Max - Bey Deckard Page 0,20

friends over because they were making too much noise. The final straw, and the thing that had motivated Crane to build a nine-foot-high fence to separate their properties, was when Bertrand had put out poisoned meat for their cat because he didn’t like it in his yard.

Max stared at him in silence, his eyes unreadable. “Did the cat die?” he finally asked.

Crane nodded, remembering how hard Mary had cried holding Pepper’s lifeless little body.

Max’s expression darkened with anger. One surprising thing that set Max apart from others of his ilk was that he had no history of animal cruelty and condemned those who did.

“He should pay for what he did,” murmured Max, and Crane felt a tiny sliver of unease because he knew without a doubt that Max was offering up a chance to show Crane what he was capable of… And it tempted him.

Disturbed, Crane pushed away the shocking thought and pointed to the pot Max had set on a round. “Your water’s boiling.”

In an eye blink, Max’s cheerful smile returned, and he set about preparing the rest of the meal.

Crane was frustrated. Max had been there for hours and nothing was happening. Apart from a touch of flirtation here and there, he’d been nothing but polite and charming in equal measures, and Crane was too uncomfortable to instigate.

Why was he even there? He’d assumed that when Max had convinced him to duck out of his weekend getaway with his wife and some friends, it was so that something debauched and wholly new would be made possible behind locked doors. Not this bizarre… date.

Crane sipped his champagne and stared at the image frozen on the TV screen, Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer on pause, wondering what the hell was taking Max so long. Having Max loose in his house was making him tense.

“Hey, Doc,” Max said quietly.

Crane turned and felt his breath catch in his throat. He coughed in alarm. “Take that off,” he said hoarsely.

Max looked down at himself and frowned. He was wearing what Mary called her “black diamond slut dress”, a slinky black number covered in Swarovski crystals with a plunging neckline. Max and Mary were about the same height, but where the dress hugged his wife’s curves, on Max it accentuated the sleek lines of his body. His muscular shoulders and his flat chest with its scant fine dark hairs should have looked ridiculous framed by the glittering black V of stretchy material… but oddly didn’t. There was something disturbingly alluring about seeing Max with his stubble and masculine arms in a dress. Crane was horrified at how his eyes were drawn to the subtle bulge down below.

“Take it off,” Crane repeated.

“You don’t like?” asked Max, his voice a low purr. Slowly, he turned around in place. The dress was backless, and because Max’s hips were much narrower than Mary’s, the opening hung far lower on him than it did on her. Low enough that he could see that Max was wearing a lacy black thong.

Crane found he couldn’t speak.

“I couldn’t help myself,” Max said when he’d completed his slow pirouette. His smile was coy. “Please don’t make me take it off, Dr. Crane. Please? I’ll be careful with it. Your wife will never know.” He put a hand to his chest, pulled aside the material to expose the small nipple below his tattoo, and traced an X over it with a fingertip. “Cross my heart.”

His guts knotted, Crane watched Max step around the edge of the couch and settle in next to him, close enough that their thighs touched. Max gave a throaty chuckle and rested his hand on Crane’s knee, palm up. Sitting in his hand was a long black tube with a compartment of amber oil at one end.

“What is that?” Crane managed to rasp.

“Don’t worry, Doc. Just some weed oil. Nothing scary, I promise.”

“Oh.”

“I thought we could get fucked-up,” Max said, grinning wickedly.

This is a bad idea. Bad bad bad idea.

“Okay,” Crane heard himself say, hyperaware of Max’s knee against his. “Just… a little.”

Time kept jumping. Crane would follow the thread of the conversation and then lose it, the words like untethered helium balloons rising to the ceiling where he couldn’t reach them. Max was laughing about something. Crane blinked, and Woody Harrelson was leering at a crying, bound woman who was gagged with tape. Max’s head was on his shoulder, his fingers playing with the buttons on Crane’s shirt. Crane had his arm around Max. Max was whispering about the