Limitless - Kate Hawthorne Page 0,7

had spent almost a month in Berlin. He’d teased and played and fucked his way through the club scene there, then he’d repeated the process in Amsterdam. This man, this stranger—Leonidas—was offering himself up as a sure thing in a line of other European sure things, and yet Andy hesitated. His pause filled him with doubt, uncertainty…all things he hated.

“Andy.”

“A child’s name,” Leonidas countered.

He bristled at the insinuation. “It’s mine.”

“Andrew?” Leonidas tested.

His name sounded robust with the lilt of Leonidas’s accent and he bit back a low growl. He didn’t succeed though, and Leonidas heard it. He huffed out a quiet laugh and then said, “Andrew it is.”

Andy didn’t say anything in reply.

“Where are you off to next, Andrew the lost American?”

There were a thousand answers, a hundred of which would have been suitable, but none of those words were the ones that left his mouth.

“That way, I think,” Andy answered, pointing across the street, toward the river.

“Hmmn,” Leonidas made that pleased humming sound again, and it resonated deep in Andy’s chest. “I hope you like what you find.”

“Enough talking,” Andy snapped, a little testy and a lot concerned about why he couldn’t keep his head on straight.

The stoplights changed and Leonidas stepped into the intersection, pausing as a throng of people bustled around them, carrying on and moving forward.

“Are you coming?” Leonidas asked, giving Andy a quick look before continuing across the street.

“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, stepping off the curb and following behind Leonidas. He caught up to him a few buildings past Le Select, slowing his pace and falling alongside the taller, darker man.

“There you are.” Leonidas offered him another grin, then crossed the street, skittering around a Vespa that had taken the corner a little faster than it should have.

“I’m here,” he confirmed.

“We have quite a walk ahead of us, Andrew. Maybe you should tell me your story.”

4

Leonidas

Andrew was painfully handsome and he was so self-aware, but also so…not. Leonidas wanted to let Andrew, or Andy, as he insisted, do extraordinary things to his body. He’d watched the way Andy had tucked his hands away so Leonidas couldn’t see them tremble, but he’d seen it anyway. He and this quiet American were cut from the same cloth, of that he had no doubt.

“Have you been to the gardens at Luxembourg yet?” Leonidas asked as they bypassed Le Guynemer and entered the garden grounds. The air changed quickly, the tall chestnut trees shading the sky. It was going to rain, but at least the canopy of leaves offered some relief from the humid air.

“No.”

“Well…” He gestured grandly. “Here you are.”

Andy looked as disappointed as he had when Leonidas found him scowling at the patrons of Le Select, but he didn’t comment on it. He wasn’t particularly fond of Paris himself, but they liked his money here and he’d found as much pleasure as he could in the city. Leonidas had been in Paris for nearly a month, and he’d found a small apartment to rent above an art studio a few blocks away from the Bastille.

The man who owned the place was old and his spine crooked with age, but he let Leonidas toy around in the studio whenever he wanted and that pleased him greatly. He’d always thirsted for a life like this—a life where he could roam and travel and not be beholden to any place or any man.

His family had more money than he’d ever know what to do with, and his patera indulged him his jaunts away from home whenever the mood struck him. This round was meant to be Rome, up to Zurich before Paris, then down to Saint-Jean Pied de Port to begin the pilgrimage he’d planned his entire adult life.

Of all the excursions he’d ever wanted to do, this was the one his parents had fought him the most on. His mama mostly hated the idea of him backpacking five hundred miles across the Iberian Peninsula, but he was her youngest and she loathed to tell him no, so she didn’t, and then he’d gone.

His patera had made it sound like this needed to be the last trip, but Leonidas was still a year shy of thirty. The prospect of returning to Greece and returning to work sat heavy in his stomach, so he’d done his best to not think about it. Having Andy here beside him helped a little bit, and that surprised him, though not in a bad way.

He also tried to ignore that.

“There’s a lot of