Acrobat (19 page)

“Dreo,” I began, “I—”

“You need to be more careful,” he told me, hand on the back of my neck.

I didn’t want to move, didn’t want him to take away the hand that was now rubbing, kneading away the tension.

“You’re not even bleeding,” Michael said to Dreo.

“Why would I be bleeding?” he asked, like his nephew was nuts.

“That was so cool,” Michael told him.

Dreo’s fingers pushed up into my hair, and it took everything I had not to let my head fall back against the sensuous petting.

“So,” Michael said after a minute, clearing his throat. “You’re touching Nate.”

I stiffened, but Dreo didn’t move his hand.

“I am,” he said to his nephew.

“So, uhm, I’m gonna sleep in Nate’s guest room tonight, right?”

“You are.”

“Where are you going to sleep?”

Dreo looked over his shoulder at Michael. “With Nate, if that’s okay. Is it okay?”

There was silence, and I held my breath, because liking me was one thing. Liking me with his uncle was a whole other ballgame.

“What if you and Nate fight? What happens then?”

“Nothing happens to you and Nate,
ragazzo
.”

I felt a hand on my left shoulder. “Nate?”

“I promise,” I said, patting his hand. “You and I won’t change, no matter what.”

He took a breath; I heard him draw it in. “Okay, then.”

“Okay.” Dreo exhaled deeply and moved his hand from behind my head and put it on my thigh. “Okay.”

When we got home, the three of us piled out of the car and rode up the elevator together in silence. They went back to their apartment, and I went to mine. Once inside, everything sort of fell in on me.

Forty-five-year-old men did not start relationships with twenty-eight-year-olds, and definitely not twenty-eight-year-olds who were probably still mob muscle no matter what they said, and certainly not twenty-eight-year-olds with sixteen-year-old nephews living with them and counting on them to be the grown-up. Jesus, how shredded did I want my heart to be?

My phone rang and startled me.

“Hello?”

“So we’re all on for Kung Fu Theater, right?” Dreo asked, his voice a husky whisper.

I nodded, not thinking that he couldn’t see me.

“
Caro
?”

“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “What is, uhm—”

“Like, dear.
Caro
is dear.”

I was such a sap, but his voice, how deep it was, almost breathless, and the endearment, I was just—it was ridiculous. Since when had I become so needy?

“
Voglio fare l’amore con te
.”

“You’ve said that before. What—”

“I want… you know what I want.”

I had not been nervous and flustered with my stomach twisting into knots since I was fifteen years old. Jesus! He was stripping me of years of smooth, cool, suave lover. I had been complimented many a time on my seduction skills. There was a pattern, almost a checklist, and when I wanted someone, I did those things, followed a formula—dinner, kissing, the suggestive banter—it was the arc of my conquest, but with Dreo… with Dreo I was floundering without control. Normally, I was the one with the agenda. I said when and where, and sometimes men missed it, thinking that because I was the bottom I was not the one making the rules, running the show.

“We’re coming over soon. Is that fine?”

“Yeah, I’ll leave the door unlocked. I need to take a shower.”

“Okay.”

I hung up and walked to the front door, unlocked the bottom and the deadbolt, and went to my bedroom, stripped, and then walked naked into my connecting bathroom. Under the hot water, after I scrubbed myself and washed my hair, I let my head roll back on my shoulders and concentrated on letting the tension run out of my body. I closed my eyes and just breathed. I had no idea how long I stood under the spray.

“Are you ever coming out?”

I turned off the water and opened the frosted shower door. Through the steam, I saw Dreo standing with his hand on the doorknob. Stepping out, I reached for my towel only to find it missing.

“I have it,” he whispered, closing the door behind him.

I watched him come close, saw the tenting in the front of his sweats, watched his eyes sweep over me from head to toe, and when I lifted my hand, gesturing him forward, I heard the whimper in the back of his throat.

Nothing quite so incendiary as knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the person you wanted craved you right back. When his hands closed on the sides of my neck, lifting my head up as his mouth came down over mine, the hoarse moan that came out of me made him smile against my lips.

“
Dammi un bacio
.” He breathed over my face before his mouth slanted down over mine and he kissed me.

