough to make me feel momentarily safe. I don’t know why I want my cops to be big. Maybe because I’m not nearly as muscled. But they were polite, and they asked all the right questions, and when they moved to leave half an hour later, I actually felt like everything was going to be okay. 23

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Until Phipps made a passing remark from the doorway. “It’s always possible that’s not his real name.” He slid his sunglasses into place, though the clouds had never really burned off today. “We’ll know more once we start digging around.” My hope shriveled as alarm stomped into its place. “Why wouldn’t it be his real name?” “He gave it to you in front of a witness,” Velasco said. “If he means harm, and he’s as in control as you make it sound like he was, then odds are good he’s smart enough to cover his tracks.” Phipps descended the stairs to the sidewalk, leaving me to trail after them. “We’ll know as soon as we check with INS. They’ll have him in the system, one way or another.” I thanked them and watched them drive away, though my thoughts were now muddled again. I hadn’t considered a fake name. It was the same one that was on the hospital records. But now that they’d raised the possibility that he wasn’t who he said he was, I had to wonder if the accent was real, too. The entire thing could be one big act, and if that was the case, how was I supposed to protect myself? Locking my door, for starters. It didn’t do much to quell the quivers in my stomach, but considering my options, I’d take it. Alex hadn’t returned my call yet, so I picked up the phone and tried Slant again. He picked up on the second ring with his usual terse greeting, and I sank into the corner of my leather couch, grateful for something that at least seemed normal. 24

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“I wanted to give you a heads up,” I said. “Police are probably going to come around tonight to talk to you.” “Me? Why?” Briefly, I explained what I’d discovered and the measures I’d taken to make sure Duncan Burgess stayed far away. “They’re just going to need you to tell them what you saw,” I finished. “What happened when I tried to leave.” Alex’s pause wasn’t reassuring. “I have to tell them you took a swing, too, then.” “I don’t care. He grabbed me first. And I didn’t actually hit him.” “You wanted to.” “Because he wasn’t taking no for an answer.” I frowned. “What’s your problem with this? The guy’s stalking me.” “Maybe.” In the background, glasses clinked, and a muted male voice called out to someone else. “But until he tried to talk you into dinner, he didn’t seem all that dangerous to me. And I see a lot of guys come through here. He just seemed…” He paused, searching for the right word. “Interested. And frankly, so did you, until you turned him down.” Heat rose in my face as I remembered my initial reaction. “The fact that he was good-looking doesn’t make him any less of a threat.” “No, but you didn’t stop staring as soon as he walked in. He got to you. I’m not surprised he tried to ask you out.” “He only did it to get to me!” “For what purpose?” Had Alex really just asked me that? “His boyfriend died 25

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last night. He was trying to get me to save him because I’d done it before. Clearly, he wants some sort of revenge.” “Look, I’m not saying that’s not the case. I’m just saying…” Alex sighed. “I hope it’s not as serious as you think.” “Me, too.” I hung up, not really feeling any better about the whole mess, but at least relieved I’d forewarned Alex about the cops. I didn’t know when they’d show up, though I hoped it was sooner rather than later. I had a feeling Alex’s thoughts about how the night happened might end up changing even more than they already had. If he described it as a simple spurned romantic interest, the police might not take it as seriously. Or they’d backburner the investigation so I’d never get my restraining order. Either way, I was screwed. I couldn’t wait for information. Booting up my computer, I made a fresh pot of coffee to tide me over for the next couple hours. I had to do something productive with my night off. The police could take official measures; I had the wonders of Google at my disposal. Duncan’s name didn’t bring up anything remotely useful, but the name of his boyfriend provided something more interesting. Randall Tully was a San Francisco lawyer, partner in a firm that specialized in family law. According to his bio, he was widowed with two sons, one of which also worked in the firm. I wasn’t bothered that Tully had a family or had been married. Plenty of men came out of the closet after finding themselves alone, especially in his age bracket. What bothered 26

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me was that Duncan had risked his health to drag him all the way to Oakland for treatment. And where were the sons? Why hadn’t they been involved? My Chinese arrived, leaving me with questions, coffee, and kung pao chicken. The single Jennifer Jones movie I could actually stand was on TCM. With distraction in mind, I stretched out on the couch, my food balanced on my stomach, and watched Gregory Peck and his raw sexuality strut around, sweating under the blazing sun. It actually worked, to some degree. But I’d underestimated how much Peck directed my attention. In this movie, he always left me hard—driving me to a shower to jerk off more than once—but that response carried with it unexpected side effects. Like not seeing Peck anymore when the edge of my plate bumped against my arousal. The first time it happened, it was Duncan’s face in front of me. Duncan’s shoulders. Duncan’s hips. Their coloring was slightly different. Duncan was fair and had those chilling blue eyes. He was more muscular, too, and had the facial hair. But the angular lines of his jaw and cheekbones were the same, and the deep timbre of his voice. If I closed my eyes, I could see him. Hear him. I had to sit up as soon as my eyelids started to drift downward. Duncan was a psychopath. I had to remember that. My cock didn’t seem to care, but the rest of me sure did. It cared about staying alive, about continuing my work. It didn’t want to end up on a slab because I focused for a second too long on physical desires that meant absolutely nothing in the 27

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end. Turning off the TV, I got up and stored the rest of my kung pao in the fridge. I wasn’t going to indulge in a shower. Taking my pants off didn’t seem like such a good idea right now. I’d clean, go back to the computer, and see what else I might be able to dig up. My cell phone rang while I was taking out the trash. I frowned when I saw the number from the hospital on the screen, but answered after dropping the lid on the can. “Dr. Coen? This is Nurse Streeter.” It was the nurse who’d interrupted me the night before. I had a feeling her voice would forever be ingrained on my memory. “We have an assault victim here, and need you as soon as possible.” “I’m not on shift. I’m not even on call.” “I know. But the patient is refusing treatment unless he gets you.” I yanked my back door open, gritting my teeth against my annoyance. “Remember what I said last night, nurse? What the hell is your problem with following hospital protocols? Get the doctor on duty to take care of it. You don’t bother me at home on my day off.” “But the patient won’t let him.” “Then you call Security and you get him kicked out. Or transferred to another ER. Something. Anything but bugging me.” The soft catch in her voice filtered over the line. “Okay, but Mr. Burgess isn’t going to like it. I’m sorry to bother you, Dr. Coen. It won’t happen again.” 28

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I didn’t hear the apology. I got stuck on the first part of what she said. “Wait. What did you say the patient’s name was?” “Burgess. Duncan Burgess. It’s the same man who was asking for you last night.” It could have been a trick. Nurse Streeter wasn’t the brightest of people. But after the events of the previous night, there was no way I could believe she was dumb enough to push me unless she was absolutely positive. And if it really was the same Duncan Burgess, I’d have him somewhere I could hold him until the police showed up. “Forget what I said.” I grabbed my keys and my jacket, bolting for the door. “Tell him I’m on my way.”

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CHAPTER 3 Cars hate me, but having a motorcycle when I’m in a hurry is a godsend. I know all the statistics. I know how dangerous it is to weave in and out, especially on a black bike that blends with shadows. Normally, I completely agree with them. Only a moron cuts off a vehicle that could squash you without getting a dent. Accident victims? Not pretty. Helmets might cut down on the number of head traumas, but that doesn’t do a thing about broken legs and road burns. Until bikers wear full body armor, it’s a risk to ride in heavy traffic like you’re a mosquito buzzing in and out. I wasn’t a moron, but the kind of anxiety Duncan Burgess had created in me earned a measure of recklessness. I was in a 30

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hurry. I did what I had to. I parked illegally, sharing a spot with another bike that had a handicap sticker who was probably also parked illegally. Other days, I might worry about getting towed. Today, I had other things on my mind. For all my frenetic energy, the ER was a tomb. The waiting room had only two people in it, an elderly couple huddled against each other. I didn’t wait to see what they might need, but pushed past the check-in to head straight for the nurses’ station. Nurse Streeter intercepted me before I got halfway there. “I put Mr. Burgess in one of the private cubicles,” she said, leading me down a hall. “He was making a scene before he passed out.” “He passed out?” That wasn’t going to help me in questioning him. “Did you give him something?” “No, he wouldn’t let me. Dr. Kim tried repeatedly to get him to agree to have somebody look at him, but he stopped that when he heard you were on your way.” Of course, Kim would back off. He was a mouse of a man. A hell of a doctor, sure, but say boo and he ran in the opposite direction. She stopped at a closed door and pushed it open. It wasn’t actually a private cubicle, but it was one of the smaller exam rooms and had only been partitioned into two beds. With the ER so slow tonight, it was superfluous. No wonder they’d brought the interloper back here. He was stretched out on the far bed, his feet dangling over 31

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the edge. The smell of blood was fresh, the paper sheet beneath his back stained scarlet, but it was the condition of his shirt, exposed by his jacket falling open to his side, that made me swear under my breath and rush forward. “Don’t just stand there!” I barked over my shoulder. “Get up here and get him hooked up. I want vitals now!” Nurse Streeter scurried to work, but I was too intent on looking Duncan over to monitor what she was doing. She’d said on the phone he was the victim of an assault. She hadn’t said what kind. Bruises mottled his jaw, and the left side of his mouth was swollen and split. He wore a black T-shirt, but multiple slices in the cotton showed fair skin beneath, along with dark hair and even more blood. In spite of all those, though, it was the state of his stomach that worried me most. Half of his shirt was just simply gone. An oblong shape had been scorched away, the edges blackened and crisp, while the skin beneath oozed raw. There wasn’t even skin left to stitch it back together. I would have passed out, too. It was a wonder he’d stayed conscious long enough to demand to see me. The electronic beep of the monitors startled me into looking up. Nurse Streeter was pale but continued to work, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she struggled to get the rest of his coat off. “Cut it,” I ordered. “His life is more important than a jacket.” She nodded and went over to the storage drawers, 32

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rummaging through until she had the scissors she needed. We worked in silence for several minutes, the only sounds the steady pulses of Duncan’s heartbeat and my occasional barked order. His blood pressure was low, but not dipping. As long as it didn’t take a sudden plunge, I wasn’t too worried about losing him. At least, not yet. I was more curious about what had happened to him. Had one of Tully’s sons blamed Duncan for their father’s death? Not everybody was as understanding about their parents being in gay relationships, even here. I’d tuck that away as a possibility until I got the chance to get the story straight from the horse’s mouth. I didn’t miss the irony that someone had gotten to Duncan just like I imagined he’d wanted to get to me. For some reason, that didn’t amuse me as much as I would have expected. “Is he a friend of yours?” Her question took me by surprise. Glancing up from where I was suturing the deepest of the cuts, I met her wide eyes with a frown. “Why would you think that?” “Because he knew to ask for you last night. And today. And…” Her voice trailed off, her lashes ducking as she clearly thought better of saying what she’d wanted to. “Spit it out,” I snapped. “In for a penny, nurse.” She took a deep breath and threw away the bloody sponge she’d been using to clean Duncan’s skin. “You just seem…invested in the patient. More so than usual.” I ground my teeth together and focused on my stitching again. Three down, too many more to count. “Who brought 33

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him in?” I didn’t want to follow this line of questioning, even if I’d pressed for it. “Nobody. He walked in on his own.” “And he didn’t say anything about who might have done this to him?” “No.” She paused. “You don’t know who it could’ve been?” I didn’t have a clue. But as soon as he regained consciousness, I expected to get that answer. Along with a few others. *

*

*

I knew I should call the police. I’d gone to them in the first place for a very good reason, and said reason hadn’t really changed, except for the fact that Duncan was currently checked into the hospital and hadn’t regained consciousness since passing out before I got there. I wondered how the police would look at my coming in on my day off to take care of him, too. To an objective outsider, it didn’t exactly say, “I’m terrified of this man and I want him to stay away from me.” If I was being honest, it actually looked pretty darn bad, and my internal debate about calling and letting them know where to find the guy turned out to be a fairly short one. I didn’t want the entire complaint dismissed because they thought I was a whackjob. I’d wait until Duncan came around again, question him myself while he was restrained, then get him transferred to another doctor. Only then would I involve the police again. If they asked why I’d come in on my day off 34

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to take care of him, I’d just throw a copy of the Hippocratic Oath at them. The private room I’d arranged for him was dim, the only light filtering through the slatted blinds and the glow of all the electronics he was attached to. I sprawled in a chair opposite the bed, watching him sleep. I wanted to be the first person he saw upon waking. Nurse Streeter had volunteered to call me as soon as he regained consciousness, but I didn’t want to lose my window of opportunity. If I stuck around, I was the one who managed his meds. I could keep him lucid enough to answer all my questions. Whoever I transferred him to afterward could shoot all the painkillers in him they wanted, but for now, this was my show. Duncan had made the mistake of wandering in on my turf, and damned if I was going to concede that advantage. Stripping him out of his clothes had revealed nothing. He didn’t carry any ID, and his wallet held only cash. He didn’t even have keys on him, which made me wonder how the hell he’d shown up in Oakland in the first place. No car meant walking or public transportation, though he was British so maybe he didn’t mind the latter. Actually, I’m wrong. Getting him undressed did tell me something. It showed just what a gorgeous specimen Duncan Burgess really was. I looked for purely professional reasons, of course, but there was no denying the man was fit. There wasn’t a muscle that wasn’t hard as stone, and the dark hair that lightly furred his chest trailed down his flat stomach to curl around the base of a nice, thick cock. Even soft, it was 35

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impressive. Nurse Streeter’s eyes widened at the sight of it, though when it looked like she might take an unprofessional interest, I dismissed her and took care of everything myself. It wasn’t until the time for the first status check rolled around, and the nurse on duty blushed when she looked at me, that I realized that I had likely fed the hospital gossip mill for the next few days. That’s why I sat in the chair as far from him as I possibly could. Anybody who peeked in—and there were a fair few—would see that nothing untoward was happening. He stirred around three, just when I was starting to get more than a little sleepy myself. The slight acceleration in his heart rate alerted me first, and I sat straighter, watching him from the chair. His signs had remained stable. That was a good thing. He hadn’t lost too much blood before showing up, so, hopefully, the superficiality of his injuries was just that. I’d yet to figure out what had caused the massive injury to his stomach, however. My first instinct was an abrasive burn, but what could have caused it to such an extensive area, at such even damage, was beyond me. Duncan didn’t make a sound as his eyes opened. From my vantage, I saw him stare up at the ceiling for several seconds before his head turned to view the monitors at his side. A frown creased his brow, and at his side, his hand stretched, the fingers spreading for a moment before balling into a fist. “It’s an expensive piece of equipment,” I said without moving. “You really don’t want to break it.” Though I’d hoped to take him by surprise, Duncan turned his gaze in my direction without so much as a startled jerk or a 36

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muttered curse. Even in the dim light, his eyes were clear and unblinking, and the shivers I’d experienced in Slant when he’d looked at me sitting at the bar rampaged across my skin all over again. I wish I knew why that happened. Something in my gut wanted to scream at the sight of him, and it was like my flesh didn’t have a say in the matter but to go along with it. Now that I’d seen him hurt, though, the initial sense of terror had faded. The thought that he was stalking me in retaliation for his boyfriend was more of an annoyance than a true fear, and I met his attention with my own unwavering gaze. “They told me it was your night off,” he said. “It is.” “And you came in anyway?” I crossed my legs, my ankle resting on the opposite knee. I did it for more reasons than just to get more comfortable in the chair. The electric throb of his voice had gone straight to my cock, just like it had at Slant, and I didn’t want my erection to be noticeable. One flick of his lashes said I’d misjudged that, though, but hell if I was going to move again and just make myself look more the fool. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” Might as well get to the meat of the matter. “I thought I did.” “No, you really didn’t.” “What else was there to tell? I told you my name, that I knew you from here.” “You forgot to mention how you brought your boyfriend in 37

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again and pulled the same stunt you pulled here last night.” Duncan rested his head back on his pillow. The discoloration of his jaw and his dark hair sliced across the white bedding like an open wound. “Randy would still be alive if you’d taken care of him last night.” “Randy was a heart attack waiting to happen,” I snapped. “If you were so concerned about his health, why not get him to cut back on the double whoppers with cheese instead of driving him across the peninsula and bay, just to get to me?” He slowly shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Really?” Rising irritation drove me to my feet and to the side of the bed. So much for playing it calm and collected. Every other word that came out of his mouth went dancing through my veins and demanded I do the mamba. “I know you were fucking around with me at Slant. You didn’t want dinner. You wanted something else. Admit it.” Coming to him was a mistake. Those icy eyes locked me into place. “All right,” he conceded. “I admit it.” Victory should have tasted a lot better than it did. It has in the past. This time, though, my mouth was as dry and arid as the I-5 on the way to LA in the middle of August. Everything else about me felt hot, swollen. And no, I didn’t just mean my cock. “The police are going to want to talk to you,” I managed to grit out. “I’ve filed a report. Next move is a restraining—” All my breath suddenly reversed direction and slammed 38

