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  It was a dream job. It was a dream shop. And even though he probably would never have a permanent station like Barrett Jackson, Gus Scott, or Ivo Rogers, three of the five brothers who owned and worked there, he could see how the experience was priceless. Hell, he could see it in his own work just in the few months he’d been there.

  At twenty-five he should have been further along his tattoo career, but his stint at Berkeley threw him off the rails for a couple of years. By the time he’d gotten his head on straight, he had to play a lot of catch-up with other artists his age. So when the spot at 415 Ink came up, Rob didn’t think he had a chance in hell of getting it. Yet Barrett saw something in Rob’s work, and the brass ring Rob thought he would never be able to grab was suddenly in his hand.

  He was scared shitless he would do something stupid and let it go.

  That something stupid was Mace Crawford… and his something stupid walked right into the shop through the back door just as Rob locked down the front of the place for the night.

  He’d been about to shut off the lights in the shop’s lounge area when he heard a noise coming from the back door. Panicking, Rob grabbed the broom they used to sweep up the shop and turned the corner, intent on doing bodily harm. Instead he bounced off of a very delectable stretch of legs and shoulders named Mace Crawford.

  From the look on Mace’s face, the devil had been chasing his tail. There was a wildness to his eyes, a haunted expression on his too-fucking-gorgeous face. He’d been on a run or was midjog, because he wore a pair of black drawstring pants slung low enough on his narrow hips that Rob could see the red band of his underwear peeking up on one side. His short-sleeved red T-shirt clung to Mace’s hard chest and flat belly, tightly enough to show every muscled ridge on his torso and leave enough to the imagination that Rob’s mouth watered at the thought of peeling the slightly rain-dampened fabric off of the man’s body.

  The art on his upper arm was exquisite. Its lines flowed around the curve of his shoulder and down toward his elbow. Neo-Traditional in style, it was a simple piece at first glance, a shout-out to the old-school flash plastered to the walls of most shops—a knight’s helm in profile tucked against a few licks of flames and a sweet red rose at the bottom—the tattoo was definitely Mace. The colors were blended seamlessly with a dab of the old style’s standard palette and a nod to the old seadog inkings from the past. Like Mace, it was a stealth piece, seemingly easy to do but complicated as all hell if someone really knew what they were looking at.

  The ink was as heartbreakingly gorgeous as the man himself, and Rob wanted to lick that too.

  It wasn’t fair for a man to be as handsome as Mace Crawford was. Sure, life was never really fair, but Mace was a kind of bad karma that made Rob wonder if he’d spent his former life suppressing civil rights or talking on the phone loudly during a movie in a theater. He didn’t want to lust after Mace. He hated nearly everything about the man, but at the same time, he had long, involved daydreams about taking Mace into the shop’s back room and doing wicked things with him on the art table they couldn’t even leave a drink on.

  And dammit, Rob was half convinced Mace knew it.

  Mace’s bright blue eyes saw everything and judged it all. There was a hard arrogance in his gaze, a streetwise weariness folded into a steel-firm assuredness that Rob hated, but it was Mace’s aristocratic beauty he disliked at first sight.

  Rob spent most of his time staring at Mace and reminding himself he didn’t like perfection. He wanted—longed—to catch the attention of a man who was real, not a construct of masculine tropes. He hated himself for wanting to run his fingers through Mace’s sun-streaked dirty-blond hair or bite at the plump of his lower lip. Rob disliked the tickle he got in his belly when Mace’s too-white smile made dimples in his cheeks, and he particularly loathed the ache in his chest when the tall, muscular firefighter laughed with his golden rumble of a voice.

  But most of all, Rob hated how Mace’s gaze landed on his face and flicked away as though Rob meant nothing.

  “I just… needed some water,” Mace said softly as he pushed his way into the cramped space by the back door. He filled the area, stealing all the air, and Rob tried to shift to let him past, but all he seemed to do was make matters worse. They tangled, and Mace sighed. “Hold on. Let go of the broom. Or just… put it down.”

