Signs of Life (11 page)

THE NEXT
afternoon Kai stood outside the meeting room door, checking his denim shirt to make sure there was no food on it, running his hand through his hair one more time before taking a huge breath and pushing the door open.

After his shock had worn off at finding out that Jeremy the Gay Club Asshat was the victim in the vandalism case, Kai had spent the rest of the previous evening reliving that night and the amazing hot sex, followed by the humiliation of being left wallowing alone in the guy’s cooling spunk. Fresh anger had kept him awake late into the night, and only the thought of the kids he’d be deserting kept him from calling Liliana and telling her to shove the whole idea up Jeremy’s ass.

Even so, backing out had tempted him all morning, and unbelievably when he
did
pick up the phone to call Liliana, it was to ask her where the meeting was being held and then inviting himself to attend. She’d been delighted, saying Kai actually being there and backing her up could only help.

So now Kai swung the heavy meeting room door open and entered, his eyes zeroing in on the tall man sitting on one side of the table next to Andrew Maglio, a state prosecutor. Jeremy was studying some paperwork in his hand and hadn’t bothered to look up yet, and Kai took those few split seconds to school his expression into one of bland politeness although his heart threatened to beat its way out of his chest; he was honestly surprised the whole room couldn’t hear how it thundered.

“Great, Kai’s here. Now we can start.” Liliana’s voice startled Jeremy out of his concentration on the paperwork, and he lifted his head and looked straight into Kai’s eyes. His reaction was all Kai could have hoped for, and he took grim satisfaction in watching every drop of blood drain out of Jeremy’s face.

So eyes really
can
goggle
,
Kai thought a little hysterically. Jeremy clenched his hands on the paper, and the loud crinkle drew everyone’s gaze back to him. Kai watched him swallow convulsively a few times, and then Liliana said curiously, “Do you two know each other?”

Kai held Jeremy’s shock-filled eyes with his. “No, I don’t think so,” he said mildly, keeping his expression faintly inquiring, a little puzzled. “As far as I know we’ve never met before.” He stepped forward and stuck out his hand for Jeremy to shake.

“Kai Daniels.” Jeremy took his hand, and Kai had to work hard to suppress a shiver at the feel of his warm palm, his callused fingers, remembering them running across his body, stroking him….

He tried not to yank his hand away as Jeremy murmured, “Jeremy Speer.” The sound of his deep, husky voice sent renewed shivers down Kai’s spine, the memory of that voice growling in his ear, “I want to watch you come,” threatening to make him do that very thing in his pants right now. He pulled a chair out and sat down quickly, crossing his legs and hiding his lap, praying he hadn’t just given himself away.

He breathed a sigh of relief when Liliana pulled out some files and got down to business, passing around mug shots of all the boys involved. They looked heartbreakingly young, Luke trying to appear defiant and tough but failing miserably, and Craig with tears streaking openly down thin, dirty cheeks, his blond hair sticking out every which way. Kai noticed Jeremy’s hand shook slightly when he picked up Craig’s mug shot, his eyes now burning with an unrecognizable emotion.

As Jeremy looked at the picture in his hand, Kai watched him openly, tracing his gaze over Jeremy’s pale angular face, cheekbones sharp enough to slice cheese on, and a full, sensuous mouth. Kai almost groaned as Jeremy absently bit down on his bottom lip, worrying it with straight white teeth. His hair was dark brown, thick and wavy, and Kai already knew his eyes were a changeable gray, able to go in an instant from ice cold to glowing with silver heat.

Jeremy’s shoulders were broad, but his body was whipcord lean from all the running, not an ounce of fat on him. His hands were slender but masculine, with long tapered fingers. He wore no rings, just a large expensive watch on his left wrist.

Right then Liliana started her spiel, campaigning for community service for the boys instead of monetary restitution. Kai tuned her out, watching Jeremy closely, seeing skepticism and doubt creep onto his face.

“These boys destroyed part of my home, and you want me to let them back in?”

“Mr. Speer, they will be constantly supervised. At no time will they be left alone in your home or around any of your possessions.”

“Why is Mr. Daniels here?” Jeremy’s question was abrupt, and Kai sat up straight as Liliana waved her hand toward him.

