Chapter Thirteen
The Leland deployment was T plus 26 hours. As I lay in his bed, listening to him in the shower, I wondered if he was planning to end this soon. It had gone on longer than I’d expected when I followed him here but then I’d thought this would just be a fuck and nothing more.
Jesus Christ, I hoped he wasn’t about to tell me that’s all, folks.
I couldn’t deny something different than I’d ever shared with a man was happening here. More substantive, more real, and a whole lot more frightening. He was drilling into me to depths I’d never let a man go. Hell, I’d never met a man before who even wanted to. It scared the hell out of me to feel vulnerable and open to someone and to want to be.
That thought was no stranger than the last hours had been. Maybe it was because he was so damn inquisitive and talkative, and I often found myself unexpectedly sharing a great deal about myself though he shared nothing about him.
Even his curiosity was a seductive thing. It kept me in his bed, for giant chunks of time doing nothing but talking about me, when usually first light I’m Johnny out the door, quick to leave.
I’d never been willing to open up about myself to anyone, even with Zac and we’d been long-time lovers, and yet Leland had some magical key—beatific smile, interested bright eyes—ask and then click and unlocked. It didn’t matter what it was that caught his notice, there were no off-limit zones and I’d spent as much time here letting him rummage around in my head as I did letting him fuck my brains out.
And, oh yeah, the man fucked like a warrior. A rare find, and I was hell-bent to get every drop I could before this was over. If the price for the wants of my cock were the thoughts in my head then so be it.
Stretching back on my pillow, I groaned from the memories of the best fucking I’d ever had. He was my match in all ways.
Sexual.
Intellectual.
And the cherry on the cake, stamina.
Thank God for power hours at the gym since I was pretty sure whatever his profession was involved sitting behind a desk, running something, to complement what had clearly been an Ivy League education and his old-money air of superiority.
Thinker not a fighter.
Bullshit, he was a warrior in bed.
Fuck, he was damn near the perfect man.
The water shut off in the shower.
A minute later, Leland appeared in the bathroom doorway, still naked—hallelujah—with a towel on his head he used to vigorously rub the dampness out of his hair.
He tossed the fluffy white hotel cotton aside, chuckled, and then made a long sigh. “God, I’m exhausted. Not even the shower helped. I’ve got to get some sleep. Can’t fight it any longer.”
I tensed, praying that wasn’t one of Leland’s subtle openings leading to a discussion of me leaving here. “I’m tired, too. It’s four in the morning. Shut-eye sounds great to me.”
He came to the bed and reclined on a hip beside me, staring down at my face. “This hasn’t been anything I anticipated.”
I laughed. “Me either.”
“I can’t remember the last time I stayed awake two days straight.” He frowned. “Don’t you have someone expecting you somewhere?”
Oh fuck, this was the start of the brush-off. “No. Never.” Which was a lie, but what man wants to admit to his lover he had to sneak off to shoot a text to his mother not to worry over his absence? “Do you have someone expecting you?”
His eyes widened with mirth and frustration. “Yes. Always. I had meetings all day today that I cancelled. My cell is loaded with messages. I don’t even want to check my e-mail. I’ve just been ignoring everything with you.”
Unsure where this was going, I said, “Should I be flattered or afraid?”
Rich laughter this time rumbled from deep in his chest and ran across my flesh like warm massage stones. “Guys giving you trouble, are they? I bet you’ve left a trail of broken hearts and stalking dicks in the wake of every place you’ve ever been. I’m not surprised. You’re a fascinating man. And an incredible lover.”
He said shit like that out of nowhere with such sincerity that it made my insides giddy like a freaking teenage girl.
“There have been a few,” I replied wryly. “What’s your story? You got a man stalking you with his dick?”
It was a little late to ask that, I usually didn’t care, but I waited alertly for this answer.
He nodded, amused. “Oh, definitely.” He kissed my chest and then peeked up at me. “He’s lying in my bed right now.”
I sighed in frustration. “You are the worst tease I’ve ever met, Leland.”
He ran his hand from my torso, brushing my cock on his way to my thigh. “You make it hard for me to resist the compulsion. Though I wasn’t teasing about the sleep part.”
I smiled, but it was annoying that I could never worm my way into his personal details and how effortlessly he turned the tables each time I tried to.
