Page 27

“Parenthood looks good on you, Gunner.”
Gunner snorted inelegantly.
Chas handed him a bottle already made up with warm water and formula. Frowning in concentration, Gunner carefully tipped her onto her back in his right arm and poked the bottle at her mouth with his left hand. Poppy reached up and guided it into her mouth, bless her.
Her dark eyes drifted closed as she sucked on the bottle. She was so warm and relaxed in his arms, it started to rub off on him. He sat down gently in an armchair and propped up the bottle as she started to fall asleep. Sucking lazily, she mostly finished the bottle before she passed out.
Gunner rescued the bottle from falling and looked up at Chas. He mouthed, “What do I do now?”
Chas answered quietly, “I’d hold her for a few minutes to let her get good and asleep. Then, very gently, I’d lay her down in the crib.”
Gunner nodded and settled in with Poppy. Even in sleep, she moved a little bit. So alive, she was, and so vulnerable and trusting. He’d never felt anything remotely as peaceful as it was to hold her. And he had to admit, it was kind of magical.
He ended up sitting with her in his arms for close to an hour before he was willing to risk putting her down in her crib. At least that was his excuse, and he was sticking to it. Holding her for that long had nothing to do with the sense of calm that came over him as he stared down at her tiny, perfect face and watched her sleep.
When he finally turned away from the crib, Chas was holding out something else without comment—this time a glass with ice and what looked like whiskey from the refrigerator’s stock.
Gunner sipped at it as he sat down on the bed beside Chas and put up his feet. “Yep. I’m definitely Daddy Number One,” he said with relish.
Chas grinned. “I’ll hold you to that when she’s screaming her head off in a massive tantrum and refusing to stop.”
“Poppy? Never. She’s a sweet princess.”
Chas’s grin widened. “I work with kids all day, remember? Even the most angelic child has demonic moments.”
“Kind of like adults?” he asked cynically.
“Yeah.”
Chas had on a news channel, and Gunner asked him, “Any mention of Misty Falls?”
“Not a word.”
“Spencer said Homeland Security had shut down the press.”
“Can they do that?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Are we going to keep moving indefinitely?” Chas asked quietly.
“I hope not. Ideally, Spencer will figure out what happened in New Hampshire and that Poppy has nothing to do with it. Then we can turn her over to the authorities and they can work at finding her family.”
Except even as he said the words, he got a strange, painful pang in his gut.
Without comment, Chas turned off the lights and crawled into the king-sized bed, and Gunner followed suit. Sleep eluded him as he tried to figure out the source of that pang.
After about an hour of staring up at the ceiling in the dark, Gunner was startled when Chas rolled over and flung an arm and a leg across his body. He froze. All the years’ worth of fantasies tore through his head. He’d imagined sex—all kinds of it in every conceivable way—made up pillow talk conversations that they might have had in his head, even envisioned simply snuggling with Chas. Like this. Exactly like this.
To be here now, with Chas draped all over him, warm and lithe and relaxed, was more than the universe could possibly have paid him back for stealing his career out from under him.
Gunner’s right arm happened to be over his head when Chas rolled against his side; he’d been stretching out an old shoulder injury. Now he eased his arm down, sliding it carefully under the pillow Chas was lying upon. It was a tense few seconds, but at last, Chas’s head was resting on his shoulder beneath the thin pillow. It would be so easy to flex his forearm and embrace Chas, drawing him closer and holding him there all night long—an event ranked much higher on his life’s bucket list than he’d admitted to himself until this exact moment.
Chas shifted a little in his sleep, and his palm slid down Gunner’s belly, perilously close to his private parts. Whoa. He would never forget the first time they’d been having a sleepover and Chas had, in his sleep, fondled Gunner’s cock. It had woken him instantly. He’d lain there in the dark, his face flaming with shame, loving every second of Chas’s fingers wrapped around his eager erection.
He’d attributed it to the general horniness of being a teenager, but that wasn’t all it had been, and he knew it. He’d responded to Chas’s touch, to Chas’s young body pressed against his, the smell of him, the feel of him—
Umm, it was exactly the same way he was reacting now. In fact, he was rapidly acquiring a painfully insistent boner. Chas’s fingertips rested close enough to his pubic hair to twine into the curls, to wrap around the base of his throbbing dick, to measure the length of him by feel—