“Can I share it with you?”
“You want to sleep over?”
I made a grab for his hand and yanked him to a stop. “I want to share your bed with you, but there’s lots of things I need to do before either of us is getting any sleep. Is that okay?”
“But—“
I shook my head. “Tell me you don’t want me and I’ll back right off, but if you’re freaking out because Rhys has a big mouth, then don’t. Nothing that ever happened between me and Harry was anything likethis.” I put my hand on his chest. Beneath my palm, his heart raced in time with mine. “And it was years ago, before I ever really knew him.”
“How does that work?”
“We hooked up, didn’t see each other again for ages, then became friends through Rhys. It was nothing. I didn’t tell you because I’d pretty much forgotten about it. I’m sorry if that made you feel like shit.”
“It didn’t.”
“Oh yeah?” I tipped two fingers beneath Toby’s chin and forced him to look at me. “That’s a shame, because I’d be jealous as hell if I found out you’d fucked Joe, or Angelo, or any of the other fly dudes on that farm.”
Toby snorted, then his humour seemed to turn troubled again. “But you didn’t fuck Harry, did you? I mean, in theliteralsense. He doesn’t do that.”
“That? What do you— Oh.” It took me a second to fully catch up. “That’swhat you’re pissed off about?”
“I’m not pissed off.”
Maybe it was the wrong phrase, but the longer I stared at Toby, the deeper his frustration seemed to be. His cheeks flushed, and his dark eyes glittered, and even if I’d picked the wrong words, I’d hit the sentiment just right.
Or wrong, if his train of thought had taken him where I thought it had. “Toby...” I said slowly. “I never meant for you to think that was off the table for us. That I was going to fuck you, then walk away without—”
“Without what?”
I stepped impossibly closer to him, more sure of what I was about to say than I’d been about anything in a very long time. “Without letting you screw my fucking brains out.”
19
Toby
Cole was drunk. He had to be because there was no way those words just came out of his mouth.
I gazed at him, wide-eyed and stunned, but he was already walking away, this time in the right direction.
Dazed, I followed. Caught up with him and made a grab for his hand.
He wrapped his fingers around mine and squeezed. Then he smiled at me, and his eyes seemed to glow with a heat I’d never seen before. “Of course, you don’t have to. I’m just saying it’s definitely an option, tonight and any other night we end up like this.”
“Like what?”
“Drunk, impulsive, together... whatever you want to call it.”
I didn’t want to call it anything. Labelling it gave it permanence, and as selfish as it sounded even to my rum-addled brain, I didn’t want Cole to come to his senses. “So you’re saying I could’ve jumped you all along and you’d have been okay with it?”
“Of course.” He spread his hands as if we’d had the conversation a hundred times before. “But you didn’t seem ready for that—like, I kinda figured you needed to get used to being with a dude before we went full throttle, whichever direction we pointed the car.”
“I thought you wanted to fuck me.”
Cole stopped walking. “I do, if that’s something you want when you’re ready, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen the other way round. I’m versatile. There isn’t much I’m not down for.”
I still loved his city accent. It made me hot in ways I couldn’t describe. My body latched onto every syllable and used it to ramp my heartrate up to the thudding tattoo it was currently pounding my ears with. I stepped up to Cole and kissed him like he was my boyfriend. My fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of his neck, and I slid my tongue into his mouth as if I owned it.
Ownedhim.