A Cowboy's Home (29 page)

“Want to kiss you.” Justin added lube and
pushed inside a little, closing his eyes; the veins on his neck
were prominent as he forced himself to go slow.

Sam whimpered at the first press, at feeling
the head as it breached. He arched his neck.

“Too much?” Justin’s voice was ragged with
need.

Sam pressed down against Justin’s hard cock
and it slipped farther in. “Not enough,” he whispered.

As they kissed, Justin pushed inside. Only
when he finally bottomed out did
he
rear back a little, looking down at Sam as if he was
experiencing something mind-blowing.

“I came back hoping for you,” Justin
admitted. He pulled back, and then pushed inside.

Sam gripped the back of Justin’s head,
twisting his fingers in his hair. “I’m so fucking happy you
did.”

Then there was no talking, only kissing, the
sound of skin on skin, and an intense orgasm that
wrung
Sam dry.

When Justin followed, he sighed his
completion and went rigid in Sam’s arms before burying his face
against Sam’s throat.

“No,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

They lay quietly in each other’s arms.

“What is wrong with you?” Justin asked.

“In what way?” Sam stretched a little and
curled back against Justin.

“You didn’t run. Ever. Even when you knew
what I’d done, that I’d killed people.”

“Bad guys.”

“Fuck, Sam, this isn’t the movies.”

“No, I get that.” Sam opened his eyes, and as
quick as that, Justin was lost in the blue again. “The movies don’t
have real flawed heroes. They have caricatures—men who blow shit
up, kill
henchmen
, and
dramatically end the bad guy’s life. They have it easy. You’re the
kind of man who is a hero without even realizing it.”

Justin huffed. “Yeah, right.”

Sam gripped his hair tight. “One day I’ll
make you realize it.”

Sam woke Justin up with a morning blowjob,
which morphed into shower sex, which led nicely to breakfast, and
all before seven o’clock, because he had a restaurant to open up
and a breakfast meeting to cater for. The details of it were
sketchy, some group of businessmen or something, and they were
probably riding later.

Sam went down to begin prep, and Justin
followed a little after seven. His new lover looked good, even in
last night’s clothes. They kissed as Sam chopped mushrooms.

Finally, Justin pulled away. “I’ll be back
soon,” he whispered and went over to a table.

“I’ll be here.”

Sam checked the clock, eight o’clock and
everything was ready to go. As the door opened, he turned to smile
at the first person to enter.

Sam’s smile dipped a little when he saw Aaron
looking around the room as if he was expecting to see someone.

“Hey,” Aaron said and crossed to Sam.
“Where’s breakfast? Is it here? Ethan said to meet for breakfast,
he didn’t say where.”

Sam didn’t have time to answer because Adam
and Ethan pushed inside, followed by Marcus… hell, the entire
extended family was there. There was no sign of businessmen, so Sam
guessed
this
was the breakfast meeting he’d be catering for.
He got to cooking, and then placed bowls of steaming eggs, bacon,
and biscuits in the middle of the table, and the hordes jumped on
it.

When the door opened again and Sheriff Carter
walked in, looking mighty fine in his uniform, Sam wasn’t even a
little bit surprised, unlike the rest of the table, who went quiet,
including Aaron.

“What?” Ryan asked, looking at his brother
with a frown, and then checking around the table.

Justin pushed in, his face serious and he
came to a stop next to a gaping Ryan. “Sheriff.” He extended a
hand.

“Fuck, Justin, you’re alive,” Ryan cursed,
then drew Justin in for a quick hug. “What the hell?”

“Sit, and I’ll explain.” Justin gestured to
an empty seat. “Sam?”

Sam had yet to sit, and finally Justin took
his hand and led him to the table, taking a seat and tugging Sam to
sit next to him.

“I wanted to explain,” Justin began. “As much
as I can, anyway.”

“What is this?” Ryan asked.

“Will this be too much?” Ethan asked at the
same time, pulling Adam close to him.

Justin hesitated, looking around the table;
he grasped Sam’s hand.

“In short, back when we disappeared, Adam and
I stumbled onto something we shouldn’t have. A group of home-grown
terrorists emptying a storage locker on the edge of Crooked Tree
land.
At first we thought it was a meth
lab, in fact, that was what the authorities told everyone, but it
was worse.”
He stopped. Ethan looked skeptical, like there
could be nothing worse than a meth lab on the mountain.

