OLIVER was shocked by how nervous he felt standing at Collin’s door. His belly was all aflutter as if he had a schoolboy crush. Weird. After all, he was no amateur when it came to hookups. He’d made them his stock-in-trade for most of his postpubescent life. But for some reason, this man was different. And not just because of the fuck-me-now British accent and those piercing gray eyes of his.
Collin opened the door and smiled. Really smiled. With his eyes, his face, his whole demeanor. Oliver’s knees felt a little weak all of a sudden.
“You’re late.”
Oliver pulled out his cell phone and glanced at it. “By one minute!”
The corner of Collin’s mouth quirked up. “I don’t like to be kept waiting. I worry.”
“About me? Hey, no worries. I’m good, man.”
Collin hustled him inside the room and closed the door behind him. “They saw you out on that beach. You have to be careful. Lie low and don’t attract attention to yourself.”
“Kinda hard to do after I cracked the top ten on the player board.”
Collin winced as if unhappy that Oliver had just put himself in the crosshairs of whoever could be knocking off the top players.
“What’s the plan now?” Oliver asked.
“I’ll answer that only if you promise not to go running around conducting an amateur investigation of your own.”
He frowned. “I was only trying to help.”
“I appreciate it. But I’m a trained professional. Let me do the sneaky stuff.”
“Hah! So you admit you’re James Bond!”
“You never let up, do you?”
“Nope. I’m relentless.” Their stares met, and Oliver took the step forward that Collin was obviously hoping he would take. For whatever reason, Collin seemed unwilling to take the sexual initiative, but that was okay. Oliver had initiative enough for both of them. He reached up, speared his fingers into Collin’s short, silky hair and pulled his head forward for the kiss they both wanted so bad.
Collin resisted, his gray eyes turbulent. “We shouldn’t.”
“You’re right. And yet….” He leaned in a little closer.
“I can list a dozen reasons why this is a dreadful idea,” Collin blurted.
“I can list two dozen.” Oliver leaned in close enough that their breaths mingled.
“I… just… can’t….”
“Ah, there’s my repressed Englishman. Dude, you gotta learn to live a little. Loosen up.”
“And you think you’re the one to show me how?”
Oliver smiled wickedly. “I know I am.”
Collin inhaled sharply, holding out for one last moment. And then he all but inhaled Oliver.
Once unchained from its uptight British leash, Collin’s urgent desire was at least as intense as Oliver’s, if not more so. He slid strong fingers around the back of Oliver’s head, grabbed his longish hair, and pulled him in even deeper to the kiss. Their tongues clashed and teeth clicked, and there was nothing restrained or elegant about it. They were both voracious and held nothing back.
Oliver grabbed Collin’s shirt at the waist and tugged it free of his pants. Oliver wanted skin and shoved his hands under the fine cotton in a frenetic search for it. Ahh, better. Collin’s smooth flesh, hard muscle slabbed over ribs, all of it laced with pounding blood, slid under Oliver’s palms.
He hooked his fingertips into the muscular indentation of Collin’s spine and pulled Collin’s hips tight against his. The mutual bulges in their pants rubbed provocatively, and he groaned into Collin’s mouth. A driving need to take him hard and deep spiked into Oliver. His gut tightened in anticipation—
A cell phone rang.
“Ignore it,” Oliver muttered against Collin’s mouth.
“Can’t. Work.”
Oliver actually ground his teeth in frustration as Collin stepped away, clothes askew, and fished out his phone. Oliver was too fucking horny to be amused that the ringtone was “God Save the Queen.”
Collin listened to whatever was being said on the other end of the line in complete silence for a good thirty seconds. His expression passed through shocked to alarmed and then to grim as hell. “Understood. Will do.”
Crap. That was a work voice. His temporary spell over Collin was broken. The Brit was back to being his usual repressed, no-nonsense self.
“Well?” Oliver asked in resignation. “What’s the big news that made you look like you’ve been sucking lemons?”
“Do you know Leon Tran?” Collin asked tersely.
“Yeah, sure. Everyone does. He’s one of the leading money earners of all time on the professional poker circuit. He’s in second or third place here right now.”
“He fell out of a cable car en route to the top of the Rock of Gibraltar today. Broke his neck. He’s dead.”
A bucket of ice water in his face couldn’t have stunned him any worse. Oliver stared at Collin in disbelief. “Someone is trying to knock off the top players to make way for themselves!”
“My boss thinks so, and I have to agree. Frankly, in light of this death, I have to wonder if the Jet Ski that nearly killed you was not an accident either. You, too, are renowned as one of the top poker players on earth, as it turns out.”
