Jewels And Panties: (Book 1-15) Billionaire Romance Series

by Brooke Kinsley

  "Cynthia..." he breathed. "I... I..."

  Unable to articulate how shocked and horrified he was at his wife, all he could do was stammer and sweat as he leaned against the patio. He loosened his grip on the case and shifted his weight from foot to foot as though he was getting ready to give up and hand it over, but I wouldn't be so lucky. I took one step toward him and he reached for a sushi knife from the block on the counter. It sliced through the air as he brandished it in my direction.

  "I can't let you do what you want. What you've got down there... What you're planning to do... It's not right. It's evil."

  "It's not evil," I said. "It's love. It's nothing but love."

  "That down there is not love!"

  But he didn't know what love was. To him, love was being married to a woman he knew nothing about who harbored dark fantasies about things that made him sick. He knew nothing of love. But I did.

  "Put the knife down."

  "No!"

  He waved it some more.

  "Put it down!"

  Desperation took over my mind and part of me wanted to fight him for it but he was just as angry and pent up as me. He'd kill me if I approached him. We looked into each other's eyes, trying to stare each other out in a mental stand-off that would see no winner.

  Then I felt a soft touch on my arm and looked down to see Cynthia. She was beckoning me down to her level so she could press her smeared mouth up against my ear.

  "Leave him with me," she whispered.

  There was a peculiar authority to her voice and I found myself nodding meekly and stepping backward out the room. She closed the door and left me out in the hall. From inside the kitchen, I could hear muted voices and footsteps. A second later, the screaming started.

  Chapter Three

  Berger

  "So, this Eugene. He was, like, your boyfriend or something?"

  The old gave me an anxious look, terrified that I'd become hostile.

  "Dude, I don't care that you're gay."

  "You don't?"

  "Er, no. I don't care. It's not, like, the nineteen-fifties anymore."

  His entire body sagged with relief.

  "You really don't care?"

  "Literally, not many people care about that kinda thing anymore."

  He moved back as though he'd been physically hit by the revelation.

  "Tell me you really mean it," he cried.

  "Jesus, man. Calm down. Yeah, I really mean it. It's cool. People are gay. It's not really that interesting."

  "Not that interesting!"

  "You know what I mean. It's not like a whole whooop die dooh fantastic ding dong anymore. It's cool."

  His eyes began to water and if I was being honest, I'd have to say I was sick of the sight of him crying.

  "Chill," I told him but his bottom lip began to quiver and once again he was off gibbering and sobbing.

  "You've no idea how long I've waited to hear that... that what I wasn't terrible. That I wasn't some sort of pervert or wrong' un."

  Fuck, I thought. I'm going to have to hug this guy all over again and tell him everything's okay. The more I looked at him, the more I could see just how much he had suffered beneath the weight of his sexuality. It was almost impossible to believe that people could still feel such shame.

  "When was the last time you were back home?" I asked. "I mean back home in the States."

  He pushed the heel of his hand into his eye socket and shook his head.

  "A long time ago.When I was nothing more than a boy."

  I was doing the math in my head when he said.

  "Probably over fifty years ago."

  "Shit."

  "Such a long time ago."

  "A lot has changed since then. You wouldn't recognize the place."

  I tried to figure out what life would have been like back then, what life would have been like for my dad when he was a kid or even my grandpa. It felt like I was imagining a parallel universe and it made me uncomfortable.

  "Eugene," I said, trying to keep him on topic and stop him crying. "You must have really loved him."

  "Fuck I really did. Love of my life. There's never been anyone like him. Probably never will be although Lord I've tried to find a replacement."

  "I know how that feels."

  "You do?"

  "Kinda. I've loved people and... loving them sometimes just isn't enough to be in their life."

  He slumped down into the sand and began rolling another cigarette. When he finished, he slapped the ground beside him and I sat down too. He offered me the cigarette and for the first time in my life, I declined.

