by Willa Okati
Ivan couldn’t let go. Wouldn’t. The line blurred. His lips, his teeth, they belonged on Robbie’s skin, over the old bite mark on the nape of his neck. Not breaking the skin, but the option was there if he chose to take it. Or if Robbie asked for it.
Whatever. Ivan couldn’t stop to care. He’d put his arm around Robbie somehow, some-when he didn’t remember, and tugged the man so close a whisper couldn’t have passed between them. He could feel Robbie’s heart pounding fast-fast-fast, pulse shaking him. If the tree weren’t there, they’d have fallen.
He’d tucked his thumb under Robbie’s belt. Robbie moaned, a low and hungry sound, and pushed his hips as far forward as he could. Not very. Enough, though, to nudge the edge of his cock against the side of Ivan’s hand. A far too empty hand.
The zipper would have died an untimely death if he’d tried to fiddle around with fastenings, so Ivan didn’t bother. Robbie never could buy a pair of jeans that fit right, not off the shelf, the waist always a half-inch roomier than it needed to be to accommodate the lushness of his ass. Firm with muscle, but high and round.
Ivan’s mouth watered. He pushed his hand fast, eager, down the front of the damned jeans and took Robbie in a messy-rough hold. Dampness slicked his fingers, and the smell of him nearly knocked Ivan down.
Robbie, too. He moaned, muffled this time with the low-hanging dip of his head, and pushed back as Ivan rocked forward, meeting in the middle. Ivan hissed and tightened his arm around Robbie’s waist. They were steel, both of them, bent to fit and soldered together.
Only, it wasn’t enough —
Ivan moved his kiss up Robbie’s neck, tasting him as if it were the first time. He hadn’t changed. Not in the ways that counted. Still sweet, musky, earthy. He rocked his hips in tiny pushes, the best he could manage and not enough. He tightened his hold on Robbie’s cock, and it was not enough. He bit harder, and that was better, but not what he wanted.
He’d started whispering to Robbie, though he didn’t know when. Muttering things he had no right to say, but couldn’t stop. “Gorgeous,” he said, tucking hips tighter to Robbie’s ass while Robbie swore and pushed into his hand. So many years on and he still couldn’t get over it, this hard, rough-looking bear begging for it from him. “Fucking beautiful, fucking love you, never stopped loving you, God.”
“Ivan.” Robbie half-turned his head, giving Ivan only a quarter-glimpse of his face in profile. His lips were parted, slack, burnished dry from breathing through his mouth, and his eyelids were at heavy half-mast. He strained against the odd angle, cheekbones sharp against his skin. He drew the tip of his tongue along the fullness of his lower lip and his shoulders rounded on a shudder that racked him tighter still against Ivan. He was trying to say something, though Ivan couldn’t tell what it might be.
It seemed more important than almost anything not to let him get the words out. Be damned to the awkwardness of the angle. Ivan pressed his mouth to the corner of Robbie’s, catching the damp lip between his teeth and biting. Robbie’s beard scraped his cheek, rough against his short day’s stubble.
Beard. When had he grown a beard? Didn’t suit him. He had a gorgeous face, and he always tried to hide it. Not on his watch. He’d shave it for Robbie and show him how to appreciate what he had. Take it off hair by hair, one slow stroke of the razor at a time, coaxing that tough, dimpled chin out of hiding.
But in the meantime, he’d kiss Robbie all the same. Kiss him, drink him down, fill his head with Robbie’s scent and taste, and the tightly embossed heat of the soulmark beneath his hand now, hidden by his choice. Ivan fumbled at his belt. His hands were clumsy, but his need great enough that he’d cut the damned buckle off if he had to, and then—
He landed on his ass, the breath knocked out of him, too startled to do more than yelp at the jolt of the hard ground. His legs were splayed out in front of him, double furrows cut into the gravel as he tumbled. The side of his jaw burned first cold then hot.
What the…?
Ivan looked up. He couldn’t do anything else from the ground. Took a few good hard blinks to focus his eyes, and when he did it still didn’t make much sense. At first. A man he didn’t know—a young man, no, a boy—had elbowed his way between Ivan and Robbie.
“Will somebody tell me what’s going on?” the boy demanded, then tackled another, taller bastard who seemed hell-bent on kicking Ivan while he was down and too stunned to move.
