by Amy Lane
“Yeah,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m glad you got out. I know you were pretty sick all week, but I don’t remember seeing you dance tonight.”
That’s because you were talking to your friend on the other side of the club when Tommy came up behind me, splayed his hands across my stomach, and cradled me in the cup of his groin and thighs.
“Must have been when you were talking to Kerry and Jeff,” he said, knowing damned well that was when he’d been dancing. Tommy, who loved him, would torment him, follow him, yearn for him—but he wouldn’t out Chase. Not without Chase’s permission. He’d tried once. The results had haunted them both.
Mercy’s hand on his thigh was intimate and suggestive. “I hope you weren’t dancing with any pretty girls,” she purred, kneading him like a cat. It was a skillful caress: soft, receptive to Chase’s needs, kind, and hoping for a response. Chase felt like slapping her hand.
No, sweetheart. Lying to one woman about who I am and what I want is plenty.
“There’s not a girl out there who would make me happier than you do.” Oh God. A truth. Who knew?
They talked quietly, desultorily, on the way back to the apartment that Chase hated so badly. It looked good—Mercy was skillful at decorating on a budget, and she took pains to make the place cheerful and airy with nice furniture and eclectic decorations. Chase liked her taste—but he often thought he’d like leather furniture that matched the area rug, or the right to paint the wall behind the television hunter green to match the valances. He tried not to say these things to Mercy. She’d worked so hard, and he’d told her he’d love anything she did. Besides. They were saving all their money for a house.
They parked the car and ran through the warren of apartment buildings, hitting as many covered walkways as they could and laughing a little with the feel of the March rain on their heads. Chase loved that feeling—rain on his face, the patterns of each drop warming with his skin. He turned, laughing, toward Mercy as they hit the overhang before their set of stairs, and for a moment, she was the study buddy he’d started dating two years ago, his friend, his confidante, and the person who watched movies with him until the wee hours of the night.
She smiled gaily, like a child, and turned her laughing face up for a kiss, and that laughing moment was crushed under the steel door of all he could not say. He bent down and placed a gentle, sexless kiss on her lips, pale from the cold, and she opened her mouth and invited him in. He swept his tongue in for form and knew her arms would come around his neck as she sought desperately to capture something in him that he didn’t know how to give her. He kissed her well, thoroughly, stroking her tongue with his, wrapping his hands around the small of her waist, massaging her scalp through her hair with just enough pressure.
He pulled back, feeling warm and happy from the contact, proud enough of the deception for the moment that he almost forgot it was one, when she murmured, “Mmm… so, ready to go inside and take up where that left off?”
No, because my lover’s come is still running down the crease of my ass and leaking onto my upper thigh.
“Yeah, babe. But can I take a shower first? Someone spilled a drink on my lap and I feel sort of rank, ’kay?”
He smiled apologetically, and Mercy rolled her eyes, like she was used to his fastidiousness. “Okay,” she said softly, cupping his cheek and glowing up into his face like a woman in love. “I’ll go make myself comfortable.”
He swallowed and smiled and kissed her forehead with all the considerable tenderness in his soul. God, she deserved so much more.
In the shower, he forgot himself.
His hand tracked the path of Tommy’s hand as it rubbed his six-pack, and then up over each and every defined rib. Tommy had pinched his nipples hard, because he knew that made them super sensitive (it was even posted on the Johnnies site), and he’d whispered in Chase’s ear, because their shared experience had told him that his ears and the side of his neck had a nerve sensitization express straight to his groin.
“We’re going to the bathroom, okay? And I’m going to bend you over, and be inside you, and fuck you so hard you’ve got no room in your body for anything but my cock and my come, okay? Say no now, ‘Chance’. Because once this song is over, you’re mine.”
He’d punctuated that with a brutal twist of Chase’s nipple, and Chase had been a puddle, submissive, willing to say anything, do anything, go anywhere, if only Tommy kept touching him.
