🔥 The Glove 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from His Rival’s Bodyguard by Rafe Calder

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter opens on the New Year’s Eve three years before His Rival’s Bodyguard and ends after the epilogue. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Roman’s side of the cloakroom, one glove, and two New Year’s Eves in the same parking garage. Explicit content — 18+.

The Glove

I walked out of that cloakroom with a glove in my fist and Luca Moretti’s pulse still beating in my palm.

I’ve told him why. He had that from me in the same room, three years late, with his wrists in my tie. He said quiet, and I couldn’t have him quietly, and I wasn’t mine to give. All of it true.

I never told him where I went.

It was nine minutes to midnight. New Year’s Eve at the Aurelian, every house in the city under one glass roof, pretending to like one another until the clock ran out. I crossed the lobby at a walk. I’ve left rooms with men bleeding in them at that walk. The girl at the half door wished me a happy new year, and I believe I answered her.

I didn’t take the lift. A lift has a camera and a mirror, and I didn’t care to be looked at by either. Four flights of service stair to the garage. I counted them, because counting is what I do when the other thing isn’t available.

The truck was in the far corner of the second level, nose out, the way I always leave it. I got in. I locked it. I put both hands on the wheel.

The left one was bare.

I hadn’t noticed. I had pulled that glove off with my teeth, to have my skin on him and no leather between, and I’d picked it up off the carpet on my way out and never put it back on. Now I sat in the dark and looked at my own hand as if it had been somewhere without me.

It had. It had been around his throat. Not squeezing. I’d had my thumb under the hinge of his jaw, and I had tipped that face up where I wanted it, and the mouth that had been insulting me across ballrooms for six years had opened under mine as if it had been waiting to be made to. I could still feel it. The heat of him. The knock of his pulse, quick as a bird’s, coming up into my palm every time I licked into him.

He had ridden my thigh. I want that understood. Vittorio Moretti’s son, in a dinner jacket that cost more than my first year’s wages, with somebody’s sable crushed behind his shoulders, grinding himself on my leg in short, hungry strokes and making small furious sounds about it. He’d got his hand between us. He had found me through the wool and squeezed, and said something filthy in Italian about the size of what he’d found, and I had fucked up into his fist like a boy of sixteen.

Turn me around, he’d said. Get my trousers to my knees. Find out how quiet a Moretti can be.

I was hard enough to hurt. I had walked through a hotel lobby like that. I’d wished a coat-check girl a happy new year like that.

I told myself I would sit there until it went down. I gave it two minutes. I once held a hide for nineteen hours in February. I couldn’t hold that one for two.

I opened my belt.

I’m not a man who does this. I see to it in a shower, in ninety seconds, the way you’d clear a jam. I don’t think about anybody. That night I took myself out in a parking garage with my employer four floors over my head, and when my bare hand closed around my cock I made a noise I had to bite off.

It was the hand. It still smelled of him. Something expensive, and under it orange peel and warm skin. I brought it up to my face first, like an animal, and breathed. Then I licked my palm, because it was that or spit, and I tasted his throat.

That finished any idea I’d had of being quick about it.

I gave myself what I had refused in that room. All of it, in order. I’m thorough. I turned him by the jaw to face the coats. I put his hands on the brass rail and told him to leave them there. I got those trousers open and down, and I looked, because I had wanted to look for six years: the long back, the narrow hips, the curve of his ass under a shirt tail. I’d have gone to my knees first. I knew that, sitting there, and it shocked me. I would have opened him with my tongue until that clever mouth ran out of languages, and then with my fingers, slowly, however long it took, because I’m not small and I wouldn’t have hurt him for the whole north corridor.

My fist was moving. Long, tight pulls, slick with spit, the skin sliding. I had my head back against the rest and my right hand locked on the wheel, still gloved, and the leather creaked each time I stroked.

And then I’d have fucked him. Standing, from behind, with that hand on his throat to feel every sound he didn’t make. He’d have been tight. He’d have been scalding. He would have pushed back onto me with all that spite and taken more than he should, to win, and I’d have had to hold his hips still and say easy in his ear.

He would not have been quiet. I knew that as surely as I know the weight of my own gun. I’d have had him loud inside a minute, with a ballroom on the other side of the door, and I wouldn’t have covered his mouth. I would have let every family in Harbor City hear what the Warden had done to their prince, and hear him ask for it again.

