Chapter 5

CHAPTER

FIVE

Killian

Noah wasn't as useless as he made himself out to be. He'd strangled a man while tied up, and he'd been more than capable of digging a grave without breaking down or complaining about his shirt—now covered in blood and mud.

"You uh, you should get cleaned up," I suggested, shutting the cabin door and sealing us back inside the warmth.

He looked down at himself, winced at the mud and snow clinging to his legs, and shrugged off the big coat. "Right." He kicked off his boots and headed for the bathroom.

The cabin had a small shower. If it worked, the water was probably cold. A few minutes later, I heard the hiss of water, and Noah's yelp. The cold must have cleared though, since Noah started humming a few minutes later. Always talking, humming, moving, making noise—he didn't know when to sit still and listen .

I cleaned the blood off the living room floor, rearranged the furniture over the stains, and stacked the fire with fresh logs. As I was adding the last log, Noah started to sing. I didn't know the tune, but his voice carried the sentiment well, adding his own flare. Emotion warmed the notes. He was… good. Really good.

I hadn't known he could sing.

What the fuck was I doing, listening to the boss's son singing in the shower like this was some kind of vacation in the woods?

I needed to get my shit together. If I wasn't killing him, what was I doing with him?

My phone rang. I picked it up from the kitchen counter and winced at the caller's name.

"Where are you?" Noah's father asked, voice grating.

"Cleanup." I parted the drapes behind the kitchen sink. Big snowflakes buffeted the window. "Snow's coming down hard. I'll wait it out. Be back in a few days."

Val's heavy sigh made his irritation clear. "There's a situation. We need you here."

I'd have replied, but Noah appeared, a tiny towel wrapped around his slim waist. He used another to ruffle his hair. Water droplets glittered across his skin. He grinned, and as his whole face lit up, a sudden bolt of lust almost dropped me to my knees.

"Killian?" Val growled.

"Yes, I will." I turned away from Noah and ended the call fast. If Val learned he was alive, we were both dead. Fuck, this wouldn't do. I tossed the phone on the counter, beside the bag of groceries, and braced against the counter's edge.

Shit. I hadn't expected him to appear nearly naked, hadn't guarded against it.

The grocery bag rustled. "What the hell kind of supplies are these? Beans and beer?" He snorted. "At least you're on brand. Did you get any actual food?"

"Put some fuckin' clothes on."

"Can't." He tossed a can of soup in the air. "Washed them. They're hanging up in the bathroom."

This was insanity. I was insane. I had to be. Keeping a mark alive? This never happened. Why was he still breathing? He should have been the one in the hole in the backyard, not standing in the kitchen with nothing on, his lustrous body licked by the cabin's soft, warm lighting. I'd seen him in various stages of nakedness, but never like this, and why the fuck was my heart pounding?

Noah King was everything I shouldn't want, and everything I craved.

I'd known it since my first job for the Back Bay Mafia, beating the shit out of some guy who'd thought Noah had been an easy target and had tried to sell compromising photos of the boss's son. I'd seen those photos. His father had given them to me. I'd stuffed one down the stupid bastard's throat as a message. But I'd kept one too, knowing I shouldn't have. There was a part of me—a part I'd silenced—that desired Noah, in ways that could never happen. It had been easy to ignore, until now.

I marched into the living room, grabbed the ropes, and while he was distracted with emptying out the groceries, I grabbed his arms from behind.

"Easy, big guy—wait? What?—"

I shoved him against the counter and looped the ropes around his wrists. "This isn't camp."

"What the fuck?!" He bucked. "We had a deal!"

"And I kept it." Fuck, his skin was hot where my knuckles brushed his bare arms. His back muscles rippled, shoulders rolling, and it was like a goddamned symphony of masculinity that kicked my thoughts over and made my dick twitch.

"I meant untie me forever, not just for helping you get rid of a body!"

I had him pressed to the counter, his back to me. The towel clung to his hips and hugged his ass, an ass I was pressed against, an ass as hard as a nutcracker. A vivid, blinding image of me taking his hips in my hands and spreading his ass shot need into my veins, bringing my whole body alive in savage fire.

"Get off!" He bucked, writhing, making his firm ass grind against my hard dick.

I needed to move, now , or this was going to get real awkward, real fast. I hauled him off the counter, bullied him into the living room, dropped him on the couch, and returned to the kitchen. I took my frustration out on the supplies I'd brought, flinging them inside the cupboards and then slamming the doors.