My irritation lasted only until his face moved in the direction of his hand caressing my leg. I shivered in anticipation of Leland’s mouth on my cock, and my eyes drifted closed. Instead of lips surrounding my dick, I felt a tongue run the outline of the scar on my thigh.
I opened my eyes to find Leland studying it.
“What happened here?” he asked.
I touched the puckered flesh on the outside of my leg. “The bullet went in here.” I moved my hand to touch the healed flesh on the inside only a few inches from my balls. “It came out here. It doesn’t look bad now, but it was a mess. A few inches higher and I would have lost my junk.”
“I, for one, am very glad that you didn’t,” he said intensely before kissing the ridged skin on the inside of my leg. “When did this happen? Where?”
“Seven years ago. The where I can’t tell you. Got me shipped stateside for six months. That’s how long it took me to get back the full use of my leg.”
He settled next to me, close to my pillow. “Is that why you left the military?”
“No, the military left me.”
His golden brows furrowed. “Are you going to explain that one?”
I held his eyes with mine. “Are you going to suck my cock? It’s not kind to play down there and let me think you are then not do it.”
“We’d probably sleep better if I did. That shower didn’t do anything I wanted it to. You got me hard again just by saying cock.”
Laughing, he sank back against his pillows and covered the lower half of his body with a sheet in his I prefer to converse way.
Tease.
Fine, Leland, we’ll talk.
“So really, why did you resign your commission?” he asked again.
“Fuck, you’re tenacious. If I answer you, will it get your dick in my mouth sooner?”
That only made him laugh harder and, damn, my grin slipped through. He brushed my cheek with his thumb, circled the line of my mouth, kissed me and then broke contact again.
“I don’t know why you are so committed to maintaining this air of strong, emotionless brute. You are anything but that. I find who you are inside, Graham, as captivating as your body, so indulge me.”
How could someone hold a defense against an assault like that? I sure as hell couldn’t. Christ, I was in bed with the most gorgeous piece of ass I’d ever had and he wanted to waste more minutes talking about me.
I looked away and took in a deep breath. “This isn’t easy for me. I hope you know that. Loyalty isn’t just a word for me. It’s a tenet I live and breathe. I’m loyal to my country, the military, the people I care about, and the clients I work for. Loyalty. I value it when it’s given and I value it in me.”
“I knew that about you before you said it. And it goes without saying no matter what it is you think you shouldn’t say to me.”
“My last mission was fucked up on a lot of levels. The objective. The resources. The tactical plan. And the rules of engagement. Bad intel and bad support. It was starting to feel like it was more important to the command structure that we get in and out in an arbitrarily correct way than me doing everything I could to achieve my objective and not to lose a man. I can’t talk about the specifics. Not ever. But it was fucked up, I nearly lost my best friend, and I got that bullet in my leg keeping Dillon from going into a body bag. The mission was wrong, the restrictions unacceptable, the risk under assessed, the result failure, and they awarded me a fucking medal for it. I couldn’t do it anymore. If they wouldn’t let me do everything in my power to achieve my objective or protect my guys then I wouldn’t lead them into combat anymore.”
“I can’t imagine being in Special Forces and doing things 24/7 the army way. Did you like military life?”
“I loved it. It was how I lived since I was fourteen. Military prep school, West Point, and I was in for the long haul. I was a soldier’s son and it was the life I wanted even though the military didn’t always want me. There is still a lot of old guard not agreeable with having a gay man rising in the ranks. Subtle things. Always there. I could shrug it off, do my duty, but I couldn’t shrug off the deteriorating security of my men. I addressed my concerns with my superiors after my last deployment and shortly thereafter I was politely offered a medical discharge for my leg. I took it.”
We were both quiet as he absorbed all that. I could see on his face him thinking it through and it made me curious what his reaction would be to what I’d just shared.
“They didn’t force you out. Why leave voluntarily?”
“It was better for me to part still friends with the military. If I’d stayed longer I might have left hating it and with my beliefs in shreds.”
He pondered that for a moment and then exhaled loudly. “Wow. Giving up something you loved for treating you badly so you can still love it. You are a complex man. The hardest decision I ever had to make because of my sexual orientation was whether to go to my high school prom with a boyfriend or a girlfriend.”
The tension inside was replaced by hyper-focus on him because the prom date comment threw me for a loop. “And what did you decide?”
He grimaced. “I went with my sister. I’m not sure which category she falls into.”