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into my lungs when he grabbed my wrist. His fingers easily reached around it, not just because I’m a tad on the slight side but because Duncan was a big fucking guy. And strong. I mentioned the strong, right? It had caught my fist at Slant, and it caught me now, though I hadn’t been doing anything but standing there. “No police.” He wasn’t begging. It wasn’t a request. It was an order, or sounded like he meant it to be an order, because there wasn’t a hint of coaxing in his silken tone. I tried to yank away, but his grip was resolute. The best I could do was stand there and just let him hold me. Fighting him made me feel pathetic. “Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you followed me to my favorite bar,” I said. “You act like trouble, you get treated like trouble.” I left out the part that as soon as I got free, I was going to call them. Only an idiot would tell the nutjob threatening him that he was about to turn his ass in, when he was still under the so-called control of the nutjob. Duncan didn’t speak. He seemed to be waiting for something, but when nothing happened, his mouth tightened. I followed his focus when he glanced down at my wrist, and together, we both watched him readjust his hold on me, his thumb deliberately pressing over my pulse. “You have this thing for holding hands, don’t you?” I commented. “No police,” he repeated, but it lacked the force his earlier command had held. He started to try a different grip, his 39

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fingers sliding around and farther up my arm, but then his eyes widened, and the electronic beeps of his heart monitor surged faster. “Where’s my ring?” I glanced at the readings. I didn’t like how his body was reacting. “What?” “My ring. Gold with a blue stone. Where is it?” “I don’t know.” I reached forward and pushed on the shoulder that was rising from the bed. The wires had pulled taut, and he risked pulling them off completely if he didn’t relax. “Lie down. You’re only exciting yourself.” “You don’t understand.” Duncan released me so quickly, and with such force, that I stumbled back from the bed. “It’s mine. I need it.” He needed a sedative, that’s what he needed. “Hang on.” Keeping him in sight out of the corner of my eye, I went to his bag of belongings hanging on the bedrail. In it was everything that had been on his person when Nurse Streeter had stripped him down. If he’d been wearing his ring when he came in, it would be in there. His chilling gaze took in everything. A minute later, his clothes, shoes and wallet rested on the end of the bed. “It’s not here.” “It has to be!” “It’s not.” I met his eyes, refusing to flinch under his probing attention. “Maybe whoever roughed you up took it.” That possibility had clearly not occurred to him. He turned a sickly shade of white as he glanced down at his upper body. When I accidentally brushed against his foot, gathering up 40

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his things to replace in the bag, he jerked back so quickly he kicked his shoes off the bed. “Don’t touch me,” Duncan hissed. “You need to get out of here. Now.” I froze. “Interesting response from someone so desperate to have me around in the first place.” I was going to do it, of course. And as soon as I walked out of the room, I was placing a call to the psych ward. He needed to be in restraints before I let anybody who wasn’t a six-four ex-linebacker anywhere near him. “Tell me who did this to you, and maybe we can figure out what happened to your ring.” The sound he made was more of a bark than a laugh. “You’d never believe even if I told you.” Probably not, but it had been worth a shot to try and get more information before others intervened. “You won’t know until you try me.” It had to be a trick of the light. Or the lack of it. Because Duncan’s eyes grew even paler. Glacial chips peering down the length of his body at me. “I try you right now, and you won’t live to tell the tale.” There is nothing like a death threat to get my ass moving. Though my blood was ice and my heart in my throat, I backed out of that room with his gaze tracking me the entire way. I felt it even after I’d inched into the hallway, and after the door had shut, and with each measured step I took to the nurses’ station. “Call the psych ward.” Reaching over the counter, I plucked Duncan’s file out of the rack of open cases and 41

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flipped it open to make a note in the chart. Hurriedly, I scribbled out a prescription for the strongest sedatives I could think of in my muddled state and ripped it off the pad to hand it over to the nurse on duty. “I want him in restraints before anybody else goes in to see him.” She glanced at the scrip. “Who’s going to give him the shot then?” “I will.” I ignored her surprise. Nurses forget that doctors know how to stick a needle in someone’s skin, too. “Now make that call.” Something in my tone must have lit a fire under her wellpadded ass. Two orderlies showed up in less than five minutes with the restraints in hand. I already had the drugs. Calling the pharmacy to light a fire under them, too, had worked wonders. “He’s a big guy,” I warned as I led the orderlies back to Duncan’s room. “My guess is he’s going to fight you.” They nodded, though the bored look they exchanged said more about how much they took their jobs for granted than it did about my judgment. Taking a deep breath, I pushed the door open, keeping it as slow and even as I possibly could to keep Duncan from doing anything rash. The bed was empty. And the bag hanging at the end of it was gone. All that remained was one discarded hospital gown.

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CHAPTER 4 Duncan might not have wanted me to go to the cops, but his mysterious disappearance now meant I had two different police departments looking at me funny because of this man. Even with the nurses backing me up, not to mention hospital security, the two uniforms sent over from Oakland PD kept exchanging little knowing glances as I gave my statement, the ones that said, “Jesus, how do we get all the crazies?” More than once, I had to snap my fingers in front of their faces in order to get their attention again. In my estimation, that didn’t bode well for them taking the case seriously. “He obviously just walked out,” Tweedledum said. “People do that.” 43

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I gritted my teeth. “Not people who’d just been assaulted like Mr. Burgess. Besides, there wasn’t enough time.” “You probably just weren’t aware of how much time actually passed,” his partner, Tweedledee, contributed. “You were busy, you said.” “Yes, getting restraints.” “So you knew the guy was a flight risk.” Every word that came out of their mouths drove me closer and closer to violence. “No, I knew he was dangerous,” I spat. “And clearly unstable, and if you don’t treat this with the urgency you should, you can bet I’m going to go over your heads and tell your bosses you didn’t care that a potential mental patient escaped the hospital and is now out on the streets, doing who knows what to who knows who.” It wasn’t just the cops who paled at my furious description. The orderlies and nurses looked a little sick, too, like they hadn’t really thought of the situation that way. I wasn’t about to waste the effect to explain to them that I didn’t really think that was the case, that I just wanted the police to think so, so they’d get off their asses and find the man. All I cared about was getting something done. “Well, we’ll let you know what we find.” Tweedledum snapped his notebook shut and gestured to his partner that it was time to go. “If you hear anything, or if Mr. Burgess shows up again, let us know.” The sarcastic retort was ready on my tongue, but I bit it back and whirled on my heel to march down the hall. I didn’t need to stick around. My sole reason for being at the hospital 44

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at three o’clock in the morning had upped and walked away, and I just wanted to go home and crawl into bed, hoping that he didn’t show up there because he thought I’d stolen his ring or wanting to finish the job he’d started at Slant or something else entirely. I didn’t remember the ride home. All I remembered was cold night air, darkness, and the overwhelming desire to forget the last forty-eight hours had ever happened. The silence echoed around me as I let myself into my townhouse. My bones felt like fragments moldering away in a grave somewhere, dry and crumbly and ready to collapse at the slightest provocation. Somehow, I dragged myself upstairs and flopped onto my bed, the rumpled blankets from my unsuccessful slumber the night before wrapping around me. I sighed in pleasure. I might suffer from my own version of insomnia, but man do I love my bed. That sense of disconnect or anger that other insomniacs tend to develop toward anything sleep-related never hooked into me. Every time I stretched out, I burned with hope that this was going to be my night of the most perfect sleep ever. That never happened, of course, but it didn’t stop me from wishing. Right now, I didn’t even bother getting up. My legs dangled over the edge of the mattress, and I used what little energy I had to toe off my shoes. I was already starting to drift into that nowhere space between wakeful and unconscious, gray and bodiless, when the bottoms of my feet began to prickle. You know the sensation. It’s when your feet have fallen asleep, so you try and stomp some feeling back into 45

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them. Those seconds when the feeling is just starting to come back, when it feels like thousands of tiny needles are trying to break through your skin from the inside out. Annoyed at being yanked from the brink of sleep, I pulled my legs up more properly onto the bed, re-angling myself so that I actually had the pillow beneath my head. I scratched at the arch of the foot prickling the most with the nail of my big toe on the other foot, but that didn’t do anything to make it stop. “Damn it,” I muttered. Rolling onto my stomach didn’t do anything. Neither did kicking at the blankets to get them situated over my legs. As a last ditch effort, I sat back up again, my hands going to my fly. I was suddenly more awake than I’d been when I’d left the hospital, and my hopes that I was going to have a restful night slowly disintegrated away. As I pushed my jeans down and tossed them onto the chest at the foot of the bed, something whispered from the corner of the room. I froze. I couldn’t see shit. My blinds were still shut from having them closed before going into the hospital, and not a trickle of light filtered from the hall. I didn’t have anything electronic in my room except for a digital clock, so it couldn’t have been from something like that. Maybe a draft? Had I left something open? No, I was sure I hadn’t. The sound didn’t repeat itself. I sat there for over three minutes, waiting, watching, worrying, and nothing came. With a shake of my head, I grabbed the hem of my shirt and peeled it up and off. I was tired. My brain was playing 46

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tricks on me. Too much weird stuff in the past couple days mixed in with good old-fashioned exhaustion created chaos. I needed order in my life. A path. Things to fix and bodies to solve. I was simply feeling out of control, and my mind was making me paranoid as a way of convincing me to lock down. I didn’t have to be told twice. Once I was in my boxers, I grabbed the blankets and burrowed underneath them, bunching the soft fabric around my neck and ears in my best tortoise impression. The heat helped. A lot. I was able to start drifting again within just a few minutes. Something tickled across my ear. Soft. Warm. My skin erupted in goose bumps. I didn’t otherwise move. Sleep. That’s what my body was telling me. Even when I felt a gentle pressure at my shoulder, a return of the prickling only located at the base of my neck now. “Peter…” I could have been dreaming. Part of me thought I had to be. I was just far enough away from consciousness to consider it possible. But the whisper of my name came again. Nobody called me Peter except strangers and my parents, who were strangers in and of themselves most of the time. Certainly, nobody had been in my room when I’d lain down. The possibility crossed my mind that somebody could have broken in while I was out. The sound I’d heard in the corner…the one that felt like wind sneaking in through every available crack. That could have been breath, like the sigh of 47

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someone waiting. Nobody had been waiting for me for years. Ever. I’d never had a relationship that went any deeper than really great sex for a few weeks. The only problem was the speaker was female. As the prickling under my skin grew more insistent, I forced my head out of the blankets and blinked into the darkness. It wasn’t just dark. My eyes were bleary from nearsleep. I couldn’t seem to focus. I tried again and again, but either I was more tired than I thought, or it was even darker than I’d assumed. There was a third option, that I was actually asleep, and in all honesty, I kind of liked that one best. My brain was trying to goad me into getting the hell out of there when my body seemed to resist anything related to moving at all. Then I saw her. Yeah. Her. No way was I dreaming. I hadn’t had a woman in a sexual position in my dreams since I was fourteen and decided to stop fooling myself about being gay. Of course, the rationale that a woman had snuck into my apartment was almost as insane. Especially since I didn’t recognize her. In spite of the darkness, her features sharpened with every passing second. A heart-shaped face. A long nose. A mouth with a nonexistent top lip, and a bottom lip that more than overcompensated for the lack above it. Her ash-blonde hair hung in sheet-tangled waves to her shoulders, and beneath thick, natural brows, hazel eyes that looked like they could 48

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bore through concrete regarded me with undeniable hunger. “Hello, Peter…” She spoke like she was afraid of waking an entire room full of people. The words floated on puffs of air, almost tangible enough to sink into my skin when they landed. She had a curious accent, too, not American but as if English was definitely her second language. Stretching a slim arm toward me, she brushed fingertips over my forehead, pushing back strands of hair that clung to it. Each pass created tingles, even more so when she caressed the side of my face. I wanted to turn away from her touch, but my neck refused to move. I was starting to have serious concerns about my lack of motor control. “Who the hell are you?” I croaked. She smiled. Kind of. Rather than relax me, it only gave me strength to inch away. “Lisette.” A French name. She didn’t sound French. She didn’t look French. Okay, I’ve never actually met a French woman in real life, but I always imagined them dark like Juliette Binoche or Audrey Taotou. “Don’t go,” she cooed. Her hand tightened around my shoulder and stopped my futile attempt to put more distance between them. “I’ve only just got here.” “Got here? Oh, God, you broke in.” Nails scratched down my chest, pearly and sharp. I hissed at the contact, but at least she didn’t draw blood. “Doors are just the means to hide away from the world. A 49

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man like you doesn’t want to hide.” “Really? Because hiding from some psycho woman in my bedroom is starting to sound like the best idea ever.” Her hand reached my stomach. I didn’t remember the blankets getting pushed away from my body, though now that I was aware, it felt like the thermostat had broken at some point. I would’ve sworn it was a hundred degrees in my bedroom. “Relax. You want to sleep, don’t you?” Without taking her eyes off me, she bent her head and pressed a closed-mouthed kiss to my navel. Then another one at the edge of my boxers. “I’m just here to help with that.” “Unless you plan on dosing me up on pentobarbital, you’re shit out of luck, lady.” I found control of my arm and reached down, trying to push her away from my lower half. My attempt didn’t even rank as feeble. Maybe I was dreaming. Nothing else explained something this surreal. “Do I have to click my heels together three times or something to get out of this? I’d ask you to pinch me, but considering where you are, I don’t think that’s the smartest request right now.” Lisette laughed, a husky sound that made me smell death. “No wonder Duncan’s so enamored with you. You’re funny. He doesn’t usually do funny.” “Duncan?” Hearing his name gave me power I hadn’t had. I pushed myself up and kicked her away, startled when my bare foot made contact with very real, very soft skin. I must have taken her by surprise because she actually fell off the edge of the 50

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bed, landing on the floor with a distinct thump. It was enough to spur me in the opposite direction, scrambling for my jeans and my cell phone. She appeared on her hands and knees in front of me, her eyes almost glowing in the darkness. With a casual sweep of her leg, she kicked back and pushed my jeans beyond my reach. The only way to get them now would be to go past her. “This doesn’t have to be like this.” She was practically purring. I remained immobile while her fingers folded over mine, twisting and turning to pull me to my feet when I didn’t want to move. Well, not in that way, anyway. “I’m here to make both of us happy.” And with that, she pushed me back onto the bed. Flat on my back, with my knees dangling over the edge, I stared as she let go of my hand to go straight to the waistband of my boxers. She didn’t even make me lift my hips as she pulled them off, but the second she skimmed her fingertips over my flaccid cock, laughter bubbled up in my chest. “Oh, lady, you have got the wrong number here.” I knocked her hand away and propped myself up on my elbows. “I’m gay.” “I know.” Lisette cradled my soft length like it was something precious, and bent her head. Her warm breath did more than heat my skin. It made the prickles return, this time in my balls and thighs. “But a mouth is a mouth, isn’t it?” As she licked around the crown of my cock, I only had one thought. This cannot be happening. 51

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I couldn’t push her off. I tried. I pushed at her head first, hoping just to knock her away, but that was like shoving at a brick wall. Then I kicked out, forgetting everything that had ever been indoctrinated in me about hitting a woman, but she grabbed my ankle with her free hand and pinned it to the side of the bed. There wasn’t any moving after that. Unless you count the bob of her head as she started to suck on my cock in earnest. Sometimes, biology is a terrible, terrible thing. It betrays when you most need it on your side. I’ve seen enough death and wrong turns in recovery to know that sometimes, what your body does just cannot be helped. Lisette had made a very good point. A mouth is a mouth. Especially a very talented one. And I loved a blow job as much as the next man. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to fill my head with the unsexiest images I could think of. My senior Calculus AP teacher with her forty-year-old sun-damaged skin that made her look seventy. The homeless man who hung out on the corner three blocks away. Amy Winehouse. Nothing worked. Every time it felt like my erection was starting to flag, Lisette added a little more pressure to the suction, and I drifted a little bit farther away. Just when I thought this whole night couldn’t get any weirder, a bellow of heat rushed through the room. It was a flashfire, sizzling across my skin, a tangible wave that went from one wall to the opposite. It stole all the breath out of my lungs and left me gasping, but more importantly, it pulled 52

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Lisette off my cock with a rake of teeth that was far from pleasant and sent her whirling around. A brilliant flash of focused light, almost immediately swallowed by dark, left me blind. Something snarled, and Lisette screamed. I’m guessing it was Lisette. If I had more than one woman in my room, my parents would throw a ticker tape parade. I found some measure of control and managed to swing my legs onto the bed, my arousal still throbbing in spite of the impending danger. In fact, it felt even harder. Like whatever was in the room was exciting it even more. I had long ago figured out that my cock had a mind of its own most of the time, but this was getting a little bit ridiculous. I still couldn’t see. The heat that had swept across the room was still there, resting still and heavy and dry. Rubbing at my eyes, I struggled to discern what the various sounds were. If I couldn’t get away, I wanted to at least understand what was going on. They were gone. The heat remained, but any noise had vanished. Then someone winced. And it wasn’t me. The lassitude that had leadened my limbs disappeared. I bolted from the bed and promptly tripped over my shirt. Swearing under my breath, I yanked the garment away from where it had tangled around my ankles. This never happened to people in the movies or on TV, unless it was the bimbo blonde who always got the psycho knife in the back. Of course, I very much doubted the movie victims got blow jobs 53

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before getting killed, so maybe it was just my lot in life to turn every stereotype on its ear. A pair of boots appeared before me. They were shadowed by the darkness in the room, but they were there. They weren’t little girly feet, either. I froze. Denim-clad knees appeared in my line of sight as whoever it was crouched down. “Are you all right?” Duncan asked. Somehow, I wasn’t in the least surprised it was him.

