Snowed In:

Hunt&Cam4Ever #4

written by

Adira August

This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, places,

products, locations and incidents

are wholly sprung from the author’s

imagination or are used fictitiously.

Author’s Note:

I believe all my titles can be read stand-alone. Except for this one. If you like BDSM sex and that’s all you're looking for, this book will be okay, I suppose.

But if you are looking for character and relationship and arc, you’ll want to read the first three Hunt and Cam books, starting with On His Knees.

AND: What would I do without Tanja Ongkiehong? The so-smart, hardest-working proofreader/editor around? I’ll tell you what: keep giving my readers typo-laden titles. God bless her, so seriously.

And you, too.

addi-

OTHER BOOKS IN THE Hunt&Cam4Ever SERIES

ON AMAZON

Wednesday Nov 30th

4:28am

“Why don’t you get started, I have to hit the head. Which is …?” Cam had already disappeared into one of the offices along the darkened hallway.

Dragging the heavy briefcase with the evidence along, he found the door.

He cupped his hands under the cold water. The scent of dark roast … Cam had made coffee … the ding of the elevator accompanied the blaring music …

I picture you with matchstick men … the Colt was in his hands … I look for you, I see you when … he pivoted into the hall … You rush to lie in bed with him… a revolver held out pivoted toward Cam frozen in the hallway with a mug in his hand. Steam rising into the air …

“Runnn!” he screamed. Cam couldn’t hear him over the music.

And with him you’re the matchstick men … his first round hit between the shoulder blades …. the revolver spun away on its cylinder to stop amongst white shards of a broken ceramic mug…

Cam writhed in agony; arterial spray arced from wall to ceiling to wall. Two minutes. He has less than two minutes. He leapt on Cam … both hands pressed down to stop the blood. Cam screamed.

“You’re supposed to save me,” Cam wept … blood gushed … “Please, Hunter, please!”

His hands slipped off in the blood. Desperately he pressed again. Cam looked behind him, eyes huge with terror.

The killer was kneeling behind and to his left … stringy hair like flailing tentacles, the gun pointed at Cam’s head … he couldn’t let go of Cam’s leg … click of cylinder turning …

“Hunter! Hunter, please!” Cam was too far away to grab - screaming - writhing - arterial spray spattered and pooled across the floor - Hunter scrambled for Cam and sank into the blood, he couldn’t catch the edge of the floor to stop himself BANG!BANG!BANG! Cam was dead Cam was dead Cam was dead ...

4:34am

Hunter Dane came awake suddenly in pitch darkness … something … a dream … gone.

Slowly he became aware he was curled on his side with his butt snugged up against Cam’s hip. For a few moments, all he knew was a feeling of safety and completion. The feelings surprised Hunt, who had never slept with anyone, until Camden Snow.

He smiled to himself, a thirty-five year old domestic virgin.

Until a few weeks ago, he’d been another kind of virgin. Cam had also ended that. The memory prodded his half-staff almost morning wood into a lodgepole pine. It was nice, being full and hard and half-asleep next to his lover. He smiled with his eyes closed.

There was no point in opening them. Cam’s bedroom loft was pitch back at night, far removed from city lights. Unless there was a moon. There were no curtains over the floor-to-ceiling window walls of the huge A-frame in the Colorado foothills. Moonlight through the thin air at altitude lit up the interior in grayscale, as it journeyed across the sky.

But not tonight. Not with the sky and landscape blotted out by the blizzard, while they slept in the quiet darkness.

Quiet.

Had the blizzard ended? When he’d gone to bed the wind was roaring through the trees, shrieking in the eves. Hunt had wondered how he’d fall asleep with the volume of the storm.

He listened carefully. No, there it was—a tsunami of wind and snow ten feet over his head, muffled into a rush and moan by what must be a deep blanket of snow on the roof.

Hunter reached for his cell on the nightstand to get the time. Not there. Right. He brought his arm back under the comforter. His phone was locked in his Bronco for the duration of his days off. And his Bronco was surely buried under a drift in Cam’s driveway.

No chance dispatch could reach him. No bodies, no crime scenes, no politics. No one shooting at him.

No one he had to shoot.

Hunt rolled onto his back and sent a prayer of thanks for the storm to whatever gods might be listening. It was the storm that allowed him respite: feet on feet of snow blanketing the foothills, rendering the roads impassable. A speck in a snowbound wilderness, Hunter was at peace. At least for a few days.

Beside him, Cam shifted. Hunter knew he didn’t sleep well on his back. He had no choice because of the hip-to-ankle cast on his left leg acquired after a bullet shattered his femur.

The bullet Hunter hadn’t been able to stop.

He resisted the urge to roll over and throw an arm over Cam’s strong, solid body, tuck his fingers in under Cam’s waist and snug his now half-mast cock into the valley where Cam’s thigh met the mattress. It would wake him, and he needed to sleep.

Coming in late from working in his studio, Cam had brought the scent of snow and cold and the solvent he used to clean his brushes. Hunter’d been half-awake when Cam slid into bed later, warm with new scents from his shower. He wriggled around under the comforter until his hip touched Hunt, placed a wide, warm hand over Hunter’s drowsy cock, and drifted off.

Hunt wondered at the concatenation of events that brought him to the bed of a 24-year-old Olympic Alpine ski champion. Detective Lieutenant Hunter Dane was dark and damaged and no one of note, except perhaps to a few he’d served well. Camden Snow was a 7-medal national treasure—handsome, winsome, charming, shy.

The pairing was inexplicable. Ludicrous.

But Cam was the only man Hunt had ever wanted, a relentlessly demanding Dom who’d stripped him of every defense. Who cared for him and brooked no bullshit from him. A sweet kid, a fearless competitor. A talented artist. A notorious BDSM Alpha male.

Camden Snow could have anyone. At the club, he had only to nod in the direction of a sub and that man would fall to his knees—if he didn’t flee. Full Metal Dom, they’d dubbed Cam.

But from the moment they’d laid eyes on each other over two years before, both men knew someday Hunt would kneel for Cam.

As he relaxed back into sleep, the memories washed over Hunter: the worst case of his career, finding Cam at the club, dropping to his knees just inside the entranceway.

Cam with both hands inside Hunter’s cargoes, working him in front of the onlookers.

Hunter buffeted by humiliation and unbearable arousal …

Holding him, stroking him, Cam touched his lips to Hunter’s ear. He spoke without force. “There are no limits. You have no safeword. You do nothing I do not order. I don’t stop until I’m done.”

Hunt’s right hand inside his pajama pants tightened on his cock. Precum slid over his fingers.

“You have one chance to walk away. Once I restrain you, nothing and no one can or will rescue you. I am all there is.”

He moved down, cupping his balls with his fingers, thumb stroking his taut shaft.

Cam thumbed his slit, circled the rim. Hunter couldn’t repress the moan. He felt Cam’s lips at his ear again. His warm breath scattered Hunt’s thoughts.

“Open your -”

A strong hand clamped down on Hunt’s.

“Need something, Hunter?”

Cam had a vise grip on him; he couldn’t move. “Sorry I woke you.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Cam rolled up onto his elbow. “You’re in my way.” He loosened just long enough for Hunt to pull his hand away. Cam tightened down, feeling the pulse in Hunter’s substantial thickness. He didn’t need to see Hunter’s face to know his harsh breaths came from parted lips.

“I’m not going to ask you again, Hunter.”

He didn’t shout or snarl or harden his voice. Camden Snow didn’t have to. He just … informed.

Hunter knew there was only Cam’s way, or Cam’s way. There were no highways to take. He would comply, or Cam would act.

Both options made his stomach hollow and the itching heat behind his sac deepen. His cock would have jumped if Cam’s hand allowed any movement. The hand left him to toss the comforter off the bed. Pull the pillow out from under Hunter’s head.

Taking hold of Hunter again, Cam skated a thumb around his ridge, spreading the precum Hunt always poured when Cam touched him. Camden Snow’s interest at this point was not sexual. Hunter needed something from him. Cam would know what that was.

Hunt uttered a low mewling sound. But did not answer Cam’s question.

The fist in his hair bent Hunter’s head back into the mattress. Cam’s other hand slid down over Hunter’s balls. Thumb pressed in front, fingertips nestled underneath, Cam twisted.

“Ah! God!” Hunter shouted, his hips jerked, to rise, shift, escape - but Cam held him fast. Hunter’s hands flew to his crotch.

“Hands on the mattress,” Cam told him.

Shit! Hunter froze. “Cam!”

“Now.”

Cam rotated the pad of his thumb.

With a high whine, Hunter slammed his hands down next to his hips. Cam did not let up.

Hunter lay back, panting, open, completely at the mercy of the sadist who knew none. His way. Or his way.

“Open your legs, Hunter.”

Hunt’s protesting groan made Cam’s dick jump and throb, the head jammed into the elastic waist of the sweat pants he slept in. When Hunter’s knees fell open in submission, Cam almost came. He fought for control; this was not about him.

“You were about to say?” Cam asked.

“I was … thinking … about … the first time … at the club …”

The hot spikes of pain digging into Hunt backed off only slightly. Cam’s hand remained—a cat holding down a mouse, claws sheathed.

“About when I … fuck … knelt … for you. When I knelt for you.”

Cam untwisted, massaging, outlining each sore testicle with his fingers. His sub’s hot shaft pressed the inside of Cam’s wrist. He sought under Hunt’s sac for the fiery roots of his erection, pressed and stroked and was rewarded with a guttural stutter in Hunter’s breath.

Hot wires ran back between Hunt’s legs to his hole, up from his balls into his gut. Something … something tingling at the base of his spine, spreading. But he did not buck or twist or shift away. He accepted whatever Cam chose to give him.

Blindfolded by the night, Hunter’s world was heat and pain and need created by the hand between his legs and the fist in his hair pinning his head back, neck stretched, mouth open, gasping for air.

It was perfect.

Cam fed his sub’s ache and fire while he entertained himself asserting his ownership. Hunter would tell him what he wanted to know. He lifted and rolled Hunter, using his dick and his neck for handholds, bringing him up onto his own body.

It was a signature Cam move, the confident action of a very strong man.

“Which part were you thinking about?” Cam asked, rubbing his bristly cheek against the side of Hunt’s neck and over his ear.

Cam reached for the bedside lamp. A pool of soft light enveloped them. Hunter’s forehead rested on Cam’s chest, his hands on the mattress kept his body angled up. He looked down between their bodies, to his dripping cockhead jammed back against Cam’s fingers.

“In the foyer,” Hunter whispered. “At the beginning.”

Cam lowered Hunt’s zipper … his erection shouldered through the opening … Cam caught him, wrapped his hand, calloused by the torque of a million ski pole grips, around Hunt’s thick, hard cock. Fingers tightened. Not tight enough. More powerful for that. Hunter swallowed a moan.

“Spread,” Cam ordered.

Hunter’s legs opened and slid off Cam’s body to rest on the mattress.

“On me,” Cam told him. Hunter lowered himself as Cam’s free hand glided over his waist, inside his pants, down his abdomen …

“You mean this?”

Cam’s two big hands surrounded him, working him, to make Hunter hot and tight and hard and wired. …

Hunter panted. “Ye- Cam … yeh-”

“Where was your mouth?”

“Mouth on my shoulder.”

Gratefully, he bent his head. Cam’s shoulder. Wide and deep.

Hunter’s head dropped, he panted against Cam’s white T-shirt.

“Open your mouth. Wide. I want to hear you pant.”

Shit.

His mouth opened over the curve of Cam’s shoulder … With every agonizingly delicious slide and squeeze of his hands, Cam’s shoulder became wetter. Hotter. There was no control; Hunt could barely swallow.

“Arms, Hunter.”

His arms hung useless. Cam hadn’t told him to do anything with them.

“That’s right,” Cam said as Hunter went completely limp on top of him. Pushing his sweats down, Cam rubbed Hunt’s rigid cock, sticky-slick with precum, against his own.

“Tell me what comes next, Hunter.”

A long hesitation. Hunter strained against Cam’s erection. “The yoke.”

“Why the yoke?”

“So - so you can flog me.”

Cam stopped moving, holding Hunt still. “Before all that, before you started beating off, what were you thinking?”

“I don’t … please …” He tried to push into Cam’s motionless fist. No good.

“Think, Hunter.”

“I just woke up. I was … was feeling good.”

“Horny?”

“No, like, content. Here with you. Safe inside the storm. Away from … all the crap of the last few weeks.”

There it was. Cam started in on Hunter again and felt his legs stiffen.

“Fuck. I’m going to come.”

“Well, one of us is going to come,” Cam told him. “But it’s not going to be you.”

Hunter groaned and trembled.

“Jesus, you went forged-steel on me.” Cam moved his hands over Hunter’s body: hips and butt, backs and sides of his thighs, calming and gentling. “Be still.” He needed to think.

“Safe inside the storm.”

Not safe from the storm, but safe inside of it. Isolated. Buried. But Hunter wasn’t safe; he’d brought his demons with him.

Cam knew what Hunter apparently did not: that before he woke he was having a terrible nightmare, shouting and twisting. Cam had spoken quietly to him until he’d quieted. And even in the pitch dark, Cam knew when Hunter woke up.

A month ago, on the night Hunter was remembering, Cam had been inside of him, holding him, naked and raw, when the monstrous realities he buried to get to the end of his case clawed their way out in a screaming, roaring, shuddering agony that had nothing whatsoever to do with sex.

That had come a few days later, in this bed. Cam had broken him, then, too. Gently, skillfully, just as relentlessly, Cam brought them both to ecstasy. He was the only man who’d ever owned Hunter Dane.

What Hunt had gone through recently hadn’t been as horrific, but it was here with them. They’d be trapped for days. And with no distractions, his demons would gnaw away at Hunter until his very skin would seem too small.

But Cam had to deal with the man under his hands, in this moment.

“Look at me,” Cam said, making his voice clear and loud.

Hunter raised his head, his eyes dark and unfocused.

With his hands on either side of the face of the man he loved, Cam brushed back his hair and smoothed his dark wings of brows.

“I’m in a lot of pain, Hunter, and I don’t have my meds.” He could see Hunter’s eyes clear, a rush of adrenaline obliterating the effects of endorphins and enkephalins.

Hunt frowned and pushed himself carefully away from Cam, rolling off the bed to standing position. “Don’t move.”

He strode quickly across the room, his stiff member bobbing and weaving like a drunken fighter. He disappeared into the bathroom, an in-home spa bigger than the bedroom it adjoined.

Cam pushed himself up against the headboard, watching for Hunter to come back—the most beautiful man he’d ever seen. Dark and graceful, subtle shadows and streaks of light over long muscles, smoothly sculpted. An uncut cock that was technically a little big, but fit his 6’2” frame perfectly. Hunter Dane’s body was one of Cam’s most cherished gifts.

But he wanted more than Hunter’s body. He wanted the thing Hunt had told him he could never give.

“I can’t be what you want me to be … I don’t crave anyone’s company if they aren’t present. I’m not bothered by longings for the presence of a particular person. I don’t—connect.”

“You’re saying you don’t love,” Cam told him.

“Love is something we do, Cam. Whatever subjective feelings we have about someone that people call love are just that, subjective feelings. … I care for people, in that I do things for their benefit. I just don’t do all the other things. …touch someone just to touch them, when it serves no other purpose…”

But they had connected. Still, Hunter held himself back. He kept the dark places from Cam, the places that spawned his nightmares.

And Cam wouldn’t settle for only part of Hunter Dane.

Hunt appeared with a bottle of water and Cam’s prescription vial, his dick tucked inside his pajama bottoms. He put the items on Cam’s nightstand and retrieved the comforter from the floor. Shaking it out over the bed, he let it settle over Cam.

Cam reached for the water. “Come back to bed. But don’t lie down, sit cross-legged next to me.” He pointed to a wing chair. “Grab the afghan off the chair and wrap up in it.”

Hunter complied. He rarely objected to anything Cam wanted in his own home; Cam had his reasons. And when they were at work, where Cam had gratefully accepted a civilian researcher position while his leg healed, Detective Lieutenant Hunter Dane was in charge. Cam didn’t question Hunt’s orders, either. It worked for them so far.

“So far” being an admittedly few and very chaotic weeks.

Cam waited for Hunt to settle on the bed before twisting the cap from the bottle. “Down this,” he said handing Hunter the cold water.

Hunt lifted an eyebrow but did as he was told.

“Now,” said Cam, putting the empty bottle aside. “You need to go to the club.”

“Why would I go to the club? I just said I was feeling peaceful and safe.”

“But you aren’t,” Cam said. “Not inside. So you started thinking about that night, about me giving you what you needed. Breaking you.”

The wind’s muffled howl became louder and Hunter pulled the afghan tightly around himself .

“There won’t be any flogging tonight,” Cam told him. “But since we’re both awake …” Cam held him with a searing look and pulled his shirt off.

Hunter felt the familiar tightening in his gut at the sight of Cam’s bare torso in the lamplight. Hunt’s own Nordic sex god, upper body wide and solid, his chest deep. A line of light highlighted the slope from shoulder to neck, casting a deep shadow in the hollow of Cam’s clavicle that Hunter longed to have his tongue in.

“Strip,” Cam told him.

Hunter went full wood instantly at the order, at the set of Cam’s mouth and the ripples along his arms as he divested the bed of the comforter, once again. Hunter quickly obeyed.

“Come around to my side.”

Moments later, he was next to Cam, his shaft bobbing out over the mattress.

“You always think too much,” Cam told him, idly fingering his foreskin. “It’s time for a lesson in obedience.”

