by Anyta Sunday
God, he was bone tired. Heading to the office was the last thing he wanted.
He rubbed the coarse fabric of the chair arm. “Send Sam to the manor.”
He ended the call and opened his suitcase for a tie. Better make a good, authoritative impression. For the journalist.
Mom and Casey were digging into the cake. Frosting clung to both their upper lips.
“I’ve got to get to the manor for an interview.”
“Can I go with you?” Casey asked. “I haven’t seen Duke for ages. He never visits anymore.”
“Let’s leave Rohan to his work,” Mom said.
“I’ll meet you for dinner.” Rohan pushed to his feet.
“Maybe you can bring Duke back?” Casey asked. “I have n-new material for sewing cushions.”
“Sewing? After my last time?”
She looked puzzled.
Rohan lifted his ring finger, flashing the scar he earned attempting to sew a patchwork blanket—a suggestion Casey had given him for the “perfect” gift. “This, remember?”
She nodded. “Looks better than it did over Skype.” It had been in stitches then. Casey hummed, thoughtful. “You, me, and Duke could make dessert together?”
“Not tonight.”
“The w-weekend, then? Pretty please?”
Rohan grunted, and Casey cheered. He would do anything for his sister.
Even if what she asked was hard. Physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Duke Lawrence-Decker dropped to his knees in the east gallery just off the manor foyer.
Dark green walls supported a giant gilded mirror and portrait of his and Rohan’s great-grandfather.
The chandelier above Duke splintered light over a cluster of Georgian seats and coffee table. Roses scented the air, mixing with the heavier weight of fifty years of history.
The polished floors were hard under his knees, and it wasn’t the first time Duke wondered how many people who lived in the manor before him had found themselves in a similar position: on their knees, hands ripping at buttons, eager to suck some cock.
Today’s prick: a good six inches curving slightly to the left. Duke’s cock throbbed as he leaned forward to swallow all six inches. His bottom lip had barely touched the glistening head when a voice barked from behind him.
“Duke! Christ.”
A large hand cuffed him hard at the neck, yanking him to his feet. Duke’s man of the day stuffed his pretty cock into his suit pants and scurried out of the gallery stringing apologies.
Duke stifled a sigh and focused on the unmistakable warmth of the fingers squeezing his neck.
He was in no doubt who was behind all that power. Even if he hadn’t heard his voice, he’d have known him from that clipped breath. From the block of heat that hovered close, radiating into Duke from the top of his head, down his back, to his heels.
From the way Duke’s heart instantly skipped a beat.
His cousin. Rohan.
Donning a smirk he knew would infuriate, he pulled out of Rohan’s grip and faced him. “Welcome home.”
Rohan stared at him, the chiseled line of his jaw hard with annoyance. Those full lips curled downward, poised and ready to put bratty Duke in his place.
“How long are you staying this time?” Duke asked, trying not to take in the rest of Rohan, and failing.
His presence demanded attention. The tight, tailored suit pants; the shirt that highlighted his square shoulders and lean figure. The silver tie that perfectly matched his eyes.
Rohan adjusted his shirtsleeves, as if he wanted the conversation finished before it began. His disapproving gaze roamed over Duke. Shirt ridden up over one hip. Unbuttoned fly. Striped boxers still bulging with arousal.
Duke resisted the move to button his shirt. Resisted the inner warning telling him to back up and quietly pay attention. He’d stand wherever he pleased, thank you very much. And he pleased to stand a half foot from his bigger, older cousin.
Rohan cursed. “Jesus, Duke.”
“I was horny. What’s the big deal?”
“You didn’t know that man.”
Duke shrugged. “How would you know?”
“Because Sam’s a journalist for the Greenville Chronicle, and he wants to interview me.”
Duke had figured that out. The journalist was there for another stupid interview about Rohan taking over the SmallQ empire. “If you’re quick, you can catch him at the gates.”
“Forget the interview! I have to deal with you.”
