Burning Bright: A Spicy M/M Weretiger Heist Romance Page 3

  Ryan looked mostly mollified by the explanation. “So you don’t think it’s rabies or anything like that?”

  “Trust me, no. Google what the symptoms are of rabies, and I bet you a hundred bucks that you don’t have it.”

  For the first time since he’d come back from the job, Ryan smiled. “You’re on.”

  Ryan

  The dreams hadn’t changed since the first night, and yet now they were completely and utterly different, because the way Ryan felt about them had changed. They didn’t feel like nightmares anymore.

  He wished they did. Nightmares, he knew how to cope with. But these dreams of flesh, prey, devouring, hunting… they were exciting. His heart would race with joy as he chased down something small and soft and warm. He was fearless, he was perfect. All the world was his to want, and his to take.

  His sex drive was ramping up, as well, which was more inconvenient than anything else. Ryan felt like he was going through a second puberty. Everything made him horny, turned him on: a woman’s bare legs, the scent of someone else’s desire — hell, even Lucas was looking tastier all the time, and Ryan had made a vow to himself long ago that he’d never let his attraction to Lucas ruin the good thing they had between them.

  Sometimes lately, though, when the wind moved the air just the right way, Ryan would have to close his eyes and just breathe in the smell of Lucas. It was virile and alluring, both vulnerable and strong at once. The wild parts of Ryan wanted Lucas, and the only reason that he didn’t act on the desire was that logic still outweighed want inside his head.

  For how much longer that would continue to be true, Ryan had no idea. And what happened after that, he didn’t want to think about. He was already pretty sure he was gonna fuck up his entire, carefully-built life, but that didn’t mean he had to contemplate it before it happened. He’d rather live in blissful ignorance of what was to come, frankly.

  “What if I really am infected with something?” he asked Lucas yet again. “Like rabies. Not specifically rabies, don’t give me that look. I googled the symptoms, like you said I should, and I know it’s not that. But there could be some contagion that not many people know about that gets spread through tiger bites. But when I tried googling that, all I got was, like, werewolf stuff—”

  “Werewolf?”

  Ryan shrugged. “Weretiger, I guess. But it was all just TV and movie things; nothing helpful turned up.”

  Lucas gave a loud snort. “Well, yeah. Obviously nothing helpful turned up, because those aren’t a real thing, Ryan. You’re not turning into a weretiger, I can promise you that much.”

  Ryan had to bite his tongue to stop himself from saying something randomly bitchy for no reason. He was tired from not sleeping well, and felt more lost and more afraid than he wanted to admit even to himself, let alone to Lucas.

  He didn’t know what to believe anymore. Laughing off any possibility, even one as crazy as weretigers, just made him feel like he knew even less than he had before.

  “Look,” Lucas said, voice more serious now. “My mom’s been pushing for me to come visit her, because I’m a shitty son who never does. Why don’t you come with? Getting away from things will help you, I’m sure of it.”

  “You just want me there because you want a buffer between you and Catherine.”

  “Guilty as charged,” Lucas replied easily. “I thought I could get away with it, but you’ve seen through my cunning plan.”

  “Of course I saw through it. You like being fussed over by your mother about as much as most people like going to the dentist — which is kind of weird, I gotta say.” Ryan shook his head. “It’s like you’re allergic to anything too nice happening to you.”

  “Anyone gets weird about getting treated like a kid when they’re a grown-ass adult.”

  “Nah, it’s more than that. You’re pathological about it.” Ryan was certain enough about this to keep his tone firm. “You hate it like it hurts.”

  For a moment, he could see a look of distress ghost across Lucas’ face. It was gone as swiftly as it appeared, almost too fast for Ryan to be certain that it existed at all. When Lucas spoke, his tone was chipper to the point of sounding forced.

  “I’m serious about taking a trip. Let’s get away. Ignoring your weird psychoanalysis of me, our discussion has at least established that you know my mom is a world champion at making sure people are taken care of. It’s like, her calling in life. You’ll feel better about stuff once you’ve had some intense TLC, I swear.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll come with. If your mother is half as good at pestering as you are, I’m shocked you held out this long before caving in.”

