Forever

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1Coming Home

Quinton Mann and I were having a late dinner at Raphael’s. The posh Italian restaurant had sort of become our place, and we dined there at least twice a month, in the shadowed alcove that had also sort of become ours. That was where we’d sat back in February, when Quinn had bought me dinner for my birthday.

This time he ordered Raphael’s version of bouillabaisse with a side dish of linguine, and he talked me into eggplant parmigiana.

“I don’t eat purple vegetables, Quinn.”

“Eggplant is good for you. Besides, you don’t have enough roughage in your diet.” He brought his napkin to his mouth.

“Excuse me? How do you know how much roughage I eat?”

“I have my ways.” Above the napkin, his eyes were green with laughter. He was teasing me.

“Bastard.” It was said without heat; I liked that he teased me. My c**k twitched.

“Mark. I’m cut to the quick!”

“Sure you are. And I’m just brokenhearted about it.”

“Well, so you should be.” He refilled his wine glass and raised the bottle. “Mark?”

“Not tonight.”

He looked thoughtful, but he didn’t hassle me. Unlike Ed, my i***t partner. I’d told him once I went easy on the sauce, and I nearly had to knock him on his ass when he kept insisting. And then, of course, he went down to South America and got dead.

The waiter approached and whisked away the empty antipasto platters. “Are you done with your salads, signori?” At our nods, he took them as well. “Your dinners will be out shortly.”

Quinn reached for a breadstick and opened his mouth to say something when a warm, female voice interrupted.

“Hello, Quinn. I didn’t expect to see you here.” It was Lieutenant Colonel Francis, the Marine who worked at the Office of the Inspector General. She did a good job, and if she’d been a man I’d have tried to get her to leave the military and come work for the WBIS.

“Abigail. I might say the same thing.”

Abigail? I arched an eyebrow at my lover, and he looked puzzled. Ah. So in spite of her looks and intelligence I didn’t need to consider her a possible rival.

“Mann.” Major Jonathan Drum II didn’t appear too pleased to see him. Did he have something against the man having a decent dinner?

“Hello, Drum. You both know Mark Vincent, don’t you?” Quinn was so polite.

Drum turned his glare on me. “What’s he doing here?”

I looked down at the table, at the breadsticks, the wine glasses, the cutlery, then back up at him. “Having dinner? That is what one does in a restaurant, Major.”

Under the table, Quinn nudged my ankle with his foot, indicating he didn’t want me to start anything.

Drum, on the other hand, seemed to be itching for a fight.

“I’m going to get you, Vincent.”

“And my little dog too?”

Drum ignored that, although both Quinn and the lieutenant colonel bit back laughter. “I’m going to nail your ass to the wall!”

“Beg pardon?”

“It was your fault, what happened to me in Paris.”

“I thought you didn’t remember what happened in Paris.” This time Quinn kicked my ankle, and I gave him an injured look.

“You were behind it. I don’t know how, but it was all your fault. You’re a sociopath.”

I was no longer amused, and my chair scraped back as I prepared to rise and beat the s**t out of him. Drum had been calling me a sociopath for years, and it was getting old. Just because I did my job well—

“Abigail, I think you’d better get your dinner companion out of here. I don’t know how long I can keep Vincent under control.” Quinn had his hand on my arm, as if he really was preventing me from lunging at the major, tearing off his head, and using it for a bocce ball.

“Jesus, Mann, how can you even bear to be in the same room with Vincent, never mind at the same table?”

“I hardly think that’s any of your business, Major.”

“If word gets out—”

“But it’s not going to, is it, Drum?” I wasn’t going to let him threaten my lover.

He stared at me. His eyes grew wide and his face took on a sickly shade of green. “What…? You….”

Yeah, believe it, Drum. I’ll shoot you where you stand.

The maître d’ came scurrying to our table. “Is there a problem, signori? Lovely signorina, what may I do to assist you?”

“Nothing. I apologize for the disturbance, signore. Let’s go, Jon. I told you I’d rather have Thai tonight.”

“Friiitttzzz!” He seemed to have recovered himself, because the whine was back in his voice.

Lieutenant Colonel Francis gave an almost unnoticeable wince at the sound. “I hate when he calls me that,” she muttered. I couldn’t blame her—I hated that nickname for Francis myself, but fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about it—but maybe she wasn’t WBIS material if she was willing to put up with him. “You know you won’t be comfortable in the same restaurant as Vincent, and I’m not going to be comfortable if you spend the entire time we’re having dinner glaring at him. I’m sorry, Quinton.” She studied me for a moment. “I wonder what your two agencies are up to. Let’s go, Jon.”

She looped her arm through his, and he barely contained a flinch. Had the lieutenant colonel let him feel her claws?

Quinn watched as she practically dragged Drum out of the place: he shook his head, but before he could say anything, our dinners were brought out and placed before us.

“Would you like some grated cheese, signori?”

“Ah, let’s live dangerously. Knock yourself out,” I told the waiter, and he sprinkled cheese over my dinner like snow.

Quinn laughed. “All right, why not? I’ll have some on my pasta.” He signaled when he was satisfied with the amount.

“Buon appetito.” The waiter left us.

I picked up my fork. “Y’know, Quinn, I wish I knew what Major Drum has against me. I’m really a nice guy.”

