Page 27 of The Moon & His Tides
Amid the heat and ecstasy of our embrace, sank deep in the desire I felt boiling through every atom of my blood, I felt peace.
A clang from the kitchen had us both jumping apart like schoolboys caught looking at titty mags. Sebastian laughedsoftly, touching two long, strong fingers with furred knuckles to his swollen mouth. He looked at me with wonder and a kind of keen-edged intensity as though he wanted to take me apart and discover what made me tick.
I took an instinctive step back.
“I’ve never kissed a man,” he mused, then laughed again. “What a strange thing.”
“To kiss a man?” I croaked, voice ravaged with desire.
“To like it.”
I closed my eyes as he offered those words so simply. How could he be so nonchalant in the face of his rapidly shifting sexuality?
I still remembered the acute terror that had stabbed me through the heart when I’d had my first kiss with a boy in the back of the rectory at my estate. He’d tasted like communion paper, and his lips were as thin and dry as Bible parchment.
I’d thought I would die the moment our lips met, and when I survived, I felt such staggering guilt that I thought it was only a matter of time before lightning struck me down.
Not because I was religious.
I’d never given a damn about it.
But because I’d been born the son of a marquis, and no matter how quickly the rest of the world marched on into modernity, the peerage of England still had decades to go.
“Light in the loafers,” my father would say about Cousin Ernest. “A pansy little fag.”
“Hey,” Sebastian’s voice cut through memories and anchored me in the present. He was holding my forearm, his hand big enough to grasp the muscled width of it. “Was I that bad?”
A joke.
Bloody hell, hejokes.
“You seem very unperturbed about kissing your first bloke,” I said, and somehow, the words were accusing, which was preposterous because I liked kissing them too.
Something careful moved over his features, and his eyes pierced mine like golden pins. “You have a good mouth, and happily for me, you know how to use it.”
“No gay meltdown,” I prodded, feeling like I was coming out of my skin.
His head cocked slightly to the side, and a piece of inky hair curved over his head like a perfect comma. “I’d hate to steal your show.”
“If you’re so comfortable, why don’t you do something about this?” I dared, crudely cupping the painful erection caught beneath my trousers.
Sebastian’s brow spasmed as he looked down at me, then back into my scowling face. “You want to use me?”
I opened my mouth to say something, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t like the way he said those words, so coldly, or the way calculation entered his previously warm expression.
But he was already stepping closer, pushing my sternum with the heel of his palm until I once again sat on the edge of the table. Without waiting for permission, he straddled my legs, clamping them tightly together so I felt trapped by his powerful thighs and the large body curled over mine. Panic singed the edges of my dark mood, and regret began to seep through.
“Sebastian––”
“Stai zitto,” he said and I knew enough Italian to heed his order to shut up.
His fingers were large, almost clumsy on the clasp of my belt. The sound of metal teeth unlocking was a loud rasp in the quiet night, but not as loud as my gasp when he tucked his tongue between his teeth and courageously reached into the placket of my pants to pull my cock into his hold.
“I wondered how heavy you would feel,” he admitted, tongue sweeping over his full bottom lip as he stared at his hand uncovering my shaft through my boxers. “Like tempered steel.”
Fuck.
How could he be so assured? I was the seasoned Dominant here, the one in control, the one with real goddamn experience.
