Dangerous Games Read online

  Reese ducked his head as he shoved his hands in his back pockets, looking both sheepish and hopeful. “Sorry just to show up like this. I missed you at the office today. You okay?”

  Reese Armstrong missed him at the office? He’d been looking for him? Luca mopped at the sweat on his brow with his towel. Just answer his question. “I’m okay. I w-w-work from home s-s-sometimes.”

  The dark blue of Reese’s linen button-down shirt was striking against his tan skin and the honey-gold blond hair falling over his forehead. His eyes were the color of the sky at dusk. His long, strong legs were encased in faded blue denim.

  “Did I catch you at a bad time?” Reese asked, flashing one of those gorgeous smiles.

  Luca draped his towel over his shoulder. “I was j-j-just working out.” Slow down. Breathe.

  “Sorry to barge in on your workout. I came by because I wanted to see you, Luca. I hope that’s okay.”

  They stared at each other for several beats, while Luca tried not to get lost in those deep blue eyes.

  “Uh, you going to invite me in?”

  Flustered, Luca stepped back. “Sure,” he said, keeping his tone neutral. “C-c-come in.”

  Reese stepped across the threshold. He looked around Luca’s unprepossessing apartment, which he’d taken fully furnished when he’d moved to Denver nine months before. Now he saw it through a stranger’s eyes—drab and impersonal.

  “Nice place,” Reese said, certainly lying.

  Luca resisted the urge to make excuses for the bland interior. He hadn’t invited this guy over and he owed him no apologies. “Thanks.”

  Reese approached the computer desk, where Luca had installed multiple screens for ease of programming. “Whoa, this is quite a setup.” Reese took a step closer. Christ, he even smelled good. He was biting his lower lip in a way that made Luca want to moan. “I just wanted to apologize.”

  Startled, Luca replied, “For what?”

  “For yesterday. At lunch. I was—it was stupid.”

  Luca stiffened. So he had been right. Reese had been playing him in some way. What was the guy’s angle now? Whatever it was, Luca had no intention of making it easy for him.

  “Mind if I sit?” Without waiting for a response, Reese strode toward the sofa and plopped down.

  As much as to give himself a chance to get his bearings as anything, Luca offered, “C-c-can I get you a b-b-beer or something?”

  “Sure, that’d be great. Thanks.”

  Luca went into the kitchen, trying to comb his messy hair with his fingers as he went. Grabbing two cans of Coors from the fridge, he returned to the living room.

  Reese looked up with a smile as Luca reentered the room. He patted the sofa beside him. Luca moved toward him as if he were the guest in his own apartment. He sat, holding out a can of beer to Reese, who took it, popped the top and drank nearly the whole thing in one long gulp.

  Setting the can down on the coffee table, he turned to Luca, his eyes flickering from Luca’s face to his torso. Reaching out a hand, he touched Luca’s shirt. Even through the fabric, his touch sent a jolt of lust through Luca’s loins.

  Reese grinned, his expression slightly quizzical. “Is that like an inside programmer’s joke?”

  “Huh?” Luca glanced down at his T-shirt, which had been a freebie at a computer coding seminar he’d attended while at MIT. The logo read: Friends don’t let friends code in PHP.

  He looked up at Reese with a grin. “Oh. Yeah, I guess. PHP is a p-p-programming language. It’s popular to bash PHP and Java, but really all p-p-programming languages are just tools. Some languages are more suitable for a p-p-particular domain. All languages have landmines, even strongly typed languages. To quote Bjarne Stroustrup, ‘There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.’”

  “Barn who?” Reese replied, looking confused.

  Luca chuckled. “Sorry. Shop talk. Stroustrup is a Danish computer p-p-programmer. He created C++.”

  “C?” Reese asked. “Why not A? I’d rather have an A than a C, even with two pluses.”

  Luca laughed, the tight knot of anxiety at what Reese was doing there slowly unwinding. “The plus plus is shorthand for incrementing a value by one. C++ was an improvement on another language already out there called C. And it was called C because it came after B in the alphabet, which was a program developed by Bell Labs back in the dinosaur days.”

