At My General’s Command Read online

  “No, probably not, but I’m sure you have a good idea that if we compared the numbers, you’d find a big difference between the number of people arrested that come from the city or are tourists, and those that you arrest that come off this base. So yes, the general is currently a little too busy to personally deal with a statistical minority.”

  There was a pause before Chief Williams recovered himself. “You little shit.”

  Christian shook his head. “I think that marks the end of this conversation. I’ll deliver the message to General Williams, have a nice day.”

  The police chief continued speaking in an angry tone. Still, Christian ended the call without bothering to listen to any more. No doubt, the police chief would take a moment to realize he’d been hung up on and would be calling back.

  “Sucks for him, since I’m the one answering the damn phone,” Christian muttered to himself.

  “Who did you piss off?”

  General Winter’s voice from behind brought Christian around with a slight yelp. The older man was standing outside his office door, frowning at Christian.

  “Jesus, sir, you scared the hell out of me,” Christian complained, holding a hand to his beating chest.

  God, he hated it when the general snuck up on him like that.

  “I’m putting a damn bell on that door,” Christian continued.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Christian was again struck by the strange mood that had come over the man. Christian wanted to ask what was wrong, but he didn’t quite know how to. For all their comfort with one another, and ease of conversation, there was still that gap between them.

  Christian glanced at the phone nervously. “Ah, the police chief?”

  “What did he want?”

  “Apparently, another private got himself in trouble last night and was thrown in the drunk tank.”

  “And? People have been getting drunk and doing stupid things since the moment alcohol was invented. Why is that my problem?”

  Christian raised a brow. “As I’ve mentioned before, Chief Williams gets testy when it happens a few too many times for his liking. Though I probably didn’t help too much by pointing out that compared to how many people who don’t come from here that he has to arrest, our soldiers are pretty well behaved.”

  “Good. Maybe that will give him something to think about for a little while. I’ll speak to him some other time, and remind him that he has more important things to do than to waste either of our time.”

  Christian squirmed, both pleased that he wasn’t going to get his ass reamed, but still uncomfortable with the irritation he could hear in the general’s voice. It wasn’t like General Winter to express something like aggravation. One of Christian’s favorite things about the working for General Winter, besides the genuine care he had for his men, was that he seemed to draw from an infinite well of patience. Seeing him irritable was surreal.

  “Uh, sir?”

  “Yes?”

  Christian tried to hold the other man’s gaze. “Is everything okay with you?”

  General Winter frowned. “I’m fine, why?”

  “Because you don’t seem...fine.”

  “Really?”

  Christian grinned nervously. “Yeah, really. I know I talked about how there are some things I don’t know about you, things that are kind of weird to not know when I think about it, but...I know what you’re like day to day. And you’re...off. You’ve been off the past couple of days.”

  General Winter blinked at him. “Oh. My apologies.”

  “Something wrong?”

  General Winter shook his head, the surprise disappearing behind an impassive expression. Christian was almost impressed with how quickly the older man managed to lock all his emotions down behind a professional mask.

  “No. Just a few things on my mind is all, it will pass. Truth be told, I haven’t been sleeping too well, and I think I might take the next hour to myself. Maybe have a little nap.”

  “In your office?”

  “Yes, can you adjust my meetings today?”

  “I can do that, yeah.”

  “Thank you.”

  Christian watched the man walk stiffly into his office, and continued to stare after him. Since when did General Winter, the workaholic who barely knew the meaning of a good and proper night’s sleep, take a nap in the middle of the day? The thought was even more troubling than knowing that something was bothering the general. It was one thing for the man to be bothered, but for it to coincide with uncharacteristic exhaustion?

  “What the hell?” Christian muttered, turning back to his computer.

  Fixing the schedule to put everything back an hour was no big deal. Christian’s Saturday might be packed for the first half, but General Winter normally had an easier time the whole day. It was nothing to move things around, and reschedule the medic’s visit for Monday as well.

  Yet the ease of his work also meant he could ponder over what was wrong with the general. On some level, he figured he shouldn’t be too bothered. Everyone had their off days after all, and sometimes that went on for more than a day. And it wasn’t like the general was a young man either. For all Christian knew, General Winter could be in pain, or just slowing down.

  Christian wrinkled his nose. “Nah.”

  Okay, sure, the man wasn’t getting any younger but, a person didn’t just start to run into the ground overnight. If the general was starting to slow down due to age, Christian would have seen the signs long before now. Plus, he made sure the general saw the medics just as often as the older man insisted the other soldiers on the base did. Christian wasn’t supposed to know the results of those exams, but he had an understanding with the clinic that if there was anything he needed to know to keep the general healthy, it should be passed along quietly.

  “Dammit, Christian. Don’t do this to yourself. Just...focus on something else,” Christian chided himself.

  That something ended up being combing through the message system. If there was one thing Christian was not the best at keeping up with, it was purging messages. When he was generally responsible for both his own message box and that of the general, it was something that could fill up pretty quickly if he wasn’t diligent. Most of the time, though, it ended up being hundreds of messages in each box that he had to go through and delete, save, or mark for later consideration.

