"Fuck."
Jeans that should have been on the end of the bed where he always put them so they would be handy if he needed them in the middle of the night. Because he always slept nude. With jeans at the end of the bed. Always.
"Well, just ... fuck."
Suddenly, it wasn't the least bit reassuring that he was totally, completely alone. No roommate, no friend staying the night, no lover in his bed. Of course, he'd never had a roommate, didn't collect close friends, and there hadn't been a serious lover since college. He didn't have time for them. They could never adjust to his whirlwind travel schedule or his erratic hours.
The impact of his isolated life was never clearer than it was at this single moment in time. He'd been in war zones that hadn't made him this apprehensive. Something akin to menace seemed to linger on the air, dangerous, primal. Threatening.
Finding the willpower to move again, Hunter strode to the bedroom door. He found it still securely locked. Unhappy, he jerked the jeans off the chair and slid into them.
He tugged the jeans into place over his ass and moved to the open window, his cool, sweaty hands arranging his half-hard cock more comfortably to one side as he buttoned the fly. It was a tight fit. He usually liked the way the thrill of danger always made him hard, but tonight it was just inconvenient and slightly disturbing. This wasn't some foreign battle or prowling lion that he could run from by hopping a plane or boarding a safari Jeep.
He wasn't intruding on someone else's territory. This was something stalking him. Just him. Someone had been in the room.
It was about more than just a pair of misplaced jeans. He didn't know how he knew it, but he did. He'd felt a similar but more fleeting sensation now and then over the years since his parents had died, like a lingering presence or an unexplainable force nearby. He had always consoled himself with the fairy tale that it was one or both of his sorely missed parents watching over him from beyond. The presence always had left him with a feeling of safety and comfort. This time it was the same—but different.
The tingle between his shoulder blades made him tense, restless, and sweaty with apprehension.
The breeze gusted up, and the blinds clattered softly against the window frame. Hunter raised the slats higher and leaned out the opening. The rush of air carried the smells of the city with it, but it still felt good on his skin, in his face, lifting the damp strands of hair and drying his scalp.
From his parents and their experiences, Hunter learned to love wide-open spaces and physical freedom. He'd spent most of his childhood and youth traveling with his parents from untamed country to the next primitive territory. They'd made him a partner in the family business as they photographed and chronicled natural disasters, military uprisings, and amazing events around the world. Hunter loved nature, craved the rush of energy the wind carried on it.
Except this wind carried something dangerous with it. Something or someone. He pulled back into the room.
"Burglar?” he asked the silent walls, but glanced out the window. “Nah. Nothing here to risk the climb for.” Six floors up in a twenty-story building? Not a real person.
"Ghosts, then?” The thought of a ghostly apparition tweaked his memory. Something. Someone ghostly. “Crap. Maybe I got his picture this time!"
Tearing out of the room, Hunter headed across the hall and entered his spare-bedroom-turned-dark-room. Reflexively, he reached for and found comfort in the old, heavy, pebbled metal of the paper vault, part of his father's legacy to him. He used digital SRL camera for his assignments. But nothing satisfied his creativity in the same way as it did to take his personal photographs on film, to develop them on the enlarger and in chemical baths the way his father had taught him to do.
Soft, dim amber safelights glowed at the touch of a switch. He used the guest bathroom for the actual developing, but the final product of his recent photo shoot hung clipped to wires that crisscrossed a corner of spare bedroom.
"No, no, not that one. Where are you?” Hunter sorted his way through the drying prints, looking for the ones that had sparked his memory.
"Yes! Here you are.” He tugged three pictures off the line and studied each one carefully, moving closer to the light to be sure he wasn't missing anything.
"What the hell?” He sorted through them three times and went back to the line to see if he had grabbed the wrong ones.
When a thorough search revealed he had the pictures he wanted, he scanned them again and still, again, found nothing in the frames but an empty chair and a glass of red wine. The very pale, intense, platinum-blond man that had been sitting in the chair across from him in the outdoor café yesterday evening wasn't visible in the photograph. But Hunter couldn't remember a time when the man had left the table when he had taken the shots.
Hunter had covertly snapped his picture from under a rumpled cloth dinner napkin. The man had been staring at Hunter, and Hunter couldn't resist capturing the man's animal magnetism on film, even without permission. Hunter found the man's intensity and boldness attractive. His flawless skin looked like fine marble, and his eyes were the same gray of an approaching thunderstorm. He was built large and muscular, with chiseled, high-boned
