The Driver E-Book

Amy Lane

• Herausgeber: Dreamspinner Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Hell-raiser, getaway driver, and occasional knight in tarnished armor Chuck Calder has never had any illusions about being a serious boyfriend. He may not be a good guy, but at least as part of Josh Salinger's crew of upscale thieves and cons, he can feel good about his job. Right now, his job is Lucius Broadstone. Lucius is a blueblood with a brutal past. He uses his fortune and contacts to help people trying to escape abuse, but someone is doing everything they can to stop him. He needs the kind of help only the Salingers can provide. Besides, he hasn't forgotten the last time he and Chuck Calder collided. The team's good ol' boy and good luck charm is a blue-collar handful, but he is genuinely kind. He takes Lucius's mission seriously, and Lucius has never had that before. In spite of Chuck's reluctance to admit he's a nice guy, Lucius wants to know him better. Chuck's a guaranteed good time, and Lucius is a forever guy. Can Chuck come to terms with his past and embrace the future Lucius is offering? Or is Good Luck Chuck destined to be driving off into the sunset alone forever?

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Blurb

Dedication

Growin’ Up for Good Luck Chuck

Pale Faces

Outside Your Lane

Bumpy Landings

Places I Remember

Outside Forces

Game Plans

Break-ins and Escapes

Calamity Charles

Bad Boys

Let the Games Begin

Chasing Down a Plan

Who We Are

Midnight Snacks

Going with the Flowchart

Code Red

What Heroes Do

Crossroads and Road Trips

Tensile Strength—a Long Con Fic

More from Amy Lane

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About the Author

By Amy Lane

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Copyright

The Driver

By Amy Lane

A Long Con Adventure

Sequel to The Muscle

Hell-raiser, getaway driver, and occasional knight in tarnished armor Chuck Calder has never had any illusions about being a serious boyfriend. He may not be a good guy, but at least as part of Josh Salinger’s crew of upscale thieves and cons, he can feel good about his job.

Right now, his job is Lucius Broadstone.

Lucius is a blueblood with a brutal past. He uses his fortune and contacts to help people trying to escape abuse, but someone is doing everything they can to stop him. He needs the kind of help only the Salingers can provide. Besides, he hasn’t forgotten the last time he and Chuck Calder collided. The team’s good ole boy and good-luck charm is a blue-collar handful, but he is genuinely kind. He takes Lucius’s mission seriously, and Lucius has never had that before. In spite of Chuck’s reluctance to admit he’s a nice guy, Lucius wants to know him better.

Chuck’s a guaranteed good time, and Lucius is a forever guy. Can Chuck come to terms with his past and embrace the future Lucius is offering? Or is Good Luck Chuck destined to be driving off into the sunset alone forever?

So my husband picked me up from the airport after a trip to St. Louis, and all I could talk about was how insane the drivers were there and how happy I was to get back to where stoplights are more than hints, scents in the air, and the merest whispers of suggestions. Also, I was super happy to see my husband. So here’s to all the people who obey the traffic rules so the Chuck’s of this world can drive right by us to save the day. And here’s to Mate, who keeps picking me up from the airport and listening to me talk about goofy things. Also Mary, the kids, the dogs, the cats, the friends, the colleagues, the people who listen to me ramble…. All of you make writing possible.

Growin’ Up for Good Luck Chuck

Ten Years Ago

“CHARLIE. I’M sorry, Charlie, I didn’t have anyone else to tell!”

Charles Calder—also known as Chuck—gasped in dismay and opened the door to his dorm room to let Maggie Siddons in.

She looked terrible.

Maggie had been Chuck’s college try at heterosexuality in his freshmen year. The sex had been unremarkable—but not regrettable. She and Chuck had become each other’s plus-ones during visits home and at fraternity mixers. For Chuck, Maggie had been an easy way to not have to tell his parents that he was gay, although Chuck’s parents seemed to be happily oblivious and not particularly interested in his love life. For Maggie, Chuck had been an easy way to not have to answer any questions about why she wasn’t seeing anybody right now.

But Maggie—who had pale bronze skin, charming cheekbones, and spiral ringlets that all added up to her being one of the prettiest, most popular girls at their small midwestern university—didn’t look pretty and adorable right now.

That pale bronze skin was showing purple, and it was swollen under her eyes and along her jaw. Her eye itself was showing brick red, and she had a split over her eyebrow that would scar. Her body—tight and athletic—wasn’t moving too well, and Chuck tried to still the hammering of his heart as he took her in.

“Maggie, oh dear God!”

She threw herself into his arms and began to sob.

It took her half an hour to get the story out—but Chuck had it figured out long before she did. She’d been seen flirting with some dork named Kyle. Jock, not dumb but lazy. At first, Chuck thought Maggie would see through the guy and his pathetic, “Help me, Maggie, only you can tutor me out of obscurity!” schtick, but everybody had their blind spot. Chuck’s mother’s blind spot was his father’s infidelity, and his father’s blind spot was the contempt his children held for him because of it. Maggie’s blind spot was apparently blond, entitled Kyle Miller, and while Chuck hadn’t liked the guy, it wasn’t like he could just beat the crap out of Miller because Chuck had a bad feeling about him.

Well, apparently Chuck needed to trust his bad feelings more, because Maggie had said stop when Miller said go, and Miller said, “Fuck me, you dumb bitch,” and Maggie had barely gotten away.

Chuck looked at his friend, who had cheerfully bared her soul to him from the beginning of their doomed relationship, and who’d forgiven him for not being that into girls. At that moment, Chuck decided that Kyle Miller was going to be the one who wished he’d gotten away.

“Charlie, you can’t hurt him,” Maggie hiccupped. “He’ll kill you. He and all his dumb jock assholes will kill you. You know it. Their fathers will get them off because they have money and—”

“Oh, darlin’,” Chuck said. “It’s not like I’m all that breakable, right?” He was, in fact, decked. He loved physical exercise as much as he loved studying. Didn’t particularly have any ambition, and there wasn’t a competitive bone in his body, but he did love doing things simply for the sake of doing them—like a zillion bench presses until his muscles ached, and then a zillion more. It wasn’t as much fun as a blow job, no, but there was still a certain visceral satisfaction to be had.

But even Chuck knew you couldn’t face off with an entire football team for visceral satisfaction.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a plan.

