by Rhys Ford
Bell hitched his hips up and wrapped his legs around Conri’s lean waist, his feet pressed against solidly muscled thighs. He groaned as Conri pushed back into him. Each thrust barely skimmed against his prostate with a tease of stark, blind pleasure, and his cock was pressed between his stomach and Conri’s. Not quite enough, the sandwich of slick skin and pressure, but too much to ignore.
He tangled his fingers in the thick hair at the nape of Conri’s neck and pulled him down. The curve of his lips demanded a kiss and then down to the taut line of his throat. The scrape of Bell’s teeth down the tanned skin dragged a complimentary, satisfying growl out of Conri. His skin tasted of salt and sweat, his pulse fast against Bell’s lips as Conri thrust into him with steady, deep strokes of his cock.
A second bite, teeth dug in hard enough to leave a mark, pitched Conri over the edge. He thrust roughly into Bell, until Bell had to brace his hand against the headboard, and came with a shudder and a groan. His cock pulsed inside Bell, warm and—as Conri pulled out—wet. There was something else too, like a pulse against a membrane under them. The Otherworld border flexed around them, thin and warm as skin, and then faded.
Bell reached for his own cock as Conri pushed himself up off him. He dragged his hand impatiently along the length of it, eager to finish, but Conri moved his hands away.
“I said, let me,” he drawled as he crawled down the bed to wrap his mouth around Bell. His tongue was slick and clever as he licked Bell’s cock from shaft to head, the pressure of his mouth and lips warm around the shaft.
Bell dropped his head back against the pillows, the hand he had braced against the headboard now tangled in Conri’s hair. He didn’t think about the fey or being an agent or anything but the spill of hot, sweet pleasure that Conri wrung out of him.
THEY SPRAWLED on the wrinkled, stained comforter, sweaty and sticky and too lazy to untangle themselves. The half-crescent bite scar on Bell’s upper arm drew Conri’s fingers again. He counted each of the teeth that had jabbed into Bell’s bicep.
“Redcap,” he guessed.
“Selkie.” Bell grinned at Conri’s quirked eyebrow. “Some rich asshole had lured her into a marina to try and play seal wife with her. Yelled for us when it didn’t work. She didn’t want to leave, and it pissed her off when she couldn’t seduce me.”
People really underestimated selkies, in Bell’s opinion. They expected cute little harbor seals and then yelled for help when confronted with the toothy, six foot plus of marine-mammal-muscle reality.
“Your drinking scar?” Conri asked.
Bell snorted. He’d never thought about it that way, but he supposed it was. The one that was easy to show off and talking about it didn’t make him sweat or have pity muscle the drunk out of people’s eyes.
He slid his hand down to the gauze square taped over Conri’s ribs. It was rough compared to the silky skin it covered.
“I should have come to you,” he said.
“Because I’m the invalid?” Conri asked.
“To see how you were.”
“You knew how I was,” Conri said with a shrug. “Finn said you went with him to the hospital, yelled at the doctors who didn’t want to treat me.”
A vet, the doctor had suggested, disdain in his voice. We don’t treat animals.
“Still,” Bell said, because… still. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what he should have done or why he owed it. It felt like he did or might. “He okay? Finn?”
“Back at camp,” Conri said. That made him pull away as he rolled over onto his back, extricated his legs from Bell’s, and stretched. “Safe and sound… until he might not be.”
There was nothing Bell could do about that, nothing he could say. He might understand Conri’s viewpoint, but he knew Iron Door’s as well. The reminder of the fault line between them cooled him down, and he sat up, one leg tucked under him.
“This can’t be a thing,” he said.
“What this?” Conri asked.
“Any of it,” Bell said. “Your help. What happened in the Otherworld. What happened here. It’s done. Let it go.”
Conri folded his arms behind his head and grinned that empty disarming smile he’d greeted Bell with the first time.
“Like I said, I’m easy.”
Epilogue
RELIEF THAT his dad hadn’t decided to die right in front of him hadn’t even lasted until they got back to LA. Faced with the first day of school, even the dregs evaporated.