  “Ah, I get it,” Reese replied, grinning back. He shook his head. “It’s a whole different world, huh? I’m in awe of people like you. I have a hard enough time with the English language, much less all those esoteric programming languages.”

  “It’s fun. It’s kind of like c-c-composing music. There’s a lot that composing melodies and writing algorithms have in c-c-common. There’s a creative side to developing, and a mechanical side to composing.”

  “Wow, so you’re a musician too?”

  Luca blushed. “Nah. Just a dabbler. Guitar.” He took a sip of his beer and gestured toward Reese’s empty can. “C-c-can I get you another beer?”

  “No, thanks. I’m good.” He bit his lower lip and blew out a breath. “So, I know it was weird of me to just show up uninvited without even texting or anything. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to dive in.”

  Luca tensed, both glad and apprehensive Reese was finally getting to the heart of what the heck he was doing there.

  “I invited you to lunch yesterday because you intrigue me. You’re so quiet at the office. To be honest, I didn’t even know you were there at first. I mean, I had heard about the whiz kid, the brilliant programmer who was taking Strata to another level, but it took me a while to figure out it was you.”

  Despite himself, Luca flushed with pleasure. He knew he’d impressed Robert Sanchez, who had doubled his salary within the first six months, but he hadn’t realized the non-programmers in the office knew much about it.

  “I’m out of the office a lot on client calls, which partially explains it,” Reese continued. “Plus, you have to admit, you aren’t exactly a super social guy. I mean, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you at one of the impromptu happy hours.”

  Luca didn’t deny this. Getting drunk and eating crappy finger food with colleagues had never been his idea of fun. While he felt fully in control at his computer, actual interactions in social settings tended to be more stressful than fun, even with other geeks.

  Reese leaned closer, his gaze intense, almost pleading. “When I asked you to lunch, I guess it was pretty obvious I was interested in more than your brilliant mind. But I fucked up. I know that now.”

  “P-p-pardon? I d-don’t know what you’re saying.” What was this guy’s angle? What was he really doing there?

  “In my clumsy efforts at seduction, I discounted your innate intelligence, your ability to see the player hiding behind my bid for sympathy when it came to Aidan.”

  “What?” Luca blurted, stunned the guy had admitted to what he had suspected—he was a player. Vindication warred with disappointment and confusion. Was he still playing some kind of game or was it possible this handsome, confident man was actually sincere?

  Reese hung his head, a look of genuine contrition on his face. “Yeah. Sometimes I can be a real jerk.” His hand dropped to Luca’s bare thigh, his fingers sending electric sparks of raw lust over Luca’s skin.

  In spite of himself, Luca responded to the touch, his cock hardening, his pulse quickening. He shifted and crossed his legs, causing Reese’s hand to fall away.

  “Please,” Reese said quietly. “Hear me out. I’m trying to tell you why I’m sorry. Let me explain and then you can kick me out or whatever you want to do.” He touched Luca’s thigh again, burning the flesh with desire.

  Luca stared into Reese’s eyes, looking for the cocky player beneath his apparent sincerity, but all he saw was genuine remorse. His heart opened, just a little. “I’m listening,” he said softly.

  “There’s no Aidan.”r />
  The words hit Luca like a sucker punch. “Huh?”

  “No Aidan. No love lost. No heart broken. I made it up because I was trying to reach you. Because for the first time in my life, I think I’ve met someone who isn’t going to jump into the sack with me, just because I smile at him.”

  Luca lifted his eyebrows. The guy sure thought a lot of himself. But then, he was better looking than Bradley Cooper and Jared Leto combined, so it was understandable.

  Reese chuckled self-deprecatingly. “I know I must sound like a pompous dick. I made up Aidan because I thought if you felt some sympathy for me, you might look past the posturing and see the real man inside.”

  Wow. Reese Armstrong felt vulnerable? Was that even possible, with those looks and cocky, easy manner?

  “It was a dumb ass thing to do,” Reese continued. “The irony is, I meant what I said. I really do want to meet someone like you. Someone who isn’t just out for what they can get. I’m tired of the shallow connections I make and then discard. I’m ready for something more. But I shouldn’t have lied to you. I apologize for that. And if I’ve blown my chances with you as a result”—he shrugged, offering a sad smile—“then that’s totally on me, and I’ll have to deal with that.”

