Augh! “You had to make this serious,” Glen complained. “It is bad luck to go out on an op with your heart all tangled around your feet.”
Cash kissed him. Gentle. Soft. Not asking for any more than a taste. Glen parted his lips and accepted, partly out of surprise, but truth was, Glen knew what he was doing.
Cash’s tongue flirted in, tasted briefly, and then flickered out. “Night, flyboy,” Cash murmured. He rolled over and backed up against Glen, who was logically the big spoon, probably. After a moment of indecision, Glen wrapped his arm around Cash’s chest and pulled close, burying his face against the back of Cash’s neck, smelling everything from his grooming products to the tang of salt air to the faint musk of sweat.
Heady and male, all of it.
“Night, Cash,” Glen said gruffly.
It wasn’t until he heard Cash’s happy sigh that he realized he’d forgotten to say it—there was no “kid” or “boy” hanging over them, not now.
Yeah, fine. He was dealing with a man in his arms, in his bed. So what?
So everything.
He closed his eyes, comforted in spite of himself.
Everything.
THE next morning found them, showered and dressed, in Preston and Damien’s room, eating doughnuts and looking over the map that Damien had prepped after last night’s recon.
“Good doughnuts, Spence,” Glen said, giving credit.
“It’s a gift,” Spencer acknowledged. “Damie, tell him the bad.”
Damien grimaced. “Speaking of gifts.”
But Spencer was unimpressed. “No, seriously. Tell him the bad.”
Damien looked at Preston’s dog. “Preacher, kill.”
Preacher smiled back at Damien, tongue lolling, like these were his best people here and he was going to enjoy every word. Preston himself wasn’t engaged in conversation. He was sitting in a corner of the room, a plate of scrambled eggs, sausage, and toast in front of him. He ate distractedly while playing simple games on a charging computer tablet, his brow furrowed in concentration. Glen, his mother, his grandmother, and even Damien, had all put their heads together as Preston’s world got bigger than his home, trying to come up with a way for Preston to disengage from people when he was in an alien place and easily overwhelmed. The tablet was the best thing, but sudoku could do in a pinch. The simplicity of math games helped Preston arrange his thoughts neatly, and that let him deal with people, who were not always so neat.
“That dog loves me,” Spencer said, not batting an eyelash. “Damien, he’s going to have to know—”
“Gun towers,” Damien said, glaring at Spencer. “And I was getting to them.”
“There’s more than that,” Spencer said grimly. “At least I think so.”
They all looked to him for clarification.
“So we took a basic fishing boat—shallow, but it could hold our gear, right?”
They all nodded.
“Now, there’s an obvious place to land—it’s a big cove, straight walk up to the house. The sides have some foliage, and we figured we could hide in there, right?”
Everybody nodded, and Spencer continued.
“So, we got about fifty feet from the island—swimming distance—and we feel something scraping up against the bottom of the boat. There’s man-made reefs out in the Sea of Cortez—some of the islands used to be processing centers for fish and fake pearls, and environmentalists repurposed the stuff that wouldn’t poison the water.”
“Smart,” Glen said, approving. He and Damien had needed to make repurposing an art form when they’d started their own business—last year’s parachute became this year’s flight bag with a heavy-duty sewing machine and some creativity.
“Yeah, well, for a minute we thought we’d run aground or something like that—but then….”
Damien shuddered. “Then whatever it was underneath us gave a violent fucking heave, like it was spring loaded, and a goddamned wall shot out of the water.”
“A what?” Glen asked, both impressed and appalled.
“I swear to God it was like a Bond movie,” Damien muttered. “If we’d been in anything bigger—hell, anything with a motor, or even a goddamned cigarette boat or Zodiac—we would have been in trouble. This thing had an edge at the top to puncture something like a Zodiac, and it was thick enough to lift a bigger boat out of the water. We were in a tinyassed fishing boat, and it just slid off, but it scared the hell out of us.”
“Wait—slid off?” Glen’s heart was pumping, and he wanted to smack them both. “You didn’t think to mention this to us last night?”
Damien bared all his teeth. “There was no reason to mention it last night,” he said.
“Also he didn’t want to worry me,” Preston said. His tablet was plugged in, but he’d stood up and given Preacher and Colonel the last of the sausage on his plate. Glen knew the look his brother had when he was recharged and ready to people again, and this was it.
“That is true,” Damien said, nodding his head earnestly, which probably meant that Preston was about to get pissed.
“Which is why he didn’t tell me last night,” Preston said, brows knitted. “But it also explains the big fucking bruises on his arms, probably from when the boat crashed down and you got thrown against the side. Ass. Hole.”
Damien grimaced. “That is also true.”
Spencer let out a snicker. “You thought that would work, did you?”
“Shut up,” Damien told him.
“That he wouldn’t get mad at you.”
“Shut up.”
“’Cause you people like to tell me what an asshole I am, but I could have told you—”
“Shut up!” That came from Preston. “You’re both stupid, but I can be mad at Damien and I can’t be mad at you. So you have to let me deal with this.”
Damien smirked at Spence. “See.”
“I’m not talking to you,” Preston growled. “Now tell us more about the bad.”
“It’s only on the mainland side of the island,” Damien said, sending Spencer a resentful glare. “The gun towers are on the peninsula side—and I have no idea why. The only thing they’re overlooking is a bunch of wildlife and a rocky shore. Sea lions, yes. Drug dealers, no. That side of the island is almost impossible to access, so either he’s super paranoid, or he just wanted to wave his big gun-dick around and show off to everybody.”
“Or he’s afraid of someone swimming away,” Spencer said. “Because it would be possible to get to the peninsula from there. Not sure they could make it through the sea lions to get to civilization, but it would certainly freak people out enough to make them not want to try.”
“But you guys got onto the island?” Glen asked, hating everything about this.
“Yeah. After the wall sprang up, the boat slid back, away from the island, and it had some speed. So we lay flat against the bottom, and when the spotlight came up to hit the wall, it missed us completely.”
“How big was the wall?” Obviously you couldn’t put something like this around the entire island—that would be impossible. The upkeep of the apparatus alone would be stupid expensive—salt water corrodes!