by Renae Kaye
Vaughn shook his head. “Nope. My house, my rules. I get to be more sorry.”
I considered it. He did have air-con, after all. I nodded and approached to help him up, even though I was still limping. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Yeah.” He waved his hand dismissively and went to stand. When the towel gaped, he quickly grabbed it, so I gave him some privacy by turning my back. I heard him get up, gave him time to adjust the towel, and then slowly faced him again. His color was coming back, but he looked really apologetic. “Sorry about the towel coming off. I know you’re uncomfortable with stuff like that. It wasn’t deliberate.”
“Don’t stress it. I’m a gay man. I’ve seen it all before.” Yes. Seen him. Not long ago. And I enjoyed it.
“But your… uh… ex? What he said when… uh….” Vaughn trailed off awkwardly. My face burned red.
“You mean all that stuff Ben threw at me when he was dumping my sorry arse?”
“Yeah. I mean, I know he was probably being a dick, but he… uh…. Oh shit. Forget it.”
I was tired from the lack of sleep yet utterly chilled out by the cool air in the house. “Go on. Spit it out. You can’t leave me wondering.”
Vaughn hitched his towel higher. “He, uh, said you were a bit of a prude when it came to sex. I didn’t really believe him, but I invited you over a couple of times to my pool parties, and you always looked uncomfortable, so I thought you must be… you know? Uneasy about sex and stuff?”
My humiliation was complete. I put my hand over my brow and shook my head. “Not that I should have to explain myself, but just so you know? Ben said I was a prude because I refused to go to swingers’ parties with him. It had nothing to do with disliking sex or nudity and everything to do with what I considered a monogamous relationship. And the times you’ve invited me over to your parties? Well, firstly I didn’t want to gatecrash on your friends, and secondly, they didn’t need a hairy old fudger like me muscling in on their fun.”
When there was no answer from Vaughn, I looked up. He caught my gaze and said, “None of my friends would’ve laughed, and if they did, then I would’ve thrown them out. I wanted you to come over. As for the hairy bit, I’m hoping it’s true.” I was staring at him, wondering if he meant that like I thought, when he said, “Anyway, we can talk about that later. So you’re okay with the… ahh… nudity?”
Was I okay with the nudity? Was the Pope Catholic? Was it hot in Australia at Christmas?
“It’s fine.” My voice was croaky.
“Oh, good. Something else for us to discuss tomorrow. Now I’ll fetch the first aid kit for you, show you to the spare room, and withdraw. Because if I have to look at your foot, I’ll end up fainting again like a Victorian maiden shown her first cock.”
I wished he hadn’t said that. It gave me too many ideas. He reached into a cupboard.
“How did you manage to cut it, anyway?”
It wasn’t like I could say I had been climbing the wooden lattice to spy on him naked. “I’m not really sure. Maybe in the morning light, I’ll figure it.”
He led the way down a hall and pushed open a bedroom door. “Maybe in the morning light, we can figure it together.”
Then he turned and left me. And goddammit, he practically sashayed back down the hall and out of sight.
Chapter Five
I SLEPT blissfully in the coolness of Vaughn’s house… and woke up completely self-conscious. I was in Vaughn Maalouf’s house, wearing only my sleep shorts and shirt, and I didn’t even have the key to my front door. I was going to have to clamber back over the fence.
But I was cool. That had to count for something.
I checked out my injury, high on the arch of my foot, and found the cut clean, although bruised and sore. It was deep—hence the profuse bleeding—but did not requiring stitching. The placement of the injury meant that it didn’t touch the floor as I walked, but if I put pressure on the arch, like walking on an uneven surface, it would be extremely painful.
Rock climbing would be out of Geoffrey Saxon’s near future. Thank goodness for small mercies.
I doused the cut in antiseptic solution and covered it with a large Band-Aid.
I emerged from the bedroom and found Vaughn in the kitchen, eating cereal while scrolling on his phone. He was dressed in day clothes. I felt awkward.
