Max kissed him again and smiled back. “Sorry I woke you. I didn’t realize you were asleep until I’d already jumped on you.”
Jed rubbed his face. It was the kind of awakening he could live with. He squinted at the dark skyline beyond the ledge. “What happened to the music?”
“It’s finished.”
Oops. Still, it felt good to snatch some proper, old-school outdoor sleep. All at once, Jed felt more like himself than he had in months.
He pulled Max to him again and kissed him, hard. Max kissed him back, pushing him against the tree and taking his face in his hands.
Jed slid his hands under Max’s clothes and over the smooth skin of his back. He’d discovered over the past couple of weeks that he loved it when Max took control and climbed all over him. It was wonderfully unfamiliar territory. Most of his sexual encounters, especially those in recent years, had been snatched, dominant affairs, conducted from the top. Perhaps it was because he’d already given himself over to Max in that sense, but he couldn’t recall a time he’d ever enjoyed simply kissing a man the way he did Max.
Max let go of his face and reached for the fly of his jeans. Jed raised an eyebrow but sat back to let him have his way. There was no one around for miles, and Flo would warn them if anyone approached. He lifted his hips so Max could free his cock. Max gave him a devilish grin, bent over, and took Jed deep into his mouth.
Jed hit the back of his head on the tree with an audible thud. He clenched his fists and closed his eyes. Up on the mountain, there was no one to hear his strangled moan, no one to hear Max’s low gasp when Jed pulled him up to straddle his chest and returned the favor.
Up on the mountain, it felt like they were the only two souls in the world.
Chapter Nineteen
MAXCAMEawake with a jump. Startled, he raised his head and rubbed his eyes, squinting in the dark room to find Jed staring back at him. “Was that you or me?”
Jed shook his head. “I don’t know. I was asleep.”
Max frowned. That in itself was unusual. They began every night in Jed’s bed, but Jed rarely stayed the whole night, let alone actually slept. Now, though, he seemed rattled, and before Max could speak again, he slid from the bed and ghosted out of the room.
Max let him go. Jed seemed to operate fine on sporadic, snatched daytime naps, but Max needed his sleep. Without it, his defective brain was prone to malfunction.
He woke the next morning surprised to find Jed sleeping beside him again. He took a moment to stare. They had a heavy day ahead of them, and a lot to do before it even began, but the sight of Jed so soundly asleep was too captivating to pass up. Shame it didn’t last for long.
A few minutes later, Jed opened his eyes with a snap, and though he didn’t move, Max knew he was instantly wide-awake and alert.
“What time is it?”
Max inclined his head to the window. “You tell me.”
Jed’s ability to tell time by a cursory glance at the sky was a standing joke between them. Max had yet to catch him out, and this morning was no different. “Six forty-five.”
Max didn’t bother to check. Instead, he followed Jed’s silent direction and scooted across the bed into his arms. He closed his eyes, enjoying the gentle scrape of Jed’s unshaven jaw on his own close-cropped hair. For a man who could sometimes appear aloof and distant, Jed seemed to enjoy the increasingly tactile side of their undefined relationship, and Max wasn’t about to complain.
“What time do we have to be at Kim’s?”
“Ten, I think,” Max muttered, drowsy and under the spell of Jed’s touch. “I said I’d watch the girls while she got ready. Did you buy yourself a shirt?”
“Nope. Kim got me one. It’s in the truck.”
Max raised his head and met Jed’s smirk with one of his own. “Think she figured you’d turn up in your sweatpants if she didn’t?”
“Probably.”
Max put his chin on Jed’s chest, stretching out the last few minutes they had to spare before he really had to get up. It was the day of the big Valesco family wedding, and with Nick away, Jed had promised Kim an escort—an offer Max was pretty sure was born out of some misplaced sense of guilt for Nick’s predicament, since Jed had shown little enthusiasm for the impending big day.
He had, however, found the time to help Max finish the long-neglected wedding present for Carla’s cousin. Turned out Jed had a ton of foreign poetry on his loaded bookshelves, and he’d found some ancient Spanish script to carve inside one of the dresser drawers. It was a prayer, from the days when Spain lived under Arabic rule.
Later that day, Max found himself in the irritating predicament of his sister trying to dress him. He batted Kim’s hands away from the tie she was trying to throttle him with. “Kim, it’s the Valescos. I’m not your date, Jed is. Go hassle him.”
The scowl on Kim’s face told him she’d probably already tried, and the fact that Jed was nowhere to be seen was pretty telling. No sane man would volunteer to wrangle Tess into a dress and shiny new shoes. Though, to be fair, if anyone could do it single-handed, it was Jed. A theory proved when he reappeared a little while later with a surprisingly presentable Tess in tow.
Max eyed Jed as he relinquished Tess to Kim to have her hair brushed. He was wearing jeans, boots, and a charcoal-gray shirt Kim had clearly forced him into. With his ever-growing hair and scruffy jawline, he looked….