It involved some sodium bicarbonate and some vinegar and then one extra ingredient of a slightly more incendiary nature.

All he needed to do was cut class one day, sneak into Kyle’s room in the frat house, and put everything in cups that he placed upside down in Kyle’s toilet tank. Everything would be fine… until Kyle flushed.

Then—God willing—the toilet would explode.

Hopefully all over Kyle, the giant piece of shit, because look what he’d done to Maggie!

Chuck planned it carefully. He didn’t want Kyle to die,but he did hope he’d be hurt. And embarrassed. And made small. Because Maggie was a force larger than life, and that’s what Kyle had done to her.

It was bad enough that they couldn’t even report him to campus police for fear of reprisals from Kyle’s father, who was a state senator and on the board of trustees for the college—but now Maggie was afraid to cross campus by herself, and had taken to sleeping in Chuck’s room at night. Chuck didn’t begrudge her one second of safety, but he did (as he told his blowjob buddy) sort of miss having his own room.

He had also put a plan of reprisal and humiliation into play, as he attempted to tell his blowjob buddy right after he’d set it up.

His blowjob buddy might have had more to say about the matter—questions about what he’d done, perhaps—but Chuck had been mid-blowjob at the time. Dan Torres was the local ROTC instructor and on-campus Army recruiter, and while he was very in the closet, he was also very out-spoken about his appreciation of Chuck’s skills.

Lucky for both of them, Dan had a small office in the back of the physical fitness offices, with a door that locked and a television mounted on the far wall that they turned on to mask their noises.

So Dan was not exactly quiet about Chuck’s plan for revenge on Kyle Miller, but he wasn’t exactly articulate, either.

“You… oh God… you… you… holy fucking God! You blew up his toilet?”

Chuck pulled back far enough to wipe his mouth off on his shoulder. “Yeah—that’s what I was trying to tell you. How did you know?”

Suddenly Dan was tucking himself into his pants and reaching for the remote control. “Chuck—man—look! You blew up his fucking toilet!”

Chuck gave a little whimper of dissatisfaction—it had been his turn for the blowjob next, and he was hard, dammit! He’d been concentrating on the blowjob, and the TV was white noise in the background. What was the big deal now?

Then he registered Dan’s horrified fascination and turned to look at the screen.

There stood the hated jock frat house, Sigma Eta Phi… except it was bursting out at the seams—literally. It sat crooked on its foundations, the windows broken from the strain, and a sort of pink foam was oozing out of one window. There were ambulances, firetrucks, and one very dazed-looking Kyle Miller being taken away from the scene with his clothing in tatters and what looked to be second-degree burns on his ass.

Chuck sucked air in through his teeth. “Wow. That did not turn out like I thought it would.”

Dan turned to him in disbelief. “Chuck, seriously? Are you kidding me? You destroyed the frat house! You could have killed somebody! Do you know how bad this is?”

“Well, it says no fatalities, so, uhm, not as bad as it could be?” He gave a mean chuckle. “Think Miller’s balls got a little crispy? Think it’ll keep him from beating on the next girl who says no?”

Dan bent his head and massaged the back of his neck. “Chuck, you have got to fucking disappear, man. I mean, off the map. Canada or something. They are going to put you in prison for this much collateral damage.”

Chuck was going to ask Dan how he knew Chuck would go to prison, when the reporter said, “Police are looking for this man in connection to what appears to be a horrible prank gone wrong.” The picture they flashed was from Chuck’s freshman year in high school, when he was all ears, teeth, and elbows, so not even his mother would recognize him, but still.

Chuck sucked air through his teeth. “You know, I’m telling you right now, prison does not work for me.”

Dan gave a persecuted groan and tilted his head back so he now addressed the heavens. “How about the Iraqi desert, Chuck? How’s that work for you? Because I could get you to boot camp in a week. All you gotta do is pack up and lay low.”

Chuck thought about it. “Yeah, can I blow shit up there?” His stomach was pretty tingly from seeing his handiwork on television. He wondered what it would be like to see that in person.

Dan gave him a long-suffering look. “Yeah, Chuck. I’ve got a buddy who recruits for the army. I’m pretty sure we can find a spot in munitions and transport for you in Iraq.”

Chuck grinned at him. “Righteous! Want me to finish that blowjob now?” He shuddered. “I gotta tell you, I might go off in my pants just from the buzz of blowing up the frat house. That is some hot shit right there.”

Dan—who wasn’t a bad-looking guy, with dark hair and hazel eyes and a sort of wistful smile one didn’t usually associate with the military—stared at Chuck in disbelief.

Chuck grinned easily, hoping for the best.

Dan shrugged and looked at the television, then looked at his watch, then looked at the pillow on the ground by his feet, and then looked at Chuck’s grinning face again.

He undid the button on his khakis.

“Fantastic!” Chuck said, sinking to his knees with all the enthusiasm of a kid with an ice cream.

Or a Good Luck Chuck getting himself some luck.

Three years and two months later

THE BAR in Cleveland was tacky—worn veneer, uncomfortable wooden booths, mashed red-felt carpet, vinyl stools that were held together with duct tape and ass juice, and shutters over the windows that stayed closed even in the middle of the day.

Which was good, because Chuck needed to drink and think and the reminder of time passing was only going to stress him out.

Iraq had been fun. Now, most people didn’t see it that way, but Chuck had been put in charge of munitions and had put that two-quarters of a chemical engineering degree to good use. He’d also learned to drive pretty much everything—truck, Jeep, tank, motorcycle, small plane—to the point that if anybody had to transport a fuckton of something that would go boom if it got shaken or stirred, Chuck was the guy to call. He’d almost re-upped, because it felt like he had found his calling, but there was that whole following-orders thing.

Chuck really sucked at it.

He took all his tests and did all his drills and shot endless rounds into the desert target range, and he was pretty fucking good at all of it. But when his CO told him to stand up straighter, he put his hands in his pockets and slouched. He probably would have spent his entire stint in the brig, but dammit, people kept needing his skill set.

All his CO’s hated him like poison—including the guy who had been assigned when he’d gotten his papers asking if he’d wanted to re-up. Nope—with this guy, Chuck would spend all his time in the brig. It had definitely been time to clear out.

Unfortunately, he’d been sleeping off his jetlag in a shitty hotel in Cleveland when he’d gotten word that his parents, who’d told him he could live at home for a month or two while he got his civilian legs back underneath him and found a job, had been killed in a car accident.