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CHAPTER 5 The shirt he wore was a different one than he’d had on in the ER, a loose button-down, with the sleeves rolled up, whose color was indiscernible without light. At the open collar, I saw the edge of one of my bandages, but Duncan crouched like his stomach wasn’t bothering him at all. “I don’t think I want to know how you got in here,” I said, ignoring his question. “No, probably not,” he agreed. I scanned the room. “Where’s Lisette?” “Gone.” He paused. “How’d you know her name?” “Because she told me.” Tossing the shirt away from where it dangled from my fingers, I started to rise to my feet, only to 55

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realize my cock was at full-mast. Standing would only draw attention to it. I wanted to grab the shirt back and cover my midsection with it, but that would do the same as getting up, so instead, I slid back until I hit the nightstand and slowly drew my legs up to hide my nudity. “I have no idea what to say to you. I’m not even completely sure you’re not a figment of my imagination, and I’ve finally gone off the deep end from lack of sleep.” For whatever reason, my declaration amused him. His rich chuckle rolled between us, and the heat that had wrapped around my body began making other suggestions. “You’re not crazy,” he assured. “You might end up wishing you were, but I can promise you, all of this is really happening.” “So how’d she get out of here? Or in here? A little trick she picked up from you and your vanishing act tonight at the hospital?” Duncan sobered at the mention of that. “You could say something like that. Lisette and I…we’re not so different.” “Oh, God, if you tell me she’s your sister, I’ll know I’ve hit my head and landed smack dab in the middle of The Young and the Restless.” “No, not my sister.” He straightened and took a step back. The darkness ate him up. “You should go back to bed. Forget this ever happened.” It was my turn to laugh, because seriously, that was the funniest suggestion he’d made to me since I met him. “Okay, one, there is no way in hell I’m forgetting some woman 56

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sneaking into my room for the sole purpose of sucking me off. And two, I don’t sleep. Or at least, not much, even at the best of times. I’m not going back to bed now, no matter how tired I am. Which means…” With Duncan out of the way, I felt more capable of grabbing one of the blankets off the top of my bed and dragging it over my lower half as I rose to my feet. “TCM, here I come.” I half-expected him to stop me, so when he backed away even farther, it was actually a surprise. “You need to sleep,” he reiterated. “And you needed to stay in the hospital,” I countered. “Looks like neither one of us is good at doing what he’s supposed to.” Wrapping the blanket around my slim hips as a makeshift toga, I kept the ends bunched in my hand as I shuffled around him to the dresser. I dug around for some sweats, aware of his gaze on me every passing second. He wasn’t leaving. For that matter, how had he gotten in? The same way Lisette had, most likely. The most rational explanation was that both of them had been waiting for me when I got home. But then why wait until she played seductress before acting? A sharp pain stabbed behind my eyeballs. Trying to figure this out was giving me a headache. I should be more concerned that he knew where I lived, as much as how he got inside. Or how he disappeared from the hospital. Or why he was walking around at all after the beating he took. “Aren’t you in pain?” I asked. “You should be. You don’t even have any skin left on your stomach.” 57

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“It’s healing. I’ll be all right.” “Maybe in a few weeks. You shouldn’t even be out of bed.” I didn’t want to change my clothes in front of him, but he wasn’t moving so I didn’t have much of a choice. I turned my back and dropped the blanket, doing a quick shimmy into my sweats. “If you don’t go back to the hospital, go home. Lock yourself inside and find some nice neighbor to cater to you for a few days while you rest. Or hit up Tully’s family to help you out.” “No, I’m not ready for that yet.” “Not ready for which?” With my ass now covered, I glanced back. “Bugging Tully’s son or going back to the hospital?” “Neither. I need to stick around and make sure Lisette doesn’t come back for you.” I sighed. His psychosis really did run deep, though I had to admit to being glad he’d rid me of at least one of my problems. “You can’t. Because if you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the cops. I wasn’t kidding before.” Duncan fell silent. Unmoving. He was a fathomless void except for the pale glints of his skin when the stray light would hit it just right. I didn’t know what to feel around him anymore. Terror, pity, gratitude, curiosity…it all balled together like a misshapen wad of rubber bands, contorting with each new event to transpire between us. The only constant was desire. Looking at him now packed as strong of a punch as it had the first time he’d walked into Slant, and I couldn’t even see him 58

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that clearly in the murky room. But I had seen enough and, apparently, it was all my body needed because even now, my cock ached. Before I could try again, he said, “I’m not going to hurt you. Why would I get rid of Lisette if that was what I wanted?” Why would he show up at my home at all? “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, trying not to notice how he stood between me and the door. “Maybe because you didn’t want any witnesses.” “She was going to kill you.” I guffawed. “By giving me a blow job? It’s a nice fantasy, but take it from the one with the medical degree. It’s not possible to die from orgasms. Not that people haven’t tried, or won’t continue to try until man just can’t get it up anymore, but it’s not going to happen.” “Yes, it will. It does. More often than you know.” His tone was utterly serious. Now, mine was, too. “Get out.” I never saw him move. One moment, there was a shapeless shadow on the other side of the room. The next, the knobs of my dresser were digging into my ass and back, and Duncan’s tight grip pinched my shoulder. “Lisette is a killer,” he hissed. “Whether you believe it or not. It’s what she does. It’s how she exists. And I am not going to let her snuff your life out because she’s feeling like a vindictive little bitch, do you understand?” His words sounded like they were broadcast through 59

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crashing waves. I didn’t know what was worse—the pain in my neck from how hard he was holding me or the roar of my blood stampeding through my veins. I was hyperaware of everything in that moment. The shivers he evoked. The heat. The way his body pressed into mine. How he managed to feel both insignificant and all-powerful, all within the same breath. This close, I could see him now. Clearly. His chilling eyes bored into mine, daring me to argue with him again. Though his mouth was set into a firm line, his goatee twitched every so often, the muscles beneath just as agitated as I was. The way his nostrils kept flaring said the same thing. What I couldn’t see, I felt. Like the thick line of his erection pressing against my stomach. “Let me go.” I meant it to sound commanding. An order. I gave a lot of those at the hospital. Nurses and interns cowered before me. This? Sounded like I was begging. Maybe I was. My mouth clearly recognized the fact that if left to my own devices, I couldn’t be trusted to do the smart thing. Duncan glanced down, as if only just becoming aware of how close we really were. The tip of his tongue appeared, running along his teeth, and I swallowed to fight the urge to lean forward and kiss him right then. “It’s been a long time for you,” he murmured. “You smell like you need it. Like if you don’t get it soon, you’ll burst out of all this lovely skin.” The seduction in his tone was only helped by his accent. My ears burned, and my throat was dry, and it really should not have been this easy to get to me. At least, that’s what I 60

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kept telling myself. I made one last attempt to try and get some control back. “What happened to no touching?” I said. “You seemed to feel pretty strong about that back at the hospital.” He jerked as if I’d shocked him, but it didn’t break the contact between us. It just drove his eyes back to mine. And I was lost in them. “I’m hungry.” Though the breathed words held no malice, I shivered anyway, especially when he leaned forward and added, “And even when I still had my ring, I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” The latter should have set off big, fat warning bells inside my head, and they did, though not the alarms of terror they were meant to be. It was the biological warning, instruction about what to do next. Tip my head. Open my mouth. Breathe. The first touch of his lips to mine made me whimper. I couldn’t call it a kiss. There was barely any contact, just a faint tickle of skin to skin. I didn’t even feel his moustache or goatee, and I realized with that loss that I desperately wanted to. I was the one to tilt forward a fraction of an inch, and the harder press of my mouth over his crumbled any sense of hesitation for either of us. Duncan made a sound that felt like a growl but tasted like a promise. His tongue pushed past my lips to touch to mine, then danced away in search of other prey. The roof of my 61

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mouth. The inside of my cheek. Every dark, hot, secret space of me I’d not even realized was there. I had never been kissed like that before, not once in my entire life. Never with such determination, deliberation, desperation all rolled up into one. I loved it. I wanted more. I craved it like I’d craved the success that had driven my entire life. In that moment, I would have thrown it all away to never have it end, and I honestly don’t think I would have blinked about the decision. He still held my shoulder, but his other hand moved as freely as his tongue. It swept across my throat, and trailed down the center of my chest. I thought he would go lower, but his fingers turned and sought one of my nipples, tweaking it into an even harder peak. I gasped into his mouth. My response elicited a chuckle. “Don’t hold back,” Duncan said. He drew back in order to gaze down at me, and his eyes seemed even paler and brighter than they had before. “If you want to scream, scream. If you want to swear at me, do it. You can scratch at me, touch me, do whatever you want. Just don’t deny what you’re feeling.” He swallowed as he moistened his lips again. “It’s no good for me if you do that.” “I can’t imagine it would be very good for me if I held back, either,” I said. I liked the way he smiled at that. It prompted me to close the distance between us and kiss him again. His entire focus was on me. The hand at my nipple soothed over the taut point before pinching again, and I arched into him, glad that he was so much bigger. Who knew I was a size62

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hound after all? I’d never been before, but something about Duncan changed all the rules. If there were even any rules left. He relaxed the hold on my shoulder, sliding around to cup the back of my neck and keep me still while he plundered my mouth. Saying he was hungry had been an understatement. He kissed like he’d been denied any physical contact with anyone, let alone a man, for his entire life. For a brief moment, I flashed on how this could be the same man grieving for his dead boyfriend and stiffened, almost pulling away. Then his fingertips found the wet spot on the front of my sweats from where I’d leaked and I decided I didn’t care. I’d be his grief therapy if he wanted. As long as he didn’t stop touching me. Duncan abandoned my cock to trace along my waistband. I whimpered in the back of my throat, grinding into his hip to get the contact back, but that did nothing to sway his search. Now that he had me, he seemed determined to get it all, and left a scalding trail along my skin as he learned all its lines. Part of me wondered if I’d missed out on this by not going out to dinner with him that first night, but as soon as reality began to seep in through the cracks of my desire, I stormed back into getting lost in Duncan’s attention. If I thought too much about all of it, the fire so eager to explode through my skin would be extinguished. Duncan would leave, because I would make him go. I still had every intention of doing that, but not until I got the release I now needed more than air itself. When my hands drifted to his chest, careful not to touch 63

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anywhere he’d been hurt—which honestly wasn’t that much— Duncan caught my wrists and stepped back. I ached for the heat again, so much so I followed without question when he pulled me to the bed. “Lie down,” he instructed. I practically jumped onto the mattress. With a smile more feral than anything else, Duncan grabbed my ankles and straightened me out, sliding his palms upward along my legs to find the waistband again. The sweats came off with a quick peel, and the cooler air made my balls crawl into my body. Duncan leaned forward on his knuckles, hovering over my hips. His shoulders eclipsed anything else, and I stared, fascinated, as he licked a path down my twitching shaft, avoiding the sensitive skin around the head to settle at the even more sensitive skin at the base. I fisted the sheets. He had turned his head in order to get the root of my cock more firmly into his mouth, and I felt his teeth nudge against the taut skin. I closed my eyes then. They were going to combust if I didn’t. This way, the heat roaring through me was contained, buffeting around inside my head before turning course to chase down my spine. The wet tip of his tongue dragged over the join of cock to hip, and Duncan eased his bite to sink lower, his nose nudging at my hip as he found my balls. My breath caught when he sucked them past his lips. He rolled them around inside his mouth, tasting every inch, until I had to let go of the bed and reach down to touch him. 64

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He was real. This was happening. I was officially crazy. My fingertips sculpted the sharp edge of his cheek. I’d spent hours staring at him in the hospital, but this was better. I learned with my hands. I helped people by touching them. My entire life was balled up in my need for the tangible, and feeling the rough texture of his skin, the muscles working as he sucked at my sac, did more to teach me about Duncan Burgess than anything else had in the entire time I’d known him. He flattened his palm over my hip, kneading the tension away before curling it around my cock. He didn’t pull. Didn’t stroke. Didn’t do anything but hold me and squeeze, tilting it away from my abdomen as he finally released my balls and licked back to the tip. For all the warning I had, the touching and the kissing and the licking and more foreplay than I’d had in years, I wasn’t prepared for his warm, wet lips to seal around the head of my cock. Lisette had been wrong. Mouths weren’t all the same. I knew the difference with the first swipe of his tongue over the slit. I’d know the difference in a dark room with my hands tied over my head and headphones blasting Metallica in my ears. I bucked beneath him, crying out when I scraped across the edge of his teeth. It didn’t hurt. Far from it. He could scrape across my body anytime, anywhere he wanted. Duncan didn’t push me back onto the bed, but the suction around my cock increased, with the added bonus of low vibrations like a truck rumbling over train tracks echoing into my body. “God…” For a split second, I wished I was witty or skilled 65

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at dirty talk. I wanted to drive him as crazy as he was driving me, and if he wasn’t going to swing around and let me suck him off, too, I had to do something with my mouth. But the words failed, or at least, any eloquent words. All I managed were more harsh pleas to an entity I didn’t believe in anyway, broken up by the occasional gasp or moan or even once, a giggle. Duncan bobbed up and down my length, slow and steady, while his other hand wormed its way between my thighs. He cupped the balls he’d already lavished with attention, then slid a single finger down the crease of my ass. I’ll admit it. I propped my heels up the bed, spread my legs, and lifted my hips in order to give him better access. No way in hell was I going to pretend I didn’t wish a gorgeous man like this would fuck me. Psycho or not. That drifting sensation that had happened when Lisette did this returned, though now, it was more of a feeling of being caught up in a full gale with only a flimsy magic carpet beneath me to keep me from crashing to the ground. I thrashed as Duncan teased, I rocked as he rolled, I grabbed the top of his head to start meeting his mouth with my own thrusts as he decided enough was enough and sank his long finger into my waiting hole. Heat boiled in my midsection, ready to spill over. I drove my cock into Duncan’s willing throat, only to sink back onto his eager fingers when I pulled away. In and out, though technically something was always in and it felt like I would fly to pieces before it all came together. Duncan didn’t fight with 66

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my rhythm. If anything, he added to it, massaging my ass every time his hand came into contact with it. I erupted as he swallowed around the head of my cock with a constriction that should’ve been impossible. Clenching around the finger still buried in my ass, I shot over and over again, feeling his muscles work as he swallowed it all. Each time he did, his skin got hotter, until my inner thighs scalded from the feel of his rough cheeks against them. My body flopped back onto the bed, boneless and spent. Feebly, I pushed at his head, trying to get him off, but Duncan was persistent, sucking on my softening length with gentler and longer strokes. “Stop, stop,” I begged. I was too sensitive. I always got too sensitive after coming. “Jesus, you’re going to suck me raw if you keep that up.” The only concession he made was to pull all the way up to the head, which, actually, was even worse. I wanted to give him a biology lesson about where all the nerves were located in male genitalia, and why his chosen area for focus was not ideal for making me relax, but my rushing blood and my erratic pulse pervaded over everything else. It deafened me to anything but the surge of darkness quickly enveloping me. I didn’t even recognize losing consciousness.

