Love for the Cold-Blooded (4 page)

“Come on,” Nicholas whispered, the word gusting hot and greedy against the back of Pat’s neck. “Come on, here we go.”

Careful teeth set into the juncture of Pat’s neck and shoulder, and Nicholas’s hand finally, finally found his cock. Pat jerked and gasped, arching his back, toes curling. The edge of pain had subsided, but the strange fullness was as intense and confusing as ever — and when Nicholas pushed in this time, a spark caught flame deep inside Pat, rushing outwards in a flash fire of annihilating pleasure.

The sound Pat made tore at his throat. He’d lost track of things, but he thought that Nicholas was growling into his ear, and that he himself was gasping, real desperation in his voice. His palms slid over the sheets as he climbed up from his elbows. His head hung low and sweat burned in his eyes and none of it mattered, nothing mattered but Nicholas’s hand and cock and body burning him up, taking him apart.

And then it all came together, igniting into a slow, glorious explosion of pure ecstasy.

Just. Wow.

Pat was left limp and dazed and ridiculously pleased with himself. It took him a moment to regain enough of his wits to realize that he was now flat on his face on the bed, sprawled limply with limbs flung randomly about. Nicholas’s hands were clenched around his hips, holding him down, and Nicholas was still fucking him — all short hard driving thrusts and rough grunts, his harsh breathing sounding oddly funny now that Pat was removed from the urgency of it.

Nicholas certainly didn’t grunt much like an astronaut. Maybe he had a chance of survival on that hypothetical alien planet after all.

Pat might have giggled a little, but whatever. He totally got a pass on slightly ungentlemanly behavior right now, given the sheer amount of win he had accumulated here. “Totally a caveman,” Pat mumbled into the hopelessly rumpled sheet.