“I was at one time. But it’s been years since I played.”
“And yet, the day you got here, someone nearly ran you over.”
“The Jet Ski was an accident.” But Oliver even sounded halfhearted to himself in his denial.
Collin said soberly, “Are you sure about that?”
A cold pit formed in Oliver’s stomach. Him? Target of an assassination attempt? He was a surf bum who hadn’t played poker in years. Any threat he might have once posed should have been long gone. But apparently, enough of his reputation lingered to provoke an attack on him. “How did your boss find out about Leon?”
“Leon Tran splatted in the middle of a busy street. Local news got ahold of it.”
“Maybe it was an accident,” Oliver offered. “Or even a suicide.”
“Would you kill yourself when you’re one of the chip leaders in possibly the richest poker tournament of your life?”
Oliver shrugged. “No. But maybe he was depressed.”
“A witness apparently told a reporter it looked like he was pushed.”
“That’s easy enough to determine. But we’d need to get over to where he died and take a few measurements.”
Collin frowned. “Why?”
“Simple trajectory motion problem. We can measure the distance from the point of impact to the cable car line and calculate whether he would have been able to jump hard enough to land that far away or not. I’ll bet you a hundred bucks he was pushed.”
“That’s not a bet I would take,” Collin responded.
“Good call. It’s a sucker bet.”
Collin grabbed a brochure off the nightstand and shoved it into Oliver’s hand.
“What’s this?” Oliver asked.
“Map. We need a cover. We’re going out sightseeing.”
Oliver snorted. “And we’re obviously not taking the cable car.”
Collin grinned back. “News coverage says it’ll be shut down until a thorough investigation is performed on how the door opened in midair.”
Oliver was disoriented as they stepped out into a dark night. Right. While they played poker, the rest of the world slept. “When did this ‘accident’ of Leon’s happen?”
“Within the past hour or two, apparently.”
“This cable car thing is a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation?” Oliver asked skeptically.
Collin knocked on the window of a white minivan parked at the taxi stand, and a sleepy driver pushed the cap off his face. “We need to go to Gardner’s Lane. Near where the cable car crosses it. By the way, are the cable cars running now?”
“No run at night,” the driver replied in a heavy Spanish accent.
Oliver and Collin exchanged wordless glances as they slid into the back seat. Tran’s death had been no accident, then. Suicide or murder. But which?
It took about fifteen minutes to wind around the north end of the rock, parallel the airport, and then head south along the west side of the rock to where Leon had died. The narrow, winding streets were deserted, but when they approached the scene of the death, a mob of police cars lit the cobblestone street like a festive party. Collin slipped the driver a twenty-pound note to wait while they checked out the spot where Leon had died.
The police had outlined the spot on the pavement where Leon hit with white chalk like some old-time police drama. Oliver muttered, “I’m gonna pace off the distance to the cable line.”
While Collin quizzed someone about what had happened as officiously as he could, Oliver counted off the paces until he stood directly under the steel cables snaking up into the darkness. He rejoined Collin, who was chatting up a fireman.
At a lull in the conversation, Oliver injected, “How high is the cable over the ground here?”
The local fireman looked up. “I’d guess it’s about fifty feet at this spot. Most of the time, the car is closer to the slope of the rock, but there’s that cliff over there, and the ground falls away from the cable a bit extra right here.”
Funny, that. As if someone knew exactly where to push Leon out to ensure he would hit the ground with sufficient force to die. Oliver made a sympathetic sound, already running the simple projectile motion calculation in his head. Collin must have done the same, for in a moment, his brows slammed together, and he threw Oliver a worried look.
Collin murmured to the fireman, “We’ll let you get back to your work, then.”
Oliver piled into the cab beside Collin. They rode in silence back to the hotel as pink and peach tinted the sky in the east beyond the still Mediterranean Sea.
When they got to Collin’s room, he insisted on running his little black device over the walls and furnishings again before speaking. As he stowed the gadget, he murmured, “So. He was pushed.”
“More like thrown to have traveled so far from the cable car.”
“Two killers, then?”
“That would be my guess,” Oliver answered.
Collin sat down at his laptop and pulled up the poker tournament’s website, specifically the leaderboard. “With Tran out of the way, one of the Albanians moves into the top ten.”
“The tournament director is splitting up the top players so each of us sits at a different table. We don’t have to face each other yet and potentially weaken or eliminate one another,” Oliver commented. “So now the Albanian guy is protected from having to play another top-ten guy.”