“So, what. I don’t see why I have to learn geography,” Finn groused as he threw his bag onto the couch and stalked into the kitchen to raid the fridge. “The minute I hit eighteen, I’m going back to the Otherworld, and I’ll never have to find fucking Belgium on a map again. Or, you know what, in the actual world.”
“You know the Otherworld’s mapped over this world, right?”
“Yeah,” Finn said. He took a swig of orange juice from the carton and wiped his mouth. “Now ask me if I care.”
Conri weighed the pros and cons to having it out about Belgium, and the cons won.
“Go do your homework,” he said. “Try and get a report card that doesn’t make me regret learning to read.”
Finn rolled his eyes, grabbed a whole bag of ham out of the fridge, and slouched off to his room. From the muted sound of conversation and the clicks that filtered out, he was not doing his homework, he was playing Overwatch. He’d get around to it before dinner. He usually did.
Sometimes Conri wondered why he wanted to come back. The world wasn’t what he remembered—the rules had changed, and he’d never really thought about parenthood. But Finn wasn’t a bad kid. Most of the time, Conri actually liked him, which was about as good as people with actual biological kids got.
He grabbed a beer from the fridge and headed back over to the case he’d left spread out on the kitchen table. It gave him a bad feeling. The husband said all the right things about his missing wife, but as far as Conri could tell, she’d hidden her trail herself. So, she was either a really underachieving con artist or something was wrong under her roof. Either way, she didn’t want to be found, and Conri had to decide if his conscience needed that on it.
He had picked up her phone records when a knock on the door made him look up.
“If that’s the Thai order already,” Finn yelled from his bedroom, “the spring rolls are for me.”
“Homework first,” Conri yelled back. “Before I turn the router off.”
He pushed the chair back from the table and went to grab the takeout before the delivery guy legged it. Plenty of places wouldn’t deliver to Little Annwn, and he didn’t want to dissuade the ones that did. The tip was already in his hand as he opened the door.
Bell—not in uniform and looking impossibly normal, but hot in jeans and a white T-shirt. He glanced at the ten-dollar bill in Conri’s hand and raised dark eyebrows.
“I appreciate the thought,” he said. “But I didn’t travel all this way for a tip.”
Conri stared at him as he wavered between relief and panic. He didn’t know what scared him more, that Bell was there for him over some Otherworld thing or that Bell was there for him, unlikely as that seemed.
“What are you here for?” he asked.
Bell glanced around. “Can we do this inside?” he said. “I’m not in uniform, but….”
But it didn’t matter. Iron Door was worn into Bell’s skin like a stain. Around here, that wasn’t going to get him killed, but it wouldn’t get him welcomed either.
“Come in,” he said as he stepped back and waved Bell in. He closed the door behind him and glanced around in an attempt to not stare at Bell. “You want a beer?”
“Sure.”
Beer. Small talk. An ache of interest in Conri’s balls as the memory of their sweaty hours in Bell’s bed ran on repeat through his head. He tried not to pay too much attention to it, but that left him watching Bell wrap his mouth around the neck of the beer. That wasn’t any better.
“So,” said as he
leaned his hip on the arm of the couch. “Why are you here, again?”
Bell fiddled with the beer. He picked at the edge of the label with his thumbnail and peeled off wet shreds. It was the first time he’d really seen Agent Bellamy look off-balance.
“Couple of reasons,” Bell said, and he took a drink of beer. Conri watched it go down with more fascination than it was worth, his eyes glued to Bell’s throat. “Working together back in Elwood was more successful than I expected, and something that my boss wanted to trial for a while, apparently. Iron Door has authorized me to approach you and discuss a more… official… association.”
“I’d be flattered, but I’m going to guess you couldn’t find another changeling who’d give the idea the time of day?”
“It wasn’t well received.”
“What makes you think I would, without my residency and my son’s freedom on the line?”
“You said it yourself,” Bell said. “You’re useful and resilient.”
