Read Online Grey's Awakening by Cameron Dane - Free Book Online Page B

don’t.”
    Sirus snaked his arms around Grey’s knees and held him firmly in place. “Get back down here.” He looked up at Grey as he tugged, and like a man without his own will, Grey lowered himself to his knees between Sirus’s thighs. Sirus touched Grey’s face, held it, but then curled his hands into fists and let them drop into the bathwater. His slate eyes hardened to granite, and Grey’s heart lurched and raced.
    “What?” The steam and candlelight in the room pillowed Grey’s voice, softening the anxiety twisting in his gut. “Is there something wrong after all?”
    “No. I’m good,” Sirus said, washing relief over Grey in a flooding torrent. Christ, he couldn’t believe how much he already cared that nothing bad ever befell this man. “I take my personal safety and health very seriously,” Sirus continued, clearly unaware of the turmoil going on inside Grey. “As seriously as I’m sure you do. Even though I always used protection with the last man I was with—all of the men I’ve been with, of which there have been four—I have in the last two years been tested numerous times for every goddamned thing in the book, since my last relationship ended in part because the man was married.”
    Grey’s jaw dropped right into the water.
    *
    Crap crap crap . Sirus stared at Grey’s obvious shock—possibly horror—and wondered what in the hell had made him share that information about Paul. The stupidest thing in the world a guy can do is talk about his former lover to his current one. Of course, Grey wasn’t really Sirus’s lover, at least, not in the relationship sense. Not quite in the literal sense yet either , he thought with dry humor. Now, maybe Grey never would become a lover. Damn it, Sirus had screwed this up nicely, and so very quickly too. Had to be a new record for him.
    “Forget I said that.” Sirus rubbed his hand over his chest, knowing the goddamned tattoo was still there. Kelsie had counseled him to think hard before getting it, but he’d believed so deeply in Paul he hadn’t listened. “We’re not going to be doing anything for long enough that we need to know specifics about each other’s pasts. You wanted to know if I’m safe, and my point was just to assure you I am. Many times over.”
    Grey shifted, the motion awkward in the space available, and drew his knees up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. “Did you know the guy was married?” he asked, it seemed cautiously. “I don’t know you very well, but I only ask because with what little I do know, you don’t strike me as the kind of man who would engage in that kind of behavior.”
    Sirus’s hackles rose and a rumble vibrated in his throat. “What kind of behavior is that?”
    “The kind where innocent people get hurt,” Grey answered, his voice calm in a way that nothing inside Sirus was. “Like that man’s wife.”
    Grey’s generous thought constricted Sirus’s chest. “You’re right,” Sirus admitted.
    God, he did not want this man thinking he condoned adultery. “I didn’t know Paul was married when we met, but by the time I did find out I was in so deep I couldn’t make myself walk away. Paul promised me the marriage had not been an intimate one for a very long time, and he said he was in the process of separating and ultimately divorcing.
    He lived in Texas, and I wasn’t there all the time to check up on him, so I accepted him at his word.” Sirus chuckled, the sound laced with cynicism—directed squarely at himself.
    “Hell, who am I kidding? I wanted to believe him and I jumped at the chance to do it.
    Then one day when we hooked up I believed him a little less, and then a little less the next time, until I went all stalker on him and saw him with his wife.” The sense of wanting to be sick at the sight he had witnessed that day still sat sour in Sirus’s stomach.
    “She was very pregnant.”
    “Shit.” Grey stared, rapt, as if Sirus told him a bogeyman story by a