Tex (Hell's Ankhor #5) - Aiden Bates Page 0,13

old teal swim trunks. Looking at him now, I wasn’t sure if they’d fit, but I hoped they’d do the job well enough. We changed in our separate rooms, and then I followed Jazz down the beat-up old boardwalk to the beach.

He walked a few paces ahead of me with a ratty hotel towel slung over his broad shoulders. The trunks did fit, barely—they were stupidly tight around his hips now, and clung tightly to his quads where they ended just above his knees. I wrenched my gaze away. It was just weird seeing him again, that was all. It was still so surreal, that I felt like I had to catalogue the differences between reality and my memory.

The tattoo was still there, though. For some reason that settled something a little nervous and wild in my chest. The lion’s head took up almost the entire wide expanse of his back. It was tattooed in elegant, thin black linework and gray shading, not quite photorealistic but not quite stylized either. The only colors in the tattoo were the lion’s amber eyes, the same color as Jazz’s own.

I’d always liked the tattoo. It suited him; I’d always thought of him as a lion, with his luscious head of hair. My lion.

We reached the sand and Jazz carelessly chucked his towel onto the sand. He stretched his arms over his head and inhaled the salty ocean air, long and slow. In the golden light of the setting sun, the varying shades of his skin were obvious: darker on his arms, with a clear line where the sleeves of his prison uniform had ended, and paler on his shoulders, chest, and back.

I was still reeling from how much bigger he’d gotten over the past three years. From the corner of my eye, he didn’t even look like the Jazz I remembered. I had a strange, sudden urge to touch him—to run my hands over the new muscle in his shoulders and lats to see if it was actually real. To confirm that this was still Jazz. That he was actually here with me.

Jazz glanced over and gave me an odd look. He fidgeted with the waistband of his shorts like the tightness was uncomfortable. “What are you looking at?”

I blinked and looked away, and then rubbed hard at the back of my neck where sweat suddenly prickled. “Nothing,” I said. “You’re just all bulked up now. You’re nearly as big as Maverick.”

“I’d have to get on steroids to get as big as Maverick,” Jazz said. Then he shrugged. “There’s just nothing else to do in the joint.”

His expression darkened as he looked out over the waves. I didn’t want to see that expression on his face—not when we’d just found our way back to each other.

I clapped him hard on the back. “Come on. Let’s see if all those muscles drag you to the bottom.” I ran into the waves with a hoot that turned into a shout when a cold, frothing wave crashed into my legs and soaked my trunks. “Fuck!” I shouted through a laugh. “It’s cold!”

I turned around. Jazz was still standing at the water’s edge, thumbs hooked into the waistband of his swim trunks, watching me with a fond little smile on his face.

“What’s the holdup?” I yelled. “You forget how to swim?”

A wave crashed into my back and I stumbled forward a little. The cold was jarring, but refreshing, raising goosebumps along my skin.

“You know how to get used to the cold?” Jazz yelled.

“How?” I asked, but I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

“Gotta dunk your head under.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Jazz grinned, and then charged forward with speed and power enough to rival his bike. He barreled bodily into me, and if the full football tackle hadn’t knocked the wind out of me, the sudden drop into the frigid water would’ve.

I barked a very undignified squawk as I tumbled backward into the waves, and I stayed down, sputtering, propped up on my forearms. Above me, Jazz laughed, throwing his head back so water droplets flew from his hair, sparkling in the light. He looked so young and carefree, something I hadn’t seen in so long, and it distracted me enough that a small wave collided with me again, the cold saltwater overwhelming my senses. When it passed, Jazz was laughing even harder. He didn’t notice the bigger wave coming behind it, though, so I scrambled to my feet and pushed him into it.

We wrestled in the water, pushing