Notorious in Nice (10 page)

Terry’s foot became a ruler holding her thighs at his mercy, and she protested when sensation left her breast, then rained kisses over his chest, neck, and anyplace her lips found purchase, when his hot, hot hand cupped her mound of Venus. Miraculous fingers separated the folds to paradise; one large, super talented thumb flicked and tortured the button to heaven.

Slick, desperate, igniting, she begged and ordered, “Now, please, now.”

And the Norse god had mercy and heard her prayers, and those large, probing fingers twisted, ground, and gave one final tweak. Earth, sun, sea, and sky converged, and he swallowed her scream with his mouth, drinking her essence, while his hand continued to minister and milk every last spasm.

“Are we going to discuss it?”

Terrence studied the swirling amber liquid in his glass. He knew the topic to which Thomas referred, but wanted to prolong the casual camaraderie that had developed between them. For the last couple of hours, ten years of bitter separation had vanished, and it was as if he and Thomas had never been parted, never suffered a life-altering rift. Formerly drawn lines in the sand eroded, much like the receding beach fronting the Promenade du Anglais’s boardwalk, which paralleled the smooth curves of Nice’s Baie du Anglais.

“Where do we start? Ball’s in your court.”

His twin’s mouth curved. “I can’t get over how your accent’s changed. You no longer speak the Queen’s English, brother.” He checked his watch. “Are you sure you shouldn’t get back to Su-Lin?”

Terry’d left an exhausted Su-Lin sleeping in his cabin and had been in the midst of rearranging the
Glory’s
itinerary to match his revised plan to extend the cruise when he spotted Thomas strolling along the main deck. Needing a shot of java, he’d invited his twin to join him in the ship’s library.

He hadn’t recognized the room was a miniaturized replica of the one they grew up with until Thomas’s pointed comment as they stepped through the doorway. Both men had a wry chortle about the vagaries of the subconscious, and any tension between them had dissipated.

Coffee soon gave way to scotch on his part and cognac on Thomas’s.

“Trust me, she needs to rest. Now, who’s avoiding the subject? Dive in, Thom, let’s get this done.”

The
Glory’s
study mimicked an early-nineteenth-century Englishman’s club, with burnished mahogany paneling, bookcase-lined walls, and oversize leather armchairs strewn among intricately patterned cream- and green-flecked burgundy carpets. Open sliding glass windows graced the exterior wall, and smoke from a stumped cigar in a crystal ashtray at the edge of a side table eddied over the Mediterranean.

“It was my fault that Carol-Ann seduced you. I knew what she was doing that summer, saw the way she managed to touch you at every opportunity, flaunt her body.” Thomas slumped against the chair back, and the leather squeaked in protest. “I hated the way you fell under her spell, that you preferred her company to mine. I was angry, resentful, and jealous. It had always been the two of us, and then…”

Terry leaned forward in his chair, elbows braced midthigh, one hand cradling his tumbler of liquor. “How was it your fault, Thom? The only person’s who’s ever been at fault is me. If I’d had any good in me at all, it wouldn’t have happened. ”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Entirely wrong. Carol-Ann was the adult, Ter. She seduced you. None of it was your fault.”

“I screwed her every day, all day, for the two weeks we were in Scotland. I couldn’t keep my hands off her. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I couldn’t stop.” Terry downed the contents of his tumbler. “I fantasized about Father dying and me marrying her.” He snorted. “I can’t even think of those days without wanting to puke.”

“I saw it happening, and instead of sticking to you like glue, I ran off to London, leaving you alone with her.” Thomas lifted one shoulder. “As soon as Carol-Ann handed me that envelope with that letter saying I was a finalist in an art competition I’d never entered, I knew.”

“Fricking hell. You never entered that competition?” Terry dug one hand through hair tangled by the gusting breezes. “Was it a trick?”

“No, there was a contest all right, and when I got to London, I found out Carol-Ann’s friend managed the art gallery holding the contest. She must have filched one of my canvases and sent it down. It was all fixed, including my win.”

“I don’t understand. Why did you go?”

“It was the easy way out. I know I should have told you the truth, but I was so scared you wouldn’t believe me, that you’d side with Carol-Ann. I was too preoccupied with my own issues.”

Startled, Terry scrutinized the wry curve of his twin’s twisting mouth, and recognition dawned. His fingers tightened around the smooth crystal, and the scotch sloshed from rim to rim, ice cubes clinking against the glass.

“You knew by then?”

“That I was gay?” Thomas asked, arching one eyebrow. He nodded and expelled a long breath. “Do you remember Viscount Emberly’s son? That summer in the Lake District?”

