Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
And the warmth of a lithe body pressed against his back. Pajama-clad legs bumping against the backs of his thighs. Slim hands curled against his shoulder blades.
Soft breaths against his spine, as with a hitching sound Ashton Harrington buried his face against Brand’s back.
Brand stiffened. “Young Master…?” he asked softly.
Harrington shook his head, his dark shock of hair teasing and feathering against Brand’s skin. “Don’t say anything,” he answered in a choked whisper. “I don’t want anything from you. Not like that. Just…just…” That rough, hurting sound again. “…just let me be here. Let me…let me not be alone.”
Brand started to look over his shoulder, unable to help himself when that aching, rough edge to the young Master’s voice caught at the quiet strings of his heart and pulled at them to the point of pain. But Harrington hunched into himself, pressing his hands harder against Brand’s back, then curling them into fists.
“Don’t,” Harrington pleaded, rasping and thick. “Don’t turn around. Just…just stay like this.”
For a moment, Brand remained as he was, taking in the hints of Harrington’s profile he could see in the dark—before he turned to face forward once more, settling into the pillow with the candleglow warmth of his young Master cradled against his back.
“As you wish, young Master Harrington,” he murmured.
Harrington remained silent for several shaky breaths, then, “…Ashton. Ash.”
“Young Master Ashton.”
The bed shook faintly as Ash let out a near-soundless, bitter laugh. “…that’ll work.”
Brand said nothing.
He only let things be, and listened long into the dark of the night as Ashton’s rattling, raspy, tear-filled breaths quieted one at a time.
And slowly, sweetly slipped into the quiet respite of sleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
ASH WOKE TO AN EMPTY, unfamiliar bed.
Not that he didn’t wake that way all the time…but he was usually half as hung over, twice as sore, and not in his own house.
Even if, right now, he wasn’t in his own bed. He was confused for a moment—the master suite was new to him, and that didn’t feel like his bed either when he’d moved out to the pool house the moment he’d returned to the States, and never come back. He’d tried to lie there in that master suite last night, looking up at the vaulted ceilings and listening to the night come in through the windows, cricket-sounds and leaf-whisper riding the breeze, the bed too large for him and everything making him think it should be his father in this room, not him.
Even if his father had never used the grand master suite, either. He slept in a room off his office in the east wing of the house.
Sometimes Ash thought it was no coincidence that that room was as far as it could possibly be from the pool house, letting them circle around each other without their orbits ever intersecting.
That was what they were, he’d thought last night—staring at the mindless eyes of the ceiling’s stucco dots through a haze of champagne that he’d only swilled halfheartedly, the fizzy taste and alcoholic bite doing nothing to chase away a feeling that left him all wrong in his own skin, ill-fitted and his limbs sticking wrong. He and his father were planets in orbits that never overlapped, circling a darkness without even the warmth of a single star.
Maybe that was why Ash always tried to burn himself out, living fast and living hard.
He just wanted the warmth of one bright star, burning in the darkness of his night.
It was that which had chased him from bed, last night—and to the only human warmth close by. Maybe if he’d been sober he wouldn’t have done it. Maybe if he’d been thinking straight, he’d have remembered those cold, cutting green eyes and the contempt with which Forsythe regarded him. Maybe if he hadn’t been hurting all the way down to the marrow of his bones, he’d have thought of that kiss he didn’t understand, and that boundary that shouldn’t have been crossed.
But he hadn’t been sober. He hadn’t been thinking straight. He’d been hurting to the point where it was a physical thing knotted inside him, choking off his air.
So he’d ended up curled up against Brand Forsythe’s back, falling asleep with the man’s body heat cradling him, safe so long as Forsythe didn’t look at him and see him for how small and cowardly he really was.
And now he was waking up alone in Forsythe’s bed, the smell of fresh-cut grass drifting in on the breeze that ruffled the linen curtains over open patio doors. The door between the adjoining master suite and Forsythe’s was open. The man himself was nowhere to be found.
Ash groaned, burying his face in the pillows—pillows that had a faint trace of that earthy scent that had surrounded him as he’d fallen asleep, that scent that had seemed to block out the world and say everything would be okay as long as he let Forsythe take care of anything he needed.