Medley Read online

  Medley

  Copyright © 2018 by Layla Reyne

  Cover Art: G.D. Leigh, blackjazzdesign.com

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  Formatting: BB eBooks, bbebooksthailand.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the copyright owner, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review.

  Second edition

  April, 2018

  EPUB Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-7320883-3-7

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

  Sebastian Stewart was never Mr. Dependable; he was more the good-time guy who only wanted to swim, party, and ink tattoos. Until he cost his team the Olympic gold four years ago. Bas is determined to do right this time around—by his medley relay team and his rookie mentee.

  Jacob Burrows is in over his head. The Olympic experience—from the hazing, to the endless practices, to the unrelenting media—makes the shy nineteen-year-old’s head spin. He’s trying to be everything to everyone while trying not to fall for his gorgeous tattooed teammate who just gets him—gets his need to fix things, his dorky pirate quips, and his bisexuality.

  When Jacob falters under the stress, threatening his individual races and the medley relay gold, he needs Bas’s help to escape from drowning. Bas, however, fearing a repeat of his mistakes four years ago, pushes Jacob away, sure he’ll only let Jacob down. But the only path to salvaging gold is for Jacob to finally ask for what he needs—the heart of the man he loves—and for Bas to become the dependable one.

  For me.

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Medley

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Acknowledgments

  Also By Layla Reyne

  About the Author

  Lawyer, priest, shrink.

  Maybe bartender.

  Ask someone to name their confessor and those were the usual suspects.

  Bas would argue tattoo artist for the last spot in the top five. Humming needle in hand, he’d heard more than a few confessions over the years.

  From the second a client stepped into his shop, they told a story. The design they picked. How much liquid courage it took. The tale of joy or woe that spilled from their lips after the first shock of the needle. Their reaction when it was done—relief, pain, regret, pleasure.

  He’d heard almost every story.

  In love, in lust, in rebellion, in hate, in freedom, in chains.

  But he still couldn’t figure out the story that’d nagged him most the past ten days. He swiveled on the stool in the rented studio, droplets of dark ink splattering his worn jeans. “You gonna give me something to go on, Pup?”

  Straddling the fancy tattoo-massage chair, Jacob laid a cheek in the cradle and glanced to his side. Mint green eyes, tequila-hazy, peered out from under long burnished lashes. “This was your idea, not mine.”

  Maybe there was the start of a story. Why did his nineteen-year-old teammate have a fake ID, and why was he so friendly with Mr. Cuervo? Was it the same story as countless other college undergraduates?

  Bas didn’t think so.

  Jacob’s eyes slipped shut again, lips turning up in a faint smile. “You said you needed to get out of there and work.” He shrugged his bare left shoulder, the one closest to Bas. The breaststroker’s upper back was wide, like most swimmers’, his delts and lats hard and lean beneath suntanned skin. Not yet fully developed, given his age, but stronger than most. “So do what you need,” Jacob said. “Work it out.”

  There.

  There was the start of the story.

  In the week and a half of intensive training since qualifying for the US Olympic Team and being selected for the medley relay squad, Jacob Burrows had been what everyone else needed him to be. The sense of humor Bas’s too-tense best friend and team captain, Alex, needed. The single swimmer willing to suffer poster boy and team pariah, Dane. A blank canvas for Bas to work on after a crazy Media Day when the simmering tension between Alex and Dane had boiled over, and Dane had leapt off his ivory pedestal.

  Whatever anyone else needed.

  But who was Jacob? A steadily improving swimmer at the University of Texas, the rising junior had gotten his first big win at Trials, shattering the two-hundred-meter breaststroke US record. One hell of an entrance onto the elite competitive swimming scene, and one hell of a fire to be thrown into. Now he was the youngest rookie, “the pup,” on a USA Swimming team riddled with drama, even more so than the drama Bas had caused four years ago. And they weren’t even in Madrid yet. Jacob deftly juggled the team dynamics, but surely the pressure was mounting on him too. What did he need? And why did Jacob put everyone else’s needs before his own? Pure altruism or something more? Or less?

  And right here, right now, was Bas taking advantage of those selfless tendencies? He should stop. Tell the shop-cat out front that the pup had changed his mind. Happened all the time at Bas’s tattoo shop back in LA. He was sure it’d be nothing new here in San Antonio either. Or maybe Jacob did need this. Maybe needle to skin would loosen his tongue enough to tell Bas his story.

  What Jacob needed.

  Alex had asked Bas to watch over the rook while they kept their secret weapon hidden from the media and other teams. To do that, Bas needed to know what he was dealing with—when and where the cracks might appear—so he could help Jacob. It was no less than Jacob’s selflessness deserved, and the least Bas could do, after being so selfish on his last Olympic tour. If tonight was his chance to help Jacob and his team, then he’d make the most of the offered opportunity, the way he knew best. Through his art.

