Chapter 7

CHAPTER

SEVEN

CAL

Carlo gestured at the bed. “Signore Reuben asked for two beds, but I knew it must be a mistake, so I made sure you had a king bed and a view.” He crossed to the windows and drew back the gauzy drapes. Late-evening sun filtered in, and through the window, I could see we overlooked a small canal with the bell tower of St. Mark’s Square visible not too far away. The view was breathtaking, even if the bed situation wasn’t.

“Are you sure it’s okay for us to have this room?” Jack asked. “Surely our original reservation would be fine if you needed to move us.”

Carlo shook his head. “Actually, it was convenient I noticed the mistake because all our double rooms are booked. This was a happy coincidence.”

Jack forced a smile. “Well, then I’m glad you noticed the mistake too. This is a lovely room.”

Carlo beamed. “I will leave you to settle in. We offer predinner drinks and snacks in the bar beginning at six thirty if you care to join us.”

“Sounds great.”

Thankfully, Jack had taken over the conversation with Carlo because I was busy biting my tongue while staring at the bed.

The second the door closed behind Jack, I rounded on him, hissing low so Carlo wouldn’t hear us if he’d decided to loiter in the hallway. “I’m not fucking sleeping with you!”

A smirk tipped his lips. “I didn’t ask you to.”

I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean.” I flung an arm wide to indicate the bed.

“Well, sweetheart, unless you heard something I didn’t, there are no available double rooms at this hotel, so it seems like our options are this or… this.”

A growl rumbled from my chest as I paced to the window.

“Calm down, Cal. It’s not that big a deal. We’ve shared a bed before. This time, I’ll stay on my side, and you can stay on yours.” Lifting his eyebrow, Jack gave me what could only be described as a come-hither look, and my traitorous cock had the audacity to twitch in my pants. Of course, being a self-proclaimed master of observation, Jack noticed, and his lips tipped up in a devilish smirk. “Unless you don’t want to stay on your side.”

Being this close to Jack was hard enough. The confined space on the plane was almost torture. Dealing with his innuendo when I knew exactly what it felt like to have his cock filling me was just this side of impossible. But sharing a bed. There was no way I was going to be able to do it without tipping my hand. Add in the number of times I’d jerked off since we’d left Seattle in an effort to avoid climbing Jack like a goddamn tree and the persistent voice in my head and my heart begging me to claim Jack and let the world know he was the one fate had decided should be mine and I was screwed.

Figuratively, not literally.

Definitely not literally. Because if I let Jack give me what I really wanted—him—I wouldn’t be able to take it back. I wouldn’t be able to walk away, and he sure as fuck wasn’t going to move into my family’s estate with me and my brothers. There was no reality where that worked out well. I needed to remember that this fake-husbands thing wasn’t reality at all, even if that kiss at the airport hadn’t felt fake, and the lingering tingle in my lips didn’t feel like a lie.

And then there was that conversation about fated mates on the boat.

My emotions were already too close to the surface after that little chat, and it had taken every drop in my ridiculously small well of willpower to keep from pulling the collar of my shirt aside and saying, See this? This is how an orca shifter knows he’s met his fated mate. If you were an orca shifter, your saddle patch would match mine, and we’d both know .

So, no, I couldn’t calm down because sharing a bed with Jack was going to mean something different to me, even if I didn’t want it to.

Before I could tell Jack more than I wanted to, someone knocked on the door.

Jack was closer, so he looked through the peephole, then opened the door. Carlo had returned.

“Mi scusi, signori. I forgot to give you these.” He held up a set of keys on one of those puffy floating foam key rings. “Signore Reuben asked me to rent you a boat. It is docked downstairs. If you want to come with me, I will show it to you.”

Jack started to leave, then glanced over his shoulder. “You coming?”

I shook my head. “You go.”

He gave me a funny look but followed Carlo down the hall while I proceeded to have a mini breakdown.

It shouldn’t have surprised me when my phone rang a second after the door clicked shut. I hit the screen to answer it after the second ring.