  "I actually like having vocal chords," I said.

  He laughed and put it in his own mouth.

  "Suit yourself. Anyway, Eugene. We met in the last year of high school. We were both keen football players although he was better than me. He was like my idol, you know. It started off that I just wanted to be like him.

  By the way he talked I figured this was going to be a long story so I made myself more comfortable and leaned my head back to gaze up at the sky. There was only a single wisp of a cloud floating by that soon dissolved beneath the growing heat of the sun like cotton candy in water.

  "You know I was thinking earlier that you might have played football," I remarked. "You've got shoulders like a bison."

  He winked at me and I could see he still had the boyish charm that Eugene must have witnessed.

  "Football was my life until I met Eugene. Then he was all I could see."

  "So, like, how did it happen? Life was conservative back then, right? How did you both know?"

  He closed his eyes as he remembered and the lines from his eyes cascaded all the way down to his jawline.

  "Conservative," he said, chewing the word. "It was more than that. It was oppressive. The town I grew up in only had one set of crossroads, two hardware stores, a deli, two ice cream parlors, three doctors, one high school with only a hundred kids and no hospital. It was about as small as a postage stamp but less cultured."

  "Woah, you have some memory."

  "I wish I didn't," he grumbled, solemnly, "My God, I wish I didn't. But in that dark hellhole where the winters were longer than you could handle and your parents loved to thrash you more than they loved you, Eugene was a ray of sunshine. He was more than that. He was the air I needed to survive.”

  “You know I grew up always knowing I was different. Even before the whole sex thing was in my head I just knew. I remember once being in the swimming pool. I was six years old and the lifeguard was walking by in these tiny shorts and I was just like, wow, that man must be a god or something because I'd never seen anything so beautiful. Girls just never did it for me. It wasn't like I didn't like them. I had loads of friends who were girls but the guys were all I could think about.”

  “When I reached high school and boys in my class were fixating on bosoms and asses I was wondering what all the fuss was about and when they started kissing I couldn't think of anything more repulsive than kissing a girl. Not like that anyway. It was one thing giving your mom a peck on the cheek. It was one thing kissing Sally-Anne with your tongue. Sally-Anne would kiss anyone if you gave her a cigarette."

  "I'm kinda the same," I joked and he laughed, playfully punching my arm.

  "Yup, Sally-Anne was no Eugene and I could have kissed him all day. That day came when we were seventeen and all the guys thought it was awesome to go out camping to this huge lake called Lake Morrison which was a full hour's drive away, a real adventure for a bunch of boys like us who'd only experienced the outside world through a grainy black and white television."

  It was the first time I'd ever seen such an expression but Cooper managed to look both sad and happy at the same time as though his face was pulled apart in both directions, each feature twisting away from the other. His foot began to tremble. It had obviously been a long time since he'd told this story. If he'd told it at all.

  "So, Lake Morrison," I prompted.

  He sparked
awake and blinked a few times.

  "Lake Morrison. We were camping. It was hot. Too hot. There were fireflies at midnight that danced on the water like spirits and owls larked in the trees although we never saw them, only heard them. They frightened me. Dad always said the owls were wise. They brought messages. They knew the future. And they just hid up in the trees shrouded by leaves and darkness watching us.”

  “We drank beer. Too much beer. I'd never been drunk before. The most I'd ever had was occasionally slipping a bottle of beer from my grandpa but on this night, man I got raging drunk. So drunk I couldn't see. We had this old transistor radio that blared out the hits of the day although Lord knows I couldn't remember a single note. So I was drunk. I'd been chucking up my guts into the water when I decided enough was enough. I was going to sleep right there and then on the shoreline.”

  “I remember laying my head down on the pebbles and waking up hours later to the feeling of a chilled breeze moving up my arm. Except it wasn't a breeze. It was fingers. Eugene's fingers. He asked me if I was okay, said I'd made a right fool of myself with my drunken antics but I didn't care because now I was sober and had this pounding headache. My first ever hangover.”

