Under Pressure Read online

  Contents

  Also by Robin Moray

  About

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  UNDER PRESSURE

  His Boy Next Door 33

  By R.J. Moray

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright ©2019 Robin Moray

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the author's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First Electronic Edition

  Also by Robin Moray

  (Up-to-date listing at robinmoray.com)

  Bonded to the Alpha series

  Bonded to the Alpha

  Loyal

  Claimed

  Mated

  Mallory Witches series

  Something Wicked

  The Omega Colony series

  Changed: Mated to the Alien Alpha

  As R.J. Moray

  Novellas

  Finding Elliott

  Serials

  His Boy Next Door

  (Channon Beaumont series)

  Season One

  Season Two

  Season Three

  A Collar For His Brat

  (Ewan McKinney series)

  About His Boy Next Door 33 : Under Pressure

  Jack knows he can't keep his boy locked away from the world, as much as he'd love to, and Channon has blossomed since coming to Santa Rita. But, beneath his new-found confidence, is Channon able to shoulder the burden of crisis? Or has he become too much Jack's obedient plaything to stand up for himself and the people he loves? And when catastrophe rocks their lives, can he do what he must to take care of his Sir? There's only one way to find out.

  This book is episode 33 in an ongoing serial, and contains acts of an adult and sexual nature. Read at your own risk.

  Chapter One

  Jack had always enjoyed Halloween. Dressing up, disguises, breaking convention. More than once he’d used it as an excuse to assume a persona and play out a fantasy in accordance with it—these days there was no need. He had all his fantasies worked out, and could play them with Channon any time he liked.

  Which he had, this Halloween. There had been a fetish masquerade ball at Damiano’s, and Jack had dressed Channon up, made him sit prettily at his feet in lace panties and a lace blindfold, several lengths of green nylon cord knotted artistically around him. Jack had worn a tuxedo and a top hat, and when anyone asked him what he was supposed to be he’d told them, “Dashingly handsome,” which tended to be enough of an answer, but in reality he’d simply wanted the excuse for a tux. And Channon had liked it, had in fact gone delightfully bashful at the sight of it, and allowed Jack to do whatever he wanted with him. Hence, the lace on display.

  But Nate and Ewan had been conspicuously absent from the party. Now, driving Nate to a client meeting in Wayfield, Jack demanded to know where he’d been instead.

  “You missed Damiano’s swan costume. It was spectacular.”

  Nate laughed. “I’ll bet. But Ewan wanted to go to his friend’s party, so I tagged along.”

  “I can’t imagine the ambiance could compete.” Damiano took the look of things very seriously, and he’d outfitted his apartment with white tulle and dry ice and artificial lilies, which had given the whole thing an ethereal, fairy-tale feel.

  “There were plastic spiders and fake webs on everything. The punch had candy eyeballs floating in it. Until they melted.” Nate grinned. “I had a good time. Ewan dressed up as an angel.”

  “How utterly inappropriate,” Jack scoffed.

  “You have to have a developed sense of irony to appreciate his humor.”

  Jack shook his head, watching the traffic for hazards so he didn’t have to look at Nate’s pleased smile. “I still don’t know what you see in him.”

  It was nothing new, nothing he hadn’t said about Ewan before, but this time Nate turned on him, his eyes flashing angrily. “I know you fucking don’t. You don’t have to.” He flung himself into a sulk against the passenger-side door, glaring out at Santa Rita’s industrial district as it rolled past. “Just let me have this one thing, okay?”

  It took Jack by surprise, both the reaction and the strength of it. That Nate should care so much for someone so…unsuitable was an irritation. But that he cared so much that Jack’s casual comment had hurt him badly enough that he retaliated? That was a shock. Jack had assumed until now that Nate was just messing around with Ewan, just stringing him along like he did all his lovers, never committing to anything. He’d been surprised when Nate had told him they were sexually exclusive. Later, when Nate agreed to bring Ewan over to play with Channon, Jack had assumed the unexpected fidelity had worn off.

  In retrospect, that might not have been what happened at all. Had Nate simply opened the circle of their relationship to include Channon? And then, by extension, Jack?

  Jack shoved that aside to reflect on it later. Right now he had to control the damage. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”

  “Yeah you did,” Nate muttered. “I know you despise him. I just want you to think for a moment about how that feels. Just imagine.”

  If instead it was Nate who despised Channon. Jack’s heart clenched. But that was different, right? Jack loved Channon, with an intensity he’d never loved anyone other than, perhaps, Nate, and even then this was another creature entirely. He could have Channon. He could never have had Nate. That was water long under the bridge, run all the way out to the sea.

  And Nate didn’t love Ewan that way, surely. How could he, when Ewan was so difficult, and stubborn, and bitter? What was there to love about him?

  “He reminds me of you,” Nate said, as if he could read Jack’s thoughts.

  Jack cleared his throat. “How, exactly?”

