On the Clock (Market Garden, #8)(9)

“You’d better believe it.” Blake grabbed on to Jason’s waist because he didn’t know what else to do with his hands. “With that much money on the—”

Jason did something with his hips. Tilted them? Fuck, Blake didn’t know. Whatever it was, it turned him inside out. His hands nearly slipped off Jason. His hips . . . moved. Somehow. His body may as well have had a mind of its own now. Fuck trying not to come. Fuck the money. Fuck the games. He needed to come.

“Oh my God,” Blake murmured. He tried to speak, but . . . f*ck that too. Words, breath, brain. The tension in him swelled, and he’d already reached his breaking point, and if Jason kept moving like that, kept riding him like that, kept existing like that, Blake was going to skip right over his orgasm and go up in flames.

And then the tension gave. Blake didn’t make a sound. He couldn’t. All he could do was tremble and thrust, somehow hold on and let go at the same time, and in spite of Blake’s death grip on his hips, Jason kept riding him until he slurred, “S-stop.”

Jason eased down onto him, and stopped. For a moment, Blake didn’t move. He let the last few waves wash over him, and he thought he heard himself whispering curses, but, whatever. He felt amazing.

“Two minutes, forty-nine seconds.” Jason brushed a soft kiss across Blake’s lips. “Eleven more seconds, and you’d have saved yourself a thousand quid.”

“’S’okay.” Blake blinked his eyes open. “Totally worth it.”





They basked in the afterglow for a long time, and Blake actually dozed off for a little while. When he woke up, he thought Jason might’ve slipped out, but he was there, lying beside him and snoring softly.

Wasn’t that an adorable sight? Jason was absolutely smoking hot, and a demon in bed, but snoozing peacefully next to Blake, he was cute, too. Blake wasn’t sure if he wanted to watch him sleep, or wake the devil and go another round.

Jason was meticulously groomed—finger and toe nails were perfect, and where he wasn’t waxed, he’d had a very recent trim, without a hair out of place. Maybe that was all part of the stage persona, part of his professionalism, but he wore that persona with ease. Naturally. No jewelry or piercings anywhere that Blake had noticed, and no ink.

Maybe the time zones were messing with him, but he wasn’t tired enough to sleep again. He could always let Jason rest and recover while he went over some paperwork on his laptop.

Moving carefully to avoid disturbing Jason, he got out of bed and headed for the bathroom, then grabbed a shower. Half the reason he kept coming back to this hotel was because the water got properly hot and had a decent amount of pressure, which seemed rare as hell in the UK. He washed and then stood under the spray, willing the hot water to either get him going or put him to sleep—he didn’t mind.

The shower door opened, startling him.

Jason nudged him to the side, and a second later, hissed. “Trying to turn into a lobster?”

“Aiming for crayfish first, but lobster sounds good.”

Jason muttered something about “insolent Colonials” and pushed the lever further toward the blue.

Blake was about to fire back with an equally snarky retort, but the water suddenly went from blissfully hot to painfully lukewarm. “Jesus!” He jumped as far out of the way as he could and let Jason take the full brunt of it. “We won’t be cooking any crustaceans in this shower.”

Jason laughed as he moved farther under the water and let that tepid nonsense wash over him as if that were a civilized thing to do. “Water temperature aside, I hope the intrusion isn’t unwelcome.”

“Unwelcome?” Blake grinned and slid his arms around Jason’s wet torso, gritting his teeth against the way-too-cool water running down way-too-hot skin. “Hardly. Though we haven’t negotiated a price for the shower, so I assume it won’t be added to my tab.”

Jason quirked his lips, and then shrugged. “Well, we haven’t done anything in the shower, so I can’t really charge you, can I?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Indeed. Not yet. But we can change that.”

“Mm-hmm. We can.”

“What do you have in mind?”

Blake gazed down at Jason’s wet, lean body. What did he have in mind? Oh hell, what didn’t he have in mind? “It’s tough to negotiate upfront when all I want to do is kiss you and get carried away.”

Jason licked his lips. “I like the sound of that.”

“Mm-hmm. I’m sure you like the price of it, too.”

“I do.” Jason reached up and clasped his hands behind Blake’s neck. “Tell you what—kiss me for a thousand quid. When lube comes into play, we’ll renegotiate.”

“Deal.” Blake didn’t give Jason a chance to respond. Instead, he finally did what he’d desperately wanted to do in the elevator—he shoved him up against the wall and kissed him. Jason tensed, probably because of the cold tiles, but then shivered and pulled Blake closer. Goddamn, they were both hard already. Even with that obnoxious cool water hitting his skin.

A thousand pounds for this? Bargain.

Still kissing him, Blake pulled one of Jason’s hands free and pinned his wrist to the wall beside his head. Then the other. Jason whimpered into his kiss and ground his hard-on against Blake’s. Obviously he didn’t mind, and everything about this—the power, the knowledge that Jason could turn the tables at any moment—aroused Blake like nobody’s business.