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  All In

  a M/M erotic romance by Alexa Land

  Book Two in the Firsts and Forever Series

  Copyright 2013 by Alexa Land. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission in whole or in part of this publication is permitted without express written consent from the author.

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

  This book contains sexually explicit material and is only suitable for mature readers.

  Dedicated to Frankie

  my first fan-boy :)

  Chapter One

  “Dude, if you keep staring at the boss like that, you’re going to get fired. That is, if you’re lucky.”

  I glanced at Cole and asked, “And if I’m not lucky?”

  “Then his mafia husband is going to put a bullet in your brain and toss your body in a dumpster,” my coworker said as he stuffed a backpack in his locker.

  “His husband isn’t in the mafia anymore. And besides, he was never that kind of gangster,” I pointed out as I snuck another look at Jamie, my ex-boyfriend. He and his new husband Dmitri were deep in conversation in Jamie’s office, arms around each other, foreheads touching. It was painful as hell to watch. And yet, my gaze kept drifting to them.

  “So, you think you retire from the mob and suddenly forget how to off the competition?”

  I sighed and turned my back to the office, peeling off my grey t-shirt. “I’m hardly the competition.”

  “You and Jamie were together for eight years, right? And you just broke up six months ago. You really think his husband isn’t threatened by that kind of history? Or by a guy that looks like you do?”

  “I really don’t think a man as good-looking as Dmitri would find anything whatsoever threatening about me.”

  Cole made a show of running his gaze slowly down my bare torso. And then he said sarcastically, “Oh yeah, who’d feel threatened by a six-two jock with abs you could chip a tooth on?” He slapped my stomach playfully, and I rolled my eyes. “Look Charlie, just play it cool around those two, ok? I like working with you, and it’d suck if you got yourself fired. Or dead.”

  “Yeah, ok. I’ll work on that.” I gave him a little half-smile.

  My coworker grinned at me, his brown eyes sparkling behind his glasses as he tied an apron around his hips. “Good. Now hurry up, beefcake. The bar opens in ten minutes,” he said as he left the employee dressing room.

  And just because I was an idiot, I snuck another look at Jamie and Dmitri over my shoulder. They were kissing now, deeply, tenderly. It made my heart ache. Especially because it reminded me of the way they’d kissed each other when they’d gotten married just a few weeks ago.

  The wedding had been on the beach at sunset. Jamie was a life-long surfer and the ocean was a part of him, so the location was perfect. They’d said they wanted to keep it small and simple, but there’d still been about a hundred guests witnessing the joyous union (for those two, that was actually just immediate family and closest friends). The ceremony was beautiful and romantic. And I must have been out of my mind for attending.

  I pulled on my dark green work t-shirt and tucked it into my Levis. The name of the bar was emblazoned in white letters across my chest. It said Nolan’s. That was such rich irony. I had, in fact, at one time belonged to Jamie Nolan. But then I’d gotten scared and run from the relationship. It was the biggest mistake of my life.

  And now every day, I came to work in my ex’s bar and wore this shirt with his name on it. Every day I got to feel the full impact of my loss, over and over and over again. And every day I got to remind myself that this pain was totally self-inflicted. I broke up with him because I was too scared to accept my sexuality, to come out to my family and friends, to admit to myself just how much Jamie meant to me, until it was too late. I would never again, despite the declaration on my shirt, be Jamie Nolan’s.

  And it was all. My. Fault.

  I tied my black apron around my hips and took a look in the mirror beside the lockers. After a quick finger-comb of my short, dark brown hair and a frown at the bloodshot condition of my green eyes, I went out to the dining room. Cole was topping off the salt shakers, and as I got busy doing the same thing with the pepper, he asked, “So, speaking of gangsters, are you still planning to go out with that Sicilian stereotype?”

  On impulse, I’d accepted a date last week with a guy I’d met here in the bar. His name was Dante Dombruso, and I actually didn’t realize until sometime later that he was some sort of mafia heavy hitter. Ok, I didn’t so much realize it as have it yelled in my face by a panicked Jamie when I’d mentioned I was going out with Dante. Totally hypocritical, if you ask me. His husband had only recently broken away from the Russian mafia, after all.

  “I don’t know what’s going on with that. He’s cancelled on me twice, both times on short notice,” I told Cole.

  “Were you actually interested in him?” my coworker asked, as he poured a steady stream of salt into a little glass shaker with a flourish.

  I shrugged noncommittally. Even though the answer to that question was a resounding yes.

  Dante Dombruso was exactly what I needed to get over Jamie. He was six feet, four inches of raw temptation and hard Italian muscle, wrapped in an expensive suit. Whatever my personal hang-ups were, they somehow didn’t matter when I was near him. My body responded to him on a primal level, and my brain just went along for the ride.

  I’d been sure of two things: Dante Dombruso wanted to fuck me, and I wanted to let him. It was so straightforward, so uncomplicated. The perfect rebound fling.

  But then he broke two dates with me. And that threw off the straightforward and uncomplicated part a bit.

