It was Joaquin’s turn to flush red and look away then.
“What are you into?”
His answer couldn’t have been any better than the one word. “You.”
Felix stood up and leaned over the table, pressing his lips to Joaquin’s. The other man fisted his T-shirt to pull him closer, and their tongues and lips danced for long moments until Felix was straddling Joaquin’s hips and had his fingers buried in his hair.
They were both already hard and groaned at the feel of their denim-covered cocks rubbing together. Joaquin tasted like wine and sex and somehow—maybe because they’d eaten one of the recipes he’d grown up with—like home.
When one of Joaquin’s moans sounded more like pain than pleasure, Felix pulled back and stood up. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Those kiss-swollen lips would be the death of him. He didn’t know how anyone looked at him and didn’t melt into a puddle of butter. Joaquin could cook food with just the heat in his gaze if he wanted to.
“Your arm.”
“It was my cock that was in pain.” Joaquin adjusted himself. “It’s been wanting to be in your mouth for weeks, and it hurts having you this close.”
Felix smiled, loving how honest and open Joaquin was about what he wanted. He wouldn’t expect anything less. And, he wasn’t going to say it out loud, but he’d imagined him talking about a blow job—the subtleties of suction and sloppiness—the way he talked about a mother sauce, and it turned him on like a motherfucker. “I think that could be arranged.”
Felix dropped to his knees and unbuttoned the fly of Joaquin’s jeans, urging him to lift his hips so he could get his cock free of his pants and boxers. Once the holy grail of fat, delicious-looking dick was bare to him, he bit his lip and smiled up through his lashes at Joaquin, whose face was starting to bear a bit of the impatience he displayed in his kitchen.
He had to press down on the fly of his own jeans to keep from coming right then. Joaquin had him on a hair trigger, but he wanted to draw this out. “Are you going to jack yourself off while you suck me?” Joaquin asked.
Tempting, but he wanted to be completely present the first time he blew Joaquin. There would be time enough—he hoped—for every variety of beej. So he shook his head and licked the diameter of the crown of Joaquin’s cock before sucking it to the back of his throat and holding him there while Joaquin threaded his fingers through his hair with unexpected gentleness.
“Oh fuck,” Joaquin said. “Your mouth is so fucking hot. You look so sexy with your lips stretched around my cock—ah, God, please suck.”
Felix loved hearing Joaquin plead for him to move, so he indulged him. He let Joaquin’s cock slip out of his mouth, shiny and dark with his saliva, before sucking him all the way down again. He moved faster because that made Joaquin curse and rock his hips up out of the chair. It made him dig his nails into Felix’s scalp and his abs seize up.
The power of driving this man out of his mind with pleasure, of making him forget that he was the master of his own universe, of making him beg for release, was so heady that Felix didn’t want it to end. But he wanted Joaquin to come down his throat so badly that he moved faster and faster, cupping and rolling his balls in one hand and jacking the base of Joaquin’s thick cock in the other.
It might have been two minutes, it might have been an eon. Felix had no sense of time and space when he took Joaquin down one last time and tasted the clean, salty flavor of his come as he shot down his throat.
He didn’t know how long it was that he laid his head against the hard surface of Joaquin’s thigh muscle as the other man recovered, calling him “baby” and telling him how good he was in nonsense words. He didn’t even care that the pose seemed kind of subservient. All he knew was that, although he might be on his knees, he’d made one of the smartest men he’d ever met speak in tongues when he sucked his cock.
* * * *
Joaquin didn’t know how he was going to put himself together after that. He’d known that his attraction to Felix was different than anything he’d ever felt to anyone else. It had been more urgent from the first time he’d seen the man dancing in the kitchen with his staff. Maybe it had been lying dormant long before that—it couldn’t possibly have come out of nowhere. Maybe that was why it was so intense.
All he knew in the moment was that he had finally experienced the kind of mind-bending sex that people wrote songs about and did drugs to have synthetically. Earthly pleasures had always been his jam, but this was on some other level that he’d never experienced. And he wasn’t about to question the fact that the only thing he could think of was more.
He needed to get Felix into a bed. He wanted to roll around naked with him for hours, but right now he just needed to return the blow job he’d just gotten.
Felix looked up at him through his long lashes, a fuck-drunk smile on his face. “You were speaking some Spanglish-fuck talk hybrid back there.”
“That’s what happens when you try to suck my soul out through my cock.”
Felix rubbed his bottom lip with his thumb and then sucked his thumb in his mouth. If Joaquin’s mouth hadn’t been dry and his dick hadn’t been completely spent, he would have needed a repeat performance right then. “We need to go to bed.”
Felix stood up. “Whatever will we do there?”
Joaquin liked this playful side of Felix. It wasn’t like the other man wasn’t usually laughing and joking around, but he liked that this side of him—this crazy-seductive Dionysian sex-god side of him—was like a secret that only Joaquin knew. He wanted to drink it all before it was lost to him forever.
Instead of dwelling on that, he stood and kissed Felix again, tasting him and himself at the same time. He rubbed his hand over Felix’s still-covered cock, making the other man chuff and push his hips into him.
