Page 29 of Brought to Light
I wrapped my arm around him and pulled him close, because fuck it. Why not. And then I led him through the forest until we found a sheltered, more-or-less flat spot between several trees.
Linden wobbled on his feet, barely keeping himself up even leaning against me. And it was cold. Not much comfort to be found, but I’d had worse. I maneuvered him down onto the ground, stripped my jacket, shrugged out of my shoulder holster, and unclipped my IWB. I pulled the Sig out of the latter and set it and the flashlight in easy reach.
Getting settled on my back sucked, since the damp chill of the ground went right through my shirt and straight into my bones, but it sucked a lot less when Linden curled up next to me, putting his head on my shoulder and his arm over my waist without any prompting. His silky hair drifted up to tickle my chin and nose. I got my jacket draped over the both of us, with my arm under it to hold him close. A blanket would’ve been nice, but the only one we’d brought with us from the cabin had stayed with Kaspar—and the jacket was better than nothing.
Having Linden pressed against me all warm and soft felt better than just about anything.
I stared up at the tiny bit of sky I could see, navy blue and peppered with stars, crisscrossed with the invisible black of branches. The stars seemed closer and brighter here, although how could they be? Although—fuck, I’d been assuming we were on Earth. And that wasn’t necessarily true.
“You never finished telling me about the housewife who wanted her neighbor killed,” Linden murmured into my chest. His fingers clenched and relaxed against my abs, like a kneading cat settling in for a nap.
I couldn’t believe he’d remembered the thread of that conversation. Fucking him drove it right the hell out of my head.
“Not too much to tell. She mom-voiced me, and the next thing I knew I was driving out to see her and check out the neighbor. He was this nutso bastard who thought he could blow the shitty air out of his house on smoggy days by using a leafblower. All the time. Inside his house.”
“A leafblower? A…thing that blows leaves?”
Right, not a lot of yard work going on in a coffee shop, and he didn’t have a frame of reference for anything else in the human world. “Basically. Like a giant vacuum cleaner, only it blows the air out instead of pulling it in. And it’s really fucking loud. This asshole ran it with all his doors and windows open at midnight, and three in the morning, and five in the morning, and then all day. This poor woman was losing her shit because she and her kids hadn’t slept decently in weeks. So…yeah, I mean, it sucks to say I enjoyed killing him. But I really, really did. What a dick.”
Linden shook against me, the vibrations and his nearness almost getting my cock perked up again. It took a second to figure out he was laughing.
“It was a public service? Is that what you’re going with?”
“You should’ve heard it, okay?” I knew I sounded a little defensive, but—okay, yeah, I was a little defensive. People didn’t usually laugh at my job. “So fucking loud. I ended up trying to turn down her money, but she insisted. Said she wanted to have the satisfaction of killing him second-hand. And then she strolled back into the house to bake cookies with her kids. Swear to God, if she wasn’t married and I wasn’t, you know, me, I might’ve asked her to have dinner with me.”
Linden stopped laughing, and he went a little stiff. “I guess women are more your preference, then?”
Like most guys, I could be kind of slow on the uptake sometimes, but that was obvious enough even for me. I twisted my neck and pressed a kiss into his hair, giving him a squeeze. “Gorgeous and stubborn are my preference.”
“Oh.” Linden nuzzled into my chest, back to acting like a sleepy cat again. I wished I had him naked under a pile of blankets, with all the time in the world to be kneaded and pressed and snuggled into exactly the position he liked the best. Taking charge during sex worked for me. I didn’t mind being accommodating afterwards. But there wasn’t much accommodation to be found on the lumpy dirt. “Okay.”
His breathing evened out quickly after that, and I took five minutes, no more and no less, to enjoy it.
After that, I went to sleep too. I’d wake at dawn, and this wouldn’t be real anymore.
Chapter Fourteen
Linden
Riding to my death wasn’t much more comfortable than walking to it, it turned out.
I shifted in the saddle for the hundredth time. It might have been more comfortable if I hadn’t been so completely, gloriously fucked the night before. But I couldn’t complain. Every twinge reminded me that I’d had one night of happiness before what was to come.
And it grew closer with every passing moment. We’d left the forest an hour or so before, passing into the grassy rolling hills and valleys nearer to Lady Lisandra’s villa. Silver-glinting streams wound through green-velvet slopes peppered with wildflowers in every imaginable color, with the midday sun pouring down and transforming it all into a stained-glass masterpiece.
My mother might be suffering terribly. At the least, fear for me and for herself would be a torture on its own.
And yet the world shone so brightly.
“Another two hours from here,” Oskar said. He rode a little ahead of me, and he hadn’t spoken to me much that morning. Or looked at me. He’d frowned at Callum and then ignored him too.
I probably hadn’t been quiet enough the night before. Luckily, Oskar couldn’t see me blushing, since he refused to acknowledge me.
Callum and Kaspar were riding double to my right, and I glanced at them out of the corner of my eye. It made the most sense to put Callum with Kaspar, since Callum couldn’t ride at all and Kaspar was a far better horseman than I was.
Still. Seeing Callum’s hands on Kaspar’s waist set my teeth on edge. Kaspar was gorgeous and stubborn, probably far more than I could claim. And his long hair kept blowing back in Callum’s face.
Callum had slid out from under me at the first hint of dawn, leaving his jacket over me but picking up his gun and walking away without a word. He’d returned a few minutes later, probably after taking a piss and stretching out his sore muscles, but he could’ve woken me with a kiss, couldn’t he? Or kissed me when he returned?