They hadn’t kissed in the tiny bathroom stall, because experience had proven that they couldn’t just kiss, they would suck and suckle and bite, leaving hickeys on Chase’s tanned skin. Tommy’s skin was pale, and Chase suckled that spot, that one right there on his neck, because Tommy had no one to hide from. Tommy gasped, ground up against Chase’s leg, and then pulled back, his face a mask of hurt and anger, desire and pain.
“You don’t get to do that!” he snarled. “This is for me! It’s all I’m going to get, and you don’t get to….” His face almost crumpled then, and Chase knew, with everything in him, how much this gamble had cost Tommy. Dex must have texted him. Chase remembered Dex asking what his plans were; he had no idea this is what Tommy had planned. Chase had left Tommy so brutally… this must have felt like his last chance. He must have just trembled in hope, anticipation, and the desire to take charge. Tommy must have—he liked to bottom, truly loved it, it was his favorite sex act, but only when Chase was on top.
So Chase turned around without comment, giving this thing, his open, spread, waxed asshole, this dirty fucking in a bathroom, because he didn’t have anything better to offer.
He was lucky Tommy loved him. There was the rip of the little lube packet and then it was drizzled right in the sweet spot, before Tommy’s bare cock thrust up, no prep, no stretching, no nothing. If Chase hadn’t shot a scene that week with Ethan, the company’s big-cocked wonder, Tommy’s own big erection would have split him in two. As it was, it felt so good… so right… so wonderful…. Chase buried his face against his massive bicep and let out a sob of need.
“Shh,” Tommy murmured, bending over and kissing along his back. It wasn’t a company move—it was one of those things fans watched the vids for, to assure them that it wasn’t all show—and it wasn’t Tommy’s style, not in front of the camera, anyway. Those gentle hands running along his ribs, that nuzzle of his lips and cheek along the center of Chase’s back—that was all Tommy Halloran, scholarship kid from Southie, who had freckles on his shoulders from misspent attempts to tan.
“Just move,” Chase muttered, shivering with rightness and need, and trying hard not to weep with shame. “Just move, Tommy. Just fuck me and move.” His shaking voice broke on the last word, because he did want Tommy to fuck him, but he didn’t want Tommy to move—or at least not to move on. He wanted Tommy right here in his body, right close to him, touching skin to skin. He wanted Tommy to stay, forever, right there, poised to thrust so hard into his body that there was room for Tommy, only Tommy, and not another soul.
Not even his.
They hadn’t lasted long. Chase had come into his stroking fist, and Tommy, without the condom, had blasted inside his body long and hot and hard. Tommy collapsed against his back and rubbed his wet cheek against Chase’s shoulders until Chase turned around and said, “To hell with your plans, Tommy,” and then held his arms open. Tommy Halloran collapsed against his chest, his shoulders shaking fruitlessly in an effort to hold back his sobs.
They hadn’t stayed that way for long. Chase stood up properly and Tommy’s spend gushed out of Chase’s body, trickling out of the crease of his backside and down his thigh. If the bathroom hadn’t smelled like piss and come and ass already, Chase’s body would have done it in that moment.
“You smell like sex,” Tommy murmured. “Sex and me.”
“I know.”
“I’m glad.”
“Oh God. So am I.”
Tommy looked up, his long-jawed, brooding features swollen from the cry and his lashes spiking around his br
own-black eyes. “Don’t… don’t do this, Chase. Don’t leave me.”
Chase had closed his eyes and kissed Tommy’s forehead, hearing his voice coming out strangled and warped, or maybe that was the men banging on the stall of the men’s room, begging to come in and take a piss.
“I’ll try,” he muttered, sure he didn’t have the courage to do any such thing.
But he hadn’t promised Tommy anything, ever, before. It was as close as he’d come to a vow.
