Chapter 80 – Pleasing the Boss

“—Pavla.”

“Right.” Then I remember the odd thing about Hunter’s biography. Pavla had married Reynard when Hunter was two. Nowhere on the internet could I find a mention of Hunter’s mother. I hadn’t been interested enough at the time, but now I realize why the information had been hidden, why Adly made the remark she did. Why Hadrian’s mother was absent. “You and Hunter have the same mom?”

Hadrian gives the slightest of nods, as if he’s still unsure he wants to share this secret. “I’ve never told anyone that.”

Warmth flutters up my spine. A day ago, it would have felt dangerous to feel honored where Hadrian is concerned, but now I feel privileged. Special. It’s the most vulnerable I’ve ever seen him, and I wonder if he’s ever been this vulnerable with anyone else.

I could dwell on that for hours, but there’s also the bomb that just exploded. “Wait—your mother had an affair with Reynard—had a baby with him—and no one knows about it?”

His half smile is panty-melting. “It’s just one of our many dirty little secrets.”

“So…” I have so many questions. I don’t know where to start. I turn to face him, pulling my feet underneath me again. “Was it actually an affair? Were your parents already together? How did Hunter end up with Reynard instead of your mom?”

Hadrian takes a breath, and it seems he’s going to shut the whole conversation down, feeling that he’s already said too much. Part of me wants to give him permission to stay silent, but another part of me believes he needs to say these words he’s never said and get them off his ch*st.

I wait quietly, and after a beat, I’m rewarded.

“It’s a taboo topic in our household, so what I know is what I’ve worked out on my own. Before my mom and dad got together, she was with Reynard. She got pregnant. They broke up? Reynard, being a Seymour, was able to get full custody. And he’s the worst, Brystin. You think any of the rest of us are bad…we look like angels in comparison to that man. He must have denied her any contact with him. So…I think my father must have felt sorry for her? Or he already loved her. I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure the only reason she married him was so that she could have whatever contact she could get with her son.”

“Oh.” It’s a punch in the gut. That poor woman, and I sure as hell know what it feels like to be Samuel if his love was as one-sided as Hadrian seems to believe it was.

But my sympathy at the moment is all for Hadrian, unloved by his father, believing he was always an afterthought for his mother. “She was put in a terrible position,” I say, as if that might make it better. I want to touch him, stroke his face. Ease his pain with touch, but I’m afraid of being too invasive so I sq***ze the hand that’s still wr*pped around mine. “An impossible position, Hadrian. I know that doesn’t—”

He cuts me off, seeming not to want my platitudes. “She should have focused on the kids she had. We were there. Instead, she pined over Hunter. Talked about him all the time. Stared at his pictures, looking for her own traits in his features. It’s impossible”—he enunciates the word, the same one I’d used—“for me not to hate them both.”

It hits me so hard, this grief that he carries, that I have to bite my l*p so that I don’t cry. The heated interactions he’s had with his cousin—holy shit, his secret brother—make sense now, and I have no words. No words to console him. No words to address this pain.

But the more I study him, the more I’m not sure that’s what he wants. He’s explaining to me. That’s all. Telling me his secrets.

He brings my hand up to his mouth and brushes a k**s across my knuckles. “He was my role model, Brystin,” he says, echoing what I said to him earlier. “He taught me that love will die and to never let anyone in.”

My heart feels like it’s shrinking as disappointment sinks in. All of this work tonight, all this opening up only to get to this excuse?

I refuse to let the door close without pushing back. “But now he’s letting someone in.”

He nods, considering. “And now I’m letting someone in.”

Every muscle in my body releases as I realize he wasn’t shutting a door at all.

I swallow, afraid to let elation in until I’m certain. “Are you?”

Another nod, slow but sure. Then his own caution steps in. “You and Elvis…?”

I can’t shake my head fast enough. “There’s nothing, Hadrian. I wanted him, but he never wanted me. Our marriage isn’t anything. We aren’t…real. We’ve never been real.”

Relief spreads like sunrise on his features. He leans toward me and reaches his hand out to stroke my cheek. “Is this…real? Are we…real?”

