Ace in the Hole Read online

  He’d wondered idly from time to time what it would be like to bottom. But the guys he dated were usually so intimidated by his job, his family name, his status and general class, that they seemed to expect him to take charge and do the honors. And he didn’t hate topping. Truth be told, he’d never thought to question how he liked his sex. Not until this dark, dangerous alpha male blasted into his life.

  Fascinated by the possibilities, he stood, reaching for Stone’s shorts. But then Stone kissed him roughly, all but sucking his tongue free of its moorings. It hurt a little and turned him on ferociously. Shocking realization broke over him that he’d never made love to a man like this before, a man who would take charge and do exactly what he wanted, who would fuck him balls to the wall and leave him begging for more.

  The emotional risk inherent in giving up control to this man skittered through him. What if he liked bottoming? What if he wanted more of the same? Where in the hell would he find another man like this? He shouldn’t do this. Yet his trousers shimmied down around his ankles, and he let himself be shoved down, headfirst, over the back of the sofa, his face buried in the seat cushions, and ordered to stay.

  Stone disappeared for an endless, outrageous minute while Christian stayed exactly where he was, scared of what this man would do to him, amazed as hell that he was putting up with being ordered around like this, and so excited that his body quivered with it. Stone returned, his hairy thighs brushing lightly against Christian’s ass. Muscles Christian hardly knew he had convulsed, completely out of his control.

  A hand milked his cock from behind until he was dripping with precum, his balls so tight they felt as if they would explode any second. He lurched when a big, blunt finger circled his anus, smearing something goopy and vaguely warm on it. And then, Jesus H. Christ. A finger dipped inside his rectum. He lurched away from the invasion, his hipbones slamming into the sofa frame, but not far enough to escape that probing finger.

  He’d bottomed a few times a very long time ago, when he was first experimenting with his sexuality. They’d been furtive, fast encounters with other teenage boys. Nothing at all like this. Apprehension coursed through him. And yet his cock was jumping and jerking wildly, his glutes clenching and unclenching, and he was letting a dark, dangerous stranger spread his ass cheeks and lube him up some more.

  And then the blunt head of that huge, rock-hard cock rested against his entrance, both a promise and a threat. Fear of the unknown swept over him, along with burning desire to know what lay beyond it.

  Whatever madness had overcome him before swept forward now, stealing his breath and what little remaining sanity he had. He wanted to be impaled. Wanted to be plundered and taken and possessed by this man. His limbs went weak, his breath grew so short he panted, and his fists and teeth clamped down on the sofa cushion.

  “If you don’t relax, you won’t be able to take me,” Stone muttered. He eased that big finger through Christian’s clenched muscles again. He slid it deeper this time, filling him up and then retreating almost all the way out. Again, he stroked him with appalling intimacy.

  Christian felt an orgasm building. Ripples of insane pleasure were building deep inside him, tucked up high above his balls as Stone worked the hot spot he’d only worked on others before. No wonder his partners were addicted to sex. He was dying already.

  “Jesus, you’re tight,” Stone ground out. “I’m going to have to be careful.”

  It was good to know Stone was having restraint issues too. Thing was, he rather wanted Stone to tear the hell out of him at this point. His hips pumped of their own volition as his control slipped yet another notch. Sex. He wanted sex and lots of it. Right now.

  Stone splayed one hand on the base of his spine, pinning him down. The strength in Stone’s palm was astonishing. Christian was not a small man, and he worked out often. And yet Stone held him still with casual ease. More of that strange intimidation/attraction tore through him.

  Stone took a step forward, his thighs shoving Christian’s wider apart. He was at the man’s mercy now. Loving it and hating it, he swore in a steady stream. That rock-hard cock was back at his hungry opening, poised for the coup de grace. He felt Stone tense against him…

  …and freeze as a phone rang.

  “Not mine,” Stone snapped, stepping back. “Do you have to get that?”

