I didn’t like the situation, but I knew Nate didn’t care about Charlie like that anymore. I just wished I could be certain that he cared for me as much as I cared for him.
Nate and I had great sex, we laughed a lot, but he didn’t tell me that I was important to him. And he rarely touched me non-sexually. I was the one who snuggled into him after sex. He always welcomed me, and occasionally he’d snuggle back, but I had to be the one to initiate it.
What stopped me from worrying too much was the way he made love to me. It was so much more than sex, and how he touched me and the expression in his eyes always laid my doubts to rest. Until they started up again.
“I’m going to have to give James an answer soon,” Margaret cautioned me one day. “There’s little more than a week left of our planned visit, so he’s growing impatient.”
Only a week? Somehow, the trap James was trying to spring for me and Ella seemed less important than the fact that in a few short days, I’d be heading home. Away from Nate. Our worlds were so different. It didn’t feel like an insurmountable obstacle in Bath, where we were both out of our usual environments. What would happen when that changed, I didn’t know.
And then, in the hotel room that we’d been booking more and more often, Nate got a message. He looked up from his phone, excitement on his face. “I’ve been invited to the Fortescue bank on Friday to meet the Board.”
I didn’t want him to go there alone. But what could I do? I couldn’t exactly develop a sudden interest in banks and go with him. I didn’t even know what Nate did, other than make piles of money for rich people.
“Be careful,” I said.
He promised he would, but it wasn’t enough. I rolled him over, anchoring him to the mattress with my weight. My move had been an instinctive attempt to keep him safe, but Nate didn’t know that. He squirmed deliciously under me, derailing my thoughts from protection and onto something else entirely as I bent my head to kiss him.
Each time, the heat and intensity of Nate’s kiss took me off-guard. He explored my mouth with such focus, such intent, it was as if each kiss was our first. Lost in him, I had just enough sense left to reach out and grab the lube from the bedside table where we’d left it earlier. Except I wasn’t going to stop kissing Nate, not for anything, and so I ended up knocking the telephone onto the floor, and it took the lamp down with it, and then Nate was laughing too hard to kiss me any longer.
“Fuck,” I said, and hung over the edge of the bed to recover the lube, which had ended up amid the carnage on the carpet.
His peal of laughter was the best thing I’d heard since the last time I’d heard him laugh, and as I realised that, I knew I was in deeper than I’d ever been before. His hand cupped my arse from my undignified position hanging half-off the bed, and then he dipped his fingers into my cleft. I shuddered with the promise of it, but much as I loved him fucking me, right now, I needed to be inside him. To know he was safe, he was mine, to claim him.
Whoa. That was a first. Was that a dragon thing? I’d never had another dragon as a lover before. Perhaps it was simply my response to the thought of Nate in danger.
I wriggled back fully onto the bed, triumphantly clutching the tube. As I slicked my fingers, his laughter died away, replaced by growing darkness in his eyes and uneven breathing as he watched me. I slipped my hand between his legs, finding the cleft of his arseand stroking over his hole. His lips parted, and as I teased him, he made little breathy sounds with each exhalation.
God, Ilovedhow he sounded when I turned him on. I’d wanted to draw this out, but I needed this too badly. I pushed a finger inside him, and he moved restlessly, eagerly.
“I’m still stretched from before,” he said, with a gravelly undertone that his voice only had when we were like this.
“Making an assumption there, aren’t you?” I asked him, adding another finger to the first and starting to finger-fuck him in earnest. “I could do this all night. Maybe I’ll just make you come on my fingers, over and over again.”
A whine punched out of him and he arched up. I wasn’t sure if it was my words or the way I’d crooked my fingers just then that was responsible, but either way, he was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, so helpless under my touch.
Of course, for all my talk, I couldn’t wait much longer. As I pushed into him, we were both groaning. Funny thing—it turned out that having such a vocal lover made me louder, too. As if it gave me permission. Or, perhaps, knowing how much it turned me on to hear him, I wanted to give him that in return.
We were both making sounds with every thrust, getting faster and faster until all I could see was Nate, his head tipped back, veins standing out in his neck as he cried out my name and came. I wasn’t far behind him, not with the way he was so hot and tight around my cock, and my orgasm slammed into me with such force that everything went white for an instant.
Afterwards, we lay together, and I remembered how this had started. His news about Bristol and the bank. I held onto him and didn’t want to let him go. Out of nowhere, I was scared.
Chapter Twenty-four
NATE
I was changing into jeans and a jumper, ready for the trip to the river that Alex and I had planned, when my door opened without so much as a knock.
“We’re going out,” Charlie said, crossing the room to undo the last couple of buttons on my shirt. “Get rid of this old-man stuff and get into something decent. Or rather, indecent.”
I tried to unclench his hands, but he was pulling my shirt apart insistently. “Comeon,”he said.“You’re wasting time, and there’s so much I want to do. Why’re you being so slow? Get these off and let’s go.”
I managed finally to unwind his fingers from my shirt and stepped back, blinking as I took in his outfit. Charlie had always dressed to kill when we’d gone out, but leather trousers that hid absolutely nothing and a sleeveless denim that ended halfway up his bare torso were unexpected now he was thirty. He still had the body for it, though he’d lost some weight.
“Come on, Nate. Get changed, so we can get out of here.” He was scrabbling at the fastening of my jeans. I put my hands on his and stilled them.
“Charlie, what’s going on? I’m notgoing clubbing with you. Where the hell would be open at this time on a weekday, anyway?”
That unleashed a torrent of words about the two new clubs that had opened in the last year, the guys he’d picked up there, the bartender who always gave him his drinks free, and the number of times he’d been blown in the bathroom. “None of them was as good as you, Nate. Not one.”
