All Through the Night: A Troubleshooter Christmas Read online

  “Uh-oh,” Jules said.

  “Uh-oh?”

  “Let’s just…check back in quickly,” Jules told him. “Rumor has it there’s a hotel room crunch in Boston this weekend.”

  Words that were tragically confirmed, mere seconds later, first by Melinda of the front desk, and then by the hotel manager, Mrs. Hanniford, who was a daughter of the American Revolution, related to John Adams on her mother’s side, a PFLAG mom, and in possession of one of the most ridiculously broad Boston accents Robin had ever heard. He usually loved hanging with her, just listening to her talk, but today he didn’t like what she had to say.

  Not only were there no rooms in this hotel, but there was nothing available anywhere in the city, including Cambridge and various suburbs all the way out past Framingham. It was, Mrs. H. told him, parents’ weekend at nearly all the colleges in the metro Boston area. During this one weekend in the fall and graduation weekend in May, there was always a hotel shortage in what was undeniably the biggest college town in the nation.

  “Pretend I didn’t check out.” Robin gave Mrs. H. his most win-some smile. “It’s been, what? Ten minutes. I wasn’t supposed to check out, and I’m coming back tomorrow. The maid probably hasn’t even made up the room. I’ll just go back in. You don’t even need to change the sheets. We can just trade towels…”

  “But you did check out. The computer already processed it.” Mrs. H. liked him. She did. She often worked the night shift, and had invited him into her office for tea on quite a few occasions. She obviously hated the fact that she was now royally fucking him. “We have a waiting list. I could put you on it…?”

  “Mrs. Hanniford,” Robin said. “Betty.” He leaned closer. Lowered his voice. “See the incredibly gorgeous guy talking on his cell phone over there?” He gestured with his chin toward Jules.

  Mrs. H. looked and then nodded.

  “That’s Jules.” He’d talked and talked and talked about Jules during their tea parties. Mrs. Hanniford could have been given a pop quiz on All That Was Jules, and gotten an A-plus. “I checked out of the hotel because I couldn’t bear to be away from him for another minute, only he surprised me by flying up here to see me. I’m pretty sure that one of the things I’m going to do tonight is ask him to marry me. Please don’t make me do that while we huddle together for warmth in the train station, breathing through our mouths to avoid the persistent and incomparable stench of urine.”

  “Laronda’s got nothing,” Jules said as he came toward them, smiling a warm greeting at Mrs. H., despite his obvious frustration, disappointment and fatigue.

  Robin looked at Mrs. H. and briefly put his finger on his lips. She nodded, wide-eyed, but then shrugged apologetically, shaking her head. She still couldn’t help him, regardless of how much she wanted to.

  “Laronda is Jules’s boss’s administrative assistant,” Robin explained to the hotel manager. “She’s, like, the queen of his office. If there was a room in Boston, she would have gotten it for us.” He knew Laronda well. Some days he spoke to her on the phone more often than he spoke to Jules.

  “Sometimes the…organization has a hotel room on reserve, but not tonight,” Jules explained, obviously not wanting to say the Bureau or the FBI in front of Mrs. H. He was clearly tired and even slightly pale. What he needed, Robin knew, was about eighteen hours in bed.

  Robin needed that, too, but not because he was tired.

  “Laronda also told me there’s a run on rental cars,” Jules continued. “Apparently a semi went off a bridge onto Amtrak’s main tracks to New York. Trains are shut down. She couldn’t even rent us a moped. I was thinking we could drive up to Manchester, or out to Hartford if we could get a car.”

  “We have sister hotels in both Manchester and Hartford,” Mrs. H. said helpfully. She went tappy-tap on her computer. “There are rooms available in each.”

  “But no cars to get there,” Robin reiterated.

  More tapping and…

  “None available from this hotel,” Mrs. H. confirmed. “I’m sorry. Maybe there’s a car service that could…?”

  “I already tried that,” Jules told Robin quietly, shaking his head as Mrs. H. bustled back into her office to answer a phone call. “But everything’s booked. I was trying to think outside the box. A limo. You know, at the very least take a lengthy ride around the city.”

