Chase in Shadow Read online

  Copyright

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  382 NE 191st Street #88329

  Miami, FL 33179-3899, USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chase in Shadow

  Copyright © 2012 by Amy Lane

  Cover Art by Reese Dante http://www.reesedante.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 382 NE 191st Street #88329, Miami, FL 33179-3899, USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  ISBN: 978-1-61372-421-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  February 2012

  eBook edition available

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61372-422-4

  Dedication

  To Mate, as always, who knows my demons and beats them back with a stick. And to my kids, who don’t have my demons and don’t know yet how lucky they are.

  Prologue

  End of the Ball

  “DID you have fun?” Mercy asked as Chase negotiated the slick Sacramento streets in the dark. Their car was good—the best, actually, a Mercedes with a killer antilock brake system—but Chase concentrated hard on it anyway. He did that. He concentrated on things that he could handle when the things he couldn’t handle were trying to climb his back.

  “Fun?” he asked absently, turning right against a red light after checking three times to make sure there wasn’t an oncoming car.

  “Yeah, Chase—fun! You know that thing you have when you get all pretty and go dancing with friends? Did you have any fun!”

  I had a blast getting fucked in the men’s bathroom by the guy whose heart I’m breaking, Mercy. Next to slitting my wrists, I can’t think of anything better.

  “Yeah,” he said with a vague smile on his face. “Of course I had fun. You know how I like to dance.”

  “Hm….” Mercy looked pensive, which, like pretty much any expression on her tiny oval of a face, looked enchanting. Chase sure couldn’t be faulted in his taste in women, could he? His father certainly loved her—adored her, actually. Told him this was the girl who would make him a man.

  “Hm?” he asked, keeping that smile on his face, his shoulders relaxed, his hands firm and able on the wheel.

  “Yeah,” she said thoughtfully. “I’m glad you got out. I know you were pretty sick all week, but I don’t remember seeing you dance tonight.”

  That’s because you were talking to your friend on the other side of the club when Tommy came up behind me, splayed his hands across my stomach, and cradled me in the cup of his groin and thighs.

  “Must have been when you were talking to Kerry and Jeff,” he said, knowing damned well that was when he’d been dancing. Tommy, who loved him, would torment him, follow him, yearn for him—but he wouldn’t out Chase. Not without Chase’s permission. He’d tried once. The results had haunted them both.

  Mercy’s hand on his thigh was intimate and suggestive. “I hope you weren’t dancing with any pretty girls,” she purred, kneading him like a cat. It was a skillful caress: soft, receptive to Chase’s needs, kind, and hoping for a response. Chase felt like slapping her hand.

  No, sweetheart. Lying to one woman about who I am and what I want is plenty.

  “There’s not a girl out there who would make me happier than you do.” Oh God. A truth. Who knew?

  They talked quietly, desultorily, on the way back to the apartment that Chase hated so badly. It looked good—Mercy was skilful at decorating on a budget, and she took pains to make the place cheerful and airy with nice furniture and eclectic decorations. Chase liked her taste—but he often thought he’d like leather furniture that matched the area rug, or the right to paint the wall behind the television hunter green to match the valances. He tried not to say these things to Mercy. She’d worked so hard, and he’d told her he’d love anything she did. Besides. They were saving all their money for a house.

  They parked the car and ran through the warren of apartment buildings, hitting as many covered walkways as they could and laughing a little with the feel of the March rain on their heads. Chase loved that feeling—rain on his face, the patterns of each drop warming with his skin. He turned, laughing, toward Mercy as they hit the overhang before their set of stairs, and for a moment, she was the study buddy he’d started dating two years ago, his friend, his confidante, and the person who watched movies with him until the wee hours of the night.

