“Fine. That scared the shit out of me.”
He was white as a tuft of Bodmin cottongrass. Tears were standing in his eyes. Gideon pulled him away from the door into his arms, new belief in his own powers to protect surging through him. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”Comforting and sexy, Lee had said, and the second part shouldn’t have mattered, but suddenly vibrantly did: Lee’s arms went round him with a force that was seeking more than safety. His mouth brushed Gideon’s neck. He rested his brow on Gideon’s shoulder for a moment, breathing raggedly. Then he lifted his head. “Can I kiss you?”
Gideon didn’t know what permission he’d given – the startled parting of his lips, his involuntary movement forward – but Lee’s mouth met his like hot silk. Gideon closed his fist in the fabric of Lee’s shirt and squeezed, hardly able to bear the intimacy of this, so suddenly after so long. His tongue pushed hungrily forward and he tried to recoil, ashamed, but Lee held him fast, grunting assent, returning the gesture. Gideon opened up for him. The slide and pressure in his mouth triggered a depth-charge of need at the core of him – under his gut, inside the curve of his tailbone, and his cock lifted so hard in his pyjama pants that Lee felt it, gasped and laughed inside their kiss and pulled away. “Oh, God,” he whispered, eyes brilliant, a flush of arousal turning his cottongrass to roses. “PC Frayne. Who knew?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What on earth for?”
“No first kiss should be that...”
He couldn’t even find the word. “Filthy?” Lee supplied, his smile making his answer a caress. “You can peck me on the cheek some other time. Probably no first fuck should be a clumsy stand-up job against a door either, but – ”
“Oh, Christ. No. Come back to the sofa with me.”
“No. We have to seal the gate.”
And now Lee was dead serious again. “Seal the gate?” Gideon echoed.
“Yes. You know what the witches say –let naught but love enter in.”
“If I hadn’t checked you out, I’d swear you were an escaped nutter, you know.”
“I know.” He leaned into Gideon, his answering erection pushing hot and tight against Gideon’s thigh. “But do it anyway. For God’s sake do it to me.”
So Gideon laid him back against the door. He’d forgotten his own strength. He’d got into a habit of holding it in abeyance. Most of the people he dealt with required gentleness, not a big burly cop throwing his weight about. Butthis man needed all of him. Tenderly Gideon brushed a trace of sweat off Lee’s brow. He took the moment to undo Lee’s jeans and push them a little way down, and he stood trembling while Lee tugged open his pyjama cord. Then Gideon seized him by the hips and hoisted him up.
Lee loosed a deep, laughing groan. He wrapped his legs around Gideon and tipped back his head. “Yes. Feels like you could hold me here all night if you wanted to.”
“Do you need all night?”
“I think I need...” He shuddered in Gideon’s grasp. “Half a minute ought to do me fine. Come on, you beauty. Come on.”
Gideon shoved up and forward. His aching shaft drove into the tangle of Lee’s jeans and briefs, the contact at once hot as hell and wildly frustrating, then Lee twisted and writhed and somehow they were pressed cock to cock. Gideon inhaled a great gasp of the skin of Lee’s collarbone, burrowing under the collar of his shirt to find the damp velvety flesh. His mouth brushed the silver chain. Lee dragged the dressing gown back off his shoulders. He stroked the taut muscles there with urgent tenderness. “It’s all right! Let go of it for me.”
Gideon had no choice left. There was something terrible to him in having a man he’d just met like this, with this explicit rawness, but Lee was dynamic and real in his arms – not just riding his cock but demanding it, meeting his first big thrust then the next and the next with a savage passion of his own, and when his words rang in Gideon’s mind –seal the gate, seal the gate– a kind of wild sanctity spread its wings over their act. Oh, and half a minute would be more than enough – Lee cried out, jerking up towards climax, freeing Gideon to ram his hips against him harder and faster till the honeyed fires of orgasm began to burn. Their heat roared up in his spine, his thighs, and then it was a huge whole-body blaze that centred and focussed and began to spend, from his balls to the place where his shaft was trapped tight against Lee’s. They came within a heart-jolting second of one another. Lee threw his head back, Gideon’s hand at the back of his skull shielding him. He convulsed, bucking to completion, Gideon thrusting them as far and as hard through it as they could go.
They caught one another on the way down. They leaned against the door in a sweaty, exhausted tangle. “Don’t fall down here,” Gideon whispered. “Come on. Let me take you upstairs.”
***
The first-floor landing was cold, a cavernous space Gideon had always shot across as a child, seeking the refuge of his room. Some kids might have seen their parents’ bedroom as a place of safety, but the Fraynes hadn’t been that kind of family.
That hadn’t been why he’d never moved with James out of the damp back bedroom he occupied now. In that and in so many other ways, he’d just been a terrible coward. He held Lee Tyack tight in the circle of his arm. Lee was hanging on to him too, his warm clasp of Gideon’s waist convincing him that he had to do better this time. The stairs had been steep and long after their exertions. They were both unsteady, clutching one another like shagged-out babes in the wood. Yes, Gideon had to do better, in what he tried to think of as his own home. “This way,” he said, and led Lee to the far end of the hall.
Lee looked round the dim-lit room. The first morning light was gleaming coldly on polished surfaces and the starched linen of the old bed. “Is this where you normally sleep?”
It was scrupulously clean. His parents’ housekeeper had officially retired, but still came once a week to take away the sheets and clean this room for the minister she’d adored, even though neither he nor Mrs Frayne would ever be coming home. “No, but... Is there something wrong with it?”
Lee turned to face him. He smiled as if he understood not only the gesture Gideon had made in bringing him here, but all the lonely years that resounded in Gideon’s memory whenever he tried to live in this house as his home. “Nothing wrong. It’s just... a bit of a mausoleum, isn’t it? Wherever you usually sleep is fine with me. Wherever you slept with James.”
There was still the faintest trace of warmth in the sheets in Gideon’s bed. Feeling it, he tumbled Lee over his body and into the warm place, then curled up tight around his back. “Sorry it’s so cold.”
“I’m not cold. You are.” Lee twisted over and put an arm beneath his head. “Come here. What happened with James, then?”
“You... You seemed to already know.”Gideon could hardly speak. Lee was right: he was the ice-block, now being warmed to melting point by this embrace. “Back at Sarah Kemp’s. You were so sure. I thought you must know him.”
“No. I get flashes about people sometimes, that’s all. It’s better if they tell me of their own accord.”