  Up close, Mace Crawford smelled like a light hint of sweat, fresh linen, and lemon zest, another checked-off box of impossible manly things. It wasn’t fair. The guy was out running and literally smelled as fresh as a spring morning, whereas Rob… was probably more fragrant. Rob stealthily sniffed at his own T-shirt and tried to remember if he had pulled it out of one of his dresser drawers or from the pile of could-be-worn-again clothes he’d stacked on a chair in his room.

  Of course the sniff didn’t escape Mace’s notice. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” he muttered back. “What the hell are you doing? Here, I mean. Aren’t you guys supposed to be having a dinner thing tonight? And how did you get in?”

  Mace towered over him. As much as Rob loved his Filipino French mother, he wouldn’t have said no to being as tall as his much older half brothers, especially when trying to hold his own against a gorgeous demigod. Rob fell into childish mind games when Mace came around, and no matter how often he reminded himself he didn’t need to prove anything to anyone, old habits and insecurities were hard to break.

  “That was over hours ago. I stopped by, grabbed a beer, then left. Look, I went on a run and just stopped in to grab some water.” Mace dangled a set of keys in front of Rob’s face. “I own the place, remember? You going to let me in?”

  “Sure, I can do that.” He didn’t get a chance to step aside before Mace edged past him and their chests brushed, setting Rob’s skin on fire. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and shook off his body’s response to Mace’s touch. “Seriously, you just came here for some water?”

  “Yeah, just for some water,” Mace repeated as he stalked over to the lounge. “Wasn’t looking for anything else, so you don’t have to worry about entertaining me.”

  “There wasn’t anywhere else you could have stopped? Convenience store? A bar?” Rob dogged Mace’s heels, determined not to salivate at the sight of his hard, full ass flexing as he walked. “I’ve got to close up.”

  “Owner, remember?” Mace jangled the keys again and then tossed them onto the table in the middle of the lounge. They skidded for a few inches and came to a stop at Rob’s discarded jacket. “You don’t have to stay. Go home. Not like I can’t lock up behind me. If you’ve got a problem with it, call Bear. I’m sure he’s up.”

  Rob had every intention of leaving. His hands were on his jacket, and he’d done one final check on the safe and bolted the front door closed. There was absolutely no reason in hell for him to stay, especially since Mace was right—the guy was one of the owners. He could dance naked in the middle of the shop, and the only person who could give him shit about it was Barrett.

  But there was something wrong. In the few months he’d been at the shop, he’d never seen Mace look… off. It was as though something that usually kept the man up had crumbled inside of him and he was holding himself up by sheer will. Rob knew what it looked like when someone was about to break down. He’d seen it in the mirror about a million times, and Mace Crawford was falling apart.

  “What’s wrong?” Rob took a step toward him, torn between touching Mace and running as far away as he could. It was one thing to lust after Mace in secret, but asking him to open up and begging Mace to shut him down wasn’t something Rob wanted to experience. But when Mace turned around, Rob saw the glitter of pain in his clear blue gaze, and he forgot all about leaving. “Dude, what the fuck is going on with you?”

  “There was a kid… in a room she shouldn’t have been in, in an apartment someone else said was clear. By the time we got to her, she was pretty fucked-up, and I don’t know if she’s going to make it.” Mace paced a bit in front of the water co
oler. Then he stopped, tilted his head up, and closed his eyes. “That’s what the fuck’s wrong with me. Now, let me grab some water and get out of here… because no matter how pretty that mouth of yours is, you’re not going to be able to kiss it and make it all better, no matter how fucking much I want you to.”

  Two

  “AND HE just… left?” Lilith, Rob’s best partner in crime and Goddess of Housing, paused halfway up the stairs to their third-floor apartment. “Just dropped that on you and booked? God, what an asshole.”

