by Keaton, Elle
As the interview wound down, Mat already knew he wanted to hire Jorgensen, but there were more hoops to jump through before he could offer him the position. If he could, he’d make the offer then and there.
“Are you headed back this afternoon?” Mat asked as he walked Jorgensen to the front doors of the station.
The younger man nodded. “It’s not too bad a trip. A nice relaxing ferry ride, and then once I’m out of Anacortes it’s only about an hour’s drive.”
Mat stuck his hand out. “Thanks again for coming all this way. We’ll be in touch. I think you’d be a good fit here.” That was the best he could offer, knowing the man would take it for the tacit approval it was. Jorgensen’s smile reached his sky-blue eyes. Jesus, when the gods had been handing out favors, Jorgensen had been at the front of the line.
At least one thing had gone well that day. Mat sat down at his desk, feeling a little more positive as he powered up his desktop. As Birdy watched him get settled, he said, “Jorgensen seems great. We’ll run all the official deep checks; hopefully that won’t take too long and we can offer him the position.”
“Most of them are already completed, sir. We’re just waiting on one last check to come back.”
“Excellent.”
Birdy shooed him out of the station a little earlier than usual. “Go home. Check on your fiancé.”
Mat didn’t argue. He needed to see Niall.
“I talked to Trey Jackson today,” Mat said when he’d drawn close enough for Niall to hear him.
He’d found Niall down at the beach, throwing rocks into the water. Fenrir was likely close by, although Mat didn’t see him.
“What did he want?” Niall asked, his voice full of suspicion. He picked up another rock and chucked it far out into the gunmetal-gray water.
Mat frowned, stuffing his hands into his coat pockets. The wind had a knife edge to it. “How do you know he wants something?”
“He’s in jail. He wants out. Therefore, he wants something. Also,” Niall gestured at himself with his thumb, “cop, remember?”
Mat sighed. Niall’s green stare bored into him. Jeffrey absolutely wanted to make a deal and thought he had information that would make it happen. Mat’s shoulders slumped a little; he knew the subject of Jeffrey Reynolds would put Niall in a bad mood. “He wants a deal.”
It was Niall’s turn to frown. “Of course he does. What does he have as leverage? And why did he wait so long to say anything?”
“He said, ‘July 3 wasn’t an accident.’ And that once I figure out what he’s talking about to come back and see him. I didn’t get to ask why he’s only coming forward now. He didn’t seem to want to spend a lot of time chatting.”
“Maybe he heard about Duane Cooper,” Niall said. “But what does July 3 mean?”
“That’s the day my dad died.”
Just at that moment, Fenrir came bounding back from his foray into the bushes, looking very pleased with himself. He was carrying something in his mouth, and it wasn’t a stick. As he gamboled closer, Mat peered at the object clamped between his jaws, wondering what it was, but Niall beat him to it.
“What the fuck is that?” he asked.
It’s not a human bone. Yeah, and if you repeat the words to yourself enough times, you’ll believe it, Mat thought. Statistics weighed heavily against the remains Fenrir had discovered in the shrubs along the southwest edge of Niall’s property being human, but Mat didn’t hold out much hope, not with the way things had been going lately.
The bone looked old to Mat; it was definitely weathered. He’d been looking forward to a quiet dinner, and now they were digging the crime scene tape out of the cruiser’s trunk and tromping around the woods among Oregon grape and prickly blackberry, trying to figure out where Fenrir had found the bone. The dog had not been impressed when Niall ordered him into the yurt, but they didn’t need his help. If there were more remains out there, Mat wanted to find them where they lay.
“It could be bear,” Niall said from behind him.
“A bear?” Mat scoffed. “We don’t have bears.”
“That’s not true. They’ve been known to swim here from the mainland. It could be dog, or something else. It doesn’t have to be human remains.”
“I don’t know why you’re arguing. You were just as freaked out as I was when he came out of the woods. My gut is telling me this is human.”