He’d arrived at the old homestead in time for the funeral after-party—and to see his sister get the thirty-day notice of foreclosure on his parents’ home.

Daphne was living there too, waiting for her divorce to come through and trying to raise her infant son, Dougie, on her own. Chuck, jetlagged and sad, had walked into the house and been confronted by his sister, grief-stricken and desperate, falling apart in front of his parents’ entire neighborhood association, while their older brother, Kevin, told her to suck it up and learn how to work for a living.

Chuck was pretty sure he hadn’t broken Kevin’s jaw, but that was only because he pulled the punch at the last second.

He wouldn’t exactly say he’d matured in the desert, but being in charge of all that firepower had made him cognizant of how to use power so one did not blow up one’s teammates. That restraint had bled into other areas of his life, and he was reasonably grateful it had saved his brother’s life that morning.

Or at least his jaw.

After Kevin had gotten up and stormed out, Chuck and Daphne had had a long conversation about how much she needed to keep the house afloat, and how much their parents’ insurance was, and what her living expenses had been to date.

Chuck had hugged her and left—mostly because there were mutters among the neighborhood mourners and extended family about calling the cops. But before he’d left, he’d promised her that he’d find a way to drum up the money.

He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t have any resources. All he had was a hotel room with pretty much everything he possessed in the world and this bar right here, which served him a beer once every forty-five minutes, the perfect interval in which to help him think.

After a couple of hours, the one thing—one thing—he knew beyond all certainty, was that the only way to get enough money to keep Daphne and her kid from getting evicted from their parents’ house was probably illegal.

He closed his eyes on that thought and massaged the back of his neck, much like Dan Torres had done the day Chuck blew up the frat-house toilets.

The bartender shoved another beer at him, and Chuck blinked at it. “Thanks,” he said, meeting the guy’s eyes for the first time.

Ooh—not bad. A little older, thirties maybe, and a little paunchy, but he had a good-natured face. The kind of face you could trust, really.

“You thought it up yet?” the guy said, friendly-like.

“Thought what up?”

“That thing you been thinkin’ since you got here.”

Chuck grunted. “Not so much. World’s oldest dilemma. How do you get money quick without ending up in prison even quicker.”

The guy gave a brief nod. “See those guys over there?”

Chuck looked over his shoulder to where a bunch of guys who practically had Criminal spray-painted across their black windbreakers sat, huddled over a table with intense, angry faces.

“Yeah. They got money?”

Guy shook his head. “No. They got a plan, though—and they’re short a driver. You know how to drive?”

Chuck made a low rumbling sound that passed for a chuckle. “Little bit.”

Guy nodded. “Thought so. You may want to hit them up.”

Chuck wasn’t stupid. He knew that if someone needed a driver for something, it was usually an illegal sort of something. And he’d learned his lesson from blowing up those toilets. If you were going to do something that could get you removed from the entire free world for a while, it was a good idea to get your sex in now, while you could.

“You sure I can’t hit you up instead?” he asked the bartender appraisingly.

The bartender gave him a heavy-lidded smile. “I get off in an hour,” he said, voice low. “They got three days before they do their thing.”

Chuck grinned. “Perfect,” he said. “I’ll be back here to walk you out in an hour.”

And then he turned to where the “criminals” all sat, arguing with each other. He pulled up a cheap wooden chair and straddled it, leaning on the back, amused when all the guys in black windbreakers and balaclavas turned toward him in a panic.

“No worries, guys,” he drawled. “Word on the street is, you fellas need some transportation. Believe it or not, this is your lucky day.”

Four years later

TEXAS—CHUCK had lived there as a kid, but it seemed hotter and sweatier now.

God, the worst thing about hanging out with criminals wasn’t the dishonesty—although that seemed inherent in the breed, at least in the bank robbers Chuck seemed to end up with. But he’d sort of taken it upon himself to steer them toward honesty, at least as thieves. It just made everything so much less bloody by the end.

He thought he’d been doing an okay job of being an ethical thief until the quiet corner of the garage where Carmichael Carmody was giving Chuck the blowjob for once, was suddenly not so quiet.

The corner itself—a sort of makeshift office with barriers to make a cubicle and a door, as well as a couple of fans—was in the back of the garage itself, and anybody entering, either from the bay door or the smaller door to the side of the shop, could be heard before they were seen. And that was exactly why Chuck and Carmichael were in that little corner.

Besides the fact that they were in Texas—and not the gay-friendly part of Texas—and what they were doing could probably get the shit beat out of them, Carmichael had a wife and three kids whom he adored, mostly, but he’d admitted shyly to Chuck that the only way he’d fathered three kids was to think about NASCAR racers in the nude. Chuck had been exchanging blowjobs with him ever since—it felt like a service to the needy, really, and Carmichael certainly was sweet and appreciative.

Of course the rest of Carmichael’s family was so awful, living in the closet was practically a relief for the poor guy. Besides his brothers and their friends being a part of the he-man-gaybie-haters club, they were also bank robbers.

Dumb ones.

Chuck had been drafted from another group—he had a reputation by now, after eluding the police a couple of times and helping plan a few jobs that otherwise might have gotten sticky. He wouldn’t have gone in with them—he didn’t like Wilber Forth, Klamath Jones, or Angus and Scooter Carmody at all, not from the first moment Wilber had grabbed his arm with fingers trying to bruise and practically told him he’d be driving for them because that was his job, wasn’t it? No, Chuck hadn’t liked getting treated like a piece of meat—but as he’d been about to pound Wilber into a mound of plasma, he’d seen Carmichael in the corner of the bar, shying away from the forward waitress and looking miserable as fuck.

“Who’s that?” he asked, interrupting Wilber’s diatribe about why Chuck absolutely had to work for him.

“That’s Car-Car.” Wilber had laughed rudely. “He’s gonna tune your ride, man, but he doesn’t have the nerves for anything else.”

And that had decided Chuck, really. This kid needed a Chuck in his life—even if it was just to give him a reason to come out of the closet and pay his wife alimony from anywhere but Erstwhile, Texas.

Of course, the more Chuck had gotten sucked into Carmichael’s life, the more he realized that Car-Car couldn’t desert his wife or his kids, and getting on a plane out of Texas would leave him without a support system—or a pot to piss in, because his shop was mortgaged to the hilt as it was.

