Chapter Seventeen #3
Sterling’s breath steadied. His hands loosened on Mitch’s shirt. Not letting go. Adjusting. Finding a grip that was firm without being desperate, and the distinction was measurable. Quantifiable. The kind of progress that lived in increments rather than declarations.
Our clothes came off in increments, first Sterling’s, then mine, then Mitch’s.
Once we were all naked, I pressed my forehead against the back of his neck.
Felt the warmth of him, the solid reality of Sterling Callahan sitting between two men who loved him, and the moment—quiet, intimate, entirely its own thing—was something I filed under a category that had no name because a name for this were insufficient.
We had arrived. However messily, however reluctantly on Sterling’s part, we had arrived at this moment together, and the arriving was the whole point.
Mitch’s hand found mine over Sterling’s shoulder. His fingers curled around my wrist, warm and certain, and he squeezed once. Firm. Wordless. Mitch Pruitt communicating when words were unnecessary and feeling was everything.
I squeezed back.
Sterling’s breath mingled with Mitch’s across the narrow space between them.
Warm. Coffee-scented still, though it had been hours since breakfast, and the intimacy of sharing breath with someone—the most basic, involuntary exchange—felt like a surrender Sterling hadn’t planned on making and was making anyway.
Worth every second of the wait. Worth every almost-smile, every guarded glance, every time Sterling had stood in a doorway considering whether to cross the threshold and had, against considerable odds, crossed it.
The lamps cast dancing shadows across the ceiling as Mitch’s fingers traced the longest scar on Sterling’s ribs—that thin white line that ran from sternum to hip, a story Sterling would never tell and Mitch had decided deserved attention anyway.
I watched Mitch’s hand move, deliberate and warm, and then I bent and pressed my mouth to Sterling’s collarbone, following the curve of it with my tongue, feeling the heat of his skin and the slight salt of sweat and the particular taste that was just Sterling, unmistakable and mine.
Sterling’s breath hitched. Short. Involuntary.
His chest rose under my lips, broad and slick with muscle, and I mapped him the way I mapped everything that mattered—thorough, patient, exact—each scar, each tattoo, each place where his body had been marked by a life he wouldn’t discuss but carried in his skin anyway.
“You two planned this,” Sterling murmured as he was rolled to his hands and knees.
His voice was rough. Wrecked already, and we’d barely started, and the fact that Sterling—the most controlled man I’d ever met—sounded wrecked from nothing more than my mouth on his collarbone and Mitch’s hand on his scar did something complicated to my chest that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with pride.
Mitch brushed a kiss along Sterling’s jaw. “We’re spontaneous romantics.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It’s absolutely a thing. Spontaneous romance is my middle name.”
“Your middle name is James.”
“James is a very romantic name.”
I laughed against Sterling’s skin. The sound vibrated through his chest and into mine, and Sterling’s hand found the back of my neck—warm, callused, fingers threading into my hair with a grip that was firm without being tight—and he held me there while Mitch kept talking, because he could talk through anything, including sex, which was both impressive and mildly irritating.
I pressed my palm flat against Sterling’s sternum. Felt his heart hammering under my hand, fast and hard, and the rhythm of it—Sterling Callahan’s heart, beating against my palm—was something I filed under its own category: Precious. Quantifiable. Increasingly Frequent.
Sterling arched when Mitch’s hand glided down his spine.
One smooth stroke from the base of his neck to the small of his back, fingers spreading, palm flat against muscle, and the sound Sterling made—low, rough, punched out of him against his will—bounced off the low ceiling and landed somewhere behind my sternum.
Mitch’s hand kept going. Down to the nightstand. The drawer slid open. The cap popped—that distinctive sound, sharp in the quiet—and then his fingers were slick, warm, and Sterling’s breath caught again, shorter this time, tighter, and his hips shifted against the sheets without his permission.
Two fingers. Slow. Careful. Easing into the tension beneath Sterling’s skin with the same patience Mitch brought to everything that mattered, and I felt Sterling’s whole body clench—muscle tightening, breath stopping, the rigidity of a man who was being handled exactly the way he needed and wasn’t prepared for how much he needed it.
My arms tightened around him. One hand on his chest, feeling his heart, the other spanning the small of his back, and I held him while Mitch worked him open—thorough, unhurried, each movement precise—and when Sterling exhaled, the sound rippled through the dark like something fundamental giving way.
“Good,” Mitch murmured. The word landed everywhere at once. Quiet. Certain. Directed at Sterling with a warmth that cut through every defense Sterling had built.
Sterling didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. His jaw was set, his eyes closed, his breath coming in measured pulls that said he was holding himself together by a margin that was getting thinner by the second.
Mitch slicked himself. I heard it—the soft sound of his hand, the shift of his weight on the mattress—and then he was behind Sterling, lining up, one hand braced on Sterling’s hip, and the coordination of it—Mitch pushing in slow, Sterling driving back to meet him, the two of them finding a rhythm that shouldn’t have worked and did—short-circuited something in my nervous system that I wasn’t going to examine while lying in a bed with two men moving against each other.
Sterling reached for me. His hand found my hip, fingers digging in, and he pulled me underneath him with a strength that shouldn’t have surprised me, but did.
His weight settled over me—warm, solid, muscle and heat—and his mouth found mine, hot and demanding, and the kiss was thorough and urgent and completely without apology.