ManLove Erotic Romance Books

Burn Card - Aspen Mountain Press - Laura Baumbach

January 14th, 2008

Las Vegas criminalist Cody Baxter struggles to save himself and his kidnapper before Cody’s lover, Gil, finds him — and rescue becomes revenge.�

The locker room of the crime lab smelled like an odd combination of flower-scented body sprays and manly deodorant. Coed, so there were separate showers. It was essentially a room full of rows of metal clothes lockers divided by wooden benches.
� Mid-morning, only a dozen or so officers and criminalists working for the Las Vegas crime lab were in sight, most having just finished an off-hours shift or overtime. This was a place to wind down from a long shift or rev up for a new one.�
� Only three hours into his usual dayshift, Cody Baxter was neither finishing nor preparing for a new day. But he was changing his clothes. He pulled a fresh black T-shirt out of an open locker and tossed it onto the bench behind him. It was identical to the shirt he was wearing except that the one he had on was torn, dirty, and splattered with what looked like dull, dark stains of a faintly deep red substance.
� His locker was directly across from the main entrance to the room. He contemplated going and shutting the door, but he decided it took too much energy. Let the gawkers look.
� Using his open locker door as a partial shield, Cody dropped to the bench, his jeans-clad legs slightly parted, balancing his small, wiry frame in a ready stance. A guy couldn’t work with body fluids, debris, and dead bodies and not get dirty occasionally. While his compact, toned body was nothing to be ashamed of, he preferred to draw as little attention as possible when he occasionally needed to change his shirt. He was a private kind of guy, liking it best when people ignored him and let him do his job. The less attention, the better.
� Lord knows he’d had enough attention this morning to last him for a long while. Even now, a copy of the offending paper lay on the end of the bench, the pages folded back to reveal the smiling candid snapshot of him and media darling Gil Turko.�
� The T-shirt just cleared his head, forcing spikes of dark hair to stick up at all angles. A recently abused muscle spasmed. Breath caught in mid inhalation, Cody waited for the twinges to pass, the lean muscles of his abdomen clenched while his arms were left encased in the soft cotton of the shirt, his movements briefly frozen.
� He flinched, worked his shoulder to loosen it up. “Ah! Damn it.” He let out a long, tired breath. “Whoa. That hurt.” Folding the soiled shirt, he laid it in the bottom of his locker. He jerked only a little when an unexpected hand lightly touched his bruised arm.�
� “Hey, you need to see a medic before we go back out? You’re moving slow, bud.”
Working the shoulder more vigorously, he ignored a fresh stab of pain. Cody shook his head and grunted an unconvincing, “Nah.”
� “You sure? You took down two big guys, Cody. One of them had at least six inches and a hundred pounds on you.” Eric Wren propped a foot on the bench beside Cody and leaned his arm on his knee, a casual stance that had the added benefit of blocking Cody from the view of the busy traffic in the hallway.�

Burn Card - Aspen Mountain Press - Laura Baumbach

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