“They did.” I turned to find Harry with his big arms full of kittens. “What the fuck? Where did you find them?”
“In that shed. I think they’re hungry. There’s some kitten food in the feed store, isn’t there?”
“Are you taking the piss?”
Harry smiled as one of the kittens scaled his broad chest and took up residence on his shoulder. “No... the police told me that you were taking all the remaining animals. We can’t just leave them here.”
“We have a bazillion cats already.”
“So, a few more wouldn’t hurt?”
My life had become a permanent reinvention ofThe Twilight Zone. I’d gone from chasing my dad around the moors to herding goats in a dead guy’s back garden. And now the only person I’d ever truly fallen in love with was waving a bunch of kittens in my face like he wasn’t going back to London in just a few short weeks. “Don’t go.”
Harry blinked. “What?”
“Don’tgo,” I repeated, desperation suddenly spilling from me in a torrent of words I couldn’t have stopped with a goddam mountain. “Don’t go back to London, to your job, to your empty flat—to the gym that makes you feel like shit. Don’t go back to the life that makes you so lonely. Please... don’t go anywhere. Stay here... with me, with all of us. We love you—Ilove you—”
Harry deposited the kittens into a wire carrier I hadn’t noticed at his feet and clamped his hand over my mouth. “Jesus. Stop, will you? Do you honestly think Iwantto go back to London? That I’m not completely fucking in love with you?”
I fought his hold on me, but I had nothing on his brute strength, and he backed me up against the horsebox with his hand still over my mouth, and his other arm on my chest.
“Joe.”
The way he said my name terrified me. Like the end of the world loomed behind the single syllable. I stared at him, trying to read the molten eyes that felt like home. He loved me. Of course he did. I knew that—it was in everything he’d ever said and done for me. But what the fuck did we do now?
Like he’d heard the panic in my mind, Harry pressed his hand harder against my mouth and his forehead against mine.
“Joe,” he said again. “I’m not going anywhere, okay? I mean—I have to at some point, to sort my life out... That’s what I’ve been trying to do today, but I’m not leavingyou, Joe. I— I couldn’t even if you wanted me to.”
His hand slipped from my mouth, but it took me a few seconds to process what he was saying. “You’re not going back to London?”
“Not permanently. I’ve got some things to clear up, and I have to give notice at the clinic and find something else down here, but I want to stay on the farm—with you—if you’ll have me?”
“What?”
“You heard me,” he said gently. “And I heard you this morning when you told me you loved me. This trip has been a crazy experience for me in so many ways, but I’m not ready for it to end, and the harder I try to contemplate it, the less likely it seems that I will ever be.”
“You’re staying?” It came out as a whisper but was punctuated by a chorus of discontented meows from the carrier on the ground.
Harry laughed and swept me off my feet, spinning me in a dizzying circle until I didn’t know which way was up. “Joe, for fuck’s sake. I’mstaying, so let’s gohomeso I can feed those cats.”
Epilogue
Joe
I impaled myself on Harry’s dick, grinding down on him so hard that the bed shunted along the floor and hit the wall.Fuck. Having him inside me was insane every time, but never more so than when I caught him in the mood to lie back and let me climb all over him.
His dick was as huge as the rest of him, but it didn’t take me long to adjust anymore. A warm hand at the base of my spine helped—like it helped with just about everything. Emotion filled me as we fucked bareback in the delicate spring sunshine. I’d never been with someone the way I was with Harry—where everything meant something... every word, touch, and kiss. Every heated stare and snatched breath. God, I loved him.
He reared up beneath me, pressing deeper inside me. I fell forward and gasped out his name before I regained some tenuous control. Riding him was always a quick game. My cock bounced between us, hard and weeping, and his gravelly moans and gentle snarl booted me over the edge so fast that I came without touching myself.
Harry laughed as I cursed and drove my fist into the mattress. “You’d think you’d have figured it out by now.”
“Shut up.” My face was muffled by a pillow. I looked up and scowled at him. “You did say you only had time for a quickie.”
“And you never let me down.”
As he shot inside me with a growl that sent my eyes rolling again, I couldn’t deny it. We spenthoursfucking at night when we had the time to kick back, but snatched daytime encounters were kind of a kink for me, and my lack of stamina when it came to Harry was a bonus.
