Richard was moving carefully, exploring almost, licking David’s prick along the veins that stood blue beneath the skin, kissing his way over the tip and down, sending pleasure shivering and curling through him. His tongue was warm, wet, slightly rough against David’s painfully sensitive skin, lips moving gently until David didn’t know whether to beg for this forever or to cry out for more. He reached for Richard’s head, pushed his hands into the curly hair, and damned near pulled a clump out as Richard leaned forward to take him down.
“Jesus!” David yelped. Richard was gamahuching him in earnest now—Lord Richard Vane, for God’s sake, sucking his prick as though he wanted nothing else, his fingers hard on David’s hips, thumbs digging into his tensed arse muscles, and David writhed under him, pushing himself up in offering. “Oh, God, yes, please, my lord…”
Richard took a gasping breath. “Richard,” he muttered around David’s stand and plunged down again. The sensation was unbearable. David had dreamed of kneeling to his lord; this was impossible. But it was real, because Richard’s saliva was wet on David’s skin, his hand fumbling between David’s legs with no rakish expertise, all need, and as Richard made a noise of urgent pleading around him, David could not hold the mounting pleasure back any longer. He locked his jaw against the cry he wanted to let out, his whole body tightening in anticipation, and spent in his lord’s mouth, gripping his hair, feeling every pulse like a shock.
Richard swallowed, coughed, and rasped, “David…”
Nothing but the urgency in his voice could have made David move at that instant. He slid off the bed, straddled Richard, and pushed him backward, seeing the wild need in his eyes. He grabbed for buttons without finesse, pushing cloth aside; wrapped his fingers around the glistening ready prick; and felt Richard buck under him as he spent, shooting onto his own chest with a deep groan.
David stared down at him. Richard’s eyes fluttered and opened. “Dear God. I beg your pardon.”
David leaned forward to lie over him, body to body, feeling the spend wet against his skin, and kissed him, tasting himself in Richard’s mouth. Richard’s hands slid over David’s arse, pulled him close, and they kissed, slow and deep, then light, then with leisurely bites, until David’s lips felt swollen, and Richard pushed him up and away a little.
“I am normally rather better than that.” Richard sounded slightly self-conscious. “But my God, touching you. I am surprised I lasted so long.”
“You lasted four years,” David pointed out, and saw the smile light Richard’s eyes.
“Well, if you put it that way.” He tucked a hanging lock of hair behind David’s ear. “I hope I may redeem myself in due course?”
“And perhaps on the bed.” The floorboards were hard, and though David was the smaller of them, that did not make him a featherweight. He clambered off the floor and sprawled over the counterpane as Richard stripped off stockings and breeches without ceremony. The mattress dipped ominously under him as he lay down by David, the two of them body to body and face-to-face.
Richard ran a finger over David’s chest and sighed, a long exhalation that seemed to let something out. “I feared…I thought I had perhaps made you an impossible ideal.”
“I understand that,” David said with feeling. “I think I had to leave.”
“I think you did. Or we should not have come to each other on these terms, perhaps not at all.”
“Ugh. Don’t say that.”
Richard smiled at him. “It is not so, nor it was not so.”
“And God forbid it should be so,” David completed. He wanted to ask, What now? but bit the question back. They had the rest of the night, and with the edge off their need, he intended to take his time exploring the broad body he could finally touch. He slid his hand down Richard’s chest and tweaked a nipple.
Richard inhaled sharply. “Is there anything I should know? That you like, or do not?”
David had a fair idea what had prompted that. “I have no taste for pain.”
“I have no desire to inflict any. Or receive it,” Richard added as an afterthought.
David put an experimental hand over Richard’s upper arm, squeezed as much muscle as his fingers could encompass. “I like your strength. Your size.”
“I don’t.”
David glanced up at his face. “Really?”
“I am too damned large. Too large, too rich, too well born. Thank God I was not the elder son as well. I wonder what sort of man I should have been if I did not tower over everyone’s heads.”