Slowly, so slowly, he slid forward and into Jack’s ass as he begged and rucked his hips back to try to get more. If Jack had any discomfort from the penetration, no sign of it showed in his eager, desperate, welcoming body. Randy took his time, sliding inside inch by inch, leisurely but relentlessly. Finally his balls brushed against Jack’s ass but he kept going to drive the final half-inch as deep as possible.
Jack stretched and thrashed and tried to impale himself even farther. His eyes fluttered open and he rolled his head back to look at Randy. The embers in his eyes almost glowed as he moaned, “You’re inside my soul.”
Randy’s lust blazed up and he had to move. His deliberate strokes quickly grew more intense as Jack pushed back against him to meet each thrust in a beautiful rhythm. Randy wrapped a lube-covered palm around Jack’s dick to twist and stroke. The juice leaking from him mixed with the lube to create a slick glide that drove Jack crazy. In minutes he was screaming his need for Randy to fuck him harder, deeper, faster.
“Please, sir. There, oh right there, fuck me right there,” he sobbed and Randy did, until his orgasm became inevitable. Jack knew it too and whimpered and babbled as he rocked against Randy’s body. “Ah, sir. Please stroke me. Please, may I come?”
“Not yet,” Randy said, and Jack almost sobbed. He reached down to Jack’s ass and ran a fingertip around the ring of muscle where it stretched around his girth. When Jack pressed his head back to Randy’s chest and moaned at the sensation, he slid his index finger in, filling Jack even more than his thick cock already did. Jack stiffened for a moment and then gasped, “Give it all to me. I want it.”
Randy considered further testing Jack’s limits, but his mind’s eye pictured a clock. As much as he took pleasure from Jack’s body, his responsibilities as the top man came first. He withdrew his finger so he could again grab Jack’s lovely slender dick and run his hand up and down the shaft in a twisting motion that made Jack cry out.
He began to pump, faster and harder. “Now,” Randy growled as he tightened his slick palm around the head and created a cage of sorts. It took only a few more strokes before Jack gasped and cried out as his come shot into Randy’s palm, hot and sticky. Randy let go too, filling the rubber buried deep inside Jack’s ass. “Aah, Jack,” he boomed as his balls emptied. “So good.”
“Don’t stop, sir” Jack begged, reduced to a wild creature by the sensations Randy brought him. He twisted and shook in his ropes, still not trying to get free but clearly reveling in being bound as they came together. “Please keep fucking me.”
Randy brought his palm to Jack’s mouth and let him lick the come off with broad swipes of his tongue over the skin and between the fingers while Randy kept moving in his ass until he softened naturally.
Jack finally stopped thrashing to sag down again into his arms. “My god. That was fucking incredible,” he gasped weakly. Randy rubbed his cheek against Jack’s beard and held him for another minute before withdrawing slowly, discarding the condom, and untying the ropes. He held Jack close while rubbing circulation into his limbs to make sure there had been no loss of blood flow, then rearranged them both under the covers.
As Jack gradually came back together from his shattering orgasm, Randy stroked his body, murmuring in his ear. Occasional tremors ran through Jack, but after ten minutes or so, he was all melted and limp under Randy’s roaming hands. He muttered, “I’ll give you a year to stop doing that.”
“What, just a year?” Randy teased, though his heart was pounding. He knew already that a year wouldn’t be enough.
Jack shifted around and rested his cheek on Randy’s chest, wrapping an arm around his waist. “The things we’re going to do to each other. I can’t wait,” Jack murmured, and Randy kissed the top of his head.
After a pause, Jack asked quietly, “I havna right to ask, but did you go back to Cuir after I left for London?”
Randy smiled at the touch of jealousy he could hear, though Jack was carefully looking away from him and at the foot of his bed. “I did.” Jack immediately tensed but Randy gave him no time to stew. “To talk with Liam and other friends. That’s it. I was lonely when you left and I needed some company, but even thinking you and I’d never be together, I wasn’t ready for anyone else.”