  They owned a car, because their standard operating procedure was to prepare for as many eventualities as possible, and a car seemed like a fairly obvious baseline factor to have at their disposal. It was a 1992 Jeep Wrangler Sahara, a make and model that they had decided on for the very tactical reason that it was the type of car that had appeared in the original Jurassic Park movie.

  Ryan had arranged for it to be modified slightly, so that it was as efficient as possible to refuel and maintain. Lucas had a bad habit of not really paying attention to stuff like that, but Ryan spent enough of his time out in the field, surrounded by the most expensive version of basically everything in the world, that he hated to see money get wasted when it didn’t need to be.

  The drive time from their inner-city apartment out to the leafy outer suburban cul-de-sac where Lucas’ mom lived took them a little over an hour.

  “Your driving isn’t as terrible as it used to be,” Ryan noted magnanimously as they pulled off the highway and into the quieter streets. “I barely feared for my life at all there.”

  “You sure know how to compliment a guy,” Lucas said dryly. “I can see how all those tourists and millionaires get conned into thinking you’re their new best friend, when you can smooth-talk like that.”

  Ryan ignored the remarks, scrolling through the playlist on Lucas’ phone, trying to find something to play through the speaker system next. “Your music taste still sucks ass, though.”

  “Fuck you, dude, the original lineup of the Germs was basically the most important bunch of guys to pick up instruments in the last quarter of the twentieth century. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Sure I do. This music sucks. Your taste in music sucks.” Ryan kept searching through the playlist. “Sucks, sucks, suuuuuucks… okay, this is tolerable.”

  He cued up ‘This Town’ by the Go-Go’s. Lucas nodded approvingly, looking at Ryan as if Ryan had impressed him somehow by picking the song. Ryan rolled his eyes. It was Lucas’ damn playlist; of course Ryan was going to wind up choosing something that Lucas liked.

  The true reason underlying Ryan’s crabbiness was that having Lucas in such prolonged proximity was making it painfully clear just how out of control Ryan’s libido was starting to get. His mouth was literally watering at the smell of Lucas, at the warm solid reality of him sitting so close, close enough to touch, if Ryan just leaned over and buried his face in Lucas’ lap and put his mouth on the fabric over his crotch and—

  It was a very long hour.

  When they pulled into the driveway at Lucas’ mom’s house, Ryan unbuckled his seat belt and bounded out of the car practically before it had come to a complete stop. Lucas gave him a puzzled look, but Ryan didn’t attempt to explain. At least now that there was more distance between them, Ryan could at least think a little more clearly, instead of obsessively imagining every position and act he’d like to engage in with Lucas and what each one would feel like.

  When Lucas opened the front door to the house, going inside to search for his mom, Roscoe the cat slipped out at the same time. Roscoe was a lean grey tabby who had always ignored Ryan with dismissive disdain in the past, clearly considering him beneath notice.

  This time, however, Roscoe wouldn’t stop butting at his ankles, demanding attention and making impatient meows at Ryan when Ryan hesitated.
>
  “Okay, okay, calm down. Here.” He crouched down, scritching Roscoe behind the ears. Roscoe immediately flopped onto his back, showing off his belly.

  “Oh no, I’m not falling for that one. I’ve been mauled enough this month,” Ryan told the cat. Roscoe gave him a baleful glare, then started purring anyway.

  It was much easier to feel laid back about everything, even the tension of his current strange predicament, now that they were away from their usual locations. Lucas had been right about the visit to his mom’s being a good idea. Ryan patted the cat on the head.

  He looked up as the door opened once again, Lucas and his mom emerging from inside the house.

  Catherine didn’t really look old enough to be Lucas’ mother, because he looked older than his age and she looked younger than hers. Sometimes they were mistaken for siblings, instead, because despite the seemingly too-small gap between their ages for them to be parent and child, it was obvious on first glance that they were closely related.