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CHAPTER 6 I woke up feeling like I wasn’t going to need my normal pot of coffee to get jumpstarted for the day. My muscles were loose, my head clear, and when I rolled onto my side, pulling the blankets up around my ear, I didn’t have the overwhelming disappointment that always came after a bad night’s sleep. Sleep. I’d slept. I opened my eyes. And immediately jerked back. Stretched out next to me was the object of what I had assumed were lust-filled dreams. Duncan lay there on his side, his head propped up on his hand, regarding me with a mixture of awe and amusement. He wore the exact same clothes he had in my dream, though he didn’t look like he’d slept in 68

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them. “What are you doing here?” I blurted. He smiled. “Watching you sleep.” So it wasn’t a dream, which meant it was very likely the part with Lisette hadn’t been a dream, either. It also meant I had had the best night’s rest I could remember in recent history with a stranger in the room, after said stranger had given me the best blow job I’d ever had. I sagged back onto my pillow, the panic at seeing him in my bed dissipating. “Well, I hope you enjoyed the show. They tend to be limited engagements.” I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. “Sorry I passed out like that. I was exhausted.” “But you woke up. That’s what’s important.” Through my fingers, I caught his pleased smile. “That’s usually what happens in the morning.” I glanced over at my clock and bolted up. My shift at the ER started in less than an hour. “Especially when I have to go to work.” In my rush to get ready, I wasn’t bothered by my nudity as I scooped up my clothes and left him behind. Soft footsteps followed as I went to the bathroom, and he lingered in the doorway while I started the shower. “I’m not inviting you in,” I said. “I have exactly twenty minutes to get my ass on the road. Last night was great and everything, but…” I shooed him off. “You can go now.” My abrupt manner must have amused him further, but one of the reasons I don’t have lasting relationships isn’t just because I work insane hours and have high standards. I also have a crappy sense of how to handle morning-afters, and it’s 69

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messed up my chances with more than one prospective partner, even the ones I might have wanted to stick around for more than a night. “I think we need to talk,” he said. He wasn’t moving. I had the distinct feeling he wouldn’t until he said what he needed to. For some strange reason, I was in too much in a hurry to feel frightened of him, so I rolled my eyes and got into the shower, pulling the curtain shut behind me. “Then you talk while I get ready. You’ve got twenty minutes.” I thought I heard him sigh, but then I ducked my head under the water and all I heard was the hot water hitting the tile around me. It felt good, better than anything had in a while. In fact, everything was feeling good, from how refreshed I felt to the smell of my shampoo when I tipped some out in my hand. Sex as a sleeping pill worked for a lot of men, but I had never been one of them. I guess I finally understood what an amazing blow job could do to you. I probably needed to thank Duncan for that before he left, though the notion of feeding his ego didn’t thrill me. “You never asked me more about Lisette,” he said. Interesting topic for him to lead off with. “You didn’t really give me much of a chance before you decided to distract me.” “You kissed me first.” “You pinned me to the wall.” “You weren’t listening to me.” 70

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“Is this what you meant by, ‘we need to talk’?” As I lathered up my hair, I turned sideways in order to watch his blurry outline through the curtain. “This is a blame game. It’s pointless.” “It’s not pointless. I’m merely pointing out that we were both distracted. I couldn’t have stopped to explain after you kissed me even if I wanted to.” A pleased flush crept up my neck, and I was very glad I stood under a scalding shower to explain it away. I didn’t think Duncan could see my color through the curtain anyway, but on the off-chance he made some dramatic move like storming forward and pulling it aside—or worse, stripping out of his clothes and joining me—I could say it was the water and not his compliment that turned me into a lobster. “So I’m a captive audience now, and you’re not in kissing distance anymore.” I bowed under the spray in order to wash away the shampoo. “Tell me how Lisette got into my place last night.” “The same way I got out of the hospital.” “If this is the set-up for ‘on her own two feet’ as the punch line, it’s really not funny.” “It’s not meant to be.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him straighten and start unbuttoning his shirt. “There’s something you need to see.” I did a piss-poor job of getting the worst of the suds out of my hair so that I could poke my head out and stop him. “You’re not getting in here,” I said. “So keep your clothes on.” 71

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“I know. I just need you to see.” The corner of the curtain moved before I could get to it, and I’d just cleared the water off my face when Duncan filled the space. He’d done what I said; he’d kept his shirt on. But it hung unbuttoned, and, as I watched, he peeled away the bandages one by one. I can appreciate a good strip show as much as the next guy, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the view I got now. Underneath the first gauzy strip, the skin was smooth and unmarked, not a bruise or stitch in sight. The same held true for the second. And the third. And the fourth. By the time he had taken all of them off, except for the large one covering his flayed stomach, I had marched over and pushed his shoulder to the wall, holding him still as I examined his body more closely. Duncan didn’t move as I prodded at his chest. My first touches were light, mostly unbelieving. Some of the slices hadn’t been deep, but there had been a lot of them. He’d looked like someone had used him as a cutting board for prepping a restaurant’s quota of sirloin strips. Nurse Streeter had had to shave him in order for us to get to all of the bleeders, and while his skin was still smooth, it was too smooth. There wasn’t a sign of injury anywhere. No puckering. No scarring. No imperfections of color. No imperfections at all. “Okay, being in the shower to find out the past couple of days were a dream is too ironic even for me,” I commented. My voice was steady though my insides were anything but. This shouldn’t be possible. It wasn’t possible. People didn’t 72

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heal overnight. Which could only mean this wasn’t the same man I’d treated. I turned back into the shower, pretending everything was all right. “I have to admit, you had me fooled. This is a pretty good con.” “Con?” “That’s what this is, right?” I grabbed my sponge to wash up. It was as much to hide the shaking in my fingers as it was necessity. I still had to leave for work very soon. “You and your twin brother get the doctor you blame for your boyfriend’s death all twisted up in knots before going in for the kill. Nice. It’ll make an interesting report for the police when I talk to them again.” “I don’t have a twin. That was me.” “Oh, right. Because it doesn’t make more sense that there’s actually two of you, and that you snuck your brother out of the hospital last night in order to fuck with my head. I’ll bet you even brought Lisette in and staged the whole fight, just to get me to see you as some kind of savior. Which, unfortunately, worked for as long as I was awake. So…” I held up my thumb so he could see the gesture. “Good job. Great work. Now get the hell out of here.” But he didn’t move, not even to give me my privacy back by dropping the curtain. “That was me in the hospital,” he argued. “Lisette put me there. And once I got over the panic of losing it, I realized she’s probably the one who took my ring, too.” Though he couldn’t see it, I rolled my eyes. “Unless 73

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Lisette has some special kung fu grip, you’re never going to convince me she leveled you like that.” “Lisette’s more than capable. She’s a succubus.” His term made me pause in mid-scrub. I knew what a succubus was, but I’d never heard it used in this context before. “If you’re saying she’s obsessed with sex, I think I got a taste of that last night.” “She’s not just obsessed. She needs it to exist.” “So drag her to a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting. This isn’t my problem.” “It is.” He finally broke and reached forward to grab my arm, heedless of the fact that his clothes were getting soaked. “Lisette tried to kill you last night. She’s going to try again until we figure out how to stop her.” I sighed. We were back to his death by orgasm theory. Which only confirmed my Duncan-needs-psychotropicmedication theory. Grasping his fingers, I slowly peeled them away from my arm, surprised he let me do it at all considering how much stronger he was. “Look,” I said, deliberately gentling my tone. “I appreciate everything. I do. The blow job, the save from Lisette, the good night’s sleep. Everything. But clearly, you have certain issues you need to work out, and I’m way too self-centered, not to mention busy, to get involved with them. My advice? Find somebody you trust to talk to. Someone whose opinion matters to you, because you know what? They’re going to tell you the exact same things I am, and since you don’t want to listen to me, maybe you’ll listen to them.” 74

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His beautiful mouth opened, then shut, then opened again. For whatever reason, he either felt like he had to be careful what he said to me—which he did, because in spite of my initial terror, I was starting to like him and I didn’t want to be the one to lock him in a strait jacket—or he didn’t know how to respond at all. Which didn’t make sense to me at all because if anything, this was a man who knew what he wanted. “I know what it sounds like,” he said, climbing out of the tub. Some of the water splashed over the side, but it was the last thing either one of us really cared about. “And I know you have to get to work. You’re safe today anyway. Lisette won’t try anything until the sun sets or you get ready to go to bed again. So I’m going to go, and you think about everything, all right? Think about what you’ve seen with your own eyes. Because you’re a practical man. I know that. I just ask you to trust it.” It was pointless to argue with him. “Will you do me a favor and talk to someone?” Duncan smiled. “Isn’t that what I’m doing?” “Someone you’re going to listen to.” “You’ve got it backward. You’re the one not listening to me.” The water was starting to get cold, and it was making a mess I didn’t want to deal with. Twisting the handle, I reached for a towel, ready to rub away the soap the water hadn’t gotten. “I’ve heard it all, Duncan. And I still don’t know why you think Lisette is such a threat.” His nostrils flared, and for a moment, the way he tensed 75

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made me think he was going to approach again. “Because you’re important to me,” he said. Then he disappeared. He didn’t walk out of the room. He just vanished. Into thin air. I stood there, dumbstruck, as a wave of heat rushed through the room. It instantly dried all the water clinging to my skin and left my hair only slightly damp. The towel hung useless in my hand, but all I could do was gape at the empty spot on the floor where he had just been standing. Disappeared. People didn’t do that. He had. Twice now. Here, and at the hospital. My knees liquefied. I had to grab the shower railing in order not to topple over. What the hell was going on? None of this should have been possible, but the longer I tried to puzzle it out, the more the pounding in my head grew. He told me to trust what I saw with my own eyes, but my eyes were playing tricks on me. They had to be. There was no other excuse for everything I had witnessed, just in the last ten minutes alone. Stitches gone. A man evaporating. It was the stuff of nightmares. She’s a succubus. A woman appearing in my room out of nowhere, determined to seduce me. I didn’t know a damn thing about what it meant to be a succubus in mythology, but I was starting to suspect that it would be a good thing to learn. Fast. According to Duncan, my life depended on it. 76

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CHAPTER 7 Needless to say, I was more than a little distracted at work. Twice, I passed off more difficult cases to Lampley, and three times, I actually told the nurses to take care of something themselves. I got more than my share of odd looks from the staff, but I was too wrapped up in the events of the last twenty-four hours to really notice. It got so bad, I did something I never do. I told Lampley I didn’t feel well and asked to go home early. He frowned, his warm gaze sweeping over me in quick assessment. “You want me to check you over?” Though I appreciated his concern, I shook my head. “It’s just a combination of no sleep and a greasy breakfast. I’m 78

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going to take something to stop the worst of the nausea and sleep it off, if that’s okay.” Lampley moved to clap me on the back, but I stepped away, holding my stomach and grimacing as if I really did feel sick. He took the hint and simply took the stack of folders that I’d left on the counter. “Go home,” he ordered. “And if you need to take tomorrow off, too, don’t worry about it. I’ll make sure you’re covered.” I muttered thanks and left before anybody could change their mind. Once I was on my motorcycle, though, I hesitated. Where was I going? I didn’t want to go home. For some reason, facing my empty townhouse filled me with dread. Most likely, that was because I feared it wouldn’t be entirely empty, or that it would be empty when I got home and then Lisette or Duncan or both would pop in without using a door or a window. My tires squealed as I pulled out of the parking structure. I needed to know more about what Duncan was talking about. That was my first priority. Information was best found either online or in a library. Since I suspected succubi might be restricted subject matter on a public computer, I swung by my house first and ran inside to grab my laptop. Thirty seconds in the dark, silent space, and I nearly didn’t go back out. Moisture still hung in the air from my shower, which elicited memories of Duncan, and the hot water, and the way his muscled chest had glistened from the drops that hit it. It 79

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wasn’t even so much the fact that he didn’t have the injuries from the previous night. If a man could vanish right before my eyes, I wasn’t so sure he couldn’t have some sort of healing powers over his body, too. And Duncan had a really nice chest. Nice enough to get my cock perking up already, just remembering what his mouth had felt like. I practically ran outside as soon as I felt the strain against my zipper. If Lisette was a succubus, it dared to reason Duncan was something supernatural, too. I had some modicum of self-control left, and damned if I was going to allow him to strip me of it, especially if he wasn’t even there. The Golden Gate Valley branch had shorter hours than others, but it was the closest to my house and had public wi-fi access. It was a gorgeous stone building, situated on the corner of Green and Octavia, and I’d spent more than one free afternoon there, curled up in the corner with a book on my day off. Something about the old place always got to me, a sense of getting stuck in time that is missing from a lot of other locations. I can’t say they know me there, but the staff always acts like I come in every day, and it makes a refreshing change. It’s probably their job, since the world is doing everything it can to make their jobs obsolete, but hey, I’m not going to begrudge doing what they have to do. It’s a fact of life. Today, I barely smiled at the librarian who greeted me upon entering. I went straight to a private corner in the nonfiction stacks and pulled out my laptop, curling into a chair away from a window in order not to get any glare on my 80

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screen. In less than two minutes, I was booted and online, and my fingers hovered the keyboard. Now what? Part of me couldn’t believe I was actually going to look this up. I don’t do supernatural; I’ve never had any inclination toward anything remotely unusual. I like facts. I like biology. I like things I can touch, things I can fix. But none of that explained a man being in my bathroom one moment, and then gone in the next. So I typed the single word in the Google box and hit enter. Over two and a half million results. Shit. I needed to narrow my search parameters. It was a little discouraging to see the most popular results either as Wikipedia entries or YouTube, but I kept it up until I found a few sites that didn’t look like they were cobbled together by bored teenagers. That didn’t make finding out what I did any more palatable, though. Succubi were female spirits—or demons, depending on the source—that came to men in their dreams and drained them of sexual energy in order to sustain their own existences. Most of the time, they came while men slept, and often left their partners for dead. Modern society of course viewed them as mythology to explain nocturnal emissions or deaths that occurred during sleep, but there were still plenty of older cultures that believed they existed. Even more disheartening was seeing that they weren’t alone. 81

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An incubus was the male counterpart. He did everything his sisters did, except to women. And they outnumbered the succubi, ten to one, supposedly. The only good thing was that the succubi were supposed to be far more treacherous. That was definitely true in my case. Well, it was true if I believed Duncan. I couldn’t find a consensus on what kind of powers they might possess other than sexual. Some claimed they weren’t incorporeal, others they were masters of stealth. A few professed the demons teleported in order to get in and out, but nowhere was there mention of super healing powers or… What else could Duncan do? I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought to get a rundown before he disappeared on me. But the longer I sat there, staring at my laptop, the more convinced I became that’s exactly what Duncan was. Incubi weren’t necessarily supposed to be gay, but then again, biological imperative said most humans weren’t, either. He was just wired differently. Like me, like any other gay or bisexual man in the world. His last boyfriend ended up in my ER multiple instances, resulting in his death this last time. That matched what I’d learned about incubi’s victims. And explained how Duncan could get him from Half Moon Bay to Oakland without fearing for his boyfriend’s life. What wasn’t explained was why he’d bother in the first place. An incubus needed sexual energy in order to survive. It was their food source, so to speak. It didn’t make logical sense for Duncan to keep bringing his boyfriend into the ER for me to resuscitate him. 82

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My train of thought threw its brakes into reverse. Of course, it made sense. As long as his boyfriend was alive, he had a steady supplier. In a way, I was helping Duncan provide his fix. My stomach churned at that. My lies to Lampley all of a sudden took on a new life of their own. I suppose I had to give him a little bit of credit for not killing Tully outright, but the notion that I’d just been bringing the man back, over and over again, to fulfill some need for Duncan was enough for me to log off and shut down my laptop. It didn’t matter that it was sex that was slowly killing the man. The end result was the same. A lot of drugs made you feel absolutely fantastic before they shut down all your internal organs or killed off your brain. In the end, nothing was worth getting shoved with both hands a little closer to the finish line. It wasn’t until I’d stepped back out into the sunshine, my backpack slung over my shoulder, that another thought occurred to me. Duncan had given me a blow job. A great blow job that got me a good night’s sleep for a change, but it was still a sexual act. For that matter, Lisette had had her mouth on me, too. I had no evidence to suggest it was the sexual release that fueled the demons; it could have just been the endorphins involved in the act itself. My guilt exploded into anger so fast I nearly kicked the teenager who brushed past me to go inside the library. What right did he have doing that to me? If I’d known at the time 83

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the risk I was taking, there was no way I would have allowed it to go so far. I would have stopped him and kicked him out of the townhouse. It was the same reason I didn’t have sex without condoms. You’re smart with your health, or you die. The math is simple. I have never been so furious with another human being in my entire life. My fingers itched to curl into fists and pummel Duncan Burgess, even though reason told me it would be a waste of time and energy. I wanted to make him bleed and apologize for endangering me like that. Worse, for very likely shortening my life, and for what? A blow job? Not even close to being a fair trade. Sitting down right there on the sidewalk, I yanked my computer out of my pack and booted it back up, snarling in frustration when the same two minutes that went by so quickly inside now seemed to crawl. At the very least, I was going to give Duncan a piece of my mind. He might have disappeared on me this morning, but he’d used the Half Moon Bay address again when he’d come into the ER after getting sliced open. Odds were good, I was going to find him there. I memorized the address and stared at the map in Google long enough to ensure I could remember it on the road. I wasn’t familiar with the area. The last thing I needed was to get lost. I just had to pray he was actually going to be there. *

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Randall Tully’s house was nestled into one of the mountains, a three-story Mediterranean monstrosity that 84

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overlooked the ocean. The lot itself had to be well over ten thousand square feet, and as I pulled my motorcycle into the long curving driveway, I glimpsed an in-law cottage tucked away in the back. Tully had obviously been a very good lawyer. With digs like this to sprawl in without having to worry about paying for, I couldn’t really blame Duncan at all for wanting to hold onto his sugar daddy. There wasn’t another car in the drive, but I marched up to the front door and pounded anyway. When that didn’t bring a response, I used the bell. Repeatedly. Its faint music chimed away inside, but not even that drew Duncan to the door. Though there wasn’t a neighbor anywhere in sight, I looked around before testing the knob. Locked. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I tried the round of knocking and ringing one more time before stepping back off the porch. My anger had ebbed, but I still wanted to confront the son of a bitch. He owed me that. And if he wasn’t staying here, where was he staying? He hadn’t had much in the way of ID in his wallet—yet another indication that his claims were probably true—and he’d never left another address. On a whim, I followed the sidewalk around the corner of the house. Gorgeous roses, nearly as tall as I was, lined the path, and their thick scents made my head swim before I’d reached the rear of the building. There wasn’t much in the way of a backyard, not being butted against a mountain. Most of the grass had been removed, and it was paved in bleached white stone, with benches, a pond, and even a gazebo dotting 85

