“Oz?” Seth’s voice brought him back to reality, soft and wrecked as it was. He hadn’t exactly heard Seth come, but he assumed, based on how he sounded, that he had.
“I’m still here,” he said, fighting to catch his breath.
Seth only hummed, and then there was nothing but the rustling of sheets again for a few moments.
“That was hot,” Seth said eventually. “Almost as good as having you in the room.”
Oz chuckled. He was glad Seth had gotten something out of it after all.
“Thanks. Uh. Ditto.”
Seth sighed deeply. “I’d love to stay on the line, but I’m about to pass out. You have a way of doing that to me.”
Oz was actually kind of proud of that. He liked knowing that he was enough for Seth. That he could well and truly wear him out, at least for an hour or so at a time.
“Goodnight,” he murmured, not far off from sleep himself. That was exactly what he’d needed.
“Night, Oz,” Seth said, and then hung up.
Oz set the phone aside, rolled over, and was asleep before he could think of anything else.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“No,” Seth said, raising his voice above his father’s unending speech for the first time. “No, absolutely not.”
“Seth…”
“Are you listening?” Seth’s heart was pounding in his chest at raising his voice to his father, but this was too much, too soon.
Too soon after he’d promised himself he was giving Oz up.
His father, by some miracle, fell silent. It was probably shock rather than a deliberate choice, but Seth wasn’t going to lose the opportunity to speak.
“I am not taking Mr. Bishop’s son onone date. First of all, he’s literally a child—”
“He’s twenty-one,” Seth’s father interrupted. Seth glared at him, and whatever he was going to say next died on his tongue.
“Secondly,” he continued. “Because if you really intended to drop it after one date, then you wouldn’t be pushing so hard in the first place. If you were going to let it not go anywhere, it wouldn’t be so important for me to give in. So no. If this is the hill you want to die on, fine. It’s my life on the line.”
“You’re not being reasonable,” Seth’s father said, calm and indifferent as ever.
A flash of white-hot rage hit Seth right between the eyes, the room spinning for a split second.
His father was trying to ship him off to marry someone he’d exchanged two words with, all for his own gain, andSethwas the one being unreasonable?
Expecting to be allowed to at least have a say in who he ended up marrying for financial gain wasunreasonable?
There had to be dozens of eligible men. There was no reason it had to be this one, right now.
Seth paused, about to say that, and then realized how skewed his thinking was.
It didn’t have to be any of them. This whole situation was unreasonable, and he was the only one in it with any shred of reason left.
“Then I’m not being reasonable, and you’ll have to come up with some other way to get me to behave,” Seth growled, leaning in over the desk. He held his father’s gaze for a few seconds, and then stood.
“Where are you going?” his father asked as he headed for the door.