  She smiled gaily, like a child, and turned her laughing face up for a kiss, and that laughing moment was crushed under the steel door of all he could not say. He bent down and placed a gentle, sexless kiss on her lips, pale from the cold, and she opened her mouth and invited him in. He swept his tongue in for form and knew her arms would come around his neck as she sought desperately to capture something in him that he didn’t know how to give her. He kissed her well, thoroughly, stroking her tongue with his, wrapping his hands around the small of her waist, massaging her scalp through her hair with just enough pressure.

  He pulled back, feeling warm and happy from the contact, proud enough of the deception for the moment that he almost forgot it was one, when she murmured, “Mmm… so, ready to go inside and take up where that left off?”

  No, because my lover’s come is still running down the crease of my ass and leaking onto my upper thigh.

  “Yeah, babe. But can I take a shower first? Someone spilled a drink on my lap and I feel sort of rank, ’kay?”

  He smiled apologetically, and Mercy rolled her eyes, like she was used to his fastidiousness. “Okay,” she said softly, cupping his cheek and glowing up into his face like a woman in love. “I’ll go make myself comfortable.”

  He swallowed and smiled and kissed her forehead with all the considerable tenderness in his soul. God, she deserved so much more.

  In the shower, he forgot himself.

  His hand tracked the path of Tommy’s hand as it rubbed his six-pack, and then up over each and every defined rib. Tommy had pinched his nipples hard, because he knew that made them super sensitive (it was even posted on the Johnnies site), and he’d whispered in Chase’s ear, because their shared experience had told him that his ears and the side of his neck had a nerve sensitization express straight to his groin.

  “We’re going to the bathroom, okay? And I’m going to bend you over, and be inside you, and fuck you so hard you’ve got no room in your body for anything but my cock and my come, okay? Say no now, ‘Chance’. Because once this song is over, you’re mine.”

  He’d punctuated that with a brutal twist of Chase’s nipple, and Chase had been a puddle, submissive, willing to say anything, do anything, go anywhere, if only Tommy kept touching him.

  They hadn’t kissed in the tiny bathroom stall, because experience had proven that they couldn’t just kiss, they would suck and suckle and bite, leaving hickeys on Chase’s tanned skin. Tommy’s skin was pale, and Chase suckled that spot, that one right there on his neck, because Tommy had no one to hide from. Tommy gasped, ground up against Chase’s leg, and then pulled back, his face a mask of hurt and anger, desire and pain.

  “You don’t get to do that!” he snarled. “This is for me! It’s all I’m going to get, and you don’t get to….” Hi
s face almost crumpled then, and Chase knew, with everything in him, how much this gamble had cost Tommy. Dex must have texted him. Chase remembered Dex asking what his plans were; he had no idea this is what Tommy had planned. Chase had left Tommy so brutally… this must have felt like his last chance. He must have just trembled in hope, anticipation, and the desire to take charge. Tommy must have—he liked to bottom, truly loved it, it was his favorite sex act, but only when Chase was on top.

  So Chase turned around without comment, giving this thing, his open, spread, waxed asshole, this dirty fucking in a bathroom, because he didn’t have anything better to offer.

  He was lucky Tommy loved him. There was the rip of the little lube packet and then it was drizzled right in the sweet spot, before Tommy’s bare cock thrust up, no prep, no stretching, no nothing. If Chase hadn’t shot a scene that week with Ethan, the company’s big-cocked wonder, Tommy’s own big erection would have split him in two. As it was, it felt so good… so right… so wonderful…. Chase buried his face against his massive bicep and let out a sob of need.

  “Shh,” Tommy murmured, bending over and kissing along his back. It wasn’t a company move—it was one of those things fans watched the vids for, to assure them that it wasn’t all show—and it wasn’t Tommy’s style, not in front of the camera, anyway. Those gentle hands running along his ribs, that nuzzle of his lips and cheek along the center of Chase’s back—that was all Tommy Halloran, scholarship kid from Southie, who had freckles on his shoulders from misspent attempts to tan.

