Burning Bright: A Spicy M/M Weretiger Heist Romance Read online

  Contents

  BURNING BRIGHT

  Ryan

  Lucas

  Ryan

  Lucas

  Ryan

  Lucas

  Ryan

  Lucas

  Ryan

  Lucas

  Ryan

  Lucas

  Ryan

  Lucas

  BURNING BRIGHT

  Sometimes it takes an animal to show a man what really matters.

  Lucas and Ryan are partners in crime: an ex-Marine who can hack any system and a seductive, amoral con man who can talk his way through any door. Together, they relieve underworld moguls and other shady operators of their ill-gotten gains.

  Their teamwork cemented through years of friendship, they can handle anything ... until the night Ryan is bitten by a tiger while out on a job.

  Now he’s changing, growing even more predatory and fearless. Pieces of his old identity fall away, one by one, until his nature has been honed to a fine edge. And this new, sharper Ryan wants one thing above all others: Lucas.

  This 20,000 word novella features a fast-paced plot, long-kept secrets, and spicy sex scenes, and makes for a perfect weekend read.

  BURNING BRIGHT

  By Julia Leijon

  http://julialeijon.com

  Ryan

  They invested enough cash in their equipment for the tech that Ryan wore in the field to be basically invisible. No casual observer, or even someone examining him closely, would be able to tell that there was anything out-of-the-ordinary about him. The ear piece fitted right down inside the canal, the same way that high-end hearing aids did. His microphone was in the top button of his white dress shirt.

  “Okay,” Lucas said into his ear, voice as clear and close as it would have been if they were standing side by side, rather than in different buildings on opposite sides of the city. “You’re at the door now, right? You’re not in the elevator, or down the hall, or up on the roof, or whatever — you’re not on the way to the door, and just telling me that you’re at the door because you will be soon?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m right in front of the door,” Ryan answered. Actually, in truth he hadn’t been; he’d been down the hall. Lucas going on a rant about checking that Ryan really was in front of the door had given Ryan time to get there. He tapped his knuckle against the wood, so Lucas would hear it.

  “Don’t knock on it! Jesus, you’ll give me a heart attack!”

  “Chill out,” Ryan replied, deliberately baiting Lucas now. “Alarm systems aren’t that much like guard dogs, you know. They don’t wake up if you make a noise.”

  “Just don’t, okay? Now, you’re still at the door?”

  “Yes, Lucas, I am still at the door.” Ryan hoped that Lucas understood just how hard Ryan was rolling his eyes along with the reply.

  Lucas gave an annoyed huff. “Good. Stay there. I’m going to disable the keypad’s connection to the security desk. When I do, you’ll have twenty seconds to punch in the factory reset code before the link resumes. The code is 310061122272 then hash three times. What’s the code?”

  “I got it, man.”

  “I didn’t ask if you got it. Recite it back to me.”

  “Jesus, what bug crawled up your ass and died tonight? 310061122272, all right? Seriously, have I ever gotten one wrong?”

  “It’s the full moon. People get crazy,” Lucas replied. “I just want to make sure nothing goes haywire, that’s all.”

  “‘People’ get crazy. But you, you’re acting totally sane,” Ryan retorted.

  “Shh. I’m disabling the link in three… two… done.”

  “What was that code again? Two, one, zero, six… or was it three…”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” Lucas complained. “You’re bad for my blood pressure.”

  Ryan laughed. “Okay, okay.”

  He tapped the code into the pad, and the apartment door swung open invitingly.

  Lucas

  Lucas’ looks made him seem — according to Ryan’s sister Jen — like someone should take him home and give him soup and a good scrubbing. “You’re a ragamuffin,” she’d told him, on more than one occasion.

  Lucas thought this was kind of emasculating, or at the very least infantilizing, as far as descriptions went.

  “That doesn’t mean it’s not true,” Jen had pointed out when he’d raised his objections. “You’re a scrappy puppy, deal with it.”

