A loud bang woke Quinn. He blinked against the bright overhead light and tried to roll over with the goal of pressing his face into the couch cushion but something hard was digging into his ribs. Groaning, he shifted and reached down to find that he’d fallen asleep on the gaming controller…again. Well, he was awake now.

He sat up, putting his sock-covered feet on the floor, and rubbed his eyes. The TV still showed the map screen for Assassin’s Creed II. The last thing he remembered was checking the map for the quest icon to the Borgia pope and then he was out. But that had been well after four in the morning.

Last night, he’d needed to think, but it had been thinking about his own personal life, so he turned to Assassin’s Creed. He had his own system when it came to gaming and thinking.

When he had a work-related problem, he played a Borderlands game.

When he had a personal problem, he played Assassin’s Creed.

When he was angry and frustrated, he played a Call of Duty game.

When he just needed to chill, he played Uncharted.

And when he didn’t want to fucking think about anything at all, he sank into a Final Fantasy game.

Last night had been huge so he fell back on the heavy hitter, his favorite assassin of all, Ezio Auditore. But even after spending several hours racing along the rooftops and killing the corrupt Borgia clan with Ezio, Quinn didn’t feel any more settled with Shane.

He’d kissed him.

Holy fuck, he kissed the shit out of Shane and he’d left the P&G arbor with his dick rock hard and begging for more.

Leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, he dropped his face into his hands. He liked Shane. He was a good guy. Maybe a little flirty and crazy at times but he definitely didn’t mean any harm by his comments. Shane struck him as being incredibly honest and forthright.

But Shane was his boss…sort of. Well, at least for this temporary job, he was Quinn’s boss. And kissing between employees was usually a bad idea.

Except for the fact that Rowe was kissing and doing a whole hell of a lot more with his boyfriend and employee, Noah Keegan.

As soon as the thought entered Quinn’s brain, he shoved it aside. He didn’t want to think about what Rowe was doing with Noah, and this really wasn’t about employee fraternizing at all. He wouldn’t be working with Shane for long and they weren’t really coworkers.

That kiss though…

Fuck.

Hours had passed and he swore he could still feel a phantom tingle across his lips from the hot touch of Shane’s lips, the scrape of his teeth followed by the lingering caress of his tongue. He’d never been kissed like that before. The absolute thoroughness of it. Like Shane was sure that he had all the time in the world to explore every inch of Quinn’s mouth. Like he wanted to stand there and kiss Quinn for the next hour and not just get to the part where Quinn was supposed to be on his knees or bent over.

He groaned again, trying to get his brain to stop replaying that damn kiss. He wanted it again. And more…

Which simply stunned the hell out of him.

Quinn had known he was attracted to guys for as long as he could remember, but he never had a lot of experience in that area. A few times he’d been desperate enough to try Geoffrey’s dating app, Matinee. But those had been quick and awkward hookups. They exchanged first names—which Quinn was sure weren’t even their real first names—and then it was a race to get off. The three times Quinn had tried anal sex with someone, he’d gone home sore and frustrated.

After that, he figured that the idea of pleasure and sex was just fairy-tale porn bullshit. Bottoming wasn’t supposed to ever feel good and too often, a blowjob was a power trip for the receiver.

Shane was different. He took his time, seemed to enjoy the kissing and the touching just as much as the other guys enjoyed simply using him to get off. Everything had felt different, better. Could sex be better with someone like Shane?

The guy who’d spent the night with Shane and stopped by the office wouldn’t have come looking for seconds if it had been horrible, right?

And Shane had offered just a bit of fun. No strings. No commitment. Just some laughs and getting off. Shane would make it fun. He also wouldn’t laugh if Quinn didn’t know everything. Well, he’d certainly seen it all from his hours of watching porn, but watching porn and doing it in real life were a little different.

Was he really considering this?

“Hey, squirt.”

Royce’s unexpected rough voice made Quinn jump. His head jerked up to find the bodyguard standing in the open doorway to his office, a to-go coffee cup in his hand and a questioning look.

“Hey,” Quinn said, taking a moment to roughly rub his hands over his face to wake up more.

“Brought your morning sugar rush.” Royce continued into the room and held out the coffee cup.

