Whiskey and Wry (Sinners Series) (31 page)

“Don’t worry. I’m going to let you out in a few minutes,” he crooned, thumbing the release button on the Jaguar’s key fob. The tiny click of the trunk unlocking sounded loud in the enclosed garage, and the thumping from inside stopped, replaced by a thin, keening whine. Sighing contentedly, Parker continued to stroke the car’s metal, taking a moment to dream of the things he had planned for the man who’d threatened to have him killed. Taking one final breath, Parker inhaled the sweet smell of the man’s fear coming up from the enclosed space, a taint of hot urine mingled with the new-carpet smell of the Jag’s interior.

“Oh, Mr. Mitchell, it’s time you and your brother got reacquainted,” Parker sang softly, lifting the trunk lid slowly so he could view his bound prisoner. “Wait till you see what I’ve got in store for you. And then, your nephew and I… we’re going to do this all over again, because while two heads might be better than one, three really are a matched set.”

T
HE
warehouse was quiet once again, and Damien breathed a sigh of relief once the door closed behind Kane’s flame-haired mother. He’d liked her. He did. But he was pretty certain she was part octopus. Every time he or Miki turned around, she’d been there with her arms outstretched, cuddling one or both of them to her before they could protest.

Not that he would have protested, because he’d spotted the teary glint in her eye with each embrace, and her warm cooing over Miki did funny things to his stomach.

No, he sucked it up and let her do what she wanted, suddenly understanding how the tiny, fey-like woman had her enormous sons and husband wrapped around her dainty little finger.

Damien’d left Miki to deal with the two Irish men as they watched rugby. The singer had declared the couch corner his, stretching out his strained knee to the left, and claimed the space on his immediate right for the dog. When Damie kissed his best friend good night, Kane was eyeing Dude, obviously intending to kick the terrier off so he could take over the space next to his lover.

They’d spent dinner listening to the Morgans tell stories about when the men had been young teens. Sionn as an adjunct Morgan wasn’t spared, and Connor drolly informed a gleeful Damien of the time when they’d gone swimming in a too-cold river in Ireland, only to lose their clothes to a pack of thieving cousins.

Kane’s walk-of-shame up the stone path to their grandmother’s house had been done naked and in a wind brisk enough to curl up their burgeoning manhoods. They’d played a match of rock-paper-scissors to see who would get their clothes, and Kane lost. Squaring his shoulders, he’d marched down the lane, undeterred by his nudity, and strolled casually into the parlor. After pleasantly greeting the priest and his assistant who’d come for tea, he headed upstairs and went straight for a hot bath, leaving his brother and cousin to shiver in the cold outside.

“None of this all for one and one for all shite with the Morgans and Finnegans,” Sionn’d chuckled. “It was cover your tackle, head on in, and take no prisoners. The bastard wouldn’t even throw us down a pair of sweats from the upstairs window. Connor and I had to face God’s men with our knickers off and our asses bare.”

He and Miki nearly died there on the couch, first from laughter then from Kane’s ominous threats to shut them up if they didn’t stop chortling. Once dinner was over, Damien’s skin began to feel too tight, and he’d bumped around the room until Sionn captured him in a hug and told him it would be okay if he fled.

Holed up in their bedroom, Damien spread out a few of the notebooks he’d taken from Miki’s stash. Most of the pages were covered in notes, lyrics, and half-scribbled passages his best friend had floating around in his head. Every once in a while, an illustration popped up, a curl of smoking skulls or zombie cats chasing giant lizards scrawled across rows of blue lines.

Damien turned on the small amp he seemed to be dragging from one room to the next, plugged in his old Fender, and listened to its familiar hum when he touched its strings with the tips of his fingers. Connecting a pair of Beats Pro headphones into the amp’s audio, Damien used his other hand to slide them over his head, then grabbed a pencil and began to read.

It was hard going. So much of Miki’s loss was fractured, his thoughts too edged with pain and grief. Working forward, Damien saw the roller coaster of Miki’s emotions, dipping down into a depth of worthlessness he’d never wanted for his friend and then soaring up in the later books when he recalled happier times for the band. One of the newer notebooks, a red moleskin thumbed to a thick bloat from ink and finger oils, held a softer time for Miki’s heart. And a whisper of a lover pushing his way into a darkness Miki never could quite escape.