He recognized the one that’d hit him. Holy cats, but he’d changed. “Cade?” Ivan blinked a few more times. He worked his jaw carefully, just in case. “Jesus, you hit hard.”
“You fucker.”
Ivan dodged, covering his face with his arm, and a good thing, too. Cade would have landed another punch if the small guy—that wasn’t Nathaniel, was it? Little Nathaniel?—hadn’t pile-driven him away. He’d go so far as to say he’d missed those kids, if they weren’t trying to kill him. Ivan’s temper crackled as he stood, scuffing the smoothly raked gravel out of all recognition.
Just to make it perfect, he thought he saw Nick and Abram keeping a safe distance. Hurray, the gang’s all here. “Calm down, would you?”
“Telling me to calm down? That’s a good one.” Cade let Nathaniel hold him back. Either that, or the kid really was stronger than he looked. Who knew with Robbie’s family? “What the hell are you doing here? Nathaniel, let go. You saw him.”
“I saw you take a swing at him. I didn’t see why you did that,” Nathaniel said, visibly exasperated. “Who is he?”
“You don’t remember me?” Ivan blurted. Damn. Shouldn’t have done that. Not that it could have been avoided too much longer. His shirt was a wrecked ruin, hanging wide open. At least his erection had gone down. There was insult and there was injury, then there was just gilding the lily.
Which was all window dressing around the moment when Nathaniel saw the soulmark on his chest. While soulmarks might be private, not too much went unseen between brothers too young to know better. Nathaniel clapped a hand over his mouth and stared at Ivan, then at Robbie.
Robbie had hidden his face behind his hair, and kept his head turned. He sounded tired, rough and older than he should when he spoke. “Go back to the game. I’ll be in our room.”
“Not unless he—”
“I said, go!” Now Robbie looked up. Ivan remembered that temper all too well. Well enough to be glad it wasn’t aimed at him, though it should be, shouldn’t it? Good God, what he’d nearly just done…
And would do again, if he could.
Ivan swallowed down a knot lodged in his throat. “Do as he says,” he put in, no matter whether he had the right or not. At least it took the brothers’ focus off Robbie. “I’m going, too. I promise.”
“Yeah,” Cade muttered, shooting Ivan a dark glower. “That’s what you said last time, isn’t it?”
“Cade,” Robbie barked. “Don’t make me say it again.”
For a second—just a second—Ivan could have sworn he caught a glimpse of the Robbie he’d known way back when, sick and tired of his brothers’ nonsense. Only when Ivan hadn’t been looking, the boys had grown up.
Ivan tucked his hands in his pockets and walked backward. He nodded once to Robbie, a dip of the head that Robbie returned. He could tell from the tingling and stinging on his jaw that he’d have one hell of a bruise there. Would Abram let him live any of this down? Not likely.
“But I thought you didn’t have a soulmate,” was the last thing he heard someone—Nathaniel—say before he turned his back and walked away. Kept walking, too, and promised he’d make it out even if it killed him.
Hah. Some things never changed, did they?
Chapter Three
“Hold still.”
“I’m trying,” Cade protested.
“Try harder.” Robbie rapped his knuckles against Cade’s wrist. “Or if you want, you can patch yourself up.”
“Mother hen,” Cade grumbled, but slouched forward over the tiny end table their room in the lodge boasted. He
wasn’t as long-limbed as Robbie and had to stretch in a forward arc over the tabletop to let Robbie examine his hand. “It’s fine. I can curl my fingers and everything.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
The electronic lock on the room door beeped and clicked. Nathaniel slipped inside, shaking off the chill of the night. “I went to get the first-aid kit from your truck,” he said before Robbie could ask. “Just in case.”
Cade rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “For fuck’s sake, I’m fine. Ow! I won’t be if you keep twisting my wrist.”
“Then don’t whine. And don’t move,” Robbie said, steadily ignoring the rest of the griping. At least Nathaniel still had a cool head on his shoulders. Sweet little brother. Always smarter and better in a crisis than himself or Cade. He’d do all right in life. As for Cade? Robbie tested the bend and flex of each finger. Cade would get by on luck more than anything else. He’d bruised and scraped his knuckles, but nothing worse. “You’ll live. But,” he said over Cade’s grumbled response, “you get to clean those with alcohol wipes. No argument.”
