Mated Read online

  Mingo McCloud, his lover, Francois, and their son, Ferric, are in Hartford, Connecticut for their best friends’ wedding. Mingo and Ferric are carjacked on the way to picking up the brides’ wedding cake. Francois, furious that he wasn’t there to protect his family, drops the super-secret case he’s been working on to take Mingo and Ferric for a quick, sun-drenched trip to his birthplace of St. Martin in the Caribbean.

  Unbelievably, Mingo and Ferric encounter the same two men who carjacked them in Hartford…and it soon emerges that they are connected to Francois’ latest security case. Francois is now hell-bent on revenge, whilst Mingo must deal with long-dormant feelings for his ex-lover, Kaolin, who is on vacation in St. Martin. He wants Mingo back and will do anything to win his heart…even to marry him. But there’s another guy hovering, too, hunky FBI agent Sage Brantley, who wants another hot threesome with Mingo and Francois. Who will die? Who will get bedded? Are Mingo and Francois fated to be mated…and were the carjackers’ guns made in Taiwan?

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Mated

  Copyright © 2010 A.J. Llewellyn

  ISBN: 978-1-55487-666-2

  Cover art by Angela Waters

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by eXtasy Books

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  Smashwords Edition

  Mated

  Mingo McCloud 4

  By

  A.J. Llewellyn

  Dedication

  To Teresa and Judie who both suggested the title for this book, on the same day within an hour of one another. Thank you for loving Mingo and Francois xoxo

  Chapter One

  When I was a kid, my mom took me to Yee Hing, the fanciest Chinese restaurant on our side of the island of Oahu. Come to think of it, it was the only Chinese restaurant on the windward side. Some people had protested the historic neighborhood of Hawaii Kai opening a strip mall built right over the remains of ancient, sacred fishponds, but much of the ponds were left intact and for most of the local residents, the thought of fried rice within reach was more tantalizing than a pile of overgrown, long abandoned mangroves.

  The year was 1983 and I was seven years old. For me, it was a treat to have Chinese food on hand. Yee Hing was geared toward Family Sundays and for my family, and many others, these outings meant a straw hat and gloves for my grandma, a new factory-second Hilo Hattie muumuu for my mom and all-I-could-eat Chinese food for me. Best of all, I got to open and eat everybody’s fortune cookie.

  I have never forgotten my first-ever fortune. The little white slip of paper read, You will be happy. What the hell kind of fortune was that for a little kid? I didn’t stay awake nights thinking about happiness. I stayed awake thinking about the Repco boys’ bicycle from Australia that had just been imported to the Hawaiian Islands. They were supposed to be the hottest bicycles ever. My mom said we couldn’t afford one, but I was obsessed. I knew details still seared in my adult brain, such as the Japanese-brand Shimano gearing and Zoom suspension forks. I wanted me a bicycle. That would have made me very happy.

  To this moment, I remember turning the piece of paper over and the little red writing said, Made in Taiwan. I wondered what part of the Chinese fortune cookie had been made in Taiwan. This was my first inkling that life wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. You see, my mom was like a big, giant fortune cookie. She always predicted great happiness for me. She just never mentioned it would be such hard work.

  I’d always been unlucky in love, first losing my heart to Kaolin, an emotional drifter who, come to think of it, had some pretty lousy gearings and suspect suspension forks. I did better falling for my current lover, Francois Aumary, even though on paper he might have appeared a disastrous choice. A recently bisexual, former mercenary, former Marine, Green Beret and now security specialist, he wasn’t made in Taiwan, but his son was made in Florida.

  Yes, after several months of gay domestic splendor, my life partner dropped a thirteen-year old bomb in my lap.

  Ferric has become a big part of my life, our lives, and we live very well together, but at the moment, Ferric and I were in a jam and Francois was nowhere to be seen.

  To backtrack a little, let me just say I never expected to get into trouble in sedate, upscale Connecticut. A little tipsy at my best friend, Leilani’s, wedding, yes. A little jealous that she and her girlfriend, Mele, were getting married, but Francois refused to marry me until it was legal in Hawaii, maybe. Well, yes.

  “Dude…are they pointing guns at us?” Ferric asked. He kept looking from my driver’s side window to his. No mistaking it. Two serious guys with two felonious-looking weapons.

  I’m an accountant. Shit like this isn’t supposed to happen to me.

  Dang. This was just one of a series of stupid thoughts that crossed my mind in my moment of terror. It’s true that your life flashes before your eyes. But why Yee Hing? Why was I thinking about Chinese food when in all likelihood I was about to snuff it?

  And why in the world I chose to remember the damned bicycle I never got when I was about to get blown away in a rental car? It speaks to my utter fear, my obsession with stuff and my belief in Never-Never Land, I suppose.

  I stared at the guy standing by the driver’s side. To his right, I could see a woman peering out at us at the crosswalk where I’d stopped. She hid behind curtain sheers from a respectable redbrick house and I hoped she was calling the police. I couldn’t believe this was happing just because I went to pick up the wedding cake.

