“Oh, kid,” he whispered into Joey’s hair.“You and me—it’s going to be such a tricky dance.”And it would be.Gideon was cautious, but Joey wasdamaged.Still it was too late for either of them.Gideon had known it the moment he’d smelled Joey Carlyle in his darkened bedroom.
The moment Joey had shown Gideon his throat, their destiny was locked in stone.
Gideon was never letting him go.
But it wouldn’t be easy.Gideon knew that.Which was why he wasn’t surprised when, after an hour of sleep, he woke to feel Joey trying to slip away.
The Cautious Hunter
JOEY HADbeen able to sneak out of a lover’s bed from the age of fifteen, and he’d never been caught.
Until Gideon Chadwick.
“Don’t go,” Gideon murmured, rolling over in bed and wrapping his long ropy arm around Joey’s chest.
Joey went completely still.“You’re supposed to be asleep,” he said stupidly, because they were.Allhis lovers were.Just because he’d obeyed the stupid compulsion to… to…stalkGideon, tofellhim, todevourhim, that didn’t mean there would be conversation afterward.
You didn’t talk to your dinner, particularly not after it had been enjoyed.
But Joey should have known better.
When he’d been still mostly a child, learning those long-ago lessons of stealth and deadly intent, he’d once gone missing in the woods for three days.He’d been staying with his grandfather for a week; the one concession his father had made to how Joey had grown up had been letting Joey go to the reservation on school holidays.
They’d gone on an outing, and Joey had simply vanished from his grandfather’s side, because that was how it had always been with them.His grandfather, knowing Joey, had simply continued to track Joey as Joey tracked a mountain lion through the woods.Joey had wanted to see it kill, watch it prey, study the techniques.
His grandfather, comfortable in Joey’s woodcraft, knew that he could survive for far longer.He had a canteen, water purifying tablets, a small tent, a formfitting shearling cocoon to sleep in.But old Joe would still track him, to make sure.
In the end, Joey had watched without passion as the mountain lion took down an elderly deer, quickly, cleanly, and without malice.He’d seen the thing feed, and then drag the deer by the haunches back to his den.
He’d hiked back to his grandfather’s house then, and when his father—who had been alarmed when he couldn’t make contact with his son—had greeted him with drama and fury, Joey had simply shrugged.
“I wanted to see how a real predator kills,” he said.“Not one who kills for money or show.”
His father, who had been in mid rant, hand raised as it often was in anticipation of violence, took a step back and swallowed, reassessing his quiet, wayward illegitimate son with newer, harder eyes.
“What did you learn?”he asked, chest still heaving.
“Even if you enjoy the kill, you don’t celebrate it over the cooling corpse,” Joey replied, eyes even.
His father swallowed again and dropped his hand.“When do you celebrate it?”he asked, and he was cocking his head as though trying desperately to hear something funny in their exchange.
“When your belly is full and your family is safe,” Joey had replied.
His father had taken another step back and then had simply taken Joey home to the daunting mobster’s mansion on the other side of the res.Shortly after that, Joey had been enrolled in military school, and while he and his grandfather had written, his trips to the vast wilderness of the reservation were over until Joey had joined the military and had been selected for Special Forces training after only two years.
By then he had killed.By then he’d become good at it.And he’d learned that rule—lived by it, in fact, both in his personal life and his professional one.
He’d been scenting Gideon Chadwick for a year and a half now, since he’d been recruited for the SCTF.At first he’d seen the tall, angular man with the hatchet-thin face and the nose like a knife blade and thought, “Deer.He’s obviously a deer.”He’d expected Gideon to haunt the home base and radio in ops info.
He remembered how stunned he’d been on their first case, when he’d found Gideon standing, dripping blood over the corpse of a killer who’d been impaled on his own stiletto.
He felt that same sort of surprise now as Gideon pulled his body close.
“Do you think I’m stupid?”Gideon asked softly, rubbing his nose along Joey’s ear.
Joey closed his eyes; the sensation was soft and sweet, and he wanted more.
“N-no.”Uncertainty?No.This was absolutely not who he was.With every lover he’d ever had, he came, he took what he wanted, and he retreated to his lair and indulged in his conquest.
