Clockwork Tangerine Read Online Free PDF

worries.
    Robin was more concerned about the identity of the rugged, handsome man snoring in a wing chair pulled up close to his bed. The man was fuzzy around the edges, but he was clear enough for Robin to catch his breath in shock at his appearance.
    He was familiar, achingly so, and when Robin squinted to get his eyes in focus, he found out why. The snorer was the man who’d pulled him out of the beating he was taking. There had to be at least one pair of glasses on the table next to his bed. He’d gotten into the habit of leaving them about the house, and, sure enough, his fingers closed over his spectacles when he fumbled about long enough to find them.
    Then he really wished he hadn’t, because the stranger slumbering in one of his worn-out wing chairs was gorgeous. Even more so once Robin could see him clearly.
    “Gods in hell, what happened?” he croaked and rubbed at his throat, wondering if he’d sucked down a mouthful of sand sometime after the beating he’d taken.
    Obviously, the blows to his head hadn’t rattled his brains too much, because he clearly remembered every firm line on the man’s face. At first, Robin believed he’d been rescued by a hallucination. Handsome, broad-shouldered men didn’t wander into Little Orient and step in between a troupe of attackers and their victim.
    Apparently, this one did.
    Robin took the time to study the slouched man. From all appearances, it didn’t look as if he’d be waking soon. His mouth was slightly open, and a touch of spit glistened on his lower lip. His dirty-blond hair appeared infuriated at something, poking up every which way from his skull. It was endearing, in a way, softening his harsh features with a boyish tousle.
    “Or you stuck your finger into one of my generators and fried yourself,” Robin mumbled as he looked around for his clothes. “Because that’s what my hair looks like when I do just that.”
    There were no clothes. The bedsheet would have to do. Wrapping the linens up around him as best he could, Robin put his feet to the floor and promptly tumbled over, falling flat across the sleeping man’s lap.
    In times of great stress, a man’s body should rise to the occasion and be graceful, or at least hardy. Robin’s was neither. Normally, it was a state he was used to, and he had grown accustomed to falling over his own feet or slamming his elbow into the edge of a table. If there was ever a time when he could have borrowed a tincture of masculine ideal, it would have been as he was flailing to free his legs from a nest of bedsheets and somehow avoided the large, handsome man sleeping not more than a foot away.
    He landed square on his rescuer. And to make matters worse, Robin was pretty certain his bony knee dug a deep furrow into the man’s crotch.
    That woke the man up.
    His hands came up and cupped Robin’s ass, bared since the sheets’ ends remained firmly under the heavy feather mattress where someone had tucked them in. It’d been too long since Robin felt another’s touch, much less the strong caress of a man’s fingers on the delicate skin of his back and rear.
    His face burned with embarrassment.
    His cock stiffened and begged for more.
    He went with the embarrassment. It was a common enough emotion for him to deal with. Arousal was something best dealt with in the privacy of his own room… alone. Preferably when he wasn’t spread apart over a man’s lap as if he were begging to be taken.
    Life was not a penny dreadful, and he certainly wasn’t a fair maiden needing to be rescued from thugs.
    Even if, for just once in his life, Robin wished someone would.
    And the man certainly had done just that.
    He nearly embarrassed himself on the other man’s pants leg when his strong fingers dug into Robin’s hips. The touch felt so right … not like he’d had much experience with anyone’s hands but his own, but those hands seemed to know exactly where to glide over and where to stop.
    Mostly, they knew how to cradle