Chapter Thirty-Seven
Leland
We drove back to the city in silence. I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to. My thoughts were racing from this unexpected change and my senses were in disarray from being alone with Richard.
It wasn’t until we were rolling across urban streets that I noted we weren’t heading in the direction of either the charity or my residence.
Where the fuck was Richard taking me? And why the hell wasn’t he talking? The Richard I knew couldn’t have kept his mouth shut an hour with Leland near.
That thought turned my musing into memories better kept from my head. Richard’s mouth doing other things. Me and my mouth on him. How we fucked. The power and passion I’d never felt with anyone except him. Too many men to count, and never what it’d been with him.
Pain and longing ran jagged through my flesh. I wasn’t cuffed. I could reach out, touch him. He was right there.
A loud metal sound pulled me from my fantasies and I shifted my gaze from Richard to see where we were. He drove down the entry to an underground garage, parked then hit a button, and watched in the rearview until the security door was fully closed behind us.
He removed the key from the ignition and opened his door. The garage was dark except for a faint light above a reinforced entry into somewhere.
What was this place? I made a fast assessment, but the garage wasn’t revealing. Another facility? A place to question me more away from the watchful eyes of the federal agents and Miguel?
When I didn’t open my door, he poked his head back into the vehicle and locked me in his hawklike stare. “Get out of the car, Lee. Like you said, we’re old friends.”
Like I had a choice. I was with a federal agent who could do pretty much whatever the fuck he wanted with me. He had a gun. I didn’t. And foolish bravado perhaps, but I was desperate to see where this was going.
I opened my door and climbed out.
He walked ahead of me into the building and I realized it was a residence. Maybe one of those secure lodgings provided by the government for agents assigned outside US borders.
He went through a Richard ritual I knew well. Unclipped his gun and set it on the kitchen counter. Then his badge billfold. His wallet. His phone. His keys.
The pent-up tension and the delay made me break first. “This is getting tedious, Richard,” I snapped. “You dragging me around Mexico City all afternoon. Where are we and what do you want?”
My question was still hanging in the air as he spun me around and pinned my body to the wall with his. “You want this as much as I do, Lee. Stop pretending you don’t.” Then his mouth crashed into mine, his body grinding into me. He was rock hard, and my cock answered though I willed it not to.
No discussion?
Just straight to fucking?
Really, Richard?
I think not…
Damn it. My body answered back and we fucked with our mouths, ripping at our clothes as if we couldn’t get naked quickly enough to suit either of us. Body locked, we moved toward his bedroom. It was an explosion of hands and tongues, hungry mouths, straining cocks begging to be freed.
It was everything we’d always been.
The rawness.
The electric current.
The rush.
Nothing had changed.
Not this.
Not us.
Not even how Richard shoved me down on the bed. How his large hand pressed again my abs, holding me in place as he reached into the table for the lube and a skin.
No foreplay. No words. No need for either. Only him slicking us up, sheathing himself, and sinking his big beefy cock inside me. It was war with our bodies. It was passion. Ex-lovers as though there’d never been anything bad between us. It was Richard and Leland a year later in Mexico as if we’d never stopped.
Goddamn him.
* * *
There was only moonlight in the bedroom as we lay quietly listening to the sounds of Mexico City beyond. It was never fucking quiet on those streets. But we were quiet.
Our first fuck had been our trademark blend of passionate and angry, our bodies expressing mutual hurt and lust and need. The second was slower, more a give and take, the open sharing of our bodies in the best version of us.
Now that the anger was gone and the desire quenched, all that remained was our intense connection and the ghost of our former friendship.
Richard ran his finger down my cheek, the gesture unlike him and confusing. He was better at hiding his thoughts than he had been.
“You’re still the hottest man I’ve ever seen. Don’t you ever look bad?”
I laughed from both the compliment—that Richard said it aloud at all—and its strangeness. “You look wonderful yourself, Richard. Fit. Healthy. Like you.”
