“To give the babe a name!” I moved to sit up but his hand was in the way.
“You thought… Christ, Tom, I planned to lie! Not bind myself in holy matrimony to my niece. What the hell is wrong in your head?”
“Well, I didn’t think you’d consummate it. How was I to know you were planning to lie?”
“Fuck, did you think I was sending you away?”
“What else was I to think?”
He pressed more of his weight into the palm on my chest. “We’ve had this conversation. You made your choice! You’re stuck with me. I was offering the opportunity for you to change your mind. You’re barely more than twenty years old— I wasn’t certain you were prepared to act as a father to a babe. But now, I’ve decided you’re staying here with me. You’re not allowed to leave.”
The pressure of Xander’s hand was nothing against the weightless elation seeping into every pore of my body. “This bed? Or…”
Fingers curled possessive above my heart. “Yes, the bed. You’ll die here.”
“A little death?”
“Thomas Grayson, are you angling for something?” The teasing insinuation, delivered in a low timber had my cock twitching in interest.
“I did not think I was being particularly subtle.”
“You were not. But while you are not yet two and twenty, I am thirty and it seems I lack the stamina to satisfy you.”
The hair of his forearms was thick and coarse when I clasped it, catching as I dragged my nails along it. “I have no complaints in that respect.” I laced our fingers together and brought them together to the headboard. The effort aligned our lips and I stole a filthy kiss.
“You still have my spend inside you and you want more. So greedy…” he tutted when we pulled apart. It was a performativeeffort, belied by his own rapidly stiffening cock pressed against my side.
The still-dawning relief, his words, our kiss; it all had my heart racing. Xander untangled our fingers and held mine against the headboard in a silent command. Cold air rushed in as he unfurled himself from my side and abandoned our bed.
My whimper was instinctive, impossible to restrain in the face of an absence of contact and an exceptional view.
I watched with concupiscent eyes the smooth, carved marble flesh of his arse as he bent to retrieve some item or other from wherever we flung it.
When he turned with two pieces of cloth, one in each fist, I was unsurprised to find one black and one white fluttering rectangle.
My swallow was loud against the ambient crackling fire and the pad of his footsteps. The bed dipped under his weight and he raised the black cravat between thumb and forefinger along with his brow.
“Yes?”
In lieu of an answer, I brought my free hand up to join the other. Xander’s pink tongue dipped between his lips. Then he caught the hand and moved it to the post. Instinctively, my fingers curled around it as he looped the fabric around the wood, then my wrist and tied it off with a simple knot.
The image of his strong, masculine fingers twisting in his fine silk cravat for the purposes of restraining me, keeping me with him forever. It would be etched in my memory until the day I died.
“Comfortable?” He interrupted my nodded response to add, “Words. This only works with words.”
His insistence forced a sliver of sobriety and I tested the restraint, first gently, then with a bit of strength. I was positivethat if I twisted my wrist the right way, I could free myself. But Christ, I never wanted to be free.
“It’s so good.”
Those sturdy fingers trailed up the length of my arm with a teasing delicacy that left me breathless.
Without warning, Xander shifted to throw a leg over my thighs, straddling me.
“Fuck!” No utterance had ever escaped me with less forethought. But the sight of his darkening cock beside my own was too much to bear in silence.
His smile was teasing as he repeated his flirtatious trail in reverse up my free arm—still fastened with nothing but a desire to please to the headboard.
Unlike his, my cravat was a plain cotton lawn in an unremarkable white. When Xander finished trussing me up for both of our pleasure, I was left to appreciate the contrast in fabrics.