Hunter’s throat tightened in fear and anticipation.

Cam reached into the bedside table drawer and placed some small tubes of lubricant on top. He moved over so his good right leg would be next to Hunt.

Motioning Hunt to lie next to him on his side, Cam pulled Hunt’s leg over his own, and positioned him lying half on himself. “Move up.”

Hunt scooted up until he felt Cam’s hand between his upper thighs, fingers sliding back to the cleft of his buttocks.

“Lube,” Cam said, holding his other hand out, palm up.

It was awkward, but Hunt unscrewed the tube and squeezed some onto Cam’s fingers.

“Put it down and look at me,” Cam told him. He paused until Hunter was looking into Cam’s eyes as ordered. Cam spread Hunt’s cheeks apart with the fingers of one hand and slathered lube over his hole with the other.

“Tonight you’ll obey me perfectly.”

“Yes, Cam.” Hunter held himself very still, hyperaware of the fingers holding him open, the lube warming, his shaft throbbing with Cam’s words.

“Without question or hesitation.”

“Cam,” Hunter whispered, needing.

“What will you do for me, Hunter?”

“Anything,” he said, stumbling over the end of the word.

“You’ll be a good boy for me?”

Sonofabitch! Hunter’s erection jerked. “Cam-”

“Answer me, sub.” The silky tone carried the threat.

“I’ll be … I’ll be a good boy”—he strangled on his humiliation, heat rushing up his chest and neck to his face, pouring precum like water from an overturned glass—“for you. Obey you. No question. No hesitation.”

“Or?”

Hunt’s cock jerked hard. “You’ll punish me.” A hoarse whisper.

“You think you’ll like it. Not this time. Remember the strap?”

The cuff chain in his fist, Cam dragged Hunt’s manacled hands toward his ass, bowing his back.

WHAP-WHAP!

Once on each side, so fast they felt simultaneous. The pain exploded across Hunt’s cheeks. He cried out as the strap found his ass again.

WHAP-WHAP!

“Ah, God, shit!” The exact same spots. Cam was nothing if not a perfectionist in total control of his instruments. Hunt tried to move away, but the iron rod of Cam’s left forearm pressed.

WHAP-WHAP!

Hunter screamed. The pain unfettered, explosive. His orgasm had exhausted his resources. Endorphins receding. No defenses.

WHAP-WHAP!

He yowled, head back, tendons stretched in agony, now.

WHAP-WHAP!

“Red!” Hunt screamed.

Hunter Dane had never safeworded before. The fear he felt now had no tinge of lust. The pressure in his groin subsided.

“I remember, Cam.”

“You understand?”

“It’s not a scene,” Hunt said.

“Oh, Hunter Dane,” Cam said softly. “It’s never a scene. Not between us. It never was. Never will be.”

Cam’s finger circled, teasing the tight ring guarding Hunt’s entrance. “Do this,” he said, pressing a little harder so Hunter would not mistake his meaning. “Do it to me.”

To Cam? No question. No hesitation.

Hunt wrapped an arm around Cam’s waist and slid him down. Cam’s fingers left a trail of lube over Hunt’s sac and not-so-stiff cock.

Hunter Dane was a bisexual switch, a sub to men, Dominant with women. As a Dom, he’d had his dick in every orifice, as confidently controlling as Cam was with him. But only with women. If Cam expected him to switch now, Hunter would fail him.

Sitting up, he took his time working Cam’s sweats over his hips, rocking him back and forth, not asking him to lift himself. Cam still wasn’t allowed to put weight on his shattered femur.

“Are you stalling, sub?”

Hunter slipped the sweats off over Cam’s feet. “Yes, Cam.”

Bending from the waist, Cam reached for Hunter, grabbed him by the back of the neck and dragged him up and into a bruising kiss. Cam forced him open, invading his mouth. His other hand closed around Hunter’s throat, collaring him.

Hunter whimpered, chest to chest, submitting to whatever angle pleased his Dom, waiting for Cam to cut off his air.

Finally ripping Hunter’s mouth away from his own, Cam held him up over himself by the throat. He tightened his grip enough to feel the wildly beating pulses in Hunt’s neck.

“You’ll feel what I make you feel, come when I make you come or won’t because I say no. You’ll endure punishments I decide on. Perform actions as I order. Because I order. Did you forget?”

Hunter’s breathing slowed, his heartbeat became regular, his cock could pound nails. “No, Cam, I didn’t forget.”

Cam swiped a thumb over Hunter’s carotid and larynx in comfort and threat. “You’re very hard, now, aren’t you, Hunter?”

“Yes, Cam.” He waited for the fingers to tighten. They did. “I’m very - ah - Cam.”

“You’ll put yourself in my ass, just the way I want, as long as I want.”

Hunter felt himself sink into the soothing depths of submission. His body relaxed, all his weight for Cam to bear beneath him. “Yes, Cam.”

Cam’s hands glided down over his sub’s shoulders, around and back up, into his hair, claiming him. He couldn’t fix the things eating Hunter from the inside: the residue of the attempt to take his life, the half-decomposed corpse sliding onto a metal table, the torture of a gentle soul who only wanted to bring help to his people. That would have to wait.

But Cam would get Hunter through the storm.

With instincts honed on the bodies of dozens of men, Cam knew how to help his sub. He’d known the first time they met, passing one another in the club entrance.

Now, he’d give Hunter the security of his domination and push him past the limits of submission. Hunter needed to know how much he could trust Cam, even when his Dom shifted his reality.

Cam swept his hands down Hunter’s sides and snugged them under his glutes where they met his thighs. His lifted and spread, and his fingertips found the tight, moist ring. Hunter’s eyes closed.

“Look at me,” Cam told him quietly. “Do you get to come?”

“No, Cam.”

“Who gets to come?”

“You do.”

“Who’ll make that happen?”

Hunter’s body tightened, hips flexed. “I will.”

“Say it.” Cam allowed a fingertip to penetrate his sub.

“I’ll ma-”—Hunt choked on the word—“make. Make you come.”

“Why?”

“Because you say so.”

Cam relaxed back, letting his hands fall to the mattress. “Do it.”

When Cam laid back, Hunter spent a few moments drinking in the sight of his Dom spread before him: the sculpted landscape of his powerful body, the golden trail of hair that led to his solid, thick cock, erect but not straining. His white-blond sleep-mussed hair that shone in the lamplight, flopping over his forehead to shadow his cold blue eyes.

Hunter had never fucked a man. He’d wanted to touch Cam before, wanted it badly. But Hunt wasn’t sure how to please him. And he had to negotiate one leg fully encased in a cast from hip to ankle.

“You’re thinking, Hunter,” Cam said. “Stop it.”

PER HIS INSTRUCTIONS, Hunt had made a platform for Cam’s torso from the thick folded towels and positioned him face down, with some pillows supporting his upper chest and head. He angled Cam’s cast leg to the side.

Small tubes of lube with the caps already off waited on a hand towel within easy reach, a dispenser of baby wipes next to them. But when Hunt had taken a condom from the drawer of the nightstand, Cam’s hand clamped down on his wrist. Hard.

“I did not tell you to do that. You’ll feel everything.”

Cam was fastidious about cleanliness. But this night was a lesson in obedience. Hunter dropped the condom.

It was seven years since Cam’d had a cock in his ass. But it didn’t matter. He closed his eyes and took several deep, centering breaths. Focusing. Preparing. He’d made championship runs through pain and cold and exhaustion. This was for Hunter.

“Lie down against me.”

Hunt positioned himself next to Cam.

“Put your leg over the cast, bend it, knee against the inside of my thigh.”

Hunt swallowed hard and licked his lips. As he threw his leg over the cast, his body pressed hard along Cam’s side. When he bent his leg as ordered, he pushed Cam’s thigh aside with his knee. His asscheeks, round and full, developed to control a body hurling down a mountain at highway speeds, opened enough to reveal the shadowed furrow between.

“Are you hard, Hunter?”

“Yes, Cam, I’m very hard.”

“Lube yourself and shove up against my side. I want to feel it. Shove it against me but don’t move it.”

Bastard, Hunter thought, reaching across Cam’s body to the towel, squeezing a pile of lube out and scooping some up. He slathered it over himself and let his body lean into Cam’s.

“What did I tell you to do, Hunter?”

Hunter’s throat tightened. “Touch you the way you touched me.”

“Lay your head on my shoulder, Hunter. You can’t relax holding yourself up. … Good.”

Cam wriggled against Hunter’s slick stiffness and clenching abdomen. “Oh, Hunter, the things I’m going to make you do. … Put your hand on me.”

Hunter knew exactly what Cam meant. His right hand still covered with lube sought between Cam’s cheeks for what he could not see. When the pad of his middle finger found Cam’s puckered hole, he stopped.

“Remember what I did to you that first time, bent over the bathroom counter. Do that.”

Hunt cock throbbed. The first time … naked … restrained …

The hand left his waist and fingers combed through his hair as Cam massaged his ring with the other hand, around and around, pressed in the center, went back to massage. …

Caught in the memory, Cam’s back warm against the side of his face, Hunter was barely aware of his fingers moving over Cam, circling, pressing, stroking …

… he slid inside until his curled fingers and knuckles pressed against the insides of Hunt’s ass cheeks. …

… his middle finger penetrated Hunter again. Slick with lather, he slid in easily, but not deeply. … The pad of his finger moved in and out, working his way around …

Hunter concentrated—biting his lip—controlling his breathing, so turned on he could taste blood in his mouth.

It wasn’t like the times he’d touched women, the muscle under the tender surface skin more substantial. Cam was so tight Hunter’s fingers ached keeping up the movements. So hot … so slick …

Hunter scissored his fingers, spreading them slightly, and rotated. He felt the vibration of a rough sound deep in Cam’s chest, and moaned in response. Rock-hard, his hips flexed

“Do not move!”

The command brought Hunt back to the moment. Frozen, his whole body tense. With an effort, he relaxed.

“You disobeyed me, already, Hunter?”

“I didn’t - ”

“You didn’t … what?” Cam’s hands were fisted under the pillow, head down, concentrating on blocking the feelings Hunter generated with his simple manipulations, the weight of his body, the sound of his breathing.

“Know,” Hunter said.

“I can feel you, Hunter. You’re about to brand me with the red-hot dick drooling down my side, and you didn’t know? You’re slipping into subspace, and that is not allowed. You understand?”

“Yes, Cam.”

“Do you understand?”

Hunter’s voice cleared. “I’m with you. Any way you want me.”

“On top. Knees on the outside. Lay your dick between my cheeks. Make sure everything’s lubed.”

While Hunter positioned himself, Cam brought his hand out from under the pillow. He stretched his fingers, cramped from clutching the sheet so tightly.

Hunt’s good, thick shaft slide against him, tucked between his glutes.

This was new for Cam, this solid length of heat pressing against his hidden flesh. He’d done it to may, to Hunter, knew the feeling of control that came with it.

It was this that would undo his sub.

Hunt laid himself down, curving over the top of Cam’s backside, his lean supple body pressed. He felt so good to Cam: not holding Cam down, but trusting his support. Cam rocked his pelvis slightly, to rub Hunt’s cock against himself. He felt the hitch in Hunter’s breathing before he heard it.

“Reach down and grab me, hard. But don’t move. Keep your eyes open.”

“Cam.” It sounded like a prayer.

The towels and pillow made a space above the cast where Cam’s hip and leg joined. Hunter tucked his hand inside the space and reached, wrapping Cam in his own heat and need. He felt the throbbing pulse of Cam’s cock against his palm. Hunter trembled, but he did not move. Pressed against Cam, buried between mounds of solid fiery flesh, it was like Hunt held himself in his hand.

It took all his will to remain motionless. His desperate need to come became a state of fusion with his Dom, instead of a need he contended with.

Hunter Dane was the most responsive man Cam had ever known. He felt what no one else felt, and more deeply. He felt Hunter’s forehead press into his neck, warm breath on his spine. “Cam … Cam …” A mantra. “Anything ...anything …. Cam …”

It was time. Cam reached for the lube and then for his cock, pushing Hunter’s hand aside.

Hunter made a small noise of protest at the loss.

“Take hold of yourself,” Cam ordered.

Bracing himself on one forearm, Hunt buried his fingers between Cam’s cheeks and around his throbbing, slick-with-lube cock. He wanted to bring his knees inside, between Cam’s legs. But he hadn’t been told to.

As so often with Cam, he was desperate and needy and off-balance and held fast by indomitable will.

“Slow.” Cam made the word clear and strong.

He could picture Hunter’s cock perfectly, the weight and length and shape he’d held and sucked and tormented and satisfied. He knew the wide head with the well-defined ridge would be unyielding. He relaxed his jaw to breathe his anxiety into the pillow as silently as possible.

Hunter would be careful, take his time. But what Hunter didn’t know, what Cam had never told anyone, was that he’d only bottomed three times. It had been agonizing.

THE COMPETITION IN STOWE when he was 15 was the first time his mother had let him go on his own. The other boy, 17, seemed experienced and worldly to Camden Snow, shy and longing for the touch of a being like himself, who wanted the things he wanted. The things he didn’t know how to get.

David. The other boy’s name was David. He and Cam had been eyeing each other during the last few competitions. Unlike Cam, David knew how to get what he wanted. When he found himself alone in an elevator with Cam, he’d said, “Let’s go to my room.”

Cam blinked shyly at him and smiled. And followed him.

David was a good kid, a good young man. He got Cam to tell him how inexperienced he was. He soon had Cam on his stomach, his pants on the floor. David used an ocean of baby oil, all he could find in the hotel gift shop. He spent some time getting Cam ready with his fingers. A good kid.

Cam was incredibly excited, afraid he’d shoot at the first touch of the slick glans against his anus. But David rubbed him with the head a little and pressed. He was careful; he instructed. (“Push out … yeah … hold still now … ”) David guided himself steadily and slowly, and his knob slid into Cam with little resistance.

David stopped to ask Cam how he was doing but-

“Jesus, fuck! Jesus fuck, fuck, oh Jesusfuck!”

David froze. “Is it hurting you? Should I … tell me what …”

“Not hurt, it’s just - oh shitshitshit!”

Cam grabbed the sheets in his fists and buried his face in the pillow. “Do it,” he managed to croak.

David went slowly at first, and when Cam did nothing but shout “Jesus, fuck!” over and over into the pillow, the boy pumped in earnest.

Cam thought he would pass out from the stimulation. It was as if everything—not just his nuts but the very skin of his sac, not just his cock, but the different lobes and the veins that ran along them, his spine and his guts—connected to taut wires that heated and vibrated and made every cell itch and burn and thrum unbearably.

Another 15-year-old virgin surely wouldn’t have borne it. But Camden Snow had already mounted his first Olympic podium. Possessed of steel-clad self-discipline, he would not fail. He held himself perfectly still until David, a good kid but not a stayer by any means, came with a little screech and shudder.

“Out,” said Cam.

David pulled out with alacrity and Camden Snow screamed into the pillow.

It was not an auspicious beginning.

Ever the researcher, Cam found that the kind of overstimulation he experienced wasn’t that uncommon. It would, should, might, depending on what you read, fade with time.

He’d tried again a year later, almost to the day, with a boy his own age. No good. It wasn’t pain, per se; it was just unbearable.

Cam acquired a set of anal plugs in graduated sizes, determined to train himself. He discovered lubes that worked better than baby oil. He got through the smallest one by inserting slowly while masturbating and hardly moving it. But he could not get past the next one. He couldn’t hold out more than a minute without feeling like he’d lose his mind.

Incredibly busy with training and competing and schooling and still painfully shy, the handsome, accomplished youth remained woefully underfucked and barely blown. But he was born to be a champion, and Camden Snow wouldn’t waste a second he needed to accomplish his professional goals on teen sex angst.

He had a computer and a hand and an imagination. And other things to do.

The month before his eighteenth birthday, Cam found himself traveling the Continent with a man of 20, smaller in stature than he, in every way. Cam found trust and comfort with the quiet skier who shared his bed and was an exceptionally good kisser satisfied with the mutual hand jobs and blow jobs that were all Cam offered.

Geo had the habit of gently massaging Cam’s hole while he sucked him off. He did not penetrate, having been told not to. But it felt wonderful as long as Geo was sucking him, and Cam determined to try anal again.

It was less unbearable than the first two times, but such an obvious ordeal that Geo had pulled carefully out and said, “Do me.”

If there was anything besides Alpine skiing Cam knew, anything he had exhaustively researched and absorbed, it was how to fuck a guy up the ass. He put Geo on all fours at the end of the bed, pushed his shoulders and head down and his knees open slightly. Cam stood behind, condomed and lubed.

The sight of the slender man, semi-prostrate before him, accepting, submitting, made Camden Snow feel like the mountains he raced down: huge, powerful, invincible. One hand on Geo’s hip and the other on his own very hard shaft, Camden Snow leaned forward and pressed.

It was like a perfect run. Smooth, controlled, the hot ring gliding over him, nature taking the reins, guiding him home.

With Geo shouting something that sounded like “Anchor! Anchor!” Cam pistoned him with savage delight. Hands on Geo’s hips, the Olympian literally lifted the smaller man off the bed as he drove between his compact cheeks. Geo grabbed his cock, Cam braced himself against the mattress, and they exploded at the same time.

It was epic.

It was an epiphany.

They collapsed on the bed, gasping and giggling. Camden Snow found himself, and Geo Gallo found a Dom.