  “He said I could sleep some more in his tent. He had water there and some snacks. Said I'd feel better if I came inside from the chilled wind."

  Cooper started to laugh like a maniac, staring up at the sky as though he was seeing Jesus. Please don't start crying again, I thought. Just for the love of God keep it together.

  "I don't remember how I got in there," he continued. "But before I knew it I was lying in his tent looking up at the bugs sticking to the canvas ceiling and feeling the pressure of Eugene's body beside me. The tent was nothing more than a bed sheet bent over in half over some tarpaulin. It was sweaty and cramped and I could smell just about every single part of that boy's body but I was in heaven.”

  “He lifted my head up and pressed the lip of a water bottle to my mouth. I drank until my stomach felt it was close to bursting. When I felt better, I sat up and it was then that I realized he was wearing nothing but his underpants. Nice tighty whitey little things that showed just about everything I'd ever dreamed of seeing. I remember noticing there was a small patch of wetness at the front, just a little speck of something."

  Jesus Christ, I thought. I don't wanna hear anymore but as this old dude was taking such good care of me and he was about as fragile as a kitten in a dog fight, I nodded and tried my best to look thoroughly enthralled in his story.

  "Hmm... wetness," I repeated.

  "Yep. Anyway, I was so shocked at the beauty of this boy I thought I was gonna barf."

  "Standard reaction of course."

  "And I was sat there all hunched up, cradling my stomach just hoping to God I wouldn't puke again when he asked me if I was okay and he touched my shoulder. Just a gentle, innocent touch but it sent, like, this spark of raw energy up my arm until I was sure every single hair on my head was standing on end. I was shaking. I was covered in gooseflesh. I was alive. I told him I wasn't okay. Then I said the worst thing imaginable.”

  “While holding my breath and trying to push down the water in my stomach, I told him that I was in love with him. Then I waited for the thrashing. A boy like me in those days didn't go around saying things like that to people. He'd beat my ass for sure."

  "Did he?"

  "Beat myass? No."

  He licked his lips as though he could still taste this adolescent experience and shook slightly. Something told me that he was sitting right beside me with an erection growing in his pants but I was too scared to look down.

  "He kissed me," he said. "He just full on threw himself at me and pushed his lips to mine. And that was it. We were thrashing at each other. Pushing and pulling at each other like it was the end of the world and our bodies were the only things that could keep one another alive. He bit into my chest. I bit his throat. We wound our tongues together until we were this great, sloppy mess and I lay on top of him, grinding my body against his. He was rock hard. I'd never felt a cock before apart from my own and I remember being surprised because his was much smaller than mine but way cute like I could just gobble it up."

  Oh, my God. When will this end? I braced myself for more details and dug my fingers into the soil as I cringed.

  "It was him who got naked first. Pulled his underpants down so that I see and smell the length of him. I'd never wanted to taste something so much in my life and without so much as a single second of hesitation, I went for it. Just leaned down and sucked on it, tasting its pure saltiness and how it throbbed red hot in my mouth."

  The thought of the old guy, as nice as he was, engaged in any kind of sexual activity made me uncomfortable but not for the most obvious reason.

  "So this was your first time?" I asked.

  "It was my best time," he replied. "The boy spurted in my mouth right away but he wasn't done. I kept going and he kept loving it. On and on we went. There was no way the other boys didn't hear us. We were crying out like howler monkeys for hours. I had to try my hardest to not spurt my load in my pants. It was that good. All I needed was for him to breathe on me and I woulda came. When I couldn't suck on him anymore and it felt as though my jaw was seizing up, he pushed me down onto my back and took charge. It was what I had been waiting for for so long. If I could have died right then I would have. Would have saved me a lot of hassle too.A lot of pain.A lot of regrets."

  For a second, the sadness swept back into his eyes but it soon disappeared as he continued with his story.