There was the same drugging effect as the first time, except now, naked, there was no way for him not to know, not to see, what he was doing to me. I trembled under his hands as his tongue got reacquainted with mine, stroking, tangling, tasting. He sucked hard, and when I couldn’t breathe, I broke the kiss, my head back as his lips devoured the skin where my neck met my shoulder. When he bit down, I got my hands on him, in his hair, holding as he leaned me back further so his head could drop to my chest. Then his mouth closed around my pebbled nipples. He suckled and nibbled, and when his fingers wrapped around my shaft, the jolt of electricity was involuntary. I would have fallen, but he had me. Bigger than me, stronger, he eased me down to the floor under him, pinning me there with his weight.

“
Guardami
.”

I could barely breathe.

“I told you to look at me.”

It was hard to open my eyes—I was drowning in sensations—but finally they fluttered open in time for me to see him take the crown of my shaft into his hot, wet mouth.

Every impulse I had said to drive up into him, but I stayed still as he slid his lips further down, not far enough to choke himself, his hand still fisted beneath his mouth, stroking me, the other fondling my balls.

I had so many questions, because Dreo really seemed to know what he was doing, and earlier…. He’d been thinking about me since he met me? There were answers I needed to—

“I wanted it to be perfect,” he growled before a lubed finger slid inside of me.

I would never forget the look in the man’s eyes when I jolted under him. That he had caused the reaction pleased him: his eyes, the way they glinted, told me so, as did the curl of his delectable lips. My lube, opened on the bathroom floor beside him, was a surprise. He would have had to have gotten it out of my nightstand, and the thought of him wanting to find it, searching it out, needing me, made me shiver.

“I never thought—” He caught his breath. “—that you could want me.”

“You’re so beautiful. Anyone would want you.”

“No,” he said, his voice a deep rumble in his chest. “When I’m with you, just standing with you, I’m different, lighter, softer…. Your influence, you change me.”

“Is that”—I shivered, my body flushing with heat—“good?”

“Oh yes,” he said as he stroked my dripping cock.

When he added a second finger in my ass, I groaned loud and hoarse; those deep, dark eyes of his, heavy-lidded and hot, made my heart stop.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the pressure of his fist leaving my aching shaft as he reached beside the lube and lifted the condom to his lips. “The bed will have to wait.”

“I don’t care,” I told him, arching under him as he scissored and stretched, swirling his fingers inside me, rubbing and loosening the muscles, relaxing and arousing at the same time.

The rip of foil as his slippery fingers continued to push in and out, the glide easy as he curled them forward, rubbing over my prostate, all of it made me shudder.

“Lift your legs.”

What? “Don’t you want me on my knees?”

“Fuck no,” he said, and his voice rumbled in his chest as he dragged me over the rough bathmat, lifting me at the same time I felt the head of his cock at my entrance. I hadn’t even looked. His eyes, they were just too gorgeous to tear my gaze from, but when he nudged me, I had to see.

The man was huge. Long and thick and beautiful. Just seeing him tore the whimper from my throat. “Oh God, please.”

“Nate…
ho bisogno di essere dentro di te
… I have to be inside you.”

“Yes, please yes.”

His fingers didn’t meet as he held his cock still and lined it up with my fluttering hole. “I’ll go slow.”

He would not—I wouldn’t let him. I was not some ingénue he was about to fuck. I was a man, and I knew my body well. I had been living in my skin a long time.

I pushed into him at the same time he breached me.

“Nate!” he yelled, surprised and overwhelmed, breath catching as his hips snapped forward.

Instantly, I was impaled on the hard, velvet length of him, and as he pulled out and then plunged back inside, the push took the air from my lungs.

I remembered why I so loved being on the bottom. The feeling of fullness, the delicious drag over my prostate, the stretch that was part pain, part pleasure, the slow burn followed by the building heat—I had missed it all so much. Not that I regretted any of the men I had taken to my bed since Duncan. I didn’t, but God… to be held and filled was heaven.

As the man drove into me, hard and deep, I moaned out his name.

“
Sei così bello
… you’re so beautiful like this.”

