Chapter 15
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Up on my toes, I snatched at Simon’s mouth, and he didn’t stop me. He kissed me back – all lips and careful, guarded teeth and a hint of the red wine on his tongue. The long, sleek lines of his body were addictive. I didn’t want to stop touching him.
He’d clipped his mossy hair soft and close and short at the back, and—
Feedback screeched. I whipped my hand back, but the squeal didn’t stop – Danger! Danger! Infatuation detected!
“Fuck!” My ears rang white hot with sound.
Simon winced, twisting both hearing aids out, and I shrank back – palms up, regretting everything.
“Sorry,” I signed. “My fault.”
“For the love of god.” With gratifying impatience he crammed them into the miniature pocket in the front of his waistcoat. Not even bothering with their compact charging case. “Come here.”
He kissed me again. Thoroughly. Branding me with a sparkly new appreciation for those useless-tiny pockets as he pushed me towards the door of Richard bloody Whittaker’s third living room. I should start a society expounding their virtues. Definitely on the to do list. When I got a minute.
Oh, holy French kiss Batman.
He tongued into my mouth like he planned on burning through all the oxygen in the room. Out in the hall, we collided with the edge of a half-moon table and the gilded mirror sitting on it clattered.
Who cared?
I kissed him back. Lips. Teeth. Hands all over. Oh Christ.
Tonight. Just tonight. I was taking everything I could get.
Simon pressed in between my thighs and I groped him closer. Under my bum the table creaked on its spindly little legs with full-on disapproval. Behind me, the probably-Ming vase teetered.
Ugly things did not belong here. The house knew I shouldn’t have my troll hands anywhere near him. Maybe this was Simon getting back at Richard. Or making a point like he thought he needed to boost my ego. I didn’t care. I’d take pretend.
The vase shuddered.
He could be addicted to spontaneous and mildly problematically-timed sex in country manor houses for all I cared.
Was that a kink? It sounded like a kink. A career-threatening, debilitating one. Poor guy needed therapy, not me jumping on the... console table? Or him.
And, oh.
Ducking down, his tongue did something magic against the pulse point on my neck and I flailed against him.
“God, you’re good at this.”
“What?”
He didn’t hear me.
The whole reason we were here was the screeching whine of his hearing aids, but with Richard, he hadn’t taken them out after they’d gone haywire. He can’t have trusted him enough.
“Ben, stop talking.”
Excellent plan. I thumbs-upped. Simon shook his head on a very pointed eye roll.
“Upstairs. Come on.”
I scrabble-dove off the table top, moving with him.
All left feet and too many limbs, we scuffed us up the steps of the bone-shatteringly hard, fairytale staircase, kissing and kissing and kissing.
My lips tingled at the pressure, bruising in real time.
I didn’t care. It felt good. This was bloody wonderful.
His fingers buried in my glutes and I tensed, like a vain idiot, to give him something to cling onto.
One wrong move and I’d tumble down the cold marble like that gargoyle falling off the roof. I needed him naked. My gorilla fingers wouldn’t fiddle through the domed buttons of his waistcoat fast enough.
When I looked up, he was smiling, perpetually amused by me.
“Good job you don’t have a bra strap to deal with, isn’t it?”
I risked a backstep to sign to him.
“I’m a lot worse with bra straps, actually.” So there. Suck on my bisexual incompetence.
Simon snorted a laugh – grumbly and thick at the back of his throat – and ten-thousand carpet moths crawled out of all the dark places they’d been hiding and took flight in my guts.
“How about you do you, and I’ll do me?”
Oh, sweet torture. He had a solution for everything, didn’t he?
Long slim fingers slipped his waistcoat open, button by button like taking his clothes off all slow and sexy was no big deal. It parachuted to the floor in a dramatic billow, and I watched him start in on his shirt, eyes locked to mine.
The little triangle of skin at his collar opened out broader as his hands worked down. My tongue gummed to the roof of my mouth. My fists balled so tight my blunt nails bit into my palms and my knuckles stung. Screw turn taking. I wanted to touch. Needed to, before he changed his mind.
“Let me help?” I unballed my fist on my other palm, reaching for permission with my fingers to my face, and Simon tracked my signs, nodding.
A cufflink plink-plunked off his shirt as I tugged at it, bouncing down the steps, disappearing into the cavernous hallway like a coin tossed into a well that did not grant wishes. The universe had to be waiting to Humpty Dumpty me right to the bottom to balance out the cosmic order of things.
Oh fuck.
Nothing flashy about Simon under his clothes. He didn’t spend hours on end on the weights at the gym, chasing definition. He didn’t have to, did he? Even the motion of his smallest finger commanded confidence. Real people did not get to look as good as he did.
I drank him up in hungry sweeps. Every millisecond date-stamped in my head. Black-boxed. Locked in. His chest. The curl of hair around his nipples. The warm smoothness of his arms. His slim, strong fingers on the silk of his tie, pulling the knot through.