“You think the Albanians are knocking out the competition?” Collin asked.
“It’s as good a guess as any. They have a reputation for violence. Although any of the remaining players could be the killer.” He shrugged, then added, “Will the directors cancel the tournament?”
Collin answered grimly, “My boss thinks the director will have no problem with players eliminating each other as long as they keep the shenanigans off-site.”
Oliver stared. “So this is what? Combat poker?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s sick.”
Collin shrugged. “It would explain the inclusion of known criminals and players of questionable moral fiber. No offense intended.”
“None taken.”
Collin remarked, “I’ll bet some thug is getting his ass chewed as we speak for not being more subtle and for not hiding the body.”
“No kidding. What do we do now?”
“If I were sitting back in England watching this from afar, I’d tell myself to watch my back. And for God’s sake, to stay out of the top ten.”
Oliver stared in chagrin.
Collin’s eyes popped open in surprise. “Hey, man, I’m sorry—”
“No need to apologize for telling the truth. And besides, if you’re right about the Jet Ski incident, I’m already targeted for elimination.”
Collin moved quickly to stand in front of Oliver. “I’ll do everything in my power to keep you safe.”
“You can’t watch me day and night.”
“Why not? There’s no rule against players spending time together.”
“Yeah, but you could get hurt if you’re too close to me the next time Jet Ski guy tries to kill me.”
Collin answered quietly. “I’ll take my chances.”
Gratitude flowed through Oliver, but he had no words to express it. Instead, he stepped forward and wrapped Collin in a bone-crushing hug that said everything he could not.
Somehow, Collin’s head got turned toward him, and his got turned too, and their mouths brushed across one another. And then they latched on to each other desperately, kissing as if this were the last time they would ever see each other.
It was probably a terrible idea to fall into the sack because they were scared and looking for comfort. But damned if Oliver didn’t want to. He had been quite the slut over the years, willing to sleep with anyone, anytime. After all, it was just sex. And if it felt good, why not do it if the other guy was willing?
But Collin wasn’t his usual easy pickup. He was tense as hell about sex, practically closeted. Not to mention that whole honor and integrity thing Collin seemed stuck on. Not the kind of dude to crank the wank and walk away without looking back. Like I would. Hell, like he had a hundred times.
Oliver took a shaky step back. “Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to derail the conversation about what we’re going to do next.”
Collin’s gaze was clouded. Confused. Like the emotional whiplash of making out and then going back to talking shop was too much to process.
Oliver knew the damned feeling. Staring at the back of Collin’s neck as he turned away to gaze out the window, Oliver couldn’t help but notice the strong lines of tendon and corded muscle in his neck. God, he’d give anything to see those straining in the throes of pleasure. But instead they were tensed, obviously, against his abrupt rejection.
He raised his hands. Started to take a step forward. Opened his mouth on an apology.
But before he could do any of that, Collin announced briskly, “You’re right. We need to focus on work. And right now, we need to figure out who’s running this tournament and why.”
Oliver’s hands fell to his sides.
Collin sat down at the laptop and started typing rapidly. “Let’s see how good El Rocca’s security system really is.”
Oliver blinked, startled. “Be careful. If they’ve got countermeasures in place, you could lead them right to us.”
Collin looked up from his screen at that. “Do you trust me?”
With his life? “I guess so.” Even to his own ears, Oliver sounded doubtful. “Give me your key card. I’m going to run down to my room. I’ll be back in a minute.” He slipped out and headed down the hall.
Oliver grabbed a change of clothes, basic toiletries, and his own laptop computer, threw them in a backpack, and headed back upstairs. He paused in front of Collin’s door. If he walked away right now, kept his head down, and made sure to stay just out of the top ten players going forward, he should be able to hang around until the end of the tournament and then take his shot at winning.
But if he stepped through that doorway, he would be going all-in with Collin. He would be committing himself to helping Collin’s investigation, with the intent to rip this tournament open and expose its secrets to whomever Collin worked for.
What if his father was somehow mixed up in this mess? Did he dare tangle with his old man? He knew better than most just how formidable a foe George Elliot could be. Two men were already dead, and Oliver had possibly been targeted for elimination as well. Did he dare expose himself to even more danger?
Did he dare try to survive in this jungle on his own?
He ought to go it alone, if for no other reason than to protect Collin from danger.
But Collin was so damned noble.
And so damned sexy.
But so damned naive.
And clearly out of his depth in a violent situation.
But he wanted Collin.
And shouldn’t have him.
Fuck.