by SE Jakes
Dedication
Always for the readers…thank you!!!
Chapter One
Shane wasn’t sure how far he’d walked after the trucker dropped him off. At some point, the rain had turned to hail that sleeted in diagonal sheets and stung his face as he attempted to push farther along to find the motel.
“Two miles,” the trucker had said. “I’m late, or else I’d take you.”
He’d just shrugged and headed into the diner for some coffee and food before making this leg of the trip. No cabs in this weather, and with little money, the choice between food and transportation seemed obvious. He was young, strong and had his own two feet.
In the Army, he’d walked through sandstorms and artillery fire, carried men through hell to get to safety. Frostbite didn’t concern him.
He’d been numb for the last five months anyway. He’d been forced to leave his job—his life—behind. Lost a love he’d never thought he’d find there anyway, had a killer on his six and tried to convince himself that all of this was his punishment for getting Kyle killed.
Now, he realized that walking through this storm wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had. Not when he was feeling sick on top of the fractured ribs he’d gotten hours earlier, both of which made breathing difficult. He was barely cognizant of what state he was in, although if he had to guess, upstate New York during one of the worst storms in years, if he’d heard the incessant weather reports correctly during his more wakeful hours.
The fever that had been dogging him for weeks seemed to decide that right now was the perfect time to hit him full force.
Yeah, Shane had enough troubles. And then he’d gotten turned around, something that had never happened to him before—or maybe the motel wasn’t actually where the trucker thought.
But when he finally saw a porch light, the only thing he could do was run toward it before he collapsed against the heavy wooden door.
Chapter Two
“What the fuck was that?”
Reed looked up from his computer screen to see Keith scowling at the door. “Probably just the wind.”
“Wind doesn’t sound like that.”
“Animal?” Reed suggested, and Keith peered out the window because yeah, the last thing they needed was a deer running through the cabin looking for shelter from the storm.
“Don’t see anything. Wait…shit.” Keith still moved like a military man, because once a Marine, always a Marine. He opened the door swiftly and Reed came over in time to see a man’s body crumpled on their porch.
The fierce storm blew snow and hail inside as Keith dragged the unconscious man inside. There was no telling what he looked like beyond Caucasian—his hair was covered with snow and he was bundled up, but it was no match for Mother Nature’s wrath.
“Get those clothes off him—I’ll get blankets,” Reed barked, and Keith rolled his eyes like, duh, as he’d already laid the boy down by the fire and had begun stripping the wet clothing off the most likely hypothermic patient.
Reed raced to the bedroom for extra blankets and towels, cranked the heat up in the house and grabbed his medical bag. He’d started out as a medic in the Army and had finished getting his medical degree while still in the service. He’d been out for years now, in a private practice in this small town when he’d settled in with Keith and Bobby.
Bobby.
The grief ripped through his chest, the pain still so fresh it could bring him to his knees.
You couldn’t save him, but you can save this one.
That got him moving forward. He tossed Keith the blankets as they both knelt over the young man. Now that Keith had brushed some snow off, he could see the light brown color of the boy’s hair. Lifted his lids to check his pupils and was met with green eyes that didn’t focus. He was almost as tall as Reed, was in decent shape but much thinner than someone with his frame should be.
He’d also recently been in a fight. There were bruises on his knuckles and a large bruise on his side—Reed didn’t probe, as the man’s skin would be too sensitive from the hypothermia. Broken or badly bruised, his ribs would still be a bitch to heal.
“Grab me the antibiotic and saline—wrap that in a warm towel,” Reed told Keith, who did so quickly, then returned to searching the man’s clothing while Reed started the warm drip and the antibiotics after he readied an IV.
“Any ID?” he asked as he put the stick-on thermometer on the unconscious man’s forehead and the stethoscope in his own ears and prepped to listen to his chest.
“No, but his name’s Shane Wills and the address is a PO box, according to the junk mail he had stuffed in his pocket.” Keith put the envelopes aside on a table so they wouldn’t get lost. “He’s got some cash, no credit. Nothing else in his pockets.”
“Weird.” Reed sucked his bottom lip as he continued checking Shane over. His temp was ninety-five, and he’d begun to shiver so hard Reed couldn’t keep him still. “Hey Shane—you’re safe. Can you open your eyes for me? Shane?”
At the sound of his name, the young man’s eyes flickered open for a long second and then closed again. They’d been dulled with pain and fever, and Reed was worried.
“I’ll check outside for a bag,” Keith offered as the storm’s intensity increased. “I’d hate to think he had family worried about him on Christmas Eve.”
They’d planned to have a quiet dinner in so they’d had no worries about the storm. They’d weathered far worse.
Reed pulled the stethoscope out of his ears. “He’s pretty sick on top of the hypothermia—we can’t move him tonight in this weather safely. I’ve got enough antibiotics to get him through—tomorrow, we can see about checking him into the hospital. Forget going outside—take your clothes off.”
Keith’s brow shot up, and Reed just muttered something about him being a horny bastard.
Keith didn’t argue, but he was already stripping down to his boxers. Probably knew that was the way things would go from the beginning—he was practically an honorary doctor after spending so much time with Reed.