“Cal, what’s wrong?”

Nero and Julius called the bond I had with Quin our freaky twin thing, but I was grateful for it the moment I heard Quin’s voice on the other end of the line. Quin and I hadn’t been close for a long time, but hearing his voice, knowing he was looking out for me from a continent away, made me feel good. It always had. It was the only thing that had gotten me through some of my worst days in the sandbox and some of my loneliest ops since.

“I’m fine.”

“Yeah, right. You know you can’t lie to me.”

I flopped down onto the bed. If Quin were here, he’d be giving me shit about sitting on the bed in clothes that had been on the plane, and that made me smile. “I know, but I also can’t get into it right now.”

There was a beat of silence on Quin’s end, then, “You sure you’re okay?”

“I am, and I feel better hearing your voice.”

“Same.” He took a big breath. “I know you said you’re fine, but I’ve also been getting these vibes like you’re sad or something, so I’m trusting that you are okay and that you’d tell me if you weren’t, but you know I’m here if you need me.” The words all came out in a rush, which I understood. Neither of us was very good at anything having to do with feelings.

Despite our twin bond, Quin and I had grown apart. We had the same face. Well, sort of. I had a short beard where Quin preferred to keep his jaw clean-shaven, and I had a scar through my left eyebrow from the night Jack and I had tried to kill each other in Budapest. Other than that, we were identical in appearance, but we couldn’t be more different in almost every other way. When we were kids, that meant Quin got good at lying to cover for me before I got caught doing something stupid, and I beat up, or threatened to beat up, anyone who dared to call him a nerd. As we got older, our differences felt bigger than they probably were and we let them push us apart. Quin was smart, posh, and refined—he definitely owned more than one dress shirt—and I was anything but. The fact that he’d reached out meant a lot to me, and it settled some of my internal turmoil. There was nothing I could do about the bed situation without making things awkward for Carlo or giving away our cover, so I’d deal with it.

The rest I’d try to forget about for now.

“I know, Quin. It’s just been a long day. I need to eat and crash. I’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Okay. Call me if you need me.” There was a hint of longing in Quin’s tone that reminded me of when we’d been younger and hearing it felt like a punch to the gut. When all this shit with the painting was over, I needed to make an effort to reconnect with Quin. I missed him.

“I will. I promise.”

He hung up right as the door to the room opened and Jack walked back in. I sat up, the room tipping a little with the speed of my movements. Definitely needed to move food up the list of to-dos.

“How’s the boat?”

“Fine. It’ll work well for getting around while we’re here.”

“Good. Should we go get some food?”

“Yeah.”

We opted to eat in the hotel lounge. Jack brought his tablet, and we reviewed everything we had on Azzura Scivolo while we ate.

“Tomorrow, I think we should take a ride to her estate and see if it looks like there is anything of interest happening. If we don’t find anything worthwhile, we can stake her out.”

“When you say see if anything is happening at her estate you do mean breaking in and taking a thorough look around, right?”

Jack sighed, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, Cal. I mean going to take a look at her property to get a lay of the land and see if there is any suspicious movement.”

“You don’t think breaking into her place and searching for the painting is the better plan?”

“No, I absolutely don’t. This is the finesse part of the op, the spy work, remember? If you go in guns blazing, whoever has the painting, whether that’s Scivolo or not, is likely to get spooked. I don’t think you fully appreciate how quickly information travels in the art world.”

“Isn’t part of spy work, oh, I dunno, spying?”

“We are.”

“I disagree.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m taking point on this.”

“I don’t take orders from you.”

One side of Jack’s mouth twisted into a sardonic smirk. “You sure about that, sweetheart? Because I can think of at least”—he pretended to count on his fingers—“four different times you had zero problems taking orders. Pretty sure you even liked it.”

My face felt like it was on fire as snippets of each of the four times Jack was referring to raced through my brain, making my cock hard as steel beneath the table. “Fuck you, Jack.”

