LOGINLeonard's hands were everywhere, sliding up Daveson's back, thumbs brushing over nipples, fingers digging into the curve of his ass. It was overwhelming in the best way, like Leonard was trying to touch all of him at once, like he couldn't get enough.
"Wanted this for so long," Leonard confessed against his skin. "Every time you looked at me with those eyes, every time you got that little crease between your brows when you were concentrating... Wanted to kiss it away. Wanted to make you look at me like you are now."
"How am I looking at you?" Daveson managed, though thinking was becoming increasingly difficult with Leonard's hands and mouth doing such devastating things to him.
Leonard pulled back just enough to meet his eyes. "Like I'm the only person in your world. Like nothing else matters."
The raw honesty in his voice made Daveson's chest tight. He cupped Leonard's face, thumbs tracing the sharp line of his cheekbones. "Right now, you are. Right now, nothing else does."
Leonard surged up to kiss him again, this time slower, deeper, pouring everything he couldn't say into the press of their lips. His hands slid to the small of Daveson's back, holding him close as their bodies moved together in an ancient rhythm.
"Leo," Daveson gasped, feeling the tension coiling tighter in his belly. "I'm close. I'm so close."
"Let go," Leonard urged, one hand moving between them to grip them both together through their clothes. The pressure was perfect, maddening. "Come for me, Dave. Want to feel you."
The combination of Leonard's touch, his voice, the heat of his body—it was too much. Daveson buried his face in Leonard's neck, muffling his cry as pleasure crashed over him in waves. Leonard followed moments later, his grip tightening on Daveson's hips as he shuddered through his release.
They stayed like that for long moments, wrapped around each other, breathing hard. Daveson's face was still buried in the crook of Leonard's neck, and he could feel Leonard's pulse racing beneath his lips.
"That was..." Leonard started, his voice hoarse.
"Yeah," Daveson agreed, not trusting himself to say more.
Leonard's fingers traced lazy patterns on Daveson's back, soothing and possessive at once. "Look at me," he said softly.
Daveson lifted his head reluctantly, afraid of what he might see in Leonard's eyes. But there was no regret there, no disgust, only satisfaction and something that looked dangerously like affection.
"Don't," Leonard said, as if reading his thoughts. "Don't start overthinking this. Don't start listing all the reasons why this can't happen."
"There are a lot of reasons," Daveson pointed out weakly.
"I don't care." Leonard's hand came up to cup his face, thumb brushing over his swollen lips. "I don't care about any of them right now. Right now, all I care about is that you're here, in my arms, looking thoroughly debauched and absolutely perfect."
Daveson couldn't help the small smile that tugged at his lips. "Debauched?"
"Completely." Leonard grinned, looking younger and more carefree than Daveson had ever seen him. "Your hair's a mess, you've got my mark on your throat, and if I'm not mistaken, you're going to need a change of clothes."
Daveson felt heat flood his cheeks. "You're one to talk."
"True." Leonard glanced down at himself and laughed. "We're a disaster. But fuck if I care."
He pulled Daveson down for another kiss, this one sweet and lingering. When they finally separated, Leonard rested his forehead against Daveson's.
"Stay with me tonight," he murmured. "Not in the guest quarters. In my room. In my bed."
Daveson's heart stuttered. "Leo..."
"I know it's risky. I know we have to be careful. But I need more than stolen moments in hallways and libraries. I need..." He trailed off, seeming to struggle with the words. "I need you, Dave. All of you. Even if it's just for one night."
Daveson should say no. Should maintain the distance, should remember his purpose here. But with Leonard looking at him like that, with the taste of him still on his lips and the warmth of him surrounding him, saying no felt impossible.
"Okay," he whispered. "Tonight."
Leonard's smile was brilliant. "Tonight," he echoed. Then his expression turned wicked. "But first, we both need showers. And probably some coffee, because I'm going to keep you up all night, Dave. Going to make you forget your own name."
A thrill ran down Daveson's spine at the promise in Leonard's voice. "Is that so?"
"That's a guarantee." Leonard's hands slid down to grip his ass again, pulling him flush against him. "Going to take my time with you. Going to learn what makes you moan, what makes you beg, what makes you scream my name."
"Leo," Daveson breathed, already feeling himself responding again despite having just found release.
"See? Already so responsive to me." Leonard nipped at his jaw. "Can't wait to discover what other sounds I can pull from you."
A knock on the library door made them both freeze. "Mr. Heyden?" A servant's voice called. "Your mother is looking for you. She says you have a conference call in ten minutes."
Leonard closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. "Tell her I'll be there in five," he called back, his voice remarkably steady given the circumstances.
"Yes, sir."
They waited until the footsteps retreated before moving. Daveson climbed off Leonard's lap reluctantly, immediately missing the warmth and solidity of him.
"Tonight," Leonard reminded him, standing and trying to make himself presentable. It was a losing battle, his hair was hopelessly mussed and his lips were red from kissing. "Eight o'clock. My room. Don't make me come looking for you."
"I'll be there," Daveson promised.
Leonard caught his wrist as he moved toward the door, pulling him back for one more kiss. This one was slow and deep, full of promise.
"Tonight, Dave, you're mine.
