Page 29 of The Moon & His Tides
An orgasm was supposed to be a release, not an undoing, so why did I feel so completely exposed?
My hands were almost too tense to do up my ruined suit pants, and I had to button my blazer to hide the stain of my ignoble orgasm.
Whatever moisture remained in my mouth was lost to the sight of Sebastian untucking his white shirt to use the tails as a towel for his cum-soaked hand. The bottom row of his abs stood in stark relief beneath his olive skin and the thick trail of black hair arrowing down into his groin where his erection strained against the zipper of his suit pants.
“Not bad for your first time,” I congratulated churlishly.
Fuck, I was being a right prick, but I couldn’t help it.
Those perceptive eyes were steady on me as I shoved my hands in my pockets and began to walk away with forced casualness.
“Practice makes perfect,” he said with a modest shrug before rooting his clean hand through all that thick black hair. It curled artlessly over his forehead, and I knew why Savannah liked him. I knew why Bobbi and Miranda had puffed up under his attention.
He was a star, and it had nothing to do with his celebrity or lack thereof.
It was because a man like Sebastian gave off so much light and energy, he was magnetic. Combined with his invasive gaze and curious mind, it made him a dangerous creature.
One who would eat me alive if I wasn’t careful.
“I prefer to play with my wife present,” I lied coolly. “But this was… nice. Enjoy the rest of your evening. Try not to let Miranda corner you in the kitchen. She’s been known to climb unsuspecting men like a jungle gym.”
Shadows coated Sebastian like a velvet cloak he wore too well. He stared after me implacably as I raised my chin infarewell and finally turned on my heel to walk around the side of the house to an unused entrance. As I took the stairs to the primary bedroom to change clothes, I resolved to make sure Sebastian Lombardi and I were not caught alone again.
8
SEBASTIAN
My cock was a weaponized thing with a hair trigger that threatened to go off at the barest hint of movement. I held still for long moments after Adam fled from me, drinking in the cool air, the dark night, and the heady sensation that little old me had frightened such a legend.
In truth, he had frightened me too.
Simply because holding his heavy cock in my hand had felt as right as sitting Savannah’s pretty pussy on my dick in that town car.
I was a romantic man, an Italian and a writer, so probably more romantic than most. Therefore, I believed in things like fate and kismet, in energies colliding and quantum entanglement.
It was too soon to say I felt those things with these two carefully cultivated people with pretty veneers housing seriously fucked-up demons, but something of it was there. A kind of magic in the touch of flesh to flesh, the sense that I’d spoken to Adam like this before, known him and her in an elemental waythat spoke of previous lives or two halves of a whole meeting after a long separation.
I stared down at the hand that had held Adam and had played with Savannah. Such a plain hand, wide palmed and ridged with calluses, long fingers with strong, blunt nails. A workingman’s hand, a peasant’s touch on such precious skin.
The contrast made me feel both powerful and strangely vulnerable.
Could a man like me be allowed to love and keep two people like them?
What happened in the fairy tale when the pauper fell in love with both the prince and the princess?
“I wouldn’t expect much from my husband.”
Savannah’s voice drifted like the scent of English roses through the garden, and a moment later, she appeared through the bushes on the flagstone tiles. She was dressed in white, a color I was gathering was her signature. It was a high-necked dress with overlong, tapered sleeves constructed of a lace so fragile looking I wondered if it would rend under one touch from my strong fingers. Her short, curled blonde hair made a corona of light around her beautiful face, backlit by the house lights spilling into the yard.
She was exquisite, of course.
I felt the primal urge surge through me the way it had when I’d gazed at all of Adam’s unrumpled perfection to muss her up. To put my filthy mark on her and remind her we were both just humans in different packaging.
“I don’t expect anything,” I responded honestly.
My shoulder brushed the swell of an evergreen bush at my side, releasing the pungent piney fragrance. I plucked a little branch of soft pines and twirled it between my fingers as I approached her.
“I’ve been married to him for five years,” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken. Her eyes tracked the movement of the stem around and around in my hand warily, as though the delicate needles were lethal. “He’s the kind of man who is like an iceberg. The ten percent he shows on the surface is dynamic enough to make people think that’s everything that he is. But beneath the water, he is as complicated as they come, and he doesnotenjoy being known.”