He didn’t want to stop, but as an old man who was falling apart, he needed padding under his knees to perform at his best. Earthly pleasure and all. So he broke the kiss and pulled up his pants temporarily.
Then, he surprised even himself by taking Felix’s hand in his and not letting go until they were in his dim bedroom. They didn’t waste any time getting back to kissing. Felix lost his shirt, then went about carefully extricating Joaquin from his.
The care that he took to make sure that he didn’t hurt or jostle his shoulder shook Joaquin to his core. It unmoored him from his foundations almost as readily as the blow job in the dining room had. He wasn’t used to being moved during sex, wasn’t used to feeling the need to blurt out what he was feeling.
“Thank you.” He had a lot to thank Felix for, almost too much for the two words to hold.
“What for?” Joaquin could feel him smile against the skin of his neck, and he was hard again. “The blow job or getting you undressed?”
“Both.” Joaquin cupped the side of Felix’s face. “Thank you for both those things and for helping me.”
He hadn’t meant to get that vulnerable, and Felix defused the situation immediately. “I know one way you can thank me.” He undid his jeans and pushed them and his boxer briefs down.
Joaquin took the cue and wrapped his hand around Felix’s cock. The silky skin felt so good against his palm, but he needed more. And so did Felix.
He pushed his lover onto the bed and urged him to move back until his head was on the pillows. Naked himself, he straddled Felix’s thighs and brushed his hand over Felix’s belly, making him shiver. He resumed caressing his cock, enjoying the pleasure and pain crossing his lover’s face like turbulent weather over the Atlantic.
Still, he couldn’t rest until he was a sobbing mess, just like Felix had turned him into.
“Are you going to just stare at me like a freak or are you going to suck my cock?”
Joaquin smiled at him, and he knew he probably appeared to be downright feral in that moment. “As you wish.”
Ch
apter 10
Felix liked waking up in his own bed. Maybe it was because they’d had to move a couple of times in the middle of the night when he was growing up. He remembered waking up at age ten and then again at fourteen not knowing where he was—afraid for a few seconds that he’d been kidnapped in the middle of the night and was being held in a new, worse tenement than the one his mother had rented before—only to realize that he was in his new home.
As soon as he’d been able to afford stability, he’d bought a house and made it a home. While at first he’d hoped to share it with Roman, he’d burrowed in deeper as that relationship went sour. Now that he had some space and distance, he realized that he’d known all along that Roman wasn’t his home—that he’d have to go it alone.
His desire for consistency was why he was surprised that he woke up slowly, comfortably—and late—in Joaquin’s bed. They weren’t wrapped around each other. They both ran hot, and they’d kept a hand on each other the whole night.
Even though he should have been at the farmer’s market several hours ago, he stopped and stared at Joaquin. He must have been dreaming because his brow furrowed and unfurrowed in his sleep. He didn’t know why, but it made him smile. He was probably yelling at some unsuspecting, faceless sous chef even in his dreams. Or reliving the trauma of watching Chopped and not being able to do the secret ingredients his way.
He definitely couldn’t have been stressed out about the night before. For some reason, he’d expected Joaquin to be some sort of aggressive übertop, but he’d been totally surprised. His lover was sensual and liked to savor sex like he’d savored his dinner. And, although Felix wanted to let Joaquin fuck him and vice versa, he was glad they’d decided to take it slow. Or more, they’d been compelled to take it slow. You couldn’t rush a braised meat, and you couldn’t rush the way they’d had sex.
Even if this never happened again, it would have been the best night of his life. He felt so connected to Joaquin that he was afraid that they wouldn’t be able to stop this once Joaquin returned to work and they started working together on a new restaurant. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to stop.
Maybe he could give up his dream of running his own restaurant if he could keep Joaquin? But would he regret keeping himself small for yet another powerful but charismatic man? Probably.
Luckily, he didn’t have time to continue asking himself questions about a future that he wasn’t even sure that the man lying next to him wanted. He grabbed his phone off the nightstand and winced. People at the restaurant would be wondering where he was.
Shit.
Given that he was still recovering from major surgery, Joaquin needed his rest. Felix surveyed the room, which was difficult given that the heavy drapes created near-black conditions, looking for his clothes.
He eased himself out of bed and had gathered his clothes when he thought he heard a key turning in the front door. Although he wasn’t sure about Joaquin’s policy regarding the keys to his home, Felix only gave keys to family and serious boyfriends. So, either they were about to get busted by a member of the Delgado or Hernandez clan or Joaquin had a serious, secret boyfriend he hadn’t told Felix about.
That thought formed a rock in his belly. They hadn’t discussed exclusivity, but he’d assumed that Joaquin wouldn’t be going out much during recovery. And he’d never heard about a serious boyfriend through the family grapevine.
But still, it gave him a bad feeling in the center of him to think about Joaquin with another man. He didn’t want Joaquin with anyone but him—at least not while they were doing whatever they were doing. It was just so immediate how it felt like more than fucking that Felix didn’t know where to put all the feels that Joaquin had evoked.
But he knew he would have to put them somewhere.
And, right now, he should probably hide in the bathroom or something. This whole affair was predicated on them being able to keep it a secret from their families.
