Page 72 of Read My Lips

He shoved my shoulder, eyes rolling. But he’d already laughed.

“Bedroom. Now. Before you scandalise half the street.”

Inside the bedroom door, he murmured wordlessly against my lips and the buzz ricocheted right through me. Hands cupped my face, holding my jaw, drawing me in and up. He kissed me like I was special, and I kissed him back like I believed him.

That wasn’t what this was for him. He was just good at this. And that was fine. Perfect. Amazing. Do not stop.

Lips dropped down, pressing in against my throat with a wicked graze of teeth, right over the ticking pulse in my neck. And I nearly buckled like he’d kneecapped me. Every inch of me hummed, thrumming with charge. His mouth was bloody magic.

Fewer clothes. We needed fewer clothes.

I wrenched his jacket off his shoulders as he peeled his waistcoat off. Simon sex-godded his way to total nudity, shedding clothes, tugging his cuffs off backwards. All those buttons were nothing. And there he was, with his cock bobbing about, looking like an exceptionally horny classical sculpture, all balance and poise and coiled energy.

He had to be itching to hang his things up. But they stayed crumpled on the floor at his feet; he didn’t even glance down – he was watching me instead.

And there I was – a desperate prat, jeans bunched around my knees, hopping about trying to get my socks off. But he was looking at me like I was a prize he’d won, which made no sense at all.

Under my hands he fitted together all slim and spare and strong. God I wanted him. Hard up, pressing into me, wanted him like I’d barely wanted anything or anyone. Ever.

He kissed my neck again, teeth grazing over my barely-there stubble and his hand dragged, impossibly slow, up every notch of my spine, dissolving me from the inside out. The thoroughness of his lips carved a hollow into the core of me in the shape of his name – the space it took in the air when I signed his run of letters. When I breathed all the way in, the bruising ache of it panged deep inside me.

What the hell was this?

He could get me off with his little finger and a precisely deployed waggle of his eyebrows. Anyone else stood no chance. After this, I might as well become a monk. He’d annihilated any possibility of me settling for anyone who wasn’t him ever again.

“You’re gorgeous, Ben.”

What a beautiful liar.

“Don’t have to lay it on that thick.” I scuffed a self-preservation laugh. “Already got my kit off, haven’t I?”

Simon frowned. And I wanted to stuff my words back down my ungrateful throat.

“Why do you do that?”

Silence rang in my ears – nothing but his eyes on me and the steady in and out of his breathing for the longest moment. I should have taken the compliment.

“Oh come on Simon.” What did he want me to say? Couldn’t we get back to the having of the sex? My voice was too dry, too quiet and it didn’t matter at all with his attention burning into me, reading every syllable even without sound. “You’re gorgeous. Everything you bloody do is elegance itself. I go to the gym too much to make up for the fact I’m really really not.”

He tilted his head, eyes catching mine for an uncomfortable heartbeat. “I appreciate the gym visits.” He arched an eyebrow. “Am I allowed to say that?”

I closed my eyes, blocking him out, and nodded, wordless. Everyone appreciated the gym visits. His hands trailed across my pecs, down my stomach like he planned on worshipping me, and I tensed to give him some corrugation, breathing madly, blinking to look – watching him watching me.

“I do like your body.”

“Shame about the face though. Right?” I grinned to tell him it was meant to be funny. How many times had I heard that?

But Simon didn’t laugh.

“It’s just a broken nose.” His voice was a steady whisper. Burred clear and dry with the truth of it.

The tip of his finger trailed an acid line over the bump in the skewed cartilage. I wanted to swat his hand away. Push him back. Stop him touching me like that, because it wasn’t just my skin. It wasn’t just my face. I never asked him to look this close at any of me. And it itched.

“I know.” It wasn’t though, was it? He had to know we didn’t match.

Scrappy. That’s what they’d called me the first time it happened. When James Taylor laughed at Mum at pick up, and I’d set to, bristling with it. Trouble, Grandad said about me, years after that.

“I like your smile too.” Calm as anything, Simon kissed at the base of my throat, tasting me like an obscene delicacy. He peeled back, eyes far too bloody gentle. “You hardly show it to anyone.”