“Just say the word.”

Ignoring him and biting my cheek until I tasted blood in an effort to get my hard-on to stand down, I tried to get us back on track. “It just feels like all of this”—I gestured at the table—“is going to take a long time. I thought we needed to hurry.”

“We do, but we also can’t let anyone else who might have the painting know we’re looking for it. I know you’re not used to the recon side of things, but this op is more wait and see than search and rescue.”

“I’ve done plenty of recon.”

Jack waved my comment away. “Debatable. And it doesn’t matter. The way we find out if Scivolo has the painting is by observing her movements.”

“Fine.”

We charged our dinner to the room and went back upstairs.

“I’m going to get in the shower,” Jack said, pulling a pair of boxers out of his bag.

I nodded, flopping back on the bed.

“Do you really have to lie there with your dirty clothes on?”

I rolled my eyes. “You sound like my brother.”

“It’s gross.”

“But the fact that hundreds of people have slept in this bed doesn’t bother you?”

Jack made an annoyed noise and walked into the bathroom, his shower taking precedence over continued bickering with me. The lock clicked, and the water started, and I tried not to think of Jack naked and wet beneath the spray. I threw an arm over my eyes and begged my brain not to replay the night we’d spent together in Budapest, but it was no use.

Jack had broken into my hotel room, and he’d been sitting in the dark when I got back from grabbing a quick meal. In seconds, I had the knife I always carried pressed to his side. He’d moved equally fast, driving his blade into me the second I did the same to him. We’d both missed anything vital, but cuts were deep, which was why we both still had tiny scars. The stabbing turned into an all-out brawl as I tried to take him down and he fought back. It wasn’t until Jack whispered, “Hello, sweetheart,” on a ragged, pain-filled gasp that I realized it was him. By that time, we were both bloody from wounds inflicted by our knives and having rolled on top of broken glass from a lamp that had fallen and shattered. Besides the small scar on my side from Jack’s knife, the only other scar I carried from that night was the one through my left eyebrow. The wound had healed quickly, but my eyebrow never grew back where the cut had been.

Jack had stripped off his destroyed shirt and pants and reached out to me. I did the same and let him lead me into the shower. He washed every inch of my body, helping me remove shards of glass from my back and arms, and I did the same, and then he told me to get on my knees so he could fuck my throat as the last of the blood from our injuries ran down the drain. He’d held my hands against the cold white tile and filled my mouth until I was choking around him, and still he drove deeper. My cock was so hard it hurt, but there was no way for me to find relief until Jack gave it to me. My face was a snotty, tearstained mess when he shot his load down my throat, and tasting him was almost enough to make me come. He hauled me to my feet, wrapped his hand around my cock, and stroked twice before his name echoed off every hard surface around us as I came, screaming his name.

After, he’d laid me out on the bed and fucked me until his cum ran from my body and I wasn’t sure I remembered my name, but he reminded me, whispering, “Good night, Caligula,” in my ear the second before sleep claimed me.

It had been the single hottest night of my life, and thinking about it had my dick rock hard, which I realized was a major problem when I heard the bathroom door open. I tumbled off the bed, but even hitting my knees on the hardwood floor wasn’t enough to make my dick stand down. I crawled to my bag and dug through it, grabbing for a pair of boxers, and trying to remember how much I’d hated Jack when I’d woken up the next morning, alone, his side of the bed cold.

“What are you doing on the floor?”

Jack stood in the bathroom doorway, steam billowing from behind him. His towel hung around his neck, and his hair was wet and messy as he used one end to towel it dry. A few errant drops of water slid over the dips and valleys of his torso, heading straight for the waistband of the plaid boxers he’d pulled on so they rested low, the top of the vee between his hips on full display. My mouth watered, wanting to lick the drops away, wanting to taste more than just the water, which definitely didn’t help my predicament.