  Closing his eyes, Bas bounced his fist on his knee as he visualized the design. Something Jacob wouldn’t regret when the tequila wore off. Something he’d later look at with pride and others would look at in awe. Something for the Texas Longhorn who was training for his first Olympics in his home state. The artwork came together in Bas’s mind: long curved lines woven to create horns; sharp lines angled in an inverse triangle to form a snout; touches of burnt orange at the ends of each nostril and where its eyes should be. Given creative license, he had no problem inking this freehand.

  At the first touch of the needle on the outside of his shoulder, Jacob gasped. Eyes scrunched closed, crooked front teeth digging into his full lower lip, Jacob clawed at the padded bar beneath the face cradle.

  “Breathe through it.” Bas laid his right hand on Jacob’s lower back, giving his subject’s senses a different focal point. Jacob’s breathing hitched, then began to steady, the visibly pounding pulse in his neck slowing as well. Bas gave him another few seconds, another few measured breaths, inhaling and exhaling with him, before he began drilling again.

  “Why do you
do that?” Bas asked.

  “Do what?” Jacob said, voice cracking adorably.

  “Put everyone else first.”

  Jacob moved to shrug, and Bas raised the needle in the nick of time. “Don’t do that,” he chided, drumming warning taps on Jacob’s spine. “Unless you want a mess here.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Jacob said, half-smiling, half-grimacing. He resettled his temple in the cradle, face angled toward Bas. “Why’d you start tattooing?”

  “Don’t do that either.”

  “What? I want to be sure the guy inking me knows what he’s doing.”

  Bas gestured at his own arms and shoulders, covered with colorful artwork. He’d ditched his shirt earlier, the shop’s AC no match for the triple-digit heat.

  “You didn’t do all those tats yourself,” Jacob said.

  “No, but I designed them all.”

  Jacob’s lingering gaze across his chest and arms left a different sort of heat in its wake, warmth that rippled down Bas’s neck and back as he bent his head and continued to work. He’d caught enough of Jacob’s appreciative looks to suspect the pup was bisexual like him, if not gay like Alex. But Bas hadn’t acted on those looks—no drama. Teammates—other athletes, for that matter—were strictly off-limits. Regardless of how charming their green eyes, crooked teeth, and pirate quips might be.

  “What’s the most personal?” Jacob asked. “They all look like team tats or abstract designs, except the initials on your chest. Who’s JE?”

  Speaking of drama, or rather not speaking of it . . . “It’s not usually the artist who tells his story.”

  “But isn’t that what art is?”

  “This art’s about you.” Bas drummed his fingers over Jacob’s spine again, and Jacob hummed contentedly, eyes drifting closed on another lazy smile.

  “What are you drawing about me?” Jacob asked after a few minutes.

  “You’ll have to wait and see. Now, answer my question.”

  “I’ve forgotten it.”

  Bas chuckled. “Bullshit.”

  “I put myself first once. It didn’t end well.”

  Bas’s laughter died and his insides knotted, hearing Jacob’s words and seeing how fast his toothy smile had fled. Another page of his story: not a happy one. But before Bas could read further, before he could ask who’d burned this too-gentle soul, and how Bas could avenge him, Jacob closed the book.

  “I’m only nineteen,” he said, voice bright again, albeit falsely so. “I learn more watching and looking out for others.”

  Bas flattened his hand on the pup’s warm, muscled back. “But who’s looking out for you, Jacob?”

  Jacob.

  Not kid.

  Not Pup.

  Jacob.

  Bas had called him by his name, together with a gentle hand on his back and a soft question that had sounded more like a promise.

  “But who’s looking out for you, Jacob?”

  As good as a carrot dangled in front of a starving rabbit. A carrot that came with a two-letter caveat—JE—whoever the hell that was. Jacob was still starving, regardless.

  From the first touch of the needle, he’d been hard.

  No, that was a lie.

  He’d been hard since Bas had stripped off his shirt and sat on the stool next to him in just his jeans, but Jacob was trying to ignore all that.

  The blond dreadlocks piled atop of his teammate’s head. The striking blue eyes and laser-cut cheekbones. The tattoos decorating his fly-swimmer’s massive upper body. The powerful thighs Jacob had dreamed about straddling him every night since meeting Sebastian Stewart at Trials.

  Failing to ignore, clearly.

  Thankfully, before he embarrassed himself by coming in his pants or babbling a too-telling answer to Bas’s question, his teammate’s phone rang. Queen’s thumping “Under Pressure” was enough to snap the tension.

  Bas switched off the tattoo machine. “That’s Alex. Let me take this.”

  “Yeah, go,” Jacob said, chuckling at the too-perfect song choice.

  Bas stood and stepped into the far corner, phone to his ear, while Jacob adjusted himself in the chair, breathing a sigh of relief on multiple fronts. They’d both been worried after this afternoon’s press conference—Bas for his best friend, Jacob for Alex and Dane, and also for himself. Coach had warned them that Media Day would be intense, but Jacob had had no idea it would be that bonkers. The endless clicking of cameras, reporters doggedly shouting questions, sponsors eyeing their next paychecks, and all that was before Dane had dropped an innocuous comment that’d exploded like a cluster bomb. So much attention, at domestic training. What would greet them in Vienna at their international training site, or in Madrid once they finally reached the Olympics?