"I came into your home to expose your mother for what she actually did. I never wanted to hurt you. I did not know, when I started, that there would be a you to want anything about at all.""Do you understand what you're describing." Leonard's hands had curled at his sides, and he had pulled back, put distance between them on the bed that felt, to Daveson, like the widest distance that had ever existed between two people occupying the same six feet of space. "Every conversation. Every moment on that roof. The coffee, the drive home from the gala, last night in that room with the antiseptic when I told you I loved you. You're telling me all of that happened alongside a plan to burn my family to the ground.""Yes.""Just yes.""I won't lie to you about it, not after everything, not after last night. Yes. All of that happened alongside the plan. And somewhere in the middle of it, the plan stopped being the only true thing, and you became true too, and I did not know how to tell you that w
Daveson did not sleep.Leonard did, eventually, sometime past three, exhaustion finally winning out over the adrenaline that had kept him rigid and watchful for hours after the last of Ivanna's men had been zipped into bags and driven away from the east lawn in vehicles that did not officially exist. He slept with one hand still fisted loosely in the fabric of Daveson's shirt, as though some unconscious part of him intended to notice immediately if Daveson tried to leave the bed, and Daveson lay very still beside him and looked at the ceiling and did the thing he had been avoiding since one in the morning.He let himself actually think about it.The notebook was still in his desk drawer down the hall. The flagged transactions were still there, his father's name still attached to a ledger that Lissa Heyden had built her rise on the back of, still waiting for the moment Daveson had spent eighteen months preparing to deliver, the moment where the careful architecture of his presence in t
Six weeks before Ivanna ever set foot in this house through a side entrance, in a hospital that existed on no directory a person could consult if they went looking for it, Roarke John opened his eyes and understood, before he understood anything else, that he was supposed to be dead.The last clear memory he had was the parking structure outside the prison. Release papers folded in his coat pocket. Eleven years reduced on appeal, then reduced again to time served on a technicality his lawyer had fought so long for that Roarke had stopped believing in it, and then, astonishingly, the gate had opened and he had walked out into cold October air a free man for the first time in nearly a decade.He had gotten as far as the second level of the structure.He remembered a shape stepping out from between two parked cars. A second shape behind it. He remembered thinking, with the strange clarity that arrives in the half second before violence, she couldn't even wait one night, and then the memo
What happened in the half second after that shot went out did not, for a long time afterward, arrange itself in Daveson's memory as a sequence with a clean beginning and end. He knew that Leonard moved. He knew that one of Leonard's men, positioned behind Ivanna and closer than she had accounted for, returned fire in the same instant her shot went wide into the dark past Daveson's shoulder. He knew that Ivanna went down, and that she did not get back up, and that the quality of the night changed in the specific absolute way it changed when something that had been alive stopped being alive.The gunfire tapered. Then stopped.Leonard's men were securing the last of Ivanna's people, and the eastern treeline had gone quiet, and somewhere in the house lights were coming on, staff waking to a night that had broken open around them, and none of it mattered to Daveson nearly as much as the fact that Leonard had turned from where Ivanna's body lay and was crossing back to him with an expressio
The car brought them home in silence, and the silence did not break when they reached the estate.Leonard's hand had not moved from the edge of Daveson's for the entire drive. It did not move now, either, as the car slowed through the gate, and Daveson understood without being told that whatever had happened on that sidewalk had rearranged something in Leonard that was not going to quietly rearrange itself back.He should have known the day was not finished with them.He thought about it afterward, in the specific unproductive way you thought about things you could not have changed, and he decided that the mistake, if there was one, was in believing that the danger belonged to midtown, belonged to daylight and a public sidewalk and three professionals who had already failed once. He had catalogued the attack, filed it, begun the necessary work of understanding what it meant. He had not accounted for a second attempt arriving the same night, arriving here, arriving with a different arc
He drove his heel into the lobby man's instep and felt the grip loosen by a degree and tried to use the degree and did not have enough of it, and the SUV's rear door was open and the corner man had his other arm and he was running out of the kind of time that mattered.Then he heard Leonard's voice.Not from far away. Close, from the direction of the parking structure, with the specific carrying quality of a voice that was not raised and did not need to be raised because the authority in it was not dependent on volume."Let him go."Two words.The grip on Daveson's arms did not immediately release. But it hesitated, which was its own specific information, and in the hesitation Daveson heard movement, multiple sets of footsteps, and he understood that Leonard had not come alone.What followed was brief and efficient and not clean.Leonard's men, four of them, came in with the coordinated quality of people who had been briefed and positioned and were executing rather than improvising, a
That afternoon, Leonard called an emergency meeting in Victoria's penthouse apartment. It was the only place they could all meet without risk of being observed, Victoria's building had private elevators, her apartment wasn't bugged, and her staff was loyal to her, not to Lissa.Leonard arrived firs
Daveson was in the security office, reviewing camera footage from the previous night, when his phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.We need to talk. Meet me at Café Noir in one hour. Come alone. -RRaymond.Daveson stared at the message, debating whether to respond. Every instinct told
The library was quiet except for their breathing. Leonard's hands were tangled in Daveson's hair, their foreheads pressed together as they stood in the aftermath of their confession. The moonlight streaming through the tall windows cast long shadows across the room, making everything feel both inti
"I never loved you."The words came out of Daveson's mouth like poison, carefully measured, deliberately brutal. He was standing in the hallway outside Leonard's home office, where he'd asked to speak privately. It was early morning, before the household staff was fully awake, before Lissa made her