“Emberly’s heir? Jaysus, Thom.” Terry took a slug of his drink, collapsed heavily against the chair back, and stretched his long legs. “I’d never have known. He was a man’s man, won every fricking steeplechase in the country for a decade. Did you two have an affair?”

“Not that summer, but the following spring.”

“After Father married Carol-Ann and brought her to live with us.” Terry shook his head. “I’d always thought things changed between us after she arrived. But for you, it had started a good two months earlier. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“After that bathroom incident at Eton? I couldn’t face your contempt.” Thomas shrugged and sipped his cognac. “Or worse, take the chance of losing your affection.”

“I was ashamed, you know. I should have intervened earlier when the others ganged up on Newel in the bathroom. I don’t know why I hesitated.”

“What a classic escapade that was. The whole class ganging up on the obvious fag. I was glad when you stopped them even though you paid for it afterward. It took a while for the gay-lover rumors to die down, and I couldn’t add to that. You were under so much group pressure.” Thomas’s chest expanded with his slow inhale. “I wasn’t sure how you felt and had become too much of a coward to run the risk of telling you.”

“And then came Carol-Ann.” Terry retrieved the decanter from the side table, started to pour more into his glass, hesitated, and thumped it back into place. “And you caught the two of us in flagrante delicto when she was called down for my behavior. You should have called me out then. Looking back on it, I was desperate for you to notice, to stop me.”

“You were drinking so much by then. Every time I tried to broach any serious topic, we had a shouting match.”

“It ate away at me, the sin of it all. All Carol-Ann had to do was crook her finger, and like Pavlov’s dog, I tucked my tail under my legs and ran to sniff at her quim.” He glugged a good mouthful of scotch. “I hated her, I hated me, I hated Father for leaving her alone, and I hated you for being the good twin.”

The
Glory’s
horn sounded, the twin engines’ humming dimmed, and a cannonball splash preceded the anchor’s plunge to the sea’s depths. As the ship swung toward the Nice waterfront, the prevailing wind stilled. An occasional car horn blared above the hum of city noises, scooters, traffic whistles, and a series of church bells struck eleven gongs.

“A bad B movie, that’s what we were.”

“And she got exactly what she wanted. Did you ever wonder why the hell Father married her, Thom? I still can’t figure it out. It couldn’t have been sex. Otherwise, he would have stuck around to enjoy it. Certainly wasn’t to give us a mother figure, so why?”

“In profile, in a certain light, she looks like Mother.” At Terrence’s raised-to-the-hairline eyebrows, his twin added, “You never noticed?”

“Frick.” Terry spewed the word and tried out different images against his eyelids. “He missed Mama. Sodding bastard. Didn’t he notice that dollar sign tattooed on Carol-Ann’s pupils?”

“You didn’t, at first.”

“Rub it in. It took me a long time to sort things out afterward. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew Father would throw me out if I hit you.” He reached for the scotch again, arrested his actions, clenched his fists, and slouched back into the butter-soft leather. “It was the only way to exorcize my guilt.”

Thomas lurched to his feet and grasped the edge of a bookshelf. He moved over to the open windows and closed his eyes. More humid than Monte Carlo, the temperature in Nice proved a good ten degrees hotter. A halfhearted draft attempted to cool the morning but succeeded only in lifting the blond wings bordering his twin’s temples.

“Once I came into my trust, I hired a firm to find you. They sent me photographs of you training for the Royal Marines. I wrote you letters, but I never sent them. Until that cocktail reception in Antibes, I wasn’t sure how you’d react. Tell me the truth, Ter, does it make a difference? Me being gay?”

“Fricking no, Thomas,” Terry snorted, and he rose. “I’m not a sodding insecure adolescent any longer. To be honest, it wasn’t you being gay that made me go off the deep end. It was that you didn’t trust me enough to tell me. It was me being so ugly inside. It was me screwing my stepmother. It was me spinning out of control. It was all me, and I took it out on you.”

Edging forward, he stood inches away from his twin.

“And now? Where do we go from here?”

Some unknown force had them facing each other.

“I’d like us to be brothers again. You?”

Promises, futures, hopes, regrets boomeranged from one pair of storm-colored eyes to the other.

“We never stopped being brothers, Ter, we just didn’t speak for a while.”

“Too true, boyo, too true.”

“Boyo? After all these years, I prayed you’d purged that bloody term from your vocabulary.”

“When it gets such a rise out of you? Never.”

When they embraced, Terry closed his eyes and offered a silent prayer of thanks. Close to tears and embarrassing mushiness, he thumped Thomas’s back and growled. “Food, boyo. Me stomach’s a-growling like a wolf.”

“Still can’t admit to strong emotion, eh, Ter? You need to embrace your feminine side.”