“Good morning.”
He looked up with a smile. “Hey. How did you sleep?”
“Fantastically.”
“And how’s the head and foot?”
I put one hand to the back of my head. “Still a little tender. The foot’s going to take a while to heal, unfortunately.”
His face turned serious and worried. “You don’t need stitches, though?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“No doctor?” he pressed.
I nodded. “I’m sure.”
“No CPR, mouth-to-mouth, or sponge baths?”
I froze. He wasn’t serious about that, was he? I stared at him, but no expression of joking or laughter transformed the concern on his face. He was serious. Vaughn Maalouf was flirting with Geoffrey Saxon. Christmas miracles did exist.
I needed to say something back. Something witty. Something flirty. Something quickly.
“Uh….”
“Moving too fast?” he asked with a chagrined laugh. “No problem. I’ll give you… oh, let’s say two hours. Then I’ll try again.” He clapped his hands together. “Now what would you like for breakfast?”
“Uh….”
“Eggs or cereal?”
And my stomach gave a loud growl that overruled everything else. I decided on cereal, and Vaughn bustled around to fetch me a bowl and milk while my mind exploded ahead with possibilities of what he meant. He didn’t let me dwell on my thoughts as he began to chatter about Christmas coming and asked my plans. Then he told me about his large extended family get-together that would be happening, and before I knew it, I’d finished breakfast, and Vaughn had ushered me outside to where the chair still stood next to the fence.
He gestured. “Do you want to go first, or shall I?”
I was astonished. “You’re coming over?”
Vaughn nodded enthusiastically. “Absolutely. Or else you’ll chicken out about coming back. So I’m going to make sure you can’t ignore me. Or my air-con.”
It was early, but already the sun was beating down on us. I thought about spending the day with Vaughn. He was undeniably sexy. He was like sex on a stick, and I wanted to lick him up and down. It was also the idle fantasy of a single guy over forty about the adorable but unattainable single guy next door to him. Would I be able to make it through the day without indicating how cute I thought he was? Would I die in mortification if he found out?
But then again, he’d said something about playing doctors and nurses with me. You didn’t say that to a guy you didn’t fancy. So maybe he was receptive to playing more than Monopoly with me. Did he want a brief liaison? An affair? More?
I’d never thought about Vaughn more than as some impossible fantasy. Of course I was attracted to him. And he was also super nice.
While I was standing there trying to figure him out, Vaughn put his hands on his hips and turned to the fence. “I guess I’m going first.”
Then he stood on the chair, and with an athletic vault, he was over the fence. He was now on my side while I was on his side. “Come on, Geoffrey.”
I wanted to vault over athletically like he did, but then I considered my fitness level and the fact I didn’t want to spend Christmas in the hospital with a broken neck—actually, I didn’t want to spend any period in hospital with a broken neck—so cautiously made my way over. Vaughn was standing in the middle of my backyard, contemplating my tent. I dropped to the ground, stumbled a bit, yelped from the pain in my foot, and then limped over to look at what he was staring at.
“Shit.” I sighed with exasperation.
Vaughn grinned. “I guess it’s a good thing you did sleep over at my house.�
��
I turned up my nose as I reflected on the soaking-wet doona, pillow, and tent. The sprinklers had come on in the early morning, as per the recommendation for watering the gardens in the hot Perth summer. It would’ve been a nasty wakeup call.
“It’s one of those good news, bad news scenarios, isn’t it?” And with another sigh, I leaned down and grabbed the wet bedding and draped it over the clothesline to dry. Vaughn helped by dismantling the tent and placing it neatly on the patio where it could dry out but not kill the grass.
“Thanks,” I said with appreciation. “I guess it’s my turn to invite you into my house.”
He flashed another of his mega-hot grins at me. “Getting an invitation into your house is a start, I guess.”
He held my gaze as I tried to work up the courage to ask him what else he wanted an invitation to. I chickened out and turned to lead the way.
