I pass him a coy look. “Oh, I have a pretty good idea just how hard it’s been.” I palm his erection, which only causes the fire in his gaze to burn brighter.
Before I can protest, he lifts me up, forcing my legs around his waist. His mouth slams against mine, his kiss voracious, hungry, desperate as he carries me toward my makeshift bedroom.
When he reaches the doorway, he pauses, looking around. “Where the hell’s the door?”
“I told you. This is just a den.”
He glances at me, then out to the open living room before back at me again. “Oh, fuck it,” he growls, practically tossing me onto my clothes-covered bed.
“Julian!” I squeal, laughing at the playful deviousness in his expression.
He hurriedly shrugs off his suit jacket while I rip my t-shirt over my head, both of us frantic to scramble out of our clothes. Finally, once his boxer briefs land on the top of our discarded things, he retrieves a condom from his wallet and climbs onto the bed, crawling up my body.
Impassioned lips find mine and I melt into him. He tastes as I remember…citrus, spice, and Julian.
“Guinevere…,” he pants.
“Yes,” I exhale.
“I’m buying you a fucking apartment with a door. And a better bed than this pullout sofa.”
I laugh, the sound echoing through the room. “And why would you want to waste your money on that when I can just crash at your place?” I bat my lashes, passing him a demure look.
“So I can show up at your place anytime I want.” Leaning back, he rips the packet open with his teeth, then rolls on the condom.
When he teases me with his length, I grab the back of his neck, every inch of me alive with anticipation. “And why would you want to do that?”
“So I can have you anytime I want.” He exhales as he pushes into me, slow and restrained, filling me in a way only he can.
Our eyes meet as our bodies connect, but unlike before, it’s not just the joining of our bodies. It’s the joining of our hearts, our minds, our souls. I thought Trevor made love to me all those years we were together. He never did. But Julian… This moment, this feeling. This is exactly the love I’ve been searching for my entire life.
Maybe four isn’t such a bad number, after all.
Chapter Thirty-Six
My fingers draw light circles around the grooves of Julian’s scars as we lay in his bed, the motion now as innate as breathing. It’s a far cry from the morning I woke up in this same bed and had a panic attack about where I was, who he was. Now, this is the only place I want to be. It has been for the past two months.
As summer made way for fall, our relationship truly blossomed. We’ve opened up to each other in a way I never did with Trevor. I want Julian to know everything about me. And I want to know everything about Julian. Thankfully, he wants me to know everything, regardless of how sad and horrible. He shares these things because he knows I won’t judge him. I’ll love him in spite of it.
I’ll love him because of it.
It doesn’t matter that he still hasn’t uttered those three magic words to me. He will when he’s ready. In the meantime, I shower him with my own love.
“How did you meet Mr. Price?” I ask in a lazy voice, spent and sated after our latest round of lovemaking. As much as I enjoy going out with him and being seen on his arm, my favorite place is still in his bed. He’s an exciting and enthusiastic lover, one I can admit I’m incredibly addicted to.
“Mr. Price?” He peers down at me from where I rest in his embrace, relaxed from the steady rhythm of his beating heart.
“Yeah.” I continue tracing circles around his scars. At first, it made him self-conscious. Now, I like to think it offers him the comfort he needs, that he deserves. “I know what Camille and you have shared, but I get the feeling there’s more to it.”
“What? You don’t think I’m some criminal mastermind who took advantage of an old guy, like his children do?”
His words bring a smile to my face. Now that I know the real Julian Gage, thinking of him as a criminal mastermind is absurd.
“Absolutely not.” I shake my head. “Plus, I did the math. When you met him, he was in his sixties, not this elderly, feeble man his kids made him out to be.”
“That’s for sure. He had more energy than I did some days. Thankfully, the judge realized his kids were greedy and pissed off their father didn’t give them the bulk of his wealth.”
“But I also think there’s more to the story than you befriending a lonely man over a game of chess.”
“I can’t get anything past you, can I?” he comments on a long sigh.
“No, you can’t.”
His lips curve into a small smile, eyes sparkling as he stares into space. He pulls me closer into him as he sighs, relaxing. If I asked this same question a few months ago, he would have closed up. Now he talks about his past with no hesitation. It hasn’t been easy. There have been moments he’s struggled to share certain things, especially when I asked about the aftermath of his mother’s death and he told me about the six months he spent in a juvenile detention facility before the judge ruled he acted in self-defense. Regardless, he’s slowly learning how to open himself to me.
“No one really knew how to handle me in any of my foster homes. I never got the help I should have when I was first placed in the system. I went to therapy, but it didn’t work…at least not for me. I kept blaming myself for what happened. When I got to be too much for my first family, they sent me on to the next home. The cycle repeated for years, so much so that I thought this was my penance for taking another man’s life.”
“Julian…” I tighten my arm around him, kissing his chest. “You don’t honestly believe that, do you?”
“I did at the time. And I’ll admit there are times I still do. I had no direction in life. When I first arrived at a new home, my foster parents would care for a little while, hoping to save some poor kid from becoming another statistic so they could brag to their friends about all the good they were doing. Until they realized how difficult it was. They’d quickly lose interest and wait for Child Services to come and take me to a new placement so they could try all over again with a new kid. By the time I was sixteen, I was so used to the cycle, I stopped caring, stopped trying. I’d been through so many foster homes, I’d lost count.”
“It couldn’t have been all bad. I’m sure you had friends at school.”
“I was never in the same one long enough to make friends. Child Services did everything to keep me in the same district, but it wasn’t always possible. I always had to start over again in new schools. After a while, I stopped trying to form friendships with anyone there, since I knew it would only be a matter of time before I was uprooted again. Plus, I hated being teased by everyone about the fact that I didn’t have real parents. I acted out, allowed my anger to get the better of me. I was suspended from school a lot. And that’s actually what brought Theodore Price into my life.”
“How so?”
“I was living in a foster home with five other kids in Fort Lee, just across the Hudson from New York. My foster parents had their hands full, so they never realized when I wasn’t there. Hell, when I brought home my notice of suspension, they signed it without even reading it. They were just going through the motions, knowing the clock on me was ticking. I was a few years from being eighteen and aging out of the system, with no hope for a future.
“When my mother died and Child Services came to take me away, they let me bring a few items with me. I’m not sure how, but my mother’s old address book ended up in my things. I think I just wanted something with her handwriting on it and that was the first thing I could find. Well, as I grew older, I became more and more angry about the shitty hand I’d been dealt. I figured everything would be different if I had a real family, people who actually cared about me. So I looked in my mother’s address book and paid her parents a visit at their multi-million dollar home in the Upper West Side.”