Chapter 12
HUNTER
It would be far too easy to fall in love with Lincoln, I realized. With one hand on his back and the other on his chest, his lungs expanding with every breath between my grip and his watery eyes blinking up at me with a desperation I could almost taste.
“What do you need right now?” I asked, sliding my hands up to his face so I could wipe the dampness from his cheeks. “I don’t know you well enough to know yet.”
Lincoln snorted, scrunching his nose. “And you say you don’t know how to do this.”
“I don’t.”
“When you pretend, don’t you feel it here?”
He pressed his hand against the middle of my chest, and I didn’t have any option besides to tell him the truth.
“When I’m with you, I do.”
“What does it feel like?”
I licked my lips, trying to make sense of the way I felt the first night with Lincoln when I’d put him on his knees. He wasn’t the first hookup, the first paying customer, the first man I’d dominated, and yet everything about him had been different. I had been different.
“Feels like the only thing I want to do is put you on your knees and keep you there. I don’t even care about fucking you. I mean, I want that, but…”
“You could put me on my knees,” he murmured.
I glanced at the empty glass on the table, the weary redness of his eyes.
“You’ve been drinking,” I reminded him.
“I’m not drunk,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’m just tired.”
“Then let me take you to bed.”
He groaned, but when I pulled him to his feet, he didn’t argue. When I walked him to the bedroom, turning lights off along the way, he made no protest. And when we reached my bedroom, he made an amused sound in the back of his throat.
“I knew the other room was a guest room,” he said. “There’s no way you fuck strangers in your own bed.”
“I don’t fuck strangers in my apartment,” I corrected, plucking at the hem of his shirt before tugging it over his head and tossing it onto the floor.
Lincoln turned and tilted his head back, tears dry but cheeks still splotchy. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I don’t bring men home.”
“Paying?”
“Ever.” I turned him back around and slid my arms around his waist, undoing the fly of his jeans and shoving them down to the floor.
He stepped out of them and went for his underwear, but I stopped him.
Both of our hands grazed over the warm bulge between his legs, and he pressed back against the thick erection between mine.
“Why me?” he asked quietly.
I didn’t have a real answer, so I settled with, “Why not you?”
The only light in my bedroom was the green glass banker’s lamp on my nightstand.
It barely illuminated the book and the water glass in front of it, and I wondered what Lincoln’s impression of my otherwise dark bedroom was.
The furniture was a combination of mid-century and Victorian, lots of wood and texture, a four-postered bed with an ornate headboard and matching nightstands on either side.
“I’m on PReP,” Lincoln said, and I buried my smile into the crook of his neck.
“So am I.”
He inhaled sharply, breath clicking, and I gave him a gentle push toward the bed.
I wanted him, my body wanted him, but there was no way I was going to fuck him.
We both reached the bed, and he looked from one nightstand to the other, correctly judging which side I preferred and climbing into the other one.
“I have clear test results,” he said.
I tugged the blankets until he lifted himself off the comforter and slipped his feet between the sheets.
“So do I,” I said.
Lincoln gave a little wiggle into the mattress and blinked so slowly I thought he’d fallen asleep. I sat down on the edge of the bed, one leg raised up and the other one hanging off the side. Reaching over, I brushed his hair back from his face, and he practically purred into my hand.
“I’m vers,” he murmured, the words disappearing into a yawn.
I couldn’t answer him in the affirmative to that because while I’d definitely enjoyed both placements before, it had been too many years to count since I’d bottomed.
“What about you?” he asked, when I didn’t reply.
“It’s complicated,” I said.
“It always is.”
He rolled onto his side with a heavy sigh and gathered the blankets in his fists. He looked so small in my bed, almost weak, and I hated it as much as he would have if he could see himself.
“Roll over,” I said, finally committing to getting in bed myself.
Lincoln groaned and turned to face the side of the bed, and I pulled him into the middle, bringing our bodies flush. He pushed back against my erection, hips swirling. “I hope we can uncomplicate it.”
“Go to sleep.”
“Yes, Daddy,” he teased, but the words caught in his throat, and my breath caught in mine, and neither of us moved.
When it was impossible to hold my breath any longer, I let myself kiss the back of his head. “Get some rest, Lincoln. We’ll figure this out in the morning.”