Reed stripped too, stoked the fire and laid the comforter down while Keith crawled under the blankets and rolled Shane so Keith was pressed against his naked, shivering body, Shane’s back to his chest. Reed quickly got under the blanket as well and pressed his chest to Shane’s.
“He’s freezing,” Keith grumbled, but Reed noted he’d reached up to feel the boy’s forehead like he could will his temperature back up. His dark eyes were intense, and for that moment, it was the first time Reed and Keith met, on the steps of this very house on a Christmas Eve what seemed like ages ago.
“You still look the same,” Keith murmured, reading his mind as always.
“Bullshit.” And still, the man could make him blush.
They’d been together for eight years today, had been in love for most of that time, although for sure it had started with lust.
Nights like tonight reminded them that they were lucky to have one another. Made them miss Bobby too, although Reed suspected that would be an ache that neither man would ever be able to shake.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Keith told him now and Reed shrugged.
“Eight years ago, this was me,” he reminded Keith, who he knew needed no reminding.
“Bobby and I never did this to you.”
“Yeah, but you wanted to.”
Keith smirked and didn’t say anything else for a while.
Suddenly, Shane shifted hard against Reed. Murmured the name Kyle and pressed his lips to Reed’s neck. And then he went still again.
Reed raised a brow at that, suddenly uncomfortably hard himself at the contact. “What happens when he wakes up?”
“He’s either going to fre
ak or he’ll be in heaven,” Keith said with a frown. “We can’t let him come to like this.”
“I don’t think we’ve got a choice. I just want him to come to.” Reed shifted and felt Shane’s hand move down between their bodies. He looked down to see Shane circle his own cock, murmuring Kyle’s name again as he stroked.
“Is he doing what I think he’s doing?” Keith asked, and Reed breathed, “Yeah.”
“Not a bad way for a man to warm himself up,” Keith said, and the two of them waited, not wanting to do anything inappropriate with him but not wanting to stop him, either.
Under the heavy blanket, Reed began to sweat—he saw Keith had too and checked Shane’s pulse with his free hand. Definitely not thready any longer. No, it was fast.
Shane began to breathe hard against his shoulder, his body shifted, his hips rocking toward Reed’s body as he stoked his broad cock. It was rock hard and hot, blood rushing to the organ and to other parts of the man’s body as well.
There was no way to stop this. Reed saw the look in Keith’s eyes—liquid desire, knew they’d both relive this in their fantasies for a long time to come.
When Shane came, it was with a sharp, keening cry. His eyes remained closed, his breathing sharpened and his skin was slick with sweat.
Mission accomplished.
Shane moved close to Reed, murmured “Kyle” and “missed you” a few more times and then fell back into the depths of the fever.
After half an hour, Reed checked Shane’s temperature and stopped the warm saline so the guy’s fever wouldn’t spike up. Keith shifted out from under the blankets and grabbed a washcloth and fresh boxer briefs for Reed, who cleaned Shane’s belly and chest, pausing to stare at his body.
“He’s military,” Keith declared, staring down at the younger man.
“You think everyone’s military.”
“I knew you were.”
“I was a doctor.”
“Didn’t matter.” Keith watched Reed change out of the soiled black boxer briefs into the fresh pair. “I wonder if he’s AWOL?”
“Are you going to check?”
Keith shrugged. “I’ll see what I can pull up without triggering a manhunt. First, I’m going to look and see if he dropped a bag in the snow along the path.”
He got up and pulled his clothes on, his cock achingly hard as he tucked it into his jeans. He glanced at Reed, who watched him and was so fucking grateful that someone looked at him like that after so much time spent together.
He pulled on a heavy jacket, and Reed told him, “Ten minutes,” before Keith disappeared into the blizzard. He tracked down the path as best he could—Shane’s footprints were long covered up, but he knew there was really only one way up the driveway through the massive trees that lined both sides of the drive.
He’d lived here for ten years—bought the house with Bobby on a whim, which Bobby teased him about till his dying day.
“So impulsive,” Bobby whispered to him the night before he died. “So unlike you.”
It had been. He’d remembered being embarrassed to tell Bobby that he believed there was something magical about the place, because Marines didn’t believe in magic—they believed in hard work. Country. God. Family.
But Bobby had believed in him and that had been all that mattered.
“Bobby, what are you doing?” he called into the howling wind and waited, like he expected a response.
“There’s always a plan,” Bobby had told him before his eyes had closed for good that night a year ago. Keith had never had a reason not to trust him.
Chapter Three
Keith stomped the snow off his boots, stripped down and found that Reed had carried Shane into the spare bedroom, gotten him comfortable. There was a warm saline IV running into his arm and IV antibiotics on the bedside table.
“He’s got pneumonia. I’ll be monitoring him all night,” Reed said.
“We’ll be monitoring him all night,” Keith corrected. “I didn’t find any bag. Let me go try to get the word out about him first.”
He went into the small office on the other end of the living room and shot off some emails to friends who were still enlisted. He figured he should hear something back by the morning. He also checked local missing person’s reports and found nothing. Something in his gut told him not to report Shane to the authorities, though.