  It was their eyes. They had just the same kind, clear and expressive. They had the same hands and fingers, too, although Catherine didn’t have her son’s habit of nail-biting, and her knuckles didn’t have the tracery of faint scars from fight-split skin.

  Catherine’s scars were elsewhere -- a line of white that cut through one eyebrow unless covered with makeup, a criss-cross web at the corner of her mouth where her cheek had scraped against a pavement.

  None of her scars were from Lucas’ father. That was one of the things that was different, between the two of them. She’d had no idea that he was a violent man when she left, only that her own terrible love affair with heroin took precedent over every other relationship in her life. The violence had come later, after she was gone.

  But she was many years clean now, and Lucas was grown up, and both of them had scars instead of wounds now.

  “He can always tell when someone’s a cat person,” Catherine noted with a grin.

  “Doesn’t he usually ignore you?” Lucas added, having seen the pair interact in the past

  Ryan nodded. “Yeah. I guess that sometime since we were last here I started turning into a cat person,” he said, unable to stop himself from making the pun painfully, absolutely unfunny through emphasis. He wished his sister would learn a thing or two about how to deploy cringe-worthy jokes that transcended the dichotomy of ironic and unironic. This shit was an art.

  “You’re as obnoxious as a cat, that much is for sure,” Lucas said, wincing at the joke. “Come in, Mom’s got food ready.”

  Saying that Catherine had food ready was an understatement. The table was laden with far more food than it needed to be. Pasta salad, egg salad, garlic bread, lasagna, regular bread and butter, salami, tomatoes, lettuce, chicken, avocado, cheese, and probably even more stuff that Ryan couldn’t see immediately that was lurking in the further recesses of the spread.

  Lucas seemed as surprised by the lunchtime feast as Ryan felt.

  “What is it with people putting effort into making sure that me and Ryan are eating? Jen — that’s Ryan’s sister — she does the same thing pretty much whenever we see her. She never just wants to hang, she always wants to go out for a meal. There’s no way you and Roscoe keep this much food around when you’re not expecting us.”

  Catherine looked at her son with amusement, raising her eyebrows. “We put the effort in because we know that you don’t bother to look after yourselves. Not properly.”

  “Hey! We’re here in one piece, aren’t we?” Ryan objected. “I once knew a computer guy who got honest-to-God scurvy. I have never had scurvy.”

  “The fact that your standard for good health is ‘doesn’t have scurvy’ sort of proves my point for me, doesn’t it?” Catherine retorted. “Be honest, there is disgusting old delivery pizza in your refrigerator at home right now, as we sit here, isn’t there?”

  Lucas scratched the back of his neck and gave his mother a sheepish look. “Yee…esss… but that’s just because…”

  She sighed and waved her hand. “Just eat some vegetable lasagna before my blood pressure goes up.”

  After they’d eaten as much of the food as they could fit in their stomachs — Catherine didn’t let them leave the table until they were as full as they could get — Ryan and Lucas relocated to the living room, where Lucas immediately launched himself into one of the recliners and began flicking between the cable channels on offer.

  Ryan took his time to look around the room, because his habit of casing every location for points of interest was impossible to switch off. Bookshelves, mostly full of second-hand Penguin paperbacks with orange spines, decorated with snapshots of Catherine’s nieces and nephews.

  Some of the older photographs were of Lucas as a very small child, dressed up as a vampire for Halloween with his front teeth missing, or covered in paint while attempting to make brightly colored art.

  “You were adorable,” Ryan said, because it would have been a dereliction of his duties as a best friend if he’d let something like that go past without some kind of asshole remark. “Just look at your little face.”

  It wasn’t just a joke, either — Lucas had been an incredibly sweet, guileless looking kid back then. The effect was heightened by the fact that there was a huge gap of time before the next images of him; the photographs jumped from Lucas at about age five to at least ten years later. By then, Lucas was wearing the wary, hard version of himself that Ryan recognized as familiar.