And now, Chase straightened up in the shower, fingering his stretched sphincter, reluctantly wondering if he’d erased every part of Tommy from his skin. He thought of Mercy, in the bedroom, waiting wide-eyed for him to come out and to make love, and of all the times he’d done just that, sliding his lips on her soft, perfumed skin and imagining rougher skin that smelled like sweat. He remembered the times he’d stayed awake in the dark, running his hand over her shoulders, her hips, through her hair as she slept, willing himself to feel his body stir. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes his breath would catch, and his cock would fill with blood, and he’d kiss her neck, her breasts, her soft belly, the slick sweetness between her thighs.
Sometimes.
Most of the time, he simply lay there, next to her, and wondered how things had gotten so fucked up that the person he loved—truly loved, because Mercy was funny and smart and gracious and all the good things a girl should be—was the person he hated, not for herself, but for what she made of him.
He thought of that time now, as he stepped out of the shower and dried off, his skin soft from all the time spent under the water, and opened the drug cabinet, his eyes dreamy and out of focus. He knew where they were. He’d bought them. They were harder to get hold of now that they made all of the really good electric shavers and disposable blade heads, but some drug stores still carried a good old-fashioned razor blade.
He’d had them in the back of the cabinet for more than a month, and she’d never noticed.
“Chase?”
“Out in a minute!”
His fingers didn’t even shake as he reached for the box, and opening it felt predestined.
The metal was cool and thin in his fingers, and practically nonexistent.
So this is how she’d done it. It was easy.
His thumb and forefinger warmed the metal, and it was almost like a trickle of water against the inside of his wrist.
“Chase?”
No one by that name lives here.
“Out in a minute!”
Out… out… out….
God, how he wanted out.
Yellow
Amy Lane Lite
Light Contemporary Romance
Pierce Atwater used to think he was a knight in shining armor, but then his life fell to crap. Now he has no job, no wife, no life—and is so full of self-pity he can’t even be decent to the one family member he’s still speaking to. He heads for Florida, where he’s got a month to pull his head out of his ass before he ruins his little sister’s Christmas.
Harold Justice Lombard the Fifth is at his own crossroads—he can keep being Hal, massage therapist in training, flamboyant and irrepressible to the bones, or he can let his parents rule his life. Hal takes one look at Pierce and decides they’re fellow unicorns out to make the world a better place. Pierce can’t reject Hal’s overtures of friendship, in spite of his misgivings about being too old and too pissed off to make a good friend.
As they experience everything from existential Looney Tunes to eternal trips to Target, Pierce becomes more dependent on Hal’s optimism to get him through the day. When Hal starts getting him through the nights too, Pierce must look inside for the knight he used to be—before Christmas becomes a doomsday deadline of heartbreak instead of a celebration of love.
The Mannies
Growing up and falling in love…
Sometimes family is a blessing and a curse. When Tino Robbins is roped into helping his sister deliver premade dinners when he should be studying for finals, he’s pretty sure it’s the latter! But one delivery might change everything.
Channing Lowell’s charmed life changes when his sister dies and leaves him her seven-year-old son. He’s committed to doing what’s best for Sammy… but he’s going to need a lot of help. When Tino lands on his porch, Channing is determined to recruit him to Team Sammy.
Tino plans to make his education count—even if that means avoiding a relationship—but as he falls harder and harder for his boss, he starts to wonder: Does he have to leave his newly forged family behind in order to live his promising tomorrow?
The Mannies
Starting over and falling in love.
Tino Robbins’s sister, Nica, and her husband, Jacob, are expecting their fifth child. Fortunately, Nica’s best friend, Taylor Cochran, is back in town, released from PT and in need of a job.
After years in the service and recovering from grave injury, Taylor has grown a lot from the callow troublemaker he’d been in high school. Now he’s hoping for a fresh start with Nica and her family.
Jacob’s cousin Brandon lives above the garage and thinks “Taylor the manny” is a bad idea. Taylor might be great at protecting civilians from a zombie apocalypse, but is he any good with kids?