The boy was in trouble—or he was trouble—Keith was sure of it.
Then again, he’d thought the same thing about Reed when he’d shown up half dead on the doorstep on Christmas Eve, just the way the local legend said would happen. The realtor had been the one to tell Keith about it originally—she liked that bit of local flavor and thought Keith might as well.
Supposedly, the cabin was at least a hundred years old, and it had a reputation of bringing lovers together on Christmas Eve. People came there in bad weather, looking for an inn, but there was no record of an inn being on or near that property. There was a Motel 6 twenty miles away and nothing beyond that Keith had ever been able to find on any map, no matter how old.
No one had a clue where the inn rumor had started, but when Keith bought the house he’d inherited that story along with a good foundation, sixteen-foot ceilings and a nonexistent electrical system. Over the years, with Bobby’s help and then Reed’s, he’d rebuilt almost everything while keeping the original feel of the place.
And yeah, his sentimentality had definitely shown through.
From the outside, it looked like little more than a sturdy log cabin. It was exactly the way they liked it, because their business was as secret as their private life and it provided the men with the necessary security.
Having any kind of personal life or attachments as a mercenary was never recommended. Once anyone knew you had something—or someone—you’d rather die than lose, you were in trouble.
Keith and Reed had been off the grid for so long, it was a concern only at times like this. If Shane had been sent in to hunt them, he’d done a piss-poor job of it.
Keith would make sure it stayed that way and dammit, Christmas Eve and investigations didn’t go together. He sipped his Scotch, the smell of ham and other foods cooking in the kitchen wafting over him. Reed had insisted on making a feast, and Keith’s stomach rumbled appreciatively at the thought of the spread. Both men had learned to cook relatively well in their years in the military when they’d been living alone. Over the course of the years, they’d picked up a lot from Bobby too, who’d actually gone to culinary school at some point, just for fun.
Keith would’ve paid money to see that—an active-duty Marine in culinary school. Smiled thinking about Bobby using his KA-BAR knife to peel potatoes.
In a way, this meal was Reed’s tribute to the man who’d died a week before Christmas last year. The men had promised Bobby they wouldn’t stop celebrating the holiday.
Pulling his mind back to the present, Keith flexed his fingers over the keys, tapping into databases he had no business being in and coming up blank. That in and of itself brought up a number of red flags, in Keith’s book.
“Anything?” Reed asked, coming into the den, leaning his hip against the desk facing Keith, who shook his head. “Special forces?”
“No way.”
Reed seemed to agree. “Definitely military, which means this ID’s fake. Good, but fake.”
“Shane’s his real first name though—even half unconscious, he responds to it,” Keith pointed out.
“Witness Protection?”
“I’ll email Dan in case someone’s missing. That’s a Christmas Eve email no one would mind getting,” he said, knowing the US Marshal would appreciate the heads-up.
“I’d hate to think of Kyle out looking for him. No one should be alone during the holidays,” Reed said somberly as he moved closer to Keith.
They both had, at various points throughout their lives. “He’s not alone.”
“No, just shut in with one of the most suspicious men on the planet.” Keith merely smiled be
cause Reed said it with an affectionate rub to his shaved head, followed by a kiss. “I can still see the bite mark.”
“You were a little excited,” Keith said wryly, and Reed snorted.
“Yeah, just a little. Not your fault at all.”
“I was planning a repeat performance tonight, but I guess it’ll have to wait.”
“Looks that way.”
Keith sighed. “When he wakes—”
“You are not going to interrogate him.”
“You’re really going to owe me,” Keith told him mutinously as Reed moved away and shrugged.
“Not a hardship,” Reed called over his shoulder as he walked across the hall toward the guest room.
Through the open door, Keith watched his partner rub the young man down with water and alcohol. Managing fever on top of hypothermia took skill, but Reed had dealt with much worse.
After another hour of emails, including hearing back from Dan, his marshal contact, that all their WITSEC men and women were safe and sound, Keith got up and went to the doorway of the guest room, noting the flush of fever on Shane’s face had subsided somewhat. But the boy’s eyes still held that hazy, faraway look whenever they opened to Reed quietly saying, “Hey, Shane, can you open your eyes for me?” And then just as suddenly they’d close again and sleep would take him.
Reed looked up at him. “You okay?”
Keith put his hands up to grab the doorframe above his head, stretched himself as he gave an unconvincing, “Yeah.”
“You’ve got to admit this is weird,” Reed said finally. Of the three of them, he believed the least in that old legend about this house drawing those in need to it, but he couldn’t deny the oddness of this. “I mean, eight years to the day. To the hour.”
Keith shrugged. “’S’what the legend says. Travelers in need find their way here on this day at this time.”
“Like me.” Reed’s blue eyes shone in the soft light, the memories making him smile a little. His blond hair was on the longer side, and he was shorter than Keith—six-two to Keith’s six-five, but his build was lankier. He was strong as hell, though, as Keith well remembered when he came to that night he woke on the living room floor and immediately tried to punch both Keith and Bobby.