  "He took all of me," the old man swooned. "All of me. Just every single inch, all the way down his throat until I was sure I was tickling his voice box."

  The old man let out a laugh and adjusted the crotch of his pants. Now I was sure he had a hard-on and I didn't really want to see it. I looked away over to the far horizon of the desert where a speck of blackness loitered in the sky, a bird maybe, or perhaps just a hallucination.

  "Anyway, I'm sure you don't wanna hear all the gory details," he said.

  "Bit late."

  "To cut a long, beautiful story short. I came four times that night. Twice in his mouth, once on his ass and once in it. It was the best night of my life."

  "Sounds like you've remembered every second of it."

  "I've relived it up here every night since I was a teenager," he said and tapped his temple. "You wouldn't believe the pleasure it still gives me."

  I cleared my throat and looked back over for the bird. It was gone now.

  "So after that... You became a couple?"

  "We became inseparable. We had a purer love than any man and woman could have in marriage. We had the real thing. The love of two boys cannot be compared with regular love. We were like two cherubs, two angels hellbent on seeing out the end of days choking on each other's cocks. There came a point when we weren't even a couple. We were merely just the same being. Two hearts, one body. Two minds, one soul. Two cocks one…"

  "Okay, yeah. I get it. So what happened?"

  "It happened. It...”

  It looked as though the waterworks were going to start all over again as his bottom lip shook and I just couldn't bear the thought of him babbling through his tears again. I took the pouch of tobacco out of his top pocket and proceeded to roll him a cigarette, plopping it into his mouth before he had the chance to cry.

  "You're a dear boy," he said as he lit it and gave me a wink.

  He was the first person I'd ever seen wink with a tear falling down his cheek at the same time. Pain and a youthful cheekiness.Misery and irony.

  "Eugene was all I ever wanted," he said. "But he wanted more than just me."

  "Aw, please don't tell me he cheated on you."

  "Oh, Lord no. He would never have done such a thing. What he wanted couldn’t be found in the arms of another man. What he wanted came in slips of paper and made dreams come true. He wanted money. He wanted out of our shithole town. He needed glamor, something else to live for apart fr
om those two hardware stores and the one set of crossroads. He wanted me to bring him riches. Neverending riches so he could be the great character he thought he deserved to be."

  "So, what, like he made you rob a bank or something?" I laughed.

  Cooper froze. The cigarette dropped from his mouth and fell in the sand. He picked it up and placed it back between his lips with the sand sticking to his chapped skin.

  "Or something," he said, narrowing his eyes.

  I waited for an end to the story but he just stood up and walked away toward the horses and that was that. Well fuck, I thought. Clearly, it didn't end well. Normally, I'd have taken the hint and kept my distance but something against my better judgement made me get up and follow him into the stables.

  "It's cool," I said. "You don't have to tell me a thing."

  "I won't," he replied, not looking at me.

  He was bending down to kiss Mercy on the nose. The stables were black and cool and smelled like shit and hay but it was strangely nice and cozy. Taking a seat on a hay bale, I watched the old man and his horses. He was the most loving person I'd ever seen. Loved the horses more than most people loved their kids. It was sad to see. He would have been a great father. Maybe even a great husband to some lucky guy.

  As I watched him, I debated whether I should tell him what I'd been thinking the whole time he was telling his story. I'd felt awkward the entire time, not because I didn't like to hear about sex, not because I couldn't bear it envisage this old man with a cock in his mouth, but because I wanted to hear more and I didn't know what that meant to an alpha male like me.

  “Hey, Cooper?”

  “You can call me Coop if you like.”

  “Okay, Coop?”

  “Uhuh.”

  “You wanna hear a story?”

  Chapter Four

  Lincoln

  At first, I thought it was Schiele making that ridiculous sound but then I realized it was Cynthia who was screaming.

  "You lousy son of a bitch, loser!" she screeched. "Do you not know what the chemical is capable of?"