He smelled of sea air, lemon soap, and the clean tang of fresh sweat before it had time to dry—like sex without the dark aftertaste of musk.
Javi pulled off Cloister’s T-shirt and left it to tangle around the bulk of his cast while he kissed his way down the span of his chest. He lingered on the tight pink bud of a nipple—the scrape of his teeth over it was enough to make Cloister squirm under him—and then down to the tangle of scars, ink, and bruises that decorated Cloister’s ribs.
He’d picked out the pattern of the ink over the last few months. Without the scars, it would have been a shitty tribal straight off the wall, the lines blown and ink faded—just what a stroppy fourteen-year-old Cloister would have picked, Javi supposed. It was the spray of scar tissue through it that made it into art, the disruption that was beautiful.
“You and roads really don’t mix,” Javi said as he ran his tongue over one of the slick raised commas of scar tissue that floated on top of the bruise. He slid his hand down Cloister’s stomach and under the waistband of his sweats. Then he wrapped his fingers around the hard, interested rise of Cloister’s cock. “Have you thought about office work?”
Cloister laughed as he worked the sleeve of his T-shirt down over his cast. He tossed it to the side. “Can you imagine me in a suit?” he asked.
It was a joke. Out of uniform, Cloister’s wardrobe consisted of old jeans and old T-shirts he’d grabbed from charity shops. The only clothes he spent money on were his boots and his sneakers, and that was only so he could wear them down until they looked like he found them in a trash heap.
Still, Javi abruptly could imagine Cloister in business clothes. The image of Cloister in a well-cut suit, tight across the shoulders and cut close to his lean hips, sank through Javi’s mind to the place he kept his fantasies—big hands splayed obediently against cold glass, the crack of command in Cloister’s voice as he growled in Javi’s ear, and now Cloister in a suit Javi could peel off him.
“You like my suits,” he said.
“You look good in suits,” Cloister said raggedly. His hips lifted off the bed as Javi stroked him. “I look like a cat someone dressed up, half-strangled and all pissed.”
Javi still liked the idea.
“Call me Javier,” he said as he let go of Cloister’s cock—and wrung a low groan of protest out of Cloister’s chest as he did so—and closed his eyes.
“Why?”
“Because I told you to.”
“Fuck off.”
Javi pushed himself up. He straddled Cloister’s waist and leaned over him, his hands buried in Cloister’s cropped tangle of blond hair and his face close enough to feel Cloister’s breath against his jaw. He closed his eyes.
“Because I asked you to.”
“Javier.”
There was no poetry to it when Cloister said it, no quicksilver sensuality in the way he held the syllables in his mouth. It was just a name, drawled by a man whose Spanish had a thicker Montana accent than his English did. The only thing clever about his tongue was the way he kissed.
Even with Javi’s eyes closed, it was still Cloister under him, not anyone else. Thank his grandmother’s God for that.
“Is everything okay?” Cloister asked. He grazed his hand down Javi’s ribs to his hip and hooked it into the waistband of his trousers.
Javi opened his eyes and looked down at Cloister. It wasn’t okay. He’d thought Kincaid couldn’t hurt him anymore, and he’d been wrong… again. And this time there was no Saul to step in and, for reasons Javi would probably never get, give him an out.
But right now Javi thought maybehewas okay. He wasn’t sure why, and he was still pissed off at Kincaid’s games, but suddenly he didn’t feel as though he would drown in all his old mistakes, not when he had so many new ones to make.
He tilted Cloister’s head back and slashed a hard kiss over his mouth.
“You’re not naked,” he said. “So not yet.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE CASTwas a pain in the ass. It wasn’t even that Cloister couldn’t use his hand—he had another hand, his mouth, his tongue—but it just got in the way. The plaster was heavy, rough to the touch, and Cloister kept misjudging where it was or how much effort to put into moving it. It felt like his last growth spurt, when his previously reliable map of his body was defaced overnight and he knocked over things that never used to be within arm’s reach.
“Sorry,” he muttered as he banged the cast against the headboard for the second time. He sealed the apology with a kiss, his good hand cupped around the back of Javi’s neck to pull him down.
“Do I need to cuff you, Deputy?” Javi asked. He caught Cloister’s arms just below his elbows and pinned them to the bed on either side of Cloister’s head. His lean face, all elegant bones and a scruff of fresh stubble, was intent as he looked down at Cloister. “Be still. Behave.”
Javi pressed his weight down to underline the command, the long muscles in his arms tight under his skin until Cloister actually felt restrained. It made his chest tighten—the kick of fight-or-flight adrenaline, but diluted to a tint of itself—and his cock ache as his balls tightened eagerly between his legs.
One was instinct, the other a learned response. One day he was going to actually get cuffed as part of a training exercise, and he would have to explain how his cock had just gotten mixed signals.