The kid was well and truly trapped, Chuck figured. The best he could do was give him a little bit of kindness and some happy moments, and maybe a few more years of not getting the shit kicked out of him because he turned those big brown eyes on the wrong guy.

That was what they were doing in the back of the closed garage, the night breeze coming in through a skylight overhead, Carmichael’s mouth sweet and hard, exactly the way Chuck liked it. Nothing like a good-luck blowjob to make sure a job came off right.

Right then, Wilber and Klamath came barging in.

“Sh!” Klamath whispered. “You’re going to get us caught!”

“No,” Wilber said, laughing rudely, “I’m gonna get those Carmody kids caught. You and me, I’m gonna get off scot-free!”

With that, he snagged a set of keys from a pegboard by the door and moved to the car, a basic model SUV, a little scuffed and very unremarkable, the kind of thing a soccer mom would haul her kids in. Chuck and Carmichael had long since pulled up Chuck’s pants and dropped down behind the counter of the office. But even from their precarious hiding place, they could still hear Wilber and Klamath talking.

“What are you doing there?” Klamath asked urgently.

“Sabotaging the gas line,” Wilber told him. “It’ll take a while. We’ll get there okay, but while Chuck’s got it in idle, the car’ll just die. Then you and me can take off in the burner car we’ve got parked around back, and everyone else’ll get caught.”

“Man, why would they give us all the cash?” Klamath demanded. “Your plan don’t make no sense at all.”

Wilber sucked in a breath. “Well, I guess it’ll make sense if they’re dead, won’t it?”

Chuck met Carmichael’s eyes under the counter, and he read the dreadful truth there.

Carmichael couldn’t tell his brothers about this. He absolutely couldn’t. Besides wanting to know what he was doing when Wilber and Klamath were sabotaging the car, they would flat out not believe him. Carmichael hadn’t wanted to be in on the job in the first place. It was a big bank in a sizable town, and they were robbing it the day after paychecks went out, when there would be plenty of cash in the drawer. If Carmichael mentioned this to his brothers, they’d believe Wilber over Carmichael, and he’d be dead.

If he didn’t mention it, he’d be there for the robbery, and Klamath and Wilber would shoot him.

If he survived the robbery, he’d be in prison, which might possibly be the safest option. But prison in Texas was no picnic.

Chuck couldn’t help it. He looked Carmichael in the eyes and said, “Don’t worry. I’ve got a plan.”

Well, his plan had worked—and it hadn’t. At the end of it, he’d driven off with the money from the job while Carmichael, Scooter, and Angus went to prison, and Klamath and Wilber went to big holes in the ground.

Chuck’s plan had involved contacting someone he knew in the sheriff’s department and making sure Carmichael and his brothers knew to lie down on the ground the minute they heard the bullhorn.

A sniper got Klamath and Wilber after Chuck had helped them load their car. And while Chuck didn’t exactly mourn them, he’d abandoned Carmichael to prison, which hadn’t set right with him. It didn’t matter that he’d taken the money and invested it. When Carmichael got out in two years, he’d have enough money to set his wife and kids up right and still get the hell out of Dodge and live a good life. But so, sadly, would his brothers. And it had meant leaving a friend behind.

He’d run the plan by Carmichael that morning, before Carmichael’s brothers swung by to pick him up. The kid hadn’t hesitated. He’d told Chuck prison was better than death, so Chuck had done the deed with Carmichael’s blessing. But God, it had hurt. Chuck had admitted—to himself, if not to Carmichael—that it would have hurt a lot worse if Carmichael hadn’t gotten out of there alive.

A tough decision, and an opportunity to get out of the life he’d accidentally fallen into.

Chuck lived simply, for the most part. He liked high-rise apartments but didn’t mind if they were small and simply furnished. He liked fast cars, but Carmichael had taught him enough about cars to know fast wasn’t always expensive. And he liked his clothes comfortable and not flashy. With a little bit of education on the stock market and some good investments, he managed to quadruple the money he got from the bank job and set the brothers up with bank accounts full of untraceably laundered cash.

Carmichael had written him a carefully worded letter, saying that his wife and kids lived in a house now, instead of an apartment, and that she had promised to be faithful to him while he was in jail.

Well, Carmichael had always wanted to do right by her, Chuck figured regretfully. He wished the guy well—he’d done his part and more than.

Of course, Angus and Scooter hadn’t written him a damned thing after he’d sent them their account numbers and information. He wasn’t sure if they were too dumb to realize how lucky they’d been to get out of that bullshit alive, or if he was going to have to live his life looking over his shoulder once they got out of prison. But that would be a while. They were in for five-to-ten because, unlike their brother, it had not beentheir first offense.

Eighteen Months Later

GOD, CHICAGO was ice fucking cold in the winter. But it was still better than Texas.

He’d told himself that he’d left Texas because he didn’t want the po-po to connect him to the bank job gone wrong. His sheriff buddy had wanted Wilber and Klamath and hadn’t cared so much about the bank-insured money Chuck had gotten away with, but still—he wasn’t the only deputy near Erstwhile who’d be on the lookout. So, no Texas for Chuck. Sure. That was it. He was afraid he might get busted.

It was a lie he told himself to avoid thinking about the brown of Car-Car’s eyes as he’d turned and given Chuck a last forlorn wave before marching off to the bank—and to prison.

But Chuck had sworn off bank jobs—no more of that noise. He’d made his nut with investments, and could probably live comfortably off his portfolio as long as he didn’t go too hog wild, but he hated being bored. So he enrolled in school again, figuring maybe he’d finish up his degree, or maybe learn something else. He had a job, he figured, but learning things like art history and regular history and economics, well, that could be a fine hobby.

And it turned out there were enough dumb criminals in Chicago for him to never be bored.

Which was how he’d met Josh Salinger.

He’d been intent on mischief—not the criminal kind, nothing that would hurt anybody, but he needed to inflict a little bit of karmic revenge on a douchebag. He figured that along with transportation and munitions, karmic revenge had become sort of his calling, and it was sure calling his name now.

He entered the parking garage casually, even though he’d planned for this. Went to the fourth floor, where he knew the asshole kept his Porsche, ignoring the cute kid in the elevator with him. Chuck wasn’t trading blowjobs or anything else these days, and the kid in the elevator—brown eyes, dark brown hair, neat as a pixie and twice as tight—was depressingly young. Besides, Chuck had some payback in mind this time, and a kid holding what looked like a grocery bag in his hands was not on his list.

