Epilogue – Gabriel
A month. A month of drone sweeps and intercepted radio chatter and one proof-of-life photo, and command’s best analysts can’t tell me if he’s in a border outpost or a Veygrad basement or a truck heading south into the Dustlands.
The Wolves know we’re looking. They want us to know he’s alive, and they want us to know we can’t reach him.
I pinch the bridge of my nose until white spots bloom behind my eyelids. My shoulder aches—not the wound, that’s healed to a pink pucker of scar tissue—just the general ache of a body wound tight for thirty days straight. I dig my thumb into the muscle, and it doesn’t give an inch.
I know exactly one thing that will.
I stand, cross my office, and open the door to the main room of the command hut. There’s one soldier at the radio desk, a young private from the new rotation, hunched over a logbook.
“Private.”
He shoots to his feet fast enough to knock his pen off the desk. “Sir.”
“Bring Specialist Reyes to me. Immediately. Then you’re relieved for the night.”
His eyes go wide. I can watch the math happen behind them—Reyes, summoned to the Colonel’s office at 2200, alone, everyone else dismissed—and the sum he arrives at is a court-martial. He probably thinks he’s fetching a dead man.
“Yes, sir.” He’s out the door at a jog.
I go back to my desk and stand behind it with my hands flat on the paperwork, and I don’t sit down, because sitting down is not what this desk is for tonight.
The knock comes six minutes later. Then the outer door, then boots crossing the empty main room, then my office door opening and closing, and Noah Reyes leans against it with a smirk already loaded.
“That private looked at me like he was walking me to a firing squad,” he says. “I’m at your disposal, sir.”
I don’t smile.
“Do you know what I thought about,” I say, “the first time I let myself touch myself thinking about you?”
The smirk falters. His weight comes off the door.
“Before that I kept pretending it was insomnia.” I come around the desk slowly.
“I had a fantasy. This office. You, standing right about where you’re standing now, running that mouth.
And me slamming you against this desk, paperwork and all, pulling your pants down, freeing my cock, and fucking you until you couldn’t say yes, sir like a challenge anymore. ”
Noah swallows. I hear it from four feet away, the dry click of his throat working. When I look down, his pants are tented, hard and obvious.
“I have,” he says, and his voice comes out an octave lower, “no issue with that whatsoever.” He wets his lips. “But I want to know one thing.”
I tilt my head. “What’s that, Specialist?”
“When did you have this fantasy?” His eyes are almost black now. “Before or after the latrine?”
I hesitate because the answer is a confession.
“Before,” I whisper.
The sound that comes out of him is barely human—a moan he doesn’t even attempt to swallow—and whatever leash I had on myself snaps.
My hand closes around the back of his neck, and I haul him in, kissing him savagely, my teeth catching his lower lip, my mouth swallowing the noise he makes.
He grabs at my shirt, and I don’t give him time to get a grip.
I spin him by the shoulders and splay him over the desk, one hand flat between his shoulder blades, his cheek pressed against the patrol logs.
The proof-of-life memo. All of it. Exactly like I imagined it before I ever knew his mother’s name or the taste of his skin.
He arches back against me, grinding his ass into my erection, and I press him down harder.
Then reality taps me on the shoulder.
“Fuck.” I go still. “I don’t have lube.”
Noah chuckles into the paperwork, smug. “Check my right pocket, sir.”
I reach into his pocket and my fingers close around the small tube. I pull it out and hold it in front of his face.
“You carry this around now?”
“You summoned me to your office after dark and dismissed the radio watch.” He turns his head enough to grin up at me sideways. “I’m not the one being obvious.”
I answer that by opening his belt one-handed and dragging his pants and shorts down to his thighs in one pull.
He hisses as his cock springs free into the cool air, hanging hard and heavy over the front edge of my desk.
I slick two fingers and press them into him, and he opens for me easy, pliant, still soft-muscled from this morning in my bunk.
It takes a minute, barely that, before he’s pushing back onto my knuckles and cursing quietly into a supply requisition.
“Ready, sir.” Breathless. Demanding. “Come on.”
I free myself, lube my cock with two rough strokes, and line up. Then I press in, one long, unbroken push, and we groan simultaneously, the same sound coming from two very different men.
And my shoulder is healed now. For over a month I fucked him carefully, one-armed, letting him do the work while I held still like a man under doctor’s orders.
Which is what I was. But not anymore. I close both hands over his hips, fingers digging into the bone, and I slam into him the way I’ve wanted to since the first briefing.
The desk screeches an inch across the plywood.
“Fuck—” Noah’s hands scrabble for the far edge and hold on.
I don’t slow down. I set a pace that has the desk barking against the floor with every thrust, screech, screech, screech, a rhythm anyone within fifty meters could interpret with total accuracy, and I cannot make myself care.
I watch him instead. His head rests on the desk, cheek crushed against the paperwork, mouth open, breath fogging a laminated document.
His eyes roll back when I bottom out, lashes fluttering, and there has never been anything on any map board in my career worth looking at more than this.
“Look at you.” My voice comes out low, rough, the voice I use out there. “This is what happens to soldiers who alter my patrol orders, Specialist. Bent over my desk with my cock in them.”
He whimpers. Actually whimpers, the mouthy little menace, his fingers going white on the desk edge.
“You’ve been insubordinate since the day you got off that truck.
” I punctuate it with a thrust that jolts a stack of folders off the desk and toward the floor.