  “He thinks he’s unlovable,” Nate sighed. “And he doesn’t want anyone getting close enough to him to hurt him. The difference is you built your walls out of charm, and he built his out of spite.”

  Another shock. Jack took a corner carefully, letting his attention linger on the traffic to give himself a moment before he had to respond. Finally, he said, “I don’t think I’m unlovable.”

  “Really? Come on, Jack, I was there.” He rolled his head against the glass and gave Jack a supremely unimpressed look. “You wouldn’t let me love you, no matter how I tried.”

  It was like his lungs were empty and there was nothing to fill them with. Jack fixed his eyes on the road, desperate for a distraction.

  “It was like loving a cat,” Nate went on, as if he hadn’t just punched Jack in the metaphorical gut. “Ewan’s just the same. Except with him I can hold him down and fuck it out of him.”

  Jack shook his head, forcing himself to inhale slowly. That wasn’t…was that really what Nate thought? That Jack had hated himself too much to be with him? I wasn’t the one screwing everything with
a dick and a pulse, Jack thought and resolutely did not say.

  They didn’t talk about this. They had never talked about this. It had been buried, years ago. Jack’s infatuation with Nate and Nate’s absolute refusal to change for him. Or, he realized now with a sickening jolt, perhaps it had been his own stubbornness that had led them down that path.

  Fuck. Really?

  It was habit to make a joke of it, so Jack tried. “You’re saying that if I’d only let you fuck it out of me, we might have worked out?” He tried to sound like he was laughing it off, but Nate’s snort was sharp, and his tone dry as a desert.

  “Maybe if you could have given up a shred of control, but no.”

  “I did let you fuck me,” Jack said, irritated because…God, was Nate saying it was all his fault?

  “You also let me know how much you hated it. Whereas Ewan loves it.” Nate rolled his head back, slouching down in his seat. “Enough to tolerate my affections.”

  The thought of Ewan ‘tolerating’ Nate made Jack’s blood boil, but also…fuck, was that what Nate thought? That Jack couldn’t bear Nate to love him, and so he’d withheld…what? Affection? Submission?

  “We weren’t normal,” Jack said, feeling a little sick.

  “We weren’t vanilla,” Nate corrected. “Anyway, who cares? You’ve got what you want now. I’m happy with what I have. And what I see in him is my business. But for fuck’s sake, Jack, can you just accept that you can’t be the boss of me anymore? I’m over you. And thank God for that, because if I wasn’t? Watching you and Channon would be torture.”

  Like it was watching you go home with guys I barely knew? Seeing you crawl in at ass o’clock smelling like beer and weed and sex? Thinking about where you’d been and who you’d fucked and why I’d never be enough?

  But. That wasn’t entirely true. Jack was introspective enough to admit it oversimplified things because…

  He’d been so afraid back then. He’d hated himself for being something he hadn’t known he was, for failing to be the person he’d been trying to be. He’d seen it as failure—his lack of interest in women, his secret fascination with men. How Nate’s hands had enthralled him, idly spinning a pen or typing rapid-fire on that noisy old Model M keyboard. How he’d thought of Nate while he was in Jessica’s bed, fantasized about him to get hard enough to fuck his beautiful, intelligent, adoring girlfriend.

  And then, once the relationship with Jessica was dust, he’d hated himself for his failure. Like he’d given in to it, to Nate. He’d wanted to keep it secret and that had backfired spectacularly. He’d thought he could only have something seedy, something shameful, because he’d been ashamed of it. And then he’d gone out of his way to make it seedy.

  Fuck. He’d done that to Nate. No wonder Nate hadn’t wanted to be his boyfriend. Jack had treated him like a booty call, and Nate had acted the same.

  “Nate—” he said, but that was as far as he got.

  They were at the intersection of Minack and Cowell. It wasn’t heavily used, too far into Santa Rita’s industrial district for much but trucks and local traffic. It was, however, a shortcut between JNNS and the Nesbit-Roche building, and Jack had driven it a dozen times before without incident.

  This time a silver pick-up barreled through the intersection like it didn’t even see them. Jack did not slam his foot on the brake, managed instead just to tap it, swerving into the empty space in the pick-up’s wake. It all happened too fast to think about—one moment he was caught in regret for something he’d done years ago, and the next he was doing his best not to lock the brakes and plow right into the vehicle unexpectedly in front of him.

  It was over in seconds. Jack pulled up on the opposite side of the intersection, shaken and breathless. The pick-up vanished into the distance, apparently unperturbed.

  “Holy fuck,” Nate breathed. “Are you okay?”

  Jack nodded. He made himself swallow. “I’m fine.”

  “Did that fucker run the stop sign?”

  Jack looked back. “Apparently not.” The pole where the sign had always hung was bare. Someone had made off with it. “Kids,” he said, angry and regretful and relieved all at once.

  They were both fine. It hadn’t been his fault. The only thing that was hurt was his pride.

  “Hey.” Nate reached over to clasp his shoulder, grinning sheepishly. “Nice driving.”