  “Just move,” Chase muttered, shivering with rightness and need, and trying hard not to weep with shame. “Just move, Tommy. Just fuck me and move.” His shaking voice broke on the last word, because he did want Tommy to fuck him, but he didn’t want Tommy to move—or at least not to move on. He wanted Tommy right here in his body, right close to him, touching skin to skin. He wanted Tommy to stay, forever, right there, poised to thrust so hard into his body that there was room for Tommy, only Tommy, and not another soul.

  Not even his.

  They hadn’t lasted long. Chase had come into his stroking fist, and Tommy, without the condom, had blasted inside his body long and hot and hard. Tommy collapsed against his back and rubbed his wet cheek against Chase’s shoulders until Chase turned around and said, “To hell with your plans, Tommy,” and then held his arms open. Tommy Halloran collapsed against his chest, his shoulders shaking fruitlessly in an effort to hold back his sobs.

  They hadn’t stayed that way for long. Chase stood up properly and Tommy’s spend gushed out of Chase’s body, trickling out of the crease of his backside and down his thigh. If the bathroom hadn’t smelled like piss and come and ass already, Chase’s body would have done it in that moment.

  “You smell like sex,” Tommy murmured. “Sex and me.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Oh God. So am I.”

  Tommy looked up, his long-jawed, brooding features swollen from the cry and his lashes spiking around his brown-black eyes. “Don’t… don’t do this, Chase. Don’t leave me.”

  Chase had closed his eyes and kissed Tommy’s forehead, hearing his voice coming out strangled and warped, or maybe that was the men banging on the stall of the men’s room, begging to come in and take a piss.

  “I’ll try,” he muttered, sure he didn’t have the courage to do any such thing.

  But he hadn’t promised Tommy anything, ever, before. It was as close as he’d come to a vow.

  And now, Chase straightened up in the shower, fingering his stretched sphincter, reluctantly wondering if he’d erased every part of Tommy from his skin. He thought of Mercy, in the bedroom, waiting wide-eyed for him to come out and to make love, and of all the times he’d done just that, sliding his lips on her soft, perfumed skin and imagining rougher skin that smelled like sweat. He remembered the times he’d stayed awake in the dark, running his hand over her shoulders, her hips, through her hair as she slept, willing himself to feel his body stir. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes his breath would catch, and his cock would fill with blood, and he’d kiss her neck, her breasts, her soft belly, the slick sweetness between her thighs.

  Sometimes.

  Most of the time, he simply lay there, next to her, and wondered how things had gotten so fucked up that the person he loved—truly loved, because Mercy was funny and smart and gracious and all the good things a girl should be—was the person he hated, not for herself, but for what she made of him.

  He thought of that time now, as he stepped out of the shower and dried off, his skin soft from all the time spent under the water, and opened the drug cabinet, his eyes dreamy and out of focus. He knew where they were. He’d bought them. They were harder to get hold of now that they made all of the really good electric shavers and disposable blade heads, but some drug stores still carried a good old-fashioned razor blade.

  He’d had them in the back of the cabinet for more than a month, and she’d never noticed.

  “Chase?”

  “Out in a minute!”

  His fingers didn’t even shake as he reached for the box, and opening it felt predestined.

  The metal was cool and thin in his fingers, and practically nonexistent.

  So this is how she’d done it. It was easy.

  His thumb and forefinger warmed the metal, and it was almost like a trickle of water against the inside of his wrist.

  “Chase?”

  No one by that name lives here.

  “Out in a minute!”

  Out… out… out….

  God, how he wanted out.

  Jerking Off

  One Year Earlier

  THE boy in the video looked supremely uncomfortable. He had blond hair, helped along from a bottle, high and wide cheekbones, and piercing blue eyes. His voice rasped a little; not a baritone, more like a reedy tenor. But girls told him it was sexy, and his smile was half shy, half come-hither, and even though he knew his chin was a little soft with baby fat, he’d been hitting the gym and he was pretty sure he was getting more defined, even in the face. He was talking to someone off camera, and that raspy, reedy tenor squeaked with surprise.