The elevator door opened, and Chuck strode over to the Porsche in its customary spot, little radio fob in his hand. The fob was something he’d developed in the military—an electronic master key allowing him to pilot any of the vehicles in the auto bay. When he’d started driving for bank robbers, he’d teamed up with an electronics whiz and a dedicated car thief to come up with a handheld version of his own.

The fob worked, but he knew that car-alarm companies were constantly trying to find new cryptocodes to keep car thieves out. He kept in contact with Teeter the electronics whiz and Skinny the car thief, though—they’d been so excited about the concept he’d come up with, they’d kept him eyeball-deep in prototypes ever since.

This one didn’t let him down. In fact it hadn’t let him down the last six times he’d tried it on this car.

The car beeped as he disabled the alarm, and he gave a sigh of relief, sliding into the Porsche and stretching luxuriously before looking around.

Oops! There was a new security camera on the visor, and another one located behind the pressure plate on the steering wheel, and—oh, hey—he felt carefully and located the dye pack under the seat, ready to blast him when he moved the seat back.

Pity.

The douche-nugget who owned the champagne-colored ode to ridiculous spending was about five six, and Chuck was six three. Ah well, no luxury ride today.

He was so involved with figuring out how to maneuver with his knees up to his chin, that the opening of the passenger door almost caused his heart to jump out of his chest.

“Dye pack under the driver’s seat?” The pretty boy with the dark hair and eyes stuck his head inside. “Here, get out of the seat and I can disable it for you. You weren’t planning on stealing it, right? Just relocating it in the parking garage, like you’ve done for the last two weeks?”

Chuck stared at the kid. “Well, uhm, yeah.”

“I heard Gaetz talking, you know. Asshole’s been whining about his precious gross car since you started doing it to him. Revenge, right?”

Chuck opened his mouth, then closed it while those doll-bright eyes stared at him and the kid waited patiently for his response.

“Not for me,” he finally croaked.

“Yeah, I know. For Professor Ledbetter, right? I sit in the back row during class, but I was there that day.”

Chuck tried to swallow his anger and couldn’t. “It was a shitty way to be outed,” he said, referring to the day Toby Gaetz had looked at the grade on his latest paper and sneered, “A D-? I don’t think so. My dad is on the board of trustees, you know, and he doesn’t like faggots.”

Chuck had been appalled—and the gentle sixtyish Dr. Ledbetter had been almost in tears. Chuck had stalked out of the classroom hell-bent on finding a way to torment Gaetz for being an asshole, and this kid….

Chuck frowned, remembering that this kid, wearing an adorable little fedora and a leather jacket that made him look like a combination of Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire, went to talk to the professor earnestly as everybody left.

“I told him my father was Felix Salinger,” the kid said, “and he really hated bigots. Don’t you remember? Torrance Grayson ran that series on homophobia in academia the next week?”

Chuck sucked in a breath, stunned. “You did that?” he asked.

“Well, Torrance Grayson did that,” he answered, referring to the beautiful, openly gay anchor for the Salinger News Network, Chicago’s answer to CNN. “But yeah, my dad told Gaetz’s dad that if anything bad happened to Ledbetter because of his son’s nasty mouth, they’d kill, fry, and eat the current board of directors for the university, and they’d do it live on the air.” The kid gave a sweet smile. “My dad is pretty much the greatest guy on the planet. Gaetz may not be so loud now, but he’s still spewing bile about Ledbetter—or he was, until his precious Porsche started disappearing. I heartily approve. In fact, I’ve got a wrinkle, but I need you to get up so I can disconnect the dye pack first, okay?”

Numb, Chuck finally managed to get out of the vehicle, and he stood back, watching as the kid produced a tiny tool kit from the sleeve of his natty black leather jacket.

It took him less than a minute, and he was humming the whole time. When he’d finished, he gestured for Chuck to get in and then ran around the front of the vehicle and got into the passenger’s seat. As Chuck put his seat belt on, he watched the kid do the same.

“Didn’t you have groceries?” he asked.

“Hm? Oh yeah, they’re in the back. Don’t worry about them. Hey, my last class of the day is over. How about yours?”

Chuck nodded. “Yeah, nothing but weekend. Why?”

“Well, I happen to know they’re about to put new cameras in the parking garage. The only reason you’ve gotten away with this so far is that the old ones were disabled about a month ago while they fixed the system. Anyway, this is your last day to do this, and Gaetz is about to be locked in the bathroom for—” His pocket buzzed, and he pulled his phone out of his impossibly tight black jeans before reading the text and smiling. “—three, four hours. How do you feel about taking this thing for a spin?”

Chuck grinned at him. “Kid, what’s your name?”

“Josh. Josh Salinger.”

Chuck put out his hand. “Chuck Calder.”

They shook hands. “Once around the city, Jeeves, and then we can go for pizza.”

They bullshitted on the drive around the city, talked about the class and cars and ex-boyfriends. Chuck might have let some of his more colorful past exploits escape, but it was so easy to talk to this kid who harbored no judgments. When the gas gauge showed nearly empty, Chuck returned the car to the parking garage—in a totally different place, of course—and he and Josh got out of the Porsche. Then Chuck followed Josh to his own vehicle, a roadster as natty as his outfit.

“Nice,” Chuck said. “I’ve got a Chevy myself.”

Josh grinned. “Parked here, or did you take the L?”

“I’ve got an apartment in the suburbs. I take the train in.”

“Well, I’m driving back to the suburbs after I pick my friend up from in front of the campus.”

Chuck eyed the interior of the roadster skeptically. “Will your friend fit?”

“He crawls through ventilation shafts as a hobby. The back seat will be fine.”

Chuck laughed and let any hope of getting into Josh’s pants fade into the wind. That was fine, though. He’d had plenty of lovers, but he’d never had a friend he could talk with about art history, philosophy, and car theft. Josh was the little brother he never knew he needed.

As Josh pulled the roadster out of the parking garage, Chuck realized Josh had forgotten the little plastic bag of groceries he’d had in his fist when he’d gotten into the Porsche. It wasn’t until three weeks later, when he heard Gaetz complaining about how somebody had left a bag of rotting fish in the center console and the car was practically undrivable now that he knew what Josh had done.