We both chuckled over that, but I was not really sure why I was laughing. Talking about my career in the military was exhausting. The boyfriend-girlfriend comment was unsettling and needed further exploring since bisexuals were problematic in their own right and had their own no-fly zone with me. And his follow-up to my grim shit had been nonsensical, nonjudgmental, unrevealing of his thoughts, and alluringly him.
His body molded into mine, and his mouth started wandering the left side of my chest. His tongue swirled in a pattern, then lifted. “What’s with the tattoo? Olivia 1996.”
Shit, I didn’t want to go there, not now when he’d made me feel too open. “Olivia was my sister.”
“It’s the only tattoo you have. Why only one?” he asked quietly.
“I only had one sister.” It took me a moment to collect myself enough to say for the first time what I had never said to anyone. “She’s the only person I’ve ever failed and lost. The one soldier I didn’t bring home. And I will live for her, honor her, and remember that always.”
“What happened to her?”
My jaw stiffened as I struggled to maintain my iron control and I sure as hell didn’t know why I was telling some guy I’d picked up in a restaurant my most personal shit.
“How did she die?” he asked, prodding me to continue.
I avoided his eyes. “We were twins. Always inseparable. It happened when we were eighteen. I’d been shipped off to boarding school and she went to our local high school. She was picked up by six guys, part of the neighborhood lowlife, thrown in a truck, raped repeatedly, and left for dead. She died two days later in the hospital. It was my fault. If I had been there I could have stopped it.”
His expression tightened with his withheld reaction to that. “It’s not your fault and you couldn’t have stopped it. Six to one. If you’d been there they might have killed you, too. Have you ever considered that?”
I lifted my chin. “Yes, and if it had gone that way, so be it. It wouldn’t be as bad as regretting every day not being there for her.”
Leland turned into me looking ragged from too much being unloaded like a bomb out of nowhere on top of him, when he never appeared overrun by anything.
“I would regret you not being here, Graham, and I’m pretty sure your family would, too, so shut up about fault and don’t ever tell me again it would be better for you to have been there even if they’d killed you. It wasn’t your fault. As capable as you are, you might not have prevented a damn thing, that’s something we’ll never know, but I can say without a doubt it wasn’t your fault and that I’m glad you’re here.”
I sank my teeth into my lower lip, shaking my head. Fuck, tears burned in my throat. I didn’t want to let them flow and sure as hell didn’t want him to see them. But he was the first person ever to say it wasn’t my fault and that they were glad I was here, and when Leland made a pronouncement it was wholly believable.
“You are ten times the man inside you are on the outside, and that says a lot.” He brushed his thumb from the corner of my mouth up my cheek then ran his hand down my jawline to rest on my neck. “If you don’t hurry up, Graham, and let me fuck you, I won’t be able to take it.”
Laughter rattled through the emotion-clogged passages of my chest—tangential sexual comment out of nowhere. His reactions to things at times were weird, but then there was a lot about Leland I found odd.
I chanced a glance at him and the way he looked at me made my entire blood supply concentrate in my cock. I fought to clear my mind of everything, each grim recitation he’d dragged me through, to focus on one thing: what it would feel like sinking my cock into him.
I needed to shake off my mood, put away my regrets for another day, and there were tonics in the world that cured pain; fucking Leland worked brilliantly that way.
He pulled me down, or rather made moves to tell me what he wanted that I obeyed, then he ran his hands up the inside of my thighs, spreading me wide so he could see everything full view.
My mind wasn’t completely empty of our discussion and other shit, but him working with his tongue to tease my ass, running me from my balls up my crack and around my hole shot sensation through me so powerfully that even before he took me full length in his mouth my mind went blank.
“Come on, baby,” he said, working his tongue like a virtuoso. “Let it all go. It feels better when all you think about is me.”
Conceited and a control freak this go around.
Nope, didn’t care.
His mouth teased at my hole before his tongue pushed inward. Oh fuck, there wasn’t anything but Leland when he touched me like this and I was pretty damn sure nothing could ever make it feel better.
I put an arm under my head so I could watch him work his magic on my balls and cock. My head floated back and I started moaning from the unadulterated pleasure of the way he penetrated with his fingers.
“Oh yeah, fuck yes,” I moaned, flexing into his mouth as he sank down over and over again on my pulsing cock. I took hold of his golden hair, gripping and begging for more as I pushed into him with my thrusting hips.
