25
UNLOCKED
“I THINK THAT’S the last of it,” Dylan said, grunting as he dropped his end of the tallboy onto the floor of my foyer.
Correction—our foyer. It was midmorning Saturday, and after dragging ourselves from his bed and moving the last of his furniture from his small apartment, he was officially moved in. Well, not including the stuff still sitting in his place in Florida, but he said he’d deal with that later.
Dylan’s hand went to his lower back as he straightened, and my lips twitched in amusement.
“You okay there, old man?” I asked. “Not gonna keel over, are you?”
He held up a finger in response, and I couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled out.
“A little heavy lifting and the man is down for the count—”
“A little?”
“It’s not like we had a huge house to move,” I said. “We might need to work on your stamina. I’m willing to go all night with you if that’s what it takes. Work you hard and deep.”
Dylan shot me a glare and shuffled down the hall. “Haha, you’re hilarious, asshole. It’s not the furniture; it’s the fact that I worked myself hard and deep for you that I’m a little worse for wear this morning. Where do you keep the aspirin?”
“That’s the drawer I know,” I said as I walked past him into the kitchen and opened the drawer by the fridge. I took out the pills, grabbed a water out of the fridge, and then set them in front of him. “Ibuprofen’s better for muscle aches. And I’m sorry, we should’ve waited—”
“No, we shouldn’t have waited until we got back here. The whole point was to give it a send-off. And boy did we. You know, I don’t even think Derek had me work some of these muscles—” He stopped and laughed when he caught the expression on my face. “I meant at the gym.”
“I’ve never heard the bed called the gym before, but…” I grumbled.
Dylan swallowed the pills, and when he’d finished off half the water bottle, he grinned. “I have to admit, this jealous side is kinda hot.”
I reached for the top of his jeans and tugged him forward, and when he was flush against me, I ground my hips against his.
“Does that feel jealous to you?” I asked.
“No…it feels amazing,” Dylan said, and wound his arms around my neck. When he winced, I frowned.
“Aww, poor babe. You really are sore, aren’t you?”
He pouted, and those delicious lips of his were more than I could resist. I took them in a hard, swift kiss as I wrapped an arm around his waist and kneaded my fingers into his lower back.
“Oh God,” he said as he pulled his mouth away. “That feels—”
I did it again, and Dylan groaned in a way that made my dick hard.
“Good?” I asked.
“Yesss…”
I continued to dig my fingers into his back and then ran a firm line up his spine to his neck, where I massaged the tense cords there. Dylan let his head fall back as he rolled his hips against me, and I smiled at his obvious enjoyment. He certainly knew how to relax into a moment, and the taut muscles under my fingertips definitely needed to be worked out.
I looked past his shoulder to the TV that was playing in the background, and as Dylan’s lips found the side of my neck, a familiar face flashed across the screen and I froze. The arms I had wrapped around Dylan tensed, and my jaw locked up like a vise as the headline popped up on the screen.
EXCLUSIVE: NEW INFORMATION ON ACE’S BOY TOY UNLOCKED.
But that wasn’t what had me all rigor mortis. No, I thought as the show cut to commercial. It was the woman whose face they’d run that headline under. The woman who was seated in some studious-looking room, with her hair straightened, perfect makeup applied, radiating an innocence she certainly hadn’t had a week ago when she’d been blackmailing me for a cool two mil. And fuck, the idea of what that bitch was about to say almost had me herding Dylan out of the kitchen and back to the U-Haul we’d just finished unpacking.
“Hey,” Dylan said as he lifted his lips from my neck to look at me. He’d probably noticed my dick had flagged and my attention was elsewhere, and considering I usually had trouble focusing on breathing when he was near, I was sure he’d picked up on my change in mood. Fucking great.
“What’s wrong?” he asked as he pulled away from me. When he caught sight of my face, his smile dropped. “Ace? What is it? What’s the matter?”
I tore my eyes off the commercial playing, and when I found his gaze I opened my mouth to tell him, but in my periphery I caught the intro to the entertainment show and it was too late. Dylan had seen the direction of my stare and pivoted to take a look at what had stolen my attention from him, and as his spine straightened to the point where it looked painful, I wondered what was going through his mind.
“Sex, lies, and dirty secrets were unlocked this past week,” the announcer said. “We’ve got all the details on the mysterious man in Ace Locke’s love life. That’s right. Dylan Prescott, the other half of PresLocke, has been an enigma up until now. With Locke and his camp staying quiet on the whirlwind romance, not much has been learned about the sexy Calvin Klein model, other than he looks muy caliente in a pair of briefs. But we sent Holly to sit down with a woman who knows all about this young man. After all, who would know him better than his own mother…”
Oh shit.
Shit.
Shit.
Fucking shit.
My eyes darted to the man standing an arm’s length away from me, and as I went to reach for him, Dylan began to move. One foot in front of another, he tracked across the space between the kitchen to the couches like a robot with the single-minded focus of getting as close to the mounted screen on the wall as possible.
As the blasted show cut to another set of commercials, to no doubt draw out their thirty minutes of viewership, I watched Dylan come to a dead stop in front of the TV and wait.
Yep, they’d certainly succeeded in doing their job in this house. And while millions across the nation would wait, and sit through the ads for the top story they were keeping until those final few minutes, we waited through commercial upon commercial for them to come back and reveal just how deep they planned to twist the knife to get the top scoop.
There was no other sound in the house except the sales pitches of every item that flashed up on the screen, which I doubted either Dylan or I comprehended. Yeah, the two of us were like goddamn zombies. We’d zoned out on all that was around us, including one another, as we waited for the other shoe to drop.