By then, Chuck realized that he might never sleep with Josh Salinger… but he would surely die for him.

Pale Faces

LUCIUS BROADSTONE didn’t like hospitals, but he supposed nobody really did. The only people who had good memories of a hospital were those who’d had children, and usually those memories got much better once the parents brought the baby home. Lucius had spent too many hours in hospitals—as a kid, getting bones set, or as an adult, watching his mother die. And he couldn’t forget all those silent hours with his brother, because neither of them had words to cheer the other up after a lifetime spent learning to be quiet in the most brutal of ways.

But like the hospital or not, Lucius had been called into the chemo ward in one to do business, and while he hated the venue, he was appreciative of the time these people were giving him when they so obviously had other things to deal with.

The boy in the hospital bed looked pale, young, and ill; there was no other way to put it. Josh Salinger had been diagnosed with leukemia earlier that summer, and while Lucius understood the prognosis was hopeful, the boy—who was scarcely twenty-one as Lucius understood it—was going to have some hard weeks ahead of him.

Unfortunately, Josh and his family were the very people he had to ask a favor of, when they had already done more for him than he probably deserved.

“You brought me flowers?” Josh said, brown eyes lighting up in amusement. “That’s amazing! We’re not even dating. We’re not even going to date, and you brought me flowers. I may never date again.”

The wraith-thin young man sitting on the bed next to Josh—Josh’s best friend since they were practically in diapers, Lucius gathered—took the flowers and breathed in lightly.

“You’ll never date again anyway because you’re stupid and you got sick. And you have no sense of smell right now, so I’m claiming the flowers because I have a boyfriend, and I need to brag about that.”

“Grace, give me those.” A brawny arm belonging to a red-headed drawling cowboy swept out, snagging the flowers before Grace—whose real name was Dylan—could object. “Thank you, Lucius. I’ll put these in water and we can all enjoy them.”

Lucius gazed helplessly at Charles Calder and tried not to whimper. God, it was so unfair. Long rangy body, brawny arms and a chest as wide as a barn, and that didn’t even touch on the auburn hair and green eyes, or the lantern jaw and the lean mouth. Chuck Calder was every rich boy’s dream of a bad boy with a killer smile.

And God help him, Lucius wanted him. So bad. It wasn’t even fair. But besides the occasional flirty wink and some really enjoyable banter, nothing about Charles screamed “serious.” And as the CEO of a company struggling not to go under and of some other enterprises of questionable legality, perhaps, but great importance to the people those enterprises served—Lucius could not afford to be anything but serious.

He didn’t have time to go around sweeping charming Charles Calder off his feet, dammit! But Charles didn’t seem to need any time to do the same thing to Lucius. Oh no. That happened for Charles as easily as breathing.

Speaking of… breathe in, breathe out. Remember: manners and appearance.

“Thank you, Charles,” Lucius said with a little nod of his head. “That’s nice of you.”

“Well, they’re keeping me around for my charm and good looks. Figure I’ve got to deliver.” Charles followed that up with a wink, even as he was setting the flowers on the counter by the sink. Josh had been having a hard time keeping food down with the chemo—he’d gotten dangerously dehydrated with his last dose, so they were keeping him in for observation after this treatment. Lucius could tell that his family and friends had tried to make this room home for him. A colorful throw on the bed, some stuffed animals that had obviously been provided by Grace, and flowers, lots of them, brightened the place up for what was probably only a two-day stay.

But Josh’s parents could probably have afforded the entire wing of the hospital to themselves, if they’d wanted it. Looking at the faces of the boy’s mother and the man Josh called Uncle Danny, though, Lucius thought that his parents would probably have given all of their fortune if only Josh would get well.

“I was hoping to find Felix around,” Lucius said, trying not to sound censorious. Felix Salinger, Josh’s father, owned the local network news station and was purported to be one of the richest and most powerful men in Chicago. The perception around town was that Felix held the purse strings and controlled the direction the family took. Lucius, though, had seen the family—and he used the term loosely, because Charles Calder and the other people in the Salinger orbit did not appear to be related by blood—working together in something that could be best described as syzygy as opposed to patriarchy. So perhaps presenting his case to Julia Dormer-Salinger, Felix’s ex-wife, and Benjamin “Danny” Morgan, his current lover, would hold some weight.

“I’m afraid Felix had to be at the office today,” Julia said, understanding in her porcelain-blue eyes. “We’re trying to balance ourselves so there’s somebody here should Josh need us, and I’m afraid Felix drew the short straw today.”

Josh mock-coughed. “Babysitting. Babysitting.”

And Dylan “Grace” Li was having none of it. “Yes, we’re babysitting you. If you hate it, get better.”

Josh narrowed his eyes. “I liked you better when you told the rest of us to fuck off. Can we go back to doing that?”

“No, because I like being grown-up enough to lord it over you. Get a job, find a boyfriend, and stop wasting our time in the cancer center. I’m getting bored.”

“Piss off. I’m enjoying the rest.”

“Then you take what you can get. Now, you’re the one who said to listen to the man, so shut up and listen.”

Lucius smiled at them, enjoying their banter, and then he noticed their hands clenched tightly, and he realized Josh was in a great deal of pain.

He sucked in a breath and adjusted to the idea that his usual smooth boardroom theatrics weren’t necessary here; in light of the circumstances, they’d be downright rude. Without another word, he pulled a stool up behind him and scooted closer to the bed, addressing Benjamin Morgan and Julia Dormer-Salinger across the bed, Josh in the center of the it, and Grace perched on the edge.

Charles Calder, he noticed, was leaning against the doorframe slightly behind the bed, almost as though he was a security guard or hired muscle, which didn’t surprise Lucius at all. The last time he’d seen Charles Calder, the man had kissed him senseless, disrupted a formal gala, and dismantled an explosive device all in the same evening. Something told Lucius that Mr. Calder would be all ears for whatever the rest of the group was planning.

“So,” he said into what was obviously a waiting silence. “When we first met, I was trying to track down stolen tech that was bleeding my company dry.”

“Did you find the internal source that was providing information to Sergei Kadjic?” Benjamin Morgan asked.

Lucius nodded. “Yes. It was much easier once the distributor was taken care of. We just looked for an employee looking jumpy as fuck and trying to find a buyer for his information. Done. The guy is in custody, and he’s looking at five-to-ten, and my company is running slightly better,” he said. But while he kept his voice smooth, it was the “slightly” that bothered the hell out of him.