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the shallow landscape. The man had excellent taste. I couldn’t say that if I’d been in Duncan’s shoes, I might not have tried the sugar daddy route myself. Sliding doors led from the patio into a bright yellow breakfast room. Without really expecting much, I tugged at one, shocked when it slid with ease. I opened it just enough to poke my head inside, but the interior was as silent as the exterior. Odds were good, Duncan wasn’t here. What was my next step? I didn’t want to just walk away. Duncan had likely lived here. There could still be evidence about who he was inside. Maybe there was something that would lead to another address, one he used when he wasn’t literally sucking Tully dry. But going in was breaking and entering. Or trespassing, at the very least. If someone caught me, they would have every reason to have me arrested, and I’d have no good story to give the police about my presence there. Somehow, I thought I’m trying to prove whether an incubus is trying to kill me and my patients wouldn’t fly too well with them. Especially since I’d already filed a report that said I was terrified of getting anywhere near the guy. I listened for a full five minutes before I made up my mind. Not a peep had come from inside. Nobody was home. If somebody showed—an unlikely measure—I’d hide until they left. It wasn’t like the house wasn’t big enough to offer some sort of hole to crawl into. The door shut noiselessly behind me. Though I wasn’t sure what exactly I expected, it didn’t feel like a tomb, or like its 86

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owner had passed away a few days earlier and left his home in a state of stasis. Off to my left, the refrigerator hummed along, and the faint smell of pepper hung in the air, as if someone had been cooking recently. It might have been a leftover from Tully, but my instincts said otherwise, and I crept forward, holding my breath against what I would find. The kitchen was spotless. The stainless steel fridge didn’t even have fingerprints on it. Tully had a great cleaning service, because stainless steel is a bitch to keep clean unless the room doesn’t get used very much. I opened the refrigerator. Stacks of Tupperware, bottled water, fresh milk with slight condensation still on its side. It got used. Even more importantly, it had been used recently. A quick sweep around the kitchen revealed nothing. So did the dining room. And the first living room I found. And the second. Jesus, I would never understand having so much space when you didn’t need or use it. Why waste the money? There were other more important—and more fun—things to spend it on. I stopped in the front hall. Mail was stacked neatly on a small Victorian table, edges squared, smallest on top. The postmarks were all within the last couple of days, and one was even addressed to D. Burgess. It was just junk mail, but the fact that Duncan had lived here long enough to even get junk mail was significant. Since the downstairs had been a bust, I moved up. The start of the hall looked out over the foyer, and I paused for a moment, looking down. My bird’s-eye view showed 87

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something I hadn’t seen from the lower level—the design of the tiled floor. The colors looked familiar, heavy gold encircling a dark blue that looked like the ocean at night. But it was the angular pattern, sharp faces set in odd juxtaposition against each other, that made me frown. I’d seen it before, but I didn’t know where. A memory niggled at the edge of my mind, itching like it always did when knowledge I knew I had escaped me, and I stared at the floor for long seconds as I tried to grab hold of it. Something about it was wrong. My eyes scanned it over, sweeping back and forth, but the answer only came when my gaze circled it the first time instead. It was flat. It shouldn’t be flat. When I’d seen it, it had been three-dimensional. And smaller. My brain rearranged what my eyes were seeing, and within moments, I knew. I’m not sure why I’d blocked it out since it was part of this whole nightmare, but I’d really only gotten a quick glance at it once, and even then, I’d been distracted by other things, like the man it was attached to. Duncan’s missing ring. The urge to go downstairs and look at the floor more closely drew me to the top riser until I talked myself out of it. I could look at it better when I was done searching the next two floors. I needed more information on Duncan, not more finely sketched, specific details, and I turned on my heel to continue down the carpeted hall. Most of the doors were slightly ajar. I passed over a guest 88

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bedroom and a bathroom as big as my kitchen, before coming to a halt in front of the first room closed to me. I gripped the handle and turned, but as my feet crossed the threshold, the figure stretched out on the bed made me freeze. Speak of the devil. Or in this case, speak of the incubus. My eyes raked down his length. Damn it all, the man slept in the nude. I did not need that kind of salty goodness distraction. Distraction from what? My fury came roaring back.

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CHAPTER 8 He sprawled on his stomach, his face turned away from the door. It wasn’t much of an advantage, but it was something, and I ignored the memory of how he’d stopped me from ever making contact before in favor of marching forward and slamming my fist into his kidney. I’m not a fighter. I’m not really a physical person. But something in Duncan incited me to act, and it had from the very first moment I saw him. Pain shot through my elbow and shoulder from the force of the impact, but I was already swinging my arm back to hit him again when he rolled away. I froze. Not from the confused gaze he settled on me, but from the sight of his perfect chest and abdomen. The burn that 90

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had eroded away all of the skin on his stomach was gone. Now it was just a long stretch of perfect tone, lickable and mouthwatering. Somewhere in the back of my head, I’d known he had probably healed all over, but seeing the proof of it was disconcerting, especially when it was proven with such incredible form. Duncan didn’t move. “What’re you doing here?” My purpose crashed back. I threw the punch, but any element of surprise was long gone, and Duncan caught it with ease. He shoved me back, hard enough to push me away from the bed but not so violently that I fell. “What did I do to make you mad now?” he asked, more than a little annoyed. I spluttered, trying to find my voice. Leveling a finger at him, I said, “You’re an incubus.” His eyes narrowed. “Yeah.” He paused, but when I didn’t say anything, prompted, “So?” I gaped at him. “So? Are you kidding me? Just how many years off my life did that little blow job cost me last night?” Duncan relaxed, propping his head up in his hand. He looked like some sort of demigod lying there, regal and sure of his attraction. The new angle of his body had his soft cock resting against his thigh, but as he watched me—and as I tried not to watch it—it began to thicken, though if it was because of genuine desire or a demonic reaction to a human in fuckable range, I had no idea. “I don’t know,” he admitted. Denials, I’d expected. Maybe even protestations. Not calm 91

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confessions that confirmed exactly what I’d feared. “What do you mean, you don’t know? You have to know. It’s your whole business.” “I mean, I was out of control last night. Hurt. Hungry. If you want the truth, when you passed out, I fully expected you never to wake up again.” The pit of my stomach dropped out. “I don’t even merit trips to the emergency room?” I snapped. “Gee, thanks ever so much.” Duncan shook his head. “You were never in any risk. I stayed there all night, waiting for your heart to slow, or your body to do something it shouldn’t, but all you did was…sleep.” He seemed as bemused by this as I was angry. “Well, it’s not happening again, I can tell you that. I don’t care what kind of monster you are. You don’t fuck with people’s lives like that, especially without their knowledge.” “I don’t have a choice in the matter. That’s what I am. That’s what I need.” “Well, I don’t need it, and I’m not going to put up with it. Because I do have a choice.” “Yes, you really do.” His mild acceptance was a slap in the face, snapping me out of whatever spell his gorgeous body was casting over me. “It’s fascinating.” “What?” Duncan sat up, and I stumbled back a step, unwilling to shorten the distance between us. Crooking his finger at me, he regarded me through his lashes, unblinking and unrelenting. 92

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“Come here.” He was serious. The fucking gall. “No.” “Come here.” He repeated the command in the same tone, the same tempo. To prove I wasn’t some idiot he could bend over his cock, I retreated two more steps. “And I said, no.” My response didn’t irritate him. In fact, he smiled, relaxing as his hand dropped to his side. “And that’s exactly my point.” I waited for him to explain, because I still had no idea what was going on here. All I knew was that I’d come ready to tear his throat out, and here I was, still talking to him with only landing a single blow. “You shouldn’t be able to tell me no,” Duncan said. “Why do you think incubi and succubi are so dangerous? Not just because we feed off your lives. Because you don’t have a choice in the matter. You couldn’t stop us, even if you wanted to.” His announcement made me pause. That sounded familiar. I might have read that in one of the various sites I’d visited. “I tried to get you to leave with me at that bar,” he continued. “And you turned me down, remember?” “Because you scared the shit out of me.” This finally cracked his calm demeanor. “What? Why would you be scared? You were aroused, and I didn’t threaten you. You didn’t even know who I was then.” “Didn’t matter. It’s happened almost every time I’ve seen you since.” 93

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“What has?” I tried to describe it. “The desire to run as far as possible in the opposite direction. I feel like someone’s got me hopped up on amphetamines, and my skin’s going to crawl right off my body.” Duncan rose from the bed, all sinuous grace and sexy muscles. My eyes flickered downward, because—let’s face it—why shouldn’t they appreciate the view, but I kept my chin high as he approached. “You don’t seem like you’re scared now,” he said quietly, stopping just out of arm’s reach. “And you came looking for me.” “Yeah, so I could kick your ass.” I took a deep breath, focusing my attention inward. My cock had perked up at the sight of his, and at the deliberate focus he’d given me when he’d ordered me forward, and my heart beat faster because of that. I was also sweating a little, sticky and uncomfortable where my shirt hugged my upper back and my jeans dug into my ass. Other than that, though, the terror that had often gripped me when I saw Duncan wasn’t there. “But no, I’m not scared.” “Why?” “I don’t know. I’m just not.” “But you are excited.” Slowly, he raked his gaze down my length, not lingering on my crotch like I would have expected, but taking me in, all of me. It was the long drag back upward that I felt. This one 94

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crawled, seemingly unwilling to lose a single detail. It made the bottom of my feet hot, my hands clench into fists at my sides. I shoved them into my pits to reinforce my control, but by the time our eyes met again, every inch of me screamed for more than a look from him. “Weren’t you supposed to be at work?” he asked softly. The question shook me. “I left early.” “Why? Because you wanted to find me?” “Because I wanted answers.” “And now you have them. You can go back to work now.” He was right. I could. But I really didn’t want to. “You’re welcome to stay,” Duncan said as if he’d read my thoughts. I realized he was touching himself, nothing overtly sexual but barely there caresses along the top of his thigh. I practically felt them myself, and swallowed the wish to say so out loud. “I’d like for you to stay.” Under any other circumstances, I would have said yes. I wanted him so badly, I don’t think I would have even cared that he was grieving his ex-lover. But one thing remained the same. “And I’d like not to shave a few more years off my life. Thanks, but no thanks.” “You won’t. Not here.” “Because the big bad incubus says so? I think we’ve already established I’m not gullible enough to fall for your lines.” 95

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“No.” He gestured toward the door behind me, the graceful sweep of his arm like the swish of a caged lion. “I’ve made this house a sanctuary. A safe place for me to bring lovers. The magics infused in the grounds keep those within its borders safe regardless of what might transpire here. Did you see the emblem in the front hall’s floor? That locks the magics in place.” The image he evoked burned onto my retinas, my world going blue for a split second as more of the pieces slipped together. “Just like your ring. That’s why you were so desperate to get it back.” Duncan nodded. “Because I knew I couldn’t control what I took otherwise.” “But it didn’t work on your boyfriend. You still kept bringing him into the ER for me to save.” At least he had the grace to look shamed. “Because the ring isn’t as powerful as the emblem in the house,” he said. “It’s fine for one or two encounters, but more, and…well, Randy was very demanding of my attention. The man had a kissing fetish—” “Enough.” I didn’t need to hear about his dead ex. “So let me get this straight. As long as you and your boyfriend had sex here, he was safe. When you went out and things got out of control, he had a heart attack and you brought him to me.” “Yes.” “You really expect me to believe this isn’t another pick-up line?” His head swung back in my direction, and my chest 96

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immediately tightened. He could have sent me up in ashes with the heat of his gaze. I couldn’t even get my feet to move as he prowled up to me. “I find that what I expect from you is nothing that you actually give.” He curled a long hand behind the back of my neck, the tips of his fingers digging into the muscle on this side of pain. I tensed, but didn’t fight him, even when he reached down and grasped my other wrist, guiding it to his erection. “I expected you to fall over backward to come to me, and you didn’t. When you refused to treat Randy, I expected you to be some monster, willing to let innocent men die, and then when I actually saw you, when I heard from the nurses just why it was you hadn’t come at my command, I expected to be able to take you for my own pleasure instead. To replace what I’d lost.” I couldn’t speak. Something molten had begun to bubble in my belly, something hot and flowing as he wrapped his fingers over mine along his shaft. Together, we stroked his cock, and the throb into my palm echoed the pulse within my own skin. “I won’t tell you to stay,” Duncan murmured. “I’ll tell you…I want you. I want to bend you over and bury myself so deep in you, it’ll take me a week to get out. I want to hear you scream again when you come, and I want to see if you’ll sleep again afterward.” His thumb caressed my jaw, making the inside of my cheek tingle. “I think I help you as much as you help me, actually. So I won’t tell you to stay.” He pulled me forward, inch by inch, until his lips hovered along mine. “I’ll 97

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ask it instead.” A little voice in the back of my head crowed about just how smooth Duncan really was. He’s playing you, it said. He’s really good at it, but he’s still playing you. For once in my life, the rest of me didn’t give a flying fuck about the little voice. I wanted what Duncan did, plain and simple. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been this excited, this hungry for another man. I closed the distance between our mouths, open already for his tongue, for his need, for anything he was willing to give. Ever since meeting him, my behavior had been irrational, unpredictable when I prided myself on always following the same path. Kissing him now, wanting more, was as irrational as it got, but I didn’t care. I was too lost in the craving for him, clawing its way through my veins. My grip on his cock tightened, and the sticky pre-come coating the tip rubbed into my skin as I pulled harder. Duncan let my hand go in favor of bringing his up to cup my face, coaxing me to arch into him, my head tilting back in an unequivocal invitation. Devour me. Take it. Don’t stop until we’re both senseless and the world spins again. With my free hand, I clutched at his hip, fingers flexing into the tight muscle. I’d loved the feel of him fucking me when he’d sucked me off, whether I wanted to admit it or not. And this was a cock that took no prisoners. When he fucked me for real, I was going to feel every thick inch, and then I’d feel it again whenever I sat down afterward. If ever there was 98

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reason enough to call a halt before things got out of hand, that was it. That was more than enough to say, slow down . Maybe for some other man. Not for me. Not in that moment. I wasn’t leaving this house until I’d taken what I’d wanted that first night, terror be damned. And if Duncan was right and I got some decent sleep out of it, too, then all the better. My lungs burned by the time he broke away from the kiss, but though he stepped back, I didn’t let go of my hold on his cock. Duncan stopped, smiled, looked for a moment like the devastating killer he was, and then ran his fingers along the forearm of the hand holding him. He barely touched me. I still shivered. And let go, because the muscles in my arm seized with the same tremors that took over the rest of me. “You’re a son of a bitch,” I panted, my mouth crooking into a grin. Duncan shrugged and retreated to the edge of the bed. “I’m just not interested in a hand job in the middle of the floor when I could have you bent over a nice comfortable mattress instead.” I couldn’t really fault that kind of logic. My feet brought me forward, my hands busy at divesting myself of my clothes in the interim. I threw my shirt aside as we came abreast again, but Duncan was the one who went to work on my pants. My cock jumped at his proximity. It knew what it wanted. It had known from that very first night. He didn’t touch me until I was completely naked. Then, it 99

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wasn’t the feel of his long, hot fingers wrapping around my erection that I got. It was two hands, firm on my shoulders, reversing our positions so that the mattress pressed into the back of my knees. Duncan pushed me to the bed, brought me down to eye level with his cock, and whether it was his intention or not, I went for it. The tip was sticky sweet, and my taste buds exploded from the pre-come I’d rubbed around the velvety skin. Duncan groaned, and though his hands clutched at me harder, he didn’t push me away or tell me to stop as I sucked the head past my lips. I might have gotten violent if he’d tried. I wanted this, wanted to suck him off so badly my teeth itched for it. Now that I’d chosen to ignore the fear and the apprehension, sheer unmitigated lust had taken over. I took in several inches, my cheeks hollowed from how tight the vacuum was. I only stopped when he hit the back of my throat. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to swallow, because hell yeah I was going to let him fuck my mouth, but I wanted to enjoy the sensations of that hot skin against my lips. There is little more exhilarating than that texture. The friction of it going back and forth over skin sensitive to every thing that goes across it. Toss in the sounds an excited partner can make, the way muscles contract beneath hands, and it’s a veritable feast for the senses. I intended to glut. Above my head, Duncan’s breathing grew louder, more ragged, with each pass I made down his length. “This isn’t what I meant,” he panted. 100

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Answering would mean stopping. Stopping wasn’t acceptable. My hands slid around to cup his ass, tracing up and down along the crease. His claims about wanting to fuck me were exhilarating to say the least. I’m an equal opportunity partner. Top, bottom, sideways, inside out. In my mind, as long as both of you got off, what was the point in labels on who did what? Sometimes, I craved sucking a juicy cock like this one. Sometimes, I had the desire to push someone to their knees and get the same. The same held true for asses. While I wanted to know what it would feel like when he split me open, the smooth muscle in my grip made me wonder what it would be like to sink into his flesh, too. Would he let me? Would I have to ask? To test the waters, I tightened the hold I had on one cheek in order to separate them. Duncan didn’t stop me, nor did he do anything to prevent me from dipping into that hot crevice and seeking out his hole. It contracted at the first touch, and I groaned, the thought of what it would feel like to have it squeezing around my cock too vivid to ignore. Groaning had the added benefit of vibrating into Duncan’s shaft, too. His hips jerked forward, and instead of stopping at the back of my throat this time, he pushed all the way in until my nose was mashed against the dark wiry hair at the base of his cock. If I hadn’t trained my gag reflex years ago, I might’ve reacted poorly to the sudden shift, but the truth of the matter was, I was ready for it. Ravenous. I let him hold there for long seconds as I inhaled his musky skin and circled the 101

