Page 33 of Carry on Wayward Son

I blinked, turning more fully to look at him. “Seriously? You’re not joking?”

“I’ve encountered a fair number of them during my time with the Navy,” he said, and he might as well have been telling me he’d encountered bad weather during a commute. Simple. Confident. Understated in a way that spoke of someone who’d lived through things he didn’t explain or justify. The kind of simplicity that sat on top of something much larger, much darker, that wouldn’t be unpacked for casual conversation.

I had my own things I couldn’t explain or unpack, buried so deep they’d probably never see daylight again. I understood that instinct. I wouldn’t press him for details he wasn’t offering. “Then I’m very glad you kept the upper hand in that particular encounter.”

“So am I.” His hand was still moving on my wrist, his thumb making slow circles over the scars there. “What about you? I learned to fight because of the job, because I had to. You said your father taught you.”

“He’s in law enforcement,” I said, which was true enough. “He wanted all of us to be able to protect ourselves, to never be helpless if something went wrong, so he made damn sure we were trained well from a young age.” I paused, considering how much more to reveal. “I found it to be excellent stress relief over the years. Better than therapy in some ways.”

“That tracks with today,” he said, and I heard the smile in his voice. “You definitely had some stress to work through.”

“Mmm.” I didn’t want to keep going down this particular road, didn’t want to venture any closer to truths I couldn’t afford to tell. I sat up, extracting myself from the warm circle of his arms, and reached for the robe hanging on the hook behind the bedroom door. I pulled it around myself, tying the belt at my waist, creating a barrier between us that was necessary even if I already regretted it.

“Is this the part where you kick me out,” Jace asked from behind me, his voice dropping into something warmer and more suggestive than conversational, rich with implication, “instead of talking me into the shower with you?”

My body responded to that suggestion immediately and without my permission with a rush of heat that made my breath catch. I kept my back to him for a long moment, negotiating with myself, weighing options and consequences. I shouldn’t encourage this. Shouldn’t let him any closer than I’d already let him, which was already closer than I’d let anyone in a very long time—years, if I was being honest. It couldn’t go anywhere real, couldn’t develop into anything beyond what it was right now. Not with everything I was carrying, and what I was really doing here on Hatterwick Island.

But God, it had been so long. So unbearably long since I’d let anyone this close to me, and he was good—not just in the obvious ways that had become crystal clear over the past hour, but fundamentally, in the way that actually mattered. He was a genuinely good person. I knew it the way I knew things, with the kind of bone-deep certainty I’d learned to trust. And that kind of fundamental decency was rarer than it should have been in this world.

I turned around to face him where he still sprawled across the mattress, the sheet riding low across his hips in a way that was sinfully appealing.

I kept my expression composed and my voice steady. “This is the part where I point out that we have actual work to do going through all those files you brought over. We’ll both think better and more clearly with some food in us.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “How do you like Chinese takeout?”

A beat of silence while he processed the redirect.

“Do they even have Chinese food here?” I asked.

“We do, actually. Pretty decent too.”

He sat up in one fluid movement, entirely unconcerned with his complete absence of clothing in a way that was frankly unfair given the current precarious state of my willpower. “They typically run pretty slow on delivery this time of year though,” he said, reaching for me with clear intent. “How about we order now, get that shower I mentioned, and then get to work on the files once the food arrives?”

His hands found the lapels of the robe and slid inside it, palms warm against my skin as they moved down my sides. He pulled me firmly against all of that warmth, that solid muscle, and I was suddenly very aware that he was ready for another round in a way that was doing significant damage to my reasoned argument about the work we needed to do.

I wound my arms around his neck and gave up on reasoning entirely.

“We can order after,” I said, already pulling him back toward me. “Better not risk the food getting here before we’re ready. Much better not to risk it at all.”

Seventeen

JACE

The Chinese arrived at seven-thirty, which meant we’d been in the shower much longer than strictly necessary, and neither of us was apologizing.

We spread the files across the coffee table and the floor around it, dividing them by category: Madden’s compiled case materials on one side, the local government records on the other. Apparently our visit to town hall this morning had greased some wheels, because Peggy had pushed through a public records request Madden had submitted weeks ago. The result was a substantial stack of meeting minutes, approved contracts, bid submissions, and budget allocations going back five years, all of it bureaucratic and dense and exactly the kind of thing that hid interesting information inside layers of procedural language.

I settled onto the floor with my back against the sofa and a container of beef lo mein and started reading.

Layla sat cross-legged on the other side of the coffee table, chopsticks in one hand and a highlighter in the other, moving through pages with focused efficiency. Koa stretched out beside her, chin on her knee, periodically receiving an absent scratch behind the ears without her looking up from whatever she was reading.

It was—comfortable. Unexpectedly comfortable, in a way my brain kept trying to draw my attention to when it wasn’t otherwise occupied with the documents in front of me.

It kept drifting back to other things, too. Like the sight of her naked and glistening beneath the shower spray, head thrown back in ecstasy as she pulsed around my cock…

I pulled my attention back to the page and found Anthony Strand’s name in a contract approval from three years ago—a feasibility study for waterfront commercial development on the south end of the marina district, approved under Miles’s administration, cost shared between the city and Albemarle Development Group. The study had gone nowhere, or at least nowhere that showed up in the subsequent meeting minutes.

There were other names. Coastal Meridian Holdings, a real estate investment group out of Raleigh that had put in two bids on properties adjacent to the marina that hadn’t been accepted. A local contractor named Pete Wharton who showed up in an unusual number of approved projects for someone operating out of a two-man shop. A company called Blue Water Infrastructure had won a contract for dock renovation work that seemed over-priced for the scope described. A developer named Gary Fitch who’d submitted a proposal for a resort complex on the Atlantic side that Miles had championed before city council voted it down.

Some of it was probably ordinary small-town government inefficiency and favoritism. Some of it might be something else. The problem was they all looked the same on paper until you knew what you were looking for.