It happened in the space of a heartbeat.One moment Spook was all agitation and wild panic, the next his fists were raised and a right hook hammered Xane across the jaw, making stars explode inside his ears and his vision twizzle like he was inside a kaleidoscope.Dammit he had hard fists!
Even falling, Xane refused to loosen his grip.He went down, but he took Spook along with him.Sprawled across one another, they wrestled; elbows and knees flying, shins and hips making collisions.The carpet roughed up Xane’s skin, and he wound up tasting far too much of both Spook’s and his own hair.
“Stop it.Fucking get your head out of your arse.”
“Then get off me.”
“Like hell.I’m not letting you run.Slap a restraining order on the bitch and be done with it.”
“I’ll never be fucking done with it.How could you think…?You know what she did.”
“Yes, but the only one granting her power over you now is you.”
Wallop.Another punch slammed his head against the side of the bed.The pain blistered along the back of Xane’s neck, and ruptured his intention to hold back on the aggression.Fuck that.Fuck getting beaten and bruised.He was trying to help here.
An iron-tang tingled on his tongue.
Xane smashed an elbow into Spook’s ribs, and followed up with an upper cut.He used the moment of breathlessness in his opponent to pin Spook’s hip beneath his thigh.“Will you fucking stop so we can reason this out?”
But no…
Spook was like a pressure cooker whose lid had just blown off.He writhed like physical contact between them burned him.Then he caught Xane several more blows around the head and across his back, his anger and anxiety turning him into a masterclass of feral prowess.Spook Mortensen had always been a particularly gorgeous man.Furious, he was like a primal god.A smouldering, golden being forged of white precious metals and castrated pain.Xane was smitten even as he grappled him into submission.Spook might be the more agile of them, but he had a weight advantage.“You’re not going anywhere.”
Spook’s teeth tore into his shoulder.
Shit!
Xane froze.
Shit!
“Really?”he rasped, his eyes rolling up, while their lids dropped.His heart banged against his rib cage.There were few things that undid him completely with quite such efficiency as being bitten.Spook, goddamn him, knew that.“You’re gonna play it like that?Dirty?”
To be fair, that wasn’t perhaps how Spook had intended it.He wasn’t exactly reasoning at the minute, and aggression was definitely taking the top seat.Didn’t change how Xane responded.
The crazy bastard bit him again and this time a place far more intimate than the side of his neck.
It was a curious weakness, but everyone had them.The fight drained right out of Xane, as taut pleasure replaced it.Not that it had ever been his rage driving this battle.He looked down at the livid mark now taunting him from the flat of his pec, and the feral glare of the man who’d made it, and as he did, he was transported back into the past.Back to another day, another time that Spook had been braced above him.They’d both been a lot younger then, with few lines worn into the skin around their eyes.Spook’s anger then had been just as livid.
Siv.Xane had never met her.Knew her only as the woman responsible for driving Spook right to the edge, of driving him out of his homeland, away from his family and anyone he’d known in his youth.
A woman his friend had loved once and would have done anything for.
Before she sold him out.
Love.It was why it’d been so hard for Spook to move on, to rebuild.A decade later and he still couldn’t let his guard down enough to share his heart with anyone.
Because of her, he constantly second-guessed himself.Because of her, he’d shut himself off, and locked his libido down tight.
Spook was not, by nature, an uptight person.Just a little bit of a sadist.
As if to remark upon that point, Spook hooked his little finger into the ring piercing through Xane’s nipple and tugged.Xane hissed hard through his teeth.Damn, that felt good.
Dani didn’t really play rough.Leastways, not proper rough.And Luthor’s idea of rough and tumble fell firmly in the category of horseplay.It never had an edge, never crossed any lines.It was never nasty.It never left the sickly sweet taste of fear in his mouth.
Not content with bruising his nipples, Spook scraped his teeth down Xane’s abs.Lower.Lower.His black-painted fingernails dug hard into the bones of Xane’s hips.Lower again, so that they were pushing the definitions of what was acceptable between them way beyond their limits.
Xane ought to have pushed him off.This was, after all, a distraction, and means to an end.An end that would see Spook walking out of that door with his passport and heading to the airport.But he didn’t do it.