A dam of emotion breaks inside me, and I know if I don’t k**s him soon, I’ll cry, and it hits me how cruel Elvis has been all these years, able to sit on this side of the same kind of plea I’ve given to him, feeling nothing. Thinking instead that there was an emotion to be played and used. I don’t think I could ever do that to a human who looked at me with as much vulnerability as Hadrian has looking at me now.

But maybe that’s not fair to judge Elvis because I’m not in his position. I feel so much for Hadrian. And it’s so genuine that I practically burst when I tell him. “So f**king real, Hadrian. So f**king real.”

We come together tentatively, our l*ps brushing once, twice, three times before clutching together in a static k**s. As frenzied as we’ve been every time before, this time we’re deliberate, exploring as though we’re new to each other. As though we’re new to making love, and perhaps we both are because everything about this feels different than any other time I’ve been with a man, despite how infatuated I believed I was.

Once, years ago, Shiloh said to me that love was different when it was reciprocated, and I bottled up and didn’t speak to her for days, though I’m not sure she realized it. I was certain that she couldn’t know how I felt, how I loved enough to make up for what was lacking on the other side.

Now, as Hadrian k**ses down my neck, as he undresses me with gentle hands and learns the religion of my body with the reverence of a zealot, I see how true Shiloh’s statement was. So true that I don’t need to hear the words from Hadrian’s l*ps to know that what we’re both feeling is love. It might even be a long time before either of us are familiar enough with the emotion to be capable of exp**ssing it in words.

For now, we exp**ss it like this, with his t***ue along the hollow of my neck, with his palms splayed across my belly, with his fi**gers feathering the skin at my h*ps, with his mouth bet**en my th**hs.

Perhaps the greatest tell that this time is different is that, when I go for the b**tons on Hadrian’s shirt, for once he doesn’t stop me. Except for the time I caught him in the shower, I’ve never seen him undressed. I even wondered once or twice if he was hiding some childhood scar or some imperfection beneath the layers of clothes he kept bet**en us, but now in his naked magnitude, I discover he is physically flawless. Toned where a fit man should be toned. Groomed where a man of class should be groomed. Hard where a virile man should be hard.

I touch as much of him as his patience allows, skating my l*ps over taut biceps and firm forearms. Dancing my fi**gers over the plain of his torso. Finding him adorably ticklish behind his knees. Discovering how sensitive he is at the spot bet**en the backdoor and his balls.

By the time he picks me up and carries me to his room, I feel like an advanced scholar in the language of Hadrian Seymour, only to realize I’ve barely begun my studies when he lays me on his bed and t**ses me to orgasm several times before sliding into me with the hottest, hardest c**k I’ve ever had inside me.

Only then does the Hadrian I know make an appearance, talking dirty as he rolls so I’m on top. “Such a w*t hole when it’s happy, isn’t it? Able to take as much as my c**k will give, such a greedy little cunt.” He abuses my sensitive c**t with the pad of one fi**ger and pinches my n**ple with the other until I squeak out in pleasure/pain. “Bounce on me, baby. Show me you know what to do with a c**k that wants to treat you so right.”

His tolerance for leaving me in control only lasts so long, though, and soon his fi**gers are gripping into my h*ps, lifting and lowering me to meet the rapid th**st of his pelvis. His c**k at that angle sends blinding sparks across my vision, and I collapse against his ch*st with a jagged m**n.

“Oh, no. You aren’t done until you’re filled with my cum.” He rolls us again and takes my mouth with a passionate k**s while he brutishly beats into me, and I think about his words while I drive my nails down his back, while another orgasm threatens to twist through my exhausted body. Think about how I could never be filled with him. Think about how there would always be room inside of me for more. How I could never just take the pieces, because until I had all of him, I could never consider myself whole.

How easy it is to love someone completely.

How easy it is to be loved completely in return.

Afterward, in the dark, when our skin is soaked with sweat, our bodies coiled around each other, we flit around the heavy sentiments in fragmented phrases.

“I’ve never,” he says.

“I know. Me too.”

“It’s not what I thought.” He strokes a strand of damp hair out of my face. “You?”

“It is, and it isn’t.”

He nods, and I’m sure he understands.

“We can’t…” Lose this. Let each other go.

“We won’t,” he promises.

“We have to—”

He cuts me off with a fi**ger to my l*ps. “We’ll figure it out, honeybee.”

“We will?”

“We will.”

I fall asleep believing him.

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