“Goddamn you, Lucerne, you’re not even sorry.”
“Well, I cannot believe you are so riddled with jealousy. Vaughan, I said it plain to your face that I would not give up loving women.”
“That woman is in love with you.”
Lucerne considered himself fortunate that Vaughan still faced the window. “Should that matter to us?” he said tersely.
“She matters to you.”
“You matter to me.” Lucerne again clasped his hand around Vaughan’s shoulder. When he was not instantly rejected, he shimmied closer, sliding his arms around Vaughan’s torso, and squeezing him tight. “How I feel about Bella doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
“You can say it, Lucerne, but you cannot force me to believe it.”
“Yet it’s the truth. I swear it. Should I prove it?” He nuzzled the side of Vaughan’s neck, while simultaneously sliding his hands down towards his lover’s loins. Vaughan’s back stiffened immediately, but so too did his cock. With a light but insistent touch, Lucerne traced the line of it. “Shall I fuck you? Would you like that?”
Vaughan’s heart hammered hard enough for Lucerne to feel it.
“Let me be,” he said without conviction.
“Alas, I really don’t think I can do that.”
Lucerne briefly glanced over his shoulder. He’d left the door at the far end of the gallery ajar, but there was no question of him going to close it. If he broke contact with Vaughan even for a second, the other man would slip away. There was little chance of them being come upon anyway. It was a large house, with barely a handful of residents. He’d seen barely a soul all day.
He slipped the first silver button of Vaughan’s falls. “I’m going to fuck you.”
“Don’t you bloody dare.”
Lucerne tore the remaining fastenings free of their holes and wrenched the tails of Vaughan’s shirt free of his breeches. He roughly shoved the latter down. “Oh, I dare. And let’s be plain about it, you want me to do it. You can pretend otherwise all you like, but we both know the truth, though do feel free to swear otherwise if it pleases you to.” He released his own cock, which reared and prodded eagerly between his lover’s downy cheeks.
“Get the hell off me, Lucerne.” The attempted elbow jab came as no surprise. Lucerne used Vaughan’s momentum against him and succeeded in wrestling his arms into the small of his back. It was easy as anything then to tip him over the nearby side-table, and to stretch and lubricate his puckered whorl, with the vial of oil he plucked straight from Vaughan’s coat pocket.
“Remember Italy…il mio amore…Vaughan. Don’t fight so. Let me give you what you want. The whole of me, right where you’ll feel it best.”
The cabinet rocked against the uneven floorboards in time with Lucerne’s thrusts. Bright sparks kindled in his loins, which rapidly beat a pathway of fire to his brain. He’d allowed Vaughan to fuck him thus, but so far hadn’t done the same to him. The sensation of it was heady indeed, a thrill so sharp it drew his balls up tight in a mere matter of strokes.
The heat. The squeeze. He plunged himself deep again and again, marvelling at how not so very long ago the very notion of this act had terrified, even disgusted him. Now… now he could hardly imagine why he’d lived twenty-seven years without doing it as often as physically possible. It was such a sensual act. Not to mention as hot as both sin and the landscape indulging in such a wicked act would condemn his soul to.
Distantly, he was aware of Vaughan cursing him bitterly, but there was no resistance to the slide into his arse. No attempt to end the penetration. So let him protest. It wouldn’t change anything. “You don’t fool me,” he said. “Is it truly even my affection for Bella that has you in such a moider, or just the fact that how you feel leaves you at someone else’s mercy?”
At some future point, he was sure Vaughan would retaliate and make him pay dearly for this, but presently, he didn’t care. He was generating too much selfish pleasure from overpowering him. He spent hard, coming inside his lover’s arse, while savouring every tight clench of his muscles squeezing every drop of bliss from him. It was ecstasy as fine as coming in a willing woman’s cunny.
He opened his eyes in time to witness Vaughan climax with a soul-searing grunt. His cock founting semen over the polished tabletop. He would have liked to hold him. To cradle him close and bask in the peace of togetherness, but Vaughan pushed him away with a snarl.
“You goddamned bastard!” He wrenched up his breeches and stormed off.
Lucerne sagged against the table and watched him go, too wrung out to pursue, his body still awash with the glow of spending. After a moment catching his breath, he turned to the mullioned window seat. Eventually, Vaughan and Bella were going to force him to make a choice, though how he would ever choose one over the other was beyond him. They each offered something the other couldn’t give.
At the sound of approaching footsteps, he hurriedly fastened his breeches. He half-expected to see Vaughan returned, ready to plant a fist in his face, or annihilate him with a kiss, but it was Charles instead, something he ought to have anticipated from the sound of heels. Vaughan moved with the stealth of a pickpocket.
“Charles?”
“Marlinscar. I’ve just seen Pennerley. He barged past me like the devil were about to take a bite out of his arse.”
Lucerne blinked and forced what he hoped was not too artificial a smile. The look Charles bestowed him in return rather disabused him of that notion.
“If you’re not busy…”
He was malingering in a window seat, so could hardly claim so.