I wasn’t sure if he heard me because his answer was a quiet snore, and I was jealous that sleep had taken him so easily.
The Yes, Daddy had me up for at least another hour, my brain trying desperately to understand the intent and the implications.
He hadn’t even meant it seriously, but he’d asked how it felt in my chest and hearing him call me that definitely made me feel some kind of way.
The whole kink thing wasn’t new to me. Beyond the roles I’d played for money, I’d watched more than my fair share of porn.
Some of it was more fucked up than others, but I knew about dominance and submission, knew how to spank and where.
I’d experimented with bondage and nipple clamps, and my favorite way to play involved drawing out and denying orgasms to the brink of tears.
There was a heady kind of arousal in that sort of power, and it made me hungry for more.
Finally, sometime before sunrise, sleep took me alongside Lincoln, who hadn’t moved an inch since he’d passed out. His body still molded to mine, his fingers still tangled in the sheets. He was…God, he was gorgeous, and he was trusting and hurting and scared, and I wanted him.
Just after eight, Lincoln stretched and yawned, his toes reaching down toward the tops of my feet before he curled back into a ball against my front.
“Do you know about free use?” he asked sleepily.
“Good morning,” I said, “and no.”
“It means you can take without asking.”
I still had my sweatpants on, but it was easy to imagine the way my dick would slide between his ass cheeks and notch against his hole. “Is that something you like?” I asked, eyes still closed.
“In theory. I’ve never had a partner who was into it, considering they’ve all been submissive.”
“We can try it.”
My dick was sticky with an entire night of leaking precum, but I wasn’t going to fuck Lincoln the way he wanted…
the way we both wanted…until we’d set some ground rules.
I’d seen that in porn too, normally at the end when they’d replay the little videos they took at the beginning, talking through all the things I’d already watched them do.
“Now?” Lincoln asked.
“After we talk about it. After we have an agreement.”
He grunted and rolled to face me, staring at my throat instead of my face. He busied himself tracing swirls and lines from one side of my chest to the other, his mouth pulled down into a frown.
“Just like your brother,” he muttered.
My blood ran cold.
“I can live with the fact you’ve slept with my brother, but I would sincerely appreciate if you didn’t bring it up in my bed.
” Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but I pulled away from Lincoln, sitting on the edge of the bed with my feet on the floor and my back to him.
Even though he could certainly hear the jealousy in my voice, I didn’t need him to see it in my face.
“I meant Marshall.”
I stood, bracketing my hands on my hips and staring up at the ceiling. “You told me you and he never—”
“We didn’t,” Lincoln interrupted.
I turned back toward the bed, fingers digging into my waist and my eyes narrowed down at him looking like a mussed-up angel in my sheets. Lincoln’s legs were tangled in the comforter, but he tried to sit up, slide toward me, his hand outstretched.
“I have no designs on your older brother,” he said, “or the younger one, or any ones you don’t know about yet.”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
He flashed me a smile that quickly fell away. “I did mean Marshall but only based off the things Silas has told me.”
Sighing, I scrubbed a hand down my face, not wanting to regret what I was about to ask, but also needing to get the question out there. “What do you mean?”
Lincoln managed to get himself out of bed, blankets discarded behind him. He stood toe to toe with me, and we both ignored the morning wood jutting out from between our legs. A night spent in each other’s arms had clearly the same effect on us both.
“Do you…God, I don’t want to be the one to tell you this.”
“Talk,” I demanded.
Heat flooded Lincoln’s cheeks, and he said, “Marshall is a Dom.”
I would have sworn the floor dropped out from under me with those four simple words. The room fell away and the only thing that remained was me and Lincoln there, still half asleep and all the way horny. That, and the knowledge my brother was apparently into BDSM.
“Did you not know?” Lincoln let out a quiet laugh. “It’s kind of obvious.”
Well, now that he said it, of course it was obvious.
Marshall had always been the natural caretaker of the four of us.
He was commanding without being controlling, confident without being cocky.
And none of us had ever talked about our sex lives together, beyond some good old-fashioned teasing and ribbing, but the pieces of that puzzle still slotted into place.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“Don’t tell him I told you.”
“He doesn’t even know you and I know each other.” I groaned, scratching at the side of my face. “Does Smith know that you and I…?”
Lincoln shook his head, rubbing absently at the back of his neck.