"Asshole!" he yelled from the living room.

"I can still kill you!"

"You won't," he called back. "I got under that thick skin of yours, didn't I?"

The little shit. He needed to learn to keep his damn mouth shut. Permanently. This feeling, this… rage, it wasn't for him, it was my own fucked-up head, but I could use it. Get it done. Do what I was supposed to do, instead of dragging out the inevitable and torturing us both. I removed the gun from under my shirt and marched back into the living room.

Noah lay half sprawled on the couch, where I'd left him, his hair mussed, his face furious, and his towel tented over a hard dick.

"Fuck," he snarled and dropped his head back on the couch, flinching his gaze at the ceiling. "Shoot me, then. Get it over with."

I had been about to do that, I had the gun at my side, but… This was fucking confusing. Why was he hard? I swallowed a lump that had been working its way up my throat.

"Don't make it weird," he said, voice low, deep, like he didn't want to speak, or maybe thick with desire. "Just shoot, or suck my dick I guess, whatever."

Suck his…

Touch him, like that, sprawled on the couch, tied up…

The semi I'd been trying to fight off came roaring back, pooling heat, hardening. Noah hadn't seen, not yet; he was still blinking at the ceiling. Was he hard for this fucked-up situation or hard for me? I'd known he was into men. It was obvious from the first time I'd dragged his high-as-fuck ass out from under the sheets of a threesome before any more photos turned up on the internet. Not that it mattered. What mattered was now, and what all this meant.

Maybe it didn't have to mean anything?

He blinked, and his gaze slid sideways to look at me. Then it moved down my chest and settled on what had to be the obvious bulge in my pants. His eyes narrowed, then widened. He opened his sweet lips, about to say something that would ruin us, something smart or sassy, something that would drive me crazy. I lunged, slammed a hand over his mouth, pinning him down. Now I had him under me, I drank him in—his heaving chest, pert nipples, the scrunched abs, since he was bent some, and the V of his hips, guiding my eye to where the towel stretched over a very eager dick.

With his hands tied and wedged under him, he couldn't fight me off if he wanted to. But I needed to hear him say it. Say yes.

I dragged my hand down his chin and gripped his neck. He smiled, eyes dancing. And he was going to say something sharp, something biting. I might hate him for it, but I wanted to hear it too: hear him sneer, hear that vicious passion, that restrained rage he had at the world, hidden so far down he might not even be aware of it. If he told me to stop, I would. If he said no, I'd listen. It would be for the best, for both of us.

"Wanna fuck ?" he asked, drawing out the fuck so I felt the word travel through my hand at his neck.

"I'm not fucking you," I growled, but I pushed in so close his beautiful blue eyes were all I could see.

"You sure?" he purred, then shifted his ass on the couch, bringing his thigh up, pushing it against my knee that was propped next to him. "Because this feels a lot like foreplay, Killer ."

Foreplay. Was that what this was? Him tied up, me over him, on him, gun in my hand, my dick raging hard and his twitching under the towel. I'd resisted for so long, trapped the needs behind a thousand mental doors, buried it so deep there was no chance of these desires coming back to life. Because it had ruined me once. Destroyed me. But here they were, in the room with me, burning me up, taking the reins, shredding my control, and all because Noah King didn't know when to shut his pretty mouth.

I pressed the 9mm gun to his lips and Noah opened as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Goddamn. Need rode me so hard I almost moaned from the agony.

"You like it, being tied up?" I asked him.

He couldn't answer, since the gun barrel was in his mouth. But his eyes answered for him. And so did his dick. I removed the weapon, kept my other hand on his neck, and stroked the 9mm down his chest. He'd seen me kill a man, he knew how this ended, eventually. Was he hot for this because of what was coming, or hot for me? When the gun skimmed the towel, his breathing quickened, but his eyes stayed on my face. I drew the weapon down the hard bulge under the towel.

"Fuck." He gulped, and I felt that too, under my palm. "This is some fucked-up shit and I am?—"

I tossed the gun onto the couch beside us, drew my other knee up, pinning his legs between my knees, and pressed my hand over his mouth again. His eyes blew wide.

Trapped. At my mercy. If anyone else had Noah pinned like this, I'd kill them. He was mine.

And since he wasn't getting out of this alive, I'd make his last night one of the best nights of his life. And maybe mine too.