The Christmas presents I had wrapped yesterday were still piled on the table beside the box where I kept my tape and ribbons.
“Are these for your brother’s and cousin’s kids?” he asked and proved he’d been listening earlier. He was a nice guy. I felt a little burble in my stomach and wondered if that was a feeling of tenderness. A guy who was both sexy and nice? I’d have to watch my heart.
“Yeah. Rugrats. Do you have any?”
He hadn’t mentioned kids, but there was no reason a gay guy couldn’t have kids. He laughed. “Not yet. Do you know the sisters, cousins, and second cousins I mentioned over breakfast? Well, at least six of them have offered to be my surrogate if ever I found myself a husband. Now marriage equality has passed, the offers are sure to be even more stringent this year. My mother will be asking why I don’t have a boyfriend, my father will be slipping me phone numbers of odd gay guys he mentioned his single son to, my sisters will be putting their kids in my arms at every opportunity, trying to make me feel clucky, and my brothers….” He chuckled again.
I wanted to know. I’d discovered I wanted to know lots about this handsome and sexy man. “Your brothers what?”
I thought I could see a little bit of a blush on his cheekbones. “They’ll be warning me against the dangers of matrimony, but every single one of them manage to pull me aside at each family gathering and tell me in secret how great it is to be married.”
When things with Ben were working, in the early days of our relationship, it was pretty nice to be with someone. I missed that.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah. Well. Let me grab some clothes, and we can go back to your house, okay?”
He nodded and flashed that grin again. It should come with some sort of warning to men over forty. It was capable of inducing heart attacks.
“Don’t forget to bring your swimming trunks. We’ll have a dip in the pool.”
I still hadn’t replaced my old faded-green trunks. But Vaughn was simply going to have to put up with them. “As long as there’s no jokes about how lily-white my chest is. I don’t go to the beach much.”
“No nudist beach for you? What a pity.”
“I don’t have a hot body to show off like you do.”
Shit. There was that compliment I was hoping to avoid. I didn’t even make it to midmorning without revealing how I thought he was sexy.
Vaughn blushed, although he managed to hold my gaze. “How about we go together and see who gets more compliments?”
My cock thought that was a mighty good idea. And since I was only clad in my sleep shorts, it meant Vaughn won that round because I was compelled to turn and scuttle away into my bedroom to gather some clothes.
And my wits. Was Geoffrey Saxon flirting with Vaughn Maalouf?
I could almost hear the harking of the heralding angels welcoming another Christmas miracle.
Chapter Six
WE REMAINED in Vaughn’s cool house all day, only venturing outside to swim every couple of hours and to cook lunch on the barbeque. I provided two chicken schnitzels I had in my freezer, and Vaughn decided to cook them outside to save on the heat in the house.
We talked like old friends. Or perhaps new ones. We talked about our scintillating professions. I worked as a purchasing officer, and so it wasn’t the most interesting of professions, yet Vaughn wanted to know about it.
I found out, in turn, that he was a roofer. It explained the fitness of his body and the tan. He told me some wild stories about some of the more dangerous jobs, then admitted he wanted to get out of the industry.
“It’s a job for the young, Geoffrey. There are some older guys working on the roofs, but it takes a toll on your body. At the moment I’m fit and young, but I can’t be doing this when I’m fifty.”
He went on to tell me he’d applied to university and was waiting to see if he could get a place.
“What do you want to study?” I asked with interest.
“The course I’ve applied for leads to construction management. I really like the building industry, so I thought I’d get some qualifications and move up in the world. I spoke to some people at the university, and they think I can do two courses a semester. That’s half a full-time load. It will be hard while working, but I think I can do it.”
It didn’t quite gel with the party-boy image I had of Vaughn. I had thought him rather shallow and concerned more with his looks and social life than adult things like his career in ten years. But perhaps that was maturity. One really didn’t have the right to judge a man on what one saw by being a peeping tom.