“You are, Mark.” He appeared to be categorizing the shellfish in his stew. ”Did you notice he mentioned your ass? He does seem to have a fixation with it. Quite frankly, I think there’s a latent lust for you under all that hostility.”

I started choking on my eggplant parmigiana. “Oh, Jesus, I’m going to have nightmares over that for months.”

“Well, if you do have nightmares, I’ll just have to wake you up.” He frowned for a second. I wondered if there was something in his meal that didn’t please him, and I started looking for our waiter. But then Quinn fished a mussel out of the bowl before him and loosened the flesh from its shell with one of those tiny forks. He tipped his head back and let the contents of the shell slide into his mouth. He swallowed thoughtfully before touching his napkin to his lips. “What would be a good way to wake you up, babe?”

As if he didn’t know. I growled at him and forked up a bit of eggplant.

“Are you free next weekend?” His foot went back to rubbing—no, not rubbing, caressing—my ankle. “I’ve got tickets for The Phantom on Saturday evening; I can give them to Mother if I have to, but I’d rather not. I promised you.”

“Yeah, I remember.” When he’d taken me to this restaurant for my birthday, almost seven months before. “I’ll check my schedule.” But I intended to make sure I was free.

* * * *

I spent most weekends with Quinn when I wasn’t working, and most times we wound up in his town house in Alexandria. Almost as much of my wardrobe was in his closet as there was in my own in my apartment in DC.

But this time I brought a garment bag with me. It contained a three-piece black suit, a white dress shirt, and a black silk tie.

They were all new. The little tailor at Putting on the Ritz nearly had an orgasm when he realized I was going to buy a made-to-measure suit.

“I like the way you look in that suit, Mark.”

“Thanks, Quinn. You’re looking pretty edible yourself.”

His suit could have been the twin of mine, although his shirt was pale green and his tie a darker shade of green. Color was high on his cheekbones as he approached me.

He stood toe to toe with me, and he pulled my head down to lean his forehead against mine. His breath was hot on my mouth. “I want to strip that suit off you and f**k you over the couch.”

My c**k began to swell. Usually I was the one who f****d him. I reached for him, and my fingers flexed on his hip. “But…?”

He sighed. “It would make us late.”

“We could be fashionably late.”

For a moment he wavered but then said, “Don’t tempt me.”

“Spoilsport. Okay, fine, Quinn. We’ll just consider the entire evening as foreplay, then. But when we get home….” I sauntered out of the door ahead of him, leaving my promise hanging.

* * * *

I’d planned to torment him throughout the entire play, but our seats were in the orchestra, it was a sold-out performance, and f**k if I didn’t get caught up in the action on stage.

I poked him with my elbow. “That isn’t the Phantom,” I whispered, indicating the red-costumed, skeleton-faced figure coming down the stairs at the masquerade. “Watch the way he walks. That guy is shorter too. Jesus, those people are stupid.”

“No one’s ever seen him. Not and lived.”

“I’ll bet the Wardrobe Mistress has. How would she get all those letters she keeps whipping out of her pocket?” I tapped my fingers restlessly on the arm of my seat.

Quinn placed his hand over them. “Mark, you’re supposed to suspend disbelief.”

“Yeah, well, they are stupid.”

“Yeah, well”—he squeezed my hand—“suspend.”

* * * *

“Did you enjoy it, Mark?” We’d stopped for an after-theater drink and now were on the road back to Quinn’s town house.

“Yeah, it was pretty good.”

I had to feel sorry for the Phantom. Poor bastard. He was ready to give that woman his heart, and what did she do? She went sailing through the Labyrinth with that “insolent boy,” Raoul. So, okay, he had a thing about killing people who crossed him. That didn’t make him a bad person. What the Phantom should have done when he had Raoul swinging in that noose was yank his pants down and f**k the idea out of him that he was the one for Christine. Then he should have f****d her, and then he should have thrown them both out of his Opera house.

“Only pretty good? Wasn’t that you standing beside me, giving the cast a standing ovation?”

“Well…they did a good job and deserved it.” I reached across the seat and ran my fingers over his thigh. The muscle jumped beneath my hand, and I grinned. “Thanks for getting the tickets, Quinn.”

“You’re welcome, Mark.” He pulled the Lexus into his drive and let me out. The one-car garage was too narrow for both of us to comfortably exit the vehicle.

I waited by the end of the walk, keeping a casual eye on the neighborhood—one could never tell, and it didn’t hurt to play it safe—and Quinn thumbed the remote and the garage door slid shut.

I had the key he had given me, but unless I was alone, I always waited for him to open the door. It was his home, after all.

Once inside, he reset the alarm. I went up to the second floor, prowling through the bedrooms, making sure everything was secure, while Quinn did the same on the first floor. We’d both been in the business too long to get careless.

I hung up my suit jacket and was just unbuttoning my vest when I heard Quinn coming up the stairs.

“Mark?”

“In here, babe.”

Sexual heat went through me like a flash fire.

Quinn stood in the doorway, one hand negligently on the doorframe, the other on his hip. I let my eyes wander over him, and my mouth went dry.

His vest hung open over his flat stomach, his tie was loosened, the top buttons of his shirt were undone, and his feet were bare. His obvious arousal marred the smooth line of his trousers.

“You’re not planning on sleeping in here, are you?”

“Only if you’re joining me.”

“My bed is more comfortable.” He pushed off from the door and sauntered toward me.