HUNTER’S COCKHEAD TOUCHED HIM. Cam felt a flow of hot liquid run down over his balls. His dick became unbelievably harder in his hand. He smiled into the pillow. Hunter fucking Dane. When he was with Cam, he poured enough precum to wet down a slip and slide.

Cam stroked himself firmly. The distraction helped him, somehow, to endure. He relaxed his body, his glutes—everything—and pushed out as he knew he must and felt himself slowly opened.

“Stop there.”

Hunter stopped, his glans halfway in. A tight band cutting across, rubbing his stretched frenulum. He needed to move but stayed still. Obeying. Panting. Hot saliva dripped onto Cam’s back, Hunter’s lips branding him.

“You like that?” Cam asked.

“Cam.” Low, hard. Hunter teetered on the edge of shift.

“Can you feel it, Hunter? Rim on rim?” Cam moved a bare millimeter.

“Don’t.” A plea and a warning.

“Are you giving me orders?”

Harsh breathing. Hunt didn’t answer, but eased himself inside until Cam’s sphincter closed over the foreskin gathered behind his now-buried crown. He let go of himself. Both hands clamped on Cam’s shoulders, Hunter steadied himself, eased in an inch and pulled back.

Looking back under his own arm, his position awkward, knees spread, allowed Hunt a clear view of most of his shiny column. The pale mounds of Cam’s ass twitched with every one of Hunt’s controlled micro-thrusts. He dropped his head before the sight made him come, feeling everything getting slicker, slipperier, harder to control his depth.

His precum spilled into Cam. It leaked and dripped, the thought spurring his need to slam and drive. He saw Cam’s arm vibrating with the movements of his hand, hidden beneath his body.

Anger born of lust took hold of Hunt. He dragged his nails down Cam’s arm to his jerking fist and knocked it away, claiming the stiff, slick cock for himself.

This was his job. Serving his Dom, bringing him off, fucking him with no thought for his own release.

“I’m doing this.” Hunter Dane claimed his obedience.

Beneath him, Cam’s body thrummed, his face hidden, a sound rose up from his chest, like the muffled roar of the wind, swelling, powerful.

Cam reached back and grabbed Hunt by the hair, jerking him forward and down, stubbled cheeks scraped hard. “Fuck me, sub,” Cam snarled. “Hard. Now. You come now.”

Hunter shoved. Cam felt himself give way and took the burn. With a deep guttural howl he came, praying Hunter would, could, obey him. But Hunter was coming even before he slammed into Cam’s ass. Cam felt the pulses and the welcome snarling roar of Hunter’s release.

When the pulsing stopped, Hunt froze, not wanting to move inside his Dom without an order.

Cam, collapsed under him, forced himself to relax. It had not been terrible. And Hunter had gotten exactly where he needed to go. Cam could feel him recede. The length of his arousal and the strength of his orgasm had drained him. Thank God.

“Enough,” Cam said.

Carefully, Hunter pulled out. He rolled off Cam onto his back. The last thing he remembered before sleep took him was Cam throwing the comforter over them both.

9:15am

“I can’t flog you, Hunter. Not like before; I told you last night.”

“I - just - you do that in sex, too, don’t you? You’re a fucking dominant sadist.”

They faced each other from the ends of the big couch in front of the fireplace where they’d settled in after breakfast.

“I will flog you, trust me,” Cam answered. “When I decide to. And we’ll both enjoy it, in our own ways. But not for this. It’s not possible now that we’re … Jesus, we’ve barely known each other a month, and out of that we’ve actually spent how many days together? Ten? Maybe twelve? In the space of a few weeks, you’ve already left me once. What we have, it’s too intense. Too fragile.”

Hunter huffed a bitter laugh. “I can’t go to the club for it, anymore, either.”

Cam frowned. “Tell me.”

THEY’D AWAKENED TO A GRAYISH GLOOM of dead light filtered through snow-covered windows. But the electricity was on, the lamplight cheery. Then they’d found themselves literally glued to the sheets by dried body fluids.

Hunter thought it was hilarious, especially when Cam placed all the blame on him.

“I had an accomplice,” he said, grinning.

Cam shot him a dour look. Hunt scooped him up and took him into the big bathroom for a warm, sudsy sponge bath. He’d done it before and gotten quite adept at keeping Cam’s cast dry while soothing him with hot, fragrant lather.

Cam dressed while Hunt showered; Hunt stripped the bed while Cam went downstairs to make coffee. He’d also thaw and heat whatever wonderfulness his doting mother and grandmother had stocked his freezer with.

Hunter was hoping for apple pie. As he bundled up the soiled bedclothes and shoved them down the laundry chute, the rich scent of cinnamon-laced pastry reached him.

It was a pecan ring. Perfect and hearty and crunchy and soft and buttery.

“You could become a professional glutton if the homicide detective gig doesn’t work out,” Cam told him.

“That’s no way to refer to a connoisseur of artfully crafted heritage baked goods.” Hunter licked a fingertip to get the last bits of pecan and brown sugar to his mouth.

NOW THEY WERE ENSCONCED ON THE COUCH under chunky merino wool blankets with mugs of hot cider. Cam sipped at his, waiting for Hunter to gather his thoughts.

“The Doms at the club, most of them, it’s sexual for them,” Hunter said. “They used me to get off.” Hunt shook his head at Cam’s startled and none-too-pleased look. “No, you were the first who—it was a hard limit, no one touched my asshole.”

Cam relaxed. “I heard. You had many hard limits. You didn’t swallow, either. Why?”

“It wasn’t fair to ask them to give me what I needed, to help me get where I had to go and not give them something back. They got off on me in a lot of ways. One of them used to hold my head down and shove his dick between my chin and neck.”

“No shit? Must be the all-around rasp,” Cam mused.

Hunt nodded. “They came on me and over me and against me. They used my mouth, but I never swallowed. I didn’t let them in me.”

“You swallowed for me, Hunter.”

Hunt’s gut clenched in response to the intimate tone. “You made me want to.” He stopped and looked into the fire. “After being with you … ”

“What?”

“You know I never attached to anyone,” Hunt said. “So all the stuff in the club, it was just people getting off on each other. But after you - us … I realized sex is something. Something created between people. Those Doms were doing something that wasn’t just about them. It was about me, too.”

“Yeah, of course,” Cam agreed. “Half those guys are in love with you.”

“Thing is”—he caught Cam’s gaze, needing him to understand—“I only want one Dom being sexual about me.”

Cam was tingling and thickening under the blanket. But he didn’t move. “There are Doms who play without being sexual.”

“Yeah, some. Ink was good. He was great, in fact. But ever since Spanko got through transitioning, he doesn’t play with anyone else.”

“There are straight Doms who don’t do sex.”

“Or men.” Hunt looked to the thirty-foot-high window wall. West-facing, it was totally crusted with snow, except for a foot at the top under the eaves. It made him feel cold. He turned back to Cam.

“Let’s change the subject.” He took a pull of his cider. “Tell me what happened to you last night. When was the last time for you, anyway?”

Cam’s lips pressed, but Hunter deserved an answer. “Seven years.” He surrendered to the inevitable and told Hunter the Tale of the Three Bottomings.

“So you didn’t enjoy what we - I - did, at all?” Hunter kept his voice even and wore his politely interested face.

“Stop it,” Cam told him, having seen Hunt’s professional demeanor in action. “I’m not a guy at a poker table or witness at a crime scene.”

“I’m aware,” Hunter told him, maintaining his expression. “It was bad for you?”

Cam shrugged. Hunter waited.

“Thing is, it was all really intense, but, some parts were …” Cam’s eyes darkened. “At the beginning? I think ... I could’ve stayed there a little while.”

Hunt didn’t ask why he hadn’t. He knew that Cam in Dom mode always served Hunter before himself.

“What happened after the part you could have stayed at?”

“It was manageable and even … when I was rubbing it to distract myself, it was kind of insanely hot but …” He shook his head. “It’s like sexual Jenga. Always teetering on the edge of structure collapse, of the thing getting loose, being consumed. The tension is … definitely not fun.”

“I see.” Hunt kept the disappointment out of his voice. “Well, we don’t have to do that again.”

Cam cocked his head. “But you want to.” It was Hunt’s turn to shrug. “You do it with women; I’ve seen you. You like it.”

“No.” Emphatic. “That’s a totally different thing. That’s a Dom thing. Not like what we have. I never had this.” He gestured vaguely between them.

Cam finished his cider and put the empty mug on the sofa table. “This what?” He asked the question gently. Hunter was on the brink of agitation.

“I wasn’t—I didn’t—” He got up and went to the fire, poking at the logs, changing nothing, sending sparks rushing up the chimney.

When he came back, he was calmer. “Okay. Did you know they made the Chicago River run backward?”

“Uh … no.” Cam was lost, but talking usually kept Hunt’s anxiety at bay.

“The river used to flow out into Lake Michigan. They switched it so now Lake Michigan flows into it.”

Hunt paused when Cam’s mouth dropped open slightly. He looked so young then, like a kid at his first glimpse of a live elephant.

Hunt smiled. “Never mind, you can look it up sometime. My point is, the Dom/sub thing is directional. Women don’t give me anything, not anything they do. I mean, trust and submission, sure. But all the make-you-feel goes from me into them. They take as much as I want to give them. Is it like that for you?”

Cam considered. “Yeah. At the club, anyway.”

“That’s how it is here, too,” Hunt said. “What did you tell me that first time upstairs in your bed? ‘Take it’.”

“Look at me,” Cam ordered. Eyes locked, each with perfect awareness of the instant Cam’s glans touched Hunter’s ring. So wet. Swollen. Soft tissues. Slick. Tight, but not unyielding.

Cam grunted as the muscle spasmed against his cockhead. Hunter’s hips tried to rise, instinctively, to meet him. But Cam held him motionless.

“Take it. You just take it.”

“You’re saying a Dom is like a river flowing into a passive body of water, the sub is like the lake.”

Hunter nodded. “Only its feelings, energy. Being a sub—it’s like after they switched it. I’m the river the lake flows into. The water is huge, endless. The more I submit, the stronger the current until I’m all rippling and shit from it, waves of it. But it’s all one way. Into me.”

He went back to the couch and sat on the edge next to Cam, his words urgent with his own understanding.

“That’s how pain works for me when I’m like this. Energy in, that I can’t control. It vibrates, like sound waves shatter a crystal glass. Breaks up the wall inside keeping the dark shit in check. Then there’s an avalanche carrying all the boulders and broken bits away.”

Hunter searched Cam’s face. “That didn’t make a bit of fucking sense did it?”

Cam put a hand on Hunter’s cheek and brought him close for a kiss. Slow, careful, reassuring.

“Dude,” he said when he pulled back. “I broke you. I had my arms around you, my body against you and my dick inside you when you broke. What you just said? That’s exactly what it was.”

“Oh.” Hunter sat back. “So you get it.”

“Not what it has to do with anal sex. And that you want it with me. Are you wanting to be the river? Dom me sometimes, all the way?” Cam wasn’t able to imagine how he’d manage that if Hunter said yes.

“God, no.” Hunt placed his palm on Cam’s chest, feeling the strong, slow beating of his heart. “Last night we were ourselves, Dom and sub. But at the end it was like I was over you and under you at the same time. I was doing you and you owned me so fucking hard.”

His eyes closed for a moment, and took a deep breath.

“But,” he went on, his hand slid under Cam’s thick thermal shirt, needing skin. “At the beginning, the part you liked? It was fucking hot. For both of us. That’s what I want. A river that flows both ways.” His hand glided over the mounds and valleys of Cam’s torso.

“Just that? You don’t want to fuck me?”

Hunter raised his eyes, and Cam almost gasped aloud at the depths of heat and need and pain he saw in them.

“I want to serve you.”

Cam opened his arms, ignoring the hot column clamoring for attention under the blanket. “Lie with me.” He took Hunter into his arms and held him.

Cam wanted what Hunter wanted. He wanted many things with Hunt, for him and from him. But Cam could sense how close to the edge he was, how much the last two cases, one layered over the other, had to be excised first.

The storm had stalled out over the eastern slope and the Colorado plains: burying cattle and homes, obliterating roads, paralyzing road crews. In the best-case scenario it would move on within twenty-four hours. But even if it did, it would be at least two days before the roads were cleared enough for the plows to dig them out. If they were lucky.

It could easily be a week before he could get Hunter to the club. Cam sighed. Even if they did get to the club, it was no guarantee of help.

A buzzing sound reached them.

Hunter untangled himself from Cam. “I’ll go put the sheets in the dryer. You need anything?” He picked up their empty mugs.

“Yeah. When you get done, I need to work out. So do you, before you end up with a pecan ring where your abs used to be.”

“I’m storing up energy for when I have to shovel us out of here,” Hunt called from the open kitchen at the other end of the great room. “Besides, you ate way more of it than I did.”

“I’m building bone; I need the calories.”

When Hunter disappeared down the hall to the laundry room, Cam grabbed the hand-held phone off the charger on the sofa table.

IT WAS A VERY OLYMPIAN HOME GYM. It had an obstacle course as well as the standard free weights, treadmill and machines.

Hunter spotted Cam, standing by to change weight settings as he did an upper body regimen. It was entertaining. Camden Snow in a tight white tank and black shorts rippling and flexing and sporting a sheen of perspiration.

“Does someone come in to help you, usually?”

Cam shook his head, using his crutches to cross to an open metal frame with a bar about eight feet up. “I can do it, it just takes a lot longer. But I can’t do this one. So…”

He raised his arms, letting the crutches fall. Behind him, hands at Cam’s waist, Hunter lifted him up. Hunt stayed in place to catch Cam if he lost his grip. Cam was still forbidden to put weight on his injured leg.

He expected Cam to do a series of pull-ups. Instead, he hung. His glutes and abs tight, legs together, extended at an angle. The seconds ticked away. Cam breathed deeply, slowly.

With no clock in view, Hunter didn’t know how long Cam had been hanging, but it was surely several minutes. Cam flexed his shoulders into place as if preparing for a pull-up. And kept hanging.

More minutes passed. Cam’s alabaster skin flushed across his chest and shoulders as if he’d been lightly flogged. Sweat rolled in steady rivulets down his body.

Hunt was beginning to understand the meaning of the word “champion.” He worked out, for his job and for Dwight, who’d been photographing him for stock photo sites since college. Hunter was strong and fit and looked good naked.

But he was not this. He didn’t think he ever could be this. This machine built from an early age, sculpted over more than a decade by hard work and uncompromising dedication.

Cam shifted to an underhand grip and rose a few inches into a 90-degree flex. More minutes. Cam didn’t pant or strain or quiver. Hunter was sure his eyes were closed as he continued his controlled breathing, his body locked in. His wet shirt clung to his body. His blond hair darkened at the sides and roots.

Cam switched to a forward grip and lifted into a full flex, and Hunter’s mouth dropped open as he looked up in what he would, himself, characterize as awe. He thought of the times Cam had simply lifted him and turned him or adjusted him, totally controlled him. The raw power always aroused the hell out of him.

Slowly, Cam allowed himself to drop into a passive hang again.

“Okay.”

Hunter pressed Cam’s waist with his hands so he knew it was safe to let go, and lowered him to the floor. When he touched down, he kept going, bending his good leg, the cast leg sliding out, Hunt squatted with him until Cam was sitting. He reached for his toes, laying his forehead on his knee. Finally, he sat up and laid all the way down, arms stretched out to the sides.

“That felt so damn good,” Cam sighed. “It’s been weeks.” He cocked an eyebrow up at Hunter. “Nice. Next time I’ll just use that.”

Hunt looked down at the pole peaking up out of the waistband of his shorts that had slipped down when he lifted Cam. He didn’t go 12 o’clock high very often.

Camden Snow knew in that moment, looking at the swollen lip of cock pouting over the edge of the fabric, exactly what to do for Hunter Dane. He sat up and held out a hand for Hunt to take. Once upright, he kept a hand on Hunt’s forearm and bent to pick up his “sticks” as he called his crutches.

“You can put that away for now,” he said off Hunter’s erection. “I’m going to clean up and get dressed. You work off that energy, and I’ll meet you downstairs.

“Okay.” Hunt moved to the free weights. “Hey,” he called back over his shoulder. “There’s a door over here.” He peered through the small window, but it was blank and white.

“Leads to the walkway, to the stairs and my studio. You’ve been up there.” Hunter turned the thumb latch. “I really don’t think you want to-”

WHAM!

“-do that.”

The wind had slammed Hunt back into the wall, and a thick curtain of snow filled the room on a blast of arctic air.

“Shit!” Hunt yelled from behind the door. He got his shoulder into it to force it closed again. When he turned, he found Cam failing to keep a straight face.

“Blizzard,” Cam said. “Sustained winds sixty-five miles per hour. Gusts up to one hundred.” Cam stopped smirking when he realized Hunt’s eyes were huge, his movements jerky.

“Come over here,” Cam told him, making his voice hard. “Now.”

Hunter complied, stopping a couple feet away, eyes darting around for a possible enemy. “What? Are you alright?”

“Closer.”

“What?”

Cam grabbed a handful of shirt and pulled until their bodies pressed together. The crutch he’d released hit the floor with a clatter.

“Hold onto me, Hunter, I might fall.”

Hunt took Cam into his arms, holding him tightly, searching his face for any sign of pain. Cam stroked his palm over the side of Hunter’s face and down his neck until the rapid pulse he felt beneath his hand, slowed.

“We’re okay. We’re safe,” Cam said. “I have rich people generators, buried cables for the phone and electricity, plenty of food, an insanely sexy guy to keep me warm. As do you…”

That got a small answering smile.

