“Do you want to write downHot Lips?” I joked and side-eyed Keeg, watching him trying to stifle that perfect smile of his. The way he fought it made me think of how he’d hidden that sexy-ass part of himself with the panties. It wasn’t right. He should have flaunted those aspects of himself with pride—like he could flaunt his skills with a dick.
“To start, what we’ll be doing is working our way through a series of questions and answers,” Bryan went on, “that are likely what you’ll have to deal with in your first interview together. This will serve as a getting-to-know-you experience, considering the circumstances. And it will help us establish what you may need to find new verbiage for, which I will offer suggestions for as well.”
“Sounds cool,” Keegan replied, nodding.
“Oh, you Americans have such a way with words,” Bryan said with an annoyed smirk, as though already irritated with Keegan. “And you need to decide if you will be going on major international interviews wearing baseball caps, so if you don’t plan to, I suggest you go ahead and remove it.”
Keegan was already reaching for it when I said, “The cap stays,” through my teeth, in about as serious a tone as I imagined Bryan had ever heard me use. “Does thatsound cool, Bryan?” I asked, deliberately using the words he’d been so snippy about with Keegan.
“Noted and decreed, Your Highness,” Bryan said, smiling and raising his hands in apparent surrender. As much of a dick as he could be on occasion, he knew when he’d stepped in it.
With my ground rule of backing-the-hell-off-Keegan clear, Bryan began the interview, with Frederick taking notes and offering occasional comments throughout. It was the basics, much of which I’d already learned through my discussions with Keegan.
No curveballs or surprises until Bryan said, “Both of you have experienced the serious loss of a parent, Keegan being not only adopted, but losing his adoptive father, and Owen his parents, Queen Tara and King Gregory. Is this something that helped you bond initially?”
I could feel my cheeks turning white.
I checked Keegan’s response, instinctively drawing him closer.
“I-I…” he stammered.
It was a weighty question, one Bryan had delivered with total disregard for either of our feelings on the matter. Normally, I appreciated his candidness in Q&As like this, but with another person—namely Keegan—involved, I found myself outraged. Of course, I could tell by Bryan’s expression he was just awaiting a response, not picking up on Keeg’s clear discomfort.
“We’ll skip that one for now,” I spit out, trying to keep from making a scene, but it was clear by the way Bryan’s head popped up from looking at his tablet that he was surprised by the way I said it. He glanced between us, nodding, before moving along to other questions.
I felt Keegan trembling in my hold, and in some ways, it helped me ignore my own discomfort with the question.
15
Keegan
I’d been nervous about seeing Owen again after we’d messed around.
No messing around, except for emergencies, in which case we could definitely share blowjobs and handjobs…and maybe kisses.
Whatever the hell it took to get my mouth around O’s cock was worth it, because fuck that had tasted so good. And then when he’d blown in my mouth, it was so thick and there was so much that I had to get a good gulp to get it all down.
Despite how amazing the experience was, I feared how Owen would feel about what we’d done.
Did he have doubts? Regrets?
I was glad when the interview prep finally ended and Frederick and Bryan left Owen and me alone to chat.
“Are you okay?” he asked, offering me a bottle of water before sitting back on the sofa beside me, much closer than we’d initially sat before Bryan had encouraged us to scoot closer together. Made me kind of wish Owen had his arm back around me, the way that had offered me so much comfort when Bryan had asked his question.
“I’m fine. I’m sorry I got weird after Bryan brought up our pasts.”
“It’s not bad that you reacted the way you did. I was surprised by it too. These are people we loved, who we still love, even if we can’t have them in our lives anymore.”
I nodded. “Might seem like a strange time for me to mention this, but I used to get bullied a lot in elementary school.” Owen clenched his jaw and balled his hand into a fist, still listening, but like he wanted to jump through some sort of memory time warp and kick some ass.
Normally, I would have been annoyed by some guy getting all overprotective, but admittedly, I kind of liked the way he was doing it, so I kept on. “You think I’m short now—I wastinyback then, especially compared to all the guys in my class. My hair was sort of all over the place. I could never get it to do anything or look like anyone else’s hair. There were a lot of weird things about me, but now that I’m older, I don’t think it was those kinds of things that made them pick on me. It’s almost like they could tell that all I wanted to do was fit in, so that was the last thing in the world they were going to let me do.”
“Did they hurt you?” he asked.
“Not anything serious, but there was teasing and shoving me around presumably by accident. I can’t say I had it as bad as others. I’m not trying to be all woe-is-me about it, but my point was, I didn’t have a lot of friends, so my family was everything. And Crawford always encouraged and supported me, never made me feel strange or like there was something wrong with me. When I was seven, I had this game I’d play where I’d sneak into Nance’s room and wear her high heels. Don’t even know how I knew, but I had this feeling I couldn’t let anyone know what I was doing. And one day I wanted to try on some of her lipstick. It just so happened that Crawford arrived home early that day, and before I knew it, I was caught red-handed, literally…and with some actually managing to get on my lips too.”
Tears stirred in my eyes, and I batted them away quickly. Owen’s arm found its way around me, just as it had during the interview prep.