“Embrace this, boyo,” Terry said and flipped him the finger.

“Always the diplomatic response. But you’re right. I skipped breakfast, and these days my headaches are exacerbated if I don’t eat regularly.”

“We’ll have to head into Nice if we want food. Our new chef isn’t scheduled to join us until the weekend, and I’m almost certain the galley’s near empty.”

“And you’re itching to get back to Su-Lin. Don’t look so surprised. You’ve glanced to the bow four times in the last minute, and you have that lusty look on your face, not to mention your tenting pants.”

Heat warmed Terry’s cheeks, and for a second, he almost averted his eyes. “Shite, I see you’ve lost your reticence. We sure as Sheila never talked like this before.”

“Gay men are notorious for being frank about sexual matters. I have no reticence left. I imagine we both have the same level sex drive, Ter, just different fixations.”

“Okay, boyo, this is one area I’m going to need to ease into.” Terry swallowed a whole bunch of images he wasn’t prepared to handle, not right then. “Do me one good and organize the Boston Whaler with Austen? I’ll get Su-Lin and meet you on deck in an hour or so. We can have lunch in Nice.”

“An hour? ’Nuff time?”

“Hardly, but within the limited scope of activity available to me…” Terry grouched, waving a what-have-you gesture at his twin.

“What do you mean?”

“I find myself strangely reluctant to take her virginity.” He avoided his twin’s direct gawk. “No one’s more surprised than me. I think I’ve developed a conscience at this late stage of life. In the female arena, I’m oh for oh, Thom. I don’t have relationships, I screw.” His fingers snagged on a tangled hair knot. “I so do not want any of this.”

“Is this some sort of test?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. She’s ten years younger than I am, but in terms of life experience, the gap between us is higher than fricking Everest. Half of me wants to put her in a rowboat and set her adrift. The other half can’t stand for her to be out of sight, not for a heartbeat.”

“I’m as possessive as you are. It’s one of the things that doesn’t cut it in gay circles. I knew exactly how you felt last night watching her and Harrison in a lip-lock. It amazed me you didn’t pound him unconscious.”

“If nothing else, I’ve learned control over the last decade.”

“You mean I was the last man you beat into a coma?”

“A coma? You were in a fricking coma?”

“Sticking it to you a bit. I was out for half a day, nothing life-threatening.”

“Jaysus, Thom, I’ve enough guilt to live with as it is,” he said, eyeing the doorway and calculating time to orgasm. “I’m out of here. See you later.”

The walk down the corridor seemed endless. Terry slammed into his cabin, locked the door, and made it into Su-Lin’s room within minutes. He heard the sound of running water, and visions of Su-Lin naked and foamy slithered into his brain.

Six days. Six interminable days, and he’d become so obsessed with her, with sheathing his aching prick in her hot little pussy. He thunked his head against the head’s doorframe and allowed the thought that had been percolating since their first night to formulate. If he took her, if he made her his, could he ever let her go? Fear held him paralyzed, and he knew he’d hold off for as long as he could. A woman-child like Su-Lin would never stay with a black soul like his.

Lifting his eyelids, he spied the outline of her nubile body through the sheer plastic shower stall. As he watched, she bent at the waist to scrub her toes. Desperation-fueled lust had his cock throbbing, hard as granite, balls so tight, so locked, it wouldn’t take much to lose what was left of his precarious control.

Wet, slick pussy, pink folds, drops of moisture like iridescent pearls nestled in soft, sable ringlets; Terry’s hands balled into fists. The remembered taste of her nectar fed every jerky movement; he discarded his T-shirt in the bedroom and toed off his jeans before he opened the translucent shower enclosure.

“Terrence,” she said, one onyx eyebrow lifting, wet black hair clinging to her shoulders and back. “I woke up dreaming about you.”

“Did you, darlin’? What kind of dream, my sweet aphrodisiac?” He nipped the curve of her nape and fitted his throbbing cock along the seam of her ass. He assumed possession of the soap. Sniffing the soft lather, Terry murmured, “Peach. Somehow, I see you as a cherry, red, round, glistening, waiting for my mouth. I’ll have to order new soap.” He’d worked up a thick layer of foam between his hands.

“Turn around, darlin’. Stick your foot on the bench. Such strong thighs.” He trailed a finger along her quadriceps muscle. “Wider, spread your legs wider. That’s it. Jaysus, your pussy’s pouting.” He used both hands, one holding the hood of her clit, the other massaging the little nub, fingering, pinching. “That’s it, work it against my thumb, I can feel you starting, your tight tunnel spasming. Do you know how much I want to be inside you, to feel you milking me? There isn’t a second I don’t picture my cock sliding into your pussy. That’s it, darlin’, grind against my hand.”