Page 25 of The Moon & His Tides
“Who knew Adam Meyers could be such a bear,” Sebastian mused idly, looking out at the garden instead of at me.
Perversely, I wanted his attention back on me as much as I relished being spared his scrutiny.
“Well, you try being the host of a party full of high-society Brits and tell me what kind of mood you find yourself in.” I sounded as ill-tempered as a child, but I couldn’t help myself.
Ever since Savannah had come home smelling of heat and spice, of Italian man and sex, I’d been on edge.
“If you don’t want me here, I’ll leave,” he offered, as if reading my mind. When I looked at him, faintly struck by his perceptiveness, he shrugged casually. “Sex and intimacy are two very different things. You didn’t just invite me into your marital bed. You invited me into your home. I was raised without two pounds to rub together in the rubbish of Naples. I won’t hold it against you if you’ve reconsidered the invitation.”
It took me a moment to comprehend exactly what he was suggesting. “You think I’m acting like a right arse because I’ve realized I invited a heathen into my civilized house?”
Sebastian looked slightly over his shoulder at me, smoke curling from his mouth over his left ear in a caress I wanted to mimic. “I wouldn’t blame you.”
A short bark of laughter erupted from my chest. It shouldn’t have felt good, but it did. The tension I’d been gathering inside my chest all night loosened, one knot of many untangled. Freed, I sucked in the clean night air and then took a long drag from my cigarette.
“The first memory I have is throwing an absolute fit as a lad because my nanny forced me to wear a cravat to one of my father’s business events. Have you ever worn one? Well, it’s like being strangled by a starched bit of fabric wrapped too tight around your throat. To this day, when I’m too long in polite company, I get that feeling like a vise across my neck.” I angled my head to shoot him an indolent look. “It isn’t the heathen I take umbrage with, you understand? It’s with the lot ofthem.”
I tossed a hand at the house behind me the way one tossed garbage into a can.
Sebastian’s eyes tracked the movement. They were darker than gold in the low light, something like amber, and just as sticky. When he looked back at me, I felt myself get trapped in them and gave up my struggle as easily as a fly.
“Why do you live like this then?” he questioned with quiet sincerity. “You’re a rich, powerful man. Do as you want.”
This time, my laughter hurt as it rattled through my chest like a caged thing struggling to get free. “Once an editor friend of mine suggested I write a memoir. Foolish man. I asked him why I would want to write about the memories that trap me to this day.” I paused, sucked in the acrid smoke of nicotine, and let it travel to my head in a lovely rush. “Do your memories trap you?”
“Memories,” he agreed. “Circumstances.”
“My cage may look different than yours. Gilded, perhaps. But that doesn’t mean I’m free.”
“And you want to be free,” he surmised, eyes bright with intelligence.
At some point, he’d flicked away his cigarette and moved closer to me, where I sat half inclined on the stone table. He loomed over me, hair dark as a night without stars, shoulders wide enough to hold up the world. I itched to trace the breadth of them with my palms. Test the strength of them with my teeth. Mark him up, mark himmine, with punishing lips.
“Freedom is an illusion,” I said because my cynicism was a matter of my very Britishness and upbringing.
“Freedom is a choice,” he countered, bearing down on me now, stepping up so his legs straddled either side of mine stretched out in front of me.
His scent was everywhere, in my nose, on my tongue. It was potent, almost animal, making me want to growl.
“You’re a child for thinking so,” I told him with all my aristocratic, haughty grandeur.
He had the gall to grin down at me. “And you’re an old man so stuck in his ways you don’t see how easy it is to correct them.”
“I am only twenty-eight. What would you have me do?” I asked mildly even though something inside me seethed and boiled.
He was close enough to kiss.
So why wasn’t I kissing him?
Why was I indulging in the mockery of a conversation and not bending him over the table?
I didn’t get to know my lovers this way, in the way of quiet, oddly intimate silence spent smoking out of doors, in the way of invasive questions and raw answers.
I didn’t do this, and I didn’twantto do this now.
My black mood hovered on the horizon, but closer, something else beckoned as warm and enchanting as the sun.
A sun named Sebastian.