  Son. Of. A. Bitch. It was his boss’s personalized ringtone. The one person on earth whose calls he had to take day or night, rain or shine, about to be epically fucked or not.

  He jerked up off the sofa, yanked at his pants, and fished around in the pocket. “Yes, sir,” he answered, trying his damnedest not to sound out of breath and failing.

  “Did I interrupt your workout?” Senator Jack Lacey of the great state of Texas drawled. “Or is she a hot little number willing to put out?”

  It was no secret he was gay, but Lacey insisted on trying to convince Christian to take up pussy-pumping as a hobby. Hell, tonight he was apparently the hot little number willing to put out.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked, ignoring the man’s questions.

  “I need to go over the itinerary with you for this damned fund-raising blitz Jill put together. No way in hell am I making some of these appearances she’s got booked for me.”

  “Why don’t you take that up with your wife, sir?” He did his best to stay out of the raging battles Jack and Jill Lacey engaged in behind closed doors.

  “Bitch isn’t coming to town until Friday. Some gardening shindig came up in Texas, and she flew out to attend it. Left me to do all the goddamn glad-handing with a bunch of blue-haired Jews come South to die.”

  Christian winced. His boss was nothing if not an insensitive racist. He actually wouldn’t vote for the man, were he a citizen of Texas. But Jack Lacey was a powerful senator in Washington, and as a member of his staff, Christian had gotten a chance to help draft landmark legislation on federal prosecution rules. Privately, Christian hoped to parlay that into a job at the Justice Department sooner rather than later. But until then he was stuck wiping this jerk’s proverbial ass.

  He looked around the living room for Stone, but he was nowhere in sight. Probably stepped into the bathroom to relieve that massive hard-on of his. Lucky bastard.

  It was beginning to look like he’d get to tuck his erection in his pants, trot down the hall like an obedient lackey, and spend the next two hours explaining to his idiot boss why this series of public appearances in Florida was good for his entire national political party and would gain him favors, donations, and endorsements in his own campaign for reelection.

  He yanked on his shirt, buttoned it angrily, and tied his tie with jerky movements, using the mirror behind the bar to straighten it and comb his hair. Nope, he didn’t look like a man who’d been on the verge of the fucking of his life.

  Although as he walked down the hall, lube squished around sexily in his drawers, reminding him in no uncertain terms of what had almost been. His intensely dissatisfied dick leaped to attention eagerly. Down, Tonto. No Lone Ranger for you. Irritated and uncomfortable, he pasted on a pleasant expression and knocked on Lacey’s door. Sometimes he really hated his life.

  Chapter Two

  STONE slept for shit. He dreamed all night long of a muscular blond Adonis who looked a lot like Christian Brandeis ordering him to his knees and doing unspeakable things to him. Which was odd. He wasn’t a serve-the-master kind of guy, his job as a security consultant to the rich and famous notwithstanding.

  Most of the time, his clients were polite, professional, and accustomed to working with top-drawer security people like him. Occasionally he had to crack the whip with some snot-nosed musician who’d just made it big and thought having crazed stalkers was cool. Today’s client should fall firmly into the former camp.

  He knocked on the door of the suite on time to the exact second, according to his watch, which he’d just set off the international atomic clock. Precision mattered in his line of work.

  �
��C’mon in!” a voice called in a thick Texas drawl.

  He stepped into a suite easily twice the size of his, decked out like a campaign headquarters in full swing. Which was odd. The election was a solid year away. He didn’t envy politicians their lives. Fund-raising was pretty much a full-time job for them. How they could look themselves in the mirror every morning, he had no idea. He couldn’t do it. It was like being a whore in a business suit.

  “You must be Stone Jackson. I’ve heard great things about you.” A perfectly groomed and well-moisturized man around fifty years old stepped forward, smiling big enough to show off his mouthful of porcelain crowns.

  A disturbing sense of déjà vu swept over him. Looking at the senator was like looking into a mirror at a twenty-year-older version of himself. The man had the same dark eyes, olive complexion, strong jawline, and broad smile he had. Their hair was different, but even their heights and builds were similar. It was a little freaky.

