The truth was, he'd already fucked everybody in Pittsburgh.

Some of them twice, although twice was usually not part of the plan. Even with all the colleges and the university attracting a fresh influx of talent every fall, Brian Kinney could easily get bored with the local selection.

When that happened, he took off for the weekend. There was always somewhere to go—Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles. New York City was the hands-down favorite, though. No matter what they said about San Francisco, as far as Brian was concerned, New York was the gay city. What else was Manhattan but a grove of upthrust cocks? The streets teemed with glorious ass.

He could always get what he wanted for free, but sometimes he liked paying for it. The dynamic was different.

He'd heard, via an email forwarded from a pal of a pal of a pal, about a new guy in Manhattan. Extremely expensive, and supposedly worth it in some unique way the email didn't entirely elucidate.

He called himself Spike. Nothing else, just Spike. Which almost made Brian delete the email right there. But then the last paragraph caught his eye.

By the end of the night he'd scared the bejeezus out of me—and I never came so hard in my life. Not really sure how he does what he does, but it was the best five large I ever squandered. You have to book far in advance. Even then, sometimes he's not available at all.

Brian dialed the number.

When they met, at the door of a hotel suite many many many stories above a tony east side avenue, the guy looked him over coolly, tilted his head, and said his name by way of greeting.

"Spike."

"That a threat, or a promise?"

"Depends on what you paid for."

Brian raised his chin. Returned the stare. "The whole shebang."

"Right, then." He opened the door a little wider.

He was English. Bleached blond, oddly pale, and not quite as young as Brian expected. He had a stillness to him that was . . . interesting. Like he'd be capable of just standing in that doorway, looking at him with that hard unflurried gaze, for as long as it took for Brian to decide to either come inside or go his way.

He stepped in.

As he drifted across the large living room in his soft drapy black trousers and shirt, Spike offered food, booze, poppers, drugs, with an air of polite boredom. As if he knew they'd be refused, which they were. When he reached the doorway on the far side of the large room, he'd shed his shirt, and turned. His trousers rode low on his hips, hanging over a tantalizing bulge. Spike raised his hands to the doorframe, and stood there a moment like that, the light making him half gold, half silver.

Then he pulled the string on his trousers, turning and stepping neatly out of them as he disappeared into the next room with a flash of perfect lily ass.

Brian decided it didn't matter how old the guy was.

Stripping off his own clothes as he went, he hastened after.

He had the skin of a boy. Satiny, without bump or blemish or a single hair where a hair wasn't wanted. His mouth was soft and pliant, like a boy's too, when Brian pressed in on it. But he had the thrusting tongue—and the cock—of a man who knew what his way was and how to have it. Beneath the note of tobacco and bourbon, his mouth tasted, in a way that was strange but not unpleasant, of earth. His eyes expressed the cool disengagement of the hustler, but the cool extended to his body too—he was, Brian realized slowly as Spike curved against him, hands tracing the contours of his back with a delicate touch that Brian felt in his balls, oddly chill. The kind of chill you'd associate with clammy. But he was dry everywhere, not the least bit of sweat or reek of it, just a faint note of some rare cologne when Brian probed with his mouth along his cheek, beneath his ear, down the neck.

Spike stepped back, regarded him.

"What's it to be, then?"

"I drive."

"Fair enough." Spike crooked a brow. "Don't expect you do this much . . . don't expect you have to."

Brian was used to compliments, and compliments from rent boys weren't really legal tender as far as he was concerned. So why did he feel himself flush beneath that dark gaze, feel proud that this guy recognized his physical power, acknowledged it openly? He threw his shoulders back, let a hand trail slowly down his chest, his belly, to his cock, the other man's eyes following the whole languid sweep.

Spike dipped his gaze and smiled.

Christ, Brian thought. He'd been half hard since shucking his clothes, but all of a sudden he was steel.

"Aw, yeah," Spike murmured. "That's what'll be giving me the rogerin' I so bloody well deserve." He flowed to his knees with a movement like a length of silk sliding to the floor.

When his cock disappeared into that wet insouciant mouth, Brian wasn't sure who was driving.

He'd had many many many many blowjobs over the last fifteen years. Blowjobs that went on and on, blowjobs that made him shoot like a geyser almost at once. Blowjobs that were hot, worshipful, angry, languorous, frenzied, ecstatic. But none quite like this. And it wasn't just that this Spike had no gag reflex at all—that he could hold him by the hair and fuck his mouth, bouncing in and out like a kid on a trampoline, then dig in close, and tight, and slow, and the guy just took it with a low hungry growl. And it wasn't even the weirdness of how his mouth and tongue, that started out cool, like he'd been sucking ice chips, stayed that way, even though they were making enough friction to power the lights all up Madison Avenue. And it wasn't the stillness of his flesh, in the way Spike's hands gripping his hips, then the globes of his ass, then his hips again, should've been throbbing, and weren't.

It wasn't all that. Or—yeah, it was part of it, part of why this guy was the subject of emails and cell phone calls and text messages across half the globe. Why he demanded and got five thou a night.

But what it mostly was . . . was that gaze.

Nobody had ever looked at him like that before. Those eyes—blue, although they seemed to Brian black and fathomless and consuming—they could mesmerize. And this was not a metaphor.

He was standing over him, fists in his hair, dicking this whore's mouth, and yet . . .

. . . he was possessed.

And when Spike drew off suddenly, leaving him twitching, and broke the gaze, Brian's knees nearly went out from under him. For a moment he couldn't think how he'd gotten here, why this was happening.

"Who are you?"

"Like to fuck me now, pet?"