Cade glowered, but took the packets of sterile wipes from Nathaniel without further complaint, even when Nathaniel rumpled his hair into stand-up spikes. Nathaniel dodged before Cade’s casual swipe could land—not that he’d aimed to hit—and perched on the edge of the queen bed he and Cade were meant to double up in. Robbie had figured since he was paying for their accommodations, he’d the right to a bed all his own.
Robbie leaned back in the narrow lodge chair matching Cade’s and folded his hands loosely before him, linked over his stomach. The fever had faded enough not to distract him—for the moment. Small mercies. The acute awareness of his soulmark, like a loose tooth, wasn’t so easily ignored. Especially not when Nathaniel tried and failed to pretend he wasn’t staring.
He’d deal with Cade first. “Don’t do that again,” Robbie said. Something in his voice made Cade look up almost sharply. “I can fight my own battles.”
“Sure you can.” Cade poked gingerly at one knuckle with the corner of a wipe. “Did you know he was going to be here?”
Robbie had known that question was coming. “No. If I did, I wouldn’t have come.”
“Did he know you would be here?”
Robbie frowned in reluctant consideration. He’d asked himself if he believed Ivan’s claim, and… “I doubt it. He seemed as surprised as I was.”
“Who was he, though?” Nathaniel piped up from his place on the bed. He’d drawn his knees up and looped his arms around them, propping his chin there, making himself look younger than he was. “I mean, beyond the obvious. I always thought you didn’t have a soulmate. Or that you were a widower, even if you didn’t wear an obsidian bead or anything. I didn’t ask, because…” He shrugged his thin shoulders uncomfortably.
“I never wanted to talk about it,” Robbie said, rubbing at the rough edge of his beard. “If you’d asked, I’d have told. You don’t remember him at all?”
“I remember…something, now that I’m trying to,” Nathaniel said. He frowned. “Was he the one who kept trying to repair the roof of our old house?”
A bark of laughter escaped Robbie. “And put more holes in than we’d had to start with. God, but he was useless at home repair.” Yet he’d insisted on trying, because Robbie wouldn’t let him pay for professionals to do the work. Ivan’s family had money. Ivan claimed he wanted nothing to do with that, but the way a man was raised always showed its true colors one way or another. Add that to the list of things they hadn’t been able to find a compromise on. “I think some of the patches are still there.”
“He laughed a lot,” Nathaniel said, visibly sorting through his memories. “He made you laugh, too, didn’t he?”
“Probably.” Robbie raised one shoulder. “He had a knack for it that I never did. I usually figured putting him and me together as soulmates was the punch line of some cosmic prank.”
Nathaniel frowned. Cade too. They didn’t like to hear him come down hard on himself, though they’d had a lifetime to get used to it. “And you loved him?” Nathaniel asked.
Robbie took his time before answering. Yes. God yes, but he’d loved Ivan. Loved him with more passion than a man could be expected to handle, especially a young man with brothers to raise and a history—then—of trouble with the law. He’d changed after taking the boys, but he couldn’t alter his past.
“Yes,” was all he said in the end. Then he added, “Enough to know that I was losing him. We fought. All the time. Do you remember that, too?” At Nathaniel’s reluctant nod, he went on. “We loved each other, but there was too much in the way for us to be happy about that love. I loved him enough to let him go. He loved me enough to leave.”
* * * *
Ivan caught the icepack Abram tossed at him. “For me? You shouldn’t have.”
“I know. My big, bleeding heart gets me in trouble every time.”
Ivan chuckled, then grimaced. He pressed the icepack to his jaw. Cade had a punch like a pissed-off gorilla. No teeth loose and no bones broken, but he’d have a nice bruise as a souvenir. He brushed a lock of hair behind his ear and asked, “Do I have as much gray in my hair as he did?”
“Not yet, but you’re getting there,” Abram said. “He’s changed.”
“Just a bit, yeah.” Ivan whistled quietly. “The beard alone…”
“You’ll wish you had one soon to cover up the pretty colors your face is likely to turn,” Abram pointed out. “Doesn’t hurt too much?”