  Cole studied me for a long moment. I’d been working here only a week, but I’d known him for a while. I’d been a regular at this establishment since turning twenty-one two years ago, and he’d worked here about that long. Only back when I was a customer here it was called Flannigan’s, it wasn’t owned by my ex, and my life hadn’t totally been in the crapper. He said, “So, you know, maybe Dombruso cancelling on you is a sign. Maybe the universe is trying to intervene and keep you from making a big mistake.”

  “Since when does the universe care about me making mistakes?”

  Speaking of which, here came my ex, looking adorably tousled and a little flushed. God. “Hi guys,” he said to Cole and me as he crossed the room to unlock the front door and flip on the neon sign that declared the bar and grill open.

  “Hey,” I mumbled, turning my back to him as I got really interested in the pepper shakers.

  I felt a light touch on my arm and glanced at Jamie. Concern was evident in his sky blue eyes as he asked, “How are you, Charlie?”

  Depressed. Lonely. Missing you like crazy. “Fine,” I said, looking away again and screwing the lid back on a pepper shaker.

  He hadn’t removed his hand from my arm. “How are you really?” he asked gently.

  I hated this, I hated the be-nice-to poor-fucked-up-Charlie routine. It made me feel even more pathetic than I already did. I met his gaze and said steadily, “I’m fine, thanks.”

  Instead of removing his hand, he rubbed my upper arm. His touch was so sweet and tender that he might as well have just gone ahead and punched me in the face – it was that painful a reminder of all I’d lost. “You know you can talk to me, right?” he said. “You’re going through a lot right now, and I want you to know I’m here for you.”

  He didn’t mean our break-up. Last week, I’d finally come out to my parents. And as a result, I’d gotten kicked out of the house I grew up in. I was now sub
letting a kind of depressing empty apartment Jamie had recently vacated.

  “I know. And I appreciate it, Jamie.” I broke eye contact again. He was so close to me that I breathed in his scent. Jamie always smelled a little like the ocean and like clean cotton. And now he also smelled faintly of his new husband’s expensive cologne, which made me feel like whacking my head against a wall. “I’ve got to finish setting up my station. I’ll talk to you later, ok?” I turned my back to him and pulled a dish towel from my apron, wiping up some of the pepper that I’d spilled.

  “Ok, Charlie.” He paused a moment before finally going back to his office.

  As soon as he was out of sight, I bent over and thunked my head against the table in front of me. And I just stayed there for a while, wrapping my arms around my head.

  Working here was such a stupid idea. Jamie, in his ongoing effort to save me from myself, had offered me the job so I could end the nightmare of working for my uncle’s exterminator business. But taking this job had been a mistake. It was a great bar, but God, the Jamie factor was just so hard to take.

  Being here was somewhat bearable when the place was busy and I had less time to wallow. But Jamie was trying out something new, opening the bar for lunch, and these daytime shifts had been so quiet you could hear crickets chirping. It would probably pick up when word got out that we were open this time of day, but that hadn’t happened yet.

  Besides this not entirely successful lunchtime experiment, the bar and grill biz was going great for my ex and his husband – nights and weekends were hopping. They’d started running this place just a few weeks ago, and the change in ownership had made it more popular than ever. I wouldn’t have predicted that. Even a city as famously liberal as San Francisco still had a conservative element, and I hadn’t expected the patrons of an Irish sports bar to stick around when the place was taken over by a gay ex-cop and his ex-mafia husband. But not only had the blue collars stayed, they’d slid over and made room for the influx of young urban hipsters that suddenly found something appealing about this place – ever since locally famous former gangster and former nightclub owner Dmitri Teplov became associated with it.

  But apparently, neither the hipsters nor the blue collars had gotten the come-and-get-drunk-on-your-lunch-break memo.

  I was still bent over the table, face down and trying to find the motivation to actually get up, when a deep voice behind me said, “Well, that right there made the trip across town totally worth it.” I raised my head and peered over my shoulder, and there was Dante Dombruso, arms crossed over his chest, a big grin on his face as he studied my upturned ass.

  I stood up quickly, and in the process I knocked over the large carton of pepper that I’d left on the table. I actually caught it as it fell, but on the upswing I managed to fling some directly into my face. Did you know pepper actually makes you sneeze? A lot. And here I’d thought that was only in cartoons. I sneezed about five times in as many seconds, and Dante held something out to me.

  A-choo! “Seriously?” I asked, both hands over my nose and mouth as I squinted at the pristine, monogrammed square of fabric he was holding out to me. A-choo!

  “Yes. Take the handkerchief.”

  A-choo! “Do you honestly expect me—” A-choo! “—to blow my nose in that and then hand it back to you?” A-choo! “Because that’s super weird and gross.”

  He grinned at that and said, “Keep it.”

  A-choo! “Ok. Thanks,” I managed between sneezes, then grabbed the handkerchief and blew my nose loudly and inelegantly. It actually helped tremendously, and I sighed with relief as the sneezing ceased. Then I said, “I’ve never understood cloth handkerchiefs. The only logical thing to do once you’ve covered something with snot is throw it away.”

  “So your argument against cloth handkerchiefs is that they’re illogical?” Dante looked highly amused by all of this.

