Page 91 of The Sun & Her Burn

“However reluctantly,” I added with a rueful smirk.

“I knew she would be good for you,” he said smugly.

I should have kept quiet, but the wine at dinner and the scotch combined to make me say, “It’s both of you. I forgot so many of the things I enjoyed in life. Enjoyed about myself, even. It hurts, like sensation coming back to a sleeping limb, but most days, I think it’s a good thing.”

“You may have forgotten yourself, but I never could,” Seb replied with forced casualness, but his body was a tense line against my own. “I’m happy for the opportunity to remind you.”

“Not much has changed,” I agreed, but it was a warning to us both.

I am still the same man with the same fears, I meant.

My old lover nodded slightly, his mouth tight. “I know. Unlike you, I have changed much over the last ten years and grown past childish fantasies. The moon? It is meant to stay far above me in the sky.”

I turned from him, closing my eyes against the flare of pain his world weariness caused me.

I did that to him.

Stripped him of that romanticism and hope that had been so elemental to his beauty.

It was probably why, I thought with dawning horror,he had given me Linnea instead of dating her himself.

He no longer believed in a love that moved the stars and the sky.

At least, not for him.

Fuck, not all monsters had claws and fangs.

I had never felt crueller.

“Don’t beat yourself up too badly,” Sebastian drawled, almost teasing me. “You were always good at that. I knew what I was getting into back then, Adam. And I know what I’m hoping to get myself into now.”

I shifted to look over my shoulder at him to see the pugnacious angle of his chin and the resolution in his honeyed eyes. It made me feel better to know that he could still be a gladiator when it came to defending his passions, however foolish they might have been.

He noticed the way my shoulders relaxed slightly and smiled a little as he bumped his hip into mine.

“I wish I could dance with you both out there,” Sebastian said in a low voice. “It’s been so long since I felt a man against me.”

My throat went dry in an instant.

“You haven’t been with any other?” I asked, but it was all breath and no sound.

Happily, Sebastian understood, and he shrugged. “How could I have fallen in love with any other man? Even the memory of you surpassed the reality of any of them.”

What was a man supposed to say to something like that?

The words punctured the armored walls around my heart, cutting me straight to the soul.

“Sebastian,” I said, and it throbbed like a wound with longing and angst and the pain of new hope mingled with old fears.

“I’ve dreamed of you so many times,” he continued as if he hadn’t just broken my heart and then brought it back to life again with a handful of words. “Touching me again. Tonight, I cannot stop thinking of it.”

I swallowed thickly as warmth swept away some of the anguish.

“Tonight, I don’t want to talk about feelings,” he admitted, very uncharacteristically. He laughed shortly when I raised a skeptical brow. “I want to focus on this moment instead of the past or the next. I want to tell you that I wish I could drag you onto the dance floor and tangle our bodies with Linnea’s.

“I want to feel your big hands on my hips as you move me to the rhythm you set, Linnea between us and writhing. I know you’ve thought about the three of us together.” His chuckle was wood smoke, rich and heady. It made my eyes sting and my throat ache. “She wouldn’t be like Savvy, cold but politely submissive, a tight restraint on her need to be a good girl for us.”

“No,” I agreed, because I had thought about it. Linnea made it impossiblenotto. Just watching her move her hips hypnotically to the beat, her own hands like lover’s trailing over her curves, was enough to tempt a much better man than I to sin. “She is so curious. She would be…enthusiastic.”