  “Take off my shirt? Now?”

  “Well yeah,” said the voice off camera. “You’re going to have to get naked if you want to do this.”

  The boy blushed. “I didn’t realize we were going, you know, full frontal today. No worries.” With movements that were a mix of confident and clumsy, the loose-fitting baseball T-shirt was hauled over his head and he stood there, a twenty-something college-aged boy, wearing cargo shorts and flip-flops. He had an athletic build, because baseball was more his game than football, and that goofy, lopsided grin that jocks get when they’re proud that they’re jocks. He was outdoors, and it must have been just a little chilly, because his nipples almost immediately became pointy and puckered, like the skin on his not-quite-soft stomach.

  “Do you want the whole package?” he asked, and the voice on the other side of the camera laughed kindly.

  “Not necessary yet. Okay, Chance, tell us about yourself.”

  That self-conscious jock smile appeared, revealing two perfect dimples on the apple cheeks, next to the smile grooves at his mouth. Girls must have been falling into those dimples for years.

  “Okay, well, I’m Chance.” And not even a stumble at the assumed name, although anyone who knew the industry knew he had one. “And I’m here to audition for Johnnies, because,” a little bit of swagger here, “you guys pay hella fucking good, and I’m trying to get a degree in engineering and save money for a house!”

  That kind laugh again. “I’m glad we pay so well. So, do you have any experience in the adult film industry?”

  Blush. “No. No. Not really.”

  “What about with sex?”

  “Well, me and my girlfriend, we’ve been getting it on. She seems to like what I got.” There was a suggestive, adolescent thrust of his crotch, because, well, it seemed called for.

 
“So, your girlfriend. Any guys?”

  Chance blushed, and then seemed to realize that this would be a selling point. “Yeah! Yeah, actually. I had this friend who came out right after high school. He used to jerk me off.” Chance’s smile relaxed, became soft and sexy. “He was really good at it.” He shook his head. “God, I’ve never come like that.”

  “Mm…. Why do you think that is?”

  Shrug. “I dunno. He was a guy—I’m sure he played with his equipment a lot. Knew what to do with it.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Brother, did he!”

  “Yeah? Want to show us if you know what to do with it?”

  This time the blush was accompanied by a cocky grin. “Guess it’s time, huh? Didn’t get my balls waxed for nothing!”

  His hands went to the waist of his cargo shorts, and then the voice on the other end of the camera stalled him for a second.

  “You nervous about doing this on camera?”

  Chance tilted his head a little, considering. “Well, yeah, of course. You don’t know what you look like when you come—for all I know, I’m hella ugly or something. But at the same time….” He trailed off and shuddered, and his eyes got half-lidded. One hand went unconsciously to his stomach, then slid up to his nipples, which were still pointy and puckered. “It’s sort of cool. It’s making my stomach all jumpy, and….” His other hand slid down under the waistband of his shorts, as he made obvious kneading motions on his groin.

  “It’s turning you on?”

  “Mmmm….”

  “Take the shorts off, Chance, and show us.”

  HE STILL remembered the look on his friend Donnie’s face when their friend Kevin had suggested it.

  They were going out to pizza after their last baseball game of the season. They’d lost, which hurt, even for a small college team that wasn’t known for its sports, and Chase was transparently grateful that Donnie was treating.

  “Nice to have a rich boyfriend,” he kidded—but it really was only kidding. He admired the hell out of Donnie, because the night they graduated from high school, Donnie had gone out into his parent’s backyard with Chase and two purloined cans of beer. They’d leaned against the brick barbecue stand and Donnie had looked up at the sky, his blue eyes transparent in the summer dark, the slight wind ruffling hair that was so blond it was almost champagne-colored. Chase loved that color so much he’d started experimenting with hair dye, so he could have it for his very own.