That was the thought that did it. Not his body. Again. The idea that there might be one.

I came into my own hand with my teeth shut on his name.

It went on a long time. Six years’ worth. It was in my palm and over my knuckles and on the black wool of my trousers, and I sat there and shook like a man pulled out of the harbor.

“Luca,” I said. Aloud, once, to a windshield. I had never used it. I wouldn’t use it to his face for three more years.

Then the concrete began to hum. Four floors up, a whole hotel was counting backward from ten. I heard them reach zero through the slab. Out in the roads every ship in the harbor let go its horn at once.

I cleaned myself up with a handkerchief. I put the glove back on over a hand I hadn’t washed. At twenty past twelve Dante came down in the lift, loose with champagne, and laid his palm on the back of my neck and asked whether I’d seen anything tonight worth telling him.

“No,” I said.

I had kept one thing back from Dante Varga in eighteen years, and I was wearing it under a glove. I’d have slept in it, if I slept.

“Rule one,” my husband said. “Where did you go?”

New Year’s Eve again. The Aurelian again; Mara doesn’t vary. Three years had gone by, and a war, and one summer wedding at Stella Maris. The priest got his roof. I had danced with Luca twice that night. I’d lost the room both times, and I hadn’t minded.

At twenty to midnight he said he wanted his coat. He walked into the cloakroom and stood in the middle of it, under the brass rail, with his hands in his pockets, looking at me.

“You’ve given me why. I never asked where. You walked out of that door with my spit on your mouth, Roman. Where did you take it?”

“The garage.”

“And?”

“Level two. The far corner.”

“And.”

He knew already. I could see it. His color was up, and his eyes had gone dark and bright together, the way they do when a column is about to close.

“I got into the truck. I meant to wait until I was fit to be seen.”

“Did you wait?”

“Two minutes.”

“And then?”

“And then I didn’t.”

He breathed in through his nose. “Everywhere, we ask,” he said, not altogether steadily. “I’m asking. Show me.”

I took him down by the service stair. Four flights. He went ahead of me, which he isn’t supposed to, and I let him.

The truck was in the same bay. He got in on the passenger side without waiting for me to open the door, which made two rules in four minutes. He turned sideways on the leather with his back against the glass and one knee drawn up, in the fourth midnight blue, like a man settling into a box at the opera.

“As it was,” he said. “Exactly. I’m an auditor. I shall know.”

“I was armed.”

“Then be armed.”

“I don’t touch you armed.”

“You aren’t going to touch me. You hadn’t the nerve; I have heard the testimony.” He smiled with every tooth he owns. “Hands on the wheel, Warden.”

Nobody had called me that in a year. It went straight to my cock.

I put my hands on the wheel. The left was gloved. I looked at it. Then I brought it up and took the leather in my teeth, a finger at a time, and pulled, and on the other side of the truck I heard him stop breathing.

“Oh,” he said faintly. “So that’s how.”

“That’s how.”

“And then?”

“I looked at it. It had been on your throat.”

“And then.”

I opened my belt.

I was hard already. I had been since the cloakroom door. I drew myself out in the gray light of a parking garage, with my husband watching me from a yard away in a dinner jacket, and closed my bare hand around it. His lips parted.

“You licked it first. Your palm. Tell me that you did.”

“I could taste you on it.”

“Cristo.” He reached across the console, took my wrist, and brought my hand to his own mouth. He licked it. One long, slow stripe from the heel to the fingertips, with his eyes on mine. Then he put it back where he had found it. “There. For accuracy. Go on.”

I stroked. Slowly. I had been slow that night, once I gave in. He watched the whole length of me travel through my fist, and he looked at it the way he looks at a set of books he means to own.

“What were you thinking of? In order. Don’t spare me.”

“Turning you around.”

“Yes.”

“Your hands on the rail. Your trousers at your knees.”

“As requested.”

“I’d have knelt first.” My voice had dropped to a place I don’t take it in public. “I would have had my tongue in you until you forgot which language you were swearing in.”

His head went back against the window. He had his palm flat over the front of his trousers, pressing down, not moving. “You never said. Three years, and you never once mentioned that you’d meant to do that.”

“You never asked where I went.”

“And after that?”

“I’d have fucked you. From behind. With this hand on your throat.”

