And he was sitting in Finborough Theatre at a revival production of Bury the Dead watching me act.
For a brief, uncharacteristic moment of panic, I thought I literally couldn’t go on. My idol was sitting not ten feet from me, so close I could imagine the feel of his eyes on me, hotter than the blazing theatre lights. If there was ever a time that the show could not go on, it was absolutely now.
But then remembered myself. I’d grown up in mafia country, Naples, hounded from the age of twelve to join the Camorra so that by the time I was a teenager, avoidance was no longer a viable option and I’d had to use my fists and wits to escapes their clutches. If I could face down a mean, money-eyed Italian in an alleyway, I could face down a gentile, money-backed Adam Meyers in a clean but slightly decrepit theatre in Kensington, London.
Not only could I withstand it, I could own it. I’d been gorging myself on adversity since I was a child, so this panic, this fear of failure was nothing but premium fuel to me. So, I used it. And I bloody well killed it.
In fact, there was no doubt in my mind that I gave the performance of my life, just as there seemed to be no doubt from the audience given the standing ovation I received at the end of the play.
Afterward, I lingered in our communal changeroom, drinking from a bottle of grappa an overeager, too-interested stagehand bought me opening night because I’d mentioned it was the only liquor I had a taste for. There was no doubt in my mind that Adam was out there, mingling with the others at the closing night party with patrons from all over London. Finborough was a smaller theatre, outside the theatre district in the West End, but it was still relatively influential. I’d known it would be a night to hobnob and I was dressed accordingly, in the only nice suit I owned, one that Cosima had sent me the money to buy. It was all black, from the tip of my tie to the soles of my Santoni leather loafers, and it made the gold of my eyes fucking glow. My hair was tousled, but I wasn’t the type of man to care, and I hadn’t shaved in a few days so my jaw was defined by the dark shadow of a coming beard. I looked dark and dangerous. Women would flutter around me like butterflies ready and willing to be trapped in my net and even some men would circle, tempted like moths to my flame. I was confident in this because I was lucky enough to be born beautiful and loved enough to realize it. Yet, there I was cowering backstage after everyone had already joined the party because I was scared of one single man.
To be fair, I’d essentially cuckholded him and he’d been a hero of mine since I was fifteen. If that wasn’t a landmine to be avoided at all costs, I didn’t know what was.
“Seb?”
I turned to see the overeager stagehand, Maggie, popping her head around the door with a frown on her face.
“You coming? People are asking to see the star of the show,” she told me with a beatific smile.
She was cute, with one of the nicest pair of breasts I’d had the pleasure of seeing half spill out of a top, but I didn’t fuck people I worked with.
I thought of Savannah and amended that thought.
Apparently, I only fucked people I worked for.
“Are you hiding in here?” she asked me, head cocked and eyes wide because she knew me. She knew Sebastian Lombardi didn’t hide from anything, let alone people. I was a natural born charmer, normally, I’d already be out there performing like it was my second show.
“Of course not,” I smiled at her, straightened my shoulders and made my way toward her where I slung a comfortable arm over her shoulders as I walked us both into the front reception hall. “I was just giving the other actors a chance to shine before I upstaged them.”
She laughed. “I think It’s a bit too late for that. Now, I’ve been tasked to take you straight to Michael so he can introduce his star to investors.”
I allowed myself to be swept up in the meet and greet of theatre politics, wooing my director and producer Michael Horton’s friends as easily as breathing. The familiar routine of hook, reel and netting conquests lulled me into a false sense of security so over an hour later when I finally felt the electric touch of a heavy hand on my shoulder, I wasn’t prepared to turn around into the face of the man I’d been avoiding all night.
I was surprised by Adam Meyers even though I knew enough to be prepared.
No, it was more than that, I was wowed by him.
