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That should not have been a turn-on. “I⁠—”

“And that I have zero social skills or any idea how to interact with people, especially when I really like them?”

“Well, I⁠—”

That was as far as I got before Bastian reached for me, drawing me close, then turned to push me up against the wall and slant his mouth over mine.

Fuck, he was a good kisser. At least, when kissing me he was. I groaned loud enough to give the ghosts a run for their money as our mouths melded. I opened for him, and when he hesitated to taste me, I slipped my tongue into his mouth.

His reaction was explosive. He moaned, too, and dove into the kiss with gusto. I felt the surprising strength in his body as he pressed me harder against the wall, completely overwhelming me.

He did even more than that. As his mouth devoured mine, he reached between us, opening the fly of my jeans, then reached in to cup my balls. The sounds I made increased to porn levels as he drew his hand up, freeing my giddy erection and stroking it.

I was ecstatic, even though major parts of me hadn’t caught up to what was happening. Those parts didn’t matter, as far as I was concerned. All that mattered was the pleasure that coursed through me, the intimacy of the way Bastian and I kissed, and the explosion of hopes and dreams inside me that jumped to the conclusion that we could be together forever.

I was totally gone for Bastian in every way.

Unfortunately for me, every way meant that I completely lost control and came all over his hand with a startled gasp.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I whispered, flaring hot with pleasure and embarrassment.

“No, that was hot,” Bastian replied in his dead sexy voice, hand still holding me as I softened.

He was going to say more, I knew he was, but Polo barked from the doorway to my bedroom.

Like we’d been found out by parents, Bastian and I leapt apart. My dick was sad to lose his touch and hung there softening before I thought to tuck myself away. Bastian stared at his sticky hand for a second…like he was thinking of licking his fingers.

“There’s a bathroom through there,” I squeaked, nodding to the door to the en suite. “The previous owners converted the small bedroom next door into a bathroom in the nineties, I think. It’s got everything you need to tidy up.”

I begged myself to stop talking.

Bastian looked from his hand to me to the bathroom door. “Um, thanks,” he said, then stared right at me, intense as hell, and repeated, “Thanks,” with an entirely different meaning.

“Anytime,” I squeaked, and although I meant it from the bottom of my empty balls, I grimaced at how embarrassing I was as Bastian quickly headed into the bathroom.

CHAPTER 6

Bastian

“It was all going really well. Marco is a fantastic cook, and we’d had a really lovely supper. There were all sorts of fascinating readings coming from the equipment once we went upstairs to check. And then I had to go and make everything awkward by kissing him. Not just kissing him⁠—”

I stopped my admittedly rambling explanation and stared down at Mrs. Reynolds in her white silk-lined casket. I’d finished brushing her hair and arranging it artfully around her sweet, wrinkled face, and I was almost done applying the subtle make-up that would make her look less, well, dead.

“I really shouldn’t be telling you any of this,” I said, as sheepishly as if she were my fourth-grade teacher and I’d been called up to her desk for not handing in homework. “Needless to say, I took things a bit too far, and⁠—”

And what? It had been awesome, really. I’d made Marco come in less than two minutes just by touching and kissing him. That sort of thing didn’t tend to happen unless a guy was really into it and halfway there already.

At least, it didn’t when a guy was with me.

Marco had been really into it. He’d responded to my kiss like it was the best dessert he could have had after our fantastic meal. He’d kissed me back and made sounds that must have had every EMF detector in the house pinging as hard as my libido had been.

If I was an entirely different kind of guy and even remotely sexy or prone to acts of selfish indulgence, I would have unzipped, pulled out my dick, and finished what I’d been aching for by coming all over Marco’s satisfied cock.

I sucked in a breath as my dick pressed against the front of my work trousers, then squirmed in an attempt to adjust things and get them to settle down.

“I’m so sorry,” I told Mrs. Reynolds. “I’m being incredibly unprofessional, I know. You probably wouldn’t approve, although I bet you lived a far more exciting life than anyone knew about.”

Talking to the corpse of an old woman deflated things at once. It also made me smile as my thoughts shifted to fantasies of all the things Muriel Reynolds might have done in her life. She might have been a wicked young woman once who bucked the system and had all sorts of torrid love affairs in a time when women were supposed to be shackled to their kitchen and the nursery.