“Quietly?”

“No.” I was close. I hadn’t expected to be. It was his eyes. “I knew you would be loud. I wanted them all to hear it. That isn’t what I came on.”

“What, then?”

“That there might be a second time.”

He made a sound as if I’d struck him.

“Stop.”

I stopped. Rule two. My fist was shut around myself and the whole of me was shaking, and I stopped.

“You don’t finish this one alone. You finished the last one alone, in the dark, and then you put a glove on over it and went back to work.” He was already undoing his own trousers. “Seat back. All the way. Now the weapon, and be quick, because I’m coming over there.”

I ran the seat back. I have never cleared a pistol so fast. The watch. The magazine. He caught the round himself, out of the air, and set the three pieces along the dashboard in a row with the grip toward my hand. Then he came across the console in his shirt and that jacket and nothing else, and got a knee on either side of my hips.

He had seen to himself beforehand. Of course he had; he schedules everything. He was slick and open when I put two fingers to him, and he laughed at my face and pushed down onto them to the knuckle.

“I had planned on a cloakroom. You’ve changed the venue. I’m adaptable.”

“Luca.”

“I know. I’m asking. In your lap, in this seat, with nothing between us. Is that itemized enough?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ve waited three years and four flights of stairs. Don’t make it five.”

He reached back and held me, and sank down.

There’s no room in a driver’s seat. That is the whole of its merit. He had the wheel at his back and the roof an inch above his curls and nowhere to go but onto me, all the way, bare, until he was sitting in my lap with every inch of me inside him and his forehead against mine. He was hot as a furnace. He was shaking. I put my left hand around his throat, thumb under the hinge of his jaw, and his pulse came up into my palm exactly as it had in that room.

“There you are, kincsem,” I told him. “That’s what I walked out on.”

“Then don’t be careful with it.”

I wasn’t. I got my other arm around his hips and drove up into him, and he rode it, hard, with both hands braced on the headrest behind me. That truck is armored. It weighs three tons. It rocked. He talked the whole time. He never stops. I told him so once, in a cloakroom, and he said make me, and I’ve never managed it yet and I hope I never do. Italian, mostly. My name. What I felt like. What he had done in his own bed that same night, with his own hand at his own throat, because it was too small and it was all he had.

“You as well,” I said.

“Twice. I hated you through both.”

I fucked him harder for that. His back hit the wheel. The horn went off, one long flat blast through two levels of concrete, and he threw his head back and laughed, and then I found the angle and the laugh broke in half.

“There. There—Roman—”

“Louder.”

“There’s a man in a booth—”

“He’s Mara’s. He is paid not to hear. Louder, királyom. I waited three years to hear this in a garage.”

He let me have it. All of it. He was loud in two languages with my hand on his throat, so that I felt each word go by, and I told him he was beautiful. I told him he was taking me so well, that I’d thought of exactly this with my fist around my cock and it had been a poor copy. I took my arm from his hips and closed that hand around him. He was wet to the root. There was gold on his fourth finger, and gold on mine, and I watched the two of them move.

Somewhere over our heads a whole hotel had begun to count.

“Ten,” Luca said into my mouth. He was grinning. He was wrecked. “Nine. Are you—”

“Yes.”

“Then with me. On the number. I’m asking.”

I have never been able to refuse him an itemized request. I held him on the edge of it through six, and five, and four, with my thumb on his pulse and his body shut around me like a fist. On one I drove up and stayed there, and he came over my knuckles and my shirt front with a shout the whole garage threw back at us. I went with him. Deep, and bare, and saying his name. The right one, this time. To his face.

The harbor went off. Every horn in the roads.

He lay on me for a while. I left my hand where it was. He likes it there. He put it there himself.

“Happy New Year, Warden,” he said into my neck.

“Roman.”

“Roman.” He kissed the corner of my mouth. “I should like the first one struck from the record. It was a clerical error.”

“It was four minutes.”

“It was three years, and you spent them in the wrong column.” He sat back an inch, which we both felt, and looked at the console. My left glove lay on it where I had dropped it. He picked it up. He turned it over, folded it once, and slid it into the inside pocket of the fourth blue, over his heart.

“Mine,” Luca said. “You may apply for it in writing.”

I never applied. I have driven him home bare-handed ever since.

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