I followed, enjoying the sight of his arse once again. I didn’t know what to make of Nate Mortimer. My dick knew what it wanted to make of him, and that was a sweating, panting, ruined mess. But I hadn’t spent enough time with him yet to work out who he was. When Charlie had cornered him at the bar, he’d been…vulnerable? Something other than a smooth entitled banker, anyway. I’d warmed to him when we’d joked about Jane Austen giving blowjobs. He would be easy to like. And just now, he’d definitely been open to getting laid.
But he was abanker,so I had no interest in puzzling him out. I simply needed to get him talking so I could find out why one of the Mortimer family had been poking about in James Fortescue’s study.
Chapter Five
NATE
What a waste of a morning that had been. With Alex Teague there, I couldn’t ask Ella any leading questions about the Fortescues, and with Ella there, I couldn’t explore why Alex had been so eager to investigate James’s emails.
As soon as I’d seen Alex at the breakfast table, I realised he hadn’t been working the bar last night. The Fortescues were so hierarchical they madeDownton Abbeylook progressive. Staff would never be permitted to dine with the family. He was clearly part of the Cornish contingent, which helped me place the melodious accent he had, the ‘r’s rolling when he spoke. He looked a little older than the rest of the visiting Cornish dragons, apart from their matriarch. I’d put him in his mid-twenties, and he was as devastatingly hot as he’d been last night.
If Ella hadn’t tagged along to the theatre, perhaps I could have worked out my attraction towards him. Lost in a pleasant daydream of doing precisely that, I was unprepared to come face toface with Charlie when we returned to the Fortescues’ house. He was pale and unshaven, his hair damp as if he wasn’t long out of the shower. Ella’s chatter faded into the background as I stared into his face, my heart doing something unexpected and unpleasant in my chest.
“Nate,” he said, his voice gravelly. Hungover. There was no mistaking the signs to someone who’d been through God knew how many hangovers alongside him. “I want to talk to you.”
My stomach turned over. I didn’t want to be alone with him, to find out what else he had to tell me about my shortcomings as a dragon, a person, and a lover. No one had ever known me the way he had, which was how he’d known exactly what to say to leave my soul flayed and bleeding when he broke up with me.
I was frozen, staring at him. Ella squeezed my arm. “I’ll see you later, Nate,” she said, and disappeared upstairs. Alex followed her, with a backwards glance at me and Charlie.
With no conscious intention of doing so, I found myself trailing Charlie into the small parlour at the front of the house. I closed the door behind us. Whatever he had to say, I didn’t want another living soul to hear it.
He threw himself into an armchair with his usual scapegrace grin. “I wasn’t sure if you were really here or not. I must have been rat-arsed by the time I saw you last night. If I said or did anything I shouldn’t have, it was the drink, okay?”
I leaned against the wall, arms folded, one leg crossed over the other at the ankle. My body language was announcing my unease, but I couldn’t help it. I needed to protect myself.
“You asked me to suck your cock,” I told him.
“That sounds about right,” he said. “You always did give better head than anyone else.”
The backhanded compliment was a slap in the face, waking me from the disconnected state I’d been in since seeing him in the hallway. “What do you want, Charlie?”
He picked at a thread on his trousers. “We shouldn’t have broken up.” He glanced up once he’d said the words, gauging my reaction.
My heart pounded as disbelief, hurt and hope swirled inside me.
He shrugged slightly when I said nothing. “We had fun, didn’t we?”
Yes, we had fun. Looking back, we had so much fun over the six years we were together that I couldn’t understand how we hadn’t been kicked out of uni, arrested, or both. The fact we were rich and white was probably all that had saved us.
“That’s it? Not because you miss me or love me, but because we used to have fun? Did you really—” I stopped because evenIcould hear the hurt in my voice.
He pushed up from the chair and came to me, his hand reaching to touch my cheek. I was hypnotised by him, the way I’d always been. The first time I saw him in the student union bar, I’d been transfixed, and I’d been under his spell ever since. No one looked like Charlie. He was a Greek god, blond curls framing a face so classically beautiful it almost hurt to look at.
But it wasn’t his looks that had held me captivated—it was the mischief, the delight in beingalivethat made him impossible to resist. We’d had the invincibility of youth, added to the heady arrogance of being dragons among humans, and we’d done anything and everything we’d wanted, laughing all the way. With him, I’d felt alivein a way I hadn’t since.
“You know I’m crap at saying the right thing,” Charlie said at last. “But Ihavemissed you, Nate. I just want things to go back to how they were.”
For an instant, I was drowning in his blue eyes. I wanted, so badly, to believe that he loved me and regretted what he’d done. But he hadn’t said that he did.
“It doesn’t work like that,” I said roughly. “You don’t get a free pass on everything. Why the hell do you think I’d want to get back with you?”
“Because I was a dick then, but I’m asking nicely now?” He looked up at me through his lashes, the look of a little boy who’d done wrong, which had always earned my instant forgiveness. “And you’ve missed me, Nate. I know it. Why else would you be here?”
Rejecting him wasn’t an option. I needed to stay in the Fortescues’ house, and Charlie might tell me to pack my bags if he didn’t like my answer.
I swallowed my pride and hurt. “I don’t know, Charlie—there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. I need to think about it.”
The smile that dawned on his face looked genuinely happy. “So think about it. Just don’t take too long.”
