Page 131 of The Sun & Her Burn

“For my exclusive use,” I pondered aloud, pressing my foot gently against the front of Seb’s trousers along the ridge of his hardening cock. “What might I do to you, Sebastian?”

To my surprise, he tipped his head back to stare up at me with glittering eyes, a small, wolfish grin widening under the edge of his black velvet mask. “Whatever you want, Adamo. You just have to earn it first.”

My brows raised into my hairline. “Oh, and how might I do that?”

“We’re here,” he said, signalling Linnea and himself. “We want you. I want you. And friendship has never been good enough to quench the hunger I have for you. Ten years later and I am still starving for everything you have to give me.”

“Sebastian.” I said his name because in moments when words didn’t suffice to describe the enormity of my emotions, only his name could come close.

“I need you to prove you want me the very same way,” he declared, bold and brave even on his knees at my feet. “I needyou to show Linnea and me that we aren’t the only ones willing to fight for what is between us.”

“And what is between us?” I dared to ask.

“An impossible universe,” he said solemnly.

I swallowed thickly as I reached out to run a thumb along the strong, stubbled line of his jaw until it rested on the crest of his full lower lip.

“I don’t want to hurt you again,” I confessed and then dug deeper so the words tasted bloody on my tongue, excavated from my very bone marrow. “I don’t want to hurt myself again.”

“Then don’t,” he said simply. “I understand the score. I’m not eighteen and naive anymore. I know I will never walk down the beach holding your hand, telling everyone the moon is my lover. But I can still feel pride knowing you are mine, even if I cannot touch you as I wish in public. Having you in any way is better than not at all.”

His eyes were luminous, lit from within by the eternal flame of his faith and optimism. He made my heart ache with a powerful beat, strong enough to crack open my ribs and fall out of my chest to get close to him.

“Do you agree?” he asked.

I swallowed once, twice, fighting past the fear instinct, the memories of losing my mother, Juliet, in a car crash as a boy, finding Gregory in bloody bathwater, seeing Bryce killed in action after starting to fall in love with him, watching Sebastian walk out of my life during my panic attack, waiting for Savannah to leave me, realizing Oscar Hampton had my neck in a guillotine…

Those “zombie” years after Sebastian and Savannah left, when I’d been weak enough to let Oscar back into my life, had been one long slog of drudgery, shame, and regret with nothing but acting to punctuate my life with glimmers of contentment.

Since Sebastian and Linnea had re-entered my life, none of those things had ceased to exist, but my sense of gravity had adjusted. It was easier to stand tall and have the courage to want and wish again because I had their light to guide me out of those dark memories and moments.

Love made the pain of living worthwhile.

That was what they had been trying to show me and tell me for the past two months.

I just had to reach out and accept the hearts they held out on their proverbial sleeves, and I would be a much richer and happier man than I ever had been before.

Of course, it didn’t mean Oscar would stop trying to sabotage my career or that it would be easy to come out to the public as a bisexual man, let alone one in a throuple. It didn’t mean my father, who barely talked to me as it was, wouldn’t throw a fit if he found out his son liked to suck cock. It didn’t mean I would get to play Anton Daventry, the legendary British spy, a role I had lusted after since I was just a lad watching films for the first time at my father’s knee.

But it meant I had people at my back who would soothe me through the hurts and cheer me through the successes.

It meant I wouldn’t be alone, not ever again, so long as I trusted them and gave them reason to trust me in turn.

I used my hand on Seb’s face to encourage him to stand.

He went willingly, unfolding to his full height, eye to eye with me and toe-to-toe. His physique was that of a swimmer, long and lean with the broad shoulders and narrow waist that made my mouth water.

“How can you trust me again after what we’ve been through? I want to be worthy of you, I want your forgiveness, but how can I earn it after all this time?” I asked because I knew he hadn’t forgiven me. Not really.

How could he when I forced him out of my life and didn’t speak to him for ten years after?

Sebastian studied me, his mouth pressed flat, but his eyes, always the windows to his shining soul, were bright.

“You want my forgiveness?” he drawled in an especially fragrant Italian accent. “Get on your knees and open your mouth.”

I had never been on my knees for another man.

Not in all my years of dalliances or in my training as a Dom at clubs in Britain.