Page 1 of The Stargazers of Copper County
CHAPTER ONE
BENNETT
I could admitthe humiliating truth.
Well, I could admit it to myself, at least.Silently. And with caveats.
The only thing still keeping me in the tiny town of Copper County, New York, this summer was the chance to ogle my very young and very…well-formed… yard man every Friday afternoon.
Caveat one: I went to some lengths to make the situation less… well, pervy. I made it a point not to actually speak to the guy and avoided him in real life, so it wasn’t like I actuallyknewhim. I mean, yes, you could argue that I lived in the world’s smallest town, next door to perhaps the second-smallest, and that everyone in both towns knew everyone else, but I reasoned that knowing him wasn’t the same asknowinghim. You know?
Also, I kept my pervy watching to the upstairs windows while partially hidden behind the edges of curtains.
Like a fucking gentleman.
Caveat two: I owned my own company, and it wasn’tsostrange that I’d want to continue working from my lake house in the summer instead of moving back to the city, even if I didn’t have my own personal appointment with pervitude at the endof every work week. Remote work was in demand for a reason, right? It made people happier and more productive when they could labor in a beautiful, comfortable setting. And with the summer sunshine glinting off Copper Lake right outside my window and a pool in the backyard just ready for me to take a refreshing dip, I couldn’t get more beauty or more comfort than I did right here.
Caveat three: my niece Vega had only left to spend the summer in Lisbon with her mom a few days ago, so it was reasonable that I needed a vacation after being a temporary stand-in parent for nine months. Before I bought it, this lake house in Copper County had originally been my parents’ vacation home and my grandparents’ before that, so you might say vacationing in Copper County was in my blood. A family tradition. One that transcended my newfound voyeuristic hobby.
And caveat four, which was really the most important and inarguable caveat: summer wasn’t going to last forever. There were a finite number of lawn-mowing days. And for any human attracted to the male physique—which I was—to move back to their apartment in the city and miss a single opportunity to bear witness to nature’s greatest triumph would be wasteful.
Theo Rosswasthat triumph.
And I was not a wasteful man.
Theo was tall and lean. Muscular. Though it was only June, he was already sporting a summer tan, which made his blue eyes seem somehow brighter. The messy brown mop on his head seemed to go perfectly with his well-worn ball cap, flicking carelessly out from under the brim whether the cap was on forward or backward.
The man had no idea what he did to me. None.
When he arched, and stretched, and pulled his T-shirt up to mop his sweaty brow, I whimpered in my silent house. Whenhe bent over to tie his shoes like he was presenting his ass for approval, I bit my fist. When he’d accidentally doused himself with water from the hose one time, making his shirt translucent and his shorts cling to him in the best possible way, I’d spilled iced tea down the front of me, ruining a perfectly good shirt.
And then there was his newest trick. The one that had begun two weeks ago when my car was in the shop. He must have thought I was away from home because after he’d finished mowing, he’d kicked off his shoes, stripped off his shirt, shucked off his shorts, and cannonballed into my swimming pool with nothing but his boxer briefs and awhoop.
I’d stared open-mouthed—literally, jaw dropped and mouth breathing—as he’d flown through the air, the afternoon sun turning his skin golden. The water splashing up had sparkled like a handful of coins tossed by an indulgent royal. He’d done that hair-flipping thing guys do—well, hot ones, at least—when they come out of the water, and my cock had suddenly remembered all the boys I’d lusted after at summer camp.
And maybe, I’d thought at the time,maybethat was all this was. Residual teen angst. Unsown oats from a time when I’d been too scared to embrace my true desires.
But then he’d done it again the following Friday afternoon, and my cock had tried peeking over the windowsill to get in on the action.
This was no teen angst. I was thirty-seven years old, for fuck’s sake. And Theo, despite being younger than I was by too many years, was definitely a grown man.
What I had wasadultangst, pure and simple. Lust. Desire. Throat-clogging need.
Was it due to a dry spell? Potentially. I hadn’t even considered looking for a hookup after getting the call from my sister to take care of Vega and deciding almost immediately that it would be better for her to finish out her last two years ofhigh school in a close-knit community rather than move her to my place in Manhattan. That meant it had been more than half ayearsince getting any kind of naked attention from another man.
But I suspected it was at least a little bit due to the tempting morsel currently shaking his ass to whatever music was streaming through his earbuds as he used long-handled loppers to clip a few scraggly branches off the junipers at the edge of my property.
I’d already banged my shin on the wooden crate Vega kept her schoolbooks in at the end of her bed, and now I was shamelessly hanging sideways from one of the pencil posts on her bed to keep from knocking everything off her bedside table.
This was the only window that provided a view of the property line where Theo was working. And he obviously needed… supervision… while handling such a dangerous tool. What if the loppers slipped and cut him? If no one was watching, who would be around to rush him to the nearest…
My thoughts scattered like cherry blossoms as Theo reached high enough to cause his shirt to ride up. The elastic band of his shorts, coupled with the one from his underwear, had inched lower as he’d worked, and now there was a scant view of…
A cleft.
I squinted my eyes at the shadow.
Yes. A definite clefty shadow. And just above it were two perfectly placed lower-back dimples.