  Ryan had first met Lucas during that void of time not covered by the photos, between when Catherine had left her husband and when Lucas had eventually come to live with her.

  Those years hadn’t been easy for Lucas, not at all. Ryan had been one of the few people who’d known even part of what was really going on, and Ryan had been a stupid kid with no more power to fix it than Lucas himself.

  After Catherine had left, Lucas’ dad had started drinking, and eventually the drinking had cost him his job, and the shame of that had left him spiraling down into a directionless, angry depression for which the only target was his son.

  And as Lucas became the person he was now, one of his central character traits had cemented itself early, one that was a constant frustration for Ryan: long before the shrapnel injury had made the metaphor literal, Lucas had already been the kind of guy who’d choose to walk normally and suffer pain for his choice, rather than someone who would let themselves show vulnerability to the world by limping.

  As a teenager, that had meant that Lucas had suffered through verbal and physical abuse without telling anyone. The first time Ryan had met him, he’d had a hand-shaped bruise circling one wrist and another bruise on one of his cheekbones. But the look in Lucas’ eyes had made it very, very clear to Ryan that if Ryan had any interest at all in ever speaking to Lucas ever again, then Ryan was forbidden from mentioning the injuries in any way.

  So Ryan had kept quiet, and Lucas had put up with it, until eventually it had gotten so bad that Lucas hadn’t been able to cope anymore. But his stubborn, ridiculous pride had meant that he refused to contact his long-departed mother and tell her that he needed her help.

  Instead Lucas, aged fifteen, had spent half a year homeless. Most of the time was spent sleeping on friends’ couches — Ryan and Jennifer’s family had played host to him for a little while, until he’d declared that he didn’t want to be a burden, and left — and some of it on the street.

  The spreads of food Catherine always put out for Lucas now, and her requests that he visit as much as he could stand, were examples of the massive guilt she felt over how things had turned out. The moment she’d heard her son was in trouble, she’d taken him in, but by then the damage was done. Lucas was a prickly, distrustful guy, determined never to rely too much on anyone.

  Hell, Ryan was his literal partner in crime, and most of the time it seemed like Lucas was just waiting for the inevitable day when Ryan threw him out on his ass, too. It was kind of awful, and Ryan tried to ignore thinking about it as much as pos
sible.

  Shaking off his frown, Ryan went over to the recliners and settled in for an afternoon of garbage. He was always sort of ghoulishly impressed with how many channels of completely unwatchable bullshit cable TV could manage to convince its customers to subscribe to.

  Like, he could almost understand wanting at least a bit of variety at your disposal, sure, but the sheer volume of crap that subscribers ended up deciding to buy every month, so they could scroll past it and never watch it, pretty much boggled his mind.

  It wasn’t that he hated dumb junk pop culture or anything like that. Ryan was pretty sure he could recite the entirety of at least several dozen Simpsons episodes, maybe more. It was just…

  “It’s for times like this,” Lucas said aloud, as if he could tell exactly what Ryan was thinking. “You were wondering why the fuck anyone has this many channels, right? It’s so we have enough crap that we can sit here and think about literally nothing for the rest of the day.”

  Roscoe the cat had stopped being such a clingy creep, after a while, which was something of a relief. Ryan was more used to cats who were total assholes than ones who were sweet and friendly.

  Roscoe didn’t leave them alone completely, but he stopped acting like Ryan was his own personal Jesus, at least. Mostly he just demanded that Lucas pat him on the head.

  It genuinely was a nice, laid back afternoon. Playing with the cat, watching shitty cable TV shows, getting occasionally fussed over with snacks by Catherine. By the time they set off on the drive home, Ryan’s state of mind was much improved.

  “Feel better?” Lucas asked as he drove.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “No problem. I stopped both you and Mom from being an annoyance, all in one swoop.”

  Ryan punched him on the shoulder.

  Lucas

  To give Ryan a break from being the field-agent half of their very illegal dynamic duo, the next morning Lucas decided to spend the day completing small jobs, doing on-site tech support and installation for people who couldn’t ask a regular professional for what they wanted.