“Oh, thank God,” Quinn moaned, accepting the cup with both hands as if he were accepting a generous gift from some noble lord. He needed the caffeine so damn bad. It couldn’t have been later than seven thirty, and he really needed to grab a quick shower before heading over to Shane’s office. He also needed at least another four hours of sleep, but that wasn’t going to happen, so he was relying on the coffee.

He took a couple of delicate sips as Royce settled on the couch, next to him. Double chocolate mint mocha with an extra shot of espresso. It was his one true luxury. Because he spent ninety percent of his day behind a computer and hated to exercise, he watched his calorie intake, but he needed his fancy coffee. He probably shouldn’t have given Shane a hard time about his tea.

“You really need to get a place you like to sleep in,” Royce grumbled.

Quinn gave a little shrug as he took his first real drink. He and Royce had somehow settled into this routine of bringing each other coffee whenever Royce wasn’t out on a job. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they just sat silently in the same room together before they separated to work. With Royce, he was comfortable and he liked that.

Over the past several months, that comfort had grown into Royce harassing him about finding a place to live that he liked. Quinn couldn’t get himself to explain things weren’t that simple. He had a feeling Royce knew there was more to it, but he never demanded to know more.

“I needed to game last night. Clear my head.”

Royce looked up and frowned at the screen for a second. “That’s the assassin game, right? Problem with the case? Or problem with the dick?”

Quinn sucked in air on his question and nearly choked on his coffee. That last question was so loaded that he didn’t want to even fucking touch it, though he knew Royce was just referring to the private eye. But few things got past Royce. He was afraid he’d ask if he suspected more.

“It’s…complicated,” Quinn hedged, then fell silent. Royce didn’t talk, demanding more details. He wished he could discuss the mayor’s case with Royce. He was always a great sounding board. While computers weren’t his specialty, he had his own unique experiences and perspective that gave Quinn an angle he usually never considered.

“Have you ever been in a serious relationship?” Quinn suddenly asked in a rush before he could stop the words. But he immediately regretted the question as pain carved vicious lines through Royce’s handsome face for several seconds before he could wipe it away. Quinn wanted to reach out, to ask him what had happened to cause him such pain, but he held perfectly still, waiting for Royce to recover. The man didn’t talk about himself or his past. Quinn knew if he’d reached out to Royce, he would have walked away and they might never have another one of their shared coffees again.

“Really?” Royce stopped and cleared his throat when the single word came out rough and broken. “You falling for that dick already?”

“Fuck no,” Quinn said on a forced laugh, willing air back into his lungs as relief coursed through him. “I was just thinking. He does the whole casual fling thing with whomever, but then you’ve got Rowe and Noah in a serious relationship. Andrei is getting married in a couple of months. Even Sven has moved in with Geoffrey. Relationships work for some people. But then Shane appears to be the exact opposite and just as happy.”

“If you’re looking for normal, you’re not going to find a set thing. Monogamous relationships or casual sex doesn’t matter. You do what works for you. That’s it.” Royce watched him, his frown deepening.

“What?” Quinn asked, his hand tightening on the coffee cup.

“You don’t strike me as the casual type.”

Quinn shrugged, forcing himself to hold Royce’s gaze. “Maybe I am. Just a little fun, right? Maybe I just haven’t met the right kind of person for that fun.”

Royce’s expression didn’t clear and he shook his head. “Don’t force yourself into being something you’re not.”

“What serious shit did I just walk into?”

Royce and Quinn looked up to find Dominic standing in the doorway, his green eyes moving from Royce to Quinn. In his hand was a large blue mug with a picture of Mister Rogers from the children’s show on it and dozens of little sayings Mister Rogers was famous for. Dominic always found the weirdest mugs.

“And then there’s Dominic,” Royce continued as if they hadn’t been interrupted. “He simply fucks anything that moves.”

“Hey! I’ve got to be selective now. They’re just throwing themselves at me.” He paused and nodded matter-of-factly. “It’s the scars.”

“Whatever,” Quinn said, taking another sip of his coffee. He didn’t mind working out of Shane’s office, but it felt good to be back at Ward Security—even if it was only for a little while. This was home.

“I’m serious. This one,” he said, pointing to the new pink scar along his left cheek that cut back toward his ear. “They all start by asking about what happened with this one. With their ooohhhs and awwwws and ‘poor baby.’ ”

“Oh lord,” Royce muttered and Quinn snickered. Dominic had been injured in an explosion when a bunch of the guys had gone in to rescue Geoffrey from his stalker. Dominic had suffered the worst of it, requiring him to stay in the hospital for a week as he recovered.