Niall sighed, and Mat knew it was because he was right. Why, just once, couldn’t they have a normal, quiet, boring day? He must’ve been muttering out loud, because Niall snorted. “You’d be bored.”
Before heading into the woods, Mat had snapped a few pictures of the bone with his cell phone and sent them to Marshal. Very likely, the Piedras County volunteer coroner and ER doctor would be able to identify it. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
“Whatever they are, they’ve been out here for a while,” offered Niall.
“I know.”
But still Mat forged his way into the dense undergrowth. It was much darker here, the only light coming from errant rays of the sun, which had begun its inexorable descent toward the horizon.
“It wasn’t until you arrived that Fenrir disappeared over here. Before that, he was on the beach. Think about it: he was here for maybe ten minutes, tops. I saw him at the edge for a little while, so that makes it more like seven minutes. He couldn’t have gone too far.”
Mat flicked on his flashlight, shining it back and forth ahead of them. All he could see were shadows and dark. The trees were thick here and the undergrowth even more impassable. Niall was right. They’d come too far.
He turned around to backtrack and slammed into Niall, who was much closer than Mat had anticipated. He stepped backward, and a branch or root caught him up. He grabbed at Niall for purchase, but they ended up tumbling to the forest floor with Niall breaking Mat’s fall.
“Jesus, are you okay? Your head?”
“My head is fine. I didn’t hit it,” Niall grumped, trying to squirm out from underneath Mat’s weight.
Niall was slightly taller than Mat, but Mat had the advantage of being on top. It had been a stressful week, even before Niall had almost been blown up, and then with Niall’s headache they’d hardly kissed last night. Suddenly the bones didn’t seem as urgent as they had. Niall was right; they’d been there a long time.
Where they lay, the forest floor was covered with pine needles and, when Mat put his hand down against it, surprisingly dry. With purpose and forethought, he ground his pelvis down against Niall’s, needing the other man to understand how much he wanted him, how glad he was that Niall was alive and in his life. The damn bones could wait a little longer.
“Jesus, Mat,” Niall whispered into the quiet of the woods. The words weren’t a protest, they were a plea.
Slowly, so if by the slimmest chance he was wrong about Niall wanting Mat as much as Mat wanted him, Mat lowered his head to taste him, to experience the silken glide of Niall’s lips, the prickly rasp of his beard shadow against his cheeks.
Niall quit moving under him. His hands moved from Mat’s chest, where he’d been trying to push him off, to the back of Mat’s head so he could pull him closer. Their lips met with a crash, and Mat was immediately lost. It had been too long. Even though he was on top, he was in no way in control. Niall wrapped his legs around Mat’s calves and ankles, holding him down and rhythmically moving his hips against Mat’s.
It was cold, damp, and nearly dark. Somewhere close there were remains, possibly human. Above them branches swayed, soughing against each other as the wind found its way to the interior. Mat didn’t care. All he cared about, all he wanted was the man underneath him.
Niall moaned and bucked. Mat forced himself half onto his knees for better purchase. He was going to have to take a shower after this no matter what happened; he might as well take it to the finish. He threw one hand out to better support himself, thinking he’d use the other to unbutton Niall’s jeans and feel his erection against his palm again.
His hand, the one not groping Niall’s dick, landed on something slick, cold, and definitely not a root. “The fuck.”
He sat back on his haunches, straddling Niall’s thighs, and groped around, found his flashlight where it had fallen next to Niall, and shone it in the direction of whatever he had touched. The empty eyes of a skull stared back at him.
Later Mat would swear he didn’t make a sound, but Niall insisted he yelped.
All Mat could think at the time was that he was being cockblocked by a dead person.
Niall blinked up at him, his demeanor changing at the expression on Mat’s face. “What?”
“We found them.”
“Found—oh, shit. Let me see.”
Niall snatched the flashlight from Mat and scrambled onto his knees to shine the light underneath the root ball of an enormous Doug fir that had been uprooted sometime in the past. Not too far past, though, because there was no secondary growth, no small ferns or fungi growing on the exposed earth.
“Well, shit.”