  “Can I at least be a pit-bull puppy or something?” he’d pleaded.

  She’d given him a shrewd, appraising look, like he was a cut of meat she was considering at the butcher. Ryan’s little sister kind of terrified Lucas sometimes.

  “Yeah, I guess I can see that,” she’d finally conceded. “Women who didn’t meet you when they were nine and you were fourteen would probably describe you as roguish, rather than dorkish. They would be severely mistaken, though.”

  Roguish/dorkish was accurate enough that Lucas had accepted it as an appraisal.

  He had a more weathered face than Ryan, and a scatter of small, low-key scars on his hands and arms. One bicep wore a large Marine insignia tattoo, done at the insistence of his buddies there after severe shrapnel to his hip and thigh ended any military career he might have had in mind.

  His teeth were white but a little crooked, and there was a bump on his nose where he’d broken it at sixteen. He’d inherited his mom’s eyes, which were big and clear and expressive. His fingernails were usually bitten down to the quick, and his knuckles were often split from forgetting to tape them when he went up against the punching bag he’d strung up in the corner of his bedroom.

  In short, if someone was to look at Lucas when he was standing beside Ryan, and that person was then asked which of the two was the hacking and computer master of the two, there was almost no chance on earth that the person’s first guess would be Lucas.

  Ryan didn’t look the part of a stealth field operative any more than Lucas looked like a programming super-brain. Ryan’s demeanor was preppy-cute; a homecoming king who majored in economics, or something along those lines.

  It wasn’t outside the realms of possibility to imagine him getting caught up in crime — but it seemed certain that any such illegal activity would almost certainly be white-collar, and amateurish, if he did engage in it at all.

  But, in actuality, Ryan was something of a compulsive lawbreaker, and the more daring and reckless the better.

  For example: during the time when Lucas had been overseas in the service, Ryan had decided that he felt like robbing a bank. That alone would have been cause for concern — real banks weren’t exactly the one-room buildings with two tellers and a big round safe door in a corner that Daffy Duck cartoons might suggest — but what made the whole thing at least a dozen times crazier was the specifics of how Ryan did it.

  He waited until a time of day when only a few customers were inside the bank.

  Then he walked into the building, took out all the security cameras with three rapid-fire shots that took a total of 1.4 seconds.

  Then he ordered the tellers to step away from their panic buttons.

  Then he ordered everyone in the room to strip naked and stand against a wall together.

  The worst part of the whole debacle, the thing that infuriated Lucas the most, was that it had worked. All of the hostages were too distracted by their own embarrassment at being naked in front of strangers to recalled any identifying details about the robber.

  The only disguise Ryan had been wearing was a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses, and yet not a single sketch-artist portrait could be created of him, and no detective could get a
useful answer out of the witnesses.

  That was Ryan in a nutshell: a con man in the most literal sense of the word. He could bestow confidence, strip away confidence, and manipulate confidence in anyone, and that was the only power he needed to get in, or out, of anywhere.

  For nearly as long as Lucas had known him, his personal motto had been “I can talk my way through any door.” It was disturbingly accurate.

  The pair of them had first encountered one another on opposing sides of a heated message-board war about the Terminator franchise. Teenaged, reckless, and sure of his own cleverness, Ryan had decided that the best thing to do in order to win the argument was hack into his opponent’s computer and replace key files with pictures of dicks.

  He’d been stopped dead in his digital tracks, before he’d had the chance to scatter a single digital penis, by the much more advanced hacking prowess of Lucas.

  Then, in the strange way that these things sometimes happen, the sequence of events had resulted in an instantly-forged online friendship made of equal parts good-natured rivalry and the ability to cause trouble together.

  Even Lucas and Ryan themselves couldn’t say for certain how it had wound up like that. Some things just seemed like fate.

  Ryan

  “There should be a safe in the study. It’s behind the picture frame on the left wall.”