Fuck, I loved the sound of him slurping and sucking my dick. Such a human sound that made him seem less perfect, as much held by his lust as me, and I wanted to come in his throat, feel the greedy moves of his mouth lapping every wayward drop he could get.
Oh fuck—my thoughts made my body shake more fiercely. “Get your dick up here, babe. I want your cock in my mouth. Now,” I ordered.
I was a panting, shaking mess on the edge of orgasm, and my skin burned as I waited for him to turn on the bed, angle on his hip, and bring my prize to my lips. He pressed his tongue flat against my shaft before he thrust his rod deep in my throat.
I wanted him in me every way I could have him: my mouth, my ass—hell, he could drill a new hole if wanted to.
Groaning, his head lifted from my throbbing length as he worked his cock in and out of the tight tunnel of my mouth. One hand brought his mouth back on my shaft as the other went to his rear opening.
“No seizing the initiative,” Leland growled. “Keep your finger from my hole. I already have this worked out in my head how I want it to go.”
“Thinker not a fucker,” I teased because, fuck, he gave me the opening and I could tell by his words he intended for me to bottom first.
He pulled his mouth away from my rod and pinned me on the bed, his hands on my shoulders.
“Thinker not a fucker? Really? I haven’t heard any complaints from you yet.”
He started pushing his balls into my base as our cocks ground against each other. His sporadic flashes of playfulness were something new to me, it surprised my impulse to answer in kind, but it didn’t make him any less hot or me less willing to be fucked by him.
I slowly raised my gaze to his and the first contact, as always, hit me like a heat-seeking missile. Those amber orbs were that powerful, and they enticed to let him do whatever he wanted this round. My cocked ached in a way I’d never experienced before, and all he had to do was look at me.
OK, that was bit over the top, but that didn’t change the fact that I wanted him more than any man I’d ever known, that he was naked, rhythmically stroking my dick with his, and had a sexual appetite that matched my own.
“What did you do with everything?”
Leland’s voice penetrated the bliss of my cock and caused my eyes to open. He was rummaging atop the nightstand, looking flustered and frustrated.
“It’s in the drawer. Exactly where it always is.”
He jerked it open. “It’s my room. Don’t do that. I hate when things I need are put away.”
His tongue did a fast dart across his lips when he at last had the condoms and the lube. He moved with disconnected jerks—ripping the foil, prepping the rubber, tossing the foil on the ground, then sheathing himself. He was a bit set in his ways, too, though he’d get pissed off if I said that now because I could tell by how he lubed us up he was one horny, overly impatient, desperate-for-my-ass guy.
Oh fuck, he was ragged and ready. He spilled enough lube to slick up a gay bar.
“You had better be ready for this. I am fucking you hard,” he warned as he positioned my body, shoving a pillow beneath me so my hole was just where he liked it.
“Do you always have to fiddle and make everything perfect, Lee?”
I felt his slick fingers in my ass, though I didn’t need the massage or the spreading, but he couldn’t skip a step if his life depended on it.
“Fiddle? Did you really say fiddle?” he jeered.
“My ass is in the air. And you want to discuss word choice. A hard fuck. I’m waiting. Or do you plan to do your hair next—”
He slammed into me without delay and I arched up, meeting the power of his thrust. He froze and the shudders reverberated through both our bodies. Always there was a brief pause once he was deep in me as though he thought if he moved too suddenly after nailing me he’d hurt me. For some reason the ecstasy that claimed his face as he fought his own raging desire made me want to laugh almost as much as he was driving me crazy.
“Do it again. I hardly felt that,” I growled.
That let loose a brutal invasion that was glorious. My cock ached from the friction of his body and as our skin slicked up with sweat his scent heightened with the smell of our sex in the room, adding to my raging need to nail him next.
My throbbing cock bouncing on my abdomen beckoned me, and I stroked myself in long, tight motions matching his thrusts in me.
He leaned in and kissed me hard before biting my lip and rearing back. “Come while I fuck you,” he murmured in breathless spurts. “I want to taste you.”
His eyes locked on my hand pumping faster. I was jerking myself off with the same fury he thrust into my hole. My cum shot in streams across my abdomen and Leland bucked harder between my legs.
I smoothed it across my flesh because I knew it teased him and then scooped up a hefty amount and lifted my flavor to him.
He sucked my finger clean and latched on wanting more.
And that was it.
The fucker came.