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“I was caught up in the feelings that I’m feeling.” He kissed my bare shoulder as I held my tacky tee to my thundering heart. “Wow, that was lame. I won’t be putting Bob Dylan out of work as a lyricist anytime soon.”
“I think what you said was beautiful, Jackson,” he whispered as he pressed tiny little pecks along my shoulder and neck. My eyes flickered shut when he held me close. “I’m not exactly a poet either. I knock people down for a living. I’m feeling a lot of feelings right now too, if that helps.”
“It does,” I confessed, inhaling the unique blend of my soap and Oliver’s skin as the aroma enveloped me. “You think we could maybe do more of this?”
“Fucking? Oh yeah.”
That made me chuckle. “No, well, yes, fucking obviously, because I need to get my dick into that sweet ass of yours sometime soon, but the other things like this, too. This right here is about as perfect a moment as I have ever experienced with another human being. Just being loved, sated, held firm in your arms…” I paused to blink away some kind of huge feeling threatening to make me weepy. No one wanted that. Crying and cops? Nope, not going to happen. “I’d like to do more of this dating and embracing after sex stuff.”
“Cuddling?” he teased, then tugged on my earlobe with his teeth.
“Oh please, as if a cop and a hockey player would ever cuddle.” I turned to gaze upon him, capturing his face between my hands, and kissed him soundly on the lips. “Maybe we can call it lounging. Yeah, lounging. Sounds like something two macho dudes would do. We can lounge after having sex.”
“You’re a total idiot.”
He wrapped his arms around my middle, then used his hip in some sort of slick wrestling move to topple my not-so-tiny self to my bed. We grappled for a minute or two, me trying to use all the self-defense moves I had learned at the academy to free myself from his grip until I realized that being in his grip was kind of turning me on. My dick was half hard, resting snugly under his balls as he sat on my pelvis, smirking down at me in victory.
“If we had the lube, you could sit on my dick and ride me like a mustang, Cowboy,” I said, my voice gravelly.
His expression changed from amused to aroused in the blink of an eye. “Let me find it,” he said, and my dick grew another inch. “You know, I think I might be falling for you,” he added.
“Yeah?” This sounded like dangerous territory. Was he really ready for this?
“Even though I have all these memories in my head, it’s like Melissa is telling me… I’m falling hard,” he added, and his skin pinkened.
“I think—” From somewhere not in the bed, the sound of a cell phone ringing sliced into the night like a shiv. It was Mack. The ringtone was unmistakable. “Fuck,” I huffed, fully prepared to ignore it. Let someone else take the call. Maybe the two new guys that had just started could go play with the gangland lords and Mafia dons this once. All the play left Oliver’s eyes, and he slid off me, lube in hand, dick fat and hard, to look at me sprawled in my bed unmoving.
“That’s you,” he said. I nodded. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
I huffed in exasperation, still debating if I could somehow not see what my partner wanted at ten minutes past midnight.
“Sometimes, I hate my fucking job,” I snarled as I rolled from the bed to find my phone. When I located my pants, I nearly tore the back pocket off in my pique. “Mack, this had better be fucking important,” I growled into the phone instead of hello.
“It is. It’s Lazlo Richter, the receptionist at the clinic. Someone knocked the security guy out and tied him up, and hell, the kid’s just been admitted to the Holy Trinity ER with a gunshot wound.”
“The fuck? I thought we’d closed this down.”
“It looks bad, Jackson.”
“I… yeah, be right there.” I ended the call just as Oliver padded into view, still clutching the lube, still looking like every dream I had ever dreamed. Fuck this fucking world. “Hey, Oliver, so something has happened…”
ChapterSeventeen
Oliver
The shiftfrom intimacy to chaos was jarring. Lying there with Jackson, I felt my world was good, and I’d even used the L word, until his phone shattered the silence. I’d watched the change in Jackson’s expression as he listened to the voice on the other end, the tension in his jaw, the sudden hardness in his eyes. When he hung up, his gaze met mine, heavy with a weight he seemed unsure how to share.
“Lazlo got shot, and someone tied up the security guard,” he finally said, his voice low, the words hitting me like a physical blow. Lazlo was always eager to help, always with a smile ready, despite the chaos he sometimes faced. It made little sense.
“What?”
“I know I’m off this case, but…” He stared at me for a moment. “I have to go.”
“Of course, I get it, I?—”
“I need to take you home,” he said, already up and getting dressed.
I scrambled to follow, yanking on my wrinkled shirt as my mind raced with questions and a sinking feeling of dread.