  Reese bit his lower lip again in that sexy way and then looked down like a chastened schoolboy. In spite of himself, Luca’s heart melted into a puddle of goo. At the same time, a tiny voice still warned him—this could still be part of whatever game Reese was playing. But if so, why? What in the world did he have to gain?

  Luca decided to ask him straight on. “Why me, Reese? I mean, c-c-come on.” Luca paused and drew in a breath. “Why focus on m-m-e? You c-c-could have any guy you wanted. I’m just a socially awkward geekazoid who’d rather play Civilization or Age of Empires on my PC than actually interact with real p-p-people.”

  The look of genuine surprise on Reese’s face almost made Luca laugh. “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re not only super hot physically, you’re brilliant. I’ve always been attracted to smart men. It’s like an aphrodisiac to me. But it’s more than that, Luca.”

  Luca sat mute as he tried to absorb these unexpected and extravagant compliments.

  Reese continued in a tone so utterly sincere Luca finally had to acknowledge, as crazy as it was, he must be telling the truth. “There’s something about you, Luca. Something I want to explore. And, I don’t know”—he paused, fixing Luca with an intense gaze. “Something about you speaks to me. I can see the pain in your eyes. What happened to hurt you? How can I fix the hurt? How can I make it better?”

  Luca’s eyes widened with shock. Was it that obvious?

  Luca barely allowed himself to think about Tom anymore. For far too long, he’d probed the loss of him, the absence of him, like a missing tooth his tongue continued to search for. He’d tried to leave the memory of Tom behind in Boston, and had mostly succeeded, but Reese’s out of the blue observation brought it all back…

  Tom Shepherd had swept into Luca’s quiet, controlled life as a software engineer at MIT like a hurricane, turning his world upside down and capturing Luca’s heart in the process. In retrospect, Luca thought bitterly that Tom had warned him from the beginning. It was often like that, wasn’t it? When you first met someone, they’d confide their fatal flaw, but you, blinded by lust or simply not paying attention, would discount the warning, too focused on the thrill of discovery to consider the potential fallout.

  It was one of the first things Tom had said when they’d met at the Muddy Charles Pub near the MIT campus one blustery winter evening and struck up an intense conversation. “I’m a gypsy. I’m always looking for that next exciting adventure. Never fall in love with a wanderer, Luca. They’ll always break your heart.”

  Luca ignored this warning, too caught up in the excitement of meeting someone new to pay much attention. It was rare he felt that kind of connection so instantly and completely. They fell into bed that very night and spent every spare moment together while Tom was giving his lecture series at the college on the effective promotion of HIV awareness in developing countries.

  After a whirlwind love affair that lasted only three weeks, Tom left for Africa with a group called Volunteers for Peace, promising to return to Cambridge in a month. A month became two and then three. The frequent texting and face time via WhatsApp dwindled as the time passed, with Tom explaining the limited Wi-Fi capabilities in the rural areas where he was supposedly working.

  Luca tried to forget about Tom and had nearly managed to do so when the guy had come sweeping back into his life. This time he stayed for two months, subletting a studio apartment not far from Luca’s graduate housing on the MIT campus. Again, they spent every spare moment together. Luca had even dared to bring up the idea of their moving in together, though Tom’s responses were always noncommittal.

  It was the night before Tom was to leave, this time for India, with promises he would return soon to Luca’s arms. “Do you have to go?” Luca had whined, even while hating himself for asking.

  Tom had smiled gently, shaking his head. “You know me, Luca. I’m a gypsy. But you’ll be with me, in my heart.” Tom had sent him away early that last evening, explaining he had a lot of packing and other last-minute things to do, and would be leaving before dawn. “And anyway,” he said, kissing Luca as he held him one last time in his arms, “you know I hate goodbyes.”

  Unable to stay away, Luca came up with an excuse to return to Tom’s place. Tom had been lamenting the theft of his favorite backpack in an airport, and Luca had found the identical one at a sports store in Harvard Square. Backpack in hand, he’d come back to Tom’s apartment and rung the bell.

  He heard music and laughter inside, which surprised him, but maybe it was just the TV. Then he heard Tom’s voice through the door. “It’s probably the pizza guy. You got any cash?”