  “Got it.” Ryan followed Lucas’ directions, revealing the small reinforced box, the lock augmented with a row of numbers that could be spun. “Oh, cool, it’s a rotary.”

  He fished a tiny combination lock manipulator out of his pocket and attached it, his gaze wandering around the room as the little device began the process of cracking the code.

  Ryan grinned to himself when he caught sight of a cloisonné dish decorating one shelf, a couple of USB memory sticks lying on the delicate enamel. He liked taking a USB or two on every job, just to fuck with the people he was stealing from. He amused himself with imagining how they would try desperately to remember what they’d saved on it — confidential documents? Porn?

  He and Lucas had a pact about the hobby: any time one of their hits went completely unreported by the target, they checked the corresponding drive to see if they needed to notify the police.

  “We’re greedy career criminals,” Ryan had once put it. “But we aren’t scumbags.”

  If the robbery was reported normally, the USBs just got added to Ryan’s weird collection of them in a drawer in his room.

  “Hang on a second,” Lucas’ voice came through the ear piece. “I just gotta go pay the pizza guy.”

  While he waited for Lucas to come back, Ryan wandered into the master bedroom and glanced around for any trinkets worth pilfering.

  “Okay, back.”

  “I can’t believe you got home-delivery pizza while I’m out on a job. What if I get arrested and it’s all because you got distracted?”

  Lucas chewed, obnoxiously loudly, in Ryan’s ear. “Then I don’t have to share my pizza.”

  Ryan went back to the study, where the combination cracker had finished its work.

  “Emeralds are in-hand. Bag feels heavy, so I think all of them are here.” He weighed the little velvet pouch in his hand a couple more times.

  “Didn’t leave any fingerprints anywhere?”

  “What am I, amateur? Just because you’re there eating stuffed-crust doesn’t mean I’m completely useless at my job as well.”

  Ryan closed the safe and removed the lock manipulator, pocketing it and the drawstring pouch of emeralds. He left the apartment, let the door swing closed behind him, and walked back towards the stairwell.

  “I picked up a great belt from the bedroom floor, too. Quality leather, designer-brand buckle. I’ll easily get a million yen for it the next time I’m in Shinjuku. Or maybe I’ll keep it. Looks great on me.”

  Lucas’s exasperated sigh was loud in Ryan’s ear. “You took USB drives, too, didn’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  “That stuff is what’s going to get us caught, you know. Not the pizza. Your crazy kleptomania.”

  “Kleptomania?” Ryan climbed the stairs, towards the penthouse. “Can a cat burglar even have that?”

  “Yes. And you do.”

  “Whatever.”

  Lucas

  Lucas tipped his chair back and propped his heel, the one on the bad leg, up on the sill of the window. Their building was beside a narrow alley space, and on the other side was a 24-hour diner with large neon lights that were at least twice as bright as they needed to be. What kind of place pushing waffles and coffee for 3am wanderers needed a sign lit up like Vegas, honestly?

  They’d picked the apartment because of those crazy lights coming in through the windows. Neither of them liked the dark much, but nor was either of them going to admit it to the other. It had become this weird open secret that Lucas and Ryan had an absolute, and absolutely unspoken, vow to never discuss.

  The sign solved the problem, because both of the bedrooms of the apartment got hit with at least a little of the glow at all hours of the day and night. Nobody had to be in the dark, and nobody had to leave a light on.

  Plus, it looked pretty cool. As views went, it was better than the sea of slightly dilapidated suburban houses that the apartment would have had if it was three blocks away from where it was. Lucas and Ryan lived right on the edge of where the particularly weird and interesting people congregated, which meant that their area was under constant threat from the encroaching horde of hipsters midway through gentrifying low-income neighborhoods that had never done anything to deserve the number of stores with ‘artisan’ in the name that they now contained.

  …it was possible that Lucas had a few strong views when it came to gentrification.

  Ryan, on the other hand, didn’t care either way, but he did enjoy working Lucas up into apoplectic anger by doing shit like signing up for barre yoga classes or buying cold-pressed beetroot juice for $8 a bottle.

