Once Wynne had left, closing the door quietly behind him, Lindsay lifted the jar of salve from the table and prised the lid off. The paste inside was yellowish and waxy and it smelled of camphor, with a trace of arnica.
“Let’s see to your hurts. This is marvellous stuff.” He smiled at Nicol and rose from his chair. “It’ll stop your face bruising and soothe the soreness. Here, let me.” He stepped towards Nicol, dipping his forefinger into the salve to extract a dab of the stuff before setting the jar aside.
Nicol shrank back in his seat. “I can do it myself,” he said, his voice husky.
“Don’t be silly,” Lindsay said, dropping fluidly to his knees in front of Nicol’s chair. “There’s no mirror in here and I can see the marks. It’ll only take a moment.”
As he leaned forward, he saw the telltale bob of Nicol’s throat as the other man swallowed and the tense clench of his jaw, but he made no more verbal protests.
When Lindsay’s fingertip touched his reddened cheekbone though, Nicol inhaled sharply and their gazes clashed again. Lindsay couldn’t look away. He held his breath as his fingertip glided over Nicol’s cheekbone in a slow sweep and Nicol’s pupils grew, swallowing up the cool grey irises and darkening his gaze.
Lindsay’s whole being was fixed on the single point of contact between them, the tip of his forefinger smoothing the waxy salve over the incipient bruise on Nicol’s face.
And then Nicol shuddered, his whole body seeming to tremble.
Lindsay stilled. “Did I hurt you?” he whispered.
Nicol swallowed hard. “No.”
Their gazes caught again and this time there was something new in Nicol’s eyes. Longing.Yearning. Lindsay should have felt triumph to see such naked need—and in a way he did—yet it made his chest ache too. Nicol was torn by this, torn between desire and fear. And Lindsay couldn’t seem to stop pushing him. Tempting him to let Lindsay satisfy his yearning.
“God, I want you,” Lindsay whispered.
Nicol closed his eyes. His head moved minutely from side to side in apparent negation, but his expression was pained with knowing.
“I think you want me too,” Lindsay added.
Nicol’s eyelids flew open. “I am not—” he began, then broke off, leaving the thought unfinished. His gaze was anguished, his scent suddenly sharp with need and with a more complex tangle of emotions that Lindsay’s human side could detect but not decipher.
“This is wrong,” Nicol muttered, an edge of desperation to his voice. But there was a note of surrender in there too. An acknowledgement that, whatever he thought of the morality of this, it was going to happen.
Lindsay set his hands gently on Nicol’s knees and slid them up his thighs, keeping his movements slow and unhurried. He paused when he reached the placket of the man’s breeches, giving Nicol the chance to push him away. But Nicol did no such thing. Only let his head fall back and his knees fall open, permitting what was to come.
Lindsay shifted into the space Nicol had made for him and began unfastening buttons. Nicol did nothing to stop him, groaning low in his throat when Lindsay peeled back the fabric to reveal the slick tip of his hungry cock poking out of the pale linen of his drawers.
Christ, the scent of him! Lindsay loved that smell—male desire, clean and musky at once, overlaid with Nicol’s elusive, mineral scent.Christ.
Lowering his head, Lindsay inhaled deeply then touched his tongue to Nicol’s tip, collecting the sticky wetness there, relishing Nicol’s flavour bursting in his mouth.
“Jesus Christ,” Nicol near-sobbed and thrust his hips upwards, as though begging for more, even as he threw an arm over his face in denial.
“You need this, don’t you?” Lindsay murmured, stealing his hand inside Nicol’s drawers to stroke his length and push the folds of linen aside. “You need this so badly.”
Nicol’s only answer was another broken moan. His right hand clutched the arm of his chair so tightly his knuckles showed white, and that sight—Nicol in an agony of indecision—made Lindsay’s chest ache again with a tender feeling he couldn’t put a name to. He was not a creature who usually suffered from an excess of scruples, but in this moment, he found himself wishing he could fulfil Nicol’s physical desires without increasing the man’s obvious inner torment.
Sitting back on his heels, he forced out words he did not want to speak, his voice harsh. “Do you want me to stop? I will if you want.”
Nicol dropped the arm that covered his face and met Lindsay’s gaze. His eyes burned. “Is it not enough for you that I submit to you?” he snarled. “I have to beg for it too? Is that what you like?”
Lindsay studied him for a long moment. “No,” he said slowly. “I just need to be sure you want this.”
“Fine,” Nicol bit out. “I want it.”
Lindsay didn’t respond to that, just leaned back in, lowering his head to take Nicol’s cock fully into his mouth.
Nicol’s groan sounded like it was wrenched from the depths of his soul. He arched up into Lindsay’s mouth with a helpless lurch, one hand coming down on Lindsay’s head. As Lindsay explored the length of Nicol’s shaft with his tongue, Nicol’s strong fingers tunnelled into Lindsay’s hair, destroying Wynne’s earlier handiwork and taking a firm grip. The wrench of those fingers made Lindsay’s eyes water, even as his own shaft swelled impossibly harder in his breeches.
Nicol had an elegant flagstaff of a cock, long and plump-headed with a ruddy tinge to it. It twitched and swelled in Lindsay’s mouth, prodding deep as it sought out the secret hollows of his mouth and throat, almost as though it had a separate existence from the man it belonged to.