Turns out Taylor’s a natural. As he tries to fit in, using common sense and dry wit, Brandon realizes that Taylor doesn’t just love their family—he’s desperate to be part of it. And just like that, Brandon wants Taylor to be part of his future.
a Winter Ball novel
Through a miserable adolescence and a lonely adulthood, Skipper Keith has dreamed of nothing but family. The closest he gets is the rec league soccer team he coaches after work—and his star player and best friend, Richie Scoggins.
One brisk night in late October, a postpractice convo in Richie’s car turns into a sexual encounter neither of them expected—nor want to forget. Soon Skip and Richie are living for the weekends and their winter league soccer games—and the games they enjoy off the field. Through broken noses, holiday decorating, and the killer flu, they learn more about each other than they ever dreamed possible. Every new discovery takes them further beyond the boundaries of the soccer field and into the infinite possibilities of the best relationship of Skipper’s life.
Skipper can’t dream of a better family than Richie—but Richie’s got real family entanglements he can’t shake off. Skipper needs to convince Richie to stay with him beyond winter ball so the relationship they started on the field might become their happy future in real life!
a Winter Ball novel
Mason Hayes’s love life has a long history of losers who don’t see that Mason’s heart is as deep and tender as his mouth is awkward. He wants kindness, he wants love—and he wants someone who thinks sex is as fantastic as he does. When Terry Jefferson first asks him out, Mason thinks it’s a fluke: Mason is too old, too boring, and too blurty to interest someone as young and hot as his friend’s soccer teammate.
The truth is much more painful: Mason and Terry are perfectly compatible, and they totally get each other. But Terry is still living with his toxic, suffocating parent and Mason doesn’t want to be a sugar daddy. Watching Terry struggle to find himself is a long lesson in patience, but Mason needs to trust that the end result will be worth it, because finally, he’s found a man worth sharing his heart with.
Regret Me Not
“Regret Me Not is a wonderful holiday read, with just enough angst and Christmas cheer to satisfy most readers… Highly recommended for anyone who just needs a sweet happily ever after.”
—Joyfully Jay
“It’s what I come to expect from this author when she’s not trying to rip my heart out. A little fluff, a little drama, a little sex, and a lot of romance!”
—Love Bytes
Familiar Angel
“Familiar Angel is fantastic… a transcendent love story… Harry and Suriel are heroes to die for, and their love is a lesson… I can only have faith and desperately hope she will keep turning out more ta
les like this!”
—Cindy Dees, NYT and USA Today Bestselling author
“Both striking and sensual, the thought-provoking novel pays equal attention to love, sacrifice, the divine, and family.”
—Publishers Weekly
Red Fish, Dead Fish
“The passion in her words of love and family somehow come through like no other author I know.”
—Paranormal Romance Guild
“I have to give high marks to this book. The writing was sharp and decisive and the story was emotionally charged.”
—Gay Book Reviews
AMY LANE is a mother of two grown kids, two half-grown kids, two small dogs, and half-a-clowder of cats. A compulsive knitter who writes because she can’t silence the voices in her head, she adores fur-babies, knitting socks, and hawt menz, and she dislikes moths, cat boxes, and knuckleheaded macspazzmatrons. She is rarely found cooking, cleaning, or doing domestic chores, but she has been known to knit up an emergency hat/blanket/pair of socks for any occasion whatsoever or sometimes for no reason at all. Her award-winning writing has three flavors: twisty-purple alternative universe, angsty-orange contemporary, and sunshine-yellow happy. By necessity, she has learned to type like the wind. She’s been married for twenty-five-plus years to her beloved Mate and still believes in Twu Wuv, with a capital Twu and a capital Wuv, and she doesn’t see any reason at all for that to change.
Website: www.greenshill.com
Blog: www.writerslane.blogspot.com
Email: [email protected]
Facebook:www.facebook.com/amy.lane.167
Twitter: @amymaclane
By Amy Lane