  If Rob had the breath to agree, he would have, but standing at the back end of a sofa angled up a flight of narrow stairs wasn’t exactly the time to pick up a conversation he’d started on the first floor, and glaring at Lilith wasn’t going to do him any good. Once his childhood best friend got on a rant, there was no stopping her.

  “Can we talk about it after we get this thing inside?” Rob jostled his end of the couch, hoping to jog Lilith’s awareness that they were trying to move him into her newly inherited place. “It’s kind of heavy.”

  Lilith looked down at him as though he were insane and not holding up the other side. “I know you. You can’t stand secrets. You hate leaving junk mail unopened because it just might be something good.”

  Lilith hadn’t taken another step. If anything, the couch was getting heavier, and not for the first time since he’d pulled it out of a free-to-take trash pile outside of a Russian Hill apartment, he was reminded that the knobby fabric was scratchy and uncomfortable on bare skin. It was also a pink plaid that would have had a better home as a jacket and skirt set for a Beverly Hills teenager than a sofa, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  Since he was impoverished, that was nothing a king-size sheet from the dollar store couldn’t fix. If only he could say the same thing about Lilith, who was taking another breath and still hadn’t moved one inch from the top of the stairwell.

  It wasn’t that Rob wasn’t happy about moving in, but the building, like most of Chinatown, was built before air-conditioning—and freight elevators—was a thing. Still, there was an indescribable and magical vibrancy to the neighborhood.

  Oddly enough, Rob felt like he was coming home.

  Even though he’d spent time in the district before, it took on a different light now that he was going to live there. It gave him a new awareness as he unloaded his life into the old building’s cramped front lobby. Lilith had given him a brief rundown, knowledge gleaned from years of visiting her grandmother, who’d owned the apartment before she passed away. Her place had been two one-bedroom units at one time, but Lilith’s grandparents had the foresight to purchase two street-facing apartments that mirrored one another and knock down walls to combine the living rooms into one long space and enlarge the kitchen. There was a powder room off of the living room—the space probably carved out of a closet or pantry—but on the other side of the main space there were two good-sized bedrooms with separate sitting areas and bathrooms.

  It was a dream in a district where space was at a premium and usually cramped. Parking was problematic, and there was a too-much-of-a-temptation home-style Chinese deli on the corner with roast pork loins and Peking ducks hanging in the window to lure customers in. Lilith was dismissive of the bakery in their building and told him to grab food at the deli instead, but it was the meat market in the storefront next door that caught his interest.

  He’d never lived someplace where he could find foods like his mother cooked, and the market showed great promise.

  The district felt old but welcoming in a way he hadn’t experienced before. The sights and sounds of people on the street were like the staccato flow of his mom and aunts chatting. Even though the language was different, gestures and facial expressions were so similar that Rob had to do a double take. Still, he felt a little bit outside of everything, like a lost child looking through a window into a world he should’ve known but that he had been denied.

  His father always insisted his mother leave her culture and language locked away in a box where Rob couldn’t get to it. He’d grown up not understanding when she spoke to her relatives on the phone, and only discovered things like adobo and sisig from a Filipino food truck parked near his college.

  It enraged and saddened him, but when he begged his mother to share that part of herself with him, she refused and told him he was his father’s son before he was his mother’s.

  Walking away from his family had been hard enough to do, but turning his back on his mother broke Rob’s heart.

  Still, over the past year, it’d gotten better… so much better… to the point where she would periodically drop by the shop to visit. He hoped he could coax his mom to come into Chinatown to see his new place, provided he could get the couch up into Lilith’s apartment before he let go and it killed him.

  “Lil, I love you, but this thing weighs five hundred pounds, and I still have to unpack.” His arms were aching, nothing like the soft throb along his forearms after a long day of tattooing, and Rob felt the beginning of tremors in his thighs. “Just. Move. Back.”

