He sounded wretched and yearning and hopeful all at once. Zeb twisted urgently round in his arms, and then they were kissing frantically, a mess of flailing limbs and tangling clothes and trapping quilt, hands and lips and longing, and the bitterness of a wasted year.
Gideon ended up on top of him after a few overwhelming minutes, his long body sprawled over Zeb’s, his light eyes looking down with the same confused mix of pain and joy and wanting that Zeb felt.
“God damn it,” he said softly. “I missed you so much. I persuaded myself you were playing with me all along. That I would never have been enough.”
“How could you not be?”
“How could I be? You’re all charm and heart and exuberance, and I count pennies and tidy things up. You’ve so much joy, and I felt so joyless for so long that when you did share your joy with me, I couldn’t embrace it even though I wanted to.” Hecupped Zeb’s cheek. “It was a great deal easier to decide that you had brought my orderly life chaos and I didn’t want it any more, rather than to realise you’d offered my trammelled existence freedom and I’d been afraid of it.”
Zeb’s heart was thudding oddly now, arrhythmically, as if it wasn’t quite in his own control. “I…didn’t know you thought that. And I did bring chaos.”
“You are excessively chaotic,” Gideon said. “I’m excessively orderly. On average, we could work.”
“Could we?” Zeb asked on a breath. “I know what you said about being stuck here, with me in London—”
“I don’t think I will be staying at Lackaday House much longer, and we need to talk about why at some point very soon. But right now—”
“Sod Lackaday House and all who sail in her. I want you. And that’s notjust for tonightorIt doesn’t mean anythingor any such rubbish. I want you back, which we can discuss later, and I want you now.”
“Yes,” Gideon said. “Yes. Oh, Zeb. License my hands—what is it?”
Zeb knew exactly what he meant, and what he was asking. He’d quoted Donne’s poem to Gideon a very long time ago, a request and a seduction in one: “License my roving hands and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below.”
“I really must memorise that. Before,” Gideon murmured, fingers skimming down Zeb’s chest.
“Behind.” Zeb slipped his own hand round to Gideon’s arse,tense, a little thinner than it had been.
Gideon spent a pleasant moment onbefore, palming Zeb’s prick, flattening his hand, touching, stroking, feeling. Connecting them, skin to skin, closing his hand possessively, finally sliding it down between Zeb’s thighs. “Between?”
Zeb curled up and forward, getting his mouth to Gideon’s neck, his ear, kissing, licking. “Above,” he mumbled against the warm skin.
Gideon cupped his balls. “Below. I will definitely remember that. If we practice enough.”
“Let’s,” Zeb said, and got his mouth to Gideon’s, and then it was nothing but breath and touch, hands and lips, and the joy of Gideon’s touch, Gideon’s response, and its echo in his own shuddering pleasure.
Fifteen
They lay entwined afterwards, Zeb wrapped in the sprawl of Gideon’s long familiar limbs, eyelids heavy, suffused with contentment.
“Hey,” Gideon said. “Don’t go to sleep.”
“Mph. No. I should—”
Go back to my roomwas what he’d meant to say, and that brought his last sight of his room to mind. He jolted sharply. “I can’t!”
“You’re staying here tonight. Don’t think about leaving. But we have to talk about why.”
“Oh God, can we not?”
“You are in here because you were driven out of your room by frightening malice,” Gideon said. “And we really do need to discuss that, which means we cannot allow ourselves to be sidetracked any longer by how ridiculously lovely you are, or anything of that nature.”
“We can if we want.”
“No,” Gideon said firmly. “Sit up, and wake up.Up, Zeb, this is serious.”
Zeb sat up reluctantly. They both propped themselves against the bedstead.
“Right,” Gideon said. “Let’s start with your room. Who knows you’re afraid of spiders?”