Jack tipped his head up. His eyes sparkled in the low light as he exhaled heavily. “Would you have come after me? If I hadn’t returned to Washington?”
Randy hesitated, but his heart was already laid bare. “Yes, I think I would have. I fought myself damn near every day not to call you, but I was losing the fight. You remember the movie Love Actually? Where the guy in love with Keira Knightly pretends to be a bunch of carolers and shows her poster after poster?”
Jack grinned and said, “Oh no.”
“Yeah,” Randy said sheepishly. “I might have been checking into where in London to get a boombox or hire a troop of itinerant carolers.”
Jack’s eyes glistened as he smiled. “I should have waited then. That would have been something to see.”
Randy kissed his head again. “No, this is better.”
Almost nervously, Jack asked, “Are we…exclusive? I suspect so, given your principles, but perhaps I shouldn’t presume—”
“Absolutely,” Randy cut him off with a playful growl. “I wunna share you, and I dunna want you to share me.”
“Good Potteries,” Jack murmured, and he sounded pleased both about the attempted accent and the message. “We dinna talk about it but I’m on Truvada. Not that I’ve done all that much, only when I traveled, but—”
“Just in case. I am too,” Randy said.
“Oh, wonderful. So, if you want to skip the condom next time?”
“We can talk about it.” Even though Randy’d been on PrEP for a few years, he hadn’t barebacked anyone in a long, long time. The idea of doing that with Jack made his dick twitch and attempt to come back to life.
Jack noticed and laughed. “My insatiable grizzly bear,” he murmured as he burrowed more deeply against Randy. Then, in an abrupt change of tone, he added, “Danny told me about what you did for him and his father.”
Randy was surprised at the shift, but he went with it. “I didn’t do that much. Danny’s lawyer reached a great deal with the prosecutor, and as a result Gates also took a plea. That note Danny left in your hotel room was enough to persuade the judge of his sincere attempt to stop Gates, so he accepted the recommendation of a suspended sentence. If Danny completes probation and community service he’ll have no criminal record at all.”
“That’s brilliant news,” Jack said. “They contacted me in England as well, you know, before recommending the deal to the court. I told them I supported it.”
Randy pulled Jack’s chin up and kissed him hard on the mouth. “Thank you. You had even more right than me to want to see Danny behind bars.”
“It’s na where he belongs. What’ll happen with Danny’s father?”
“We don’t know yet. Luc and I agreed to support a change to probation for the remainder of Henry’s sentence, and his lawyer has started the wheels turning. It isn’t clear when the next court hearing will take place or if our support will be enough to persuade the judge to alter the sentence, but the lawyer’s hopeful.”
“What will Danny do if his father does get out? I mean, will they have to stay in different states because they’re both court-supervised?”
“Nope. Part of the recommendation in Danny’s case was that, if his father’s released, he can do his probation and community service in Maine. Luc agreed to give him and Henry a place to live if all that comes together while they get established. He thinks that’s what Kevin would want him to do.”
“Oof.” Jack grunted, then eventually said, “Your Luc sounds a remarkable man.”
“He is. You’ll like him.”
“As I think you’ll like Sophie.”
Randy raised his head and looked at Jack in surprise. “Is she coming here? With you?”
Jack chuckled. “Not exac
tly. She’s coming for a visit in two weeks to help me get settled in the flat, and she wants to meet you of course.” He mouthed at the piercing through Randy’s nipple until he elicited a moan. “She wants to meet the man who stole me away from her.”
Things started to heat up for a second round, but Randy abruptly stopped what he was doing with his hand pressed against Jack’s wet hole. “Wait a minute. I just remembered. Before, you said there were two things you wanted to tell me. One was that you’re moving here. What was the second thing?”
“Can’t you guess?” Jack teased as he rutted shamelessly against Randy’s fingers.
“Tell me or I’ll make your beautiful ass so pink you won’t be able to sit for a week,” Randy snarled playfully.