  In Connecticut. And it wasn’t even my wedding!

  Click.

  Uh-oh. These guys meant business. I stared at the gun that moved a little closer to me through the open windows. Two white guys with serious menace in their eyes, cocking their weapons. I hoped I wouldn’t pee in my pants and totally embarrass myself. The guns looked real enough to me. And of all the absurd things to flicker across my mind in a moment of true crisis, was I wonder if they were made in Taiwan?

  I blinked. Think, idiot. Act!

  But I waited because so far they hadn’t said anything. I then did something even more stupid. I became my mother. I threw my arm across the front of Ferric’s body as she once had in a traffic collision long before seatbelts became mandatory. She’d thrust her arm in front of me to ward off danger. As if.

  You will be happy.

  Yeah, right.

  “Get out, nice and slow. You got a wallet on you?”

  I nodded.

  “Take it out. Put it on the console.”

  I did as I was told. I grabbed Ferric’s hand, but he was already getting out of the passenger side.

  “Cell phone?” the guy beside me asked.

  “I don’t know where it is…must be in the car.” I don’t know what made me lie except some part of me rose in defiance against being a victim. My teeth chattered. He must have believed me.

  My focus was on Ferric. I cared more about
him than myself and I begged the guy who stood beside him, “Please don’t hurt my son.”

  Ferric walked over to me, around the back of the car, keeping a distance as if he was walking behind a horse that might suddenly kick him. He stood beside me and I took his hand, thankful that he was okay. The two gunmen jumped into our car and took off.

  I pressed 911 on the cell phone in my jacket pocket, drawing it out to my ear.

  Damn! I’m on hold! Who gets put on hold when you call 911?

  You will be happy.

  Fuck!

  I really started to fret then. I wondered how pissed the gunmen would be when they realized my wallet had only my license and a few bucks in it and none of my credit cards. Those were in the billfold in my pants pocket.

  “Geez, Leilani is gonna be sore about the wedding cake,” Ferric said.

  Cool kid.

  I stared at him. Sometimes he surprised me. Scratch that. He constantly surprised me. Here I was having a genuine diaper moment and he was thinking about the wedding cake. I kept forgetting he grew up in the Opa-Locka neighborhood of Miami, which had the dubious distinction of being declared the most violent neighborhood in the US.

  The police pulled up as our rental car was a distant glow of taillights. The officers stared out at us. Their gazes hardened when they saw my African American, dreadlocked son. God help me. Hartford may have been gay-friendly, but it seemed they weren’t above a bit of racial profiling.

  “You’re too late,” I said. “They took the car. That’s them making a left down the end of the second block. I was just calling you.”

  The cops turned, looked, saw the car turn and glanced back at us.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” The officer at the wheel got out of the vehicle as he addressed Ferric.

  “He’s thirteen years old,” I said. “He’s my son.”

  They both stood outside the vehicle now, staring at us, hands on their holstered weapons.

  Holy shit, we could still die!

  The officers looked me up and down. Yeah, I knew I was lily-white and my lavender-hued Aloha shirt was possibly in questionable taste in Connecticut, but heck, we were the victims here. And besides, Ferric and I wore matching shirts. We were part of the bridal party.

  I could tell they didn’t believe Ferric was a teenager. He looked older than his thirteen years owing to his height. He was already five feet, eleven inches, but although he was not yet a man, he was still a kid.

  “Can I see some ID?” the first officer asked.

  “They stole it! We just got car jacked!” My voice rose. “They made me take it out and put it on the console. They stuck a gun in my kid’s face!”

  “Yours, too, Dad.” Ferric’s voice was quiet. For the first time he seemed upset. We were at an impasse until the woman who’d watched us from behind her curtains came out onto the street.

  “Oh, I’m the one who called,” she said from her safe vantage point just beyond her doorway.

  Ferric and I turned to look at her.

  “Sit on the sidewalk,” the first officer said. Ferric and I sat. I was still holding his hand. The officers walked back to the house.

  “Dad is gonna be so pissed,” Ferric said.

  Oh, God. Francois. Yeah. He was gonna kill me. “I deserve it,” I said, close to tears. “I’m so sorry, Ferric.”

  “Not at you, at them.” He squeezed my fingers and lowered his voice. “Did you see the expression on their faces when you told them I’m your son?” He looked gleeful for a moment. We lapsed into silence. I’d gotten Ferric into a dangerous situation. If I were Francois, I’d pack up and leave me and take my kid far, far away. And I’d buy him a Repco boys’ bicycle from Australia, just for his troubles.

  The cops returned.

  “You know somebody called Francois Aumary?” the first one asked.

  “Yes. He’s my partner and Ferric’s dad,” I said.

  “He’s on his way. The owner of this residence verifies your story. Mind telling me what you’re doing out here?”

  Ferric’s fingers squeezed mine again.

  “Picking up a wedding cake.”

  “What happened, exactly?”

  “These two guys came out of nowhere as I stopped at the stop sign to let an old man cross the road. Next thing we knew, they were pointing guns at us.”

