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“And you do now?”
Adam returned the earlier grin. “Just making conversation.”
“Conversation...” Icarus rolled his eyes, and Adam laughed out loud. Laughed louder when Icarus put his hands on his waist and cocked a hip. “How do I know you’re not going to stake me out here in the vineyards?”
Adam spread his arms and pointedly swept his gaze down his body. “You see a stake on me anywhere?” When he lifted his gaze, it was impossible to miss where Icarus’s had gone. Right to his semihard cock. “Actual wood,” Adam teased—and acknowledged. He closed the distance between them and took Icarus’s hand in his. “Trust me.”
“Why do you trustme?” Icarus traded his joking tone for one that was earnest and adorably confused. “I’m a vampire. I can kill you before your next breath.”
Adam drew him closer, and Icarus twined an arm around his waist. Pressed together, the last thing Adam felt was threatened. Turned on, yes. Comforted, yes. Life in jeopardy, no. “You had multiple chances to kill me the past week, personally or through Vincent’s hand. You didn’t.”
Icarus lowered his chin, gaze downcast. “I agreed to help them initially.”
“How long did that agreement last?”
“Until I saw you at the club the first time.”
“Exactly.” Adam curled a finger under Icarus’s chin and lifted his face. “And I’m guessing extortion was involved.”
He tried to duck his chin again, but Adam wasn’t having it, wasn’t letting this point go. His tenacity was rewarded with another eye roll and a dramatic huff. “They hacked my cock cage and my vibrating plug. Threats of death and destruction. The usual.”
When Adam failed to stifle his laugh, Icarus stifled it for him, capturing his lips in a scorching kiss that sorely tempted Adam to drag him off the path and into the rows. He was dying to shove his hands inside Icarus’s jeans, cup his ass, and grind against him. Desperate to lower the zipper, sink to his knees, and take Icarus’s cock in his mouth. Ready for Icarus to tangle his hands in his hair and use him. But he wanted all that to happen in the place he dearly missed, the place he hadn’t wanted to return to until Icarus had walked into his life.
He drew back and rested his forehead against Icarus’s jaw. “You didn’t have a choice,” he said between heavy breaths. “And even if you did, I’m not sorry. I think you’re the key.”
“The key to what?”
“That’s a longer discussion.” Fire and destiny, all of it wrapped up in the past and the future. Adam wanted to enjoy the present with Icarus, at least for today. He reluctantly extricated himself from Icarus’s arms and, putting a hand in his, tugged Icarus farther along the path. “And there are some other conversations we need to have first.”
Surprisingly, Icarus let it go. “Where are we going?”
“My favorite place up here. Plenty of sun for you to bask in.”
Neither of them spoke for several minutes, only the rustling leaves, the crunch of gravel, and the errantcawdisturbing the silence. This part of the property had once been a chorus of animal sounds—birds, squirrels, weasels, rats, the occasional fox or deer—but they’d all fled.
“Still not used to the quiet,” Icarus said, as if reading his mind. “Even after thirty years.” Adam whipped around his gaze, surprised by the slip. “Trust nugget for a trust nugget,” Icarus said with a shrug. An intentional slip, it seemed.
And if Adam’s math was right... “The Rift?”
“Just before.”
At the end of the path, Adam veered right, past the ends of the rows and into the grove of olive trees. He stopped short of the field ahead and drew Icarus close, offering another trust nugget, saying what was on the tip of his tongue the way he used to. “I haven’t felt like me in ten years. Not until I met you.”
Icarus swooned into him, forehead landing on his shoulder. “Fuck, Adam.”
“That...” He ran a hand up Icarus’s back and into his hair, using it to gently tilt his face, to draw his gaze again. “That’s the real me. The one who doesn’t hold back. But he’s had to stay locked down, be Adam, the Devil, since...”
“Since the night they died.”
“Everything changed.” That man who wore his heart on his sleeve had burned with his husband and wife, leaving only Adam—and the thing inside him—behind. But pieces of their past remained. “Except this place.”
Untangling, he let go of Icarus’s hand and stepped the final few feet through the trees and into the field of wild mustard, wanting to get there first so he could witness the expression on Icarus’s face, expecting his reaction to be even better than the one at the edge of each terrace.
Icarus didn’t disappoint. He cleared the line of trees, and as their shadow receded and the sun greeted his steps, Icarus’s eyes grew wider, round saucers of joyous blue, matched only by the smile that stretched across his face, as he took in the field of yellow and green. This late in the season, so much of Talahalusi was brown and dry, but protected as this property was by the mountain and the trees, blanketed with roving fog each morning, wild mustard could grow in the spring and fall, the bright yellow flowers stretching as high as Icarus’s knees. Icarus flattened his hands by his sides, brushing the tops of them, laughing at the bees and butterflies that scattered. Without predators, they’d flourished and kept the vineyards, fields, and flowers pollinated. Adam strolled ahead, backward, never taking his eyes off the blissfully happy vampire playing in the sun.
He eventually came down from the high, following Adam to a thinner patch toward the far edge of the field, pulling a sexy pout as he plopped onto the ground next to him. “Do you bring all your lovers here?”
“They brought me here.”
