Page 55 of The Moon & His Tides
So this was my first attempt at wooing someone––someones––and I was uncharacteristically nervous. This is why I slipped into my old, confident persona like an old, beloved coat as soon as the Meyerses stepped into my domain. Because it may have been their house, but it was my stage today, and I planned to own it.
“Buona sera, le mie bellezze,” I greeted them with a wide grin, placing the spoon in the marble rest so I could pour the decanted wine into two goblet glasses.
They both stood arrested in the doorway as I walked toward them. I even had to wrap Savannah’s hand around the stem of the glass before she took it.
I pressed a kiss to both of her silken cheeks and then took the liberty to steal one from her mouth. Only then did she soften, leaning forward to press her breasts into my chest. When I pulled away, her eyes were closed and her mouth was a softly unfurled rosebud.
I smiled at her, not the showboating grin I wielded so often, but a true one just for her.
And him.
I turned to give Adam his glass. He accepted it with a wariness that made my gut ache. My kindness had him on edge, waiting for something the way a beaten dog receiving gentle attention doesn’t believe he won’t be struck for taken liberties.
What had happened to him to make him so afraid of his own desires?
I tried to remember what I’d read of his history, about the lord and lady parents who lost their ancestral estate but still lived in luxury because of the success of their son somewhere in the Cornish countryside. I’d always assumed Britain was more liberal and accepting than my native Italy, but I wondered if I was terribly wrong and Adam had been castigated for his sexuality.
I shook off the thought and gave him his own cheek kisses. When I moved in to press my mouth to his, he held himself still as though he couldn’t trust himself or me.
I took it as a dare, whether it was meant to be or not, that I could make him break his control.
My hand slid around the back of his neck, fingers digging into the short hairs at his nape as I changed my angle and sealed my mouth over his. My tongue slid between his lips without asking, plundering his warm mouth as though I had the right. A choked-off groan was my only response before I broke contact and stepped back.
“Welcome home,” I greeted them both. “Sit down at the island and enjoy the wine while I finish things off. It shouldn’t take long. I know you’re both probably famished.”
They both blinked at me, but Savannah was the one to move first. She was used to being catered to, myduchessa, so it was easy for her to take this in stride. I watched as she glided to a barstool and daintily perched on the edge, her wineglass dangling elegantly from her fingers.
“What are you making us, Sebastian?” she asked as though she always came home to an Italian in her kitchen.
I grinned. “Spaghetti alla puttanesca.”
“Well, that sounds exotic,” she demurred before lightly adding, “Adam, come sit with me.”
He moved a little stiffly to the barstool beside her, but sat down and looked at his wife, avoiding the sight of me moving about his kitchen so familiarly.
I wondered if I’d miscalculated.
Oscar’s words rang in my inner ear,Adam’s internalized homophobia.
“I thought it was fitting for you lot,” I teased Savvy as I stirred the fragrantsugoand then went to the fridge to grab the hand-rolled pasta I’d made earlier that afternoon. “It’s pasta in the style of a whore.”
I made sure to watch them both as I delivered my line and was rewarded with a shocked bark of laughter from Adam and a little grin from Savvy. My heart warmed watching them, seeing Adam’s shoulders soften just a touch and Savannah settle more comfortably in the stool, kicking off her high heels.
“Very fitting,” Adam allowed with a rakish look. “I might have to reward you in that style later tonight.”
“I wish you would,” I agreed, turning slightly as though I wasn’t watching him while I dropped the pasta into the gently boiling water to cook. “In fact, I know we haven’t really discussed it. But I was hoping we could take things a little further tonight.”
Instantly, the newly relaxed atmosphere in the room stretched taut.
“Oh?” he asked mildly.
“What did you have in mind, Seb?” Savannah asked, only a trace amount of eagerness in her tone.
We’d fallen into a routine of fucking Savannah together, lavishing her again and again as both our queen and our pleasure slave, a contrary union that shouldn’t have been able to exist but somehow flourished between us. We used our hands and lips on her, fucked her mouth and her cunt, but we hadn’t done anything where Adam and I were particularly intimateourselves. Even fucking Savannah together, one of us in both her sweet holes, stretching her wide and filling her. Adam talked about it when he spoke his delicious filth to us both in bed, but for whatever reason, we hadn’t crossed that boundary.
I wanted to desperately, not just because I knew Savannah would love it, come apart at her seams around the full breach of us inside her, but because I wanted to feel Adam.
He had promised to introduce me to intimacy with a man, and even though my attraction to him had startled me at first, I was more than willing to delve further. If I was being honest, I was just as wildly attracted to him as I was to Savannah, and I grew increasingly dissatisfied with our lack of involvement.
