He Shelved My Designs, Then Crashed Into My Bed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Room
In a blackout at his best friend's wedding, Rett tells a stranger who found the wrong door to stay, and wakes to find he has slept with Ward Gibbes.
"Wrong room," a man said in the dark.
His hand had closed around Rett's wrist before Rett knew anyone was standing there.
It was a big hand, warm and very sure.
The storm had killed every light in the inn an hour ago, and Rett had been lying on top of the covers in his dress shirt, listening to the rain.
"Then leave," Rett said.
The man did not leave.
He stood at the side of the bed with the door still open behind him, breathing like he had taken the stairs fast.
Rett could not see his face or his shoulders, only the shape where the dark was thicker.
"You're drunk," the man said.
"I'm a little drunk. My best friend got married tonight and I gave the toast." Rett pulled at his wrist and got nowhere. "You can let go now."
"In a minute."
The voice was low and level, and it did something to the back of Rett's neck that he did not like.
The man's thumb moved over the inside of his wrist, once, over the pulse.
"What's your name?" Rett asked.
"No."
"No?"
"No names. It's dark." The mattress dipped as the man sat on the edge of it. "Tell me what you're doing up here alone, and I'll go."
Rett laughed, because it was that or something worse.
"I'm hiding from my own life. I've spent two years wanting to put a man named Ward Gibbes through a wall, and tonight I find out his cousin is the bride."
The thumb stopped moving.
"Is he here?" the man asked.
"He sent a gift. A crystal bowl. It's the kind of gift you send to a person you've never had to look at." Rett's mouth twisted. "He buys beautiful things and locks them in a warehouse. I'd give a lot to see his face."
For a moment there was only rain on the glass.
"Would you," the man said.
"Yes," Rett said.
"What would you do with it?"
"Something I'd be arrested for."
"Again?" The man's thumb started moving again, slower. "You sound like a man who has been arrested."
"Once. Don't ask."
"I wasn't going to."
His hand left Rett's wrist and came up to Rett's jaw.
It turned his face a little to the left, like a man checking a piece of work against the light.
There was no light.
Rett's heart was going hard, and he told himself it was the whiskey.
"Take your shoes off," Rett said.
"Is that an order?"
"If you're staying on my bed, yes."
A short breath came out of the man, close to a laugh.
Leather creaked as he bent, and his free hand found the arm of the bedside chair.
He settled his palm on it the way a man does with a chair he has sat in for years.
"That's a good chair," he said. "Ash."
"You can tell that in the dark?"
"The grain is open. You can feel where it was cut."
"I made it," Rett said.
"It shows," the man said.
Two shoes hit the floor.
Then the weight of him was on the mattress, and a hand flattened on Rett's chest and pushed him down on his back.
"Say it," the man said above him.
"Say what?"
"That you want me to stay."
Rett had the sense of being measured.
He was twenty-eight years old, he owned his own house and his own tools, and nobody had spoken to him like that in a very long time.
"I want you to stay," he said. "Don't make me say it twice."
The man kissed him.
It was not polite.
His mouth was hot and certain, and he opened Rett's lips with his tongue like he had a right to.
Rett made a noise he would have denied later and got both hands in the man's shirt.
The cotton was fine and expensive, and the body under it was solid and broad.
He dragged the buttons open one by one, and the man let him, breathing harder.
"You're strong," the man said against his throat.
"I lift lumber for a living."
"I could tell by the hands."
A big palm slid under Rett's shirt and over his ribs, and Rett arched into it before he could stop himself.
The man bit the side of his neck, not gently.
"Mine," he said, so low that Rett was not sure he had heard it.
"Excuse me?"
"Tonight." The mouth moved to Rett's collarbone. "Tonight, you're mine."
"Is that how you ask?"
"It's how I tell."
Rett should have been angry.
Instead his cock jumped hard against his zipper, and the man felt it and pressed a thigh between his legs.
"Oh, fuck," Rett said.
"Yes."
The man stripped him fast, shirt, belt, trousers, and Rett helped, kicking free of everything.
When he was bare, the man sat back, and Rett felt a gaze he could not see run down the length of his body.
