It Takes Two to Tumble (Seducing the Sedgwicks, #1)

by Cat Sebastian

The vicar’s hand was warm and his grip was firm, and Phillip’s gaze automatically drifted down to the man’s exposed forearm, sun-burnished and dusted with light hair.

Phillip could hardly stand it. He wanted to swat the birds away so he and the vicar could have some semblance of a normal conversation. He couldn’t be serious and stern with a man who had ducklings in his hair, or who talked to baby birds like they were guests at a tea party, or who seemed to dearly want Phillip to smile.

As Phillip continued to stare wordlessly, Sedgwick’s smile dropped and he looked down at his feet, as if he knew exactly what Phillip was thinking. Phillip prepared himself for the inevitable distancing, the slight flicker of disgust. But then he lifted his eyes to Phillip and—oh hell, was he blushing? That just wasn’t fair.

He laced his fingers into Sedgwick’s and was startled to find that it felt right, as if he had always wanted to hold hands with a madcap vicar at his dining table, and only realized it now.

But looking over at the captain, he couldn’t help but think that touching this man, seeing what happened, might carry its own kind of rightness. This wanting felt like such a part of Ben’s soul that it had to mean something, had to carry with it its own kind of moral gravity.

Now, though. Now he was ruined. Now he knew what it was to truly want something, to truly want someone, and he had to figure out how to live with that knowledge.

Hearing his name on Sedgwick’s lips did something peculiar to Phillip. It made his heart feel like it was about to crack into pieces, and it made Phillip think that would somehow be a wonderful thing to happen.

Their lips met with more urgency than finesse, and Phillip didn’t care because he had gone too many years with too few kisses, and he had gone his whole life without Ben, and now he had kisses and Ben and he had never felt better.

He hadn’t realized that this other kind of love, the kind he felt for Phillip, had so much in common with falling off a cliff. He couldn’t stop loving Phillip any more than he could stop gravity.

At every moment he had been reminded that this was Ben, his Ben, beneath him. Those sounds were coming from Ben’s mouth; the hand gripping his own was Ben’s; the strong body that went pliant beneath him was Ben’s.

For a moment Phillip could hardly breathe. “Benedict. God. I don’t want to let you down. You deserve so much better—” Ben silenced him with a lazy kiss. “Don’t you dare tell me I don’t deserve this. Don’t you dare.”