  Robin had to laugh, in part at Jules’s subtle yet suggestive eyebrow waggle. The first time they’d hooked up, they’d been in a limo, privacy shield up and radio blasting. But apparently that wasn’t even an option today.

  “I completely screwed us,” Robin whispered. “Didn’t I?” Jules had left him a voicemail saying that he was coming. If he’d taken the time to go through the twenty-something messages that had cluttered up his cell phone, and if he’d done it before he’d packed his bags and checked out of the hotel…He and Jules would’ve been up in his room, right now, exchanging long, slow, deep kisses…

  “Actually,” Jules pointed out sotto voce, laughing at the absurdity of their situation. “I’m feeling extremely unscrewed.”

  It was hard not to laugh, too, when Jules was laughing. Still, Robin shook his head. “Maybe we could catch the shuttle to New York, get a room down there—”

  “And wake up at three thirty to get back to Boston in time for you to get to work?” Jules countered.

  “I’ll get up at three thirty,” Robin said. “You can sleep in, catch a later flight.” Jesus, Jules looked so tired.

  But he was shaking his head, no. “I wanted to go with you to the studio,” he said. “I mean, if that’s okay with you.”

  Robin’s heart flip-flopped. It was amazing. His relationship with Jules had lasted longer than any other relationship he’d ever had, yet the man could still make him feel like a giddy kid with a crush. “Really?”

  “If it’s okay,” Jules said again. He touched Robin’s hand, interlacing their fingers. It was a daring public show of affection for Jules—considering they were well outside of the South End, Boston’s gay neighborhood. “The unscrewed thing was just a joke. You know that, right? Sweetie, I love making love to you, but…right now I’m just ecstatic we’re in the same city. We can go have dinner and…It’ll be tomorrow before we know it.”

  And it wouldn’t be the first time they’d talked through the entire night.

  Mrs. H. had come back to the desk. She was hovering uncertainly, desperate but powerless to help.

  “Hey, Mrs. H.,” Robin said, his eyes never leaving Jules’s. “My life partner’s a little shy, but I’m feeling a righteous need to kiss him. Do you mind if we step into your office for, oh, two minutes?”

  Mrs. H. was silent, and he finally turned to look at her. She was obviously thinking…

  “Mind out of the gutter,” he chastised her, laughing. “Two minutes? I’m good, but I’m not that good.”

  Jules was laughing, too, but he leaned forward and kissed Robin. Right there in the lobby. His mouth was soft and warm and so, so sweet…

  “Come on,” Jules said, with so much love in his eyes that Robin’s heart nearly burst. “Let’s check our bags and find someplace quiet to have dinner.”

  “We could get take-out,” Robin suggested, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans as if it were cold out. With the wind sweeping in off Boston Harbor, it was a little nippy, but Jules was warm. Maybe too warm.

  “And take it where?” Jules asked. Find someplace quiet to have dinner—hah. The city was overrun with students and their parents, all dining out. They’d walked all the way down to the waterfront, by the Aquarium. And now they couldn’t even find an empty cab to take them…Where indeed? Was there really any point going back to the hotel, where they didn’t even have a room?

  God, he needed to sit down.

  Somehow Robin knew that, and was there, helping him toward a bench.

  “Let’s just get in line at the Union Oyster House,” Jules said. The wait there was over ninety minutes, but the food and ambiance would be wo
rth it. Besides, it wasn’t as if they were rushing to get anywhere else.

  “You’re sweating.” Robin’s tone was accusatory. He’d been asking Jules if he was okay ever since they’d left the hotel. “You’ve been lying to me, haven’t you?”

  “I’m fine,” Jules lied yet again. But it wasn’t just to Robin, it was to himself, too. He didn’t want to be sick. He couldn’t be sick. Not this weekend. He’d wanted this to be special…

  “Jesus, Jules, you’re burning up.” Robin’s hands felt like ice against Jules’s forehead.

  “I’m just a little…uncomfortable. Gastronomically. I had this taco as sort of a pseudo lunch,” he tried to explain. “I think it was bad.”

  “You think you have food poisoning?” Robin’s eyes were filled with such concern.

  “No,” Jules said. Please, God, no. “It’s just indigestion.”

  “Maybe we should go to the hospital.”

