Up for Heir - Stella Starling Page 0,37

seat until Edvin was practically on top of him. “That’s much too far away,” he murmured, wrapping an arm around him.

“Too far away f-f-for what?” Edvin asked, feeling slightly breathless again because there were a whole lot of ways that he hoped Leo might answer that, and most of them involved the two of them getting naked.

Oh, wait. No. Bad Edvin.

No matter how plush and private the back of the luxury car felt, they weren’t alone, and they were also, technically speaking, out in public. And sure, the prince had a history of being photographed in compromising situations in much more public places than this over the years, but since he’d kept everything physical between them on the sweet and maddeningly innocent side so far, surely he wouldn’t want to…

Wait, would he?

Edvin bit his lip, his heart rate tripling.

Did he?

“Too far away for a proper hello,” Leo said, tilting Edvin’s chin up and kissing him in a way that started out just as sweet and innocent as their first kiss at the Zasfer estate, but that quickly became neither of those things.

Oh Lord, maybe he did.

Edvin made an embarrassingly needy sound and somehow wound up on Leo’s lap, wrapped all the way around him and feeling like he was about to combust when Leo’s kisses started trailing south, across his jaw and down his throat, clearly on a quest to discover previously untapped erogenous zones that Edvin was more than happy to cede all rights to.

“I missed you,” Leo said even though they’d just been together the day before. “You’re addictive, Eddie,” he added, unbuttoning the top few buttons of Edvin’s shirt as his hot mouth continued to do wicked things, moving lower and lower. “Did you know that, darling?”

Leo’s brain short circuited.

Darling?

Addictive?

Him?

No, Edvin hadn’t known that. In fact, Hans—the only other man he’d ever been with—had called him boring. A disappointment. Neither experienced enough in bed, nor good enough to be bothered with anymore after Hans had figured that out.

“Eddie?” Leo asked, his big hands going still as he pulled back and looked at Edvin with a little frown. “What’s wrong?”

Unfair. Hans was not allowed in Edvin’s head while Leo was touching him like this… or ever. Not ever sounded good, too.

Right.

Decided.

Edvin was officially banishing Hans from his brain for good. But unfortunately, the damage had already been done. Now, mixed in with all the delicious ripples of heat and giddy, tingling excitement that Leo’s hands and mouth and presence had stirred up inside him, there was a sick feeling of dread, too.

It had hurt when The Banished One had broken up with him, and hurt even worse to discover why, but what if Leo kept up with what he’d just started and then, once they got to the naked bit, Leo was disappointed in him, too?

That would be devastating.

“What’s wrong?” Leo repeated, straightening the open collar of Edvin’s shirt and tugging it closed again. His eyebrows drew together. “Is this too much?”

“No,” Edvin blurted, wishing he had the power to curse The Banished One for his lingering words with a lifetime of soggy cereal and shoddy cell phone service and… and testicular fleas. Vicious, mean ones, preferably… but of course a disease-free variety, because Edvin wasn’t a monster. “N-N-Nothing’s wrong,” he added in the hopes of getting them back on track despite the echoes of his past failures.

“Liar,” Leo answered immediately, with a sexy wink that made Edvin cave immediately. He’d always been horrible at any kind of deception anyway, and hated the idea of lying to Leo in particular.

“S-S-Sorry, yes, okay, well, the thing i-i-is…” Edvin darted a nervous glance at the back of Nils’s head and dropped his voice, leaning in to inhale a fortifying lungful of the prince’s deliciousness—

Wait, no, leaning in to whisper the last bit in Leo’s ear. An effort to try and preserve a modicum of dignity, not because of a growing addiction to Leo’s scent. An addiction to Leo’s everything, if he was being honest. So maybe… maybe based on Leo’s previously demonstrated mind-reading skills, he hadn’t been saying that Edvin was addictive a moment ago, he’d just been calling him out on how far gone Edvin already was for him.

That definitely made more sense.

“You’re stalling,” Leo whispered, sending a hot shiver racing down Edvin’s spine when he followed up the accusation with a nip to Edvin’s earlobe. “You can tell me if you’re not ready to—”

“I am,” Edvin blurted, as the throbbing bulge in his pants that had been relentlessly