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tight muscle of his ass with a single fingertip. When he eased back, I didn’t let my hand fall into the same pattern. I kept it there so that he’d have no choice but to take some of my finger inside. That would be my proof, one way or another. He took it. He even opened up a little for me, without me having to fight the constriction. Score one for the switch. I went back to bobbing up and down his length, every once in a while taking him into my throat. At the same time, I worked my finger inside his ass, twisting and turning my wrist as I stretched him out. Well, maybe stretching was a loose term. One finger doesn’t do a whole lot except get a guy used to the feeling of being penetrated. But I got to feel how he squeezed around me, and I can have a pretty active imagination if I’m horny enough. That was all it took for me to let him go and fist my own cock. Duncan slid his hands up to my head, cradling it between his palms as he moved to meet each one of my sucks. Each second stripped another ounce of my control. He took away the choice of when I swallowed him down and when I didn’t by burying his cock in my throat on nearly every stroke. I felt dizzy with want, a sense of fiery floating overtaking my limbs. He had to hold me down. He had to be the one to take the reins. It had to be this way, this shift from sucking to fucking, because if he hadn’t, I might have combusted from the longevity of it all. My hand flew up and down my cock. I was going to come before Duncan; I was pretty sure of it. Somewhere in the back 102

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of my head, the question niggled about shooting all over his floor, but I dismissed it before all my rational thought fled completely. He wouldn’t have let me touch myself if he cared. I honestly believed that there wasn’t anything about our joining—or any sex he participated in—that Duncan wasn’t utterly in control of every last element. A whimper escaped me. I don’t know why. It wasn’t a moan or a groan or a cry of impending pleasure. A whimper. A plea. Damn if I wasn’t begging. In the only way I could right then. His thumbs caressed the corners of my stretched lips. It tickled and sent icy heat chasing through my flesh. Familiar heat. Heat it felt I should recognize. Like I knew it in my marrow if I only chose to accept it. I closed my eyes, and I breathed through my nose, and it felt like I was flying, weightless except for the throbbing length in my palm and the shaft in my throat. I came with a muffled scream, slamming forward to swallow him down whether he wanted me to or not. It was hot and suffocating and I couldn’t breathe, didn’t really want to, but there were no other options, just this driving need to smother myself with him. The pull of his fingers in my hair stung, but I ignored it for the rush of liquid down my throat. I would have preferred having him shoot on my tongue so I might actually be able to taste it, but Duncan wasn’t moving, wasn’t letting go an inch, jerking again and again against my bruised throat until his 103

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entire body shuddered from the release. I didn’t let a drop escape. I’ve been doing this for far too many years. Maybe not as many as Duncan, though. He eased his hold on my head so that I could sit back and gasp for air. My lips were swollen and numb, my throat sore, and my wrist ached from how hard I’d been gripping my cock. The hand I swiped over my mouth shook, too. I felt like everything in me had expanded, or was trying to expand, to twice its size. Even my cock was still mostly hard, though that was helped along by Duncan sinking to his knees and sucking it into his mouth. My thighs trembled, and I had to lean back on my hands in order to keep from collapsing against the bed. It wasn’t a blow job. It was that post hand-job clean-up that I loved doing myself, where I got to lick away all the traces of come from a hot, softening cock, and then nuzzle my face in a guy’s groin, just breathing him in. Everything was silent except for loud breathing and Duncan’s tender sucking and licking. When he finally lifted his head from my lap, he stretched, hooked an arm around my waist, and hauled me close to him so our chests touched. The kiss that followed finished what everything else had not. I melted into the blankets, ignoring the way he stretched me out like some sort of child. My thoughts became leaden, too distant to try and grab, so I let them go, closing the door on questions that would have to wait until later. “Sleep,” Duncan murmured against my mouth. His long hand tickled up and down my body in what should have been 104

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caresses too distracting for me to actually obey his command. But they weren’t. And I was exhausted. Blackness seeped through me like a welcome friend.

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CHAPTER 9 Waking up in Duncan’s bed probably should have freaked me out. Stranger. Casual sex. Incubus. Lots of reasons not to trust the guy. But when I opened my eyes, terror was the last thing on my brain. I was alert, and rejuvenated, and—to put a cliché on it—felt like I was eighteen again. Rather than feeling like my life was being drained away from me in sexual drips and drops, I was ready to take on the world. Or at least, a double shift in the ER with an apocalypse on the horizon. The other side of the bed was empty, and I swung my legs over the edge, looking for my pants. It took a second to find 106

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all my clothes folded neatly on a chair. When I brought them to my nose, they smelled freshly laundered, too. Chuckling, I started to dress. No wonder Tully had latched onto Duncan. When it came to boyfriend material, a guy who looked like that, fucked like that, and then did the laundry afterward so you could get a nap was worth keeping around for longer than it took to call a cab. Of course, the incubus thing was a drawback. That sobered me up slightly as I went off in search of him. I found Duncan in the huge kitchen, standing at the stove in a pair of sweats and a form-fitting T-shirt. He glanced over his shoulder at me as I entered, smiling as he looked me over in swift appraisal. “How do you feel?” he asked. “Good.” It was the truth, after all. “What’re you doing?” “Fixing dinner.” Something sizzled in front of him, and he turned back to the stove. That was when I noticed the cutting board of chopped vegetables sitting on the counter next to him. “Your stomach must be on some sort of internal clock to wake you up in time for food.” Venturing closer, I caught the scent of garlic and olive oil, and my mouth immediately watered. “I haven’t actually eaten yet today, if you want to know the truth. Since you didn’t wake me up to kick me out of your house, is it safe to assume I’m invited to stay?” “You think I’m going to eat all this on my own?” He laughed, gesturing at the vegetables. “When I get really hungry, it’s not for this kind of food.” 107

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I matched his laughter, though mine was slightly nervous. He joked about it so casually, though I suppose for him, it wasn’t a big deal. It was who he was. I was the one who needed to adjust here. “So let me get this straight…” I leaned against the counter next to him. “Anybody you sleep with in this house is safe from getting their life sucked away?” “Yeah.” “How long were you with Tully?” “A year.” He paused where he was pushing the chicken strips around in the pan. “I don’t understand where this is going.” Neither did I. None of it. I wasn’t sure why I was taking him at his word now, just because he’d given me a couple of amazing orgasms. I shouldn’t be having dinner with him, or hanging out at his house, hoping for some follow-through on the bending over his bed we hadn’t exactly got to before I’d passed out. But I was. My stomach was even grumbling, and I’m not going to talk about how my cock had woken up as soon as I’d seen his ass in those sweats. I had just had some of the best sleep of my life, something he’d given me twice now. He was right about that, at the very least. When I was with Duncan, I got fantastic sex and rest. Considering I’d been a hard-up insomniac before, I didn’t think that was a bad trade-off at all. Oh. Except for the sucking the life out of me part. That still left me uneasy. More than uneasy. Ready to run for the hills if there was any hint at all that I’d be falling prey to his 108

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lethal charms. “So why is Lisette trying to kill me?” I asked, changing the subject. “You said she wasn’t going to stop until she succeeded. I’m ready to hear why it is I’m the object of her psycho affections now.” When he turned back to work at the chicken, I could have sworn there was fresh color in his face. “I think I led her to you. She discovered I was using you to keep my partners alive. For Lisette, that’s enough.” Psychos really didn’t need much of an excuse if I’d read my Hollywood thrillers right. Though it bothered me hearing Duncan admit so readily to what he’d been doing. “And how did that happen? Showing up at my ER, I mean. I’m not exactly in your neighborhood.” “I didn’t show up. I found you on purpose. I looked for the doctors in the Bay Area with the best survival rate, and…” He glanced up, a half-smile on his face. “You’re in a league of your own.” When I didn’t come back with surprise or mock modesty, he cocked a questioning brow. I shrugged. “I’m good. I know it. It’s the one thing I’ve always been able to count on.” “And you’ve never wondered why?” “Wondering creates doubts. In my line of work, I can’t doubt that I’m making a mistake. People die.” Some of the oil splattered onto the back of his hand, but if it burned, Duncan didn’t react. “Yet, you’ve been nothing but questions and doubts since we met. I find that curious.” 109

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“I’m a little more pragmatic when it comes to anything outside of the hospital. People and those kinds of situations are harder to predict.” “And control, I expect.” I frowned. I knew I was a control freak. Most good doctors were. I didn’t like being called on it, though. “It’s why you kept coming back, isn’t it? Because you knew your victims wouldn’t die on my table.” My choice of words didn’t make him happy. Some of the vegetables scattered when he tipped the cutting board over the frying pan. “They’re not victims.” His voice was a rubber band stretched to its breaking point, thin and tight. Warning bells pealed in my head, the hair standing up on the back of my neck as I tried not to move away from him and anger him further. “I’m not like Lisette. I didn’t go to all these troubles to secure my partners’ safety for nothing, you know?” I hadn’t really given much thought at all to why he’d done it, only been grateful he had. But his response answered more of my questions, whether he meant it to or now. “So is that why she hates you so much? You’re like a rogue incubus. Breaking the incubus code by not killing your vi—partners.” My hasty correction seemed to appease his mood, though it did little to calm down the short hairs all over my body. “Lisette is of the opinion that I’m a failure, yes. That’s why she took my ring. Without it, I’m either bound to this house, or I kill when I go out.” “You didn’t kill me.” 110

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Duncan glanced up, his eyes gleaming with an icy fire. “No. I did not. Which is something else I don’t understand.” “So what are we going to do?” I had enough answers. I needed to take steps to resolve this untenable situation I’d managed to scrape myself into. “You need your ring, I need to get Lisette off my back. How do we make that happen?” His feral smile was finally enough to drive me back a halfstep. “First, we find her.” *

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When I saw the bodies writhing against each other on the dance floor, all sweat-glistening skin and pheromone-soaked grinding, I knew I was in over my head. This wasn’t my scene. This had never been my scene. Even when I had been young and foolish, I had drawn the line at what was practically exhibitionism at its finest. At my side, Duncan slid an arm around my waist and pulled me more tightly into his body. I could have resisted— the shivers running through me begged to—but this was part of the plan. For the next few hours, I was his date here at Eternity, the club Lisette apparently hunted at exclusively. Duncan had filled me in on the details over dinner, how it was safer for me if it looked like I was with him, how the club’s owners encouraged the public displays as a way of getting the clientele even more worked up, but I had swallowed my instinctive need to tell him he was insane to include me in this in favor of actually having a plan. I needed to get this over with. One way or another. Staying 111

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behind while Duncan went off in search of Lisette left me unprotected. I hated the idea of being so vulnerable, but the truth of the matter was, they were both stronger than me. Lisette had bested Duncan. I’d seen the extent of the damage, and now I was a little annoyed at myself for not having pressed for more details, now that he and I seemed to be on better terms. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He looked scrumptious. The white shirt he wore flowed over his torso, untucked from the black leather pants molded over his legs. “My clubbing clothes,” he’d explained back at the house. To me, they looked like come-fuck-me clothes, though I guess that was the intention. My mouth went dry at how his icy gaze swept over the room, the lights dancing along the shadows of his strong cheekbones. In spite of my nerves, I had the sudden desire to lean in and lick along his jaw. What terrified me was knowing that had nothing to do with his ability to command that sort of attention and everything to do with what I wanted. A blond with a tattoo crawling down his neck gave us the once-over, and then a second and third over as well. I was convinced his attention was fixed solely on Duncan, until he swept his gaze over me as well, lingering pointedly on my crotch. I didn’t have clubbing clothes. I had jeans and a T-shirt that looked like it had been painted on. I had argued with Duncan that I didn’t have the body to carry such a narcissistic look off, but he’d promptly pinned me to the wall and shown me with his hands and hard cock just how desirable he found 112

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me. Maybe I did look good. Some of the shivers abated. With Duncan guiding me, we sauntered over to the bar to order drinks. Well, Duncan sauntered. I thought I was just following along until I looked back to see the blond checking out our asses. “He wants you,” Duncan said in my ear. A fresh wave of heat that had nothing to do with all the packed bodies in the room made my mouth dry. I perched on a stool as Duncan ordered two beers for us, and tried not to stare back at our admirer. My libido suddenly didn’t seem to care that we were there for a very specific reason. My cock was hard and throbbed against my thigh at the same rhythm as the music. Sitting made it less obvious, but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that Duncan knew. He leaned down, his forearm resting alongside mine on the bar, his long fingers caressing my bare skin. “You can’t tell me you don’t get this reaction all the time,” he said. “I wanted you the first time I saw you.” “You were probably hungry.” My response was glib, but at the bottom of my stomach, my desire was doing backflips. “And no, I don’t go out trolling for guys. I don’t have time.” “Lucky for me then.” My eyes widened the split second before his lips met mine. The kiss was soft, lingering, and the cinnamon taste of his tongue as it gently caressed mine made everything in me sparkle. I gasped and opened to him, but he never pressed for anything more than the careful exploration, his touch 113

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unceasing along my arm. I couldn’t breathe when he pulled back. My mouth tingled, and my lungs refused to cooperate. “Just so he knows you’re mine,” Duncan murmured. Our beers arrived, and he shifted in order to pay the bartender. I couldn’t stop staring at his firm profile. It was all a game in order to protect me for the night, but in those few heart-stopping seconds, it had felt more real than anything else we’d shared. The music changed, slowing down and deepening so the bass reverberated through the floor and fixtures. I halfexpected my glass to start jitterbugging down the bar, but the only thing shaking was me as I reached for it. “Would you like to dance?” My eyes snapped up over the rim of my glass to see the blond standing next to me. He was prettier up close, with dark eyes and a cute dimple as he smiled, but the only thought that went through my head at the moment—other than startled surprise that he’d ask me and not Duncan—was that he wasn’t nearly as gorgeous as my “date.” “I’m with—” “Go.” Duncan’s hushed whisper in my ear made me gasp, as much as the instruction. I turned away from my would-be suitor and hissed, “What happened to the grand plan?” As casually as if we did this every day, Duncan rested his hand on the back of my neck and drew our heads closer until I felt every one of his breaths like a caress against my cock. 114

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“Lisette is in the corner, licking her wounds with someone new. You can watch her from the dance floor while I go and talk to her.” I tried to turn and look, but his grip tightened, almost painfully. “So I can watch her hurt you again?” I said. “I don’t think so.” “She won’t. She despises public scenes, especially in front of potential prey. I’ll be safe.” His lip curved, and his eyes paled as they twinkled. “Though it’s nice to know you don’t want to see me hurt.” “Because I’m a doctor.” “Or because you’re not as indifferent to me as you’d like to let yourself believe.” He was right, and we both knew it. On impulse, I crushed our mouths together for a quick kiss before sliding off the stool and facing the blond. “Let’s dance.” Bodies bumped against us as he led me out to the floor. The pounding echoed into my flesh, louder and heavier with each step. He was steering me closer to one of the oversized speakers that flanked the ornate pedestals bookending the room. Fewer people danced there, and as he let go of my hand to grab my hip, I wondered if it was deliberate. I don’t dance. I’ve discovered the hard way that trying to coordinate my long, lanky limbs to some sort of beat that didn’t involve sex was begging for disaster. This, however, was not dancing. This was swaying. This was Blondie holding my ass with one hand while the other held my waist, and grinding our lower halves together. 115

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I probably shouldn’t have kissed Duncan before doing this. My erection was still raging. It turned out, my dance partner was hard, too. “Do you two ever do threesomes?” He practically had to shout the words for me to hear him. I must have looked as shocked as I felt about the blatant query, because he laughed. “Well, maybe he can watch if he doesn’t want to share.” “We don’t do that kind of thing,” I spluttered. My feet had stopped moving, but Blondie hadn’t given up on our virtual frottage. “Are you sure about that?” Leaning in, he pressed his mouth to the skin below my ear and added, “He wouldn’t have wanted us to dance if he didn’t like to watch, sweetheart.” I shoved him back and glared when that damnable smile continued to make his dimple dance. “Don’t call me that.” “All right. We’ll just dance. For now.” I didn’t even want to do that, but there were too many bodies for me to make any sort of graceful exit, and besides, Duncan had asked that I keep an eye out on him and Lisette. Swiveling my head around to look for him, however, brought another amused chuckle to my partner’s lips. “That’s so cute,” he teased. Jerking his chin over my shoulder, he curled his arm around my waist in order to twist me more sideways. “He’s talking to Lisette.” It only took a few seconds to spot Duncan. His height easily gave him away. Blondie was right. Duncan leaned against the wall, his head bent as he talked to the more diminutive Lisette. Her hair was piled up in a loose knot, 116

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highlighting her graceful neck, and the dress she wore, though long, was nearly transparent. Neither one of them looked very happy. It dawned on me a few seconds later that Blondie had known her name. A few seconds too late. The pedestal blocked my view when Blondie shoved me behind it. I whirled and lashed out, but my fist grazed the ornate carvings on the pedestal instead of finding contact with his jaw. A raw burn scraped over my knuckles. Blood welled in fat droplets, and I brought it up to my mouth to suck them away. “Relax.” Blondie was still smiling. I wanted to smash his perfect teeth in and get rid of that dimple for good. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just supposed to keep you occupied for a little while.” “Lisette can’t do her own dirty work these days?” “Why should she when she’s got me?” “How did she know we were coming?” He prowled a few steps closer, cutting me off even more from the crowd. “Please. You really think you’re important enough for her to track? Now Duncan on the other hand…” Of course. We should have expected it. Lisette was hardly a fool. She would protect herself at all costs, Duncan had said. She’d set up a sentry to keep an eye out for Duncan, just in case he arrived. But Duncan hadn’t recognized this guy. Which meant he wasn’t another incubus. 117

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Which meant… I slammed my foot into his gut as soon as he was close enough. Surprise worked in my favor. Nursing my injury had fooled him into thinking I wasn’t up for another attack, and he staggered back, crashing into the pillar from the force of my kick. I didn’t bother sticking around to see if he went down. I did the only thing I knew I could. I ran.

