“I love it when you do that.”

“I know you do,” Nick purred against Kelly’s ear. Kelly shivered all over, and Nick held him tighter so he could feel it.

Kelly rested his head against the wal , clumsy fingers working at Nick’s belt. “Eternity rings and manly soldiers.

You Irish really know how to seduce a guy.”

Nick hummed against Kelly’s neck as he kissed and nipped.

His entire body thrummed with bourbon and electricity.

Kelly’s hands on him were kicking him into overdrive.

Kelly’s words finally sank through the haze, though, and Nick lifted his head.

Kelly spread his hands over Nick’s stomach, bunching his fingers against Nick’s vest as he worked the buttons loose.

“What? What’s wrong? If you don’t have the room key I’m going to kill you. Or give you a sloppy blowjob in a hal way, whatever.” He gave Nick’s dress shirt a yank, and buttons went flying.

“Motherfucker,” Nick hissed as Kelly laughed raucously.

Nick fought past the al ure of Kelly’s hands on him and asked, “What did you say before?”

“I said if you don’t open the door and fuck me, I’m dropping to my knees right here in the hal way.” To emphasize his point, he pulled the zipper on Nick’s pants and popped the button free. “Actually I like that plan, key or not.”

The image tore through Nick, almost wiping his mind clean of any other thought. He even reached up to grab Kelly’s hair, his fist tightening in preparation of holding on while he thrust into Kelly’s mouth later. But he shook his head, fighting the niggling feeling that he was missing something. “Before that,” he said, and his voice was hoarse. “What’d you say?”

“Uh, about the Irish?” Kelly asked. “White knights? Circles and arches and eternity and warriors? I don’t know, I talked a lot tonight, you shouldn’t let me do that when I’m drunk.”

Nick grabbed Kelly’s face with both hands. “Eternity.

Spirit meeting matter. Archways. Warriors.” They stared at each other for a few seconds, and then Nick made a sound like an animal in pain as he backed away from Kelly and slapped himself in the forehead. “God! Why the fuck couldn’t I have figured that out an hour from now?” he shouted.

“What, figured what out?”

“It’s a cemetery,” Nick hissed. “The star points us to a cemetery.”

Nick zipped up his pants and stalked off, heading toward JD’s and Julian’s room.

“Hey,” Kelly called after him. “Does this mean I’m not getting fucked, because I don’t like this new plan at al !”

Nick stopped in the middle of the hall and turned. Kelly was standing in front of their door, his hair mussed, his suit awry, his cock obviously hard, his hands out like he couldn’t believe Nick had just walked away. But he was still smiling.

Kelly was always smiling.

Nick glanced at the door of the other men’s room, then back to Kelly. Kelly deserved better than being abandoned for a treasure hunt. When it came right down to it, if Nick had a choice to make, he’d always choose Kelly. “Fuck it, it can wait ’til morning.”

He fished the key out of his pocket and headed back to his lover. Kelly’s grin widened and he began to unbutton his own shirt in anticipation. Nick grabbed him around the waist, kissing him, then lifting him to his toes to deepen the kiss. Kelly’s hands were once again in his hair.

“You trying to sweep me off my feet?” Kelly asked, a little breathless.

Nick grinned. “No. But I am going to take you up on that sloppy blowjob you offered.”

Kelly cackled as Nick dragged him inside. “Who says romance is dead?”

Nick attacked his clothes, dropping the expensive material here and there. They both kicked clumsily out of their shoes, and Kelly wasn’t even out of his briefs before Nick tossed him onto the bed. Kelly stretched out, pushing his briefs down as he scooted closer to the middle of the king-sized bed. Though he’d seen Kelly’s hard body a thousand times before, he still nearly stumbled over his own feet when his eyes raked over the ornate six-shooter tattoo spanning from the juncture of Kelly’s thigh to his lower ribs and highlighting the muscle beneath it.

Nick tossed his last piece of clothing away and stood at the side of the bed, admiring his lover. Kelly’d had that six- shooter ever since Nick had known him, and Nick had always loved it and not quite known why.

