Tales of Darkness & Sin - Pepper Winters Page 0,146
he wanted to hold on.
I turned so I could meet that cold glare of his. “If you want to fuck me, then do it. But own that you want it. You can make me dirty. You can make me little. But don’t make me your dirty little secret,” I said.
“We could never be anything else.”
“Then I guess,” I said, pushing past him, miserable and still so, so horny, “we’ll never be at all.”
And I left him there, alone in the hallway.
CHAPTER THREE
James
They called him Tally.
A silly name for a silly boy.
And like that boy, oddly charming.
It was weeks after the shocking kiss and even more shocking reveal that Tobias Talbot-Ullswater was not only an irritational mistake but an irritating stepbrother.
It should have been enough time to purge myself of my poisonous infatuation with him. Instead, I found my mind drifting in the middle of debriefings with my senior advisors, thinking about the surprising petal softness of Tally’s lips, wondering what ridiculous thing he might be wearing the same day I greeted the prime minister of France and hosted him for dinner with his astonishingly beautiful wife who did absolutely nothing for my errant libido.
The thought of Tally in those magenta trousers painted on to his lean limbs and that damnable thumb ring with the sapphire the same dark, glittering shade as his eyes, of course, made me hard as stone.
I palmed my erection as I sat in my poorly lit office at half past eleven at night in 10 Downing Street because I’d wasted away the day fantasizing about a boy of all people.
The thing was, I’d surmised with a shiver of unadulterated shame, it was his very youthfulness that entranced me so. I was suddenly acutely aware of why Zeus fell in love with Ganymede or Apollo with Hyacinth. Tally’s energetic, almost bouncy energy invigorated me, filling me with a passion for life I’d forgotten over the long, toiling years in politics that had perhaps aged me before my time.
I did not remember a time when I was not serious. My mate, Alexander, often poked fun at my solemnity, but I’d always assumed it was just a matter of my character.
Now, even thinking of Tally and his brattish personality made my heart leap and my lips twitch with reluctant amusement.
I felt as Eurydice must have following Orpheus blindly up into the light, awed and terrified in equal turn.
The infatuation wasn’t enough to change my mind about doing something brash like dating a man before I was even sure I would like one beyond Tally and even like him beyond one kiss.
I was a logical man.
A man of reasoning and philosophy.
So my only conclusion as I was frustrated and stretched thin by fatigue alone in my office––so bloody alone––was to conduct an experiment.
Before I could debate the issue with myself, I pulled up my father’s text message history. He had passed on Tally’s number with the fruitless suggestion we might want to “bond as brothers.”
Unfortunately for my father, nothing was brotherly about my obsession with my new stepbrother.
“Hullo?” Tally answered the phone jauntily.
“I’d like to conduct an experiment.” I cut straight to the point.
He didn’t ask who was on the other side of the phone. He knew, and by the change in his breathing, he was intrigued by it.
“I told you before how I felt,” he reminded me, but his voice was soft, pliable like warmed butter.
He was not at all resolute.
But I was.
“If I am going to suddenly be attracted to me, I want to know how I might react to doing more than kissing,” I explained perfunctorily.
Tally gasped dramatically. “My, my, Prime Minister, are you calling in the middle of the night to have phone sex with me?”
“I am.” I adjusted in my chair, getting comfortable. “Indulge me in this.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you’re curious about me, about what I might want to do to you, and you seem like a man who lets his curiosity rule him.”
“Hmm, that seemed like a backhanded compliment, but you aren’t wrong,” he agreed easily with a note of amusement in his posh voice.
“Are you in bed?” I asked gruffly, already imagining him there.
I was too turned on to use a deft hand or subtlety. My pulse had quickened the moment his voice came through the phone, the heavy beat of it in my groin where my cock was hardening.
There was a slight hesitation, the feather-soft stuttering of a breath caught in his throat, then, “No.”