This thing going on now, being fucked while all limp and loose and still sparking with sensory overload — this wasn’t unpleasant, either. Pat would have thought it would be, if anyone had asked him ahead of time. But instead, everything was awesome… and then everything drifted off into soft, unfocused warmth.

~~~~~

T
he shower in Nicholas Andersen’s billionaire laboratory apartment bathroom probably doubled as some kind of high-powered space capsule that could bring you to Mars and back in half an hour, and get you sparkling clean while you were in transit.

Like, seriously: Pat had to get the AI to operate the thing. It was like a stylish glass and metal room with jets everywhere. Jets that followed Pat’s movements and automatically adjusted to whatever water temperature and pressure and flow intensity he wanted, basically by reading his mind.

There was also a steam option, and a hot air option to dry off, complete with a blow-drier thingie that descended from the ceiling and dried Pat’s hair before he could stop gaping at it for long enough to tell the AI to knock it off (reckless blow-drying made his curls unmanageable). And lastly — get this — there was a little foof of sound and a final mist from the jets, and Pat’s skin was moisturized to baby softness from neck to toe.

When he emerged from the movie theater-sized bathroom, Pat’s hair was a mess, but he was grinning so much his cheeks were beginning to hurt. He might also, possibly, have been giggling a little madly from the sheer coolness of it all. Best night ever or what?

The owner of the astronaut shower was rolled up in a bundle of sheets and blanket, looking like a white sausage. He stirred while Pat collected his clothes from the floor, finally sitting up just as Pat was trying to flatten his hair enough to settle his baseball cap at the optimal angle of coolness.

When Pat came up to the side of the bed, Nicholas blinked at him with a kind of bleary puzzlement, almost as though he had no clue who Pat was, or where he had come from. Yet another mark in the guy’s ‘how do I fail at hooking up with someone? let me count the ways’ column. He was running up quite a score… but whatever. The dude had a hilarious pillow crease along one cheek and was clearly still more than half asleep. Not to mention that Pat was feeling so content he’d have had to expend real effort to be annoyed at anyone or anything, let alone the guy responsible for the best orgasm of Pat’s life.

“Gotta run, dude, time is money.” Sure, Nicholas himself had been too busy to make extra work for the night manager, but there was a bunch of other stuff Pat should have been doing. He’d have to hurry to get everything finished before the end of his shift. He wouldn’t get any studying done tonight, that was for sure.

So worth it, though. It wasn’t like Pat hadn’t had plenty of orgasms before, because duh. But this one? This one had been like submerging in the sound of a high-tech stereo system with space-going amplifiers after only ever having heard music through the wall of your apartment when the neighbor turned up his ancient, tinny radio.

“Hrmph,” Nicholas said, flopping back down and burying his face in the pillow in what Pat interpreted as the politest goodbye he was capable of right now.

Pat had already reached the door to the lab when he hesitated, turning back. His sisters would never let him hear the end of it if he let this poor schmuck continue to bumble through life in the failtastic way he evidently had been… and in all truth, Pat felt sympathy for the guy’s total incompetence. He knew all about the trials and tribulations of having no game. Bottom line: it sucked.

“Hey Nicky, there’s something I gotta tell you.”

Nicholas raised his face again slowly, still all bleary and sleepy, but now also with an annoyed vertical crease carved between his brows. Chances were he didn’t like being called Nicky. Tough luck, Pat had earned it. “You’re hot enough to make up for a multitude of sins, and you’re definitely a good kisser. But I won’t lie, your dirty talk is the pits, man. Like, absolutely subterranean. Tunneling to the center of the earth territory, if you catch my drift.” Pat paused briefly to think over what he’d said, and nodded to himself in satisfaction. His father always said that if you were going to criticize someone, you should lead with a compliment. You should also be encouraging and show concrete ways the suggested change would improve the situation, so Pat went on to explain. “I mean, I have no standards to speak of, so it was fine. But if you ever want to get laid again you have got to shape up, bro. Do yourself a favor here.”

Nicholas blinked. Then he opened his mouth, and closed it again. Then, he blinked again. He kind of looked like an android caught in a fatal feedback loop. At least he looked like what Pat imagined that would look like, because of course he hadn’t ever actually seen an android caught in a feedback loop. Any android at all for that matter, what with technology not being far enough advanced to build a truly realistic one yet. Except for the dolphin ones, those were wicked cool. Not that Pat had ever seen an android dolphin yet, either, but he lived in hope.

Anyway. “Just a friendly hint. No worries, right?”

The way the vertical crease on Nicholas’s face deepened begged to differ, but Pat shrugged and stepped backwards out of the room, letting the door fall shut behind him. Whatever. Nicholas might not want to hear it now, but in the long run he’d be grateful someone had told him.

Chapter Two

Pretend it’s all part of your plan.

“U
rgent — immediate action required,” the AI spoke-shouted, nicely complemented by a backdrop of the throbbing alarm noise blaring out at roughly the volume of an illegal rave with particularly good speakers. “All necessary information must be provided immediately. I repeat, action is urgently required.”

Pat heard the racket the minute he got off the elevator. In the kitchen itself, it was near-deafening, and he held protective hands over his ears as he rushed over to the interface to see what on earth was going on.

“Service provider details and payment information not available,” the AI rebuked him sternly, though thankfully deigning to turn down the volume to a slightly less eardrum-busting level, now that it had gotten Pat to pay attention. “Please update all relevant files and complete all required paperwork. I repeat —”