That wasn’t lost on the other people in the room.

“Slightly?” Josh said. “Did you hear that, Uncle Danny? He said after all we went through to get rid of Sergei Kadjic, his company is running ‘slightly’ better.”

“I did hear it, dear boy. I am, in fact, overwhelmed by Mr. Broadstone’s praise. What about you, Julia? Are you swoony yet?”

Julia Dormer-Salinger, an impeccably beautiful woman with blond hair swept up off her nape, a charming summer frock in white, and a thin cardigan in pale pink to ward off the hospital chill, fanned her face in an imaginary hot flash.

“Almost, Danny. I may need ice.”

Lucius contained a smile, but he was the only one. Josh, Grace, and even Charles Calder all let out smirks. Charles may have even given a soft snort. These people surely did enjoy keeping each other amused.

He thought of Josh and Dylan’s clenched hands and decided he’d better kick things in gear.

“My tech is still leaking, but that’s not the worst part,” he said bluntly. “The worst part is how it’s leaking and what’s being taken with it. Thomas Daren, the guy who was handing off projects to Kadjic right and left, did so one project at a time. He’d smuggle the information out in a thumb drive, or later on, a small chip. Old-school stuff. But what’s happening now isn’t a project or a discrete unit of things. It’s random. Someone will buy up stock before I was about to, or one of my supply chains will be disrupted but not another. It’s like somebody is getting random bites of information from my computer servers and using it to sabotage me. But that’s not the worst part either.”

“Really?” Julia said, sounding fully concerned. “Because that’s pretty frightening. Someone with a purpose is easy to find, Mr. Broadstone. Somebody with a random vendetta is much harder to track down.”

“I know it,” Lucius said grimly. “I’ve reorganized my office twice and replaced all of my hard drives at the administration level. Each time the disruptions stopped for about a week, and then they’d start up again. It’s like somebody is gathering data from the ether, and we just can’t figure out where to plug the leak.”

“But you said that’s not the worst thing,” Josh Salinger said, his voice hoarse. Lucius took a deep breath and tried not to look at the young man’s pale face. God, he didn’t want to be here, distracting this nice family from taking care of someone they were obviously devoted to. Trying desperately not to think about his own younger brother.

“No,” Lucius said. “The worst thing is Caraway House.”

“Is that like Cassowary House, with shitty Australian birds?” Grace asked randomly.

“Uncle Danny thought it was a place for drunk poets,” Josh said, smiling through cracked lips.

Benjamin “Danny” Morgan shrugged. “There are worse charities,” he said, smiling fondly at both of them before turning fox-clever eyes on Lucius. “But that’s not what Caraway House is, am I right?”

Earlier that summer, Danny and Felix had researched Lucius with a thoroughness that should have made them enemies. And it might have, but the first thing they’d offered Lucius was help to keep Caraway House afloat, which was one of the reasons Lucius was trusting them now.

“Sadly no,” Lucius confirmed, and in spite of how hard everybody was working not to make this place too serious, his own expression grew grave. “Caraway House is a shelter for abused women and their children. It is, by necessity, off the radar. Ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands, stalkers—there are a lot of people who would like to know where Caraway House is and how to get access to it. I’ve got three different locations, one in Peoria, the city proper, one in Chicago, and one on the far corner of the campus that houses Broadstone Industries. By any sort of road, the two buildings are a good four or five miles apart. I doubt if anybody working at the tech campus knows about Caraway House, and I’ve worked hard to keep it that way.”

“You’ve had problems there?” Julia asked, concerned.

“I have security,” Lucius said. “But we’ve been fending off cyberattacks at least once every other night for the last week. The Broadstone campus facility is for women whose husbands have resources. I know the common assumption is that domestic abuse is a problem of poverty, and to a certain extent, that’s very, very true. But it’s also a problem of power, and often the rich and powerful men who abuse their wives don’t have anybody richer or more powerful to deny them. Caraway House is meant to be the protective arms that give women a chance to get on their feet and take back their lives. Only we can’t do that if we’re afraid to let them past the gates in case somebody’s abuser is lying in wait and our security let them through.”

“Darling!” Julia Dormer-Salinger’s voice was almost… panicked. And while Lucius knew Danny Morgan was her husband’s lover—fiancé, in fact, if what the papers said held water—Lucius was not surprised when Danny’s hand, nimble and quick, closed over hers. Danny, who was perhaps two or so inches taller than Julia, leaned over and kissed her temple. “We’ll protect them, sweetheart,” he said softly. “That’s why we’re us.” When he spoke next, it was to Lucius. “Do you think the attacks on Caraway House have anything to do with your other cyber leaks?”

Lucius ran a shaking hand over his face. “I’m thinking yes, but I only have a gut feeling to go with that. I… I’ve been chasing my tail here,” he admitted. “First, there was the stolen projects. Then there was finding my tech was being sold to a mobster, and in the background, this was going on. But it wasn’t critical until this last week, when Caraway House was hacked repeatedly. I am so scared. Those women put their faith in me, you understand?” The only reason he hadn’t dismantled his father’s tech company from the ground up, by hand, was because it funded this endeavor. The irony of that man’s legacy going to fund a safety net for women like Lucius’s mother was the savage nectar that kept Lucius from simply throwing it to the wolves.

“Of course we do,” Danny said, and then to Lucius’s surprise, he turned to the sick young man in the bed. “Josh, we’re a go with this one, right?”

“Absolutely, Uncle Danny,” Josh said through a gruff throat. Then he yawned. “But if you’re going to plan, make it quick. I’m afraid I’m not going to be awake for long.”

“Moron,” Grace said. “You’re going to fall asleep, and they’re going to leave me with you and go plan, and then when you wake up, I’ll brief you. Who do you think you are, cancer boy? Super Josh?”

Josh chuckled rustily. “If only,” he murmured and then closed his eyes.

Lucius looked at him in dismay. Was that it? Was that the end of his audience?

“Good idea, Grace,” Charles Calder said softly. “Do you mind sitting with him? Danny, Julia, and I can take Mr. Broadstone to the cafeteria. I’m dying for a soft serve. How about you?”