Duke straightened. “It would have been a fuck, because I wanted a cock ramming my ass hard. Nothing sinister about that. Something you shouldn’t have any difficulty understanding.”
A mistake to bring up the video. To rehash that moment six weeks ago..
Duke couldn’t hold Rohan’s gaze.
Rohan spoke with unnerving calm. “Sit down.”
Duke folded his arms. Didn’t move.
“That’s the way this is going to be?” Rohan laughed drily, and Duke fought an uneasy shiver.
Rohan didn’t grab his arms and manhandle Duke into his chair as expected; he leaned in and bore his gaze into Duke’s eyes so hard it had to leave an imprint on his soul.
“This attitude has to change.”
Duke scoffed. What did his cousin think he could do? He traveled for work all the time. Was barely in Greenville. When he was, it was a night or two, coming home late and leaving early. Duke felt like he had barely seen him at all this past year.
Rohan studied his face, nodding to some internal debate. “I’m staying at the manor for good.”
Confusion jolted into Duke along with something else that tightened his stomach. “For good?”
“Your parents gave you everything except boundaries. By God, I’ve tried to give you some. But clearly I’m away too much. This right here,” Rohan said, pointing between them. “We need to fix this.”
A shiver rolled through Duke and he stepped back. “I don’t need fixing. I’m an adult.”
“Twenty-one, but you act like a horny, spoiled teenager.”
Duke ignored the small plummet of his stomach. “I’m twenty-two.”
“I don’t hear you disagreeing with the rest.”
Duke shrugged, then stormed out the gallery door and ran up the sweeping staircase to the master bedrooms.
The manor had always been too big for a single person. Yet with Rohan following him, the air felt thick, claustrophobic. The hair on the back of Duke’s neck prickled like Rohan was always one breath away.
Duke strode into his room. At the alcove, he’d set up a coffee machine. If ever there was a moment for caffeine it was now. “You’re really here to stay?” he bit out.
Rohan slouched into Duke’s favorite armchair, with a high cushioned back. His large hands rubbed the thick, gray fabric.
“I have to visit your dad this weekend. Come visit your family with me.”
“Can’t. I’m busy.”
“Busy with what? Screwing the remaining half of Greenville?”
“That’s rich, Ro. I vividly recall you dicking a hot piece of ass six weeks ago.”
Out the corner of his eye, he caught Rohan casting his gaze toward the windows. “Look, come visit for the weekend.”
“I have other plans.” His friend Kyle didn’t need him until next week, but Rohan didn’t know that.
“Cancel them.”
Duke flustered, dropping coffee grains over the bench. “I can’t just cancel.”
Rohan snorted derisively. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“I don’t want to visit the farmhouse. I’m . . . I’m still upset Mom and Dad are passing the family business to you.”
That wasn’t it at all. It was a lie that Rohan seemed to think, though, and he’d hide behind it. The truth was too raw.
“You’re upset I’ll be heading SmallQ?”
Duke felt a prickle roll down his spine. Rohan was analyzing him as if he didn’t believe the lie.
It had been a
shock for many that Duke’s dad would pass his empire on to his cousin’s son and not his own. A shock for many, but not for Duke or anyone close to their family.
Rohan was a far better fit for the job. Duke had never cared for working in a tech company. He’d always enjoyed English and film studies. Graduated with a degree in philosophy from Greenville University last year.
Rohan, however, had groomed himself as a savvy businessman. He was older, more experienced, and he cared about the tech company. He’d taken SmallQ to great places. He was closer to Duke’s dad than Duke was.
Duke breathed in the rich scent of percolating coffee and faced Rohan. “I haven’t been back there for three months,” he muttered.
Dark brows pinched together in a frown. “All the more reason to come. Repair your relationships; apologize for past transgressions. Grow up.”
“Fuck you.”
A tight laugh. Rohan pushed to his feet, strode over to the alcove, and stopped right in front of Duke.
The coffee bubbled behind Duke as Rohan stretched to his full height, a good half-foot shorter than his cousin’s imposing figure.