  It did, however, do the job of refocusing his mind, he was pleased to find. Christian’s own inbox had been the first on his list, and he was dismayed to find several hundred messages waiting for him. Most of the time, it just required a brief look over each message before he could decide, but some required him to read the entire contents. The task ended up eating almost an hour of his day, and it kept his thoughts from his worries.

  “Done is done,” Christian proclaimed proudly as he closed his inbox.

  Then again, there was still the general’s inbox.

  Sighing at himself, he opened it and began combing through. Opening the first message, he scanned over its contents before deciding it wasn’t needed. His decision to throw it in the trash folder stopped him in his tracks when he realized there was already something in the folder. It honestly didn’t matter if he was the one who read it or the general, it would always be Christian who inevitably made the decision to delete emails. General Winter left the decision of what to keep and what to get rid of up to Christian, if only because there might be something in the messages that Christian might need.

  But Christian hadn’t cleared the old messages in quite a while.

  “Dammit general,” he muttered as he opened the folder.

  He stopped, raising a brow at the demanding title. Opening it brought his other brow up.

  “Don’t want people to see this?” Christian read aloud.

  There was an attachment, a video file from the looks of it. Christian’s heart pounded as he hovered the cursor over the link, pondering what he should do. On the one hand, it was clearly not meant for his eye
s. On the other, there was obviously something very wrong with this message, and he wasn’t sure he could leave well enough alone when it looked like someone was threatening the general.

  He clicked it.

  It took the computer a couple of minutes to download the file. A two-minute-long video popped up on the built-in player.

  “All that for two minutes? Must be HD,” Christian muttered, clicking the play button.

  And immediately froze.

  The first few seconds of the movie were taken from the perspective of someone lying on their back. A bedroom could be seen in the background, with the general clutter of a pair of pants thrown over a desk chair, a laptop, and a closet. Far more interesting to Christian was the very naked man who stood in the center of the shot.

  General Winter.

  The camera stayed panned up, just low enough that Christian could see that it didn’t look like some of the salt in the general’s hair had crept to his groin yet. Amidst the utter shock of what he was seeing, some part of Christian’s brain couldn’t help but think that the general was in very good shape for someone closer to fifty than forty. In the sunlight coming from somewhere behind the camera, Christian could see just about every detail of the general’s body from the waist up. The general’s body was still tight with muscle, though perhaps didn’t have the definition that a younger man would have. Sparse crops of hair could be seen trailing down the general’s flat stomach and up to his chest. His arms looked even more impressive out of his uniform, and Christian’s breath stuttered as he watched the muscles shift and flex.

  He was never more happy that he’d long ago muted the sound from the computer after being irritated half to death by the message alert noise. Christian watched as the general bent down, a wicked smile on his face as he ran his hands up the pair of legs of the person filming. Christian didn’t need the camera to pan down to show the filmer’s straining, eager cock, or to know that the person being stroked by General Winter was a man.

  Well, that certainly settled whether or not the general was into men.

  Christian continued to sit, frozen with a mixture of complete shock and growing arousal as the video continued to play to the end. He watched as the general, his boss, a man he’d nursed a quiet attraction to for almost a year, worked his way up the filmer’s body. Light kisses were laid down upon the other man’s skin, trailing up the man’s inner thighs and up to his hips. The camera shook a little as the general’s mouth continued to wander, taking his time as he explored the other man’s body.

  The clip finally ended with the general’s face in full view of the shot. Christian sat there, staring at the image, transfixed by the sight of General Winter’s expression caught in the frame. Of all the emotions he’d ever seen on the other man’s face, Christian had never seen pure arousal before. Lust practically radiated from General Winter’s eyes as he stayed locked in the screen. And while it wasn’t actually aimed at Christian, he couldn’t help but feel the effect of the expression.

  Slowly recovering his composure, he cleared his throat and forced his eyes away from the screen. The pants of his uniform were already uncomfortably tight, and Christian really did not want to continue staring at the image. Though he hadn’t seen everything, and it was obvious the clip was part of a longer video, Christian knew damn well he was going to be adding that to his memory banks for later use.

  When his eyes settled back on the screen, he tried to avoid the small window where the stilled video sat. Instead, Christian looked at the email sitting behind the video and read what was there once more. Though it was apparent the email was still threatening, he couldn’t exactly understand what the point of it was. Obviously, someone wanted something from General Winter and was using the video as leverage.

  Would it really matter if someone saw the video though? The general wasn’t a married man, and as far as Christian knew, hadn’t been seeing anyone seriously in the past year. How could a sex tape be used against the general? And what exactly did this person want?

  “And who is it?” Christian wondered, his mind now transfixed on the mystery.

