Page 30 of Redstone
“Absolutely.” The pause from his husband made Garrett sigh. “Jonah, I will swear on whatever you want me to swear on that I’ll be back by the time Cody gets in. I wouldn’t do that to himorto you; you’re going to need help wrangling all of the kids.” Cody, Ten, Darrell, and Grennson were all arriving at Miles Caractacus’ floating family dwelling today, a brief visit before they headed back to Olympus and the beginning of their second year at the Academy. “Provided you don’t make me late,” he added when Jonah seemed to have no inclination to roll off him.
“We haven’t spent an afternoon in bed together in way too long,” Jonah said, stretching out against Garrett and rubbing the lengths of their nude bodies together. Garrett turned intothe movement, drawn to his husband’s warm skin like light to a black hole. “Can’t blame me for wanting to prolong it.”
“Mmm, no,” Garrett agreed. And quite the afternoon it had been too; Jonah had been away for the past three weeks, traveling from Drifter ship to Drifter ship like a ghost and negotiating small but useful deals for mutual assistance in the Fringe. Garrett had been stuck in unending debate with the Senate while trying to juggle dozens of other projects and potentials at the same time. One of those potentials, one that could provide invaluable information for other projects, had finally agreed to meet with him face-to-face.
It was quite a coup; Garrett would be the first person in over a decade to speak with Berengaria Alexander in person. Needless to say, he and Jonah both been busy, so when the opportunity to fall into bed and forget everything else for a while had come up, neither man had resisted.
Two spectacular orgasms later and Garrett was feeling rather successfully relaxed. And when Jonah curled his long fingers around Garrett’s waist again, sliding his hands up his back until they got a good grip on his shoulders, Garrett gave in. He let his head fall back against the mattress and wrapped his legs around Jonah’s waist, hitching him closer to where Garrett wanted him, where he’d already been once.
“I’ve got to leave in half an hour,” he whispered in Jonah’s ear, loving the way he could still make his husband’s breath shudder in his chest. “So, you’ll have to be fast andfocused.”
“I don’t know about fast,” Jonah said with a faint groan as he found the spot andpushed, and oh, fuck, Garrett hadn’t had Jonah twice in quick succession like this in way too long. He loved the ache of his body opening for Jonah, the intense pulse of pleasure it sent quivering through his core and out his limbs. He wanted to prolong it, preserve it; moments like this were so rare now, times when Garrett could exist solely in Jonah’sarms, with no distractions, nothing pending, nothing pressing. He almost missed that indolent period of his life when the only thing on his mind was the next party, the next casual fuck.
There was nothing casual about Jonah, though. He demanded Garrett’s attention, taking the concept of focus to another level as he moved with precision, so good at pushing Garrett’s buttons at this point that even though he’d come twice already, Garrett’s body responded with rapidity.
Jonah’s eyes were open, fixed on Garrett’s face, watching every expression that crossed it and adjusting accordingly. He fucked him slow but deep, pressing in hard each time, and Garrett tensed and tightened every muscle in response, his hands slowly turning into claws that clutched Jonah closer with every thrust.
“That’s it, darlin’,” Jonah murmured. “That’s it, give it to me. You’re so ready to come again, aren’t you? You’ve been dyin’ for it, all these weeks.”
“Shut up,” Garrett choked out. “Shut up, you’re cheating.”
“You saidfast—” His hips screwed in hard again, hard and so slow, but it wasn’t about Jonah’s speed, it was about Garrett’s reaction, and that was very quickly spiraling out of control. “And I just wanna give you what you want.”
Garrett had just the right pithy response on the tip of his tongue, but it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t going to be able to say it. He lost the ability to do anything but let Jonah in, take what he gave and wrap himself tighter and tighter with every second until finally, in what felt like far too little time for his sated body, the coil of tension inside of him broke open.
Unlike the last two times, which had been more explosive, blinding and ecstatic, this orgasm spooled across his body like a solar prominence, slow and expansive and pinging across every nerve in his body. He felt Jonah tense against him, slow down even further, and press in so hard it felt like their bodies might finally merge. His exhale gusted against Garrett’s ear, echoingwith the sound of Garrett’s name, and when Jonah finally slumped, Garrett was there to catch him.
A few minutes later, Jonah rolled away with a grin. “Ten minutes left,” he said smugly. “You’d better hurry, darlin’.”
“Oh sure, flaunt your ability to have a nap right in front of me,” Garrett snapped as he forced himself to get out of bed and head for the sonic shower. “Being a smug bastard isn’t sexy.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jonah said as he tucked his hands behind his head. Sprawled out on their bed, naked and sweaty and striped with red lines from where Garrett had dug his fingers in hard, he was almost irresistible. “It always looks good on you.”
Garrett shook his head. “You’re not making it any easier to leave right now.”
“You’d betterfocus,then, darlin’.”
“Smug. Bastard.”
He did make his shuttle in time if only barely. The window for his audience was a brief one, and Garrett pulled his mind away from a warm room and warmer husband and refocused on the task in front of him.
Berengaria Alexander. She’d lived in a secure space dwelling, orbiting Liberty, for fourteen years now. Her home was more of a self-sustaining fortress than a simple home, with carefully managed gardens, solar power for everything as well as nuclear-backup systems, and a privacy shield that could fry the control systems of ships as much as ten times as big as her entire micro-colony. She lived in the company of bots only and never did public appearances. She occasionally gave interviews but only via holo. She was independently wealthy, decisively isolated, and by and large seemed content to be forgotten. Garrett was still somewhat surprised that he’d managed to land a face-to-face meeting with her.
Then again, if the woman had any soft spot, it was her brother Kyle. She hadn’t been his guardian for long, but her feud withPresident Alexander over Kyle’s custody was legendary among the upper classes, as was her defeat. She hadn’t stopped pushing until the president sent Kyle off to boarding school, and then only because her health had taken an unexpected and suspicious turn for the worse.
She knew something that would help them, Garrett was sure of it. It didn’t make sense for Raymond Alexander to stuff his brother away and delay the trial again and again. His poll numbers were down, and petitions among every special-interest group from students to military officers to family advocates were multiplying by the day, insisting on “Justice For Kyle!”
After all, why delay, when it should be a simple thing for him to discredit his brother in court? Kyle had already confessed to killing his classmate. With the help of an empath and a few genetic tests, the president would be able to frame Kyle as delusional and have him locked away, without the interest he was generating right now. And if he were hoping for Kyle to quietly die and diminish the controversy that way, well, that wasn’t going to happen. Not while Garrett was on guard.
There was another reason for the president’s machinations, and Garrett was going to find out what that reason was.
The shuttle pulled up to the glittering privacy shield outside of Berengaria’s home. “Voice verification, please,” a smooth-toned voice said over the comm.
“Garrett Helms.”
“Stand by for scan.”
Ah yes, the infamous ship scan. The technology was so invasive that most planetary governments refused to use it, citing health concerns. Submitting to it was a condition of Garrett’s visit, though, and he sat still as the specially calibrated radioactive rays suffused the ship, getting a three-dimensional picture of everything living or inert inside of the hull. The AI classified everything it found, comparing it to the original specsfor the shuttle, analyzing life signs and any hint of weaponry, including chemical and organic.