“They were far-right activists who believed
the only way to incite change was to encourage terror. Domestic
terrorism. Five men—well, four men and one boy younger than us. I
won’t tell you what happened, that’s a story for
Adam and me
.” He looked at Adam and
thin-lipped
he nodded slightly. “I swear to
you, Adam, every day you don’t remember what happened is another
day of peace.”

Adam didn’t answer, just leaned against
Ethan.

Ethan looked torn; he must want Adam to
remember everything, but at the same time he loved Adam, so he
would want to spare him the pain of those memories returning. “Your
back….”

“What about his back?” Ryan asked, still in
confused mode.

“Scarred,” Gabe said. “Burned.”

Ryan nodded as if he understood.

“They were psychos,” Justin continued. “I
don’t have another word for it. They didn’t want to leave evidence.
We got out, but not before the fire caught us. I thought Adam was
dead. The last thing I saw was him staring at me, lying so still.
He had blood all over his face. There was an explosion, and I
thought he’d been hit.”

Ethan closed his eyes briefly. “Where was
this? If it was on Crooked Tree land, we’d have known.”

“What the hell?” Ryan said what most people
at the table were thinking.

“No, it was a long way from here, Flathead
way. They took us there, had arguments about what to do with us. A
couple of them wanted to kill us there and then, but the kid there,
Jamie Crane, he wanted to use us, turn us so he’d not be alone.
Maybe, in his own way, he was protecting us… I don’t know.” Justin
stared right at Adam. “We were kids, and we were scared.”

When Justin fell silent for a while, Marcus
prompted. “What happened then?”

“DOJ, DEA, CIA, all the alphabets. Covert
shit, joint jurisdiction. I woke up in a military hospital. They
told me Adam was dead, and then made me into something else. I let
them make me what they wanted me to be.”

Ethan shook his head. “Who are
they
?
And what kind of
something else
?”

“A guy you know, Saunders, he visited
pretending to be DOJ.”

“He wasn’t DOJ?” Ryan asked. He looked
confused.

“Saunders told me my family was in danger,
that the country was in danger, that Adam had been murdered. And I
wanted to be someone else because I was consumed with pain and
guilt, so I let them change me. Hell, I was a teenager still.”

Justin glanced at his dad, who held his fists
in his lap, sitting on the hard chair. His face was pale and tears
coursed down his cheeks.

“You let them change you into what? Or who?”
Ryan asked. He seemed overwhelmed with all the information thrown
at him.

“Someone who would work inside those kinds of
organizations, undercover, integrated, a blunt instrument for them
to use with no comebacks. I killed everyone who hurt
Adam and me
. All of them except Jamie Crane, the
kid who ultimately saved us.”

Marcus pressed a hand to his chest, with a
shocked expression. Adam didn’t move a muscle.

Ethan swallowed and then nodded slowly, as if
coming to some kind of realization. “The ones who hurt you, and who
you thought had killed Adam.”

“Xander Walden committed suicide, ate a
bullet when I was just a minute away from him. I never got to look
in his eyes as he died.”

Next to Justin, Sam was restless, clenching
and unclenching fists.

“Dillon Naves and David Crane,” Justin
continued. “I shot them both. Dillon had moved south, back to his
girlfriend, distributing meth as a way to finance domestic attacks.
I infiltrated the cell that protected him, took it all down, and
put a bullet in Dillon’s left knee. I watched him thrashing on the
floor, and then I shot him in the stomach. Part of me wanted to
leave him to bleed out there in the middle of the fucking forest,
his confederates dead around him, but then I couldn’t have been
sure he was dead. I waited, watched him writhe, and told him all
about who I was, so he knew he was going to die. After he knew who
was killing him, I shot him.”

“You don’t have to tell us this,” Ethan said
softly. He laced his fingers with Justin’s. “Not if it hurts.”

