“You like everything,” she said, trying to swat the thumb he was still holding up.
He pulled it out of her way and added an index finger to his list. “I have also observed that you enjoy it when I go down on you—and again, our interests are perfectly in alignment.” He took the two fingers he’d used to make his list and tapped his forehead. “So I took my big brain and put those two things together. My god. It’s almost like you’re sleeping with Elon Musk.”
“Elon Musk? Gross!”
“Hmm. Elon Musk is a mood killer. Noted. Mark Zuckerberg?”
“Ugh!” She couldn’t help but laugh, though.
“Perhaps it’s the tech-sector angle you’re objecting to in these analogies. Who else is known for their intelligence? Hmm. Angela Merkel?”
“Oh shut up.”
“You know what would be an extremely efficient way of getting me to shut up right at the moment?” He wagged his eyebrows and licked his lips.
Well. Who was she to pass up this opportunity? She scooched herself up until she was kneeling over his face. “What if I smother you?”
“Ah, what a good way to go.”
“But then Sebastien will have to be duke.”
He lightly swatted her butt. “This is not a good time to talk about my brother. Or my dreaded fate.”
“Yeah, yeah, point taken. I—” And, wow. He looped his arms around her thighs like he was anchoring her to him—or him to her, she wasn’t sure which—pulled her down, and . . . went to town.
Historically, Dani had enjoyed oral sex, but honestly, she’d never totally gotten the hype. It had never been at the top of her list. But there was something about the combination of Max’s mouth moving against her and the pressure from being on top. There was also something about the noises he was making. He was clearly enjoying himself.
She couldn’t keep herself from moving, and she couldn’t hold back the obscene-sounding moans that were slipping out, because dear god, she was writhing around on his face and she had never felt anything so good. She never wanted it to end, but it was going to, and soon.
“Oh my god, Max!” she cried as an orgasm started to overtake her. Absurdly, it felt like it started in her toes and moved up her legs in a wave, coming to a head at the juncture between her thighs, where his mouth met her, and just kept . . . exploding. She, not historically a screamer, screamed.
He chuckled, and the vibrations joined the aftershocks zinging through her core.
She lifted herself up onto her knees and looked down at him. His face was wet—and nearly split in two from the widest grin she’d ever seen on him.
She was struck by the astonishing thought that she had never felt this good before, and she didn’t mean just physically.
Max couldn’t sleep that night, which normally would be nothing new but was sort of new given that since he had been sharing a bed with Dani—or her dog—he’d been sleeping like a baby. Tonight, he had too many thoughts zipping through his brain. Around midnight, overwhelmed by them, he sneaked out of his room and went into the bathroom of Dani’s and called his brother. It was not lost on him that last time he’d made a covert phone call from a hotel bathroom, it had been to Dani.
“Remember how you said you didn’t want to hide anymore?” he said when his brother picked up.
“Hello to you, too. No, you didn’t wake me. How’s the honeymoon going?”
Seb was joking, but the time with Dani here—and in Riems—had felt like a honeymoon. Max had been free from the oversight of the wider world and completely wrapped up in Dani. Emotionally, before, but now physically, too. “You said you didn’t want to hide anymore,” Max pressed on. “And I said I’d help you. Which I meant,” he rushed to add.
“Yes. That came out a little melodramatically,” Seb said, “but the sentiment was genuine.”
“So you want to come out. To Mother and Father.”
“To everyone, I suppose. I don’t want to . . . live this way anymore.”
“Good,” Max said, perhaps a tad too urgently.
“Max? Are you all right?”
“I’m in love with Daniela Martinez,” he blurted, “and I don’t know what to do about it.”
There was a slight pause before Seb started laughing.
“I beg your pardon?” He was a sorry specimen, he realized, but he wasn’t sure he deserved mockery.
“I’m sorry,” Seb said. “I’m not laughing at you, or her. She’s amazing. Of course you’re in love with her. It’s the idea of you being in love with anyone. It’s so . . . not you.”
“Well, that’s my point,” Max plowed on. “I don’t think the me everyone knows really is me. Not anymore, anyway.”
“Ah.” Seb had shed all teasing from his tone. “So you don’t want to hide anymore, either. Is that what I’m hearing?”
Yes. That was exactly right. “What do I do, Seb?”
His brother didn’t answer right away. Max wondered if Seb, like him, was thinking about how profoundly the tables were turned with that question. It used to always be Max leading Seb. Clearing the way for him.
“Does she know how you feel?” Seb asked. “Does she feel the same?”
“No on both counts.”
“How do you know she doesn’t return your feelings?”
“Even if she does, she won’t let herself. It’s . . . complicated.”
“Ah. Too bad. You are in need of a wife.”
Max chuckled. “Can you imagine if I went home and told Mother and Father that I was done with Lavinia and was marrying Dani?” He thought back to his grand exit from the wedding.
Seb turned serious. “You know, Max, you can marry whomever you want. They can’t prevent it. They can make life unpleasant for a while, but ultimately, they can’t do anything about it.”
“Actually, I have to tell you something.” He filled Seb in on how he’d refused to help Mother round up Father at the wedding and about how it had felt like a decisive shift in how he related to them. “Of course, I have no idea how things are going to be when I get home. They’ll probably try to pretend that nothing is different. As far as Father is concerned, there won’t be anything different. It won’t be as if Mother will have said, ‘Maximillian refused to assist me with wrangling you in your embarrassingly inebriated state.’”
“And you want him to know,” Seb said.
“Yes. I realize that it probably sounds hollow, given all the other times that I’ve behaved in ways that have displeased them, but—”
“This time it’s different,” Seb said vehemently, finishing the sentence the way Max had been planning to. “You’re done playing by their rules.”
“Indeed. But I don’t know how to make them see that.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
The we in that sentence felt like a tonic.
“Anyway,” Seb said with a chuckle, “I’ll come out when I get home. They’ll lose their minds, then your not behaving the way they want won’t seem so bad.”
Seb was in jest, but it was another example of how much the tables had turned. Regardless, Max didn’t want to lose track of the fact that his brother was planning to do something momentous. “I wonder if the world has changed enough that they won’t care that you’re gay.”