He stood at the top of the front stairs, looking down at me from on high. At the door, I paused, looked around my childhood home, then walked out the door.
CHAPTER 2
DANIEL
San Diego,Summer 2001
Paper rustled as I flipped over yet another page in the file I was reading through, having given up on the screen hours ago when the words blurred together, and now they were doing it again. I’d been at it for hours—more than I could count easily.
The chair creaked and groaned as I leaned back, pressing the heels of my palms into my eye sockets. My back, popping like twisted bubble wrap, joined the creaking and groaning.
“Hey! Whattya doin’ tonight?”
I jumped; the chair righted itself. The voice irritated me, mostly because he planted his large ass on the piles of reports I’d spent the whole day painstakingly researching, writing, and printing, only for him to come along and destroy them.
Ignoring the question, I looked up at him, motioned toward the mess he’d made, and asked, “You mind?”
“What?” he asked, looking over his shoulder.
“Move your ass, Parker.”
“Jesus, someone needs to get laid.”
“Someone needs to move their ass off an entire day’s work before I send him to Siberia for his next deployment.”
The Texan shivered visibly, and I couldn’t help but laugh at him. He hated cold weather. On every mission and deployment I’d been on with him that included even slightly chilly weather, he’d bitched the entire trip until the guys on the team hazed him into shutting his trap.
“You would dare!”
“Try me.”
He stared at me, contemplating whether I meant business. Then the Dom in him came out, and he said, “I can always turn you over my knee and paddle your ass.”
“You could. I might even like it, but that doesn’t keep you from freezing your balls off when I scrounge up a mission to send you on to the frozen tundra.”
“You’re a heartless little shit sometimes, you know that?”
“I’m aware.”
“Go out with me.”
Parker Holt and I met at a kink club several years prior. Amazing sex could be difficult to find when you had to hide who you are. So I put up with him and his bossy, controlling ways.
“Okay. No brainer. My question is this: who will I be going home with?” Or who he would go home with.
“You know I hate limiting myself.”
Which is why I never understood his decision to join the military.
“I’m very aware of how much you like group play.”
“And I know how much you don’t. So, my offer is this: we hit the clubs, we both find a sweet little morsel to drag home…”
“And if we don’t?”
“Then we take advantage of the chemistry we have on hand.”
“So, now I’m a backup plan.”