  The fear in his voice must have spurred something in her lizard brain, because Lilith took a dramatic breath and began to cautiously back up through the open door of their apartment. It was slow going, probably because the front room was littered with the bits and pieces of his life that he could put into a box or ten. There’d been a time when he’d had a bedroom the size of Lilith’s Chinatown apartment, but those days were so far behind him, they could’ve happened to another person.

  Rob took a tentative step up to the next stair tread. In fairness he had been a different person then, one with less ink and driven by someone else’s ambition. He’d been Robert back then, a stocky off-brand knockoff hoping to fit into a family line he had no business being in, putting his shoulder to a grindstone he’d tried to convince himself he didn’t hate, and working toward someone else’s dream.

  “Not anymore. They can all go to hell,” he muttered to himself as he reached the landing and nearly dropped the couch when he tried to take another step up. His foot landed with a thump, and Lilith shot him a dirty look while she tried to hold her end up. “Sorry. I thought there were more stairs.”

  No one would ever call him graceful. As much as Rob loved to dance, his body was made for other things, none of which included ballet or any kind of sport that required coordination or teamwork. He always seemed to zig when he should have zagged, and his family’s oddly innate ability to read the minds of their fellow sportsmen escaped him. His father despaired at his attempts to play tennis and racquetball, and once commented that perhaps his youngest son was better suited for something more in keeping with his brutish blood and should take up football.

  It hadn’t been the first disparaging volley against his mother’s ethnicity, and certainly not the last. Over time Rob would learn to ignore the slings and arrows lobbed at him, noting his half siblings never spoke that way about her in front of their father, but Rob was fair game.

  And he’d gone along with it, hoping to earn everyone’s respect, to get them to overlook that he was a golden-skinned changeling born into an aristocratic clan and see that he was good enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

  It’d been easier to walk away than to change their minds.

  “Let’s just drop it here,” Lilith said as she let go of her end just as Rob got through the front door. He had to scramble to avoid his feet being smashed under the weight of the heavy couch, and as he danced back, the front door swung and its knob dug into his spine.

  “I swear to God, it’s like you took out an insurance policy on me and are trying to kill me,” he grumbled as he rubbed at a sore spot near his kidney. “I’m going to shove it toward you so we can open the front door all the way.”

  “Sure, if you need to.” Lilith’s imperious response came as she flung herself onto the far end of the couch. “I am done.”

  Lilith was God’s response to a much younger Robert’s prayer for a best friend. She’d come
through the door of his high school English class wearing a sequined tank top, black skinny jeans, and high heels that added three inches to her already six-foot-tall, stick-thin body. At the time, he’d been suffering under the delusion that he was straight, and somehow the statuesque, confident young woman with her severe black bob and bright red lipstick was the girl of his dreams… kicking Annette Gresham, a commonplace cheerleader and honors student, out of the top spot.

  Sadly for Rob’s unrequited heterosexual delusions, Annette Gresham soon became Lilith Walters’s dream girl, something he learned when he screwed up the courage to ask Lilith out on a date, only to be asked if he had the buxom Annette’s phone number and could they make it a threesome.

  Lilith liked to say that her offer brought him to his senses about being gay, and Rob had to admit there was more than a little bit of truth in that statement, especially since his first reaction to her suggestion was a total lack of interest in something he’d heard his older brothers chortle about. It was the first step down his own personal yellow-brick road, and Lilith was certainly his Glinda… if Glinda the Good Witch ever looked like she moonlighted as a dominatrix.

  Unabashedly bisexual and unapologetically hedonistic, Lilith was still possibly the most grounded person Rob had ever met. When his former landlord evicted Rob from his studio apartment so the man’s son could move in, Lilith offered him the second master bedroom in her place. He’d said no before, so Rob didn’t think the offer was even on the table, but Lilith, the sister of his heart, insisted.

  “The place is huge and paid for,” she reminded him. “Remember? Crazy grandma? The only thing that would piss my family off more than me inheriting this place is if I set up a den of drunken debauchery in it, and you, Robbie boy, can be my first victim.”