“I thought I was going to get on my knees and let you fuck my mouth like a cheap whore,” Kelly drawled. “I mean, since you can’t afford a high-dol ar escort with your pants.”

There was a sparkle in his eyes. He knew exactly what he did 180 to Nick when he started talking like that. When he laid that tight body out for Nick to gaze upon.

“You were, but plans change,” Nick growled. He dug in his overnight bag and pulled out two things, showing them to Kelly for him to choose which would come first: a tube of lubricant, or the little red flip camera they kept for . . . special occasions.

“Camera,” Kelly gasped. “Oh God, yeah. The camera.”

Nick crawled onto the bed, wrapping Kelly’s hips in his arms and pul ing him closer. He handed him the flip cam, and Kelly scrambled to turn it on so he could catch the first touch of Nick’s tongue to his cock.

Ten minutes later, Nick was on his back, Kelly straddling his chest and fucking his mouth as he filmed it. He wasn’t going easy; he was far too drunk for that. But the rougher he was with Nick, the harder he pulled Nick’s hair, the deeper he thrust even after Nick nearly gagged on him, the more he bruised Nick’s lips, the more turned on Nick became.

Kelly arched over him, gritting his teeth and shouting Nick’s name. He cried out again and met Nick’s eyes, fist clenched in his hair. “If I came all over your face, you’d take it out on my ass, wouldn’t you?”

Nick dug his fingers into Kelly’s hips, nodding.

Kelly turned the video camera to face him, and gave it a sly smile. “Not usually recommended, but this is going to be worth it.”

Chapter 8

Selly groaned when the light lanced through Khis eyelids. He buried his face in the mattress, burrowing under his pillow.

Someone picked the pillow up and tapped his shoulder.

“No!” Kelly griped. “Fuck PT, dude.”

“Get dressed, babe, it’s almost six.”

Kelly sat up too fast, and his head swam. His stomach churned briefly, but he got it under control. He was surprised to find not just Nick in the room, sitting on the end of the bed, but also Julian and JD loitering near the doorway. “Jesus, how long did I sleep?”

“What happened to your neck?” JD blurted.

Kelly gingerly touched his neck. “Something about . . .

holding on to the headboard. I can’t remember. Jesus, what was in those drinks?”

Nick chuckled darkly. He pulled a boot on and stood to stamp his foot against the ground. Then he sat again and laced it up.“How’d you come up with cemetery?” Julian asked Nick.

“Call it divine inspiration.”

“Yeah, I’m betting God was invoked a lot last night,” JD said under his breath.

“Shhh,” Kelly begged. He put a hand to his head. “What are we doing, why are we up? Oh my God in Heaven.”

“There are two main cemeteries we need to look at,” Nick explained. “If we start early, we won’t have to split up to cover the ground.”

“I think we’ve proven we work better as a hive mind than we do solo,” JD added.

“Indeed,” Nick agreed cheekily.

Kelly was groaning when he rolled out of bed. He had to hold his head to make sure it stayed attached. “Let me shower and throw up,” he muttered. He wobbled toward the bathroom, not even self-conscious about being bare-assed naked. Especially odd since he was pretty sure there was a bite mark on his ass. If they didn’t want to see him post-fuck, though, they shouldn’t have been in his room at six in the morning.

Julian merely rolled his eyes as Kelly walked by, but JD tried his best not to look. Kelly patted him on the shoulder, then slid the pocket door to the bathroom closed and promptly threw up everything he’d had to drink the night before.

“Charming,” he heard Julian comment after a few seconds of gagging with his head in the toilet.

It was going to be a long day.

Rather than piling into the Range Rover and driving to the cemetery, Nick suggested they walk it. It was a glorious day, full of sunshine and birds singing and a nice cool breeze.

Kelly had to stop occasionally, apparently to make sure he didn’t hurl again, and Nick did his best not to laugh at his lover’s misery. He distinctly remembered trying to discourage the last two rounds. He slipped his arm around Kelly’s shoulders, patting him in the same way he’d done a hundred times before when they were suffering through a morning after.