“I have some business to attend to,” Rohan said. “I’ll pick you up after work tomorrow. Five o’clock.”
“No.”
Rohan ignored him. Calloused fingers and the blunt scratch of fingernails scraped over Duke’s hip as Rohan tugged down his shirt. “Wear something clean. Run a goddamn comb through your hair.” Those fingers drifted to his open fly and tugged the denim, making Duke’s hips thrust forward.
Rohan’s knuckles were a hair’s width from the semi Duke had not tamed. He shoved his cousin’s hands away. Buttoned and zipped up. “I can dress myself.”
Rohan looked at him for a long moment. A soft sigh slipped out of him.
Duke preferred the annoyance to the disappointment. He flinched when Rohan gently swept the pad of his index finger under Duke’s eye.
A hysterical and inappropriate shot of electricity bolted through him.
Rohan held up Duke’s stray eyelash. “They say if you blow on this and make a wish it comes true.”
“What would you wish?” Duke ground out, pushing back against the counter, farther from Rohan.
“It used to be easy between us.”
“Is that a wish? Because you know, you shouldn’t say it aloud or it won’t come true.”
A controlled smile tipped Rohan’s lips. He pushed his finger to Duke’s lips. “Blow. You need this wish more than I do.”
Rohan pressed the lash onto the bow of Duke’s lip, turned, and walked out of his room.
No one in his family had ever spoken to him the way Rohan had—clear yet kind. His parents had seen him as someone to file away, but Rohan . . . he saw him.
His presence shifted something in Duke, made him at once want to follow his orders and resist. It made him twist inside, confused and excited.
Rohan’s heavy footsteps were already groaning down the century-old staircase when he finally released the breath he’d been holding. His eyelash fluttered off his lip, and Duke couldn’t stop himself casting a soft wish.
Immediately he regretted it.
He yanked open a front-yard-facing window and bowed over the frosty ledge. Rohan emerged from under the grand veranda. He’d slipped into a long woolen coat, and was looping a light blue scarf around his neck.
“Rohan!” he called, his breath a burst of cloud.
Rohan turned and looked at him, one tight brow hitching up.
Duke ignored the confused lurch in his gut. “I’ll write Mom an email. Start that way.”
“Never took you for a chicken, Duke.”
Duke glared at him. Chicken? God, he knew exactly how to play him. Dammit. “Fine. But don’t blame me if it blows up in our faces.”
He slammed his window shut.
Rohan stared up at him through the gridded glass. With a twist of his lips, he tucked in the end of his scarf and strode toward his Lexus.
He sat in the driver seat messing about for a long minute, and Duke jumped at the buzz of his phone vibrating against his ass.
Rohan peered up in his direction, and Duke lurched back from the window, pulled out his phone, and read the message.
Rohan: Buy something for your parents. Don’t drink tonight.
Duke: Like you can stop me.
Another buzz.
Rohan: You’re begging for my attention, aren’t you?
A shiver trickled through him and his fingers fumbled over the screen.
Duke: I manage well without you.
Rohan: Why don’t I believe you?
Duke watched Rohan’s silver Lexus back out past the fountain and onto the street.
His pulse stuttered in his throat—tight with frustration and something much worse. Something he shouldn’t be feeling. They were cousins.
Second cousins, technically. But their families were—despite crazy family history—close. Rohan’s mom and dad acted like an aunt and uncle to Duke, and Duke’s parents acted the same to Rohan.
He looked down at the Why don’t I believe you burning on the screen in his tight clutch. He let the phone plop onto his bed.
He turned, desperate for coffee. Desperate for something a lot stronger than that, but he wasn’t about to do anything that might admit how much he was begging for Rohan’s attention.
The mahogany-framed mirror above the fireplace smacked his reflection back at him, and he hissed in a breath.
His face was flushed, bottom lip raw from the rough kiss he’d had with that damn journalist. His cheeks were smooth from a shave, but that was his only groomed feature.