“Dropped something.” I pulled out the next thing my hand touched and surreptitiously held it in front of my raging hard-on—praying to whatever deity might be listening that it was a pair of underwear—while I slipped past him into the bathroom. I didn’t take a full deep breath until the door was locked behind me. That had been close. Too close. I leaned my head against the door and tried to get my heart and my dick to calm down.

It was a losing battle with one of the organs in question.

Needless to say, the second I stepped under the shower spray, I wrapped a hand around my cock and jerked myself off, biting on a folded washcloth to keep from making any noise as I came. Even though I’d tried to be quiet, I had a feeling Jack knew exactly what I’d been doing. Especially since I hadn’t, in fact, grabbed a pair of boxers but a dirty T-shirt, and I’d had to dart out of the bathroom in a towel.

“Forget something?” he drawled from where he was sitting on the bed, his back resting against the padded headboard, his laptop propped up on his knees.

“Grabbed the wrong thing.” I rummaged through my bag as fast as possible, keeping my back to him. If it were anyone else, I would have dropped the towel and done a little teasing—hell, maybe that’s exactly what I needed to do. Maybe I needed to run a little experiment to see if Jack was as affected by our proximity as I was. Sure, he threw out innuendo left and right, and he hadn’t had any trouble with our hookups in the past, but maybe he had more self-control and wasn’t walking around half-hard, hoping one of us would give in to the pull between us.

A quick glance over my shoulder showed Jack back at work reading whatever was on his computer screen. In one slow movement, I untucked my towel and let it slide down, catching the ends to slow its descent toward the floor and tugging it up and away from my body after it cleared my ass.

“Shit.” Jack’s curse was followed by a crash.

“Everything okay over there?”

“Uh, yeah. I, uh, I… dropped my laptop.”

Bending forward slightly, I dug into my bag, pulled out a pair of boxers, and tugged them up my legs inch by inch. When I was done, I turned around to see Jack standing by the bed, his laptop held low so I couldn’t see his dick, but I could guess what he was trying to hide.

He swallowed hard and looked at me. “What are you doing?”

“Getting changed.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.” He ran one hand through his still-damp hair. “It’s not a good idea.”

I knew it wasn’t for reasons that probably weren’t the same as Jack’s, but the rejection still hurt, even if I knew he was right, even if I knew what it would do to my heart if we went there again then parted ways. It was the small dagger of rejection piercing my heart that I blamed for what I said next. “Because you can’t run this time.”

Jack took a step back like I’d slapped him, and then his wide, shocked eyes settled into a scowl. “I don’t run.”

“Really? You don’t run?” I scoffed and counted on my fingers. “Colombia. You left me zip-tied to the goddamn bed. Calgary. We fucked in the bathroom at that club, and you were gone before I finished washing my hands. See also Tokyo. And let’s not forget Budapest, where you made sure to be gone before I woke up.” The second the words finished falling from my lips, hanging in the air between us so heavy they were almost visible, I wished I could take every single one of them back. Jack had stolen one of my jobs after each time we hooked up, and I hated him for it. But after Colombia—the only time we’d ever spent the full night together—after I realized what he was to me, I hated it more that he never stuck around.

“Cal—”

I held up a hand, cutting him off before he said something neither of us needed to hear. “I’m sorry. That was out of line. I’m tired and cranky, and I just need to get some sleep.”

He nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Okay.” Jack set his computer down on the desk and walked back to the bed, folding the blanket down.

I went to the closet and yanked the two spare pillows I found there off the shelf.

“What are you doing?” Jack asked as I laid the pillows end to end down the center of the bed.

“Making a wall.”

“Can’t trust yourself to keep your hands off me?” Normally, his joke would have sparked more snark, but now it just felt flat. He cleared his throat and helped pull the pillows into place.

I hadn’t been lying when I’d said I was tired, but a wave of exhaustion hit me the second I climbed under the covers. I rolled over, putting my back to Jack and closing my eyes. I started drifting off within seconds, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d been thinking about that night in Budapest or what, but I could have sworn I heard Jack whisper, “Sleep well, Caligula,” as sleep pulled me under.