“The roof is specifically designed to bear the weight even if the snow drifts right over the house. Okay?”

“What if your appendix bursts?” Hunter asked, trying to sound like he was kidding.

“Lost the appendix when I was thirteen. I could blow an aneurysm,” Cam said thoughtfully. “But even on a clear summer day we’re so far from a hospital I’d die.”

Hunt dropped his forehead to Cam’s. “You’re mocking my tragic PTSD, you know.”

“Sadist,” Cam reminded him. He pointed, and Hunt retrieved his crutch. “C’mon. Skip the workout and give me a short version of your sexy sponge bath. Then we’ll find something to eat.”

“THIS IS THANKSGIVING DINNER,” Hunt said as Cam put dishes from the stove, oven and microwave on the counter for him to take to the table.

“Yeah. You spent Thanksgiving doing some tedious evidence thing at the museum of natural history,” Cam said, tossing him a couple oven mitts. “What’d you eat?”

Hunter sniffed appreciatively at a pan of turkey in gravy he placed in the center of the small dining table. “Uhhh … no idea.” He went back for the dishes of stuffing, mashed potatoes and asparagus. “You were at your mom’s?” He balanced a small cut glass bowl holding jewel-bright homemade cranberry sauce in the crook of his elbow.

“Gran’s.” Cam wheeled himself into place at the table with a bottle of wine between his legs. “With my insufferable sisters who showed up from school and insisted on keeping me company, since I was trapped on the first floor. Mom and Gran were in the kitchen.”

He opened the wine. “The entertainment consisted of an 11-year-old screeching at a 13-year-old about which ship is the real OTP. Of course, I have not one fucking clue what an OTP is or what ships have to do with them.”

He poured chardonnay into their glasses. “Did you know ‘pharmercy’ is not a drugstore where you’d get something to ‘mercykill’? Which is what I hoped someone would do to me.”

Hunter filled his plate listening to Cam complain about the little sisters he adored but barely knew. It made him feel old and a little sad and a lot alone. But it also made him happy for Cam, coming from a place full of love and support and normalcy.

“Then my uncle Bernard showed up who is, among other enthusiasms, a self-taught legal expert. He opined endlessly on our last case.”

Hunt gave him a quizzical eyebrow lift. He said nothing as his mouth was stuffed with stuffing.

“I didn’t say a word. None of them know I’m working for you.” His tone aggrieved, he pointed his fork at Hunt. “And that’s getting old.”

“Working for the city in a data management capacity is not a secret. Of course, tell them. Just not the details of the team or the cases,” Hunter said after a swallow of wine.

Cam went back to his food. “Gran says if I don’t bring you to Christmas Eve, I shouldn’t bother showing up.”

Hunter started. “What?”

“Don’t fight it, Hunter, Gran always gets her way.”

Hunt shook his head. “I’ll have to work,” he decided. “It’s … how does your grandmother even know about me?”

The question confused Cam. “What do you mean? I told her.”

Hunt closed his eyes for a few seconds. “This is—I appreciate it. But remember how much your mother doesn’t like me.”

He’d only met Cam’s mother once. A stunning ash blond, a prominent attorney, she’d made herself perfectly clear the morning after Cam was shot.

“People tend to speak freely coming out of anesthesia,” she said. “He told me about your”—she hesitated—“attachment disorder, let’s call it. Camden would be an extraordinary human being if he’d never heard of the Olympics. My son deserves to be loved.”

“Gran is my mother’s mother. Don’t worry, you and I will go hang at her place after the streets are cleared. Just the three of us. You’ll like her. She bakes.” Cam tilted the glass bowl over his plate and splorked half the cranberry sauce onto it. “You don’t have family in the area?”

Hunter dropped his fork and sat back, arms folded across his chest. “You’re an internet research prodigy, Cam, you know what family I have.”

Cam frowned at Hunter’s tense undertone. “No, I don’t. I wouldn’t invade your privacy, Hunter. That’s like stalking.”

A prickling heat swept over Hunter Dane.

“No, no,” Cam said, seeing the look of shame. “I asked you to. Fuck, I challenged you to find out about me.”

Hunter swung the monitor around. “Take a look at this,” he told Dan Gordi, the medical examiner on duty.

“Why?”

“It’s your job?”

Gordi sighed and glanced quickly at it. “You took the name off.”

“It’s confidential for now,” Hunt said. “I just need to know if what I was told is consistent with the medical facts.”

Gordi squinted at the screen. “So … we have … left femur … comminuted midshaft fracture. That means ‘broke into pieces’ to you … Jesus, can’t believe he survived … huh … no graft, sutured the femoral artery … no compartment syndrome … This is a lucky guy … oh … maybe not that lucky.”

Hunter went hollow. A presentiment of something vile. He kept his voice even as he pretended to make notes. “Oh, yeah?”

“Let’s see, just turned twenty-four so probably not symptomatic yet … wrong side of the full-penetrance line …”

Dan Gordi sat back. “Okay. Someone shot him, he had multiple procedures, he’s got a lot of metal holding his leg together. Looks like the artery repair healed well.” Dan Gordi sat back and turned the monitor to Hunt.

“In fact,” he said. “Looking at his numbers, I’d say he’s in perfect health, except for being shot and having a fatal genetic disorder.”

“Hunter!”

Hunt made a dash for the downstairs bathroom. He managed to get to the kitchen before vomiting his meal into the stainless steel sink.

Running the cold water, he flipped on the garbage disposal and used the spray arm to clean up the mess.

Cam wheeled up next to him, holding out a clean, damp towel.

THEY WERE BACK AT THE TABLE, cleared of food. A carafe of coffee, some cream, brandy and glasses of water were untouched. The men sat diagonally from one another at the corner of the table.

Cam had Hunter’s hand in his, his thumb stroking over the knuckles. His other hand gently held Hunt’s wrist, a mystery of strength and delicacy in the sculpted rise of his styloid process under smooth, tan skin and silky black hairs.

“It’s my Huntington’s, isn’t it?” Cam asked.

Hunter tried to pull his hand away. Cam tightened his grip.

“Did you forget I’m stronger than you are?” Cam asked, keeping his tone light.

“Did you forget I’m more ruthless than you are?” Hunter asked, not masking his darkness.

Cam grinned, and Hunter looked confused. “Well, you did once threaten to dump me out of this chair and toss it off the deck of the club. … And wasn’t there something about me crawling down after it to see if it still worked?”

Hunter’s hand relaxed, and he fought hard to not smile. “You were being a brat.”

“I was,” Cam admitted. “You were being obtuse.” Hunter didn’t deny it. “And you are now, too. Maybe unconsciously.”

Hunter looked away and back. “Jesus, Cam, we’re not going to start shrinking each other, are we?”

Cam ran a hand soothingly up and down Hunter’s forearm. “Hunter Dane. I’ve been ‘shrinking you’ since the moment we met. It’s kinda my job.”

Hunter was fascinated by the sight of Cam’s fingers trailing over his arm.

“You avoided me for two years. What took you so long to come to me for what you needed?”

Hunter dropped his head. Cam leaned forward to hear him.

“I was afraid I’d lose myself.”

Cam cocked his head. “But you didn’t.” Hunter’s hand tightened in his. “It’s not the decomposed body or the guy who tried to kill you or the tortured victim, is it? Not this time. This is about me, right?”

“Not ... exactly. It’s about me.” Hunter’s voice was so strained and soft, Cam leaned over until their heads were touching.

“About you … ?” Cam prompted him.

“About me—needing you.” He raised a face so stark with anguish tears sprang to Cam’s eyes.

“Hunter…”

Hunt was out of his chair and on his knees in front of Cam who dragged him up and into himself. He lifted his good leg to circle Hunt’s waist as well as he could.

“I can’t stop it. I can’t stop it.” Hunter whispered.

Cam did the only thing he could do. He kissed Hunter deeply, and Hunter kissed him back. All the pain and fear and confusion and unspoken feelings in lips and tongues and hands and chests and arms, desperate and needing and somehow beyond the intense sexuality that seemed to inhabit their every moment together.

Finally, even kissing kept them too far apart. They wound themselves together, two men so powerful they would have broken the ribs of weaker men, men who loved each other less.

4:15pm

Outside the big A-frame, the snow still fell, but the winds abated, the snow slanted instead of horizontal. An occasional gust stirred up a thick flurry from a drift or shook cascades of snow from the upper boughs of blue spruce. The storm was moving.

Inside, Hunt and Cam lay together on the sofa in front of the newly built-up fire. They were quiet, lost in their thoughts, needing the contact.

Hunt shifted against the lip of Cam’s cast. “Isn’t this plastic?”

“Hmmm? What?” Cam rubbed his cheek over the top of Hunt’s head.

“Your cast.”

“Oh. Yeah, polyure-something, I think”

Hunter lifted up and thumped on the cast. “So why can’t you get it wet?”

“I can. It’s the stuff inside, the padding. Stays damp, gets itchy.” Cam gave a shiver. “They were going to take it off today. But,” he gestured at the windows, “snowmageddon.”

“You mean off-off?” Hunter asked.

“They said. If everything looked okay, yeah. They had a thigh cast made for me. Some kind of webbing-over-metal deal.”

Hunt cocked an eyebrow. “Sounds kinky.”

“Sounds like heaven. I’ll be able to drive my Outback. I can bathe and bend my leg. And scratch.” He closed his eyes and sighed, imagining the luxury. “I can remove it to sleep.”

Hunter’s arms tightened, imagining himself pressed back against Cam, bodies curved into each other, both hard and hot and … forever his mind whispered.

Hunt pushed himself away from Cam into a cross-legged position between his legs.

“I have a serious question. How are we going to work together? At the end of the Tamil jars case, when I thought they might go after you, it wrecked me. I had a team to lead; there were hostages.” He shook his head. “This thing between us, it affects other people, not just me.”

Cam withdrew into himself a little. He was certain Hunter didn’t realize how much the work meant to him now that he couldn’t be on a mountain or even exercise his body properly. But he also knew Hunter had to make his decisions based on what made sense for the team.

“Do you want me to quit?”

“No! Hell no, I don’t want you to quit.” Hunter got up, pacing. “It’s not just that I love working with you. It’s that you’re great at this.” He stopped.

“I’d never have solved it in time without you. Never. Two more people dead, maybe three. I was asking a question, Cam, it wasn’t rhetorical. How are we going to work together?”

Cam sat up, allowing his cast leg to rest on the floor. He pointed to the coffee table in front of him. Hunter knew what Cam wanted. He shook his head.

“I can’t sit. Not right now.”

Cam considered him. “What would you be doing if you were home, instead of here? Right now?”

“Cam …” A wtf statement.

“Hunter.” Cam let himself shift slightly; Hunt frowned. “Right now, you’re going to trust me. Answer the question, what would you be doing?”

“I’d be outside helping Ed shovel snow. Keep an area clear so people can get their dogs outside to pee. Make sure the walks at least get salted.” He cocked an eyebrow at Cam’s surprised look. “I’m useful as well as decorative, you know.”

“Then what are you doing inside, now?”

“You don’t have a dog. And you’re a rich guy. Isn’t anyone coming with equipment to shovel you out?”

“Us.”

“What?”

“Us out,” Cam said. “We’re in this together.” He retrieved his crutches from under the couch and stood. “I don’t have a dog, but I do have a studio I can’t get to. And I’d really like to.”

He led the way across the great room, through the mudroom to the door that led outside to the breezeway. “Shovels and whatever across the way, in the garage.” He stood aside, blinking with innocent expectation at Hunter.

Hunt grabbed his jacket off the hook rack, eyeing Cam with not a little suspicion. “Trust you?” he asked, zipping up and fishing his gloves out of the pockets.

Cam shrugged and gave him a sweet smile. Hunter pulled the door open. The glass storm door was solid white two-thirds of the way up.

Hunter tried to push it open. The drift might as well have been a concrete wall. Lips pressed. No way was Hunter Dane backing down in front of Camden Snow.

He took off the gloves. A few seconds of fiddling with the release catches, and he lifted the top pane off the door and leaned it against the wall. The snow stayed in place except for the light dusting a swirl of wind blew in.

Hunt faced the opening and started pushing the snow back from the top.

“Very clever,” Cam said. “Shouldn’t take you too long to-”

A double handful of snow smooshed unceremoniously in his face effectively cut him off.

Hunt whirled around to reload before Cam could react. Not fast enough. A strong arm around his neck, elbow directly under his chin, contracted. Hunt had only a few seconds before the pressure on his carotids took him out.

He threw himself back into Cam, crashing him into the boot bench. When Cam’s arm left his neck to help stop his fall, Hunt came around with a double armful of snow.

“Don’t you dare!” Cam yelled, laughing. But the snow hit his lap, and Hunt grabbed for his waistband. Too slow. Cam’s hand was inside Hunt’s sweatpants first, shoving the ice-cold mess inside.

“Arrrrrrshit!” Hunt dropped to one knee and wrapped a hand behind Cam’s neck. He ducked and pulled. Cam tipped forward. Hunt shoved his arm between Cam’s legs and under his body.

Hunter Dane had always known how to defeat Camden Snow. Cam was strong. Cam was fast. But he hadn’t been in a hundred struggles with drunks and madmen and crazy-ass women.

Hunter did so love being owned by him. But this was boy war.

He ducked and shifted and lifted and stood with Cam over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He swayed his body toward the open top of the door and exposed drift. “Missing the slopes, asshole?” he asked, making as if to shove Cam outside.

“You are SO going to pay for this…” Gasping the words through laughter.

Hunter moved quickly—in the opposite direction. He got Cam through the doorway to the great room with only a single clunk of his cast against the jamb and strode to the couch, dumping him on his back.

Falling across Cam’s body, he reached for the sodden mess of slush in his pants. He managed to get Cam’s waistband pulled out and his freezing wet hand inside.

He didn’t stop at Cam’s sweet, soft cock, but pushed down and back. He had his middle finger in Cam’s hole up to the first knuckle before his sex god could move.

“Hunter!” Cam froze. “Jesus, that’s cold!”

Careful not to move his finger, Hunter nuzzled Cam’s neck and took his earlobe gently between his teeth and pulled. He felt Cam’s buttocks tighten, his dick stir and thicken.

“Trust is a two-way street, remember?” Hunt whispered.

He looked into Cam’s face: eyes soft, unfocused, lips parted. His beautiful boy. Hunt didn’t see the photogenic symmetry of the magazine spreads and posters. He saw the mystery he’d never solve, the depths he’d never reach, the caring for him.

And as he shifted back onto his knees next to Cam and moved the cold, wet flannel pants further down and slipped Cam’s smooth solid length all the way into his mouth, for the first time the word “love” flashed across Hunter’s consciousness.

“Hunter,” Cam breathed his name.

Carefully, Hunt sucked Cam off, not wanting to purposely move inside him, not knowing what would be too much. Cam shifted, lifted up. Hunt’s finger slid out, and he felt more than heard the deep groan.

Laving the cock in his mouth with a firm tongue, he felt Cam push back onto his finger. Hunt kept himself still and straight for Cam to use.

And there on the couch, freezing in the draft from the mudroom, on fire from the mouth and tongue and finger and service, Cam surrendered his control over himself. When his movements elicited the heat lightning of stimulation throughout his core, he grabbed Hunter’s hand, and Hunt grabbed in return.

They stayed like that, as if about to arm wrestle across Cam’s torso for control of his body. But it was only Hunter anchoring Cam to the world.

When the feelings became too much and Cam lifted away, Hunt stopped everything and waited. And Cam learned not to fear the rushes of energy, and let himself—finally—feel deeply. Hunter would take care of him. When he came, he held nothing back: no sound, no movement. And Hunter welcomed him, wanting all of him.

8:00pm

The silence was only broken by the delicate susurration of tiny ice crystals blown off the tops of the drifts. It was a sound Hunter Dane loved. He stood at the edge of the breezeway, the shovel at rest, catching his breath. His exhalations left no clouds in the dry air at altitude.

He looked out at the bright dark. A blanket of champagne powder covered the landscape, a trillion sparkling pinpoints in a black night.

Stepping out into the open air, head back, eyes closed, myriad pricks of ice touched, melted and cooled his face. Longing to stay in the moment forever, knowing his body was rapidly losing the heat from his exertions and his clothes becoming damp, and not being a foolish child, Hunter stepped back out of the night.

HUNT PEEKED INTO THE OVEN. “Is that mac and cheese?”

“Grab a big spoon and bring it out here,” Cam said, putting silverware on the table. “We’ve got hot apple pie for dessert.”

“I got enough cleared to get you to the stairs,” Hunter said. “That should take care of dinner. Doing the stairs later will take care of the pie.”

Cam shrugged. “Let it go. It’s good enough.”

“It’s only good enough to get into the garage or about eight feet into the drive before you’re wading through snow. It drifted almost to the top of the nearest of your driveway lights. That’s like, ten feet.”

Hunt set the big pan on a towel in the center of the wood table. The cheese was still bubbling.

“Looks like a picture in a cookbook,” he said, waving away the bottle of wine Cam held up from the behind the kitchen island.

“You read cookbooks?” Cam slid the pie into the oven and turned it down.

Cam wheeled up with four bottles of water that Hunter took from him.

“At one time, I did,” Hunter answered. “I mostly drooled over the pictures.” He drank one of the bottles down in one. “I worked off-duty at the Slightly Foxed on Larimer,” he explained, loading his plate.

“I don’t get that name; it’s not a used bookstore.” Cam spooned bright red beets onto his plate next to the macaroni.