We watched TV together, chatted, and ate. I wanted to impress him, so I pulled out my never-fail recipe to make cornflake honey joys, chucked them into the hot barbeque after Vaughn cooked our schnitzels, and closed the lid. The heat would be enough to cook them. I scored points for that because Vaughn loved my honey joys.
I spotted a box of Scrabble on his shelf and challenged him to a game. Neither of us were very good at it, and the scores were evenly dismal. Vaughn pulled out a bottle of scotch halfway through the game, which meant it was even harder to make words. We abandoned the game with me in the lead by only three points.
It was five o’clock, and Vaughn proposed another swim before we thought about making something for dinner. It was our fourth dip for the day with the cut on my foot carefully covered by a waterproof dressing, and I had lost any of my inhibitions. Vaughn had seen my body now and was neither repulsed, nor so overcome with lust he’d attacked me, so I was confident enough to slip out of my shirt and dive into the pool.
I’d learned the hard way it was better to be in the pool when Vaughn took his shirt off and prepared to dive in. I swam a lazy lap while I waited for the splash that would indicate Vaughn had joined me. I touched the end of the pool and turned to work out where Vaughn had gotten to. He was standing on the edge of the pool, looking directly at me. His shorts were the sailor-blue ones and did nothing to hide the shapes under the material. I hadn’t yet decided whether I liked the view from the front or the back the best. Vaughn had said he climbed a lot of ladders, and that certainly showed in his rock-hard glutes, but the front was just as interesting, with its soft curves and telltale bumps. Memories of the night before flashed before me, and the images of Vaughn swimming naked rose in my thoughts. What would be his reaction to me suggesting another midnight swim tonight? Would he be up for ditching the trunks again?
I blinked and with horror realized I had been staring. For how long?
My gaze flew upward, and my eyes met his twinkling brown ones.
“Just checking,” he said and then dove into the pool.
Just checking what? Checking I was still gay? Checking I was checking him out? And now that he’d checked on me, what was he going to do about it?
I watched his figure glide under the water and come closer to me. I expected him to surface halfway up the pool, but he kept coming underwater. Then he subtly changed direction, which gave me warning about what he was about to do. I was in the deep end of the pool, my feet some distance from the bottom, so I was hanging on by resting my elbow on the lip of the po
ol and leaning back against the fiberglass side. It meant when Vaughn surfaced less than a meter away from me, I had nowhere to go.
He broke the surface of the water with a noisy gasp, put one hand on the pool beside me, wiped his other hand across his face, and pushed his hair back. His forearm was brushing my shoulder.
I was fortysomething years old, and I’d had enough teasing all day. I needed to know.
“Just checking what?” I whispered.
Vaughn bobbed in the water beside me and quietly replied, “Just checking to see if you would be receptive to this.”
And then he moved in and placed his lips over mine.
Yep. Vaughn Maalouf was kissing Geoffrey Saxon, and I was kissing him back.
He tasted of chlorine and maleness. His body came to rest against me, and I could feel the heat pouring off his body. He tangled his legs with mine, and I placed one hand on his waist to steady him. Or was that to steady me? I wasn’t sure.
He growled deep in his throat and placed his hand on the back of my head to pull himself closer. It caused my elbow to slip off the edge of the pool, and we began to sink. He pushed away and grabbed for the side while I did the same, panting as I caught my breath.
I wasn’t surprised when Vaughn wasn’t even breathing hard. There was that thing about being younger and fitter.
“I guess I should make sure you can stand before I try that again, right?” he said.
“Only if you want me alive at the end of it.”
He leaned over and ran the backs of his fingers down my furry chest. “Alive would be very much preferable.”
“And not only because of the hassle of calling the cops, I hope?”
He chuckled and floated nearer to me until our chests touched and he was whispering the words against my mouth. “No. Not only to avoid calling the cops. If you’re alive, there’s lots of things I can think of doing other than calling the cops. Would you like to know about some of them?”
Did I want to know? My cock was sitting up eager to listen to any suggestion.