  “That’s our hard earned money you’re spending on that shit,” Lucas would remark in utter disgust.

  Ryan would just slurp it cheerfully. “Stolen money, Lucas. I have to cleanse my blackened soul somehow.”

  “Cleanses aren’t a thing! You have a liver! That cleanses everything for you!”

  Christ, he was such a little shit. Lucas wanted to strangle him at least half of the time.

  The thing about Ryan was that he was as self-serving as a spoiled house-cat. No matter what the circumstances, Ryan’s first instinct was to find the angle he could work. He’d get whatever he could out of a situation and then he’d abandon it and move on to the next one.

  Lucas had gotten used to living with an uneasy sense, somewhere at the back of his thoughts, that the pair of them were a team for only as long as Ryan continued to find it more beneficial than bothersome.

  He listened in on the ambient sounds as Ryan went up the fire escape stairs to a higher floor of the building and then caught the elevator down. They’d checked the distribution of security camera coverage while preparing for the job, and — providing that Ryan had stuck to the plan, which was never a sure thing — on the incredibly slim chance that Ryan wound up being recorded on any of the footage from the evening, the cameras would place him as having been visiting a floor several stories higher than where the robbery took place. The security system itself would give him his alibi.

  As the indoor-sounds transitioned to outdoor-sounds, indicating to Lucas that Ryan had left the building, Ryan spoke to him directly.

  “I’ve got another one in me tonight. I don’t want to go home yet.”

  “You’ve got several hundred thousand dollars of loose gemstones in your pocket,” Lucas pointed out, barely even surprised at the level of recklessness Ryan was displaying.

  “Whatever, it’ll be fine. Call it full moon madness, since you seem to believe that’s an actual thing. Find me somewhere else to hit.”

  Lucas skimmed the various data readouts for the area Ryan was in — traffic reports
, weather, security systems, street cameras — and calculated quickly in his head.

  “There’s a place a few blocks from where you are. Townhouse. It doesn’t have any cameras, internal or external, but the programming patterns on its self-timer lights inside make me think the inhabitants are gonna be out the whole night.”

  “Sweet. Give me the address.”

  Lucas sent it to him via the custom-built encrypted messaging app they’d installed on Ryan’s phone.

  “Don’t linger, though, okay? Just because you’re itchy for some extra thrills is a lousy reason for us to wind up in jail.”

  “But your pizza craving, that was real legitimate,” Ryan deadpanned. Lucas laughed.

  “Fair point. Right, I’ve disabled the alarm on the window by the back door and on the street-facing side gate. The garden shouldn’t have anything worth checking out, unless you think you can fit a top-of-the-line grill into the pocket of that tuxedo.”

  “Ugh, no. You’d stink up the apartment with steak all the time. No way.”

  “I don’t get why you’re so grossed out by red meat.”

  “Personal preference, that’s all,” Ryan answered. “I just don’t get the appeal. Okay, going in.”

  Lucas listened as Ryan pushed the window wide and climbed inside, smooth and agile as a gymnast.

  “Nothing interesting in the kitchen. I’ve found the staircase to the second story, and also the basement door. You pick: am I going up or down?”

  “Why do I have to pick? You’re the one who wanted to do an extra job tonight in the first place.”

  “Just pick,” Ryan demanded. “Up or down.”

  “Fine, asshole. Go up.”

  “Down it is.”

  Refusing to make any sound of frustration — he wasn’t going to give the insufferable little shit the satisfaction — Lucas instead just rolled his eyes. “Whatever, dude.”

  The blast of static that came down his ear piece was so abrupt and loud that Lucas was sure at first that their state-of-the-art equipment had crapped out on them like cheap garbage. Then he heard Ryan’s yell of “FUCK!!” and realized that the static wasn’t static at all, it was the kind of violent scuffling cacophony that might wind up on a 911 recording.