Page 81 of Full Mountie

Longing.

Fuck me.

I try to tell myself I’m justmissingthem. Nolonging. No big feelings. Because I see them behind masks of propriety that make me want to strip them bare. Because I gorged myself on them, naked and honest, for four days straight over the long weekend.

Because as the seconds tick by, minutes passing and turning into days, I can see last weekend better than when we were in it, and it was perfect.

Obviously, one misses perfection. That’s not a big deal.

Perfection is fleeting, in that desperate, holy fuck kind of way that makes you think all the stars have aligned and you’re having a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Yeah, we’d talked about it happening again, but there was a solid part of me that wasn’t sure that wasn’t wishful thinking. That we’d slide back into the love triangle thing again, instead of the unexpectedly right triad.

So I miss them—us—together.

And so I’m lying in bed, lazily stroking another pile-of-bodies-inspired hard-on.

What I need to do is to stop moping, and lock down a plan if I want to quell the nerves inside me.

I don’t like being nervous about a relationship.

I like to be in control, and that usually means clear definition of what a thing is—and isn’t—before we get too deep.

That didn’t happen this time.

It didn’t happen the first time with Lachlan, either.

But that was foolishness I won’t repeat. No falling in love this time. I’ve learned my lesson.

29

Lachlan

Thursday comes and goes. Gavin snaps at a reporter in a scrum when he’s asked about the clean-up in Beaumont. It’s going slowly and there’s some fuckery going on between the municipal, provincial, and federal levels of government. But the meat of his response—that it’s an exceptional tragedy which requires an exceptional response, and “good enough” is, in fact,not—gets lost and what gets looped all day on the news is his flash of anger instead.

By the end of the day, he’s laid down the law—tomorrow he’s going to the Beaumont Elementary School and he’s going to be fucking helpful.

I’m not sure it’s going to go like that at all, but we pull together a functional travel plan. We’ll drive, because it’s only two hours away, and we can bring our own security so we aren’t a drag on local resources. I send an advance party with a two-fold assignment: find a place for the prime minister to meet with displaced residents and hear directly from them what they need in the next seventy-two hours; and report back the early intel on that question so he can bring something with him.

It’s a decent plan.

It gets derailed before it can even get off the ground by three drunk, entitled young bucks in suits who decide to piss their frustration with the government literally onto the Parliament buildings.

So Friday begins a few hours after Thursday ends. I’m dragged out of bed at three in the morning with an apologetic call from Corinne Smith, my former partner at RCMP HQ—and our hockey team’s goalie, when we actually get a chance to play. The Ottawa police made the decision to hand the suspects over to us, and she’s giving me the heads up. One of the guys under arrest is too stupid to shut up about how much he hates Gavin, and it starts to sound like he’s threatening the prime minister.

That jams up my plans to accompany the prime minister’s convoy today, so on my way in to question the drunken idiots, I wake some people up.

“What’s up?” Hugh answers the phone with gruff sleep dripping off his greeting. I shouldn’t be thinking about how good his voice sounds or how much I’d like to have woken him up by rolling over instead of hitting the call button.

I fill him in. “I need you to shift over to the PM’s detail this morning.”

“On it.”

I hesitate. So much I want to say, but it’s easier to keep it professional in moments like this. “Thanks.”

There’s a beat on his end, too. “Yeah, of course. Later.”

At the RCMP headquarters, I head to the interview rooms and talk to Corinne first. She apologizes for the early morning wake-up, but I agree with her that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

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