When he finally went still, Hollis swallowed and kissed his way back up Ian’s body. He got to his face and couldn’t stop the grin that stretched his lips when he got a good look at a fucked-out GQ. He stretched out one arm over Ian and groped for the lube they’d left on the bedside table. He poured some into his hand and wrapped it around his dick.
“Let me,” Ian whispered, reaching toward Hollis’s groin.
“No. I just want to look at you lying here all hot and sated. Won’t take a minute.” He squeezed his hand and moved it the same way he’d noticed Ian liked—thumb stroking over the top. Desire started to fill Ian’s expression again, and Ian wrapped his slender fingers around the base of Hollis’s prick. That was all it took. He shot all over him, never taking his eyes off Ian’s face. The younger man’s delight in watching him come made him stare until he was sure that expression would be stamped into his fantasies for life.
He leaned down, still panting, and kissed Ian, his own lips feeling raw and sensitive.
Kind of like his heart right then.Chapter 13Ian was really starting to hate the outdoors. He’d convinced himself that the miserable time he’d had camping with Rowe, Snow, Lucas, and Andrei this past summer had been largely due to the ridiculously hot temperatures and the fact that he was still recovering from a broken leg.
Now it was months later. The temperatures were hovering close to freezing and his leg had even more time to heal…and he was still miserable. But no amount of misery was going to stop him from getting to the White Rock schoolhouse. Quinn had come through on the location of the abandoned mining town—one that hadn’t been turned into a tourist spot because it was barely on a map. Ian was sure that the kids were being held there. They had to be.
But his confidence didn’t get rid of the ball of worry that was slowly growing in his stomach. What if he was wrong? What if he’d dragged Rowe, Noah, and Hollis down to the middle of nowhere, Kentucky, through frigid woods, to this abandoned coal-mining town to find it truly was abandoned? They took a chance heading farther from Cincinnati, making it nearly impossible for them to rush back to Lucas and the others if Jagger struck again.
They were wasting time that those kids couldn’t afford. If Jagger realized for half a second that he was risking losing out on this investment, he could have those kids moved and out of everyone’s reach long before they found their location.
Dead leaves covered the ground in a thick blanket, obscuring limbs and holes in the dirt dug by all manner of animals in the warmer months. Ian stepped over a fallen limb and the ground gave way underneath his foot, sucking him down as if it meant to swallow him whole. A strong hand grabbed his elbow before he could fall to his knees and helped pull him back up to more solid ground. He looked over his shoulder to find Hollis flashing him a slightly strained smile. They were all exhausted and cold, but Hollis was still clinging to his smile as if he knew that Ian needed his positive attitude.
“You okay?” Hollis asked when Ian was standing safely on his own.
Ian nodded before bending over to dust some of the dead leaves and dirt off his jeans. It didn’t really matter. They were all filthy. The day before, they’d gotten up early, taken the dogs to Gidget’s, then driven down to Harlan County, deep in old coal country in Eastern Kentucky. The Appalachian Mountains rose up around them on all sides. Bleak brown and gray covered the hillsides, punctuated by the occasional evergreen. But there was an air of hopelessness to it all. The coal-mining companies had shut down and moved out of the towns that had depended on the mining operations, leaving too many people jobless and desperate. They stopped two towns over from where they would ultimately leave Rowe’s truck and picked up some basic supplies, but Rowe had been adamant that they take only what they could carry.
They hiked until it was too dark to see in front of them and then they made a cold camp. Rowe refused to even let them start a fire, but Ian couldn’t blame him. They had no idea what they were hiking into. Without a doubt, they’d be outnumbered. Survival was dependent on them being able to sneak in and out again. They couldn’t risk being spotted because of the fire.
The only good thing about the entire trip so far was that he’d slept wrapped up in Hollis in their tent. The ground had been hard, but the big man generated a lot of body heat, keeping him nice and toasty. Hollis had woken him twice during the night when he’d tried to crawl, but each time he’d held him firmly, his arms and legs locked around him. He still hated that Hollis saw him like that, that he woke the other man from his sleep, but it was hard not to love drifting back off to sleep exchanging gentle kisses, wrapped in his warmth, feeling so damn safe despite being in the middle of the woods.