The beer was cold, and the proposal was interesting, but it wasn’t exactly what Conri had—briefly and headily—imagined when he opened the door. It probably should have been. They both knew where they stood when they left Elwood.
“I’ll think about it,” he said as he finished the beer. “If it’s worth my while, I’ll let you know.”
He used his legs to push himself up and took a step toward the door.
“I said a couple of reasons,” Bell said. “The offer is… a good excuse.”
Oh.
Conri turned back. “Oh?”
“Yeah.”
They looked at each other. It dragged out long enough that Conri felt his mouth twitch at how ridiculous it was.
“Do I have to guess?”
Bell snorted. He rolled the bottle between his hands, condensation wet on his already damp palms. “If you would, it’d make this a lot easier. I wouldn’t have to risk that I got the wrong end of the stick.”
“If I had to,” Conri drawled as he sauntered over until he was a bit too close to Bell on the chair, “I’d say that we both know it wouldn’t work if this were a thing?”
Bell leaned back. His face was unreadable as he looked up at Conri, the bottle braced crookedly against his knee. “Absolutely,” he said. “I couldn’t trust you. You couldn’t trust me. That’s not going to last.”
The tease took on a bitter note in the back of Conri’s throat, because that wasn’t wrong.
“Not for long,” he admitted as he edged farther into Bell’s space. He propped his hip on the arm of the chair, his legs lazily tucked against Bell’s. “But maybe that’s okay. Trust me, lasting a long time isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes shorter is sweeter.”
“So, if this were still a thing,” Bell suggested slowly, “you might want to… do something that doesn’t involve dead unicorns sometime?”
Conri touched Bell’s face. The thin scar was distinct as a thread. He leaned down to kiss Bell. It was slow and thorough, as if something might have changed since they parted.
“I’d consider it,” he said. “I like good food, and that noise you make when you—”
The smack of Finn’s door hitting the wall interrupted them. Conri pulled back from Bell as he recalled his… responsibilities.
“Was it the Thai food?” Finn asked as he dragged his headphones off his messy setter-red hair. A frown creased his face as he saw Bell. “What’s he doing here?”
It wouldn’t last, and it wouldn’t be easy, but Conri thought it might be worth it.
Wolf At First Sight
By Rhys Ford
SFPD Lieutenant Joseph Zanetti has spent years protecting his city, and from the looks of St. Connal’s Pub and its bad-boy owner, Levi Keller, the place is a hotspot for trouble and violence. Joe’s problem? Levi is delectably hot, with secrets Joe can’t wait to dig into.
As a Peacekeeper for paranormals, wolf shifter Levi doesn’t need the complication of a hot cop sniffing around his pub when he’s just sent his teen son off to summer camp. He’s busy brokering a peace agreement between two warring factions. When Joe stumbles into Levi’s world, both plunge into a situation neither one of them was ready for—falling in love.
To everyone who loves things that go bump in the night…
Acknowledgments
OH, TO the Five… always. And to Bru, who jumped in on this ride. As well as to Elizabeth, Liz, Naomi, Gin, and everyone else at DSP for letting us go crazy with this
.
One
“GOD, I hate you.”
It was a muttered refrain Levi had heard more than a couple of times since he first brought home his squalling red larva from the hospital, only his son’s face visible from the swaddling blankets wrapped around his squirming body. There’d been a few long, drawn-out fights when Declan entered adolescence and was conflicted by the rise of hormones every young boy faced. There was anger and a bit of self-doubt, mostly from grappling with the loss of a mother who’d checked herself out of the hospital and disappeared, practically right after they cleaned the afterbirth off the thin, pale newborn.
Then there was also the first time he shifted into his wolf form—a long-legged, gangly thing with too-big paws, no sense of direction or grace, and an overwhelming appetite for pizza and cheeseburgers.
Levi dealt with Declan’s little act of verbal aggression with an arched eyebrow, followed by an ice-cold shot back, “Really?”