“Is that a threat or a promise? Anyway, it’s about how I got my position at the Smithsonian so quickly. Do you know what kind of demand exists for jobs there?”
“Did Sophie or her father pull some strings?”
“Not exactly, though they helped with the introduction. Ultimately, what made the difference was my scholarship in identifying and authenticating a previously unknown work by Jean-Pierre Brousseau.” Randy froze as Jack continued with a touch of smugness. “I shall be quite the commodity on the lecture circuit for a while, and the Smithsonian board leapt at the chance to hire me on before the public reveal.”
Randy croaked out, “Are you serious, Jack? It’s really a painting by—?” He couldn’t say the name. It was beyond impossible. Even after all the talk, deep down he hadn’t been sure it could be true.
Jack scooted up in bed so they were sitting side by side. “Beyond question. The tests on the canvas, on the pigments used, even the frame, all bore out my research. We found the number François wrote on the back of the canvas, just covered up. Combined with the paper trail I assembled, the Valcoates appraisers were persuaded of the error and have formally withdrawn the incorrect report that denied authenticity.”
Jack was so proud he looked like he’d combust as he declared, “You, my dear, are the sole owner of a genuine Brousseau.”
Randy had known he’d look like that. He had known that Jack’s fire would shine out like a beacon when he proved without a doubt that he alone had identified an unknown work by Jean-Pierre Brousseau, and Randy was grateful he could see it. He pulled Jack to him and tasted as much of that passion and joy as he could capture.
Once Randy was able to think again, he put a hand to his head. “Oh my god. I actually own a priceless work of art. I don’t even know what to do about that.”
“You don’t need to make any decisions yet. The custodial agreement your lawyer Christian negotiated allows for private disclosures for professional purposes, but is quite explicit about your rights to determine whether and when a public disclosure is made. Of course my museum, well, my former museum, is hopeful they can persuade you to make a big production out of it. They’ll want to have press conferences and a gala opening. Pomp and circumstance an’ all. But you have the final say.” He smiled. “And since I no longer work for the Kensington, they canna use me to persuade you to go one way or t’other.”
Randy was reeling. It wouldn’t sink in. He owned a painting potentially worth many, many millions of dollars. “Do I need to sell it?” he fretted. “How will I protect it if I don’t?”
Jack soothed him and pulled Randy’s head down to his own shoulder. “Shh. There’s no rush. The painting is safe and you’ve as much time as you want to take advice and think this through.”
“What about your new job? Won’t that depend on when the unveiling happens? And you deserve the recognition.”
“My new director at the Smithsonian is confident the reveal will happen at some time, and she’s sufficiently impressed with my work that she has ideas about other lost mysteries she’d like to investigate. As for me, yes, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I proved my scholarship was correct.”
Jack cupped Randy’s face between his hands. “But much more important than that, I found my life. Whether the painting turned out to be genuine or imitation ultimately made little difference.” His eyes glistened and his voice was rough. “My own sweet bear. You are the true masterpiece.”
Epilogue
“Left,” Jack said. Sophie adjusted the landscape slightly on the left side and waited for Jack’s approval. He nodded.
Randy watched the two of them work with his arms folded across his burly chest as he tried to keep amusement off his face. Jack and Sophie were like two halves of a whole. They didn’t need to talk much but seemed to communicate in eyebrows and grunts and one-word comments. Jack turned and saw the glint in Randy’s eye.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Randy said with a shake of his head. “It’s just I get a kick out of watching you together.”
Sophie slipped through Mata Hari to join them near the bar. She had golden hair pulled back from her heart-shaped face and was willow-thin, so the slinky silk dresses and strappy heels she favored made Randy think of a femme fatale in a movie from the forties. She and Jack were about the same height, and when she twined her long, bare arms around Jack’s waist they looked almost like siblings. As the two of them surveyed the curated walls of Mata Hari, the tilt of their heads was so similar Randy thought they might calibrate it with a protractor.