“It was when it opened.” Hunter passed on the beets, the color too close to blood. “Used books and some new stuff from local writers. And maps, lots of maps. First ones around here to put coffee and armchairs in a bookstore.”

Cam shook his head in admiration. “How do you know all this stuff?” He shoved a huge forkful of macaroni into his mouth.

Hunt shrugged. “My mom used to take me there all the time. All over Larimer, that neighborhood. There were junk shops and second hand clothes stores and shit. Before the urban renewal thing happened.”

“Cool,” Cam said. This was the first time Hunter mentioned anyone in his life who wasn’t a member of the club or cop-related in some way. “So you do have family around here?”

It was the second time that day Cam had asked Hunter about his family. Hunt knew that was what people did in relationships: They exchanged information about the other people in their lives. He wasn’t sure why, exactly. But Cam had talked about his sisters and his family and then asked Hunt about his. He acted like it was no big deal, to ask or answer. It was what people did.

Hunt put down his fork and opened a second bottle of water. He took a mental deep breath.

“No, I don’t. My father’s family disowned him when he married a ‘nigger’ as my grandfather referred to my mother. He declared that no ‘half-breed pickaninny’ would ever inherit a dime of the Dane fortune. You see, my father came from a good family.”

Camden Snow was as white as his name. “I’m sorry,” he said as though someone had died. “So, your mom’s black?”

“As far as my father’s father is concerned, everyone from a ‘mud race’ is the same. As for my mother”—he drank some water—“no one knows exactly. When my grandmother was fourteen, she was walking along a road outside Hopi. A carful of men—grown men—gang-raped her.

“When they were done, they dumped her off the side of the road. She’s been on Third Mesa, at Hotevilla, since. She doesn’t speak of it. Never has. I have no idea what my mother’s biological father was. Besides an asshole who doesn’t deserve to live, I suppose.”

“They made your grandmother pregnant?” Cam’s face crumpled, eyes full.

“Don’t.” The word had teeth; Hunt’s eyes bright with pain and guarded rage. He knew Cam was oddly sheltered: world-traveled, but protected from hardships that weren’t a function of racing down mountains at highway speeds. The first time Cam saw a bloody murder weapon, he’d vomited. But Hunt had no sympathy to spare for him now.

“The end of the story,” Hunter said, carrying his half-empty plate to the island. “Is that I had wonderful parents. My father taught music at Metro State, and my mom was our Parish organist and had private students. They loved each other. They loved me.

“I was ten when my father was killed in an auto-ped by a drunk driver.” He snapped his fingers. “Gone before the ambulance got there.”

Hunter dumped his plate into the sink and ran the disposal. Then he turned off the oven.

“I went to college on the insurance settlement Mom put away for me. It was enough with the modeling that I never had to take a loan. In the middle of my junior year, a doctor called me. My mother was hallucinating. They’d stuck her in on a three-day mental health hold. He wanted to know what drugs she did.”

After putting his plate and silverware into the dishwasher, Hunt began wiping the counter.

“They assumed”—he stopped, coughed—“She was young, only fifty-three. When the drug tests came back negative, they diagnosed her with late-onset schizophrenia. They didn’t look for anything else.”

He stared down at the countertop, swiping the sponge over it with a ferocious intensity.

“They wanted to commit her to a state facility. Told me to go back to school. … I took her to Hotevilla. A few years later a young guy doing an internship at the health clinic got interested. My mother has a dementia similar to Alzheimer’s. Only it makes you crazy before it lets you forget. She was supposed to be dead by now. But my grandmother won’t allow it.”

He threw the sponge into the sink, rinsed his hands and grabbed a towel.

“I go up once a month and take them good food, whatever they need. I think they give most of it away.”

Hunt went back to the table and took his seat.

Cam had gotten control of his face and his emotions. But he couldn’t ignore the vision of Hunter, the morning after that first night, pulling away after Cam had kissed him sweetly.

“I care for people, in that I do things for their benefit. I just don’t do all the other things. …touch someone just to touch them, when it serves no other purpose…”

Cam wondered when the last time was Hunter had felt his mother’s touch?

“Can I go with you sometime?” Cam asked. “When I can walk again?”

“It’s not a good idea.” Final.

“Can you tell me why?” Cam was careful to keep the hurt from his tone.

Hunter rubbed his face hard with both hands, reminding himself that Cam was a fine, caring man who would never call anyone a disgusting, dehumanizing name. He deserved better than Hunter’s ancient, impotent wrath.

“You really can’t understand,” Hunt said, leaning forward. “They need peace. Constancy. If you showed up with me, it could … disturb that. Even after you left. There might be repercussions. In the place where they are, that particular place, to a lot of people, you’re the enemy.”

Something inside Cam shrank and crumpled. “Am I to you?”

Hunter looked away. “When I told you that you’d get hurt, you should have believed me.”

“Am I to you?”

Hunter shook his head no, his throat too tight to risk words.

Camden Snow had never had an intimate relationship outside of his family. There’d been many guys he’d hung with and had sex with and liked. But he’d never had a boyfriend or real lover any more than Hunter had. For Cam, it had simply been that he had no time or feeling to spare; everything went into the training, the slopes and wind and speed and torque and victory.

Once diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease, accepting the inevitability of a descent into uncontrollable body spasms and madness and death, he couldn’t risk loving.

He knew only one man who might be strong enough to not abandon him, and that man avoided him. Until he hadn’t. Hunter Dane had dropped to his knees and given Cam possibility.

Now, he knew why his man was strong enough to stay with him. Now, he knew how strong Hunter Dane needed him to be. As strong as he was, himself.

Cam fixed Hunt with a direct stare, cool and removed, to give him the solid support he needed to speak.

“Tell me what am I to you,” he ordered.

Hunter raised a shattered countenance. “You’re”—he cast about for the right word—“refuge.”

THEY WORKED IN SILENCE, cleaning up after dinner. Cam wrapped the untouched pie in plastic. Hunt put things on high shelves that were difficult for Cam to reach. They touched often in the space between the island and the counter. Hunter on his feet, Cam in the chair. Thigh to shoulder, hand to hip. Each taking comfort in proximity and industry and connection.

Hunt finished folding the last dishtowel and hung it on the rack at the end of the island.

“How about you pour us a couple brandies and meet me by the fire?” Cam asked.

“Sounds good,” Hunt answered. “Like something Gloria Swanson said to William Holden in Sunset Boulevard.”

Cam grinned. The phone rang and he rolled off to the other end of the room to answer.

Hunter hit the head first. He washed his hands longer than usual, working up a thick lather, spreading it up over his wrists and halfway up his forearms. He hated it when his hands smelled like kitchen cleaning.

Cam had matching soap and lotion dispensers in silver and black; the products gave off a faint clean almond scent. Hunt wondered if it was his choice or something else his mother supplied.

When he came out, he located two small snifters and poured out healthy dollops of Armagnac. Hunt didn’t know dicksquat about brandy, but it was the only one in Cam’s liquor cabinet.

Cam was on the phone when Hunter joined him.

“I have no idea; I’d have to be there. … You still have TV. … Yeah, of course, I am … Gran, the whole development is built for this kind of storm, we have our own snow plow company and everything.” He rolled his eyes at Hunt as he listened, but his smile was soft.

Hunt started to get up, to give him some privacy. Cam waved him back down.

“I’m not alone … I am telling you the truth, Hunter’s here. … Right here, yes. …” He shot Hunter an evil grin. “Sure.” Cam touched a button on the base that activated the speaker.

Hunt jumped, but Cam grabbed his wrist and pulled him down. “Hunter, this is my grandmother, Delores Snow.”

“Mrs. Snow,” he said automatically. “Very nice to meet you.”

The voice that came back was a strong and sultry contralto that sounded not at all grandmotherly. “Thank you. You’re a puzzle and mystery solver, Camden tells us.”

“I’m a homicide detective.”

“Yes, but beyond that. He was stumping us all with matchstick puzzles at Thanksgiving. He says you’re quite a master of them.”

Hunter had never in his life had a conversation like this one, where someone just wanted to know you and asked. His instinct was to excuse himself. He thought treating her like an important witness or judge was his best option.

“I like them,” he said. “I like all kinds of puzzles and games.”

“Good. When you come over, we’ll play a few. Right now, I have a mystery I need solved.”

“Gran, he’s not a computer expert,” Cam cut in.

“Hush now, and you listen, too. Are you with me, Hunter Dane?”

He grabbed the notepad and pen Cam kept next to the phone. “Ready when you are, Mrs. Snow.”

“Do you want ‘just the facts, ma’am’?” Delores Snow asked, referring to the signature line of an iconic TV detective.

“I’d rather hear the whole story, if you don’t mind,” Hunter replied, ignoring Cam’s frantic head-shaking.

No one was better at coordinating information than Camden Snow. But he was no detective. Hearing every detail from a witness or suspect gave Hunter the most working data. And he wanted to please this woman if he could, if for no other reason than to pay her back in some small way for her cooking.

“I don’t mind at all,” she said. “I am in my home office working on my computer. It’s a desktop. A tower, you see. I’d rather be useful than sit around like a mindless lump watching television.”

“If I can interrupt, where in the house is your office?”

“Downstairs, off the kitchen. Short arm of an L, used to be a laundry room. I moved that upstairs, you see, no sense whatsoever in having laundry downstairs. I told Camden that when he was building his house.”

Hunt nodded, though she couldn’t see him. “I agree, not much downstairs but dishtowels.” Hunt scratched a quick note: sketch layout of office and adjoining. He handed Cam the pad.

After he read the note, Cam shot Hunter an exasperated look and tried to hand it back. Hunt pointed firmly at the paper and gave Cam a do it look. Knowing better than to argue with Hunt in cop mode, Cam got to work.

“Precisely!” Delores sounded very satisfied with Hunter. “I’d been working about an hour when the computer went off. Click - off. Just like that. Nothing happens when I press the power button. My electricity is still on.”

“Pardon me, but were you being literal just now? Did you hear a click?” Hunter asked.

Silence. Then. “You know, I didn’t think I was being literal, but now that you ask, I did hear something. I think. But there was a sort of static pop from the monitor at the same time, so maybe I’m imagining it.”

Hunter made a note. “Thank you. Please go on.”

“I looked at the power strip. That took some effort, you see, because it’s a very big heavy desk very close to the wall and there’s a cabinet next to it. I had to get a flashlight and lean all the way over. Of course, many things had to be moved so I could peek back there. It’s still plugged in. So is the monitor, and it works fine.”

“The monitor is plugged into the power strip?”

“The computer is in the power strip. The monitor in the wall. I got this power strip because it’s supposed to protect against these big surges of electricity. Lightning and all that. We get plenty of lightning here, you see, we’re out on the plains. But not usually during blizzards.”

Hunter took the pad back from Cam. “Nothing else is plugged into the strip?”

“No. My lamp is on the opposite side and uses an outlet over here.”

“Will you give me a minute, ma’am?”

“Take all the time you need. But start calling me Dee.”

“Thanks, Dee.”

Hunt studied Cam’s diagram. The office was essentially a wide hallway, open at one end to the kitchen around the corner, the long arm of the L. The other end of the room gave access to the garage through a door.

“Dee, does the door to the garage have weather stripping at the bottom?”

A pause.

“Gran?” Cam asked.

“How do you know there’s a door to my garage?”

“I made him a sketch,” Cam said. “He asked me while you were talking.”

“Smart man. No, detective, it does not.”

Hunter was making more notes. “And you keep a kitchen trash under your sink?”

“I do.” They could hear the puzzlement in her voice.

“Well,” Hunt said, “I have an hypothesis, but it’s just guesswork based on the assumption the problem isn’t with the computer, itself.”

Cam looked surprised.

“Let’s hear it,” Dee told him. “We’ll see if you live up to your reputation.”

“A power strip with a surge protector has a switch on top. What they call a rocker switch. Sometimes there’s a light, or the rocker itself is a light, to tell you the power is on. Sometimes there isn’t. My assumption is yours doesn’t have one, or you would have mentioned the light being on. That’s not a detail you’d miss.”

“Are you trying to flatter me?” She sounded amused.

“No, I’m not,” Hunter answered. “I’m reporting an assumption based on observation. I also assume the power strip is flat on the floor or you wouldn’t be able to see it, well.

“My theory is you have a mouse. Maybe driven inside by the storm. “Came in from the garage under the door, ran along the wall, stepped on the rocker and shut off the power. It made its way to the kitchen, probably looking for a meal in your trash.”

“Hang on,” Dee said. They heard the clunk as she put the phone down.

Cam was grinning and shaking his head. “If you’re right, you’ll have a fan forever.”

“Mouse droppings!” They heard Dee call out some distance from the receiver. There was a clunking and scraping close to the phone. Hunter was nodding; Cam was mystified. Hunt handed him another note.

Broom handle

“It’s on!” Dee crowed into the phone. “Hunter Dane, I’m baking you muffins!”

Hunt made a quick inventory of appropriate responses. “I’d be delighted to have anything you bake, Dee. Everything Cam’s ever given me has been amazingly good. Also not flattery.”

Cam switched off the speaker and grabbed up the handset. “So. You going to tell Mom to get over herself? … I know … That’s all I’ve been saying.”

Hunter held the brandy snifters in his hands, warming them both while Cam finished his conversation. Hunt was content; he got to fix something.

Cam hung up the phone, leaned over and pulled Hunter in for a kiss. Hunt’s arms went out, keeping the snifters upright. Cam held his face with both hands, and their tongues met in a slow waltz.

After he pulled back, Cam took one of the snifters and held it up in a salute to Hunter before he took a sip. They both settled in with their drinks as before, at either end, facing each other.

“I’m going to answer your question, now,” Cam told him. “The way we work together is to work together. Yeah, it’s only been thirty-three days. And that’s the key. This is new for both of us. Not just each other being new, but being in this kind of relationship.”

“Wait.” Hunter frowned. “You said you knew how to have a relationship.”

“I do. Just haven’t done it with a guy before.” Cam said.

“You had an intimate relationship with a girl?”

“Four girls. Two sisters, a mother and a grandmother,” Cam said.

Hunt was not amused. “You know what I mean.”

“I do. But you don’t know what I mean. I mean I know what it is to be committed. To negotiate issues. To know, not just trust, but know as much as I know there’s a drink in my hand, none of those people would ever abandon me. No matter what kind of major asshole I might turn out to be.”

Cam lifted his glass to his lips and tipped the entire contents down his throat.

He was teasing Hunter, who knew exactly what he was doing. They’d been at work...

Cam twisted off the cap and downed half the bottle of juice in a couple swallows. The ripples of his throat …

“I’m beginning to feel sexually harassed,” Cam smirked.

“It’s just new, being together like this,” Hunter said. “We’ll get used to it.”

“That would be too bad. We going to discuss the case or go into your office, and I’ll drink the rest of this for you?”

“You trying to seduce me?” Hunter asked as Cam set the empty snifter on the sofa table.

“I’m trying to remind you. … Looks like I succeeded,” he said, his eyes on the mound stretching the crotch of Hunt’s sweatpants.

“Remind me of a time we didn’t do it?”

“Remind you of what you told me.”

Hunter nodded and finished his own drink. “We’ll get used to it? That’s how we work together?”

Cam shrugged. “Yeah. Look, cops are married. Wives, or maybe husbands, stay home and deal with the danger every day. They deal. So will we. You have to give this time. You have to believe in us.”

Hunt pulled his knees up and crossed his forearms on them. “Bullshit about your family aside, you misled me. Lied to me. That’s hard to believe in.”

“You think I lied to you.”

“You did.”

Cam looked at his lover, huddled behind the bulwark of his legs and arms, and knew he was hurt and afraid.

“You once told me you didn’t hurt me on purpose. Well, I didn’t mislead you on purpose, either. Think about it, you know I didn’t.” Cam stayed still, giving Hunt time to work it through.

“I warned you, more than once, you’d get hurt,” Hunter said. “I told you what I am. So, yeah, I hurt you. But not on purpose. I already explained, I don’t do relationships. I don’t know how.”

Cam pulled Hunter up until their mouths almost met. “I know how to have a relationship, Hunter,” Cam whispered and brought them together.

Hunt dropped his forehead onto his arms and stayed that way a long time. When they came, his words were spoken into the space between his knees and his heart. “You know what I wanted when I came here?”

“What was that?” Cam asked.

Hunt raised his head. “I wanted to sleep and fuck and watch TV and eat popcorn and fuck some more, right on this couch.” He crossed his legs and sat up. “But it’s been like a marathon therapy session, hasn’t it? With you in the role of therapist.”

Cam shrugged. “We did sleep and fuck and eat, though not popcorn. Know what I hoped for the storm?”

Hunter shook his head.

“That you’d be here. That you’d get done with the case and still want to be with me. And it’s all been great, to me. But”— he gestured to the side of the fireplace—“right now, get my sticks.”

Hunter fetched Cam’s crutches from where they leaned against the edge of the mantlepiece. Cam stood up.

“Have a seat and wait for me,” Cam said, and Hunt realized it was an order. Cam was shifting.

Hunter felt the familiar hollowing and rushing as blood moved into his lower body. Just being near Cam in Dom mode excited the hell out of him. And if that was tinged with a thrill of fear, it only made his yearning more acute.

Cam went into the alcove next to the fireplace where his Olympic medals lay in an unlighted glass case mounted on the wall. Underneath, was an antique five-drawer cabinet.

Hunt sat down, ready to jump up if Cam needed any help. He could just make out his back and butt, heard a drawer slide open, a clink of metal. The drawer close.

