Inked Destiny

chemotherapy…

It’d only been days but if felt like months. What if the thing with Quinn was all in his imagination? What if it was only about sex?

The craving for a joint returned. He stifled it with an immediate No!

The last thing he wanted was to smell like reefer today. Quinn hadn’t made an issue of it the other night, but he hardly thought an ex-cop who’d eventually need to get a PI license would want to risk having it all go down the toilet because his boyfriend liked to smoke a little weed from time to time.

Derrick took a sniff at each shoulder then bent his head forward to make sure nothing clung to the leather. Secondhand smoke was a killer.

Enough stalling. He patted his zippered pocket, a nervous gesture since there was no possibility the carefully folded sketches had escaped. Do this for Etain.

Hah! He knew exactly why she’d sent him here.

Matchmaker! She’d given him this excuse to see Quinn again.

His heart took a dive, settling with a hard crash at the pit of his stomach as a reality bigger than the state of his love life gripped him. Twice in two days she’d nearly disappeared from his life permanently. First the Harlequin Rapist and now this brush with death in front of the shelter.

He hadn’t been sure she’d be at Cathal’s house, not until tall, delicious Mr. Edible made his presence known and tried to send him away. Well, bigger, nastier brutes had attempted it in the past but when something mattered, he had a spine of steel.

Not that Etain had needed him to rush to her side. She had Cathal and Eamon. They were enough. She didn’t need him—

No!

No! No! No!

That was negative thinking.

He was done with negative thinking. He’d had weeks of negativity. Months even, if he was being honest about the state of his life prior to Quinn.

Strength was his middle name now and because of it, he could face a hard truth. There was a reason Etain hadn’t fully shared. True, she’d always played things close. It was there in her apartment for everyone to see. No personal touches. Nothing. As if at a moment’s notice she might pick up and leave.

Since he’d known her, she’d been the rock and he’d been just plain pathetic. Some of his choices when it came to men…

He shuddered. Bad. Worse. Horrible. Totally awful.

Well, as of now, that had changed. He was going to be her rock. He was going to help her get the police some information, whether it meant working with Quinn or not. He wasn’t without contacts. He’d found her, hadn’t he? He had access to the records at the tattoo shop and he’d been there when she’d tattooed a lot of her clients.

“Time to pull on the big girl panties,” he said, striding purposely to the dock that would take him to Sean’s boat—and Quinn.

Fourteen

Quinn rolled his shoulders. Christ, he’d forgotten how much he hated sitting at a desk and mentally grinding through mostly irrelevant data as a way of gathering intel.

The Internet search on the Curs MC was a slow, excruciating crawl that had landed him on Facebook more than once. Facebook! There was a reason the jails were full. Call it the stupidity of criminals, though unfortunately nothing had popped that had any relevance to the killing at the Curs hangout.

It’d be so much easier to tap into law enforcement files, even kiss someone’s ass in a different agency, but one of Sean’s sources had gotten back to them with a warning that one wrong move would trip plenty of red flags and cause a shitload of trouble for anyone who didn’t have official cause to be looking into the club.

Didn’t mean it couldn’t be done, but their involvement in this didn’t warrant trashing a contact or leaving anyone hanging out to dry. What they needed was the list of names from Etain, a place to start, and truth be told, an excuse to move.

He was antsy. Itchy. As if at any moment he just might come right out of his skin.

He didn’t like the feeling even if he understood the source of it. There’d been plenty of down time when he was undercover, but even then he’d been playing angles and pushing limits, living at the sharp edge between life and death.

He’d felt like a soldier in the trenches, especially during the stint in prison. He’d longed for freedom more fiercely than a lot of the inmates, because for him freedom was a call away.

And now, days into that freedom after making the call and having supposedly been shanked by another inmate and bled out, he struggled against the urge to escape the chair in favor of pacing as a swell of frustration and helplessness came. He wasn’t used to not being able to take action, but other than being there for his family, his father’s cancer wasn’t an enemy he could fight. And he hated it. If not for Derrick—

He stopped himself because the only thing worse than the slow crawl of a worthless Internet search was doing that same search with a raging hard-on. Jesus, what a way to come out of the closet.

A muted tone sounded, announcing someone had just tripped the farthest of Sean’s sensors. There was the tap of keys as Sean opened a camera’s live feed.

Quinn used it as an excuse to leave his chair but the boner he’d been trying to avoid came on like a battering ram at seeing Derrick on Sean’s screen. A few clicks later, and Sean had pulled up another image, Derrick at Stylin’ Ink.

“I thought I recognized him,” Sean said. “What’s he doing here?” It was followed immediately by, “Fuck. Etain’s worse.”

Sean reached for his cellphone as if to call Cathal. Quinn stopped him by saying, “Hold on, Derrick is probably just stopping in to see me.”

“You know him?”

A throb of pure heat went through his dick at just how well he and Derrick knew each other. Unfortunately that heat also slid up his neck and into his face just as Sean glanced at him.

Sean laughed. “Like that, huh? Why don’t you intercept him on the dock, blow off a little steam, because for the last hour I’ve felt like I was trapped in the cabin with a caged beast.”

Quinn headed for the doorway. “Back in a few.”

“Take it out of camera range unless you want me watching.”

“Will do. I’m not into kink.”

“Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

“Not going there,” Quinn said, stepping out into the wet, silky caress of fog arriving in thin wisps.

The feel of it against his skin momentarily halted him, driving the heat of lust back with a desire equally intense and not totally foreign. He’d always enjoyed being on, in, or near the water, but not like this, at least not since he was a kid visiting his grandparents in the sweltering heat of the South, days so hot he’d wanted nothing more than to rip off his clothes and dive into the lake.

He shook his head, partially clearing it as he resumed walking. “Been cooped up too long,” he muttered, gaze straying to the Bay and water cold enough to shrivel his dick and pull his balls up tight in protest if he jumped into it. Jesus, it might come to that if he and Derrick couldn’t get somewhere private, though when his path finally intercepted Derrick’s, thoughts of privacy, water, and Sean slid away like raindrops down a building to be replaced by fiery possessiveness and a growled Mine.

Fuck, where had that come from? But he didn’t deny it, and he didn’t care who witnessed the kiss as he pulled Derrick to him, locking their bodies together for the grind of hard cock against hard cock as he slammed his mouth down on Derrick’s, plundering and claiming with the thrust of his tongue.

It didn’t end with the one kiss. Or even a second, though he restrained himself from touching anything but