Page 54 of Read My Lips

He’d clipped his mossy hair soft and close and short at the back, and⁠—

Feedback screeched. I whipped my hand back, but the squeal didn’t stop – Danger! Danger! Infatuation detected!

“Fuck!” My ears rang white hot with sound.

Simon winced, twisting both hearing aids out, and I shrank back – palms up, regretting everything.

“Sorry,” I signed. “My fault.”

“For the love of god.” With gratifying impatience he crammed them into the miniature pocket in the front of his waistcoat. Not even bothering with their compact charging case. “Come here.”

He kissed me again. Thoroughly. Branding me with a sparkly new appreciation for those useless-tiny pockets as he pushed me towards the door of Richard bloody Whittaker’s third living room. I should start a society expounding their virtues. Definitely on the to do list. When I got a minute.

Oh, holy French kiss Batman.

He tongued into my mouth like he planned on burning through all the oxygen in the room. Out in the hall, we collided with the edge of a half-moon table and the gilded mirror sitting on it clattered.

Who cared?

I kissed him back. Lips. Teeth. Hands all over. Oh Christ.

Tonight. Just tonight. I was taking everything I could get.

Simon pressed in between my thighs and I groped him closer. Under my bum the table creaked on its spindly little legs with full-on disapproval. Behind me, the probably-Ming vase teetered.

Ugly things did not belong here. The house knew I shouldn’t have my troll hands anywhere near him. Maybe this was Simon getting back at Richard. Or making a point like he thought he needed to boost my ego. I didn’t care. I’d take pretend.

The vase shuddered.

He could be addicted to spontaneous and mildly problematically-timed sex in country manor houses for all I cared.

Was that a kink? It sounded like a kink. A career-threatening, debilitating one. Poor guy needed therapy, not me jumping on the... console table? Or him.

And, oh.

Ducking down, his tongue did something magic against the pulse point on my neck and I flailed against him.

“God, you’re good at this.”

“What?”

He didn’t hear me.

The whole reason we were here was the screeching whine of his hearing aids, but with Richard, he hadn’t taken them out after they’d gone haywire. He can’t have trusted him enough.

“Ben, stop talking.”

Excellent plan. I thumbs-upped. Simon shook his head on a very pointed eye roll.

“Upstairs. Come on.”

I scrabble-dove off the table top, moving with him. All left feet and too many limbs, we scuffed us up the steps of the bone-shatteringly hard, fairytale staircase, kissing and kissing and kissing. My lips tingled at the pressure, bruising in real time. I didn’t care. It felt good. This was bloody wonderful.

His fingers buried in my glutes and I tensed, like a vain idiot, to give him something to cling onto.

One wrong move and I’d tumble down the cold marble like that gargoyle falling off the roof. I needed him naked. My gorilla fingers wouldn’t fiddle through the domed buttons of his waistcoat fast enough.

When I looked up, he was smiling, perpetually amused by me.