With a nod of satisfaction, Sophie rested her head on Jack’s shoulder and smiled over at Randy. “Twins from different wombs,” she murmured before continuing her study of the walls, and Randy laughed. Despite how intimately Jack and Sophie stood together, Randy had realized instantly upon meeting Sophie that not a touch of sexual attraction existed between the pair. Sophie might have no sex drive to speak of, but she craved physical contact. Randy didn’t quite understand yet how that worked, but then, it didn’t matter. It worked for Sophie.
He followed their gaze over the walls. Sophie and Jack had spent all morning rearranging Randy’s art collection into vignettes that each told a story, then directing his staff to move the bar’s furniture in order to complement the works on the wall. Even though he’d looked at many of the pieces for years on end, combining them in a new way made him appreciate them all over again.
“Damn, you’re good,” he said happily as he studied the nearest grouping. “I never would have made these connections.”
Sophie languidly turned her green eyes back to him. “You selected each work with love, Randy. It’s like they’re all your children. You didn’t want to play favorites, so you tried to showcase each one individually.”
Jack shrugged. “Sometimes it takes an unbiased eye to see how the personalities fit together, and how certain pieces can support each other. That’s all we did here.”
“Well, it’s fantastic,” Randy said.
Sophie slipped free of Jack and took Randy’s hand to tug him into the side room on the left of the bar. “Come see what we did,” she urged.
Randy and Jack had been together for two weeks when Sophie arrived from London to help Jack settle into his apartment. The three of them had spent a lot of time together each day before Randy headed to open the bar, exploring the museums of Washington like noisy, chattering magpies, full of opinions and reactions to everything they saw. Randy noticed that around Sophie, Jack’s accent stayed posh. It was only in private with Randy that he slipped into his more natural way of speaking.
A few nights she and Jack had been waiting up for him at Randy’s house after he closed Mata Hari, and they’d lazed around the fire with a bottle of wine to talk about favorite painters and new artistic movements. Sophie had taken to pushing Jack onto the floor so she could curl up against Randy. When Jack teasingly complained one evening that he’d been replaced, she’d looked at him under her lids and murmured, “Randy is far warmer than your scrawny bum.”
Over the past weeks, Randy had discussed the Sunrise painting at length with Jack and Sophie, Christian, Thomas, a director from the Kensington museum, and Luc before finally deciding to put it up for sale. The plan was to attr
act publicity with a gala reception at the Kensington, and the museum had already begun to tease a big, mysterious discovery. That would give Jack his well-deserved moment in the sun, and his colleagues and the museum patrons bubbled already with questions.
Sophie had persuaded Randy that, once the gala was concluded, the time would be ideal for a vigorous auction of the previously unknown Brousseau to capitalize on the publicity. With Jack’s help, Christian negotiated an auction arrangement in which the house waived the seller’s commission and also agreed to split with Randy the buyer’s fees—which Jack explained were typically added as a percentage of the hammer price—in a careful ladder structure.
The potential bid floor they were discussing staggered Randy. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself, but at even half what the auction house intended to ask, he’d be set for life. He’d pay off his loan from Thomas right away. There would be money for a new house for Luc, and perhaps for Danny to go to college. Maybe he’d talk to Joe about expanding Rainbow Space or opening a transition shelter for kids who aged out yet still needed job placement training or other kinds of counseling. The possibilities made his mind reel.
The logistics of Randy and Danny and Jack and Sophie could have been awkward, but on the second night of Sophie’s visit, when they had all eaten a very late dinner prepared by Danny and were relaxing at the mission table in Randy’s dining room, Sophie stood gracefully and stretched out a hand to Danny.
“Little waif, I think you should come back to Jack’s apartment with me tonight to let these men enjoy themselves, and tomorrow I will take you shopping. Your hair is gorgeous and I should very much like to see you in an amethyst blazer. Jack will summon a taxi for us while you grab a few things for the night. Fair warning—I’m going to have you brush my hair while we discuss your life in embarrassing detail.”
Danny had blushed but ran upstairs delightedly while Jack stood to hug her, saying softly, “Thanks for giving us some time alone.”
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