Cam returned, stopping on the far side of the coffee table. He took something from his pocket that flashed and gleamed, and dropped it on the table in front of Hunter.

A stainless steel disciplinary dog collar, a choker, with bent prongs on the inside of every link. It wasn’t a BDSM toy; it was an actual dog collar found in any pet store. A length of chain looped through the ends of the links. Jerking on the chain tightened the collar so the metal prongs dug into the wearer’s flesh.

The blood drained from Hunter’s head so fast he thought he’d faint where he sat.

“Breathe,” Cam ordered.

Hunt obeyed automatically and looked up. But Cam’s face in the firelight was all ruddy planes and sharp-edged shadows. His mouth a black line.

“Twenty-four hours TPE. Starting when you hand that back to me and ask me to collar you.” Cam went silent and stone-faced.

TPE. Total Power Exchange. Cam’s standard operating system at Scene and Not Heard, the exclusive BDSM club they belonged to. In his case, no safewords, no limits. Absolute submission. Absolute domination. Hunt had avoided Cam—compelling, enticing by the sheer power of his presence—because of it.

Until complete surrender was the only way.

“There are no limits. You have no safeword. You do nothing I do not order. I don’t stop until I’m done.”

Now, without explanation, Cam wanted not a limited session, but twenty-four hours of Hunter having no will of his own. Of having to ask to use the bathroom. And if Cam decided Hunt would kneel until he shit on himself, he’d have to do that.

But Hunter also remembered another time. In a car in the dark working against time to solve a murder.

Cam slid further into his mouth and throat. Hunt’s lips stretched so far he thought they would tear.

With both fists buried in his hair, Cam slowed his thrusts to feel every millimeter and moment of Hunter serving him. He was close.

“Bitch“—he breathed the mantra with every drive of his cock—”bitch … bitch … bitch … you fucking … bitch … you sonuva … bitch … You … own me.” Wave after wave of cum poured down Hunt’s throat, open and paralyzed by Cam’s girth.

Cam spasmed a last time and pulled out quickly. Hunter gasped, throat raw, greedy for the cool air.

Cam searched Hunt’s pockets for the keys and unlocked the cuffs. Hunter slid back, under the steering wheel, legs akimbo on the floor. He reached a trembling hand down and eased his aching erection to a less painful position.

Head on the seat, Hunt looked up at Cam: satiated, half-closed eyes on Hunter. Unreadable.

And Hunter Dane knew who the killer was.

In that moment, he appreciated Camden Snow more than any person he’d ever known. Cam was perfect.

“How do you always do that?”

“You mean force you to take what you need?” Cam pushed damp hair off Hunt’s forehead.

“Know what I need.”

Cam grabbed Hunter by the tie, pulling him into a quick kiss. “Sexual psychic,” he said.

Hunt looked around the brightly lit car interior. “Think maybe next time you could choose a more private place for it?”

Cam shook his head with deliberation back and forth. “Anything you need, Hunter. Anytime. Anywhere.”

Hunter wondered why Cam thought TPE is what he needed. The fear streamed through his center, from his throat to his gut, hollow and cold. But there was also the lure of letting go, of having no responsibilities at all.

No way to help, no way to hurt.

“Did anyone ever tell you, you think too much?” Cam asked.

“Did anyone ever not?”

He wouldn’t have to think.

Hunter Dane picked up the collar and dropped to his knees.

10:30pm

“Unless you’re carrying out specific orders, you’ll sit at my feet. Some part of your body will always be in contact with mine,” Cam said after he fit the collar to Hunter’s neck.

Surprised at not being expected to kneel, it took a few seconds for Hunter to react. He folded himself into a half-lotus and, careful of the crutches, slid close to Cam and laid his knee on the top of Cam’s foot. Hunt had to bend his head far back to watch Cam’s face.

“You will call me ‘Sir’ and look at me when I speak to you. Otherwise, eyes down. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Sir.” The fear had sent his balls into retreat, but with Cam’s words, with his cool expectation of obedience, Hunt felt the familiar tightening and tingling.

“If you need to speak without being told to, kneel and wait to be recognized. You’re an experienced sub. You know how to behave.”

Hunter didn’t nod or twitch or speak.

“Stand up and strip.”

I WANT TO SERVE YOU, Hunter had answered when Cam asked if he wanted to be dominant. Cam wondered at the irony of it—that Hunt declared his urgent desire to serve, the very same desire Cam had: to serve his sub by giving him exactly what he needed.

His eyes moved over Hunter’s body as he revealed himself, the cool light from a side table lamp playing against the warm glow from the fire, creating soft shadings of muscles bunching and skin stretched over ribs and collarbones—the dark valley between his glutes, the shadows underneath them.

If Cam could have anything he wished at that moment, his big sketch pad and a charcoal stick would materialize in his hands. He’d use the power Hunter had gifted him to make him stand and turn and bend and stretch. And Cam would capture him again and again.

Hunter finally stood nude before him, cock thickened and lifted slightly away from his body in response to his humiliation and Cam’s power. Cam wanted to take him then: torture him and ravage him. But he had a plan.

“Fetch my club bag; it’s in my car.” Cam watched realization and acceptance flow across Hunter’s face in the space of a few seconds. Saw his cock darken and rise.

Hunter turned and walked away into the mudroom. Cam heard the door to the breezeway open, the storm door’s metallic squeak and rattle as it closed. Hunter had stepped out into the freezing night.

It made him hard so fast, he barely registered the rise. Ignoring this, he returned to the alcove and took a thick folded sheet from the bottom drawer. It was waterproof on one side and would protect his sofa from bodily fluids. He returned and tossed it on the coffee table.

When Hunter returned, Cam would send him on more errands, to prepare the space for his ordeal. He’d cover the cushions, lay out items from Cam’s gym bag: lubricating oil and cloth wipes and a whippy black rod for his punishments. Finally, Hunter would go back outside to fill a small drinks cooler with fresh snow.

Orchestrating the build of anticipation and anxiety was one of Cam’s special talents. Prolonging a sub’s arousal, controlling his depth of need, retreat from completion and vulnerability to pain and pleasure was Cam’s genius.

CAMDEN SNOW HAD HUNTER DANE across his lap for over half an hour before frustration and pain spilled over in a steady stream of tears that soaked into the sheet under Hunt’s cheek. Saliva from Hunter’s open mouth had created a larger wet spot the tears were lost in.

He’d made Hunt lie across his thighs, from right to left. His head faced the back so Cam could see his expressions and hear the sounds of pain and arousal clearly. Hunt’s hands lay palms up in the small of his back. His slightly open legs stretched out, toes pointed, soles up.

Once Cam positioned Hunter, making sure his junk hung down between Cam’s open thighs, he had given his sub one order: lie still. Hunt’s only restraint was his promise of obedience, the weight of his collar. The lure of submission.

The first time Hunter’s hands clenched in response to Cam’s teasing touches, the rod connected swiftly and sharply with the sole of one foot. The pain was exquisite.

“Hands open,” Cam said after the brief, surprised yelp.

When Hunt complied, Cam laid the thin rod across his palms twice, leaving red welts. Each time, Cam tightened his fist and jacked Hunter hard, connecting the pain and punishment to arousal.

He rubbed his own throbbing cock against Hunter’s oiled hip so he’d know how much making him suffer turned Cam on.

“Oh yeah, that hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Sir,” Hunter gasped, his face flushed.

But Hunter Dane didn’t weep from pain.

Cam had continued working him with both hands. One finger outlining his asshole, dipping inside and withdrawing to massage and circle and dart in and out: a swift, soft fucking.

Cam’s other hand stayed on Hunter’s cock, held in the vee of Cam’s fingers running firmly up and over, squeezing the slick head, retreating, stroking to the base. The process repeated. Never tight enough. Never fast enough.

Hunter’s concentration was on not moving, so every keening groaning guttural sound of his suffering and lust and frustration poured out. Finally the tears ran as his body vibrated with the need to move and the effort to stay still.

Cam felt Hunt’s legs stiffen, saw his sac draw tight and knew he was about to come in spite of the absence of the tight strokes that he’d usually need to get there.

Flipping open the top of the cooler, Cam scooped up a handful of snow and slapped it between Hunter’s legs.

He gasped; his head came off the sheet. The rod came down on his ass and thighs until he shoved his head back down.

Cam dropped the rod and slathered the icy mess around Hunt’s balls and up between his cheeks, not allowing it to reach and cool the several bright red welts. Instead, Cam spread Hunt open and filled the valley with the slush, forcing it into his hole. In all of this, Cam did not allow the cold to contact Hunter’s cock.

While his hand and fingers were thoroughly chilled, Cam thrust his thumb into Hunt’s asshole and lightly stroked the bundle of muscle and nerves covering his swollen prostate. Hunter sobbed, and Cam put his free hand, cold and wet, over Hunter’s upturned palms. He wrapped his fingers around Hunt’s hands, kept his thumb inside Hunt’s ass.

“Slow. Slow down … relax … good job … shhhh … okay … good … good boy …” Cam soothed Hunter until he quieted and his breathing normalized. Cam felt him relax. “There you go … yeah … take a minute … then we’ll start again.”

Thursday, December 1st

12:37am

Cam kept Hunt across his lap for another forty minutes. It was harder to control his arousal the second time. Hunt was primed, swollen, anticipating Cam’s moves.

Cam retrieved the silky smooth tiger maple buttplug from his bag. He knew Hunter still felt humiliation from anal play, especially when he was exposed to Cam’s sight. He had Hunt fold his arms across his upper chest, to give Cam access to his nipples.

Alternating right nipple to left, fingers pinching, rolling, flicking the hard, extended nubs, Cam’s other hand twisted, rocked and fucked him with the round, oiled head of the plug. His avoidance of cock and balls kept Hunter from coming while maintaining the frustration, shame in pleasure, and urgent aching need to come that comprised Hunter’s personal cocktail of sexual agony.

Hunter mewled and huffed, choked and groaned and finally wailed in despair. But he did not move. He gave Cam no further disobedience to punish.

But Cam hadn’t come, either, and his own erection ached and throbbed. Finally, he pulled Hunt against himself, against his raging hard-on, and ground and thrust. When he was about to shoot, he picked up the rod.

With every thrust, the rod struck cheeks or thighs. Hunter’s short barking grunts pushed Cam closer until he clutched and clenched. His cum arced up, the thick hot stream falling back onto Hunter’s ass, pooling around the plug, running down his crack.

Hunter cried out again when Cam removed the plug. But he did not come.

“Get up.”

Sweating and shaking, Hunter managed to get to his feet, facing Cam. His shaft was huge and dark red. Cam could see the fast pulse in the swollen vein that ran a crooked path along the side and ducked underneath.

“Go upstairs. Toilet, douche, shower. Dry your hair. Drink a bottle of water. In that order. Wait for me at the foot of the bed. You understand?”

“Yes, Sir.”

Cam waved him toward the stairs.

He waited for a few minutes until he heard the toilet flush. Grabbing his crutches, he went to the downstairs bathroom and stripped. His pants were wet from melted snow, sticky with precum from them both. Cam cleaned up, and when he heard the upstairs shower running, heused his lift chair to get to his loft bedroom.

It was hard for a Dom to make a powerful entrance getting off a lift chair and onto crutches. Normally, he wouldn’t give a fleafuck about image; his power was himself and he knew it. And he knew Hunter responded to who he was, and that had never changed.

But tonight, Hunt needed as much Dom as Cam could conjure up for him. He donned his standard jeans and leather belt and white dress shirt: what he always wore at the club. He used the dresser mirror to make sure his hair was it’s usual carefully constructed wild-ass mess.

He passed on socks or shoes and went to work stripping the comforter and pillows from the bed. He ran the restraint chains up over the headboard inside the corner posts and laid them, with the restraints attached, on the mattress.

The shower went off, and a few minutes later the hair dryer came on. Positioning himself just inside his gym, Cam left the door open a crack, giving himself a view of the bed and bathroom door beyond.

Shortly, Hunter appeared in the bathroom doorway—sleek, nude, graceful. He paused for a moment, staring at the bed. Cam had been there. But Hunt hadn’t been told to look for him or think about him or wonder what would happen after the black leather restraints on the white sheets were strapped around his wrists.

He’d been told to wait at the foot of the bed which was a straight shot from the bathroom door. Hunt walked directly to it and stopped. He had not been told to kneel or face a certain direction. He dropped his head and waited.

Cam slipped quietly back into the bedroom. At the head of the bed, he laid his crutches on the floor and tucked them under the bed frame. Leaning back against the wall, he crossed his arms over his chest and regarded Hunter.

“Turn around.”

Hunter complied without raising his head. His muscled back was unmarked, his well-defined buttocks striped on both sides with thin red welts. There were more stripes on his thighs. He stood perfectly still. Perfectly obedient.

“Turn around and look at me.”

When he did, Hunt’s eyes went to the white shirt rolled halfway up Cam’s forearms, the jeans that Hunter knew molded to his ass and loosely cupped his package. He thought incongruously what a good job someone had done with the alterations that hid the cast, but still allowed Cam to get his pants on, while also noticing the prominent bulge next to Cam’s fly.

An image flashed so real in his mind, his mouth watered: Cam sitting on the end of the bed. Hunt on his knees, precum trickling down his throat. Cam’s fist in his hair, a hand on the back of his neck …

“At my face, not my crotch.”

Hunt’s eyes flicked up, and the base carnality and animal need in them caught Cam’s breath. Cam noted the pulse in Hunter’s sternal notch, his stiff cock and wet lips. Cam had wanted so much to spend this time they had together, the time of the storm apart from the world, making love to Hunter Dane.

He wanted to bind him with pleasures and flog him into ecstasy and fuck him until he passed out.

Now, Hunter waited. Compliant, desperate and aroused simply by Cam’s appearance. Cam hungered to throw him down and slam into him.

For a few moments, he gave himself over to a primal hunger so acute he strained the buttons of his fly and his vision narrowed to the tall figure in the lamplight. Somewhere in the dim recesses of his mind, he wondered when, if ever, he would give in to the voracious need to use this man without regard to anything but his own need.

But this was not that time, if it ever came. As much as he might want it, Cam knew it wasn’t what Hunter needed him to do.

“Lie face down, as far up the bed as possible. Arms out to the sides.”

Hunter crawled along the mattress until he felt the wooden headboard against the top of his skull and lowered himself. Stretching out his arms out, he turned his head to keep his eyes on his Dom.

Cam pivoted off the wall, leaning against the side of the tall bed. He strapped the near restraint around Hunter’s arm, close to the shoulder. Slipping two fingers between leather and skin, he checked to make sure the tight band around the lower part of the deltoid above the biceps allowed for blood flow.

The chain fed through a metal loop on the restraint. Cam took the S-hook at the end and attached it to a link high enough to raise Hunter’s shoulder and arm off the mattress.

Dropping one knee next to Hunt’s ribcage, Cam leaned over and did the same to the other arm. He opened his nightstand drawer and took out a blindfold. There was nothing Hunter needed to see, and everything to feel.

Hunt’s head hung down; he had not been told to raise it. The restraints forced his shoulders back and his arms out with no support, nothing to hold onto. The angle of the chains kept him pressed into the headboard. Cam leaned over him and slipped the stretchy black band, wide and soft, over his eyes.

His personal darkness, anxiety and arousal, acutely attuned Hunt’s senses. The mattress depressing. The drawer closing. A hand under his hip tilted him up. Something placed beneath. Allowed to roll back, his erection slid across a smooth, pliant surface. Plastic or rubber. Something he would slick with precum, he was sure. Something that would sink into the mattress top if he tried to get relief for his dick he was sure would soon be tight to bursting.

Cam moving over him. The heat of his body close to the skin of Hunter’s back. His voice close behind Hunter’s head.

“You can move your arms but do not touch anything with your hands. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Sir,” Hunter said.

“I only want to hear one thing from you tonight. I do not want to hear moaning or grunting or screaming or any other thing but a single word.”

This surprised Hunt. Cam always wanted his sounds. And, in fact, refused to allow Hunter to suppress them.

“From this moment on you only say one thing: my name. Do you understand?”

Hunt hesitated … then, “Cam.” His head pulled back by the hair. Warm breath at his ear.

“I am all there is.”

His earlobe between Cam’s teeth, sucked and pulled and bitten until Hunter cried out.

“Cam!”

“Don’t disappoint me, Hunter,” Cam whispered. “You promised.”

CAM MOVED TO THE END of the bed. He gripped each of Hunt’s legs just below the knee and pushed. Hunter’s legs bent, and his ass popped up. The lift of his shoulders kept his back curved into the mattress, his butt presented, with his asshole facing the ceiling.

“Hold.”

Cam ran his hands over Hunt’s backside and down the curve of his body and up the slope of his back. “Beautiful. Remind me to put you in this position when I decide to paddle you, sometime.”

A rattle of chains was Hunter’s only response as his arms flailed briefly in his humiliation. Cam’s jeans tightened even more.

He settled on his stomach between Hunter’s legs, making sure Hunt felt the fabric of his shirt against his skin. Being the only one nude, exposed while Cam was shielded by his clothing, would increase Hunter’s sense of powerlessness.

Cam trapped Hunt’s thighs between his biceps and his chest, locking his elbows in. His hands easily reached Hunter’s buttcheeks. Cam traced the welts with his fingers and was rewarded with a quiver of flesh and the sound of his name.

“Cam … Cam…”

Cam spread the smooth ovals apart, lowered his head, and licked Hunter from taint to tailbone with one firm stroke of his tongue. He tasted of bodywash and a musk unique to himself. Controlled by position and submission, Hunter reacted with a deep intake of breath but did not say Cam’s name.