I could be handsome in a suit or a tuxedo—I cleaned up nice—but beautiful I had never been. Not ever before, to no one but Dreo Fiore. The words, the husky sound of his sultry voice, the hammering, and his angle pooled heat in the base of my spine. The way his hand stayed fisted on my shaft—tugging, pulling—and how he watched his cock slide in and out of me, all of it was more than I could bear. Every wall came down, and I surrendered.

“Dreo, I can’t—”

“Jesus, you’re so tight and hot and—fuckin’ come!”

His demand, combined with those from my own body, pushed me over the edge. There was no holding back the heaving climax.

My balls tightened, my muscles clenched, and I came over his hand and my stomach, the spasms tearing through me so hard, so long, the orgasm devouring me.

He buried himself deeper, driving inside of me as I shuddered with aftershocks, lifting me, grabbing behind my knees, pistoning fast into my body.

I felt my muscles rippling around him, then fist tight, and he came with a roar, using me, rough and bruising and so very needed. The sounds that came out of me, whimpering, begging, moaning, combined with the catch of his breath as his head fell back and he froze there above me.

He looked as though he had been carved out of marble: the smooth olive skin, chiseled features, sculpted chest and abdomen, and long, hard muscular legs folded beneath him. Not once in four years had I actually seen him, the thick, curling lashes, aquiline nose, and full lips. I wondered at my blindness, how I had not been tongue-tied constantly in his presence.

“
Amo guardarti
.”

I smiled up into his eyes as he gently lowered my legs, placing my feet on the rug as he slowly slid out of my body. “What did you say?”

His eyes were so soft, so dark, and so full of raw possessiveness. I realized that no one had ever looked at me like that before. I could become addicted to it very fast.

“I said I love watching you,” he told me, tying off the condom and rising from his knees, pulling up his sweats before he carried it across the room to the wastebasket next to the sink.

I wasn’t ready to move, and when he returned, standing over me, I told him to get out so I could wash off.

“That’s all? I’m being sent away?”

“What do you want?”

“No, it’s your turn to say.”

I sat up and reached for his hand, tugging him down to me. His heavy-lidded eyes watched me as I climbed into his lap, straddling his thighs, and locked my arms behind his head. I leaned forward, pressing my chest to his, savoring the feeling.

“How do I say—” I smiled, licking my lips, enjoying the catch of his breath. “—I was made for you in Italian?”

“
Ero fatto per te
,” he answered me, his eyes on my mouth.

“You’ll have to teach me the pronunciation,” I breathed out, tilting close to run my tongue over his bottom lip. “I would love to learn.”

He shivered under me and captured my tongue, swallowing my laughter as he kissed me, clutching me tight, arms around me as his mouth slanted possessively over mine. I pushed against him, undulating in his embrace, tightening my thighs around his hips.

Who knew that I could so transfix a man seventeen years my junior?

Our tongues tangled, and his hands ran all over me, finally coming to rest on my ass. He broke the kiss for air.

“
Sei fatto apposta per le mie mani
,” he whispered over my skin, his hot mouth on my throat washing heat through me in a scalding wave. “You were made to fit my hands.”

God, I hoped so. I wanted them on me all the time.

“Nate?”

“I want this,” I told him, because I felt the yearning so deep down that it made my teeth chatter like I was freezing, the emotion welling up, overwhelming. “I want us to try… will you? Can you?”

“How do you mean ‘can you’?” he asked, his eyes all over my face. He reached out to trace one of my gold eyebrows, touch my lashes, the mustache and beard.

“Your family and—”

“My family is Michael, and he likes this already. And I don’t just have custody of him, you know, he’s mine. My sister wanted me to adopt him if anything happened, not just be his guardian. She was very smart, and she knew… she never wanted me to have a problem.”

“What did she know?”

His arms wrapped back around me. He was making sure I couldn’t leave his lap. “She knew I was gay because I told her.”

I brushed silky hair back from his face. It was wavy and had some curl, his thick, glossy hair that I could not seem to keep my fingers from touching. “I only ever caught you with women, Mr. Fiore.”

“You can’t be gay and be mob muscle, Dr. Qells,” he told me, hands sliding over my thighs. “And when Michael talked to his friends and they talked to theirs… it got around that his uncle was a player, and that’s what Mr. Romelli liked to hear.”