Retribution (The Protectors 3)

Until now.

I’d been around plenty of gay men and women in my life. Hell, the man I considered the closest thing I had to a best friend was openly gay and I’d spent the last couple of weeks protecting the man he’d been in love with for several years. It wasn’t something that was foreign to me, but feeling my body react to Tate’s hard body definitely was. I hadn’t even once looked at a man in the same way I did a woman. There was no way what I was feeling was real…it was some kind of fucked up fluke. It had to be. Because not only could I not be attracted to a man after a lifetime of wanting only women, I could not be attracted to the son of one of my wife’s murderers.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, I’d had to contend with Matty when he’d shuffled into the kitchen this morning in his superhero pajamas. I would have expected him to be afraid of me after what I’d done to him and his father that first night, but instead, he’d studied me for a moment, his Spiderman doll hanging loosely in his hand, and then he’d climbed up into the chair across from and just stared at me. He’d then announced that he didn’t think I was Captain America because my name was Hawke. That meant I must be more like Hawkeye and he’d begun asking me why I carried a gun instead of a bow and arrows.

I’d managed to use his hunger as a distraction and had taken him down to a small grocery store a block from Tate’s apartment. And while he’d gotten off the topic of me being a superhero in hiding, he hadn’t stopped rambling from the moment we’d left the apartment. Worse, he’d grabbed my hand as we’d walked and simply looked up at me and said, “Daddy says.” I’d taken that to mean Tate had a rule that Matty needed to hold a grown-up’s hand, but I hadn’t had a chance to ask him that because he’d started in on explaining who he thought would win if Spiderman and Captain America got into a fight.

It wasn’t until we’d gotten back to the apartment and I’d slid a bowl of Cheerios in front of Matty, that I’d managed to get a few snippets of information out of him. Like that his father did dishes in a restaurant, slept on the couch and they moved around a lot. The latter hadn’t been described that way of course – Matty had made it sound like a game where winning was about being quiet and quick. It was a telling statement of what Tate’s life was like.

And that should have made me feel better about what I was doing.

It didn’t.

Because even if Tate and Matty got what they needed out of the deal, I’d still taken Tate’s choice away. I’d terrorized him, threatened him and used his kid to get what I wanted. And then I’d reveled in the way his body had lined up perfectly with mine as I’d held him. I hadn’t cared that all the places where I’d been touching him were hard instead of soft. Or that he hadn’t smelled like flowers and that his muscles had rippled beneath my fingers. Or that his hold on me had been desperately tight instead of soft and comforting.

I could easily end this when I got them to Seattle. I could keep my end of the deal because the money for Matty’s care meant nothing to me. I could entrust them to Ronan’s care and be done with this whole thing.

But I wouldn’t be done because I’d have to live with knowing I’d failed Revay in every way. And I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck standing up and I glanced over to see Tate watching me. I cursed the fact that my dick twitched at the momentary flash of need I saw in his eyes. “What?” I bit out a little too harshly.

“Nothing,” Tate murmured as he shook his head and turned his attention back out the window. We’d been on the road for a couple hours, stopping only once to buy a booster seat for Matty along with some snacks that I never would have even thought to buy for a little kid.

“What?” I repeated, forcing the irritation from my voice because, strangely enough, I wanted him to talk to me.

Tate turned back to me and then glanced at the back seat. I looked up in the rearview mirror and saw that Matty was asleep, his head resting on his shoulder and Spiderman clutched to his chest.

“Who was it?”

“Who?” I asked.

Tate hesitated and then finally said, “Who did Buck and Denny kill?”

I felt pain shoot through my chest. Since I needed a moment to recover, I managed to get out, “You don’t seem surprised they did it.”