“Milkshake,” Grace said. “Lots of whipped cream.” And then he curled up on his side next to Josh and pulled out his phone before looking over his shoulder. “Now all of you go away and let him nap.” His imperious tone softened when he looked at Julia and Danny. “This is my job. It’s why you bring me. So I can make him smile. Go do important things, okay?”

Julia bent down, squeezed Grace’s shoulder and kissed his temple, her eyes red-rimmed and bright. “You are important, Dylan. Thank you. You make this entire ordeal better.” She straightened and traced a fingertip under each eye, fixing her makeup. “Shall we go?” she said. “Danny, I’m afraid you’re buying the soft serve. Grace just lifted my wallet out of my purse, and I’m too fond of him right now to ask for it back.”

Grace smiled at her and slid the wallet under his cheek. Lucius did a slow blink, not understanding this family in the least, before Charles slid open the door of the room and gestured them all out like the gentleman Lucius was almost sure he was not.

They reached the end of the corridor, and Julia said, completely composed, “I’ll be just a moment. I’m going to use the ladies’ room.”

She disappeared into the alcove with the restrooms, and Danny said, “I’ll wait for her here, gentlemen. If you two wish to go on to the cafeteria, we’ll be there shortly.” They continued out of the chemo ward, and Lucius had time to note the plants and skylights in the one-story building that was set slightly apart from the rest of the hospital.

“Why do they do that?” he murmured to himself. “Not put it in the main building?”

“Probably to help keep it isolated from the germs in the rest of the hospital,” Charles answered, startling Lucius. The taller man had kept pace with him so easily, Lucius had almost forgotten he was there.

Almost.

They stepped outside to where the late August humidity smacked them in the face, only alleviated a little by a stiff wind coming off the lake. Many of the hospitals in Chicago were clustered in this area, which had always surprised Lucius a little. Didn’t people get sick in other parts of the city?

Still, it didn’t stop him from turning his face to the wind and taking a deep breath as they walked down the sidewalk joining the rest of the hospital campus.

“It’s rough in there,” Charles said quietly, plainly noticing Lucius gulping air. “It’s especially hard seeing Josh there. Kid’s sort of a powerhouse. Reminds all of us why it’s not great to get cocky.”

Lucius eyed his companion with fascination. “A powerhouse at what?” he asked delicately. He knew—sort of. He’d seen Josh Salinger at work, herding an eclectic group of people who only fit in at cocktail parties if they were running a scam. A couple of them were college-aged, like Josh and Grace, but not all. Lucius had met Interpol agents, insurance investigators, and mercenaries in the Salinger den, and a couple of months earlier, the entire collective had helped him stop his company from hemorrhaging developing technology at a fatal rate.

When he’d realized that Caraway House was under siege, they’d been the first people he’d thought of. But he hadn’t counted on the heart of the operation being so ill.

“At everything, I guess,” Charles said meditatively. They approached the main lobby of the hospital, where the cafeteria sat on the ground floor, next to an in-house Starbucks, and Charles took a couple of quick steps to open the door for him.

The gesture was so natural, so smooth, Lucius was halfway over the threshold before he realized that it was a power move—or a seduction move. And when Charles put light fingertips on the small of Lucius’s back, he was reminded of the kiss.

It hadn’t been real; at least thinking back on it, Lucius assumed it hadn’t been. But at the time, when Charles had been running into a gala at the Art Institute and Lucius had inconveniently recognized him, it had felt real. Charles had been strong and commanding, which were usually the things Lucius prided himself on, and after a few brief, memorable moments of being manhandled in the shadows, Lucius had found himself barely standing while Charles wiped Lucius’s mouth with careful thumbs and told him to stay there until Charles came back out again.

Lucius had no idea how many moments had passed before he saw Josh’s friend Grace, dressed completely in black, but still recognizable by his almost complete invisibility, getting ready to climb up to the roof to intercept Lucius’s stolen tech. That was when he’d realized that Charles had been getting him out of the way.

On the one hand, Lucius had been relieved. The group of people he’d put his trust in, in spite of the fact that they’d had no reason to help him, were coming through. His company provided for a lot of families, and it funded his charitable endeavors, and he really hadn’t wanted to face letting all those people down.

But on the other, that kiss had been nothing but a smoke screen, and since it took a good twenty minutes for Lucius’s heart rate to return to normal, well, he was a little embarrassed.

He’d had a healthy sex life. He’d been kissed a lot. He was even, he’d thought, considered something of a player. But that lanky cowboy had put on a monkey suit and kissed Lucius until his brain fell out, and Lucius didn’t know how to even talk to him anymore.

For a man who had inherited a not-quite Fortune 500 company before he’d turned thirty, it was a little demoralizing.

“Mostly,” Charles said now, jerking Lucius back to the moment, “Josh is sort of the heart of the group. He’s really good at bringing people together.”

Lucius shoved the kiss back into the box it had popped out from and tried to think like an adult. “Will you all be able to help me, do you think?” He grimaced. “God, I hate to even ask. He’s practically a baby, and he’s sick, and his parents are obviously worried stupid, and—”

“And the reason we all love that kid is that he wants us to put our individual talents into helping people, and we hadn’t really thought of that before. So don’t worry. We may be worried about our friend, but if the whole Robin Hood thing is important, well then….” He shrugged, and Lucius was left to draw his own conclusions.

“Then the team has to function without him?” he hazarded, knowing it was a hard thought to have.

“At least for now,” Charles said staunchly. “And here we are at the world’s best cafeteria, bar none.” He smiled toothily, and Lucius tried not to roll his eyes.

Failed.

“What makes it the world’s best cafeteria?” he asked.

“Why, Margie here,” Chuck said, smiling pleasantly as he walked up to the counter, complete with plastic partition, behind which stood a stout middle-aged woman in full food-service regalia of apron, gloves, hairnet, and mask. “Margie, how you doin’, beautiful?”

“Better now that you’re here, Chuck,” Margie said back. Her lined face softened, and even behind the mask, she looked almost girlish. “How’s your friend?”

Charles kept his smile, but his eyes grew a little sad, and Lucius realized that the charming flirtation he’d formed with this woman held a core of sincerity in it. He remembered hospitals when his brother had been ill, and how cold and lonely they’d been. Charles Calder had managed to find humanity in the middle of that coldness, and Lucius was in awe.

“He’s sleeping,” Charles told her. “Doing a lot of that these days, but the doctors say if he can get past this rough spot, he should be on the way to mending.”