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CHAPTER 10 I realized two things when I reached Duncan’s car. One, I didn’t have his keys. But two, and far more important in the grand scheme of things, I couldn’t just leave him inside for whatever it was Lisette had planned. I had no idea what those plans might be. It was entirely possible she only wanted to talk. Then the image of what he’d looked like in the ER came to my mind’s eye. His lopsided, swollen mouth, split and oozing. His destroyed torso with barely an inch of untouched skin for me to stitch back together. The bruises, purple and green and ugly, mottling his 119

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perfect complexion. Duncan believed Lisette didn’t want a scene. I believed Lisette was a monster who probably didn’t give a shit one way or another about what kind of scene she might cause. Blondie hadn’t chased after me once I left Eternity’s walls. That meant they thought me inconsequential. Unthreatening. I wasn’t so sure they weren’t right. But it did give me something they probably didn’t realize. The advantage of surprise. I stared at the front door. There was only one problem. I had no idea what I could do. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to run away and desert Duncan when I could be the key to making sure Lisette didn’t kill him. When the bouncer at the door spotted me this time, he waved me forward to let me pass, much to the chagrin of the people still lined up out front. I slipped in as innocuously as I could, just on the off-chance Blondie waited for me inside. He wasn’t. Just the pulsing music and the sex on show and the rising desire to take my life back, once and for all. I ignored everybody else to head straight for the back corner where Duncan had been talking to her. Nobody stopped me. They were either too wrapped up in their own little worlds—which was entirely possible—or I sent off enough don’t fuck with me vibes to ward them away. I hoped for the latter. I’d perfected it in the ER, and if ever there was a time I needed that particular skill, this was it. Except the corner was empty. No Lisette. No Duncan. Not 120

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even the guy Lisette had targeted. Whirling on my heel, I searched the crowd for Duncan’s familiar shoulders. He had to be here. I’d just left the car, so I knew he hadn’t left me behind. The possibility that I was already too late made bile rise in the back of my throat, but I swallowed it down as I spotted Blondie standing guard near the employee’s entrance. People cried out as I shoved them out of my way, bodies jostling, their sweat smearing across my forearms like war paint. I ignored all of them. My path wasn’t the straightest, but I had my goal locked. Nothing stopped me until I slammed my fist into Blondie’s midsection, hopefully taking out the rest of the wind my kick earlier had left. He doubled over. Thank God. I grabbed his shoulders and made him straighten, shoving him into the wall. “Where are they?” I demanded. Blondie looked like he was going to throw up. “It doesn’t matter. You’re too late anyway.” Ice surged through my veins. My fingers dug in even tighter, finding the right nerves to pinch. God bless biology. “I’ll be the judge of that. Tell me where the fuck she took him.” When he swallowed, I was suddenly sure he was going to vomit all over me, and had to tamp down the immediate instinct to get out of his way. “Who said she took him anywhere?” he snarled. “Loverboy went of his own free will.” I hadn’t considered that possibility. Because the rational part of my brain was all too aware that I was thinking more 121

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with my dick than my head than I usually did. The chance that Duncan had been working with Lisette all along for some nefarious plan was all too real. Worse, it made sense. Ignoring logic, I took my frustration out on him, shaking him so hard that his head bounced against the wall. This kind of behavior would have had me tossed out of Slant before the first punch was thrown, but here, it seemed so commonplace, nobody paid any attention. Blondie didn’t look like he was going to give it up. However, he was guarding that door for a reason. I threw him aside and yanked on the handle, silently relieved to discover it wasn’t locked. I was a little worried by the fact that he didn’t stop me. Could I be wrong about Duncan? Had he been playing me from the start? It’s not like I had a lot of experience with supernatural creatures. I snorted into the darkness. Even the fact that I considered them supernatural creatures at all was boggling. But they were. I’d seen the evidence of his healing and teleportation myself. I didn’t have an explanation as to why I wasn’t dying because of a few blow jobs, but I was going to get that, sooner or later. Though the music still made the walls vibrate, it was a low bass instead of a deafening roar, almost soothing as I crept down the dimly lit hallway. The floor was slightly sticky; I didn’t look down for fear that it might be blood. The first door I passed stood ajar and revealed storage. The second was empty. The third had a sliver of light at the cracks. And the hum 122

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of voices on the other side. My flesh crawled. Though sweat had made my T-shirt stick to my back, it was cold now, and uncomfortable. Goose bumps erupted along my arm as my hand rested on the doorknob, but for the life of me, I couldn’t bring myself to turn it. What if I’d been wrong? What if all of this was just one big con? I could be walking in on a trap. And I still had no idea what I could do even if it wasn’t. Bruises. Slices. That sensual mouth distorted and ruined. I pushed open the door. The prey Lisette had selected stood naked on the other side of the room. He was young, barely legal, with light brown hair and a sharp chin. Tall and wiry, he didn’t even look at the door when it opened, his dark gaze fixed on something behind the entrance. His eyes themselves weren’t dark. His pupils were blown with desire. He also looked like he could have been my little brother if I had one. Lisette stood behind him, fully dressed, with one arm around his waist and her other hand stroking his erect cock. She watched whatever it was behind the door, too, until I stepped in. Then her smile turned into a sneer. “Oh, goody. The gang’s all here. Have a seat, Dr. Coen. You’re just in time for the show.” My head snapped around to see what was so fascinating. Heat rolled from the corner of the room and slammed into my gut. Duncan stood there, his shirt unbuttoned, his hands in fists 123

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at his side. Beads of sweat dotted his brow, and his breathing was harsh, almost audible. He met my gaze, and my panic exploded into something ready to eviscerate me on the spot. Where the eyes of Lisette’s prey had gone black with lust, Duncan’s had gone an icy white-blue. Not once in either of our sexual encounters had that happened before. He was both the most beautiful and the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. My cock was hard in an instant. “You don’t have to have Bobby here,” Lisette crooned. “Take your doctor. We both know he’s the one you really want.” Duncan’s upper lip curled back into a snarl that would have looked more natural on a feral cat. “No. I won’t.” “But it’s what you are.” I slammed the door shut. The only person who jumped at the sound was me. “He doesn’t have to kill if he doesn’t want to.” I deliberately placed myself between them, blocking his view of young Bobby. “So back off.” Her eyes went ugly. “You have no idea what you’re messing with here. This is what he is. What he does.” “And you’re his babysitter? Duncan looks like he’s old enough to make his own decisions.” I jerked my chin at her prey. “Unlike your date of choice. Let him go. This has nothing to do with him.” The arm she had around Bobby’s waist tightened, though she never stopped stroking his arousal. Bobby gasped as she pressed on his diaphragm, but he seemed caught in whatever demonic lust they’d cast over him. 124

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“You have no say here,” Lisette said. “You’re nothing except a mildly filling dinner.” “Mildly filling? Think again.” “You haven’t satisfied him. You still walk. Still breathe.” I grimaced and shook my head. “Hate to break it to you, but he tasted plenty satisfied to me this afternoon.” She glared past my shoulder. “In his little pity palace? Hardly counts. If he doesn’t have the nerve to take what is rightfully his without the confines of magic, he betrays what he truly is.” I didn’t like the color Bobby’s skin was turning. The pressure on his abdomen was constricting his breathing, and he was going bluish from his inability to take deep breaths. This was more than about Duncan anymore. This was about both of them. I couldn’t leave this room until I’d done everything I could to try and save them. “I’ll make you a deal.” Her attention snapped back to me. The entire room seemed to freeze. “You have nothing to bargain with.” Swallowing down the panic that threatened to overwhelm me, I snorted instead. Bravado in the face of the impossible had always been my specialty. “So killing me was just a moment of boredom for you? I don’t think so.” Lisette matched my front with her own brittle mask. “Getting you out of the way was just meant to force Duncan back onto his true path.” “Like taking away his ring.” Her smile was pure evil. Any fear I had felt from Duncan 125

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whimpered in comparison. “Like destroying his ring.” That made me pause, as she had gambled it would. I hadn’t counted on that. I’d hoped to be able to figure out a way to get that back for him, too, but I guess only movie bad guys hold on to the treasured item in question long enough for the good guys to get it back. “Get out of here, Pete.” Duncan’s voice rumbled through the room. Whatever hunger Lisette had provoked in him had affected him in ways I’d never witnessed before, not just his eyes. His words carried their own life, primal sounds that settled in my bones. They enflamed my flesh without a single touch, and I had to gasp for a moment in order to catch my breath. “I’m not leaving you behind.” Though I knew it was a mistake, I glanced back. The fixation in his eyes made me throb. “We were supposed to do this together, weren’t we?” “You stay, and you’ll die.” “Maybe that’s what the good doctor wants.” Lisette’s laughter hung in the air like crystal bells shattering in space. “In his quest to save others, he really only wishes to kill himself.” Somehow, I tore my gaze away from Duncan to look at Lisette in disbelief. “With logic like that, it’s no wonder you have to rely on your body to get anywhere.” She hissed. Seriously. I half-expected poisonous spit to leap between us and blind me. “Take him, Duncan. Before I kill him for simply annoying me.” I held up my hands to hold them off, in case Duncan 126

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decided to act. “You haven’t heard my deal yet. Trust me. It’s a doozy.” Lisette regarded me for a moment. A long, agonizing moment. “Fine. Amuse me.” “First you have to let Bobby go. You know you only picked him out to use against Duncan because he looks like me.” Bobby was oblivious to the negotiations going on around him, and when Lisette suddenly shoved him away, he nearly stumbled to the floor before I caught him. He blinked at me, eyes unfocused, as I gripped his arm and hauled him back to his feet. The kid had checked out and I had no idea when he might come back. All I knew was that he was better off anywhere but here. “Get your clothes on,” I said, though I have no idea if he heard me. I waited until it felt like he wasn’t going to fall over before releasing him, and scooped up his discarded clothes from the chair they’d been left in. “There’s an empty room next door. Use it, get dressed, and get the hell out of here.” This state made him malleable. He obeyed without blinking, the door clicking quietly shut behind him. “This better be worth it,” Lisette said. “Or I’m not even going to bother fucking you before I snap your neck.” Though it would have been wonderful to have some help from Duncan in this, I knew he was too busy fighting for his control to pitch in just yet. “I want you to leave me and Duncan alone. No more trying to seduce me, no more trying to kill him. Let us live our lives the way we want.” 127

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“And why would I do that?” “Because I’m going to give Duncan what he wants most right now.” Without taking my eyes off her, I backed up until I felt his hard body behind me, and reached around to grasp his hip. Even through his clothes, his skin blazed with a temperature that should have cooked his insides. It was all I could do to hold on. As much as my body screamed to get out of there, it wanted Duncan inside it just as much. Her mouth curved into a mocking sneer. “That’ll kill you. I think I was right about your death wish.” “It might,” I conceded. “But I’m willing to gamble that I can live through it. And if I do, you back off. For good.” She liked the bet. I knew she would. She honestly believed there was no way she couldn’t win. Even if killing me didn’t push Duncan into reverting into more dangerous patterns, it would still destroy his best chance at saving his human partners. Lisette got at least part of what she wanted either way. Because outside of the bonds of his magic, she just couldn’t fathom how I might otherwise survive such an encounter. She didn’t know I already had once. That was the detail I was counting on. “I’ll agree,” she said. “On one condition.” “Name it.” “I get to join in on the fun. Just to make sure you’re not faking it.” “No!” Duncan’s denial was the most vehement response I’d 128

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heard from him since walking in. I wanted to join in on that with my own, “Which part of I’m gay is so hard to understand?” but the words caught in my throat. I could only stare at Lisette, wondering what to do now. I had no guarantees I’d survive with her in the mix; I wasn’t even completely guaranteed the one time with Duncan wasn’t a fluke. Agreeing was a far greater gamble than I’d anticipated. And for what? An incubus who didn’t want to kill. Who wanted to love in peace without having to worry about harming his partners. If anybody could understand that need to preserve life, it was me. “Agreed.” Though Duncan stiffened in protest, I ignored him and gave Lisette a cocky grin. “Not that I can really fake it when it comes to Duncan, you know. The man’s got talents.” “Yes, he does.” In the space of a single blink, she stood before me, turning me into the meat of her sex demon sandwich. She ran her nails down my bare arm, scratching lightly along the way, until she reached my wrist and encircled it. Her other hand reached around my side and found Duncan’s hip. “So let’s take this somewhere more private, shall we?” Slight fear lanced through me, but it was already too late. It’s impossible to say no to a succubus who can teleport. Especially when she’s got your balls in her hand. Metaphorically, that is. I hoped. 129

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CHAPTER 11 “Okay, this isn’t what I expected.” Lisette laughed and let me go. “Where did you think I was going to take you?” I glanced around at my unmade bed, the socks I’d left on the floor, the crack in the wall where Duncan had pinned me earlier. “I can honestly say it wasn’t going to be here.” “But this is perfect.” She perched on the end of the bed and leaned back on her hands, still smiling, still beautiful. A straight man probably would have come on the spot from the way her top molded over her perfect breasts. I wondered why she kept bothering that trick with me, or if it was just such a part of her nature that she didn’t even realize she was doing it. 131

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“It’s comfortable, and you’re comfortable in it, which means you’ll relax more, which in turn—” “Will make me come harder,” I finished for her. “Got it.” “Plus, none of that pesky protective magic Duncan’s got draped over everything.” Her mouth made a little moue of distaste. “Once he’s killed you, he’ll remember what it’s like. His problem is he’s forgotten what it’s like to truly be himself.” I shrugged. She wasn’t making any move to touch me, and I could live with that just fine. “And I don’t have a problem being his all-night buffet. Sorry.” “You don’t have to do this.” Duncan’s breath scorched along the back of my ear. He had whispered, but I had little doubt Lisette heard every word. “Grab your keys and go. Forget all about me and all this business.” “So she can turn you back into a killing machine? I don’t think so.” “This isn’t your problem.” “You made it my problem the first time you brought one of your boyfriends to my ER.” Turning around, I faced those silvery eyes with an ache in my groin and desperation in my hands. They slid beneath his loose shirt and stroked his hard stomach, the muscles dancing at my touch. “The only thing that’ll stop me is if you say I can’t trust her word. And be honest. No lies to try and get me to go.” His nostrils flared. At his sides, his hands were balled into fists. I heard the knuckles crack. “She’s bound to her deal,” Duncan hissed. “But—” 132

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“No buts.” I curled my fingers into his waistband, holding on for dear life as my systems raged out of my control. “Just kiss me.” I had little doubts Duncan was a take charge kind of guy. He had to be, to orchestrate encounters in order to get the maximum result. Throw in the fact that he was built, that he had a cock to make grown men fall on their knees, and that he actually gave a damn about his partner’s response, and it’s not really a surprise to know he was a top at heart. But even tops like hearing what their partners want. It’s confirmation. Affirmation they’re doing the right thing. It got Duncan moving faster than if I’d grabbed his cock. His mouth slammed to mine, his tongue pushing past my lips without waiting for an invitation. Well, I suppose I’d given him one with my demand, but I still wasn’t quite ready for the assault. In spite of my hold on him, I stumbled back, only to get yanked forward again when the steel band of his arm clamped around my waist. His other hand held my head, fingers knotted in my hair. It hurt. A lot. I’d never been seen him so desperate. I’d never seen anyone so desperate. It managed to eradicate the last of my fears. I’d done this. Hell, I even wanted it. I wanted him to consume me, like it felt he wanted to. I wanted him to forget about whatever protests I’d put up that afternoon when I’d stormed the incubus castle and ended up on my knees instead. I wanted to drown in this man because he was the single most beautiful creature I’d ever seen, because in spite of all the incubus shit, he was funny and charming and cared about what he was doing, cared enough to 133

