"Oh, well, as long as her money's good, who cares if she's nuts!"
His hands full of memos, Alex straightened and gave Bryan a level look.
"She's crazy," Bryan insisted. "She's got a perfectly nice little boy. Okay, that floating paper thing is strange, but she's treating him like he's defective. She needs counseling. She needs to count her goddamn blessings. She doesn't need a private detective!"
"I was born in Fairyville."
Alex's voice was matter of fact, but Bryan noticed his eyes were showing too much white.
"You what?" Bryan said, completely flummoxed now.
"I was born in Fairyville. Grew up there. Left when I was seventeen."
"I thought you were born in Tucson."
"I know. I didn't want to talk about my background."
Bryan knew Alex liked his privacy. All those weekends they'd spent drinking in college, it was always Bryan spilling his life stories. Still, this was taking reserve to new levels. Who the hell cared if Alex grew up in some town with a funny name?
Bryan rubbed the throbbing center of his forehead. "What does you being born in Fairyville have to do with us taking this case?"
Alex stared at the wall that held their licenses, his preternaturally chiseled profile stirring things inside Bryan he'd learned not to pay attention to. "Fairyville is… different." He shook himself and met Bryan's eyes, the directness of his sea-blue gaze a small but palpable shock. "Fairyville is like Sedona. Vortexes and spirits and all that mystical crap."
"Which presumably you don't believe in."
Alex shrugged—not the confirmation Bryan was expecting. "I know no one's taken Mrs. Pruitt's theories seriously, not even her husband. If we check them out—talk to the hospital, see what's what—maybe we'll find something to reassure her, something to help her accept the son she has."
Alex referring to Oscar as the son she has wasn't striking the right note for Bryan.
"You can't believe what she says is true. That boy is her spitting image. Do you honestly think some family in Fairyville stole her son? And why? So they could raise a son who's normal? If Fairyvillians are so freaky, that's the last thing they'd want."
"Fairyvillers."
"Huh?" said Bryan, convinced his head was going to explode.
"They call themselves Fairyvillers, not Fairyvillians. Look, I'm not saying I believe her. I'm saying maybe something out of the ordinary happened. Don't you like to know the why of things? Doesn't it calm you even if it can't change what is? I can go alone, if this makes you uncomfortable."
Normally, Alex wouldn't have thought twice about handling a job this size solo. The fact that he'd been assuming Bryan would come made Bryan think he really was shaken.
"I can go," he said after a pause to hide his own thoughts, most of which involved sharing hotel rooms. "We've got nothing on deck right now except that mountain of background checks for Burrough's new hires. The other staff can handle that."
Alex blew out his breath and set his stack of collected papers into their inbox. "Good," he said. Not thanks, not glad to have you, just good.
Bryan mentally rolled his eyes. Polished manners or not, Alex could, on occasion, be an abrupt son of a bitch.
"Crap," Alex said now, tugging impatiently at his tie. When he yanked it off, the sight of his strong, tanned neck was enough to make Bryan swallow. "I'm sweating like a pig. Have Charlene make reservations while I grab a shower."
Bryan and Alex had a private bath attached to their office, a luxury neither of them apologized to the staff for, because they liked to run on their lunch hours. Actually, Alex ran on his lunch hour—as if his long, gold legs were made of Olympic springs. Bryan jogged and huffed. It was a pain, but it was worth it. Bryan liked his pizza, not his pizza gut.
"Reservations for tonight?" he asked, his trousers tightening at the thought of water streaming down Alex's hard body. The erection was so sudden he had no chance to head it off.
Luckily, Alex didn't turn as he stopped at the bathroom door. "Tonight," he agreed, sounding as grim as Bryan had ever heard him. "We'll take my car."
"Works for me," Bryan said as lightly as he could.
He realized he was excited for more reasons than Alex being na**d one room away. Bryan's friend had always been something of a mystery, but maybe if he tagged along to his old hometown, Bryan would figure out the why of him.
Alex shut the door behind him with shaking hands. Too rattled to undress, he leaned over the sink and let his head hang like a dog's. He didn't want to go back there. Didn't want to see those people and dig up his sins. Most of all, he didn't want to see Zoe.
Christ, he still got hard just to think her name. Sweet, black-haired Zoe with her apple br**sts and her soft gray eyes that no one could read but him. He'd wanted her to near insanity when he was younger. Even now, he didn't know how he'd kept it zipped. Yeah, she'd only been fifteen—and a fragile fifteen, at that—but she'd adored him with all her heart. She'd been his fruit to pluck, and he'd burned so hot for her he should have set his pants on fire a dozen times a day.
"Crap," he said, the ache in his chest as bad as the one in his slacks.
He didn't mean to put his fist through the wall. His field of vision simply went red, and his arm cut loose. The next thing he knew he was shaking plaster off his scraped knuckles. The reaction shook him, the loss of control. He couldn't even pull himself together when Bryan opened the door in concern.
"Jeez," he said, looking from the wall to Alex's hand. "You all right?"
"I can't go back there."
The confession was completely raw. Bryan furrowed his brow. "Well," he said, pretty calmly, considering Alex had never done anything like this in front of him before. "I'm not the one who's making you."
Alex cursed and sat on the closed toilet. "I have to go. No one else is going to take this case seriously."
He propped his head in his hands, as Bryan hunkered down beside him. The other man's nearness—simple, patient, affectionate—was more comforting than he'd ever guess. Bryan had no idea how deeply Alex valued his friendship—which was, in a way, part of the problem with going back to Fairyville.
"You're going to hear things about me," Alex warned. "Things that might make you feel differently about the man you've been friends with these last ten years."
Bryan's hand gripped Alex's knee. It was a gesture the most committed hetero couldn't have taken offense at, and Bryan was pretty much a master of those things. "Everybody has a past."