Honey Red Read Free

the ocean. A hand on his shoulder made him jump, then smile, and he rose and allowed himself to be coaxed out of yet another failure funk at the talented hands, lips, and tongue of the young, eager bartender.

 

     
    “Fuck!” Ian yelped and sat up at the same time as his bedmate, banging the back of his head on the man’s chin. “What in the hell?” There was an alarm clanging somewhere, but his muddled brain couldn’t narrow in on it. He jumped up, shoved everything off his small bedside table in his search for the source, gripped his phone and saw a strange number – one that had apparently called him a dozen times before he even heard it. He reached for the water bottle and stood, ignoring the complaints coming from the pillows. He admired the view of the man’s form – the lovely ass that had provided Ian with so much release in the last months, his full lips and rough jaw, but shook his head, trying to focus. Middle of the night calls were never good. Everybody knew that. Panic beat a small pulse in his chest.
    “Hello?” he said and fell into a chair, boneless, shocked to his core, as terror enveloped him at the sound of the clipped words coming from the small nearby hospital. He ran a shaking hand down his face, looked up and saw his current lover standing in all his naked glory in the doorway, a look of curious concern on his handsome face. Ian sensed every ounce of blood drain from his face as the doctor kept talking, telling him words he refused to process. “I’ll be right there,” he said finally, if just to get the man to shut the hell up and let him think. He hit the end button and attempted to contemplate the fresh hand he had just been dealt.
    “What’s up?” the man asked him. Ian struggled to remember his name. Finally he hit on it as he rose and grabbed jeans and a brewery-smelling T-shirt from the couch where he’d shed them in his haste to bury his cock in the other man’s body.
    “I gotta go. Hospital…it’s…um…,” his throat closed up and his eyes burned.
    “Jesus, Ian what is it?” The other man— Allen, his brain engaged for the briefest of moments—grabbed Ian’s arm. “Talk to me. I’ll come with you. I can drive.”
    “Whatever,” Ian growled before downing a glass of water and popping painkillers and a piece of gum into his mouth, still unable to process what shit storm he was about to walk straight into, one of his own making. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Three

     
    A strange, thin wail broke through Ian’s fog of exhaustion. He rolled, pulled the pillow over his head and willed the bizarre dream out of his subconscious. His body ached from his hair to his toenails, a familiar feeling from the days when he used to work out daily to improve at his scholarship sport. But now…the weak noise got stronger, piercing his eardrums and making his heart pound with a distinctly unfamiliar anxiety. He rolled once more, onto his stomach, breathing in a lung full of the now ubiquitous scent of brewery. The ever-increasing sound, now a distinct shriek of fury, and the smell of his life working as an assistant brewer for the Charleston Brewing Company, all clashed around in his half-dreaming state. When the brain-numbing noise stopped, as if by a flipped switch, he sat straight up, his newfound radar pinging.
    Throwing off the covers, he stumbled over boots and jeans jumbled at the bedside, and nearly broke a toe on the doorjamb in his haste to get across the hall. “Shit! Fuck! Hell! God damn it!” He hopped and slid to a stop outside the second bedroom door.
    “Ian James Donovan, I did not raise you to curse like a sailor.” His mother stood, cradling a small bundle in her arms, frowning at him. She was already fully dressed, made up and coiffed as she always had been for as long as Ian could remember, even at this ungodly hour. “You’ll hurt the poor wee man’s ears,” she snuggled the impossibly tiny infant against her cheek. “Isn’t that right, young