“Nah,” Ivan said, dismissing the notion. It didn’t, not really, and he’d earned it.
But would he have done anything differently if he could go back and try again? Nope. The icepack crinkled in protest as Ivan gripped it too hard. He glanced up sheepishly at Nick, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and at Abram, who’d taken up a position leaning on the wall, facing him, as chief advisor of the war council. Abram’s choice of words, not his.
Ivan laid the icepack aside. “Okay, you have questions. Ask.”
Abram crossed his arms over the thick muscle of his chest and raised an eyebrow. No questions, then, just concern.
Nick didn’t quite have Abram’s skill with body language, but carried on fiddling with the snaps on his wrist cuff, much as he had since he’d first parked his ass on the floor. “I’m not going to ask the stupid questions—”
“Appreciated,” Ivan said.
“Or maybe I am,” Nick went on. “Because I don’t get it. I really don’t. He’s your soulmate. You’re supposed to be together.”
Abram answered before Ivan could. “It doesn’t work like that. Not always. In an ideal world, sure, but not the real world. Just because you’re guaranteed true love, that doesn’t mean it’ll make you happy.”
“Forgive me for saying so, but from what I saw, you two were plenty ‘happy’ before you got interrupted,” Nick said, tapping one foot as he spoke.
Ivan grimaced. “There’s a difference between rutting and being happy. You should know this.”
Nick looked confused, a small frown line popping up between his eyebrows.
“What was I saying earlier about honeymooners?” Abram muttered. “Imagine Barrett’s pissed you off.”
“Not hard to do,” Nick said with a snort. Ivan stifled a chuckle. He liked Barrett, but rub him the wrong way and the guy was a firecracker, all flash and bang and burn-your-fingers. Even a guy as stupidly in love as Nick would have to handle him with care. “Barrett’s pissed me off. And…?”
“Imagine you were horny, too.”
Ivan didn’t hold back the laugh this time. Nick’s cheeks turned a dull red. “We’re not that bad.”
“Yes,” Ivan said. “You absolutely are. But that’s how it’s supposed to be.” He paused and pressed the back of his hand over his soulmark—instinct or reflex, he didn’t know. “I’m not sure you know how lucky you two are. Sorry for interrupting.”
Abram made a rumbling noise, but let it pass. Nick didn’t, his expression
turning a different shade of thoughtful. He probably didn’t want to imagine a soulbond could go wrong. Ivan couldn’t blame him.
“Anyway,” Abram said, “in this hypothetical situation, are you any less angry with Barrett because you want to nail him? No. Sometimes, there’s more angry than there is horny. Sometimes life gets in the way.”
Nick wasn’t going to take the lesson without a fight. “But you and Callum made it work, and I’ve heard plenty of stories about what you two used to get up to. He put your insignia through a shredder once.”
“And got a damned good spanking for it,” Abram replied without a flinch at the reference to his soulmate. Ivan liked that about Abram. Teddy bear nature or not, he could be tough as nails when the occasion called for some tooth and claw. Callum, too. They were what happened when a tornado met a volcano and ended up in Oz. “You’re not stupid, Nick. Don’t pretend to be.”
“It’s not about being stupid,” Nick protested. He turned to Ivan. “You still love him, though.”
It wasn’t a question, but Ivan answered all the same. “Maybe more than I remembered.”
“Does he love you?”
“After that stunt I pulled? I’d be surprised.” Ivan pressed two fingers to his temples. “No, that’s not true. If he didn’t, even a little, he wouldn’t have let me get the jump on him. Trust me, that man can take care of himself. But loving someone and wanting them isn’t enough. Not always.”
Nick spread his hands, palms turned up. “That’s what I’m asking. I’m not naive. I know there’s got to be a lot more you aren’t telling me. Things I’m just guessing at. You said he seems different. Maybe he’s changed. Maybe the problems you had could be fixed.” He was painfully earnest. “Why isn’t wanting it enough reason to at least try?”
Silence.
Abram cleared his throat. “It’s up to you, Ivan. I’ll back your call. What do you want to do?”
Ivan blew out a breath. What did he want to do? Good question, that. Good damn question. “I think I want to get some more ice and see about adding whiskey to it,” he said, standing up. “After that? I guess we’ll see.”