Shit was about right. Mat’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He considered ignoring it but pulled it out of his coat pocket. It was a text from Marshal, responding to the photo he’d sent minutes earlier.
‘I’d have to see it in person but tentatively, human.’
For Mat, that was enough. Marshal would never come close to tentative unless he was pretty damn sure, and anyway, now they had a skull to go along with Fenrir’s discovery. Leaning forward while Niall had the flashlight trained on it, Mat snapped a couple pictures of the skull and tapped Send.
Crawling on his hands and knees, Niall backed out of the scene and stood up. “One of us is going to need to stay here while the other goes and gets tape. There’s no point in doing anything tonight; if anything, we’ll destroy any evidence left—what we didn’t destroy already. Tomorrow we can come back and see what we can do. Brush yourself off. You look like you’ve been fucking around in the bushes.”
“You don’t look any better. Turn around so I can clean you off. And we have been fucking around in the bushes—at least, we almost were,” Mat responded. Niall did as he was told, and Mat did his best to brush the pine needles, dead leaves, and dirt from Niall’s parka.
“You know, you really know how to take a guy on a date,” Niall snarked.
“Shut up, asshole.”
“And such romance. Old bones, a dark forest—you were going to take advantage of me.”
“Niall,” Mat growled, “if you don’t mind your manners, I’m gonna throw you down right here and finish what we started.”
A broad grin stretched across Niall’s face. Mat didn’t know that he’d ever seen the man smile like that. Not in the time he’d been back on Piedras, and certainly not in high school.
“Only if you can catch me. Give me your keys, and I’ll grab the tape. I’m not hanging around in the creepy woods with some old bones.”
Chuckling, Niall left Mat to wait in the murky dark with the skull, loping off with catlike swiftness to their parked cars. The alarm beeped, and Mat heard his trunk open and shut. Then the light from his flashlight preceded Niall, bobbing as he found his way back to where Mat waited. Together they strung the tape up, around, and over the tree roots, then around a few other trees, clearly marking the area so they’d be able to find the scene the next day.
“Ah,” Niall said as they made their way back out of the wooded area, “a cop’s perfect dinner date. You are such a romantic. Wait, is this one of those mystery theater things?”
Mat rolled his eyes. Niall was ridiculous.
“Mom invited us for dinner over there, but now you look like you were rolling around in the mud making out with someone, and I’m not sure you can withstand her questions.”
Niall slowed his pace as they drew closer to the yurt. “I’m pretty sure I can handle your mother; can you handle me?”
He was a wicked, wicked man. No, Mat couldn’t handle Niall. He was a bolt of lightning Mat was trying with all his strength to hang on to.
10
Wednesday—Niall
In the end, they decided to stay home. Niall hoped Mat understood. “I love Riley and your mom,” he explained, “but I won’t be very good company.”
The bones in his backyard made him uneasy. And, if he was honest with himself, they were something he really didn’t want to deal with at the moment—and that made him feel terrible and selfish. Whoever this person turned out to be, a family—a spouse, parent, sibling, child, or other loved one—had probably been waiting years for them to come home. For closure. Or it was possible that whoever it was no longer had family, in which case Niall knew he would feel obligated to make sure they were mourned with a proper Viking send-off. Maybe it wasn’t too late for their spirit to reach Valhalla.
He watched Mat as he puttered shirtless and barefoot in the cooking area, opening a couple of cans of chicken soup and pouring them into a saucepan before placing it on the stove. Niall enjoyed watching him move. Mat was leaner than Niall, but he was still muscled and had broad shoulders that tapered down to his waist. He insisted he’d gained weight since a new bakery had moved in next to the station, but Niall didn’t think so, and frankly, he didn’t care.
“So,” Niall began, “Jeffrey Reynolds thinks he knows something about your dad?”
Mat turned from stirring the soup to face Niall, leaning one hip against the counter. The scars from the bombing were still red and angry looking, and seeing them made Niall’s blood pressure rise.
“He must. Or, as you said, he thinks he does.”