Cam gently scraped and sucked the smooth skin at the juncture of cheeks and sacrum. He followed the incurved coccyx down and in with his tongue, pressing firmly, knowing the nerves that served every part of Hunter’s ass and genitals, radiated out beneath.

A shudder ran the length of Hunter’s body; but still, he did not speak.

Cam smiled into Hunter’s warm skin. Hunt’s resistance only fueled Cam’s excitement, knowing it was an attempt to disconnect himself. A barricade of silence against what was being done to his ass and that he could not stop it.

Cam allowed no barriers. Hunter would say Cam’s name a thousand times that night before Cam was through with him. He would accept, acknowledge and know.

Cam raised his head, released his hold and crossed his arms over the small of Hunt’s back. Cam hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. Turning his head, he rubbed his bristly cheek over the welts the rod had left. Chains rattled. Cam switched sides and rubbed harder. “I own you, Hunter. Did you forget?”

Hunter’s body jerked underneath him, his lungs working like bellows. But he did not answer.

“I guess you did.” He opened Hunter again. His beard scoured the tender flesh inside. Pressing the globes of Hunt’s ass against his face, he rubbed Hunter raw, only pausing to speak.

“Mine - always mine. ... Every time you clench, every step you take ... every chair you avoid, you’ll feel me here. … Wherever you are ... I own you.”

Holding Hunt open, Cam covered the deep cleft with his mouth, using the flat of his tongue on Hunter’s asshole, massaging, stroking, circling. Hunter trembled beneath him, but he could not clench while Cam held him in position.

Hunter’s arms flailed wildly, the tension in his shoulders becoming unbearable, but with his back bowed in, he couldn't risk a power move to get away from the torture of thumbs on skin beaten and shredded and the thrill of—

His thoughts scattered as Cam’s rolled tongue pushed into him, the silken underside sliding against the interior of his sphincter. The thought was unbearable, of the tongue flicking in and out of—him. The shame was his cock throbbing, pouring hot liquid, wanting it deeper. The feeling of streams of heat and energy along nerve paths into his balls, into his cock, up his spine was ecstasy.

Everywhere, it was everywhere, he was everywhere inside him, he was-

The tongue opened, a rougher surface driving in and out, fucking, fucking his - “Caaaammmm!” Hunter cried out the name as submission overwhelmed him, arms slack, he hung bowed and helpless.

Cam thrust into the slightly sour depths of his sub, curling up, the tip finding a part of the muscle covering Hunter’s prostate. Pulling back, working the rim, thrusting again.

Hunter wept his name, “Ca-cam … Cam …Cammmm …”

The litany went on, an eloquent declaration of extreme arousal, a plea for release, an acceptance of Cam’s domination and power.

Cam angled his head just enough to allow himself to breathe and, keeping his tongue deeply inside his sub, kneaded his sore buttocks.

Hunt choked on his own breath, and Cam moved one hand underneath to tease his slick glans, rub a knuckle along the underside of his cock, squeeze his balls in a quick tight torment and then gently stroke them underneath.

Cam worked his sub deftly, knowing what Hunter loved and hated and responded to most deeply, and Hunter cried and huffed and called Cam’s name. Camden Snow was a very strong man, and he kept his mouth and tongue working, his hands moving, his sub insane with need and pain until he feared Hunter would come on his own.

Cam stopped and moved himself up and over Hunter’s body, dragging his tongue the full length of Hunt’s sweat-salty spine to the nape of his neck. He buried his throbbing length to the root, with no resistance, and unstrapped the restraints.

Hunter collapsed beneath him.

Cam wrapped Hunter in his arms and his good leg and his thick strong cock. He rested his cheek against the side of Hunter’s head.

“Who do you belong to?”

“Cam,” came the exhausted whisper.

“Where am I? Say the other words now.”

“In me … everywhere.”

“When am I in you, Hunter?”

“Always.”

Cam flexed his hips and fucked Hunt slowly, steadily.

“Cam …” Hunter breathed.

And fell asleep.

4:30am

In the pitch black and dead quiet, Cam lay awake with his arms wrapped around Hunter, who had his head on Cam’s chest, an arm around his waist, and one leg thrown over Cam’s thigh. But he breathed evenly, peacefully, deeply asleep.

Cam didn’t want to sleep; he wanted to be there if Hunter tensed and shifted into a nightmare. Lying there, Cam marveled that Hunter slept so soundly with the prongs of the collar pressed into the side of his neck.

But Hunt had slept through more than that. After he’d fallen asleep, Cam continued his slow, steady fucking, using his fingers at the base of his shaft to help himself get off. He’d gotten the protective mat out from under Hunt and the comforter off the floor to throw over him.

Cam went to pee and clean up, wishing again they’d been able to have the simpler, easier, sexier time he’d planned. But Camden Snow was acutely aware that someday, when Hunter was overwhelmed with the care of a Huntington’s patient, he also would wish he’d chosen someone simpler and easier and by that time, surely sexier.

Cam cleaned himself with a wet wipe and washed his hands.

As he stripped off his jeans and shirt, he thought if the day went well, there was still time for the kind of snowed-in retreat he wanted. Albeit Hunter’s ass would have to be handled with care. He smiled in the dark, finding his way back into bed. He did rather like handling Hunter’s ass with care.

He’d no sooner laid back against the pillow than Hunter swarmed over him, remarkably still asleep. Cam had held him close, stroking his hair, kissing him gently on the forehead until he relaxed and his breathing deepened.

The plan had been to make him come at the end, but the falling asleep aborted that plan. Cam would take care of it in the morning. Something reassuring. Something for Hunter before the last phase of the plan began.

While contemplating the best way to bring his lover to orgasm, Cam drifted off.

9:40am

Hunter opened his eyes to find himself looking up into Cam’s ice-blue ones. He started to smile and say good morning when he shifted slightly and the collar clinked and the prongs bit harder into his neck. He remembered: TPE.

“In the second drawer of my dresser find a pair of mid-thigh, microfiber mesh briefs. Gray, black trim. Fold them neatly and leave them on the long counter in the bathroom. Use the toilet, drink a bottle of water. Shower. Use a washcloth to soap everything that hurts. Twice. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Sir.”

ADJUSTING THE SHOWER TO PULSE, Hunter allowed the hot water to pound his aching shoulders and neck through the collar. Hands flat on the wall, head down, he vaguely recalled Cam’s cock pushing into him. He’d realized Cam had come inside him when he walked to the bathroom. The dribble of fluid from his hole spread and burned the insides of his cheeks.

Every time you clench, every step you take, every chair you avoid, you’ll feel me here. Wherever you are, I own you.

He felt exactly what Cam wanted him to feel, a raw burn he could not avoid.

“When am I in you Hunter?”

“Always.”

“Thank, God,” Hunter murmured, the words lost under the sound of the spray.

Feeling much less stiff, he washed the dried sweat from his hair and soaped himself with his hands. He used a washcloth on his ass and squatted to get between his cheeks. It hurt.

He held himself open and let the water rinse him clean. He re-lathered. It didn’t hurt quite as much the second time.

And all the while he thought of Cam’s tongue, hot and wet and firm and in him. Hunt would have taken his newly sprung erection in soapy hand except for the fact that Cam owned him. And he had not been told to.

He switched to a fine, cool spray.

CAM’S SHOWER WAS NO STALL. It was a large open alcove, birch paneled instead of tiled. After Hunt cooled down, he switched off the water and turned around to find Cam in his wheelchair backed against the opposite wall.

Cam was naked.

“Did you masturbate?”

Hunt swallowed hard; the collar moved slightly with the action. “No, Sir.”

Cam knew certain words had power. If he’d asked Hunter if he’d beat off or choked his chicken or any other of the quadrillion ever-evolving euphemisms, he wouldn’t have triggered the hint of humiliation and the arousal that went with it.

“Come close to me.” Cam held up some after-bath oil. “This says it should be applied while your skin is wet.”

Cam’s eyes glittered as Hunter stopped at the end of his cast leg and the cock Cam loved, substantial even flaccid, darkened and rose, literally in front of his eyes.

“Closer.”

Hunter started, looking at Cam’s cast leg sticking straight out. If Hunt swayed forward an inch, he’d be touching Cam’s toes. But Cam cocked a well? eyebrow at him. Hunter opened his stance and shuffled forward awkwardly until he was over Cam’s knees. His stiffening column hung over Cam’s lap.

“Put your arms out, hands flat on the wall.”

Leaning over Cam, hands on the wall above his head, body angled, brought Hunt’s now very erect penis, closer to Cam’s mouth. Hunt looked down between his arms into his Dom’s upturned face.

“Watch.” Cam poured some oil into one hand and rubbed his palms together. He oiled Hunter’s arms and chest and stomach. He used a lot more oil, reaching around to Hunter’s back, as far up as he could reach. He covered Hunt’s inner thighs and lower legs, avoiding the buttcheeks, where the damage was the worst.

Hunter wanted so much to close his eyes and sway into Cam’s palms and fingers. It felt beyond wonderful, the long, strong strokes, the pulls up the backs of his calves. His balls ached from not coming last night, and his dick was a sand wedge, but he wished Cam would never stop.

Using a bit more oil, Cam reached out and cupped Hunter’s sac, heavy and warm. Another of his favorite things. He smiled up at his sub. “Make any sounds you need. Come whenever you like.”

Cam felt a subtle movement inside the inside pouch resting on his palms and squeezed gently; Hunter groaned.

Cam wasn’t interested in teasing or torturing. Spreading the oil with his fingers and thumbs, his intention was to arouse and soothe. Hunt’s cock was now against his belly, a steady trickle of precum flowing down and over Cam’s fingers to drip on the shower floor.

Cam was hard, of course, but Cam seemed to be hard the majority of the time with Hunter. The thought filled him with a kind of eager contentment, background music for his life.

Hunter seemed to be filled, too, uttering soft sounds of pleasure. His hips undulated slightly as Cam’s hands moved over him.

Cam dribbled oil over Hunt’s shiny glans and hard length. He spread the oil and banded the taut column with his strong fingers. Cam knew how much Hunt liked the feel of his hands, the skin slightly roughened. He tightened his grip, rotating his fist as he moved, allowing the head of Hunt’s cock to disappear into his hand, thumbing the rim before sliding back down to the root.

Hunter’s sounds deepened into a husky growl.

Cam looked up into Hunter’s eyes, the deep gray-blue shadowed and almost black, the thick lashes wet and spiked, his skin flushed with heat and need.

“Would you like to fuck my mouth, Hunter?” Cam asked softly, and the hot column jerked in his hand. Cam kept stroking.

Hunt’s “Yes, Sir” was almost inaudible.

The wheelchair was low, and Hunter was tall. Cam leaned forward, swiped his tongue over Hunt’s slit, opened his mouth and took him all the way to the back of his throat.

The groan was loud and deep, and Cam felt the vibration through the cock he closed around, stroking with his tongue but not moving his head. Cam reached for Hunter’s hip and urged him to move, still cupping his testicles.

It was beautiful. Hunter breathed in a series of stressed ahs timed with controlled thrusts, loving the feel of Cam loving him. He didn’t chase his orgasm as much as allow it to happen, watching himself, red and wet with saliva, slide in and out between Cam’s lips.

When he came, Cam’s tongue rubbed hard when he swallowed. “Jesus,” Hunt breathed and spasmed again.

Cam kept him inside for a few moments and then pulled back, holding his hand out to catch Hunter’s still-turgid shaft. He tilted his head back, reached up and pulled Hunter down for a kiss.

“Kneel for me, sub,” he whispered, and “sub” was the most intimate of endearments.

Gratefully, Hunt sank down in front of Cam and returned the favor.

“HERE, TASTE IT,” CAM SAID, holding out an index finger with a dollop of yellow-brown goo on the end. He’d been motivated to do so by the look of revulsion on Hunt’s face when he caught sight of what Cam scooped out of the jar to smear on his ass.

TPE. Hunter opened his mouth, and Cam shoved his finger inside and laughed aloud at the surprised look on his face.

Cam used a wet wipe on his finger. “Spread yourself.” He reached into the jar for more goo.

Bent over the counter, Hunter reached back and pulled his buttcheeks apart. He felt the blood suffuse his face.

“Man, I hope you never lose that humiliation reflex; you are so fucking hot,” Cam told him, carefully spreading the thick substance over beard-burned flesh.

“Honey,” he said, “Is a great treatment for minor burns. It’s antiseptic, and the gauze sticks to it really well.” He illustrated this last by laying thin pads along each side of Hunt’s cleft.

“Release.”

Hunt let go of himself. The layers of gauze felt thick and alien in the crack of his ass. But he was out of pain.

Cam spread more honey over the welts, dark red with edges of bluish bruising. More gauze.

Grabbing the briefs from the counter, Cam shook them out and leaned down. “Left foot … down … right foot … good.” He worked them up Hunt’s legs—“Straighten”—and over ass and hips, keeping them from disturbing the gauze. Once in place, Cam smoothed them over Hunter’s rounded cheeks that twitched with the pressure, the welts making their existence known.

“Adjust your junk,” Cam told him, rolling away.

CAM PERCHED ON A BAR STOOL in front of the stove, making breakfast. On the floor, canted over on one hip, Hunter leaned against Cam’s right leg.

There was something comforting in the movement of Cam’s thigh through the fabric of his sweats. Hunt could feel the play of muscles when Cam turned to lift a bowl or stretched for an ingredient.

Hunt was anticipating that night, when the collar would come off and he could tell Cam all things he now understood.

Cam was thinking about that afternoon, when all he had prepared Hunter to accept would begin. He chided himself for being anxious. He knew what Hunt needed, knew how difficult it was for him to not get relief.

Cam had arranged for the best service Dom he knew to take care of Hunter. He’d cracked several layers of defense and primed Hunt to accept his transfer of ownership—that moment he would know Cam was handing him over to someone else to be broken.

Camden Snow had never lent out a sub or exchanged one for play. He demanded all from them, all their trust. This they gave to Cam, not to anyone else. And while it was always implied in such a situation that Cam could do that, he never would. Or, he thought he never would.

Until now.

It went against Cam’s basic nature to give up control of a sub, to give up the ability to protect him. He told himself to relax. It was all for Hunter, after all. And he knew the players well and could confidently extend trust for his sub.

After all, he reasoned, it was virtually the same as Hunt going to the club to find release. Except for being collared.

Except that it would not be his choice.

HUNTER WAS IMMEDIATELY AWARE when Cam stopped moving. Stopped cooking.

“Kneel. Head down.”

Hunt lifted himself to his knees and dropped his head. He felt Cam’s fingers on the collar. It tightened around his throat. Anxiety spiked his heart rate. Hunter Dane feared choking.

The collar came apart. Cam tossed it into the sink.

“You’re released.”

Hunt looked up in surprise. Cam cupped the side of his face with a warm hand. Raising his own to cover Cam’s, Hunt was astonished to see him well up.

“Cam?”

“Please get up. I made a mistake.”

Hunter immediately rose to his feet and pulled Cam into a full body hug. Cam buried his face in the crook of Hunter’s neck.

“First we’re going to eat,” Hunt told him. “And when our brains have food, we’ll talk.” He nudged Cam with his nose and kissed his ear.

Cam sighed deeply and looked up. “Food’s done. I’ll go light the fire.”

“I’ll bring the plates and coffee.”

“And the apple pie,” Cam told him, snagging the arm of his wheelchair. He turned it to face him and sat down.

Hunt grinned. “We’re having pie for breakfast?”

Cam shrugged as he wheeled away. “We need some fruit.”

Hunter used Cam’s biggest cutting board as a tray and loaded it with food and cutlery. Across the great room, Cam held the telephone receiver to his ear with one hand, and tossed a handful of cedar chips onto the fire with the other. The room filled with the spicy, warm scent.

He’d hung up by the time Hunter delivered the first board-load to the coffee table. Cam stripped the soiled cover from the couch. Rolling it up on itself, he launched it toward the hallway to the laundry room.

Hunt went back for the coffee and juice and napkins, picking up the rolled cover on his way by.

Last night felt like a lifetime ago.

“YOU GOT ME A DOM FOR CHRISTMAS?”

Hunt sat canted to one side with his leg bent underneath, facing Cam, propped against pillows at the other end of the couch.

“It’s only Advent,” Cam said. “Are you laughing at me?”

Hunter grinned. “No, I’m astonished by you. How the fuck would he get here? There’s like six feet of snow on the roads.”

“Ski or snowshoe. They live in the development. But you’re missing the point.”

“No, I’m ignoring the point.” Hunter carried the remains of their breakfast to the kitchen. “What do you mean by ‘in the development’?”

“Here, where I live, the development. Hanging Valley Estates.” He shook his head no when Hunt gestured with an empty coffee cup.

“People were hung up here?”

“Other than you?” Cam smirked. “No, it’s a geology thing. Or maybe a developer sales thing, I don’t know. There’s like twenty properties along the creek that runs down to the river. “

Hunter returned and perched next to Cam on the edge of the couch.

“There’s a jogging track that winds through it,” Cam told him. “You can make out just about all the houses through the trees. Some of them have horses, so you have to watch for piles of shit, though. At one place there’s a lookout and a little waterfall.”

Hunter let his hand roam across Cam’s chest over his pullover, a deep green knit, thick and warm. “It’s a foothills cul-de-sac for rich people.”

“Wealthy queers, to be precise,” Cam said, sliding down a little, relaxing under the weight of Hunt’s hand.

“All twenty of them? Who built it, Buttwell Banker?”