  At least they were dressed nothing alike. Jack Lacey was wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots with his custom-made Italian suit. Stone wasn’t particularly into fashion, but the getup screamed of the worst sort of crass pandering to a rural constituency.

  “This is Travis Tucker, my head of security,” Lacey said.

  A big, silent man stepped forward. His skin was the true black of a person of African descent who spent a lot of time outside. Stone’s in-brief said Tucker was an ex-Marine, had pulled a stint as an embassy guard in the Middle East, and was damned good at his job. Which was a red flag for Wild Cards, Inc. If Lacey already had good protection, why call in an expensive outfit like theirs?

  It had apparently been Tucker’s suggestion that supplemental security be hired from a private firm like Wild Cards in the first place. Hence Stone’s presence in Miami this morning, and his curiosity over what prompted his being here.

  “What seems to be the problem, Mr. Tucker?”

  “We’re getting death threats. Not the garden-variety type. These spout a special brand of hate. They sound more serious than the stuff we get from the usual nutballs. Call it a gut feel.”

  Stone made eye contact with Tucker, who was maybe ten years his senior. But they were both ex-military men. Both knew the value of intuition. He nodded once, wordlessly accepting the man’s worry at face value. Tucker nodded back. Yup, they were going to get along just fine.

  “I’d like an extra set of eyes on the venues we’ll be visiting this week. If you could help us find security weak spots, pick out potential points of attack, that would be helpful.”

  “No problem. I’ll just need a list of events and locations—”

  “My aide can get those for you,” Lacey interrupted. He raised his voice, shouting, “I need a copy of the itinerary!”

  Didn’t like not being the center of attention, huh? Stone knew the type. In point of fact, many of his clients fit that description. Plenty of rich, powerful people were quiet and unassuming. Didn’t go out of the way to draw attention to themselves. They were the ones who rarely needed his services. It was these loud, blowhard types who just had to be the star of the show who ended up at risk from the crazies.

  A flunky walked in from the next room, and Stone glanced over. Stared. Light brown hair, faintly chestnut in tone. Square jaw. Piercing blue eyes. All-American good looks. Perfectly tailored suit. Christian Chatsworth-Brandeis, looking every inch an aristocrat. America might not officially have royalty, but if it did, this man would be part of it.

  The silent horror was mutual as Christian stared back at Stone. Oblivious, Jack Lacey boomed, “This is my new bodyguard, Stone Jackson. And this is Chris Brandeis, my main bitch.”

  Stone blinked, startled at the senator’s crudeness. For his part, Christian’s gaze hardened into chips of blue ice, cold and hard. The man did not like his boss. At all. Stone couldn’t say he blamed the guy.

  Christian held out a stapled sheaf of papers, and Stone took it with a mumbled word of thanks while Senator Lacey wandered away and sat down on the sofa with a laptop computer.

  “If you have any questions or need me to walk you through the senator’s usual routine, let me know,” Christian said.

  “I will. Thanks.” Good God, the awkwardness of it. Last time he’d seen this man, he’d been half-crazed with lust, so hungry to have a lover with intelligence and breeding and class that he could hardly stop himself from coming all over the guy’s backside. Christian Chatsworth-Brandeis represented everything he’d ever craved in life and been denied by the circumstances of his birth.

  Farmers were not technically poor people. But all their wealth was tied up in land and equipment and animals. Success and failure were determined by the whims of global warming, and food on the table was often a direct result of grueling, backbreaking labor. He was glad for the work ethic and the physical strength his youth had given him, but he’d always wished for more.

  He’d wanted a college education at a top university. Travel. Worldliness. But there hadn’t been money for it. Instead he’d enlisted in the Army, seen the world from the back end of a Humvee, and put himself through college online. He secretly liked to watch Ivy League university lectures online when he wasn’t putting his body on the line to catch bullets for people with the cash to pay for his life.

