Page 1 of Party of Three (Sapphire Cove Suite Secrets)
It’s almost one in the morning and I’ve been lying awake for an hour, watching the shadows of wind-tossed branches dance on the ceiling of our bedroom.
I want nothing more than to roll over and wake my handsome husband with one stroking hand, to settle down onto the length of him, ride him fast and hard until he fills me with welcome, wet heat.
But somehow that feels like cheating.
My dream-hungry mind is a simmering cauldron of confused fantasies thanks to a conversation with an old friend earlier this evening. Satisfying my hunger without telling Logan what’s driving it feels like using him. I love him too much to treat him like a toy.
Besides, we both need to be up and out of the house by seven, at our desks at Sapphire Cove by eight.
With a senior management meeting scheduled for nine, we’ll only have an hour, tops, to make progress on our to-do lists before the daily cascade of emails begins.
Three different conferences are cycling through the resort this week, two of them on overlapping days that will stretch us to the limit.
I love my job. I love being the general manager of the beautiful, sprawling oceanfront resort my family founded before I was born, the place my husband and I saved from ruin a few years ago.
But I need rest. It’s not the best night to be lying awake, fantasizing about your husband making love to other men.
I tell myself I haven’t done anything wrong.
All I did was give an old high school classmate some steep discounts so he could throw a birthday party for his boyfriend in one of our premier event spaces.
I also added a few free nights for the two of them in one of our private villas.
Buckley Mitchell had sent me two thank-you emails since then, but it wasn’t until earlier tonight that he called to tell me how profoundly the romantic weekend I’d gifted him had impacted his relationship in wild and unexpected ways.
The secrets he shared, the experiences he had within the walls of the resort I run, have me thinking of my husband in an entirely different way. Or silently admitting to a fantasy I’ve always suppressed.
I turn my head, studying Logan’s profile. My eyes adjusted to the darkness two hours ago. His raw, severe beauty makes me ache. In the shadows of our bedroom, he looks like a slumbering god.
I don’t know how I slept through the night before Logan Murdoch and I shared a bed.
Probably by dreaming that a man of his size and strength and loyalty was pressing down against the mattress next to me.
The moment you first realize you’re gay isn’t when the sight of another guy turns you on for the first time and it isn’t during your first kiss with another boy.
It’s when you wake up for the first time cradled in the arms of another man after a peaceful night’s sleep, filled with an entirely new feeling of completeness, of rightness .
Some days I still can’t believe he’s mine.
Which I guess is just a dramatic way of saying sometimes I don’t feel like enough for him.
I am half his size and in the words of Logan’s ornery, loudmouth father, I talk like I’m about to burp glitter.
Logan, on the other hand, is a towering mountain of a man with a voice like low thunder.
Before we got together, he was a much-lusted-after top on the hookup apps many queer men use like dinner plates, a distinction that, along with his Marine Corps background, earned him the nickname Sergeant Stud.
Whenever I try to imagine his wild, bed-hopping life before we got together, I feel two weather patterns slam into each other inside me, creating a fierce storm of desire.
On the one hand, it turns me on to know my boyfriend was that desirable to so many people.
On the other, I spent the first few months of our relationship terrified he’d throw me over at any moment for someone taller, more muscular, someone who works hard to suppress any mannerism or gesture someone else might deride as “too gay,” whatever the hell that means.
It has taken me years to truly believe that I am what Logan Murdoch wants. It helps that he’s done everything he can to convince me of that truth.
So why am I fucking that up by getting hot at the thought of my husband plowing random twinks in our bed?
Willing myself to sleep, I turn my back to him and screw my eyes shut.
But the hunger still courses through me.
As if he can sense it, Logan rolls over, circling one powerful arm over my bare chest, nuzzling his lips against my neck, letting out a low rumble of a groan that suggests drowsy desire.
His hand travels down my bare torso, leisurely and possessively and in a way that tells me I’m his.
He gently grips my thickening cock, letting out a pleased grunt at what he finds there.
His hand lingers, spreading my little slick of pre-cum over the head of my cock with the pad of his thumb.
I’ve been leaking for moments now. I fight the urge to bite the pillow.
His fingers move on, caressing my balls before traveling my taint.
When he finds my hole and gently circles it, I shudder. I have always been wildly sensitive down there, and this thrills him. A live wire, he calls it. But my phone call with Buckley has left me so turned on, the charge that courses through me is stronger than usual.
“My prince is hungry,” he whispers into my ear.
I want him to take me, to pin me to the bed and demolish me. But this will give the images and fantasies Buckley Mitchell sent strobing through my mind a high-definition clarity.
Instead, I roll over so suddenly, I see his eyes pop open in surprise.
“Remember Buckley Mitchell?”
Startled by this non sequitur, he bends his elbow and rests the side of his face in his palm. “Your old friend from high school? The one who’d make you go hiking and then get pissed ’cause you’d always bring several shoulder bags and a parasol?”
A CliffsNotes version of my friendship with Buckley, for sure.
We were the only two gays—who admitted it anyway—at our high school, which meant we spent freshman and sophomore year treating each other like bitter rivals on a CW show.
Then, right before junior year, our mutual desire to meet other guys like us made us besties, and we started speeding off to whatever SoCal gay bar we thought would buy our fake IDs.
A few times, we tried hooking up, but we were so dramatically not each other’s type that our make-out sessions always felt like taking too long to suck the juice from an orange slice.
“First of all,” I say, “it was a regular umbrella, which is the best sunscreen there is, but yeah, that Buckley. Also, you thought he was cute when you met him at Pageant of the Masters.”
Logan furrows his brow, as if he can barely remember attending the Laguna Beach arts festival at all, even though I drag him every year.
“I didn’t think he was cute. You asked me if I thought he was cute when we met and I said not really and you didn’t believe me so you kept asking me over and over again because you get unnecessarily jealous whenever another blond bottom walks into the room. ”
“Only if they’re under five six.”
“So did you and Buckley have a fight?”
“Not really. He was calling to thank me for the party I let him have for his boyfriend in Dolphin. And everything else, I guess.”
“Everything else?”
“Turns out his relationship kinda rocketed up to the next level after that weekend, and he wanted to give some credit to Sapphire Cove. And me, I guess.”
“Interesting.” Logan strokes my forehead, but I can tell he’s trying to be patient while quietly wondering why my phone call with Buckley is worth delaying what had been cranking up to be one of the better fucks of our marriage. “Am I supposed to ask what the next level is?”
“It freaked me out a little.”
“How so, babe?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I mean, it feels self-centered. His story’s not about me. Or you and me. But some of the things he said…”
Slowly, Logan pushes himself up to a seated position and then pats his thigh.
I recognize the invitation. He wants me to drape my head and torso across his lap so he can run his fingers through my hair.
Mostly he does this to me to relax me on nights when I can’t fall asleep.
Tonight certainly qualifies. Right now, I figure he’s simply trying to calm me down enough so I can give voice to my tangle of thoughts.
It works.
“Storytime, it sounds like,” he asks. “Start at the beginning.”