  “No, my argument against cloth handkerchiefs is that the moment you use them, they become a totally repulsive snot vault that you’re supposed to keep in your pocket. I don’t even know what to do with this now.” I held the article in question away from me with two fingers.

  “I would offer to take it back, but you’ve made such a compelling argument about its total repulsiveness that I now want nothing to do with it.”

  “See? I’m going to go wash it out in the restroom. It’s the only thing I can think of to do with this,” I said, and crossed the empty dining room.

  Dante actually followed me into the restroom, and I lobbed the handkerchief into the sink and ran hot water over it. When I turned to face him, he grinned and said, “Hi.”

  “Hello, Dante.”

  “You’re mad at me,” he observed, resting against the door.

  “Mildly annoyed.” I leaned against the counter opposite him and studied him carefully. Dante was tall and muscular and classically handsome. He had jet black, longish hair and olive skin, and a slightly prominent nose offset by smoldering dark brown eyes and full lips. He wore a black-on-black-on-black impeccably tailored suit, shirt, and tie, and had apparently spent all of his adult life perfecting the five o’clock shadow, which he had down to an art form.

  “I’m sorry for breaking our date.”

  “Twice.”

  “Twice,” he confirmed.

  “Are you here to make and break a third?”

  “I’m here to make and keep a third, if you’re willing to give me another chance.”

  “I have to be honest with you, Dante,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “I can’t handle a whole lot of personal rejection at this particular point in my life. So please only ask me out if you fully intend to show up this time.”

  “For what it’s worth, I have a really good excuse for breaking those dates.”

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Sick grandmother?”

  I’d been being sarcastic, coming up with the most clichéd excuse I could think of, but his eyes went wide at that and he said, “That’s exactly right. How did you know?”

  I assumed he was kidding, and rolled my eyes. “Funny.”

  Dante crossed the small room to me and turned off the water in the sink (which had been about to overflow), and then leaned against the counter right beside me, so close our arms were touching. He pulled out his cell phone and scrolled though his text messages, then handed me the phone. The message on the screen said that his grandmother had suffered a heart attack, and instructed Dante to come to the hospital immediately. The text was from last Thursday, when we were supposed to have our first date.

  Now I felt like a total and complete asshole for joking about sick grandmothers, and I murmured, “God, I’m sorry,” as I handed his phone back to him. “Is she ok?”

  “Thanks. She’s doing a lot better. She’d started to take a turn for the worse Saturday, which is when I cancelled the second date you and I had scheduled. But yesterday and today, she’s really come around. Which is why I figured I could break away and come see you.”

  “You should’ve told me sooner that this was why you were cancelling,” I said as I looked up at him.

  “Would you really have believed me if I’d told you I was breaking our date because of a sick grandmother?”

  “I…might have.” Hell no, absolutely not.

  He grinned at that, and then he pivoted around so he had me pinned to the counter, one of his thighs lightly pressing against mine. And he whispered right beside my ear, “Please give me another chance, Charlie.”

  And now I remembered so very clearly why I’d agreed to go out with Dante in the first place. My entire body responded to his proximity, my heart pounding and all the blood rushing from my brain to my cock, making me feel slightly lightheaded. He was so far out of my comfort zone that I couldn’t even see my comfort zone from there. But somehow, it didn’t matter. When I got close to him, my libido took over and I was able to just go with it.

  Usually, sex scared the hell out of me. I’d never gotten farther than oral with my ex in the eigh
t years we’d dated. But I felt certain this could happen with Dante, both because I knew he was the type of man to totally take charge and guide me through it, and because of my new mantra: fear isn’t a valid excuse.

  I had let fear shape my life for so long, and so profoundly – up to and including letting it convince me to break up with Jamie. Fear had cost me everything, and now I was absolutely determined to stop letting it dictate my decisions. In fact, I’d decided to embrace the things that frightened me. If something was scary, I was absolutely going to do it anyway.

  “Ok. When do you want to go out?” I asked as casually as I could, as if I wasn’t about to suffer from a hard-on induced stroke.

  “How about tonight?” He was still really close to me, and his big hands came up and traced a light path down both of my arms.

  I started to sink into him, letting lust be my guide. But then I remembered something, and pulled back abruptly as I said, “Shit. I can’t tonight, there’s something I need to do.”

  “You’re still mad at me.”

  “No, that’s not it. There really is something I have to do tonight.”

  “Can I do it with you?”

  That kind of surprised me. “You have no idea what you’re volunteering for,” I pointed out.

  “I know. But whatever it is, I’m up for it.”

  “Are you trying to be extra agreeable to make up for the broken dates?”

  “Yup,” he said with a grin. “Will you let me join you?”

  “Yeah, ok.” I actually really liked the idea of having someone along for the night I had planned.

  “So, what have I gotten myself into?”

  I smiled at him cheerfully. “Nothing much. Just a little felony breaking and entering.”

  Chapter Two

  He’d totally thought I was kidding.

  I met him in front of my apartment that evening at six sharp and he started to escort me to his car, but I said, “I’ll drive. We’re going to need my truck for this.”