“A couple of them are his students.”

“Students?”

“I’m a high school teacher,” Kai explained.

“And what does that have to do with—”

Kai interrupted him. “I work with students in what’s called a second-chance school, also known as an alternative high school. These are the kids who are failing in mainstream school for a variety of reasons. Most of them are in the legal system, and it’s a requirement of their probation that they attend school. As part of my job, I work closely with their probation officers, sometimes do home visits or job site visits when a kid needs a little extra encouragement to get his or her butt to class.”

“These boys have indicated they feel a rapport of sorts with Kai,” interjected Liliana. “I think he’ll be a good influence on them. What a lot of these kids are lacking are adult role models they can look up to.”

“So these—these—thugs ransack part of my home and cause thousands of dollars’ worth of damage, and I’m supposed to just set that aside so they can come play with paint and power tools a few hours per week while
you
play Big Brother?” Jeremy’s voice was dripping with scorn, and his knuckles were white as he gripped his fingers together.

“Mr. Speer, I understand you want these boys punished—” Liliana began, subsiding when Jeremy made a sharp motion with one hand.

“Yes, I do,” he said fiercely, “and I will not apologize for that.” He picked up a file in front of him and extracted some photos from it, tossing them into the middle of the table in Liliana’s direction.

Liliana looked at them but made no move to pick them up, so Kai reached out and slowly pulled them to him, shuffling through the full-color photos of the damage done to what appeared to be a home gym, shock coursing through him. The place was like a war zone, with piles of shattered debris, the red paint splashed on the walls and floor looking grotesquely like blood spatter. Coming upon this scene unexpectedly, and while alone, must have been horrifying.

“What you don’t see in these pictures is the way they urinated on everything,” Jeremy forced out. “The way feces was smeared on parts of my—of my home.”

“The boys deserve to be punished for this,” Kai said quietly. “And from what I understand, Terrell Watkins, the main instigator, has been referred to adult court and is currently in jail?” When Liliana nodded, he continued, “The other boys don’t have any criminal records. This was a crime of opportunity, not premeditated, and from what I know of them, they were basically caught up in a situation they couldn’t control, and that got out of hand.”

Jeremy opened his mouth, but Kai continued, raising his voice just slightly, “They need to be punished, and believe me, having to give up their free time to do what basically amounts to unpaid labor will punish them. Having to spend time with authority figures who are making them do what they don’t want to do will punish them. No phones, no friends, no sleeping in.”

Andrew Maglio spoke for the first time. “Jeremy, we’ll be asking for something like twelve hundred hours of community service, not something they can complete in a weekend or two. This will take months. Also we’ll make it a condition of their probation that they attend school regularly and complete homework assignments in addition to their community service. And it’ll be clear to them that their asses will be arrested if they don’t comply with each one of these conditions.”

Jeremy still looked unconvinced, and Kai made a decision.

“I know you think being in detention will punish them, and it will, but it will also be sending them to hell.” He rolled up his sleeve to display heavy scarring on his left forearm. “I spent two years in juvie, from age fourteen to sixteen. This is from a knife wound, when some guys jumped me in the kitchen.”

Jeremy and Liliana’s eyes flew to him in shock. Kai held his hands out, splaying his fingers and showing the scarring on his knuckles.

“I got this from trying to fight them off nearly every single day. I was scrawny, and scared, and ‘too pretty’ for my own good. Sometimes I was able to fight them off, and sometimes I wasn’t,” he said simply. He watched comprehension set in, their faces holding horror and pity.

“Terrell Watkins is a hardened criminal, and he’s in jail and will likely remain in jail. These boys”—Kai waved his hand toward the mug shots—“are just stupid kids who didn’t have the balls to tell someone ‘no.’ Let’s punish them, but let’s not ruin their lives in the process.”

“If you’re a second-chance school, why were they in your class, then?” Jeremy’s voice was still challenging but lacked some of the heat of earlier.

“Chronic truancy and basically failing out of mainstream school. They are marginal students at best,” Kai admitted. “They are easily influenced, easily led. When I was incarcerated, I saw kids like this get talked into committing crimes inside and turning a six-month sentence into years. One kid was in for petty theft and shoplifting, would have been out in a year, tops. He was talked into assaulting a guard, and was transferred to adult court and adult prison. Basically his life as he knew it was over.”

