Page 163 of Fight or Flight
Silently,I push Shane’s office door open and slip inside.
He’s bent over his desk, a pair of wireless headphones over his ears and his attention focused on the laptop in front of him as his fingers fly over his keyboard.
Using my foot, I close the door behind me and lean against it as I drink him in.
He’s still wearing his work clothes, but he’s taken off his jacket and pulled his tie so it’s loose as it hangs around his neck. He’s also rolled up his shirtsleeves, giving me a view of his strong arms and corded muscles, and his usually neat hair is mussed, like he’s been running his hand through it.
Shane looks good no matter what he’s wearing, or not wearing, but there’s something extra hot about his disheveled office worker look, and my body tightens with the familiar need that’s still just as strong now as it was three years ago.
A lot has changed since we officially got together, and while things haven’t been easy, they all worked out in the end.
After we discovered Dan’s part in the blackmail scheme and how he tried to pit us against each other, we came up with our own plan of revenge before turning him in.
Because Dan was about as smart as the average brother in the Rebels, it was laughably easy to break into his room and find the stockpile of blackmail files he’d collected over the years, and with it I also found the names of all of his contacts in the Kings and the students he paid off to either set up other members or record them without their knowledge.
Once we had the full picture of what was going on, we handed all of our evidence over to our fathers and the house leadership so they could deal with him. But before we did that, Shane and I paid Dan a visit where we learned the truth about what happened with KJ, and I got to show Shane some of my knife skills and my more controversial methods for getting confessions out of people. That was how we learned about how Dan’s brother started the scheme, and that KJ was one of the first people he tried to blackmail after catching him and Cooper together.
Dan and his entire family learned the hard way what happens when you betray some of the most influential and powerful people on the planet, and within a year, the family empire was in shambles, and they were left destitute and isolated from the world they thought they’d always be part of.
The last I heard, Dan was peddling finance advice to people on the internet for cash, and his brother was serving a ten-year sentence for fraud and extortion.
Once Dan was dealt with, we had to tackle the issue of us being together while also sharing the house leadership. Since there was nothing in the rules forbidding it, the alumni couldn’t really say much about it, and most of the guys in the house didn’thave a problem with it either. They were shocked when Shane came out, especially when he told them that I was the guy he was dating, but that died out by the end of spring break, and by the time we came back to school for our final year, everyone had already accepted it, so no one really cared.
Things went surprisingly well with our families too. My family already knew I hooked up with guys, so Shane’s gender wasn’t a surprise. They were just shocked that I was with someone at all, but happily welcomed Shane into the family the same way they did with Jax’s and my cousin’s partners.
Shane’s family, especially his dad, were surprised when he told them we were together, but not for the reasons one might think. After years of him having zero interest in relationships and being very vocal to them about our rivalry, it was the fact that he was datingmethat surprised them. Once the initial shock wore off, his family, especially his parents, welcomed me into the mix as easily as Shane was accepted into mine.
Once we graduated from Silvercrest, we moved into our penthouse together and started our jobs at our respective family businesses, with me working in IT and Shane in the finance department, and that’s been our life for the past two years.
Our schedules don’t always match up, and Shane spends a lot of time traveling with his dad while he learns the ropes of the company he’ll be inheriting, but living together is as easy as breathing, and it doesn’t matter if he’s been gone an hour, a day, or a month, I still get that same sensation ofmineevery time I see him.
“Are you here for a reason? Or are you going to keep staring at me while I try to get this done?” he asks, not looking up from his laptop.
“I have a reason,” I tell him. “But I’m enjoying the view, so I’m good with staring at you while you try to finish up.”
He stops typing and looks up at me, a smile tilting his lips as he pulls off his headphones. “You expect me to be able to finish this report while you’re standing there and looking likethat?”
“Like what?” I ask innocently.
He shoots me a flat look and taps a few keys on his keyboard. “Like you don’t know how good you look in a tuxedo.”
I huff out a laugh. “And how good do I look in a tuxedo?”
He closes his laptop and stands. “Criminally gorgeous.”
“Criminally gorgeous?” I ask with a grin as he finishes closing down his desk and slips his laptop into one of the drawers.
“How much time do we have until we have to leave to meet up with Jax and Myles?” he asks as he comes around his desk. “And more importantly, is your other tux clean?”
“About an hour, and yes, my other tux is clean,” I tell him with a smirk as he stalks toward me.
His grin is dark and a bit feral as he closes in on me, and I stand passively as he corners me against the wall and gives me a deep, drugging kiss.
“I want to tear this tux off you and bend you over my desk,” he says in a low voice, his lips brushing mine with every word. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“Nope, especially since I already texted my brother, and Killer and Felix to tell them we’ll probably be late.”
He grins and gives me a little shove against the wall. “Good call.”