“Joaquin!” Fuck. Lola’s voice rang out through the loft, and her steps sounded as she moved toward the bedroom door. After another quick check to make sure nothing that could be identified as his was lying around, he went into the bathroom and closed the door as quietly as possible.
Everything in the room was glass or concrete, so the only logical place to hide was in the shower, crouched down.
“Joaquin, wake up.” Felix wanted to jump up and tell Lola to let the man rest, his protective urges on overdrive. But there was probably a reason for Lola waking him up at this hour. “Your physical therapy appointment is in thirty minutes.”
Okay, that made sense. She was here to pick Joaquin up and take him to physical therapy. But it didn’t solve the problem of how they weren’t going to get caught with no pants on by the very woman who wanted to see them married and hiring a surrogate sooner rather than later.
He hated lying to anyone, especially people he considered family, and he’d underestimated how hard it would be to sneak around with both of their families always lurking about. This wasn’t exactly lurking, and he’d overslept, but it wasn’t exactly a comfortable situation.
He was about to stand up and reveal himself when he heard Joaquin’s sleep-rough voice. Even though he shouldn’t be rock hard in this situation—at all—he was. Just from the sound of his voice. “Felix?”
The exact fucking wrong thing for him to say because the peals of laughter from Lola were of the evil-genius-whose-plan-had-worked variety. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” Felix could almost see Joaquin rubbing his hand over his face sleepily. And it made him want to wake up to that every morning. He wanted to drink coffee and talk to him. Not short-term stuff. He wanted the intimacy of a relationship, but only with Joaquin, a man who wouldn’t give that to him. “What are you doing here, Abuela?”
“I’m here to take you to physical therapy.” The bedding rustled, indicating that either Joaquin was getting up and flashing his grandmother, or Lola had sat down, apparently unwilling to let Joaquin’s slipup go. “I think the more important question is why you are calling out that sweet boy’s name in your sleep.”
Joaquin just grunted a noncommittal answer and said, “Can you grab me some boxers?”
“The room smells like sex.” Oh shit. It totally did. “He was here, wasn’t he?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Part of Felix was disappointed to hear that. He wished that Joaquin would just admit that they’d been together, that they were together temporarily. When they broke up, they could clean it up then. It wouldn’t be a problem between the two of them.
But it could pose a problem for his sister and her in-laws, so Felix sank back down on his haunches and waited.
“You should be dating him now that you have time.” Lola wasted no breath in scolding her grandson. It was almost as though she’d wanted to find him in flagrante delicto.
“All right, I need to shower.”
“Do you need help?” Felix could picture the look on Joaquin’s face when his grandmother asked that question. Totally incredulous and totally the sort of thing that now turned Felix on.
“Nah.”
“Well, hurry up, I’m going to go grab some coffee.”
Joaquin’s heavier tread moved toward the bathroom as Lola’s lighter one moved toward the door. Felix stood up slowly so as not to shock Joaquin. His gaze widened for a moment, but he stayed silent.
When the bedroom door snicked closed, Joaquin whispered, “You’re still here.”
“I had just gotten up when I heard her come in.”
“And you hid in the bathroom?” Felix thought he heard some disappointment in his lover’s voice like maybe he was starting to have some second thoughts about this whole clandestine affair thing.
“I thought we were keeping this quiet.”
“We are.” Joaquin looked down, and the regret was palpable in the air. “I need t
o shower.”
Then their gazes locked, and Felix knew for a fact that they were sharing the exact same thoughts. If only his grandmother weren’t right outside the door, they could save water, if not time, by sharing. But that wasn’t the case. It would have to wait. Unless Joaquin had changed his mind and didn’t want to fuck him anymore.
Felix pushed that thought away and stepped out of the concrete enclosure.
“Extra razors under the sink.”
Felix ran a hand over his beard growth, finally happy with his beard. “How about a toothbrush?”
Joaquin walked over to the vanity and up behind him to pull out the drawer with a new toothbrush inside. The heat of Joaquin’s naked chest up against his back. Felix’s morning wood was out of control because of just that simple touch. His whole body was on fire, and the blaze was reflected back on him when they locked gazes again in the mirror.
All of Felix’s doubts flew away when Joaquin kissed his bare shoulder. It was such a brief, simple touch. But it had Felix wanting to turn around and take his lips for hours and days until they both forgot everything else outside Joaquin’s master suite.
There was so much between them that they had to talk about, so much about this that felt like something bigger than an affair. But they couldn’t talk now. And, since he was running late today, he probably wouldn’t be able to stop over after close. The bubble of just them couldn’t last forever, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to stretch it out. The fact that real life was intervening after just a few hours should have told him that starting anything with Joaquin was a bad idea from jump.
But that didn’t stop him from wanting to keep Joaquin. He couldn’t help himself.
Chapter 11
Joaquin sweated and grunted his way through physical therapy, with his abuela thwapping the back of his head every time she didn’t think he was trying hard enough. That, he could have done without. He also could have done without the thoughts about Felix crowding his mind and his gym shorts. His physical therapist probably thought he was a pervert, the poor woman.
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