Jeremy scrubbed his hands over his face, looking at the mug shots again. Kai noticed his fingertip lingering on the edge of Craig’s picture, and he was curious. Who did the boy remind him of?

Abruptly Jeremy shoved his chair back and stood. “Can I have a day to think about it? I’ll call Mr. Maglio tomorrow with my decision.” With that he strode from the room.

Liliana blew out a breath, her bangs flying up and down with the exhalation. “That went well.”

“We made him think, at least,” Kai said, picking up the crime scene photos and handing them to Andrew. “That’s some awful shit right there.”

“Kai, thank you for what you said about—you know. Jesus,” Liliana said with difficulty.

“It was a long time ago,” Kai murmured. “I was a different person back then. And I made it out. I know I was lucky.”

“That’s a story that I’d love to hear someday, Kai,” Liliana said fervently. Kai quirked his lips up in a half smile.

“Maybe someday.”

JEREMY’S FEET
slapped the pavement, his breath coming in sobbing gasps instead of the measured breaths of a long-distance runner. He was only eight miles in but he felt like he was on mile forty-eight. The calm he usually derived from running eluded him; his mind was racing and his skin too tight across his bones. He felt brittle… like he could shatter at any moment into a thousand glittering shards.

Seeing Kai in that meeting room had shaken him to his core. Never in all Jeremy’s wildest dreams did he think he would ever lay eyes on him again, and seeing him walk into a setting where Jeremy was the fucking
victim
knocked Jeremy flat on his ass. What Kai’s game was in pretending not to know him, Jeremy could only guess; his calm and self-possession when coming face-to-face with the bastard who’d used him and walked away without a word was impressive. He must have known who Jeremy was beforehand. Had Kai been in the courtroom during the various hearings, and Jeremy, so self-absorbed, never even noticed?

Kai had looked so gorgeous, dressed in a long-sleeved denim shirt open over a tight white T-shirt tucked into neatly pressed and belted khaki pants. He was long and lean, his warm-brown skin luminous, his black hair carelessly styled. He looked professional yet casually hip, no trace of the sexy clubgoer, no piercings, no eyeliner, yet Jeremy felt an immediate surge of lust so strong it made his hands shake, his mind flashing back to Kai arched against that alley wall in ecstasy, his rock-hard cock throbbing in Jeremy’s hand as he came, his husky moans ringing off dirty brick.

In that meeting room, Kai’s golden tiger eyes were sharp and intelligent instead of slumberous and glowing with sexual heat, yet Jeremy still felt like he could drown in them. He was shaken by Kai’s admission that he’d been in jail as a kid, that he’d been…. Jeremy didn’t want to think about that, and his face grew flushed and burning hot, not with the exertion of running but with shame at how he’d pinned Kai roughly against that wall, how he held him and told Kai to “fight me” as Jeremy rutted against him and then left him without a word, covered in jizz with his pants around his knees. Jeremy had never treated a lover like that, never, and the fact Kai was a club hookup was no excuse.

Layered on top of the guilt and lust and shame was… oh God, that boy. That blond boy, Craig, who didn’t bear any physical resemblance to Brent except for tousled blond hair in almost the exact same shade. But it was the eyes, awash in tears, the lost and heartbroken look that stabbed Jeremy right in the gut. Jeremy heard how the boy’s father spoke of him in that courtroom, “fucking wimp, fucking pansy,” and it made him remember Brent’s stories of his own father, how the bastard once took his sensitive, artistic son hunting, forcing Brent to watch as he shot a deer, then cut its throat while it thrashed and bleated in pain and fear.

He made Brent help skin it after it was dead, field-dressing it right there and throwing the entrails at his son while Brent sobbed helplessly. All to try to “make a man out of you if it fuckin’ kills me, boy! Don’t want no limp-wristed fairy for a son, no, sir!”
As Brent related that story, his eyes held the same lost look Jeremy saw on Craig’s face in the mug shot, that same bewilderment at not being accepted for who he was by the very people who should have loved him unconditionally. And that left Craig open to the manipulation of assholes like Terrell Watkins.