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make an enemy of a bitch like Lisette. I liked him. More importantly, I wanted him. Him, not the sex fiend he wanted to project. I let go of his waistband in order to start fumbling with the fly. Leather pants look great, but honestly, they are a pain to get in and out of. I couldn’t get the button through the stupid hole, and I didn’t want to tear away from his ferocious kisses to look down and see what I was doing. Small hands folded over mine. That worked. “Let me,” Lisette said with a knowing smile. Duncan panted in my ear, but the arm around my waist loosened so that I’d have room to step back and give Lisette room. For a few seconds, I’d forgotten she was going to join in. My arousal should have died then, and maybe, under other circumstances, it would have. But I was too far gone at this point to care about what kind of body parts Lisette had. She had hands to take over the mundane task of undressing, and either way around it, I was going to get a thick cock in my ass. That was enough for me not to argue with her. His hold in my hair eased to the point of a pleasant sting rather than the earlier hurt. “I’m sorry,” Duncan murmured, right before he started licking along my jaw, down to my neck. “I’m so sorry.” “I’m not.” Turning my head, I did my own share of tasting, my tongue tickling along his salty skin. “I’m really, really not.” I felt him sigh. A split second later, the hard tip of his erection nudged against my stomach. I glanced down and saw 134

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Lisette fisting his length. Her hand looked tiny in comparison, but the squeeze of her fingers was undeniable. So was Duncan’s groan, reverberating through my shoulder. “This is hardly fair,” Lisette mused. “Let’s do something about it, shall we?” I jerked when her hands fluttered at my fly, but the second she grasped my cock along with Duncan’s, I abandoned any notion of telling her to fuck off. It felt good. Damn good. Burning the bottom of my feet good. She held both of them in her hands, her fingers linked, and jerked us off together. I got to feel every inch of his hot skin, how the vein throbbed in time with his rapid heartbeat. She even spread around the precome that leaked from both of our cocks before sinking down to lick it all away. “I need to fuck you.” Duncan said it into my skin, his mouth continuing to work its magic. “And it’s not going to be slow and easy.” “I don’t want slow and easy.” I wanted him to look at me, but he was too determined to taste every inch of my exposed skin. “I just want you.” “It’ll hurt.” “I don’t care.” “It’ll probably kill you.” That was it. I pushed at his chest, hard enough to surprise both of them, and broke free of their combined holds. My body missed his heat instantly, and my feet yelled at me for being so selfish as to want to say something, but I held firm and backed up toward the bed. 135

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“Stop trying to doomsay your way out of this.” I shoved at my jeans, kicking them off. “I know what I want. I know the deal I made. How many times do I have to explain to you that I know what I’m doing?” Duncan didn’t move, but his gaze tracked every sweep of my hands, every inch of skin I bared as I stripped out of my clothes. His eyes got paler, the more he saw. By the time I was naked, I could barely see his pupils at all. When I glanced at Lisette, hers were the same way. Somehow, it wasn’t nearly as thrilling on her as it was on Duncan. “How exactly do you want to be a part of this?” I asked her. The corner of her mouth curled. “As much fun as it would be to force you to fuck me, I’ll settle for helping get you ready to take Duncan instead. I can feed just as well from your orgasm as I can from my own.” “Fine.” I stretched out on the bed, my ass in the air. It put them behind me, and a frisson of fear coiled around spine. Maybe not my best idea. The end of the bed barely moved as Lisette climbed on. “Roll over,” she ordered. “You’re going to suck Duncan’s cock while I do this. I want him ready to explode by the time we get him inside you.” My mouth watered as I did what she said. “I can live with that.” I was already reaching for him when Duncan came to the side of the bed, and the instant I had his hot flesh back in my hand, I muttered, “I can definitely live with that.” 136

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Duncan helped by resting one knee on the mattress in order to get closer, but I was more than happy to twist my upper body in order to get to his cock. Lisette had been teasing me with her joyful licks over ours. I wanted another taste of him, to suck him down and feel the weight on my tongue, just like I’d had that afternoon. I had the head firmly trapped between my lips, licking away every trace of pre-come when I felt Lisette between my legs. Her touch was too soft, too gentle as she prodded my legs apart. I flattened my heels against the bed to help her, tilting my ass up as she carefully pried the cheeks apart. If my mouth hadn’t been full, I would have snapped at her to stop pussyfooting around. One of the things I like about men is that they remember I’m not going to break. Still, the first slide of her hot tongue over my opening made me squirm. The second made me moan. By the third, I was sinking farther down Duncan’s cock, eager to swallow him down, and my lips vibrated from how loud my groans had become. A hand clamped over the back of my head. Hard. Hungry. Pulling me closer and closer to the prize. Oh, God, yes. I swallowed as soon as I felt the tip hit the back of my throat. No fucking around. I wanted it, I was going to take it, and nothing either of them could do was going to make me wait any longer. My nose stayed buried in the crisp hair at the base of his cock for only seconds before Duncan eased back. I whimpered 137

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in frustration, but he didn’t go far, only as far as letting me take another breath before shuttling forward again. This time, I grabbed his ass and held on, swallowing again and again around the length buried in my throat until spots danced behind my eyes. I heard Lisette chuckle as I pulled off and gasped for air. “No wonder he likes you.” Her fingers were playing with my hole now instead of her mouth, two of them slipping inside with little problem. “You’re a little slut for him, aren’t you?” “Isn’t that the trick?” I panted. “He’s irresistible.” Duncan stiffened, but if Lisette noticed, it didn’t register on her face. Silently, I begged Duncan to keep his mouth shut. Lisette didn’t need to know I could resist Duncan just fine when I wanted to. She might think it cheating on the bet, and I had a funny feeling she was a sore loser when she got played. “Maybe we shouldn’t bother with stretching you then.” She sat up, looking all too pleased with herself. “Hands and knees, doctor. It’s time to get this show on the road.” Duncan moved faster than I did. Grabbing my hip, he practically knocked Lisette out of his way in order to flip me over and settle between my legs. Whatever she had done to work him into a frenzy back at the club was coming to a head. I don’t think he was even aware of who was in the room, which didn’t exactly fill me with lightness and joy. But then he smoothed his hand up my flank, achingly familiar, surprisingly tender, and when he bent over my back, the press of his mouth at my neck made my chest seize. “It’s not because you’re a little slut for me.” He whispered 138

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the words in my ear, barely a breath, barely discernible. I very much doubted Lisette heard anything more than my desperate whimpers and his hot breaths. “It’s because of everything that isn’t about this.” My head spun too wildly to fully grasp his intent. I only knew the sensation of him above me, the glide of skin across mine that left me wondering if he’d melted the outer epidermis away, the continued kisses at the soft flesh below my ear. A hand pulled at my cock, too small to be Duncan’s, and I arched into him as Lisette toyed with my balls. “Fuck me,” I begged. “Damn it, just fuck me.” His lower half shifted though his upper didn’t. A distinct press at my opening made me slide my legs farther apart, and then there it was, that initial flare of pain upon getting breached, the ache in my lower back as my muscles attempted to protest the intrusion. The ache would get worse before it got better. Knowing how big Duncan was, so would the pain. My fingers clawed into the sheets as I focused on the biological instead of the sensory. Open. Push back. Don’t fight it. It’s not that I don’t get fucked. I do. Just usually with better preparation, lots of lube, and with cocks not nearly as formidable as Duncan’s. Sweat sprung out on my upper lip, and I licked it away, panting against the pain. Duncan pushed forward, unyielding, unforgiving, though the mouth on my neck continued to worship my skin. My arms threatened to give out on me when I felt him break through the 139

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tight outer ring, and I let out a long, keening cry as he slid easily the rest of the way in. He didn’t stop until he’d bottomed out. Both of us knelt there, shaking from the pleasure of it. Vaguely, I was aware that Lisette still held my cock. Her mouth had joined her hands, and while it felt more than good, all my attention was centered on the man above me. “This…this is…” Coherent thoughts seemed to be beyond me. I swallowed and tried again. “Whatever happens, this was worth it. Whatever happens.” He shuddered around me, reverberations I felt all the way to the ends of my fingers. Though he inhaled, he didn’t speak, choosing instead to start pulling back, withdrawing from my stretched channel in excruciating inches that made me wish I hadn’t wasted the breath on words. I needed it now, because nothing in my body was working right, not my arms, not my legs, not my lungs. All I knew was the emptiness left behind, and before he could get too far away, I gathered what strength I had and slammed back into his hips. Teeth scraped across my cock. All three of us made sounds, though Lisette’s frustration was nothing compared to the rampaging need torn from me and Duncan. Duncan took my cue and ran with it. His hips snapped, no longer playing around with adjusting to everything. He pounded into my hole like he’d obviously wanted from the start, and I encouraged him, every inch of the way. I swore when Lisette began pulling on my balls, and I growled when Duncan began chewing on the back of my neck, and still I 140

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wanted more. I needed more. I needed the release that had been promised me that afternoon, the satisfaction that would come from giving my flesh to him to break down and rebuild. I was going to do everything in my power to get it. My hand found his, relinquishing my hold on the sheets in favor of twining over his fingers. The contact sent shivers through me, shivers that would have sent me out of my own skin were it not for the man holding me together. Was this what it was like for his victims? Had Bobby been so utterly willing to destroy himself for such a simple act? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I cared. All I knew was the fire and ice battling for dominance within my veins. All I heard was his voice, soft and melodic, coaxing me to heights I hadn’t expected. He shifted. I don’t know if he lost his balance for a moment—though the notion of a supernatural creature that had turned sex into an art form suddenly not sticking the dismount seemed ludicrous at best—or if he moved on purpose, but the next drive into my body slammed his cock across my prostate, and I did what any healthy, horny, hyped up male would do under those circumstances. I screamed. And then I begged him to do it again. Duncan complied. His chest stuck to my back from the sweat gluing us together, and his other arm had coiled around my body to find my cock. While Lisette sucked at the length, he went to my balls, pulling them in sharp tugs that matched each scrape across my prostate. I didn’t stand a chance. 141

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Everything stood out in stark relief as the world exploded around me. My head banged against his shoulder as I bowed away from the bed, and the sense of weightlessness returned, that feeling of shedding my flesh and bone and floating high above the room. There had been hints of it during previous encounters, but this was different, stronger, like the only thing tethering me to the bed at all was Duncan’s powerful body. In that moment, I wasn’t completely sure I wanted even that much. As if through a fog, I heard his groans, felt the hot rush of come filling my ass as he drove into me again and again. I don’t know how long he kept it up. Time stopped having any relative meaning. I only know that his arms came around me, and he pressed me into the bed, somehow getting Lisette’s mouth off from my softening cock before cradling me in a loose embrace. “Don’t let her win, Pete,” I heard him say. I snorted. “Like I would.” Though it took all my strength, I opened my eyes to search for her, which unfortunately required turning my head as well. I found her hovering at the side of the bed, practically quivering as she watched me. “Still alive,” I rasped. “You lose.” She shook her head. “No. That doesn’t happen.” “Try again.” “His heart isn’t even slowing down.” That was to Duncan, thank God. I think I’d exhausted my words for the moment. “How is that possible?” Duncan laughed, a dry, throaty sound. “You think I know? 142

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This was your brilliant plan. I thought I was going to end up killing him.” I felt him smile against my neck. “But all he does is fall asleep. It’s cute.” “It’s not cute. It’s wrong.” “Whatever. He’s still right. You lost.” I thought she was going to hit him. I honestly did. I’ve seen too much violence in the ER not to recognize the signs. Emotions run high, people get angry…it happens. Oddly enough, in Duncan’s embrace, I didn’t feel even vaguely threatened by it. Somehow, I just knew he’d be able to handle her this time. Except she didn’t. She took a step back, and without uttering another word, vanished. I sank into the mattress. “Can I go to sleep now? This has been a really long night.” The vibrations of his laughter lulled me into closing my eyes. “For besting Lisette, I’d give you the world if I could.” His mouth skimmed over my temple. The subsequent shiver was a tiny one in comparison to its previous friends. “Sleep…” If he said anything else, I didn’t hear it. I was out cold. A guy could get used to this if he had the chance.

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CHAPTER 12 Standing at the nurses’ station, I pretended to be absorbed in a patient’s chart while I watched the cops corner Adam Begley’s father. Begley Senior was a cadaverous waste of space, with tobacco-stained teeth and hands like spatulas. When the nurse had called to tell me he’d shown up to see his son, I’d dropped everything I was doing to phone the police. I should have done it days ago, but, well, there was a little matter about an incubus I had to take care of first. But it was done now. And I could give the son of a bitch my best smug smile as the cops practically dragged him to the elevators. I didn’t for a second believe my sixteen-year-old stab 144

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victim was going to testify against his rat bastard father. I’d seen too many of these domestic violence cases play out. The mother would likely plead with her child that his father didn’t mean it, that he couldn’t destroy their family like that, that any number of bad things could happen because the boy chose to tell the truth. But there was a small part of me that hoped to be proved wrong. That taking a knife for his mom was enough to convince the kid to do the right thing. Maybe one more life could be saved. With a smile that made the nurse do a double take, I passed back the file I knew nothing about and headed for the stairs. I had two hours left on my shift, and right now, I felt like I could save the world. You get nights like that. Nights where anything seems possible. Where even the most daunting accidents do nothing but splatter a little blood on your shoes. We’d been surprisingly slow before I got the call, but I had a feeling the next couple hours were going to fly by. That feeling vanished when I stepped out of the stairwell and saw a familiar form sitting in the waiting room. I hadn’t seen Duncan since the night with Lisette. That had been three days ago. I’d woken up the next morning, more than a little sore but a lot more alert, and he had been gone. There wasn’t even a note. Though I would never admit it out loud, I was a little disappointed. You’d think getting a guy off the hook with his arch nemesis would be worth at least a goodbye kiss. He rose when he saw me, stretching to his full height. Everything in my body immediately woke up at the sight of 145

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the worn jeans, the long hands, the half-smile on that sensual mouth. It bugged me that my first instinct was to return his smile, like he hadn’t just disappeared for three days without an explanation. It bugged me even more that I was more than a little glad to see him, but the fact that he had shown up here when he didn’t have a mark on him meant only one thing. “Is somebody else seeing him right now?” I asked as I passed by. I wasn’t going to give him the benefit of stopping. This was my turf, and I had a job to do. Duncan fell into step beside me easily. “What are you talking about?” “You brought in your latest boyfriend, right? That’s why you’re here.” The nurses’ station stopped me from going further without a case, so I leaned against the counter with my arms folded over my chest to try and stare him down. “After all, I’m still the best.” “You are, but no, I’m alone.” He seemed completely oblivious to the passing stares of all the nurses, his pale eyes fixed on me. “I needed to see you.” It was his slight emphasis on needed that did me in. It was a very good thing I had the counter to hold me up. “I guess you haven’t replaced your ring yet.” The sarcasm leaked through anyway. “Well, you’re out of luck. I’m still on the clock.” A small line formed between his brows. “You’re mad at me. I get that. But…” He held his hand up, the palm facing him. I only meant to glance at it, but once I saw the ring— smaller than the previous one, but the stone was 146

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unmistakable—my gaze jumped back to Duncan. “I owe more than a few favors, and I can’t go back to Paris for a few centuries, I don’t think, but I had to get it.” Slowly, he rested his hand on the counter at my side and leaned a little closer. “I couldn’t guarantee that you’d agree to see me again, after all.” My ears burned. He hadn’t called because he’d been too busy getting a replacement ring. It still would’ve been nice if he’d left a note, but how was I supposed to be mad at the guy just because he didn’t want to kill any more people? “Paris, huh? I don’t suppose you found any answers about why you didn’t need the ring for me, did you?” “Not any that satisfied me.” Since I wasn’t pushing him away, Duncan was visibly relaxing. “Though there’s an old myth that for every one of my kind, there’s one of yours, meant to contain our drives. Tame us, so to speak.” I groaned. “If the word soulmate comes out of your mouth, I think I’m going to be sick.” His rich laughter rolled through me. “That would require me having one, so no, I wouldn’t call it that.” He grew contemplative, and his thumb stretched to caress my side. “I like to think we satisfy each other’s…cravings.” Though I tried to look superior and disdainful, I failed miserably. He was too close, too gorgeous, and too sincere for me not to smile. “All I want is a good night’s sleep. You think you can give that to me?” Duncan’s answering smile came with a shiver. I was starting to really love those. “I think I’d love the chance to 147

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try.” A chance. I mulled it over, trying to ignore the jealous glances from the staff around me. All Duncan had to do was crook his finger, and he could have anybody in the hospital he wanted. Anybody in the entire Bay Area. He wanted me. Turning around, I leaned over the counter in order to grab the next chart to need my attention. I deliberately let my free hand glide over his. “I think we can do that.” The end of my shift couldn’t come fast enough.

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VIVIEN DEAN

Vivien Dean has had a lifetime love affair with stories. A multi-published author, her books have been EPPIE finalists, Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Nominees, and reader favorites. After spending her twenties and early thirties traveling, she has finally settled down and currently resides in northern California with her husband and two children. For more information about Vivien and her books, visit her website at http://www.viviendean.com *

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Detective Brady Lindstrom deals in death, and not just because he’s a homicide cop with the slaughter of a century to solve. Ten years ago, vampires murdered his lover. Ever since, he’s looked over his shoulder, ready for vampires to strike again. Or maybe just the one he loved.

Exhausted and angry about the needless deaths he has to investigate, Brady worries that the killers he’s looking for aren’t even human. Those fears are compounded by an unexpected visitor, the battered and nearly broken Cole Singer, the lover he’d long ago given up for dead. When Cole offers to trade information on the killers in exchange for sanctuary, Brady realizes he doesn’t have a choice. He just can’t turn his back on the face of the only man he’s ever loved. Even if he’s a vampire…

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