He was older, of course, though not as old as his wife, but he wore it well. The silver threads at his temples he wore like a crown, the weight of years a graceful mantle hanging from his broad shoulders. His face was all steep planes, his jaw so square it made acute angles, his nose a strong bridge and a sharp edge, only a perfectly pressed divot in the middle of his stern chin softened the cut of his haughty, perfect features. He was a tall man, his muscles firm curves under the pressed points of his suit. I wondered if we stood hip to hip if he would be eye level with me. A strange part of me hoped so, because it was Adam’s eyes that called a woman to sin, bright as Eden’s green grass or Eve’s seductive apple and surrounded by a thicket of brown lashes so long they tangled together.
I blinked and I realized I’d been staring too hard, too long at a man I should know very little about.
Then I blinked again, a hard closing of the eyes to erase the attraction I’d sketched out in his form.
He did the same.
I frowned at him, wondering madly if he’d been checking me out too.
When he winked, I knew for sure he had been and desire shot like Cupid’s arrow straight through my chest to my groin where it burst into flames.
For the first time in my life, I was hard for a man.
“Sebastian Lombardi,” he said in a strong, low voice. “Good to meet you.”
I froze like a little boy caught red-handed with his fingers in the cookie jar. How did Savannah’s husband know me? Could he have hired a private investigator to follow us?
Adam Meyers’ hearty laugh cut through my panic and when I finally focused on him, it was to see him shaking his head and collecting a lone tear from the corner of his fresh grass green eye.
“Sebastian, good God man, you should have seen your face. You looked practically apoplectic!” he said through his low laughter and stepped forward with his hand extended. “Adam Meyers, though obviously, you know that.”
“Obviously,” I managed to say drily, which wrung another startlingly sexy chuckle from him. “And you obviously know who I am. May I ask how?”
He frowned and tilted his head to the side mockingly. “Why, you think I’m a bad husband? Because, Sebastian, let me tell you something, a good husband knows everyone who works for his wife, least of all to ensure her safety, most of all to curtail any jealousy. Normally,” he added the last with a slight shrug.
I had the feeling he was laughing at me, delighting in the sweat he could feel slicked to my palm, a palm he still held clasped in his own, loving the way I pressed my lips together and not just because he found it funny but because he liked the way my lips looked doing it.
My heart thundered like the old, failing engine of my family’s 1965 Fiat 500. For the second time in my life, I felt drunk nearly to sickness with a combination of alarm and arousal.
“Normally?” I muttered.
His smirk widened, drawing my notice to his slightly fuller upper lip. I wondered how it would feel if I tested it between my teeth. “Normally,” he repeated with a blasé shrug. “Of course, what we have here isn’t exactly society’s definition of normal, is it, Sebastian?”
It unnerved me that he kept saying my name, but it completely nonplussed me that he said it with meaning as if he’d looked up the definition of Sebastian and was moved to express it. And the way he expressed it made me feel just as venerable and revered as the name denoted.
“You aren’t exactly acting normally right now, Mr. Meyers,” I said, diplomatically because, in truth, I wanted to punch him in the gut.
Who was that forward and yet convoluted on first meeting?
I’d been speaking to him for ninety seconds and
he already had me twisted deftly into complex sailor’s knots.
He chuckled again and stepped even closer, nearly too close to be acceptable. “Ah, excuse me if this is the incorrect way to greet my wife’s lover. You see, I’ve never had such a meeting before, I don’t know the correct form of address.”
I blinked so hard I saw spots.
His grip on my hand tightened painfully and his grin turned sly, wolfish. “You look shocked, Sebastian. Why is that? “Thou shalt not commit adultery” in thought or in deed. You think my wife knowingly went behind my back and cavorted with her chauffeur?”
My mouth flapped open and closed like wet laundry hung to dry in the wind. The sheer force of my shock seized my system and made it impossible for me to even think, let alone respond.
Adam’s eyes glittered illicitly, stolen gems I coveted even in my current state. “Yes, Sebastian, my wife told me all about your little game together. How you made her spread those slim thighs and touch her pink cunt.”
I loved the way his dirty words sounded in his posh British accent, the way the word ‘cunt’ was decadently round, a juicy morsel I wanted to eat off his tongue.