Healthy made him grimace, and he confirmed he’d accurately read what I was referring to by saying, “About what went down at your house a year ago—”
I stopped his words with my hand. “You don’t have to tell me anything, Richard.” Before thinking better of it, I added, “I already know everything. How you got addicted to drugs and what you went through to pull yourself up. You don’t need to explain to me, not a thing. It hurts that you didn’t tell me your problems or let me help, and that we lost each other over something I could have been there for you through.”
Richard closed his eyes, looking as though he was overcome with emotion. “How the fuck do you know that?”
I stretched, my expression relaxed but inside I was going oh, fuck my mouth. “You don’t know me, Richard, if you think I wouldn’t keep track of you after we ended. I didn’t want us over and it was hard for me to let go.”
Richard laughed rich and full like melting chocolate. He was such a handsome man. “I forgot you have money and can buy anything. Even my confidential employment record. Among other things.”
I grinned. “Yes, I have money and other things.”
That feeling of being replete began to recede and worry over being there with him replaced it. Every reason why rekindling our relationship in Mexico City wasn’t safe for either of us flashed in warning inside my head.
He was a federal agent; he couldn’t be seen with me. I was neck deep in the local cartel families; being seen with him was fatal to my existence. Yet here we both were, desire holding us in his bed.
“Do you remember…” Richard whispered against my ear and I let the sensation he stirred in me fade his words because I didn’t want to revive old memories. “We were good once, weren’t we?’
I somehow managed to pull one of my arrogant smirks. “Once? We were good twice and that was just today.”
He laughed, but he was annoyed.
I moved away and sat up. “I need to get out of here. Catch a cab and get home.”
Richard’s face hardened. “That’s right. Your wife. Dinner at seven. What’s that about?”
“Dinner or my wife?”
“Fuck you, Lee. Your wife. You know what I’m asking.”
I’d aggravated him and I hadn’t wanted to.
I pulled on my briefs. “It’s good for my image, and I didn’t want to be alone. Not after you.” For what it’s worth, it was the truth. It was a weird life unexpected result that was the truth.
“We can’t be together at my place again,” Richard stated as he watched me dress. “It was crazy for me to bring you here even this once.”
My pulsed jumped. He wasn’t thinking of this as a one-time thing and I hadn’t known it before that comment. And fuck, he had a lover—his partner in investigation, Miguel.
I settled in a chair and reached for my shoes to give me time to think of my next move. “I agree with the assessment that this was crazy. A better ending than our last, but an ending all the same.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” He sounded alarmed. “I want us together again. We just have to be careful. That was all I was saying.”
Together again?
That was reckless and insane and so tempting.
“I have a wife.” It was lame but all I could think to reply.
“I have a lover.”
My mind whirled. Honesty out of Richard.
“He doesn’t matter,” he added. “He could never be to me what you are.”
“My wife matters to me. I don’t want her hurt.”
“No, of course not. We won’t hurt her. We just have to be careful.”
Careful? When were we ever careful with each other?
He stepped up behind me, his chest against my back, his hands clutching my arms, and his face on my shoulder close to mine. “Being together again in Mexico City isn’t advisable for either of us. But the bureau rotates me out every two months for two weeks. I’m Georgetown bound on Monday. Meet me there at our house. It can be our spot again. Out of view of everyone. Every two months. Us together there for fourteen days alone.”
Meet me there.
The words shuddered through me long after the sound was gone. Damn, I was a fucking fool. I loved him, even still. And I wasn’t any clearer over what I was to him than I’d ever been.
Desire made it such a temptation, even when leaving Mexico City briefly was a danger. It could never work. I could never manage to keep it from everyone—Hector, Jena, and even Layla—and trips to DC no one could know about. That alone was reason to raise suspicion among the complicated elements I balanced in my life. Richard wasn’t an easily managed situation like Jamie.
He was more complicated.
More difficult.
More everything.
I left it at, “Don’t contact me again. If I show, I show.”
I was almost out of the room when Richard said, “You’ll show, Lee. I know you.”
Fuck him.
He did know me, otherwise he’d never have phrased his parting comment so brilliantly.