The fact that they’d started fucking after almost fifteen years of knowing each other hadn’t changed many of their habits.

“I hate you,” Kelly groaned.

“Poor Boo Boo.”

“I hate your high tolerance,” Kelly groused. “I hate that I can’t drink you under the table or knock you out with normal drugs ’cause your stupid body is immune to chemicals. I hate that when I try I wind up in a ditch in Mexico.”

“There there,” Nick cooed.

“I hate you so much.” Kelly’s hand in his back pocket as they walked told a different story, though.

They headed for Boston Commons, which was a nice easy stroll from the Liberty, and from there Nick explained that the city had created a red brick line through the old town that led tourists along the Freedom Trail. It was a nice easy walk that took people from historic spot to historic spot, all related to the American Revolution. They picked up the red trail and followed it toward the Granary Burying Ground.

The morning sun hadn’t yet risen over the buildings around them, casting the cemetery in a gloomy haze. Nick led the way through the gate, glancing around at the crooked headstones with their macabre carvings. It was an odd little lot. It included the graves of Revolutionary heroes, including Sam Adams and Paul Revere. In the center was a massive monument dedicated to Ben Franklin’s family. The buildings that had cropped up around the old burial ground had come so close to the boundaries that their brick walls incorporated headstones into them. Many of the headstones that had once been here had been removed and used as sidewalks, and there were estimates that hundreds of bodies still remained beneath the ground, unmarked and lost to history.

What remained was a mixture of veneration of the past and compromise toward the future. Nick had always felt a little uneasy when he’d visited this place.

“The headstones are . . . irreverent, to say the least,” JD commented. He was kneeling in front of one. Many of them had skulls grinning impishly, with wings behind them. Nick has seen a few with dancing skeletons, capering around as death chased after them.

“So?” Julian asked. “What now? Is the treasure supposed to be buried here?”

“It couldn’t possibly be,” JD answered. “Not if the stories surrounding its theft are true.”

“There’s another marker here somewhere,” Nick added.

“Are you fucking telling me we came out here before the fucking sun for another clue to where this treasure is and not the treasure itself?” Kelly asked. He had Nick’s aviators on despite the lack of light.

“It makes sense; if he was leaving clues behind for someone to follow to this treasure, he would have done it on permanent fixtures. Or, things they would have considered permanent then. Graveyards, churches, buildings of importance he had to trust wouldn’t be torn down.”

“So, you believe we’re looking for a gravestone,” Julian said.Nick nodded. “The date of death would be 1775.”

“Why?” Julian asked.

“A clue carved on a tombstone would have been left as soon as it could be commissioned, when they still had access to the city,” Nick explained. “Had to be that year because they evacuated shortly after.”

“What else?” Julian asked.

Nick shrugged and dug in the pocket of his jeans for the napkin JD had left on the table last night. “No clue. That’s where JD’s diamonds come in.”

JD took a deep breath to steady himself and stepped closer to take the napkin. Nick touched his arm gently.

“I’m sorry,” Nick offered.

JD held his gaze for a few seconds, then nodded and gave him a weak smile. “I tried putting myself in your shoes last night, when I went to bed. I get it. I wouldn’t trust me either.”

Nick cocked his head, raising both eyebrows in surprise.

“I do trust you. I’m sorry for making you feel like I didn’t.

And I made you a promise. I intend to keep it. Let’s do this.”

JD squared his shoulders. “Right.”

Kelly groaned off in the distance. Nick glanced around for him and found him sitting on the steps that led down to the sidewalk, resting his head against an iron fence. He was pretty hungover, but the last historic graveyard Kelly had been in had almost killed him. Nick couldn’t help the shiver that ran up his spine with the memory.

“Hey, babe, you alright?”

“I hate you!” Kelly called back.

“Okay, well . . . keep lookout for us then,” Nick said, his voice shaking with laughter.

He turned, and Julian fell in step beside him. The man was actually smiling. “One night, Detective, you and I will sit and have a drink just so I can say I survived it.”