  “And who is the owner of the vehicle you were driving?”

  “It’s a rental. We got it at the airport from…” I frowned, trying to think which company we’d rented it from.

  “Hertz,” Ferric supplied.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t suppose you have the rental agreement on you?” the second cop asked.

  “It’s in the glove compartment, along with my Game Boy.” Ferric’s head drooped. We had the bridal gift in the trunk. My laptop, too. I mentioned this to the officers, because my laptop was equipped with Lojack.

  “We’ll get out an APB,” the second officer said and hurried back to his vehicle.

  “I keep wondering why,” I said. “There wasn’t anything special about the car. It was just an ordinary four-door sedan.”

  “Dad,” Ferric said. “My stopwatch is in there.”

  He looked devastated. Ferric had converted a generic stopwatch into a GPS system. Francois and I had been impressed with his ingenuity. He was constantly fiddling with old-fashioned electrical things and making them into dazzling, wonderful new inventions. He’d brought the stopwatch with us because it was his favorite self-made toy. It was also a thing of genius. It really worked.

  The first cop’s cell phone rang. He dislodged it from his belt, checked the readout and took the call, ignoring me.

  “Dad!” Ferric shouted.

  I glanced up and saw Leilani in her mother’s ancient navy blue Buick, Francois in the passenger seat. I felt both overjoyed and anguished to see him. The bleak expression on his face as he got out of the vehicle before Leilani even stopped, warmed my soul. Of the three of us in our little family, he was the only one who pulled off the lavender Aloha shirt with élan. He looked fucking gorgeous. A six foot, four inch slice of serious man heaven. He came right over to us, pulling us both to our feet.

  “Thank God you’re safe,” he said. He kissed our cheeks, kissed my mouth and kept his arms around us. He’d cut all his dreads off a few weeks before, but even without them, it was obvious he was Ferric’s dad. They looked identical.

  “Did they hurt you?” he asked over and over. I knew he was upset. He kept kissing our heads and faces. I watched the way he cradled Ferric’s head in his arm. I let go of him so he could hold his son with both arms.

  “Stay right there, Mingo,” he said, his arm moving back to me.

  “Excuse me,” the cops said as Leilani darted across the road in what looked like a petticoat and fluffy, pink bunny slippers. She had curlers in her hair.

  “Glad you’re okay but where’s my three-hundred dollar wedding cake?”

  Ferric grinned. “Told you.”

  On the whole, I thought Leilani took the news of her abducted butterscotch and lemon, three-tiered wedding cake with lavender fondant quite well. Once she stopped screaming and crying and doing a strange kind of war dance on the sidewalk.

  Francois took the wheel of her mom’s Buick. I sat next to him, Leilani sitting in the backseat next to Ferric, half her curlers falling around her face. She’d seem fine one second, then boo-hoo like a baby the next. Francois had called ahead to the bakery to see if they could give us another cake. We pulled into the parking lot.

  “I can’t face it,” Leilani said, all her wedding makeup running down her face. “I trust you to pick out something. Remember, we’re expecting eighty people.” She started wailing again.

  “You can’t stay out here,” Ferric said. He looked nervous. I knew how he felt. Any sudden moves and I flinched. I’d have nightmares for months about the carjacking.

  “Francois, give me your taser,” she said. He reached into his jacket pocket
and handed it over.

  “I’m a lesbian bride and somebody stole my fucking butterscotch and lemon, three-tiered wedding cake with lavender fondant.” She started sobbing again. “I’m a force to be reckoned with.”

  Her face crumpled with a wave of fresh years. One of her curlers dropped to the floor. She waved the taser around like it was a water pistol.

  We all stared at her. All three of us trooped into the bakery. When I turned to check on her, she was sitting like a demented owl, the weapon clasped between her breasts.

  “That must have been some cake,” Francois muttered. “She’s sore as hell.”

  His cell phone rang as we entered the store. He took the call, barking at poor Ferric who merely wandered off to look at a display of cupcakes.

  “Ferric! Stay where I can see you!”

  The kid took it okay, but I could see he wanted sugar. Me, I had a taste for Chinese.

  I heard Francois muttering into his phone. I heard the words shoot to kill, and I froze.

  The smile froze on my face as I calmly discussed the cake catastrophe with the shop assistant.

  “Your carjacking was on the news. I heard it on the radio. There’s been a rash of attacks on tourists,” she said. “They follow rental cars.”

  It both pissed me off and relaxed me at the same time. We hadn’t been singled out because of some super-secret case Francois was working on–-which he was—we were marked because we were tourists.

  “This is all I have.” She slapped a white sheet cake onto the counter. I felt depressed.

  “It’s awfully plain. She had the lavender cake. The whole wedding is lavender,” I said.

  “Don’t forget the red hibiscus,” she said with a smile. Oh, right. Mele, Leilani’s bride-to-be wore a red hibiscus behind her ear and these would be the flowers of the day.

  “How about some lavender flowers made of icing?” Ferric asked, standing beside me.