Cam moved Hunter’s hand pointedly off his chest. “I didn’t know you were crude.”

Cam wasn’t the only one who could move quickly. Hunt’s arms circled Cam’s waist and slid him down, lying on top of him. He waggled his eyebrows. “I’m crude? You’re the one with the boner”—his hips pressed—“oh, to be twenty-four, again.”

Cam laughed. “And you’re some old geezer with a truck axle in his pocket.” He squeezed Hunter through his sweats. “And FYI, the billionaire’s brother built this place.”

“Nicky Hart?” Hunter worked Cam’s shirt up and dropped mouth to skin.

“I told you he’s a billionaire, too. Jag turned me on to this place when they got married.”

Hunter raised his lips from Cam’s sternum. “Hang on. Jag is the service Dom?” He worked the shirt up higher until Cam knocked his hands away and took it off.

“You know how surfers chase big surf? Jag chased big moguls. It was how he paid his expenses. He’s really good with a flogger.” Cam closed his eyes as Hunter’s mouth found the sensitive skin in the hollow of his collarbone.

“Hunter …”

The hoarse whisper shot right into Hunter’s core. He sucked and growled and ached, and Cam’s hips tilted, seeking him.

Hunt stopped for breath, panting into Cam’s neck. “Every fucking time you take your shirt off I want to do this.”

He raised his head to look into Cam’s face. “Let’s lie here and neck like horny teenagers and hump each other until we shoot. I never got to do that. And I can give you a major hickey since no one’s coming. ”

Cam pushed Hunt up. “Hang on, the first thing isn’t finished. How are you not pissed? How do you still trust me? I was going to hand you over to him.”

“No, you weren’t.” Hunt rolled onto his side, resting his head on his hand, his elbow on the cushion next to Cam’s head. He circled Cam’s far nipple with the tip of his index finger, following the well-defined border of the rosy areola.

“Cam, everything you did and planned was about getting me what I needed. I’m assuming you didn’t want to get yourself off watching.”

“No, God no. I wouldn’t even be there.”

Hunter nodded. “Which is why you literally beat it into me, scored it into my flesh. I am yours; you are in me. Always.”

“You had to know you weren’t abandoned after I handed you over and walked away.” Cam watched Hunt’s fingertip circling. “Jesus, that feels good,”—he closed his eyes for a moment—“but what do you mean I wasn’t going to? I was definitely going to. I confirmed with Jag and Nicky when the wind died down.”

Hunter gave Cam a warm, reassuring smile. “You intended to. Intent isn’t action. You were always going to release me, always going to leave the decision to me. You’re into control; all Doms are. But you care more for a sub than yourself. It’s why I trust you.”

Hunt lowered his head and licked Cam’s now furled nipple.

“Holy shit!” Cam bucked; Hunt pulled away.

“What? Did I hurt you?” He felt Cam’s cock recede.

“No, it just—that went straight to my ass, like an electric current.” He shuddered. “What was that?”

“Neurology, I expect.” Hunter sat up. “It’s just how you’re wired. Trust me?”

Cam licked his lips, and Hunt saw the anxiety flash in his eyes. It was something he knew well. Cam nodded.

“Close your eyes and relax. Try to stay relaxed and just breathe through it at first. See what happens. Okay?”

Cam shut his eyes and Hunter stroked his hair. “Deep breath and relax.”

A minute later, Cam breathing evenly, Hunter opened his mouth over Cam’s other nipple, the one he hadn’t overstimulated. He kept his tongue soft, and laid it on the bud. He heard a hiss of air through Cam’s clenched teeth as he felt it. Hunter stayed still. Cam’s body stiffened, but he didn’t move.

Hunt concentrated on remaining relaxed and unmoving. He couldn’t risk swallowing and stroking Cam even a little, so the saliva ran out the side of his mouth and down Cam’s side.

Beneath his tongue, Cam’s nipple tightened. Hunt didn’t react. He felt the bud harden and rise.

“Hunter …” Cam’s voice soft and thick. “Oh, God, Hunter.” Cam’s hand covered Hunt’s and guided it down to his shaft. Hunt wanted to smile, feeling him stretch and fill and heat—but Cam would feel it.

Cam was panting softly. Hunt felt the nipple peak under his tongue.

“Just … just … a little,” Cam gasped. Hunter didn’t move; he pressed down. The cock under his hand jumped.

“Hunter … Hunt-” Cam jerked Hunt’s head back by the hair. “Enough,” he gasped, a sheen of perspiration on his upper lip, cheeks flushed. “How did you know to do that?”

“I Dom women, remember? Lots of nipple experience.” He leaned over and kissed Cam briefly.

“You, sir, have some very interesting wiring. I think over time, if you’d trust me, allow me, I could make you very, very happy.”

Cam melted. The Dom fled, and he gave Hunt a shy smile. “Okay.” He made to sit up, and Hunt got to his feet. Cam pulled his shirt back on.

“I wish you could give me a hickey and we could dry hump until we come, but”—Cam looked uncertain—“they’re still coming. We’re all cabin-fevered, so I invited them for fun and food. And if you want Jag to take care of you, I have floggers.”

He swung around and rested his cast leg on the coffee table, looking up at Hunt for a reaction. “They’re staying over, in the guestroom. But it’s not too late to call it off.”

A shuloping crash startled them. Bright light flooded the room. Half the packed snow-ice had dropped from the window. The glass heated by the Colorado sun had melted it from the inside. A steady dripping sound reached them.

“Nice,” Hunter said of the big triangle of clear blue sky. He sat down on the coffee table next to Cam’s leg, facing him. “So, do they play poker?”

Cam cocked his head, wondering why Hunter hadn’t reacted to the noise. “You know Nicky does, but with Jag, we always play bridge.”

Hunt laughed. “You’ll have to teach me before they get here; I never played it.”

“Good,” said Cam. “We play for money. You can partner Nicky; he’s not that good either.”

“I see. Stealing from the poor to give to yourself?”

“You’re a gaming genius, Hunter Dane. After an hour, we’ll be lucky to break even. Besides, it’s a penny a point.” Cam eyed him critically. “You know, you seem—relaxed. Is it losing the collar? Did you hate it so much?”

“No, it served a purpose. When I was on the floor in the kitchen, while it was still on, I figured some stuff out. I was looking forward to telling you.”

“You didn’t, though.”

Hunter gave him a speculative look. “I was kind of hoping for the humping thing to happen, first.”

“Spill,” Cam said, serious now.

Hunter took Cam’s hands. “Last night I slept.” He fixed Cam with a stressed look. “No dreams, no drugs, no alcohol, no nightmares.”

“That sounds familiar,” Cam told him.

“It’s the same thing I told you after our first time together. I also told you no one else could have done what you did. You didn’t believe me.”

“Hunter, you’ve been going to Doms for release from your stress, call it psychic pain, for what? Years?”

“Since highschool.”

“Highschool?”

Hunter waved that away. “That’s a long story about a linebacker and a climbing rope. Ask me some night after a few beers. The thing is, I was living a life I didn’t realize I was living. That I didn’t choose. It just … happened that way.

“I lived a life where no one touched me. I touched my subs, Doms touched me with whips and belts and their cocks. But no one touched me.”

He raised Cam’s hands to his mouth and kissed his fingers.

“It was the first thing you did after you locked us in the playroom, the Church. I was still dressed, attached to the yoke. You stripped in front of me, another thing other Doms never do: be naked.”

“I hate fussing with clothes when I’m working a sub,” Cam told him.

Cam moved to the prie-dieu, a modified prayer kneeler used for creative penance. He used it as a valet stand as he stripped off. It wasn’t a performance; he simply removed his clothes.

Michelangelo employed workmen and stonecutters as models, and the lean well-muscled torsos in his works confirm it. Cam wasn’t David, slender and sharply cut. Cam was the Dying Slave - solid like living stone, smoothly sculpted, strong columns of thighs. This was a body with the strength to hold Hunter up and the power to bring him down.

Once Cam was nude, he considered Hunter like a complex math problem he was solving in his head. He walked slowly around his bound sub and stopped in front.

Cam had big hands, strong fingers. He placed his palms flat in the center of Hunt’s chest and … felt him. Up along shoulders, down over the chest and abs, around the waist and up the sides. His hands roughened, warm and … the length of Cam’s nude body pressed to Hunter’s as he worked his way under Hunt’s shirt, around to his back. Cam ran his fingers up and down the long groove of Hunt’s spine …

“You do remember,” Hunt said as Cam’s eyes became dark and unfocused. “You stripped me. And went on touching me. Feeling me. It made me crazy hot. No man—no one at all—ever made me like that.”

Cam pulled his hands free and laid them on the sides of Hunter’s face.

… then his hands were on Hunt’s thighs and ass, between his legs, up his torso: a blind man memorizing a sculpture.

He aroused Hunt with expertise and confidence, thumbs slid over nipples and Cam nodded when they hardened. His fingers between his captive’s legs manipulated, and Hunter trembled, trying to stay upright and silent, knees weak, cock raging…

Cam dragged Hunter off the table and took his mouth, opening him, ravaging him in a teeth-clashing, lips-numbing kiss. Hunt went to his knees and bound Cam to himself with greedy arms, wanting as much Cam as he could get against himself, inside himself, as much as he could enter in return.

They’d break for air and words and mouths over skin and find each other’s tongues again until Hunter ripped himself away. He held Cam at arm’s length, hands flat on his chest.

“Wait,” he gasped. “Just …” He adjusted himself and perched back on the edge of the table.

Cam lay back, still catching his breath. “Talk. Or I’ll shove something bigger than my tongue in your mouth.”

Hunter stood and walked around to the other side of the table. He was smiling again, looking at Cam: flushed and wild-haired and dangerous.

“You kept touching me. It was like the thing about the rivers and the lake. The other Doms, they gave me pain, and that worked, like a mental battering ram. But you … it was almost cruel how you made me feel, hot and safe and helpless and humiliated and connected. Connected to you. No one ever made me feel that before.”

Cam sat back up, curious. “You never felt humiliated? What about Ad leading you around like a dog?”

“You saw that?”

“Heard about it. From him. It wasn’t humiliating?”

Hunt shrugged. “Not really, it was his thing, I figured. His own kink. Like I told you before, they gave me what I needed, they got to have what they wanted. It didn’t make me hard or anything. Only you did that.”

He went to the fire, half-turned away from Cam.

“You didn’t beat your way through the layers of defenses,” Hunter went on. “You washed them away, massaged them away, gave me some kind of life energy you seem to exude from your pores. And it was too much, too fucking much. But you’re goddamned relentless. You wouldn’t stop until it all sloughed off and I was left raw and exposed. It was terrifying. And wonderful.

“And when you finally gave me the pain, it was just more touching. I could feel you through the fall, like an extension of your hand. It was power and comfort and agony and safety. Then you shoved into me, and it was you, touching everything inside me, making me stronger than the pain, taking the horror into yourself when it exploded out of me.”

He finished in a hoarse whisper, head down, tears dropping, sparkling in the firelight. “I think …”

Cam leaned forward, barely able to hear the words Hunter spoke into the flames.

“—I think I loved you, then.”

Cam’s throat was so tight he could barely breathe. He believed Hunter cared for him—maybe even loved him. But he never thought he’d hear that word from Hunter’s mouth. Maybe he only meant in that one moment he’d loved Cam. But if he did then, he did now.

Hunter wiped his face with both hands and turned around. When he spoke, his voice was normal.

“It’s the connection, I think. The touching opens a channel and energy flows. It might sound fanciful, but I don’t know another way to explain it.”

He went back to the couch, sat next to Cam and took his hand.

“Every time we were together, you touched me. Until the parking lot, when you left and wouldn’t kiss me. When you thought about leaving me.

“That’s when I got crazy, when I could barely do my job for the fear we’d never touch each other again. I couldn’t deal with what was really not a very bad case. But now, all through the storm, you touched me or made me touch you.”

Hunter smiled. “I don’t need breaking, Cam. I don’t think I’ll ever need that again. You put yourself in me. Now, I’m always touched.”

IT WASN’T FRENZIED when they came together. It was simple and sure and complete and comfortably sexual. They lay on their sides, face-to-face, bodies pressed but not straining, and talked all about Hunter’s resistance and Cam’s determination and how soon they should get up and ready for company and whether they should shave or not.

In the distance, through the great glass window, they heard a faint but familiar high-pitched beeping.

The snowplows were on the way.

*****

Epilogue - Monday Dec 5th

“You ready?” Hunter Dane stood in the doorway to the physical therapy room, watching Cam button up the fly of his jeans.

Cam turned sparkling blue eyes and a big, crooked, dimple-enhanced grin to Hunter.

“You bet I am, watch this,” he said, an excited kid about to turn a cartwheel.

He used his crutches to cross to a visitor’s chair, turned himself and … sat down.

Hunter applauded. “Wow, knees that bend. Next thing, they’ll be inventing eyeballs that move.” Cam rolled his. “Whoa! The future is now.”

Hunter went to Cam and knelt in front of him, running his hands up the backs of both calves, along the sides of both thighs and down. He turned his own shining face up.

“You feel amazing, and you look—like you should be in a big bed watching me peel these jeans off of you.”

He stood and leaned over the chair, kissing Cam briefly on the mouth. “But didn’t I hear about a brace you were going to be wearing?”

“On the bed.”

Hunter retrieved the contraption, a lightweight metal cage over a web of nylon strapping with velcro closures.

Cam straightened out the straps and lifted his healing leg, slipping the brace under his thigh.

“I’ll go pull the Outback around, meet you outside the main entrance,” Hunter told him. “You’re driving?”

Cam tightened one of the straps down. “Betcher ass I am.”

CAM GUIDED THE OUTBACK THROUGH THE CURVES into the foothills. He’d been quiet during the drive out of town. Hunter noted the lines around his eyes and mouth had deepened.

“Sore?” Hunt asked, looking out his side window.

“I didn’t want to take anything, I can’t drive on that shit.”

“Makes sense.”

Cam turned up the side road that led to his development.

“You coming in, tomorrow?” Hunt asked.

Cam shot him a look. “Somebody dead?”

“Vast numbers of people are dead. But none have been assigned to the team. It’s just a workday.”

Cam drove in silence for a mile or so. “You want me there?”

The Outback was not a very wide vehicle. Hunter ran his hand up the inside of Cam’s thigh and nudged his cock through the denim with a couple knuckles. “I want you everywhere. But I already told you, the office is off limits for sex.”

“You’re doing the obtuse thing, again.” Cam ignored Hunter’s hand. His twenty-four-year-old penis did not.

“I’m really glad we had the weekend for old movies, popcorn and non-angsty sex.” Hunter opened his hand over Cam’s growing erection, quite hot and hard through the soft, thick fabric. “How the hell big is your hot water heater, anyway?”

Hunter was referring to an hour they’d spent on the floor of his shower. Hunter had covered Cam’s cast leg in a large plastic trash bag. Letting the warm spray rain over their bodies, the men found new places and ways to make each other crazy hot, and deeply satisfied.

“Dammit, Hunter.” Cam shifted, trying to straighten himself. He removed Hunt’s hand and turned up the private road to the development.

“Are you going home now, or what?” Cam asked.

Hunter recognized Cam’s effort to sound mildly curious. Dispassionate. Hunt was more adept at it than Cam; he’d had more practice. He was also more practiced at discerning mood and reading body language. It made him a fearsome competitor at the poker table, an exceptional interrogator at work.

But Hunter knew he didn’t ever want to be playing games where Camden Snow was concerned.

Cam turned up his long driveway winding between walls of drifts the plows scraped out, and stopped in front of the garage. He noted Hunt’s Bronco, left outside on the apron, had been dug out by the private plowing company while they’d been gone.

It sat shiny and black in a roofless three-sided garage of snow. Hunter could simply get into it and drive away. And Cam needed to let him, if that’s what he wanted.

They released their seatbelts simultaneously, and it startled them into laughter.

Hunter turned toward Cam, putting his back against the cold door. “This is my idea: I get in my car, find my cell, possibly frozen and certainly dead, take it inside and see if I can get it to charge up. Tomorrow morning, I leave early, stop at my apartment to dress. Grab some more work clothes and stuff. Go to work, where I will see you.”

He paused. Cam just nodded, his lips a tight line.

“After work,” Hunt continued, “We meet back here. I bring my shit in and you find a place for it. I don’t want to look like a rumpled country sheriff instead of the smoothly urbane homicide detective that I actually am.”

Cam processed what Hunter said, and his mouth softened.

Hunter touched Cam’s thigh. “No one knows we’re together and I’d like to not change that, right now. It’ll leak eventually. I think it’ll be less interesting to everyone if it’s been going on a while. Like old news. So I want us to keep taking our own cars. That’s what I want. At least for a while.”

Hunter removed his hand. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to move into my guest room,” Cam said. “Not out of your place, just—into my guest room. It’s got a sitting room, a decent bathroom, and a private entrance.”

He stopped and searched Hunt’s face for a reaction. But Hunter was keeping himself to himself until Cam was finished.

“I want you to move into the guest room, but I want you to sleep with me. And I know you’ll want to stay at your place, a lot. Especially when we’re working a case. Be in town, on call, all that. You have your place, where you live.

“But I want you to move into my guest room,” Cam repeated. “I want to know you’re coming back.”

They gazed seriously at one another and then smiled.

Hunter leaned over and kissed Cam swiftly. “Let’s go inside so I can take your jeans off.”

Cam flushed and all his lines smoothed out. He raised an eyebrow. “Grab your cell, first.”

They opened their doors simultaneously.

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