Most men would have come out looking worse with the scars, but somehow with Dominic’s red hair and devilish grin, he simply looked more rakish and enticing. And of course, Dominic simply embraced it, adding it to his natural charm.

Putting his mug on the edge of Quinn’s desk, he pulled up his T-shirt to reveal a stunning set of abs along with a long pink scar along his left side.

“When they find this one, they just want to lick up and down the scar like I’m a goddamn lollipop.”

“And you don’t encourage that at all,” Royce deadpanned.

With his shirt still tucked up under his armpits, Dominic quickly unbuttoned and unzipped his pants, shoving them down to his knees to reveal a pair of boxers covered in dinosaurs. “And then the one on my ass—”

“I don’t want to see the one on your ass!” Quinn shouted while laughing.

“What the fuck, Dom?” Royce growled at the same time.

From down the hall, they could hear Rowe bellow. “Put your goddamn pants on, Dominic!”

Dominic instantly turned and grinned. His coffee forgotten on Quinn’s desk, he started shuffling down the hall, his pants still around his knees. “No! My pants aren’t going on until you put me on more jobs. One measly mayor job isn’t cutting it, Boss!”

“No!”

“Come on, Boss!”

Their voices became more muffled as Dominic went down to harass Rowe in his office. The doctors had cleared Dominic for action, but Andrei was still running him through training sessions. Until Andrei and Rowe cleared him, he was mostly sidelined and that sucked for everyone because Dom was stuck hanging in the office and bored out of his mind. Hijinks and antics followed. Quinn had been surprised to see him at Taft yesterday.

Royce’s low chuckle drew Quinn’s gaze back to his face. Whatever pain he’d felt moments ago was at least temporarily forgotten but then, Dom had a knack for making you forget the dark things in life.

“At least I know you guys aren’t bored without me.”

“Not bored.” Royce clapped him on the shoulder and squeezed for a second before pushing back to his feet. “But you need to get back here soon. You can’t leave me alone with that lunatic for much longer.”

“Agreed.”

Shane picked up his phone, unable to stop himself from checking it even though he knew he hadn’t missed a text from Quinn. The first one had arrived less than thirty minutes ago, warning him that he had stopped over at Ward Security and was running a little late.

A few minutes later, another asked if he wanted coffee since he was stopping at a Starbucks on his way to the Agency.

Shane replied that he was good.

Then there was another asking if he needed a bagel or a sausage biscuit sandwich or some other breakfast sandwich.

He couldn’t stop the wide grin on his lips and was glad that Hollis couldn’t see him. Quinn was a texter. A hard-core, “rather text than talk” millennial. While he’d much rather talk than text any day, he could do this for Quinn to give him a safe zone.

After Shane turned down the offer for breakfast, Quinn waited a whole seven minutes before sending the last text, and it was just two words.

We good?

Quinn turning him down for sex the previous night was surprising, but there was no animosity between them. There was no reason for it, which only made him wonder about Quinn’s past experiences with hookups. Was he more accustomed to dealing with controlling, high-maintenance douchebags?

Shane shook his head as he quickly sent back, We’re good.

And now he waited. His computer screen had a list of notes for the Spring case, but he couldn’t see them. He kept replaying the kiss in his head while at the same time straining to hear for the sound of the front door opening with Quinn’s arrival.

His office might be more cramped and confining with Quinn’s presence, but he liked the guy being there. He enjoyed their ridiculous banter, and he liked being able to bounce random ideas off Quinn as they occurred to him. He had a quick mind and was able to ferret out holes in his thinking so damn fast.

Lost in thought, he actually jumped when Quinn walked through the door, a paper coffee cup in one hand and his messenger bag slung over his shoulder. His greeting was a practiced nonchalant, but there was no missing the slight stain of pink that rose to his cheeks.

“Morning,” Shane said easily.

“Hey, did you see the news about the Indian Hill Chief of Police? Exposed string of lovers. Wife chased him out of the house with a baseball bat. It’s like the city has gone crazy over the past week and all the haters are crawling out of the woodwork. But it got me thinking on the drive over that we could be more proactive in our hunt,” Quinn quickly said as he dropped his bag by his little desk and shed his light jacket. His words were fast and slightly breathless, making Shane smile. It was like he was trying to fill the air so that Shane couldn’t say anything that would make things uncomfortable between them.