  “For indigestion?”

  “For food poisoning.” Robin was exasperated. “Just because you don’t want to call it what it is, babe, doesn’t mean you get to change the facts.”

  The wind blew, and suddenly Jules was freezing. “Oh, shit,” he said as he started to shiver violently. Just as suddenly, the taco made its play for escape. Jules barely managed to turn away from Robin as he got fiercely sick, right there on the sidewalk.

  But Robin didn’t recoil. In fact, he got closer, putting his arms around Jules, trying to stop his shaking. “All right,” he said. “Okay.” He took out his cell phone. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

  “No,” Jules managed to say before the taco tried for an encore. “Use my phone. Call Alyssa.”

  Sam Starrett was a sympathy vomiter. It didn’t take him much to join the Technicolor interpretive dance, so he backed way off as Robin pretty much carried Jules into the hotel room.

  “Bathroom’s this way.” Alyssa took charge. Or at least she tried. Robin refused to relinquish control, even when, from the sound of things, Jules lunged for the toilet and started singing the age-old hymn to the porcelain god.

  “Lys, you all right?” Sam called.

  “I’m fine,” she called back. What a difference the time of day could make.

  Feeling a tad green himself, Sam stepped out onto the balcony, closing the slider tightly behind him.

  This was going to be an interesting night. When Robin called, Alyssa had been in the middle of trying to get Sam naked—which was not really that difficult a task. Sam had never been much of a challenge to his incredibly gorgeous wife, particularly in the let’s delay dinner to make love department.

  It had been something of a mood-changer, though, when she’d suddenly turned away from him, reaching to answer her phone. Like, there was anything in the world more important than this…?

  But then he’d recognized the jaunty melody, too, as being Jules Cassidy’s emergency ring tone. And the chances Sam was going to get some before dinner dropped to a solid “probably not.”

  Jules and Alyssa had been whispering together a lot recently. Alyssa didn’t want to talk about it, but Sam was pretty sure it had something to do with Robin, who was a dysfunctional emotional time bomb, just waiting for the most inopportune moment to explode.

  From her seat on the edge of the bed, Alyssa said, “Oh, my God,” and “Of course,” and “A taco? Oh, no. Poor Jules,” and then? The kicker. “We’ve got two double beds—there’s plenty of room. Definitely. Bring him here. The Sheraton. Room 842. Do you need me to come to the lobby?”

  Sam let his head flop back against the pillow of one of their hotel room’s beds. The place had been out of kings, which was a shame because he was tall and his feet dangled off the end of a double.

  But that wasn’t as big a shame as the fact that he was not only not getting some tonight, he was going to have to endure Jules’s misery as he attempted to dry out his alcoholic fuckwad of a boyfriend, who’d no doubt gone off on another binge from hell—his first since getting out of rehab.

  “Okay,” Alyssa said into her cell phone. “But if you need any help…” And then she totally surprised Sam with her next words. “Robin, shh, sweetie, it’s really okay. We’re glad you called. Honestly. Just get Jules over here as quickly as you can.”

  Sam sat up. “Jules is bingeing?” It was a stupid thing to say—he knew it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Jules wasn’t a big drinker to start with, and ever since Robin had gone into rehab he’d cut himself off, too, in solidarity.

  Fortunately Alyssa was accustomed to Sam’s occasional idiotic verbal explosions.

  “Jules has food poisoning,” she informed him as she closed her cell phone. “They couldn’t get a hotel room, so they have nowhere else to go. Robin just managed to get them a ride—I think he stood in the street and stopped traffic. They should be here in about ten minutes.”

  You better get dressed. Sam waited for the words, but they didn’t come. Instead, Alyssa smiled at him, heat in her ocean green eyes.

  Sam thought his wife was achingly beautiful when dressed in bulky cammie-print BDUs. She was gorgeous in jeans and a T-shirt, too, with her long legs, perfect breasts, and athletic build, without even a hint of makeup on her mocha-colored skin, her dark hair cut short and sleek, capping her African-princess face, framing her huge, otherworldly-colored eyes.

  She was beautiful, as well, when she dressed up for dinner or a party—his favorite was that red dress with the short skirt. Shee-yit.