His shirt collar had stretched where Duke had pulled it during their kiss. The bulge in his jeans was un-fucking-mistakable.
He curled his feet against the floorboards, his black socks snagging. He looked like the man-whore he was. No wonder Rohan had called him out for screwing his way through town.
He raked a hand through his hair, taming it.
Angry he’d let himself get caught so close to a good fuck.
Angrier that he had hoped he’d get caught.
He grabbed the biggest mug he could find and poured coffee to the rim. He clutched the warm cup and glared into his spacious room.
This, the east gallery, and the grand room he regularly used. The other sixteen rooms were reserved for guests—and Ben had lived in one for a while but had left when he’d gotten together with Landon. Otherwise, all that curved Georgian wood and cushion collected dust.
He glanced at the single, dark-painted door that joined his suite with Rohan’s. Barely in use this year. Not like it used to be last year, when Rohan stayed here months at a time. Or back when Duke was eighteen, when Rohan had lived here all twelve months of the year. Back when things had been easier between them.
He downed his coffee and snapped the mug to the bench.
Sure, he could move out of the manor and rustle up some accommodation of his own—he had the money for it. But this place . . . the history . . . the memories he had staying here with Rohan as a kid. He’d been eleven the first time he visited, Rohan eighteen. He came every summer after that first one, and he would have stayed forever if not for boarding school.
Here was more his home than anywhere else.
He needed it.
He rounded his large bed and stopped at the door separating their rooms. He pressed a palm against the cool wood. Maybe it was his nerves, but it felt like it pulsed under him. Throbbed, like his cock. Like a warning what would happen if Rohan returned.
No, not a warning.
A promise.
“This is going to end badly,” he said, and cracked open the door.
Stale air shifted over him. He peered into Rohan’s room. A bed with drapes knotted to posters dominated the middle. A trunk at the end of the bed. Armchairs at the gridded windows.
His gaze landed on a pair of lone ice skates at the base of the trunk.
An eerie shiver tickled over him as he remembered t
he excited teenager he’d been, coaxing Rohan to join him on the ice with a puck and two hockey sticks. They’d laughed then; conversation had flowed easily between them. Rohan had been the bigger cousin he’d looked up to. Worshipped.
Rohan had been there the first time he’d stumbled home drunk. Had tended to him, given him the biggest berating of his life. His parents were too busy working to deal with anything as annoying as discipline. But Rohan made him face his own shit and clean it up.
Duke breathed in the tepid air, begging his imagination not to conjure those other memories. Those two memories were far more trouble than they were worth.
He bit his lip so hard he tasted blood.
The best plan was to clean himself up, make some food, and retire early to bed.
He stepped into Rohan’s room.
Air prickled over him, making Duke hyperaware of his footsteps dragging over the floor, the muted sound when he padded over the Oriental rug.
The first memory smacked into him: the depraved hitch of Rohan’s breath, followed by a rhythmic creaking of bedsprings. The slick sound of a lubed hand working a stiff dick.
Gently parting drapes, pulled back by a curling foot. Shadowy outlines of Rohan, head thrown back on his pillow, hand wildly pumping his fat cock. Floorboards had vibrated, bolting shivers up Duke’s heels as he watched from the doorway, gripping his own hard cock.
Duke clutched a handful of gathered drape and glared at Rohan’s empty bed.
He’d been eighteen, and he never viewed Rohan the same way again. That image resurfaced every time he took his cock in hand.
So he had distanced himself. Done everything to keep Rohan from wanting anything to do with him. That was the moment his inner brat was born.
But the brat had failed him.
He shut his eyes against the second memory. The one fresh in his mind—the one that had surfaced between them earlier. Rohan’s last visit.
That damn recording.
Duke had been spending the night out with his friends River and Ash, Ben and Landon, but he’d returned early—who knew the lovebirds all wanted to be home by midnight?
Duke gathered a handful of Rohan’s thick drapes and hugged them tight to break from the memory, but it wouldn’t shake.