“Yeah, I know how you feel, Sinjun,” Damie murmured, wiping at his face. Miki’s words echoed the resonant thrum in his soul when Sionn was near, and damn his best friend for finding the words to the music he could hear in his lover’s Irish rumble.

Damien picked up the Fender, found the beginning in Miki’s words, and began to spin out the notes tucked in between their lines.

I
T
WAS
nearly midnight when Sionn ventured into the bedroom he shared with Damien. The space was bare of any excess furniture, holding only a dresser and a bed with a pair of side tables that held mostly lube and a phone charger. Despite a designer’s intent to fill the warehouse with elegant furnishings, neither Damie nor Miki liked having too much around them. A dresser held some of their clothes but the majority of Damien’s things remained boxed up in a small room Miki’d left them in.

He paused at the doorway, taking in the beauty of the man sitting on their unmade bed. Damie’s dark hair was held against his head by a pair of studio headphones, a long black fringe brushing down his forehead to cover the deep blue eyes Sionn had fallen into more times than he could count. Damie’s bottom lip was chapped, chewed away to near blood in one spot, and his teeth worried at the mark as his fingers flew over an electric guitar’s strings muted by the headphones Damie wore.

Dressed in torn jeans and an old Sinner’s Gin T-shirt, his shoulder blades pushing the fabric up into small wings on either side of his spine, Damien took Sionn’s breath away.

And as if sensing his lover was there, Damien looked up, his face open and vulnerable, with his soul peeled back by the music he’d found inside of him. Sionn knew he’d be lost without him.

The moment lingered, a soft, whispering thread tangling between them as Sionn padded into the room. Pulling the headphones off, Damien tilted his head back for a kiss, and Sionn tasted the wild of his lover’s spirit in the fierce touch of their lips. Damie set the guitar down on the floor next to the amp and looped the headphones over the amp’s handle, then gave Sionn a lopsided grin.

“You taste like beer.” Damien stole another kiss, smacking his lips as if Sionn were a fine wine. “And more of your uncle’s pork rinds. Did you and Kane save us any, or are they all gone?”

“Nope, there are at least four more bags,” Sionn promised, climbing onto the bed. He pushed Damien back onto the mattress and covered his lover’s body, pinning him down. “Is that why you love me? Because my uncle Donal makes you
chicharrónes
, Damie boy?”

“Well, yeah.” Damien sneered playfully, reaching down to cup Sionn’s sex through his jeans. “And this. This is a big incentive.”

“Big, huh?” He crooked an eyebrow up, wrinkling his nose at Damie’s play on words.

“Enormous,” the man whispered, squeezing again. “But mostly, it’s the
chicharrónes
.”

“Fecking bastard.” Damien fought him a little, but Sionn eventually won out, stripped off the man’s T-shirt, and tossed it aside. His jeans were more difficult, the job made harder by Damien’s laughter and squirming. “Stop moving. I’m trying to sex you, here.”

“Yeah, you’re fucking romantic.” Grousing, Damien stilled and let Sionn slowly pop the buttons loose on his fly. Bending over the man’s waist, Sionn laved his lover’s exposed skin as he worked his jeans open.

“Ah, I like it when you don’t wear underwear. It makes doing this so much better,” Sionn whispered, then bit into the tender triangle of skin he’d revealed. Mewling, Damien jerked up, his knees coming up slightly under Sionn’s weight. “Ah no,
a rún
, you stay there and let me drink you down. The taste of you is better than any pint I’ve ever had on my lips.”

A thatch of silken ebony hair peeked up from Damien’s crotch at the next undone button, and Sionn parted the denim, exposing the base of his lover’s slender cock. Its root was flushed pink, straining and slick under its prison, and Sionn kissed its curve before working his fingers under the shaft to free it.

“Irish….” Damien’s mewl turned rough when Sionn’s mouth found the end of his cock, a harsh hitch fluttering his breath. Swallowed down to his base and trapped beneath his lover’s weight, Damien could only dig his fingers into Sionn’s shoulders, his nails creasing Sionn’s pale skin. “Fuck, you look so damned good doing that.”

Sionn didn’t know how much longer he could take having the taste of Damien’s skin and sex in his mouth without having the man’s heat around his own cock. Leaving Damie splayed out on the mattress, he fumbled to reach a bottle of lube, nearly dropping it on the floor. He lobbed the lubricant into the sheets, grabbed Damien’s waistband, and tugged his jeans off the rest of the way, snagging them for a moment on the man’s slender feet.