  “Thank you.” Jack licked his lip, still kind of shaken by it all. “That could have gone a lot worse.”

  Just like them, he thought. Maybe it hadn’t worked out, but they were good now, still friends. It really could have ended up a lot worse, he told himself, and tried to be glad of it.

  ❧

  He reminds me of you, Nate had said, and Jack couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Later at the Club he tried to see it for himself, squinting at Ewan when Ewan wasn’t looking, trying to work out why Nate would say such a thing.

  Ewan was difficult, stubborn. He enjoyed making other people make space for him, liked especially pushing Channon around as much as he could. He acted up with Nate until Nate reacted, like he was trying to impact the world around him, make it move for him.

  Like someone who had been helpless for a long time. Someone who had felt trapped and now refused to be.

  Jack shook himself. There was nothing similar between them. Not a thing. Nate was crazy.

  And yet. He watched the way that Ewan looked out for Channon, the tender, fierce way he handled Channon’s feelings. He never meant to bruise Channon, not really, not unless Channon bruised him first. And if Channon called him out, Ewan actually apologized to him. Strange. Almost as if he really cared, but didn’t know how to show it like a normal person.

  It itched at him, this thing he could not stop scratching. He told himself it was Nate getting into his brain but it wasn’t, was it? It was something else, a thing he did not know about himself. How could he not know this?

  “You’re in a bleak mood,” Diana said, dropping onto the sofa beside him, though not quite close enough to touch. Her submissive, Kyle, knelt beside her wordlessly. He was well trained, well worn into the grooves of their power exchange. Jack admired them, a happy couple who had things sorted the way they wanted them and managed to maintain their lifestyle in the way they preferred.

  He considered her comment. “I don’t feel bleak, particularly.”

  “Introspective, perhaps?”

  Was that closer to the truth? “Do you think I have anything in common with Nate’s Mac?”

  She laughed, one of those rippling, crystalline laughs that no doubt brought a cringe to the spine of the men she regularly crushed under her heels. “Darling, have you only just noticed?”

  It hurt unexpectedly. Jack hadn’t really thought it was true, so to have Diana confirm it… “How so?” he demanded, the words sharply clipped in crisp irritation.

  “Well, neither one of you likes being analyzed, for a start,” she said dryly. She cocked her head on one side, regarding him with amusement. She was particularly whimsical tonight, in snowy lace that reflected the whiteness of her teeth and eyes, a sharp contrast to her dark, bare shoulders. “Oh, my dear. Does it worry you?”

  “I’m unconvinced that it’s true,” Jack said, feeling defensive. Why should he have to defend himself? It was nonsense. “Mac is an attention-seeking brat.”

  “Are you sure you don’t envy him that?” Diana gave him a far too knowing look. “If you could have been that for Mr White, and he’d have loved you anyway.”

  But he wouldn’t have, Jack thought, and then, hard on the heels of it, He didn’t. Nothing I did would ever have been good enough.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jack told her—or himself, perhaps. “We weren’t a good match.”

  “That wasn’t your fault, darling,” Diana said gently. “That was just a fact.”

  “He didn’t want what I wanted,” Jack told her, needing her to understand this. Mr White was himself, and Jack couldn’t have made him happy. No ma
tter how he’d tried. Mr White had wanted a perfect slave. Jack had never been made of the right stuff.

  Channon, however…

  He shivered, thinking of what Mr White might have made of Channon, if he’d been able to get his claws into him. Channon could have become what he wanted, no mistake. And it would have destroyed him.

  “You can’t be everything for everyone,” Diana was saying. “Best to know your own nature and excel in it. Which you do, with your lovely boy.”

  Ah, Channon. And in thinking of Channon, the subject of Ewan came once more to the fore. “How is he like me, though? Mac, I mean. We couldn’t possibly be more different.”

  “Because he’s a bratty sub? Or because he knows what he is and doesn’t seem inclined to change?”

  “I’ve changed a lot,” Jack argued.

  Diana shook her head. “I know. That’s what I meant. You did change, when it suited you. But it doesn’t suit Mac, so he doesn’t do it. Still, if someone tried to change you against your will, you’d be just as stubborn as him. Just as bitey.”

  That was true, Jack conceded. He didn’t like it, however. “Is that it, then? We’re both stubbornly ourselves? Come on, that describes half the people we know.”

  “He’s quite sure no one could want him,” Diana said softly. “And for a while I thought you were the same.”

  This again? “I don’t consider myself unwantable.”

  “No, but you built a wall so no-one could get close enough to keep you.”

  A wall? Really?

  “And I suppose you threw yourself against it too,” Jack scoffed.

  Diana hummed, stroking along the back of the sofa with one white-gloved finger. “Darling. When you were pretending to be a good little boy for Mr White, do you really think I wouldn’t have eaten you up with a spoon?”

  It struck him like a bell. Jack reached for his water glass, sipping it carefully to cover his shock. Then, when he felt sufficiently composed, he said, “I didn’t know.”