When we were filming, I hadn’t looked at him properly. Health and Safety. It would have been too risky up close. But now I didn’t have to hold back.
Improbably, his eyes lit up when I tugged my t-shirt off over my head. He dipped his eyes, all smug and satisfied like he thought he’d won a prize.
That tracked. Apart from the danger of crisping up like an air-fried beetroot come the first rays of summer sun, the only thing me and Richard had in common were the swans and the six pack.
People liked muscles. Maybe Simon had a thing about them.
The look on his face in that moment alone made the gym subs worth it.
I mouthed at his collar bone, and he breathed out this murmur of a groan, lighting me up.
It sounded so real. Then I was shoving my jeans and boxers down with embarrassing haste.
Eyes and breath and hands everywhere, rough-dry and warm, on me like he had to touch me the way I had to touch him.
I wanted it to be real. I wanted it all to be because of me.
But it wasn’t, and I had to stop thinking.
Somehow we reached the top, littering clothing all the way up.
Naked. Both of us. Skin hot and giddy. He pulled me hard against him, smile broad and bright as full evidence of my obsession with him rammed into the flat of his stomach and I groaned at the skin on skin, already leaking against him.
“Bloody hell, you’re going to end me.” Simon stilled, breathless, his body heaving with the effort it must have taken him to stop. “Not right here.”
“Why the fuck not?” I’d have dropped to my knees on the landing, but Simon seized my hand, dragging us down a corridor, rattling every door knob. The second one twisted open and we stumbled in on an obnoxiously floral room, all wallpaper and chintz.
“This is better, is it?” I signed.
“Don’t be a wanker, Ben.”
He had a point. There was a bed. My shins were up against it.
The mattress creaked as I tumbled down. And Simon knelt over me, all intense and hot and laser-focused, with his cock bobbing in my eyeline – eager and ready, and yes bloody please.
Hungry for him, I licked my lips, and Simon snorted a laugh, pushing me back against the mattress.
“Not yet.”
Oh, fuck. He had plans.
Simon circled the root of my cock like it belonged to him, fisting smooth hard strokes, leaving me gasping. Chin tilted and lips parted, he scanned my face, reading my every reaction. I could breathe in his out breaths, drown in this grip, and my life would be fulfilled.
Pushing in against his mouth, I groaned into the wet heat of his tongue, grinding harder into the tunnel of his hand.
His thumb brushed the pulsing tip of my dick, and I nearly whimpered.
Language – all of it – dissolved out of the world.
The lack of it wrapped us up, tangling us together in the whispered thrum of the universe.
I fumbled for him. The heat of his cock lit up my palm like I’d never touched anyone else in my life. He fitted in my hand like it made molecular sense.
Breathless, embarrassingly desperate, I didn’t need words to know how much trouble I was in. Christ. This was just a handjob.
Simon’s appreciative groan warmed the air between us.
Sparks raced the length of my arm as we jacked each other off like horny teenagers.
Except, he kept slowing down, easing off, right when I wanted to race, and what if I messed this up?
I needed him to come. Before he changed his mind. Before I started overthinking, and—
Simon caught my jaw with sharp fingers. My neck twinged as he tilted my head towards him, eyes on mine. Time stood still. I wanted to live in every beat of his body. I hadn’t ever meant to look away.
“Stay with me,” Simon commanded.
And there I was, back with him. In alignment I hadn’t realised I’d drifted out of, held in the uncompromising warmth of his eyes as he worked me over, making me writhe.
One corner of Simon’s kiss–bruised mouth perked. He squeezed harder, testing the play of my cock, sheer wickedness in his eye and I buckled at the overload of pressure as he bent me into a solid curve.
This. All of this was everything. I didn’t need his cock in my mouth now.
Wetting his lips, he nodded, fisting me with solid purpose, and I matched him stroke for steady stroke.
When I let myself look – really look – I knew how to read him just like he knew how to read me.
His pleasure-heavy eyelids dipped low with every blink and he pitched into my rough-smooth hand over and over again.
I curved under him, hips rolling into every unforgiving squeeze.
He didn’t let us hurry. He slowed us down, relentlessly, until my breathing met his consciously controlled in and out, and one more touch would nudge me over and unspool me into forever.
The bedsprings whispered, and his breathing curled into my ear making my skin prickle, electric with pleasure.
His long neck arched gloriously, and the depths of his eyes warmed to rich chestnut right before he came into my fist.
And I let go. Shooting into his strong fingers as I worked his shrinking cock sticky and slick and he shivered and groaned, and the whole damn world quaked.
Around us, the stillness of the empty house crowded in as the last of the sunset lit the wallpaper pink and orange and grey. I kissed him again in the half light as the shadows overtook the room and the night wrapped us up, and it felt like almost getting everything I ever wanted.