“God you’re trouble even when you’re just lying here,” Sionn muttered, but he kissed Damien’s anklebone to apologize. The near giggle he got thrilled him, and he grabbed the man’s other foot, nibbling at the taut tendon above his heel until Damien began to beg.

“Dude, stop. Come on, no fucking tickling. Shit, I’m going to pee the damned bed.” Kicking, he nearly took out Sionn’s nose, and he dodged out of the way, stroking at the spot he’d left nearly soaking wet. The fingers Damie used to coax music out of steel and wood now tangled into Sionn’s hair, yanking him up in an almost painfully tight grip. “Get the hell up here so we can get busy.”

“Aye, and here I thought you were a songwriter. The poetry that comes from that beautiful mouth of yours could make an angel weep.”

Damie growled and tugged again, insistent and needy. “Sinjun’s the fucking poet. I just carve the music out from his words.”

Chuckling, Sionn made his way up Damien’s long legs, stopping to kiss a small scar on Damie’s knee before nibbling up a pale stretch of skin on his thigh. Damien’s cock was already weeping its want, and Sionn cupped its silky mushroom curve into the hollow of his tongue and lapped around the slit, catching the pearly trickle in his mouth.

Cradled between Damien’s thighs, Sionn let his hands roam up his lover’s hips and over his stomach. He reached for Damien’s nipples and played with the deep-plum nubs, coaxing them into tight peaks before grabbing at the lube bottle nestled into the curve of Damien’s side.

“You ready for me,
a rún
?” He didn’t wait to hear Damien’s answer. It would have been difficult to make it out amid the whimpering cries coming from his lover’s nibbled-on lips. A quick dab of lube on his fingers and Sionn was in, pressing into the crinkled ring tucked between Damien’s quivering ass cheeks.

They wouldn’t last long. Something taut was in the air between them. The secrets they’d shared under the sheets of the room whispered around them, tying the men together. Sionn found part of himself he’d never scraped off his mind, opening up tiny enigmatic pockets inside of himself that Damien took in, handling every soft word and choked-on cry as if it were a delicate treasure.

Shed blood no longer haunted Sionn’s dreams, tucked back away into the recesses of forgiveness. The aching plunge of the scar in his thigh was a reminder of him giving everything he could. Although he would always mourn having to kill a man, he’d found the acceptance of it, knowing he’d kept a family safe from being torn apart by the man’s bullets. Despite his avowal of being thick-tongued, Damien’s murmured wisdom struck him in the heart of his misery, and Sionn’d been grateful for the relief.

He’d pried as well. Damien’s anguishes were hidden deep, buried under layers of sarcasm and deflection, but in the warm, lightning-ripe darkness of their retreat, Sionn found the key to the chains binding Damien to his nightmares. Drawing the man out was difficult. Kissing away his tears and promising a forever was even harder, because Sionn was faced with a sea of suspicion and disbelief.

It was an ocean he swam through every night and day he spent with Damien. Every second, every kiss and every caress bringing him one stroke closer to the solitude Damien imprisoned himself in.

Miki was there. Sionn knew that and welcomed the mercurial singer. Encouraged by Damien’s guttersnipe of a best friend, he pushed on, and when he’d paused at the doorway, watching Damien spin out threads of sound, Sionn realized every achingly hard moment was worth it just to see a gentle, sweet smile from the man beneath him.

“You are worth everything, love.” Sionn delved into his lover’s heat, skimming as much lube as he could onto his rim. “I cannot wait to spend a forever with you.”

“Forever’s what you are taking here….”

He didn’t let the man finish. Damien’s impatience was expected, as was the surprised gasp when Sionn parted his cheeks, fitted the head of his cock into the dip of Damien’s body, and pushed in. Hooking Damie’s legs over his shoulders, Sionn rocked his hips slowly, trying to take his time.

“Swear to God, I’m going to kill you,” Damien ground out. He lifted his arms, wrapped his hands around Sionn’s neck, and pulled him down, forcing Sionn to roll his shoulders forward. “What part of fuck me now didn’t you get, Irish?”

Giving in, Sionn snapped his hips up, burying himself in Damien’s hot clench. Knotted up in his lover’s legs and arms, Sionn grasped Damien’s torso and shifted him until the man’s shoulders were up against the wall. Curved around Sionn’s cock, he was nearly bent over, holding on tightly as Sionn slammed into him, their bodies slipping in the sheen of their thickening sweat.