"What?" Rett said, rough.
"Nothing. Hold still."
The man's mouth closed over the head of his cock.
Rett's hips left the bed.
A hand pinned him down by the hip, an iron hold, and the mouth went down and took him almost to the root.
"Fuck," Rett said. "Fuck, you're good at that."
The man hummed around him, and the sound went through Rett's whole body.
He got his fingers into thick hair, a little long on top and cut close at the sides.
It was soft.
He pulled anyway, and the man took it and sucked harder.
"Your turn," Rett gasped, because he was going to come in about a minute and he wanted to be on his knees for this first.
The man let him go with a wet sound.
"Not yet."
"Now."
"Rett," the man said, and Rett's head came off the pillow.
"I didn't tell you my name."
"It's on the door." A pause. "On the little card. I read it with my phone before the battery died."
That made sense.
Rett decided that it made sense, and he let it go, because the man's mouth was back, lower, tongue pressing under the head of his cock.
He lost his argument somewhere in there.
When he surfaced, he was on his hands and knees, the man behind him, and he did not remember turning over.
A palm spread across his lower back.
"I need something," the man said. "Slick."
"Bedside drawer. Hand oil. For my knuckles."
"Of course you have hand oil."
Rett barked out a laugh that turned into a groan when a slick finger circled his hole.
It pushed in slowly.
The man worked him open with infinite care, and Rett pressed back onto it, shameless.
"Another," he said.
"Greedy," the man said.
"Another, or I'll find someone else's bed."
"You won't," the man said.
The second finger went in, and the man crooked them, and Rett's arms gave out.
He went down on his elbows, forehead on the sheet, and heard himself begging in a voice he had never used on anyone.
"Please," Rett said. "Please, just do it."
"Say you're mine."
"Go to hell."
The fingers stopped.
Rett said a word that would have made his grandmother cross herself.
"Say it," the man said, "and I'll give you everything."
"Tonight," Rett said into the pillow. "I'm yours tonight."
"Good."
The fingers left, and the blunt head of a cock pressed against his hole, thick and hot.
The man took his time.
He pushed in an inch and waited while Rett shook, and another inch, and he talked the whole way, low and filthy.
"That's it. Open up. You were made for this. Look how you take me."
Rett grabbed the headboard.
It was oak, and he knew every joint in it, and he held on to it.
When the man was all the way in, he stopped, and neither of them moved.
Rett felt the man's chest heaving against his back.
"Are you all right?" the man asked, and the voice cracked a little on the last word.
"Move," Rett said. "Fuck me."
He did.
The first stroke was slow and deep, and the second was not slow.
Rett's whole body rocked up the bed with it, and the oak headboard banged the wall.
"Louder," the man said, and bit his shoulder.
"The walls are thin."
"I want them to hear."
A hand wound into Rett's hair and pulled his head back.
The other hand slid around his hip and closed on his cock, and Rett came apart in about six strokes.
He shouted.
He did not care who heard it.
His hole clenched on the cock inside him, and the man swore, a rough sound torn out of his chest, and drove in once more and came with his mouth open on Rett's neck.
They collapsed in a heap.
The rain went on.
It was a long time before Rett could think, and when he did, he thought: I don't know his name, and I don't care.
An arm came around his waist and pulled him back against a chest that was still going hard.
"Stay," Rett heard himself say.
"I'm here."
He slept.
When he opened his eyes, grey light was coming under the curtains, and the bed beside him was warm.
His phone had come back to life on the nightstand.
He reached for it, meaning only to check the time, and the screen lit the pillow.
A gold cufflink lay in the fold of the sheet, small and square.
It had two letters cut into it, a G and an S.
Rett did not move.
He turned his head slowly, and in the blue light of the phone he saw the face on the next pillow.
Black hair silvering at the temples, a hard jaw, grey eyes already open and already on him.
He had seen that face once, on a magazine cover on a flagship store counter, the day he chained a chair to the front door.
"Good morning, Mr. Bonneau," said Ward Gibbes.
His voice was exactly the same as it had been in the dark.
"I've known who you were since you told me to leave," he said. "I've played that voice back for two years."
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