“Well, I wasn’t wrong about you being a sweet-talker, was I?” Wade’s smile seemed real, but a little sad. “So, yeah. I’ll come with you.” He took a step backward toward his truck. “That’s what’s going to get me in trouble, isn’t it?”
Jericho woke to his phone ringing, fumbled for it, stabbed blindly at the screen, and managed to bring it to his ear. “Crewe,” he mumbled.
“I want you at an all-agency meeting at eight,” Kayla told him without preamble. “I’ve been up all night and my brain’s fried, so I need someone else there to pick up on anything I miss.”
He fought for consciousness. “Eight? What time is it now?”
“Seven thirty.”
Of course it was. Jericho shifted around to sit more-or-less upright and plant his feet on the floor, and only then did he realize that his mattress felt different. His blankets weren’t moving like they normally would. He peered over his shoulder, and Wade was there, lying on his back, one arm behind his head, looking up at Jericho with bright, alert eyes. Jericho blinked, then smiled. Wade was in his bed, where he belonged. The day before had been a mess, but things had turned around as soon as Wade appeared.
“So you’ll be here?” Kayla prompted.
“Might be a bit late. Save a cup of coffee for me.” Then Jericho ended the call, bent over and kissed Wade’s bare shoulder, nibbled up toward his neck—and was pushed away with a firm hand.
“You need to go to work,” Wade said.
“Since when do you care about my attendance record?” Jericho said, and tried to lean back in.
But Wade held him at bay. “I don’t care when you’re doing the caring for us. But when you stop caring, somebody has to step in, so I guess it’ll have to be me.”
It was sweet, in a way, thinking of them as that much of a team. But also stupid and frustrating. “What about if we just both didn’t care? Is there a reason we can’t do that?”
Wade’s smile was fond, but patronizing. “How many times have you flip-flopped on all this since you got back here? If you want me to believe you really don’t care about your job, then you need to keep not caring about it for a period of time. A couple weeks at least. But until then, you’re on don’t-care probation, and that means you shouldn’t be allowed to screw things up too bad, in case you change your mind and want to go back to being a good little officer.”
“I don’t actually think it’s your job to babysit me like that.”
“Oh. So I’m not allowed to tell you things about your job, like that you should get there on time, but you can tell me about my job?”
“Babysitting me isn’t your job.”
“I’m self-employed.” Wade leaned back into his pillows, clearly satisfied. “My job is whatever I say it is.”
Jericho lurched off the bed, not worrying about how he might be jouncing Wade. “Fine. I don’t want to mess around with you anymore anyway.”
“Yeah, you do,” Wade said, but Jericho refused to turn around and see his smug grin. He just stalked off to the shower, climbed in, sudsed up his face and hair with the same generic bodywash—and then felt a draft of cool air as the shower curtain shifted.
“Have you never seen Psycho?” he demanded, still facing the wall in front of him. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to sneak up on people in the shower?”
“I think it’s a great idea.” Wade’s breath was cool against the shower-heated skin of Jericho’s neck. “Turn around.”
“What happened to your concern about my attendance record?” Jericho asked as he turned, his body wet and slick against Wade’s.
“I decided I could be quick. I’ll have you coming and then going inside five minutes.”
Jericho’s cock was already hardening, straining toward Wade, but he felt as if he should protest on principle. “I’m not that out of control.”
“No?” Wade raised an eyebrow, confident and beautiful. “Count to three hundred. One-steamboat, two-steamboat style.”
“Three hundred?”
“That’s five minutes.” Wade kissed Jericho’s jawline, then growled, “Count.”
And god help him, Jericho counted. He was in the twenties as Wade slid down his body, in the forties, with his voice rising a little as Wade teased, licked, sucked just the head of his cock. By sixty Wade’s mouth surrounded him, hot and wet and demanding, and of course there was an extra flick of his tongue at sixty-nine.
Jericho leaned back, bracing his shoulders on the cool ceramic tiles, and tried to think about the numbers, not what Wade was doing with his tongue, his lips, his hands. “Ninety-two,” he gasped as Wade slid a finger past his balls, up the crack of his ass, and then eased inside. And that was the end of any shred of subtlety or restraint. Wade’s mouth and finger synchronized for a full-on assault against Jericho’s self-control and the numbers got even trickier to keep track of.
“Fuck it,” Jericho managed when he stumbled over one forty seven. He wasn’t going to last to anywhere near three hundred, and he was way too far gone to worry about his lack of stamina. When he needed to stay hard, he could stay— Oh Jesus, Wade’s free arm wrapped around Jericho’s waist, tugging him closer, holding him, restraining him, and there was a second finger added to his ass, a moment of burn and stretching before they found their target together, and Jericho was done.