“Slouching in my briefings. Talking back at my range. Touching yourself on my perimeter run where anyone could’ve caught you.
” Another thrust. “Did you know I was already ruined by then? That I’d already fucked you a dozen times right here, in my head, on this desk? ”
“God—” He pushes back to meet me, sloppy and desperate. “Left, sir—angle left, right there, right there—”
I adjust my grip and drive into the spot he’s begging for, and his whole body seizes, a strangled sound punching out of him into the paperwork.
So I hammer it. Every stroke, no mercy, holding his hips exactly where I want them while the desk screeches its complaints and Noah Reyes comes apart under my hands one thrust at a time.
“Gabriel—” His voice cracks. “Gonna come. Don’t—don’t touch it, I’m gonna come just like this, gonna paint your desk, sir—”
“Then do it,” I growl. “That’s an order.”
Three more strokes and he obeys. His back bows, his mouth opens on a sound he barely strangles, and his cock jerks untouched where it hangs over the desk’s edge, striping the front panel in ropes of cum while his whole body clenches around me like a fist.
That clench takes the choice away from me.
The pressure that’s been building at the base of my spine detonates, and I come with a roar I muffle with clenched teeth, grinding deep, filling him in pulses that seem to go on longer than physics should allow.
Filling my boy to the brim. My vision whites at the edges. My knees consider mutiny.
When I finally, carefully pull back, I look down and groan at the sight—my cum welling out of his stretched hole, sliding down toward his thigh, obscene and mine and the single most possessive thing I’ve ever done to another human being.
“Christ,” I mutter, dragging my thumb through the mess just to watch him shudder. “If I weren’t forty-five, I’d bend you right back over and give you a second one.”
Noah laughs, wrecked and breathless, still spread across my ruined paperwork. Then he reaches back with two fingers, scoops up a slick trail of what’s leaking out of him, and brings it to his mouth. The moan he makes around his own fingers is filthy and entirely sincere.
I stare at him, stunned and—impossibly, thirty seconds after coming—stirred.
“I maintain,” I say, shaking my head slowly, “that there is something seriously wrong with you.”
He rolls onto his side on my desk, pants around his thighs, hair destroyed, grinning at me with cum on his lips and half the base’s patrol logs stuck to his cheek.
“Yeah,” he says. “But you love me anyway.”
I look at him. At the bruise my grip left blooming on his hip, at the mouth that has cost me every rule I ever built my life around.
“I do,” I say, my voice husky. “God help me, I wouldn’t change a single thing about you.”
He reaches up and pulls me down by the collar, and the last coherent thought I have before his mouth finds mine is that somewhere out there in the dark, far, far away, my mother’s porch light is still burning, and for the first time in my life, I finally understand what it was for.
Thank you for reading My Forbidden Commander!
I hope you enjoyed the start of this new military romance series.
Next up, in November, we find out who has Staff Sergeant Ryan Callahan…
and what they’re doing to him. Bestie Selena Winters is joining me on this one, and you can already pre-order My Enemy Captors on !
I was trained to survive capture.
Resist interrogation. Withhold intelligence. Endure pain. Wait for extraction.
No one ever trained me for them.
Four enemy operators.
Four men I should hate with every breath left in my body.
They take me after a mission goes to hell.
The next time I open my eyes, I’m in a cell.
Shirtless.
Bound.
Outnumbered.
And very, very interesting to the enemy.
They should be trying to break me.
Instead, they watch me like they’ve already decided I belong to them.
I tell myself it’s strategy when I let them close.
Survival when I stop fighting.
Madness when I start wanting the men who hold my life in their hands.
They’re my enemies.
My weakness.
My ruin.
And when the war comes crashing through the door, I’m not sure what scares me more.
That they might keep me.
Or that I might let them.
But first, we’re going back to the Wicked Sinners MC clubhouse. Diesel’s Desire is out on in less than a month!
Seventeen years ago, I buried Penny Carpenter in my past.
Back then, she was everything.
My first. My only. Mine in every way that mattered.
We were supposed to be forever. Until I chose the life.
The MC wasn’t just a club—it was blood, loyalty… destiny.
And once she got a taste of what that world really was, she left to earn a badge.
I thought I was over her... until she stormed back into our hometown, back into my life.
Seventeen years older. Just as fucking beautiful.
Untouchable in that uniform she wears like armor.
And now she’s digging into shit that should stay six feet under, shit that leads directly to my club.
She stands on one side of the law. I live on the other.
We were never supposed to collide again.
But the second I look at her, I realize the truth I’ve been running from all these years—I never really let her go.
And now that she’s back?
I don’t care what badge she wears… or what it costs me.
This time, I’m not letting her walk away.
And let’s not forget about the next book in the Seven Sins Carnival series. Knife Thrower and Cole’s story is coming to in October!
I never miss.
Not with a blade.
Not in front of a crowd.
And never with a woman.
Not until Sloane.
She joins my act with a death wish dressed up as talent, catching knives with her bare hands like she has nothing left to lose.
I should keep my distance.
Instead, I become obsessed with every defiant look that dares me to throw harder.
Night after night, she places her life in my hands. Somewhere between the flashing steel and the roar of the crowd, danger becomes trust.
Then trust becomes hunger.
But the closer I get, the more I realize the darkness inside her already knows mine.
And once our pasts collide, neither of us is walking away.