“Oh for god’s sake, shut up already!” Pat fumbled to find the option to temporarily silence the AI so he could hear himself think. A waterfall of alerts and prompts popped up in his way, and he was a little panicky by the time he finally got past them all. Why was the AI going nuts? Nothing like this had ever happened before. Clearly the mansion wasn’t burning down around their ears, so what gave?

Blessed silence at last — thank you, gods — and Pat took a moment to close his eyes and center himself, scrambling after the remains of the golden glow of satisfaction he’d been reveling in since waking from his nap. He’d had his first real hook-up, and it had been awesome. He wasn’t going to let a hysterical virtual micro-manager ruin his afterglow because it had gotten its bytes in a bunch over an accounting issue.

Once he’d regained his calm, Pat turned to the interface to puzzle his way through the AI’s demands. Service provider details, fine. Pat would get the AI all the info its mechanical little heart yearned for, and be rewarded with peace and quiet (and hopefully a couple hours to finish his work before the shift ended).

Aha, there was the problem: A payment order had been issued for an external service provider, but there was no bank account or other payment info in the system that would have allowed the AI to send out the money. Cue the AI freaking its shit all over the place. Plus, for extra freak-out-the-anal-AI value, all basic info on the service provider in question was missing, too.

Which would have made perfect sense, except: What the fuck, which service provider was the AI babbling about? Pat hadn’t called in any external help tonight. The only thing Nicholas had wanted was a pizza, and the chefs had prepared everything for that ahead of time. In fact, in the two months he’d been working as Nicholas’s night manager, Pat had only had to call in outside help once, for the inexplicable mousse au chocolat request. One call to the emergency French cuisine number, and the best restaurant in town had delivered the coveted dessert right to the mansion’s door — in the middle of the night, long after closing time.

Money was like magic, in a way. Wave it around dramatically enough, and everything you wanted would appear, as though conjured from thin air.

Anyway. As night manager, Pat was the one who should have been arranging any outsourcing. If someone else — meaning mansion security, because there wasn’t anybody else on duty at this hour — had been forced to break protocol, Pat would at the very least have been notified… and besides, then the AI would have been flashing its forms at the security guys, not at Pat. So again, what the fuck?

Maybe this mysterious external service was an older service that got stuck in the system? Maybe someone had misfiled it or tagged it with the wrong date, or some mechanical neuron in the AI’s brain had misfired, making the order pop up like a virtual gerbil?

Pat struggled through various demandingly flashing forms until he found the information he was looking for: the date and specifications of the service request all the drama was about. The request was marked as a ‘direct unclassified request by principal’, aka Nicholas himself. There was even an audio file attached. And the time stamp was roughly two hours ago.

Hang on. What the —

Okay. Just a sec.

When Pat tapped on the audio file, he already half suspected what he would hear. “So, send up a guy,” said the familiar recording of Nicholas’s voice.

“Dude.” Pat blinked at the screen. “What the actual fuck?”

Only, the thing was, the shape of what had happened was beginning to show itself more and more clearly, although it was so absurd his mind refused to wrap around it properly. It was a monstrously angular, unwieldy shape, in mindwrapping terms.

The AI was blinking an empty ‘contractor profile’ form at him, all fields unsubtly outlined in red. Pat’s hand hovered over the interface for a second before he could make himself tap away from the form; promptly, the AI shoved a list of previously engaged contractors under his fingertips, their names alphabetically sorted under headings like ‘Exclusive Companions’, ‘Roses Inc.’ and ‘Miller Enterprises’.

One of the names under ‘Miller Enterprises’ was highlighted, clearly preselected by an anal-compulsive AI anxious to get its data fix as quickly as possible when the dumb human was dragging his feet.
Patrick Graham.

Tapping on the name opened a file topped by the smiling face of a model-handsome dude with scarily white teeth and skin so smooth and perfect it had to have been digitally remastered. The stats listed underneath the picture specified that the guy was 25, freakishly tall, and very athletic. There were also a bunch of details that Pat wasn’t entirely sure he ought to know about someone he hadn’t even been introduced to.

The
Patrick Graham
file was part of a data cluster labeled ‘companions’. Pat followed the data trail one step further down the rabbit-hole, to a list of guys who were, A: so far out of Pat’s league as to be ridiculous, and B: all pretty much clones of each other. Dark hair, dark eyes, practiced smile, generic good looks, and perfectly proportioned muscular build — lickable abs and all. Kinda like a bunch of underwear models for one of those designer brands Pat never bought. (Who could afford to spend a month’s pay on a pair of boxers? Especially when the only people who ever saw Pat’s underwear were Pat himself and the swim team. Before tonight, at least, and that had come way out of left field.)

So that’s what “send a guy up” had meant.

Out of morbid curiosity, Pat checked a couple of the other files. He was unsurprised to find that all of these dudes were freakishly tall. Also evidently seriously hung, but Pat was not yet reconciled with the notion that this particular piece of data was listed at all, so he wasn’t thinking about that. (Not much, anyway. Honest. Not like any of these dudes would have given Pat the time of day, so it wasn’t like it was relevant for him or anything.)

At some point — Pat wasn’t entirely certain when —, he’d started giggling. Part of it was nerves, but also, come on, this was pretty damn funny. This wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in real life; bizarre and unlikely misunderstandings like this were the stuff of straight-to-DVD romantic comedies. Plus,
Pat
? Pat of all people? Who on earth would mistake Pat for a hooker?