“The fact that Cooper showed up dead must have something to do with it. It can’t be a coincidence.”
Mat frowned and rubbed the back of his neck. “Probably not. I just…” He sighed. “I don’t think my dad walked on water or anything, but I’ve spent a lot of the day trying to wrap my head around the idea that maybe he was involved in something that led to his death. What if he and Cooper had an illegal side job going and it got him killed?”
Niall grunted. That thought had come to mind when Mat had first told him.
“Dad was a small-town sheriff with four kids. Granted, I was in my midtwenties and Sean was almost thirty when Dad died, but both of my sisters were still at home. My folks managed to pay for college for all of us, owned a home, had decent cars. We didn’t live the high life, exactly, but…”
The yurt was silent but for the ever-present sound of the waves hitting the shoreline and the wind in the trees. Mat turned back around, stirring the soup before pouring it into bowls and bringing it to the table.
“Let’s eat.”
Fucking Jeffrey Reynolds. What was his motivation at this point? The more Niall thought about it, the more suspicious he became. Reynolds was, in Niall’s opinion, a dickbag who thought the world owed him something, and he was going to try to use Mat to get what he wanted.
He had to be after some kind of leniency, and that stuck in Niall’s craw. Yes, it happened all the time, a 100 percent guilty person trading information for a lesser sentence. Niall should be used to it by now. But he wasn’t, and his sense of justice bristled at Jeffrey’s… boldness. Whatever information he had must be good.
“Stop that,” Mat said.
“What?”
“You’re brooding, tapping your spoon against the side of your bowl instead of eating. Finish your soup, and then we can go relax in bed.”
By relax, Niall was fairly certain Mat meant something else, something he was very on board with. But he could feel bits of leaf and grime where they had snuck down the back of his shirt. “I need to take a shower first.”
“Sure, fine. I’ll clean up in here.”
“I can do that.”
“Niall.” Mat shot him a look. “It’s a pot and a couple bowls. I think I can handle it.”
Reason number three to move forward with new cabin designs: the shower was too small for the both of them. Technically they both fit, but it was tight and not fun—they’d tri
ed.
With the hot water beating down on his shoulders and back, Niall fantasized about a shower-tub combo big enough for the both of them. About pressing his naked body against Mat’s, maybe going down on his knees and taking him into his mouth.
“Babe, you’re going to use up all the hot water, and I’d kinda like a shower too.” Mat peeked around the shower curtain. “Oh.”
Niall looked down his body to his cock, which was enthusiastically greeting his lover. He locked eyes with Mat and wrapped his fist around his shaft, pumping it just once, and the heated expression in Mat’s eyes had his balls lifting and tightening.
“Fuck this tiny shower,” Mat said. “Hurry up, I need you.”
As quickly as he could, because he didn’t want to end up in the hospital again, Niall rinsed and toweled himself dry. Soper had said all activities were fine, and that definitely included sex.
Leaving the towel to dry on the rack, Niall left the bathroom and padded naked across the open living space to their bedroom. Their bedroom. The thought hit him in a way it hadn’t before, and he stopped moving. Not that he was unaware of the commitment he and Mat had made to each other, but the fact that he, Niall Hamarsson, had a life partner—someone who was as committed to him as he was to Mat…
Fenrir thumped his tail against the plywood flooring as if to say “Duh,” spurring Niall back into motion.
“It’s your turn—oh.”
Mat was waiting for him, sprawled out underneath the comforter Alyson had gifted them. Niall knew he was naked.
“I’ll shower later. Just gonna get dirty again anyway,” Mat said, wicked grin plastered on his face.
Lifting the blanket slightly, Niall slid onto the bed and up against Mat’s warm body. Skin against skin, hip against hip. So good.
“God, Niall.”
Mat threw one leg over Niall’s thigh and rolled on top of him, pressing Niall into the mattress. It felt good, life affirming to have the weight of Mat’s body on his, Mat’s erection slotted against his own at the apex of their legs. It felt right, incredible, perfect.