  The person who he couldn’t see in the video? Looking at the properties of the video didn’t add much information, citing the date of the video as being a few days ago. That didn’t mean much when the clip was obviously taken from a longer video and would have been created recently. Was it a former lover of the general’s, spurned by something the man did and seeking revenge? Or was it just blackmail.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  The general’s voice sent an icepick into Christian’s chest, and he froze. His mind flashed back to when he had chided the general for being so quiet earlier, and the man’s comment about taking a brief rest. Closing his eyes, Christian turned to face the office door.

  “Hi, General Winter,” he said.

  David

  Fighting to maintain his self-control, David repeated his question. “What the hell are you doing?”

  David had read about people looking like they wanted to disappear on the spot, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen it happen in real life. Christian physically cringed, leaning back and hunching his shoulders until his neck almost disappeared. Guilt was written in every inch of the wince on his face.

  “I…” Christian began, mouth working silently.

  David’s eyes leaped back to the computer screen, and his mouth became an even thinner line. That damned video, which had haunted him ever since he’d first seen it the other day, was still sitting in the video player. From a few feet away, David could see that the video had played through to the end, and could see the message attached to it from Ethan.

  Christian recovered enough to begin speaking rapidly. “I was going through the emails and purging them. Did mine first, and when I went to go start on yours, I saw there was a message in the trash already. You don’t get rid of stuff, so I opened it up to see what was going on.”

  David cursed himself inwardly. He wasn’t surprised that it had attracted Christian’s attention, the man was incredibly attentive to detail, and was naturally curious. David could remember all too well the number of times he’d found Christian looking around his office, peering at everything as if he needed to absorb every detail. Then there were the times he’d found Christian reading files, albeit not classified ones, just because ‘they were interesting’.

  He had been so thrown off by the entire blackmail attempt, he hadn’t followed through on deleting the email.

  “And you just decided to watch the video?” David asked.

  Christian’s fingers danced nervously on his armrest. “Well, I read the message, saw the attachment, clicked it, and then just…”

  David waited before asking, “Just what?”

  Christian’s face reddened. “Found myself staring. I couldn’t…”

  David narrowed his eyes at that, darting all over Christian’s flushed features. The other man had been staring?

  “Enjoy the show?” David asked curtly.

  “Uh…”

  It had been meant as a smartass comment, but now it was David’s turn to find himself unsure of what he was supposed to say.

  Christian winced. “Uh, you look good?”

  David blinked. “You...were, enjoying it?”

  Christian’s eyes widened, waving his hands frantically. “I wasn’t watching it because I was trying to enjoy myself. I just...wasn’t expecting what I saw. Kind of just, froze up and couldn’t look away.”

  “But…look good?” David asked in disbelief.

  Christian sputtered, hands flopping uselessly. “I have no idea what to say right now, that isn’t going to make things worse.”

  As if it wasn’t bad enough that David was currently being blackmailed by some crazed former lover, now Christian had seen the evidence? What the hell was David supposed to do now? And much to his confusion, some part of him thrilled knowing that Christian had not only seen it but apparently enjoyed it to some degree.

  Christian looked d
own at his hands, fidgeting with his fingers. The pained expression on his face brought a stab of guilt to David’s angry thoughts, and he felt himself deflate. Christian was given a great deal of latitude when it came to doing his job, and it wasn’t the first time he’d accidentally stumbled across something he wasn’t supposed to see. Of course, every instance before this hadn’t been quite as mortifying for either of them.

  David sighed. “Come into my office.”

  Christian winced again but stood up with a nod. David turned and walked into his office, rubbing his forehead as he tried to figure out what he was going to do. He’d spent the better part of the last couple of days trying to figure it out when it came to dealing with his problem. Now there was one more wrinkle to try and smooth out.

  David motioned to one of the two comfortable chairs across from his desk. “Take a seat.”

  Not bothering to see if Christian listened, David made his way to the cabinet at the back of the room. It was filled with several different bottles of various alcohol, all nice and expensive, and all generally meant for when he had special guests. David wasn’t one for drinking when he was working, or at all for the most part, but he thought he could make an exception this time.

  “And to think, I never actually took that nap. I spent most of that hour by myself wondering what I was going to do,” David said as he opened the cabinet.

  “I am sorry,” Christian said quietly.

  “Yes, I know.”

  And he did. Despite his frustration, David knew that Christian would never mean any harm. Despite the professional distance enforced on them by their jobs, David knew Christian well enough to count the man among the few people David could trust. Christian had spent the past year doing not only his job but doing it with a passion and dedication that David had always appreciated and respected. Despite his curious and often times intrusive nature, Christian had never done anything that he knew would somehow violate David’s trust or his secrecy.

  Deciding on a smooth whiskey with a slight bite to it, David pulled out two glasses to go with it. From the small fridge in the room, he pulled out the tiny bucket of ice cubes and dropped a few into each glass. Some believed whiskey should be drunk without ice, claiming the melting water diluted the flavor and ruined it. David thought that was absolute horse shit, and he wasn’t going to drink liquor when it was warm. Plus, he rather thought the melted ice gave it a nice rounded, easier to enjoy flavor that came from the dilution.