Justin considered that, but he’d come this
far. “That was six people I killed. Five if you exclude Dillon.
Then there was David Crane. He’d gone legit, set himself up as a
mechanic in San Antonio, turned out he’d thought running that far
would mean no one would know. I found him, one bullet to his brain.
I had to be quick because it wasn’t a remote location. You know
what I found when he was dead? A PC full of plans and enough C4 to
take down a building, along with schematics for a Cowboys’ game. I
stopped that, saved all those lives, but that was one more man
dead. That is what I did, you see? I’d become nothing more than
checks and balances.”

Sam rested a hand on Justin’s thigh, a
reassuring weight there. Marcus looked shell-shocked, and pale,
clutching his chest.

Ethan nodded. “Maybe you should go, Dad.”

Marcus looked at him directly, and then shook
his head. “My son is a hero. I want to hear it all.”

Justin snorted, “Jeez, I’m no hero, Dad.”

Marcus stubbornly didn’t answer that.

“Carry on,” Ethan prompted.

Justin continued. “Travis Graham? He was the
worst one, the last one I found. He’d integrated into some kind of
end-of-the-world cult shit, a front for drug distribution on the
East Coast. That took the longest. I wanted to kill him on day one,
but he had these kids as prisoners, a whole slew of them, some as
young as twelve, and he was selling them, fuck, anything to get
money. That was when I began using,
because
… fuck.”

“You had to,” Ethan said, “to keep cover. To
save the children he had.”

Justin looked at his brother with new eyes.
Ethan wasn’t judging him; he understood.

“Holy shit,” Ryan muttered near Sam.

“You got him, though?” Ashley asked.

“Yeah, I did. Chased him up an apartment
block, missed a shot.” He paused, because what he said next would
be raw and uncompromising and show him for the man he truly was. He
expected everyone to turn from him in disgust. “He fell, was
gripping the side of the building. I leaned over to help him, but I
could have done more. He was staring up at me, pleading, and all I
could hear was Adam’s voice in my head, saying near enough the same
words back in the bunker. I let him fall to his death.”

He paused. He didn’t deserve anyone to listen
to him, and expected everyone to call him on it, to tell him to
leave and never come back. No one said a thing, not even Ryan
moved, so Justin pressed on to finish his fucked up list of people
he’d killed. “The last one of the five, Jamie Crane? He was David’s
son, a kid, younger than
Adam and
me
, and a victim as much as we were. He’s doing well,
learning to live his life.”

“So you’re done now,” Ryan said. He looked a
little pale, but to give him his due he didn’t look like he was
going to arrest Justin anytime soon. “You killed him as well?”

Justin wasn’t ready to face that question,
though, and he changed the subject. “When I found out Adam was
still alive, I realized all those years I’d been paying for getting
him killed. They were my lost years.”

“Okay, so now you can stop running,” Ethan
said.

“We need to get ahead of this,” Ryan said at
the same time.

Justin nodded. “I want to stop running, right
here, and come to some kind of peace over what I did, what I was.
And maybe ask you to help me with that.” He paused. “If you feel
like you can, that you don’t see me as… too lost. And yes, Ryan, we
can talk, and if you need to arrest me…”

“The AT&T Stadium holds eighty thousand
people.” Sam pushed the words into the room. His tone brooked no
discussion and his grip on Justin’s hand was hard.

Justin couldn’t pull his hand away.

“What?” he asked, confused.

“Eighty thousand people,” Sam continued. “At
least, at every home game for the Cowboys. You imagine a device
there, all that C4 you talked about. Families. Kids. Teenagers,
girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers, teachers, nurses, construction
guys, all those people. How many would have died if you hadn’t
stopped—what was his name again?”

“Crane, David Crane.”

“Yeah, him. Answer me, Justin, and the rest
of you. How many? What seating was it? The VIP area? The cheap
seats? The ones where they have groups from youth clubs? And you
want us to hate you for that? For stopping all those innocent
people being killed?”

“No, I want people to hate me for who I am,
who I turned into.”

Sam yanked Justin around to him and pressed
his forehead to Justin’s. “Well, I don’t hate you. Fuck, I think
you’re a hero who’s spent too much time on the edge. Survivor’s
guilt, PTSD. Revenge.”

“I don’t hate you,” Ethan snapped. “You are
and always will be my brother.”

“And I want you to be one of my best men on
Saturday. I already asked you,” Gabe added. “Isn’t that right,
Ashley?”