  After the presser, questions and dread had swirled in Jacob’s head, keeping pace with Bas’s circuits around their shared hotel room. Not even the bottle of tequila they’d nursed together had calmed them down. So when Jacob had asked what Bas needed, and Bas had answered, “To get out and work,” Jacob had happily obliged, for both their sakes. They’d ended up here—in a stuffy tattoo parlor down the street from Jacob’s old high school.

  Bas glanced across the room at him, grinning as he rolled his eyes, probably at something Alex said. When he strode back over after another minute, his relief was palpable, his big body relaxed. “All good. He’s got Big Red.” Bas straddled the stool and picked up the tattoo machine again, flipping it on. “Told them to stay out for a bit.”

  “Probably a good idea.” Jacob squirmed in the chair, resituating himself and girding his loins against the bite of the needle and the nearness of Bas. Not wanting to destroy the calm with more of his sad story, Jacob asked about swimming instead—the team, their competition, what to expect at the Olympics—and Bas let him have that dodge. Returning the favor, Jacob didn’t press when Bas skirted questions about his particular experience four years ago. The loss of the medley relay gold hung heavy over the team; a weight that grew heavier each day the closer they got to Madrid.

  Tonight, though, the weight in Jacob’s balls was a bigger problem. The youngest on the team, surrounded by professionals, and swimming medley relay with Bas, Alex, and Dane, who were all in their midtwenties and members of high-profile clubs, Jacob had tried, over the past two weeks and today, to act more mature. His hormones, however, didn’t give a flying fuck about his intentions.

  The next hour was pure torture, with Jacob’s lower lip bearing the brunt of it. The worst came at the end, when Bas held up his phone with the camera inverted and showed Jacob the tattoo he’d inked onto Jacob’s outer left shoulder.

  An intricately styled Longhorn. Perfect for him. And as gorgeous as the artist.

  Jacob blinked back the moisture in his eyes and bit his tongue against saying more than “It’s awesome.”

  Bas arched a blond brow as he dabbed on salve. “Just ‘awesome’?”

  Jacob smiled through the strain, hoping like hell it didn’t look too lopsided, confused as his body was right then. “Fucking awesome.”

  Bas smiled wide, and Jacob barely contained his moan. As soon as Bas stood, Jacob tumbled out of the chair, miraculously managing not to land on his face, and darted into the changing room.

  His shoulder was on fire, but the blazing sting there was nothing compared to the scorching heat that had burned through him the entire time he’d sat in that chair. Heat that needed a release. Glancing over his shoulder, through the narrow slit in the dressing room curtains, Jacob spotted Bas way up front, chatting with the shop girl. Far enough away and suitably distracted. Jacob decided to risk it. He had to, unless he was going to walk out of here with a boner the size of Texas. He didn’t want to risk that; he was embarrassed enough already.

  He moved away from the curtain’s gap and closer to the wall, unzipping his jeans as he thought about the shop girl. Her dark curls and warm brown eyes, her full lips painted cherry red, her matching push-up bra teasing the collar of her low-cut tank, tits spilling out
over the lacy cups. Reaching a hand inside his boxers, he stroked his aching dick and bit back a groan, imagining the girl’s lips around his cock and the view of her overflowing breasts from above. Lost in the fantasy, he fell back against the wall, landing on his tender tattoo, and blinding pain erased the vision. Gritting his teeth to keep from shouting out, he spun to face the wall, left hand braced next to the mirror, right hand back down his pants.

  He closed his eyes and brought the girl to mind again. Her bright red lips, her tits in matching lace, the colorful tattoo sleeves decorating her arms. But then her willowy arms grew bigger, more muscular, and they were covered in coarse blond hair and familiar colorful designs. Her cherry red lips faded to pale pink, surrounded by rough dark blond stubble, and her brown eyes morphed to piercing blue. Jacob’s cock swelled in his hand, leaking moisture and slicking his fumbling grip. He yanked it out of his jeans and boxers and jerked faster. Head bowed, he imagined another cock sliding against his own, held tightly in his grasp. Or in the grasp of—

  “Hey, Pup, how long’s it take to put your shirt back on?”

  The dressing room curtain swung open, and Jacob, dick in hand, stared at the blue eyes of his fantasy in the mirror. “Fuck!” He quickly cast his gaze aside, struggling to stuff his interested, uncooperative dick back in his boxers. “Sorry, sorry.”

  “You’re not the first, Pup.” Jacob’s eyes shot back to the mirror. Bas was smiling, wicked and teasing. “You’re not even in the double digits.”

  Double digits of what? To jerk off after getting a tattoo? Or to jerk off to him? Or in front of him?

  Fuck, that thought would not go away.

  “It’s not an uncommon reaction after getting a tattoo,” Bas clarified. “The rush, the endorphins, the response some people have to pain.”

  Jacob had personally never associated the two—pleasure and pain. Then again, he’d never had them delivered together before, much less by someone so attractive.

  “Do what you need,” Bas said, taking a step back and moving to draw the curtain closed again.

  Do what you need.