  But Alyssa, wearing only underwear that she’d clearly bought for his pleasure…

  By all rights, Sam should have been struck blind.

  But that smile was loaded, and there was no doubt about it, it was his turn to talk, and perhaps say something brilliant this time. “I can name that tune in ten minutes.”

  She laughed—which created a phenomenon in Sam’s chest that he thought of as a pulmonary triple lutz. “Yeah, but can you do it in five?”

  He reached for her, and she slipped into his arms.

  Short answer? Yes.

  Jules wouldn’t stop apologizing.

  In fact, the very last thing he mumbled before falling asleep, after the gastrointestinal explosions had stopped, after Robin had gotten him cleaned up, into a borrowed and much too large pair of Sam’s sweatpants and a T-shirt, and tucked into bed, was “I’m so sorry.”

  Robin sat with him for a while, just stroking his hair and watching him in the light from the bathroom.

  Alyssa was curled up in the other bed. Robin thought she was asleep until his stomach growled loudly.

  She chuckled. “Amazing that you could actually be hungry after that,” she said, speaking quietly so as not to disturb Jules. “I may never eat again.”

  Robin laughed softly, too. “Thank you so much for letting us come here.”

  “Please,” Alyssa said. “If you’re going to be spending time with Jules, you need to understand that there is nothing Sam and I would not do for him. Are we clear on that?”

  “Thank you,” Robin started, but she cut him off.

  “No,” she said. “The correct response is yes, ma’am, I understand.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Now you’re scaring me a little.”

  She laughed, but she was still looking at him pointedly, so he said, “Yes, ma’am, I understand.” But then he added, “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do, either. I know you probably don’t believe that yet. You have reason to mistrust me—”

  Alyssa interrupted him again. “Once when Jules and I were overseas, he got this really awful stomach virus. It was…bad. I wanted to help him, but he wouldn’t let me near him. He can be so stubborn and…I was impressed tonight at the way you just shouted him down. You wouldn’t take his shit.” She laughed. “Okay. Bad choice of words.”

  Robin laughed, too. “Yeah, well…”

  Just stop, Robin had told Jules at an unfortunately higher volume than he would have liked when Jules had tried to push him away. I’m not going anywhere, so just fucking get used to
it.

  Of course, maybe bellowing Why? Because I love you, okay? at the top of his lungs, in front of Jules’s skeptical best friend, had helped lower her skepticism a little.

  “Sam went out to get some sandwiches a few hours ago,” Alyssa told him as his stomach rumbled again. “He thought you might be hungry after the…fireworks ended. He’s still out on the balcony, because he’s…well…”

  “He’s Sam,” Robin finished for her. “I know.” Jules had told him all about Sam’s tendency to lose his lunch in response to brutal injury or death. It was kind of funny, actually—the big, tough Navy SEAL, on his knees…Of course, during the violence, he was always in the thick of things—kicking ass and saving the day. But after it was over? Vomit time.

  He was also, Jules had said, prone to the dread chain reaction. If someone else entered the vomitron, Sam would climb right in, too. Which was why he’d scrambled outside when Robin had carried Jules in.

  “If you want,” Alyssa said, “I’ll keep an eye on Jules while you go out there and get something to eat.”

  Jules was breathing slowly and steadily. He’d been tired before the fireworks—good word for it—and now he was completely wrung out. Robin leaned over and kissed him gently on the forehead before standing up.

  “Thanks,” he said, even though he was thinking, A sandwich with Sam. Oh, boy. Sam was even scarier than Alyssa. He had this way of looking at Robin as if he were fresh birdcrap on the windshield of his recently detailed sports car.

  Still, Robin was going to have to sit down and have a conversation with the big former SEAL one of these days. Why not right now?

  He grabbed his jacket as he crossed to the slider. But before he got there, Alyssa said, “Hey, Robin?”

  He turned to look at her in the dimness.

  “I understand, too,” she said. “How much you love Jules. And for the record? I think it’s great. He’s been waiting for you, his entire life.”

  “That means a lot to me,” Robin managed to choke out, and great. Now as he pushed past the closed drapes and stepped out into the chill of the balcony, he had fricking tears in his eyes.