“What do you mean?”

“We set up a lot of alerts and traps to catch the hacker, should he or she come after the mayor, but we could do a little more hunting of our own. Spring has got to have a lot of haters out there.”

“Like the protesters.”

“Yeah, and the person he’s running against for mayor.” Quinn’s face scrunched up a bit as he dropped into his swivel chair and turned to face Shane. “Who the hell is he running against?”

“Not one for local politics?”

Quinn rolled his eyes. “Don’t get me started.”

“Maria Lopez is Spring’s opponent. And I have already begun investigating her and her campaign staff. Nothing has turned up so far.”

“I’ve designed some search algorithms for Rowe in the past that scan social media postings for certain keywords. It’ll take me a little time to modify, but I can do the same for Spring. There’s a good chance that this hacker has been following him for a while. Could have been building toward this moment. I could use the threatening note as a baseline for the algorithm, then run it against social media postings. See if we get any interesting hits.”

“Wow. Yeah, that would be great,” Shane said stunned. Quick mind? Quinn was a fucking genius. This had to give them an edge on the hacker. “Just tell me what I can do to help.”

Quinn shot him a shaky grin and cleared his throat. “Not much, really. I have to write the search code and gather the data. Not much you can do.”

“Then I’ll just stay the hell out of your way and try to come up with new angles for your search.”

Nodding once, Quinn turned back to his computer and Shane did the same, but it didn’t take him long to notice that there was none of the usual clatter of frantic typing that he’d gotten accustomed to hearing when Quinn worked. He looked up to find Quinn sitting perfectly still, his back ramrod straight in his chair. He was just about to ask what was wrong when he heard Quinn take a deep breath before spinning back around to face him.

“I was also thinking about what you said last night. That it was just some fun, and I will admit that I might have acted a little hastily in leaving last night, but I needed some time to think everything through.”

Shane just smiled encouragingly at Quinn as he chanced a glance up. He sat back in his chair, his hands folded on his stomach. This was even better than he’d hoped. After the kiss, he’d had zero plans to walk away from Quinn. It was like liquid fire had blazed its way through his veins and he had no desire to let that go without exploring it a bit further. He just thought he’d have to wear Quinn down a little more, convince him that it could be even better. He had not expected Quinn to come to him.

And so fast.

“I know that last night you were thinking we could have a kind of one-off bit of fun with no strings and no stressful emotional crap. Just sex once. But I was thinking that maybe we should consider a slightly longer arrangement. First, I think the kiss was a good sample of how well we mesh together physically. We have good chemistry and I think that’s going to translate into good sex. Second, we are likely to be working long hours on this case, particularly as we get closer to election day. That’s going to cut into your free time for hitting the clubs for someone new to hook up with. If we have a standing arrangement, you don’t have to start from scratch each time. Third, we’re both likely to suffer the same frustration over the case when leads don’t pan out. We could use each other as an effective outlet to blow off a little steam and come back to work the next day with a clear head.” Quinn stopped and took another deep breath, sounding as if he’d just run around the block rather than listing out a solid argument for sex. “What do you think?”

It took everything Shane had not to laugh, but it certainly wasn’t at Quinn. The guy had put a lot of thought into his speech when all he really needed to say was that he wanted to fuck Shane. He thought he’d made that perfectly clear the night before, and Quinn needing a little space wasn’t going to suddenly change his mind about that.

Pushing to his feet, Shane walked around his desk, pausing at the closed door to his office to turn the lock before continuing on to stand in front of Quinn. He leaned down and gripped the armrests on either side of Quinn.

“I prefer my sex without an outline, but yeah, that sounds great to me.”

Quinn opened his mouth to reply and Shane dove in, grabbing his parted lips in a searing kiss that had Quinn melting back in his chair. A soft moan rose up his throat as he opened himself completely to Shane, letting himself be dominated. The fire was back in a scorching flash, burning away all common sense. His tongue explored every inch of Quinn’s mouth, plunging in again and again until Quinn’s tongue finally chased after him, wanting more.

Oh, yeah…sex with Quinn was going to be a whole lot better than just “good.”