  A moment later, the door was yanked open and there stood Tom, shirtless, his hair tousled, a wad of bills in his hand. His color was high, usually a sign he’d been drinking, and his eyes were red and unfocused. “Hey, there,” he said a little woozily. “You’re not the pizza guy.” He grinned stupidly.

  “I’m starving, Tommy. Did he remember the extra olives?” An older man in his forties appeared just behind Tom, wearing only a small towel tucked around his waist. His hair was wet, as if he’d just stepped out of the shower. Luca knew instantly they’d been having sex not long before he arrived.

  “What the fuck? Who the hell are you?” Luca had demanded.

  The guy moved to stand beside Tom. “Uh oh,” he said, grinning as he looked from Tom to Luca. “Looks like you’re busted, Tommy Boy.”

  Tom hadn’t missed a beat. “Don’t be silly.” He took a step back, gesturing for Luca to enter, but Luca didn’t move. “This is Andy, an old friend of mine. He just happened by and well”—Tom had shrugged apologetically, like whatever had happened was completely beyond his control—“he brought some great hash, and you know, one thing led to another and…” At Luca’s frown, he’d added, “Come on, Luca. Lighten up. This is no big deal.”

  “No big deal?” Luca had blurted, outraged and hurt. “You send me away because you’re so busy, and the minute my back is turned you’re fucking some guy who just happens by? I thought we had something special.”

  “Luca, stop it. You’re making a scene. It’s not like we’re married, for god’s sake. Surely you can’t be so naïve as to think I’m seeing no one but you? You know I can’t stand someone who’s needy. This clinginess of yours is really not an attractive trait, Luca. You might want to work on that.”

  “Oh, come on, Tommy,” the other guy had said, grinning as if this were all great fun. “Don’t be so hard on the boy.” Turning to Luca, he’d added, “Come on in and join the party, why don’t you? Pizza should be here in a minute. I have some seriously excellent Moroccan hashish. I’m willing to share if you ask very nicely.”

  Luca’s eyes had blurred with tears. He’d dropped the backpack on the floor
at Tom’s feet and turned on his heel, the sound of their stoned laughter ringing in his head.

  When the chance to move from Boston to Colorado had fallen into his lap, he’d accepted the move as fate—he’d make a fresh start and meet someone new. And this time he’d think with his head instead of his heart and his cock.

  But somehow, once the walls were raised, he found it hard to lower them, not yet ready to risk the bruising of his heart. Instead, he retreated into a kind of emotional deep freeze. No one, until now, had penetrated the walls of ice.

  Reese was staring at him quizzically, and Luca’s cheeks heated. He almost wanted to tell Reese about Tom—to confide in someone about the pain that still lingered in his heart, and apparently showed in his eyes. But something kept him silent. He still wasn’t sure who this man was or what he wanted. He wasn’t going to allow himself to be hurt again.

  “Luca,” Reese whispered. He reached out and stroked Luca’s cheek with two fingers. Luca shuddered at his touch, a tremor of raw, painful desire moving through him. “I have to kiss you,” Reese murmured, his voice husky.

  Luca felt himself falling, the pull of lust’s gravity too great to resist. As their lips touched, all thought of Tom flew from his mind like a cold, damp fog burning away at the break of day.

  Chapter 4

  Luca sat stock still, his eyes wide, his pupils dilated as Reese leaned toward him. Reese could see both fear and longing in his face. Luca’s hair was thick and soft beneath Reese’s fingers as he lightly gripped the back of Luca’s head.

  A tremor moved through Luca’s body as their lips touched. Reese placed his hand on Luca’s chest, touched by the rapid patter of the younger man’s heart beneath his fingers. Luca was like a teenager making out for the first time. There was something incredibly sweet and vulnerable about this geeky, stuttering nerd.

  Reese’s cock bent painfully in his jeans as it grew erect. As they kissed, he tugged open the metal button at the top of his fly and slid his fingers into his underwear to adjust himself. He licked seductively at Luca’s lower lip, willing him to open his mouth so the kiss could get serious. He moved his hand along Luca’s bare thigh and Luca moaned softly from behind his closed lips.