“She came home stinking of drink and sex, and when I made her bend over to show me her pussy, it was still so swollen and slick. I had to get on my knees, press that sweet arse higher and lick her clean with my tongue.”
My stuttering breath wafted across his lips as he leaned, just for a second, into my face. “I half expected to find the salt taste of you inside her sweetness. And you know what, Sebastian?” He pulled away to an acceptable distance, but he pulled the air between us with him so it stretched taught and vibrating. “I wish I had.”
Unbidden, a groan rumbled through my chest. Cazzo but the image of the strong, powerfully built man on his knees behind delicate Savannah, holding her down, the span of his hand the entire width of her small waist, as he ate her and imagined eating me out of her…it was enough to make a man weak in the knees. And I was not a man that succumbed to weakness of any sort.
Anger followed swiftly on the heels of my arousal, throwing kindling on the fire blazing in my belly until it raged inferno bright.
I bared my teeth at the Brit and watched his eyes flash. “You think you can cage me in a corner with your bullshit dirty talk? Take me by surprise by knowing how much your gorgeous wife melted at my words, her hand manipulated by me between her slim thighs in that pretty pink cunt?” I asked, spewing his words back at him. “You should be thanking me, Meyers. If she’d actually had my hands on her, my cock in her, she wouldn’t have come back to you at all.”
Gauntlet thrown, I stood there, breathing like a stuck bull, glaring at him with the full weight of my confused, aroused fury and Adam Meyers only stood there. He stood there looking me in the eye for a good minute, reading something written in the gold there that I wasn’t sure I wanted him to see. Then his gaze swept thoroughly, carefully over every inch of me, an archeologist discovering bones buried beneath the earth. I gritted my teeth at the invasive scrutiny, but I allowed it.
I didn’t want to think about why I allowed it, because I had the feeling it had something to do with the loss of that intimacy I craved and how, in only minutes, Adam had established that between us.
“You look good angry,” he finally said, pushing his hands in the pockets of his expensive suit and rocking back on his designer loafers.
“Are you seriously flirting with me?”
His grin deepened the dimple in his chin. I wanted to place my thumb there, hard, and force his mouth open for my kiss.
“Why should my wife have all the fun?” he asked me.
“I…” I cleared my throat and looked around at the party in full swing around us. “What exactly do you want from me here, Mr. Meyers? You want to take me in the back alley and fight for her honor? You want to warn me off so I never touch her again or report me to my boss so I lose my job?”
My gut cramped at the thought of being fired. It was a well-paying job and relatively easy despite the calamity that was driving in London proper. I didn’t know how long it would take me to find another, or if I even could find one as good with my lack of education and skills.
“Relax,” Adam’s deep, British clipped voice interrupted my misery. “I don’t want any of those things. Though, taking you into the alley, pressing you up tight against the wall and forcing you to jack off for me as I tell you all the dirty ways I want to exploit your body, well, that does have some serious merit.”
So, it was official, my long-time idol, famous acting heartthrob Adam Meyers was hitting on me.
Madonna Santa! What was happening?
I glared at him. “Are you fucking with me?”
Adam’s eyes creased heavily at the corners as he laughed and even that little detail was hot enough to be made illegal. “Unfortunately, no. Though that’s an option I’m trying to put on the table.”
“Stop fucking around with me,” I growled, stepping closer and in doing so, realizing that we were, give or take half an inch, the same height.
Why did that make my dick so hard?
