AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You know we could see you both out there?” Criswell asked as he arrived with a bottle of club soda and a clean napkin. “For your knees.”
If not for Mama’s teachings on how to handle embarrassing moments, I would have kicked a chair in frustration. Instead, I thanked the young redhead and decided to join in the jesting.
“Philip is right. Now we all know how not to enter a tent!”
The crowd laughed and somehow, the moment lightened. Barnaby, always the mother hen, began clucking about, checking me for bruises. When he found none, he began fretting about my trousers, but I waved him off jovially.
“The prime rib is being served. Can you supervise the lines, Barnaby, and make sure everyone gets a healthy portion?” I asked to send him away for a moment. He gave me a long look with worried gray eyes, then, as always, set off to do as I asked. The Gladiators all moved off to get in line, leaving me facing Philip as two servers worked to re-zip the tent.
“Thank you for breaking the tension of the moment with your humor,” I softly said to Philip and handed him the club soda. “I suspect your backside will need this.”
“Nah, these are old. I wore them to a Memorial Day picnic with the family back in May. Me and the younger cousins, the under-twenty crowd, set up a game of touch football. The kids run me ragged, and my shorts took the worst of it. Got torn in a delicate place but Ma sewed up my crotch, so yeah, you keep the club soda for your fancy pants.”
He placed his hand over mine to nudge the bottle back to me. His fingers rested on mine for a long, long moment before someone called his name. Our gazes snapped apart.
“The meat is prime,” I nervously stated, my head and heart vying for a spot in the most erratic body part contest. They would be striving for second place for my cock, traitorous thing that it was had soundly captured the gold. It was still half hard and leaking.
“Yeah, I got a feel of that when we were kissing.”
He gave me a wink that made my slowly flagging prick begin to perk back up. My sight stayed on his ass as he wandered through the crowd, talking to everyone and anyone. I cleared my throat, cheeks still warm, and fumbled my way outside to draw in large gulps of breath as I tried my best to figure out what the fuck was going on. When I came to no sensible conclusion other than I wanted to get Philip under me—or on top of me—in the worst way, I did the only sensible thing.
I dumped the cold bottle of club soda over my head.
Barnaby would, as Philip would say, birth a city bus, when he saw the mess my clothing—and I—were now in.
Chapter Nine
Phil
Not wanting Henry to think I was scared to face him after that whole fiasco at the winery tent, I hauled my ass home after the celebratory party for Tarcy. He’d won the race and had taken a shitload of people, his racing crew and a dozen or so Gladiators, to a Bar-B-Q shack on the outskirts of town. I’d hung there as long as I could so that I didn’t appear creepy, but once the staff started sweeping the floor after stacking chairs on tables, I left, alone, and took the longest way back to the chalet that I could find.
Something had to give here. Henry and I were going to either come to blows or blow each other. Personally, I’d take door number two, Monty, but who knew what the stoic Frenchman with the pretty blue eyes wanted? Surely nothing to do with me. Well, maybe he did want something from me…
The big house was quiet when I snuck in the side door, the servants’ entrance as Madame had whispered to me just the other day while we had been having a beer and nuts break. Seems Madame enjoyed a tall frosty just like us common folk. She also liked to eat cashews and gossip. She’d filled me in on the Gaudion family, including the bunch back over there in France as well as the ones who had come to America. Henry had been the only child to survive to adulthood. He’d lost both his parents and now runs the business all alone. Which, from what I’d seen during my time here, it was how he liked to do most everything. Alone. If not for Barnaby and Madame, I’d say the man was a true hermit, if hermits wore Hermes.
It was well after midnight when I entered the kitchen, wholly unprepared to find anyone lurking around with their face buried in the fridge.
“If you’re looking for the last of the cheesecake, I ate it,” I announced, leaving the light from the fridge and the stove hood as the only illumination in the cavernous room. Henry’s blond head retreated from the inside of the Amana with speed, his face as sour as the lemonade on the shelf. “You snooze you lose,” I tossed out just to see his brows deepen.
He closed the door gently, his sight moving from me to the cookie jar. “Fortunately, I am aware of my responsibilities as a host. Knowing you enjoyed the last slice of cheesecake fills me with joy.”
“Man, you suck at lying.” I chortled and then popped the top off the ceramic cookie jar and reached in to fish out a pink macaroon for him. “Here, take two. They’re small.” I removed a few more for him and a few for me, then placed the lid back on the jar. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I could ask the same of you. It’s been like hosting a ghost of late.” He took the cookie with tender caution. It was as if he was scared that if our fingers touched, we’d lose control, which just might happen. There was something about this man that pushed the levers connected to my dick. I’d spent hours today trying to figure out what, if anything, we had in common and had come up with squat. And yet, despite us being apples and alligators, every time we got close, we ended up in a lip-lock.
“Oh, well, I figured you might need space after we got all over each other in the garage,” I confessed. It was a half-truth. Yeah, I had stayed out of his path because he had to be freaking out about kissing a lowborn guy like me, but I was also keeping my distance because he confused me big time. Sure, he was pretty. But other than that, what was the pull? I had no clue. This was a puzzle that I couldn’t seem to talk my way out of. “Guess after the show we put on today that garage kiss was nothing.”
“Hmm, yes, we did give the race fans something to see,” he replied and took a small bite of his cookie. He was such a prim and proper man. Made me feel like a caveman at times but I could not look away as he chewed delicately, his light hair glowing amber in the muted light flowing out from under the stove hood. “I feel as if I should—”
“Nah, don’t apologize. We both kind of had a hand in that little scene,” I hurried to say to spare him from trying to excuse his behavior when we both were randy buggers. “I wanted to kiss you bad.” I shrugged, chewed, and met his wide-eyed look. “And I still do. Seems I either want to pop you in that tiny nose of yours or fall to my knees to suck your dick.”
The only reply I got was him choking on his cookie. I reached around to slap him on the back, and the brush of his chest against mine was all we needed. His mouth slanted over mine. Guess he wasn’t choking on a cookie after all. The cough was the sound a refined gent made when someone mentioned cock sucking. Cookie crumbs lingered on his lips, making the kiss that much sweeter. I licked them off as he positioned me flat against the fridge, then, much to my surprise and joy, went for the zipper of my shorts.
“Perhaps if we just do it that will purge this crazy fire inside me,” he gruffly said while freeing my cock from my pants. I nodded silently, unwilling to speak in case it broke the spell that had us bound to each other. Again.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” I panted, tugging at his shirt until it was freed from his pants. He was still dressed from the raceway event, his clothes smelling of wine and sweat as I began removing them from his lithe body. Tall and lean, I ran my hands over his chest as he feasted on my throat. If he really was a vampire, he’d get no fight from me. “Your bedroom or mine?”
“They’re both mine, Philip,” he teased, and the soft purr of that accent made my balls ache. “Mine is closer.”