At fifteen, his son was gaining on him in height but had years to go before he’d reach Levi’s muscle mass… if he ever did. Ashley passed on not only her beauty, blue eyes, and long lashes to their son, but also her compact dancer body—a lithe, sleek contrast to Levi’s brawler build. To be fair, Levi also spent many evenings tossing out drunks and staring down tipsy supernaturals with enough strength to tear down a streetlamp even in their human forms, so Levi knew he could bank on just a hard look to push his son’s bravado back down a few notches.
The really was an extra cherry on top of the Levi-takes-no-shit sundae.
Levi waited, holding his tongue in the tense silence. Declan glanced to the side, making the briefest of eye contact, then dropped his gaze down to the living room floor, where his half-packed duffels sat next to piles of folded summer clothes. If he’d been one to buy into the wolf lore some older packs whispered about, building up their own arrogance and need to feel superior over the next guy, Levi could have said Declan’s submissive drop of his head and gaze was lupine in nature, an instinctual reaction to Levi’s alpha status. Calling bullshit on that type of thing was exactly why the Keller family was split—one side clinging to the old myths and structure while the ones who had a lick of common sense formed a healthier splinter group.
Levi wasn’t alpha so much as he was Dad.
The silence simmered, bubbling between them until Declan finally broke.
“Sorry,” he muttered, a bit louder than before. “You didn’t deserve that crap from me. I just want—”
“You want to stay here and hang out at the pub,” Levi finished for his son, picking up one of the duffels. He’d heard enough of Declan’s varied arguments over the past few days, his objections ramping up as the date got closer. “And you’re not. You know why. It’s not up for discussion. You can’t spend your entire life only surrounded by your own kin. It doesn’t work that way in the human world, and it sure as hell doesn’t work that way in ours. Only way you’re going to learn about other kinds of people is if you’re around them. And don’t start telling me St. Con’s got lots of people you can learn from. That’s not the kind of crowd that needs to be teaching you.”
Declan flopped down on the living room couch, a heavy overpadded affair Levi was glad he’d paid through the nose for when the kid was younger. His son was hard on furniture, especially as he was growing into his enormous feet and hands. Puberty was rough, and there’d been times when Declan’s body ached from sprouting up an inch or two, seemingly overnight. The soft, comfortable sectional, with its wide cushions, mad
e a great nest for him to curl up in. If he’d been thinking, Levi probably wouldn’t have chosen to have it upholstered in bloodred chenille, but he liked the color and didn’t realize eventually there’d be two wolves in the house and double the fur all over the place once Declan began to shift.
“Dad—”
“Michelle will be here when you come back,” Levi said, cutting through the heart of the bramble growing up around Declan’s objections. “You’re fifteen, and it might seem like she’s the love of your life right now, but the truth is, you’re barely a blink in the universe at the moment, kiddo. Yes, she’s pretty and she giggles when you tell a joke, but if she’s serious about you, she’ll wait. It’s only two and a half weeks at summer camp. There’s people you haven’t seen in a year, other kids you like and still talk to. Hell, some of them have even squatted in our house for a weekend or two.”
“It’s just….” Declan laid his head down to stare up at the ceiling, not even glancing at his father when Levi sat down next to him. “It’s not like I don’t like the place… or the things we do. Some of it’s really cool. It’s just that when I go out there, I feel like I’m a freak. At least at home, I feel normal. Like I could almost be normal.”
“You are normal, Deck.” Levi shifted over, hooking his arm around his son’s slender shoulders. Pulling his son close, Levi kissed the top of Declan’s head, wondering when the hell the little boy who’d fit in his lap only a few years ago was suddenly this handsome young man with a storm of confusion in his blue eyes and troubles in his heart. “We’re normal. Are we different than the people you go to school with? Yeah, you are. But not just because we’re shifters. We’re different in experiences and culture. There’s people out there with centuries of social burdens holding them down, and they’ve got to carry all of that crap on their shoulders, wondering if something shitty’s going to happen to them because of it or if it’s going to stop them from getting ahead.