“Fine,” he leaned forward again. I could feel his breath on my face, smell his aftershave, something rich that smelled like money. The good old boy playfulness fell from his features revealing the starkness of his desire. “My wife told me about you after the first time you drove her. ‘I have a gorgeous Italian man driving my car,’ she said in that breathy voice she uses when she’s aroused. Then she told me about your screenplay. In fact, she practically skipped into the house one day with it in her hands and shoved it in my face, spouting nonsense about how I just had to find someone to produce it. Only it wasn’t nonsense, I read it and bloody well loved it. So, I came here to see you act, to see if you had the chops to pull off the role of Roberto and somehow God saw fit to bless you with the gift of prose and acting, as well as a level of sexiness no man or woman could possibly be immune to. I wanted to kiss the writer behind the words the moment I read the screenplay. I wanted to place the man who made my wife come with only his filthy words on his knees before me so I could fuck his throat the minute my wife told me about it. And I wanted to fuck you the moment I saw you glorious as fuck on that stage for all to see.”
By the end of his tirade, we were both breathing too heavily, as if we’d run a race over his hot as coal words.
“Is that plain enough for you, Sebastian?” he taunted me.
I swallowed the tangled mess of words in my throat and tried to speak. “You know this is fucked up, right?”
Adam’s solemnity broke free with a grin and a shrug. “You’ve never fucked a man before? You should feel how hard I am thinking about being the one to break your cherry ass.”
I shuddered and tried to clench my teeth to stymie it but failed.
Adam laughed loudly. “We’ll start slow. You, me, and my wife.”
Unbidden, my mind conjured an image of pretty little Savannah on her hands and knees, her little cupid’s bow mouth stretched grotesquely by my wide cock and her satin pussy clenched tight around Adam’s driving dick.
My cock was leaking in my suit.
“Oh yes,” Adam rumbled, seeing the lust play out over my face. “I promise it’ll be just that hotter, sexier actually. Have you ever had a threesome before, Sebastian?”
“With women.”
“Ah,” he nodded, looked around the room and then leaned over to pluck two glasses of champagne from a passing waiter. He handed one to me, watched as I threw the entire glass back and then laughed as he handed me the one he’d grabbed for himself. “You’ll find sex with another man satisfying, I think. That animal inside you? The one desperate to rut and fuck without concern for your partner’s comfort and gratification? That beast can come out with a man and, if we’re both lucky, there will be a fight for the top that will satisfy the savage in ways you can’t even imagine.”
Again, my mind summoned an image of Adam and I grappling, hot, sweaty muscles slick under our hands as we pus
hed and shoved for supremacy.
“When?” I asked.
Adam’s pale green eyes flashed with predatory heat. “Now. Drink up, say your goodbyes and meet me out back in that alley you’re so eager to take me to.”
He smirked at me, ducked his head and turned on his heel to power through the crowd. People attempted to stop him, but he was on a mission. A mission to get to the alley where, I was fairly certain, I was going to have my first threesome with a man.
“Was that Adam Meyers you were just talking to?” one of my co-leads, Jake Hartley, asked me. “I’ve been wondering all night what a man of his caliber is doing here. Do you know him? Looked like it.”
“No,” I said, even though I knew I would know him intimately eminently.
“Well, what did he want?”
I shook off my stupor, clapped a hand to Jake’s shoulder and winked. “To congratulate me on stealing the show, of course.”
Jake laughed as I moved away even as he called, “Yeah, yeah, fuck you and your talent, Lombardi.”
I flicked my fingers back at him and ducked into the back room to grab my shit before I powered out the exit door.
A car was waiting.
Specifically, a Rolls Royce identical to the one I drove for Luxury Regent Car Service.
I barked out a laugh as I shook my head and made my way to the back door. Before I could open it myself, it swung wide and Savannah herself peeked out to beam at me.
“I knew he’d convince you.”
Despite my vague discomfort, Savannah’s arrogant charm soothed me. I knew her. After countless car rides and conversations and our little tryst beside Regent Park, I knew this woman intimately. Enough to know that I wanted her no matter what stood in my way. The fact that Adam Meyers was the roadblock didn’t hurt, of course. In fact, it was quite the contrary.
Savannah tugged my hand so that I practically fell into the car and I laughed when she immediately situated herself over my lap, the skirt of her pale pink dress riding up to expose the lace top of her nude stockings. I groaned and passed my hands over the silken fabric and up over her even silkier thighs.