  His boss, Peregrine Cardiffe, founder of Wild Cards, Inc., was upper-crust British all the way, and he had helped Stone file off a few of his rough edges. Taught him how to wear a well-fit suit. How to drink brandy. How to act like a gentleman. “Act” being the operative word, though. It was all learned behavior. A layer of silver over lead. Whereas a man like Christian Brandeis was a gentleman all the way down to his DNA.

  And now they worked for the same bastard. Which pretty much took a repeat of last night off the table. Goddamnit. He never mixed business and his personal life. No bodyguard did. It was impossible to achieve the cold, calculating focus necessary in his line of work if feelings of any kind intruded.

  Speaking of work, he asked the senator’s security chief, “Is there anything we can do to get cameras in the hotel stairwells on short notice? Anyone can get into or out of this place undetected using the fire exits. And while the hotel is installing cameras, the south end of the loading dock is camera blind also.”

  Tucker answered sourly, “I had to change floors when we got to the hotel to even get us hallway cameras. The hotel manager informed me that the Imperium caters to clients who value their privacy and do not want the kind of invasive security I was suggesting they install.”

  Great. Nothing like parking a high-profile and controversial politician with a lot of enemies in a hotel that prized secrecy for its customers above all else. Places like this were dens of drugs, wild parties, and underage groupies a certain clientele was willing to pay top dollar to hide from public scrutiny.

  “Who picked this hotel?” he asked.

  Christian answered that one, irony rich in his voice. “That would be the senator.”

  A world of information was packed into that dry answer. Lacey was a player. Had vices he needed to hide from the public. Was using the absence from Washington to indulge. Which geometrically increased his exposure to a would-be killer.

  “Poison of preference for the senator?” he asked quietly.

  “Arsenic, if I had to choose. But rat poison would be fine if it did the trick.”

  Stone grinned. Yeah. No love lost between this guy and his boss. “Does he know you’re plotting his demise? Should I be watching you?”

  Christian’s gaze snapped to his, and all of a sudden heat sizzled between them. Belatedly he murmured, “Hell, even his wife is plotting his demise. To know him is to despise him.”

  “Well, isn’t this going to be a fun assignment.” And the sexual tension was back, thick and heavy between them. They had unfinished business to tend to, but it was strictly off-limits, and they both knew it. Dammit.

  He leafed through the senator’s busy itinerary for the next week. Looked up at Tucker. “Which venue are
you the most worried about?”

  “Hotel ballroom where the big casino-night fund-raiser will be held. More sight lines than you can count, multiple access points, huge crowd, huge staff. It’s going to be a nightmare. The public is going to have full access to the senator. Not even rope lines to contain the crowd.”

  Stone winced. If it was even half as bad as the guy described, barring a full-on Secret Service-style team of a couple dozen guys, no way were they going to be able to guarantee Lacey’s safety. “How many warm bodies can you put on the job?” he asked Tucker.

  “I’ve got two security guys from the hotel lined up for Saturday night. And now you. The boss hates bodyguards and refuses to use them most of the time.”

  They were screwed. He crossed the living room to address the senator directly. “How bad do you want to stay alive, sir? Bad enough to cancel your appearance?”

  “I get a third of all the donations from this damned shindig. It’ll fund my television ads for months to come. I’m not fucking canceling. I’m paying a fortune for you to keep me safe and make this event happen.”

  “And I’m giving you my extremely valuable advice. Cancel your appearance. I don’t even need to see the venue to know you will be wide open to an assassination attempt.”

  “Isn’t it your job to take the bullet for me?” Lacey asked coldly.

  Christian’s jaw clenched so hard that the rippling muscles in the guy’s perfect face actually caught Stone’s attention. He pulled his gaze back to the truculent senator and answered evenly, “My job is to keep both of us alive, sir. I will not have done my job if I have to take a bullet for you. That is the last-ditch act of a failed security detail.”

  A shrug. “Not my problem.”