Joe

I impaled myself on Harry’s dick, grinding down on him so hard that the bed shunted along the floor and hit the wall. Fuck. Having him inside me was insane every time, but never more so than when I caught him in the mood to lie back and let me climb all over him.

His dick was as huge as the rest of him, but it didn’t take me long to adjust anymore. A warm hand at the base of my spine helped—like it helped with just about everything. Emotion filled me as we fucked bareback in the delicate spring sunshine. I’d never been with someone the way I was with Harry—where everything meant something . . . every word, touch, and kiss. Every heated stare and snatched breath. God, I loved him.

He reared up beneath me, pressing deeper inside me. I fell forward and gasped out his name before I regained some tenuous control. Riding him was always a quick game. My cock bounced between us, hard and weeping, and his gravelly moans and gentle snarl booted me over the edge so fast that I came without touching myself.

Harry laughed as I cursed and drove my fist into the mattress. “You’d think you’d have figured it out by now.”

“Shut up.” My face was muffled by a pillow. I looked up and scowled at him. “You did say you only had time for a quickie.”

“And you never let me down.”

As he shot inside me with a growl that sent my eyes rolling again, I couldn’t deny it. We spent hours fucking at night when we had the time to kick back, but snatched daytime encounters were kind of a kink for me, and my lack of stamina when it came to Harry was a bonus.

After, we lay sprawled together. “What time is the yoga woman coming?”

Harry sat up and reached for his phone. “Three. I haven’t got much to show her, but she seems keen.”

Of course she was keen. Every alternative therapist in Cornwall had been keen when they’d found out that Harry was setting up a holistic recovery retreat on the old stud farm site. Hell, I’d do fucking Pilates if it gave me an extra half hour with him.

“What about the physiotherapy equipment? When does that arrive?”

“Next week. The floor will be down by then, and the chalets are nearly done.”

I nodded, still awed by the progress Harry had made on the site since he’d bought it from me at the start of the year, using the money from his wildly successful book. Leaving his patients in London had wrenched his conscience, but having the retreat to focus on had brought him to life in a way I’d only dreamed of when I’d met him. And the financial boost to the farm had changed my life too. I now employed an accountant and a full-time stable hand, which meant the bills got paid, and I had time to stop for lunch and bang the love of my life.

We parted ways for the rest of the day. I tackled the perpetual chaos in the feed store, and Harry went down to the retreat site for a series of meetings I didn’t quite understand. Around four, I plucked Clyde and Bonnie—the old boy from the crazy cat house and the last mare from the abandoned barn—and led them down to the retreat. Both horses had proved so affectionate that we’d had a hard time letting them go, and somewhere along the line we’d come up with a potential way for them to earn their keep.

Harry was waiting for me in the space he’d designated for outdoor therapy. Beside him was a slender, olive-skinned man with piercing eyes and killer legs. Angelo—the patient-turned-friend who was fucking Harry’s brother at the sex club. City boys. He’d arrived last night, but I’d been caught up with spreading the muck pile to say hello. Such was my life.

I liked Angelo, though. I’d met him at Christmas when Harry had dragged me to London, and it was fucking hilarious to see his pristine designer kicks in my muddy field.

“Piss off,” Angelo said when I laughed at him. “Can’t look more freaked out than you in Lovato’s.”

He had me there. Harry and I had stayed in the sex club long enough for us both to decide that public sex wasn’t our bag—even if the eyeful we’d caught of Angelo and his boyfriend was something we still talked about now, low and dirty, when we were—

“Joe?”

“Hmm?” I blinked at Harry. “Sorry, what?”

Harry rolled his eyes. “I was saying that Clyde and Bonnie are the horses we’re going to use for balance therapy.”

Finally something I understood when it came to the work Harry was planning for the retreat. “Aye. Well, you won’t get any walking frames steadier than these two.”

“That right?” Angelo dodged Clyde’s curious nose. “I think we should test that theory.”

It was only then I belatedly realised that Angelo was leaning on a pair of funky black crutches. I searched my brain for what little I knew about him aside from his sexploits. Italian, dancer . . . ME. Yeah, that was it, though my knowledge of the condition stopped there.

Harry took Angelo’s crutches and set them aside while I fitted a special harness to Bonnie that would allow Angelo to lead her while she took most of his weight. It was a work in progress, but Angelo persisted as Harry and I looked on.

“We’ll be here all day if that’s how long it takes him to walk in a straight line,” Harry said softly. “Angelo’s a machine, even when he’s relapsed.”

“You’ll have to explain that to me one day,” I said. “I’d forgotten there was anything wrong with him.”

Harry hummed. “That’s why it’s so cruel. Look at Bonnie go, though. She’s so chilled.”

“Or too lazy to misbehave.” Not that it mattered. After three months training with a specialist equine therapist, Bonnie and Clyde had more than earned their place in Harry’s grand adventures.

When Angelo had done a round with Clyde too, I took the horses back to the stables and gave them a rub down. After settling them with extra feed, I went inside and found Emma at the kitchen table with travel brochures spread out in front of her.

“Going somewhere?”

“Fuck off,” she snapped.

Fair enough. I swiped a slice of Sal’s fruitcake from the tin and retreated to the living room. The french doors were open and one of the pygmy goats wandered in with some socks it had stolen from the washing line. I was still trying to get them back when Emma appeared a little while later.

“Sorry,” she said.

“What for?”

“The usual. Add it to my tab.”

I grinned. “Only if you tell what you’re up to.”

“I want to go on a teaching course.”

“Teaching what? Riding?”

“Yeah. My qualifications are old and out of date, so if I want to help Harry, I’ll need some new ones.”

“Okay. Why do you need to look at mountain resorts in Norway for that?”

“Because I think the only reason I’d get on a plane would be for something I’m passionate about, and I really, really want to do this, Joe.”

“So do it.”

“Right. Like it’s that simple.”

Of course it wasn’t simple. Nothing for Emma ever was, but surely the last year on the farm had shown her that anything was possible?

She wandered off before I figured out if she did, and Harry showed up not long after.

I let the goat have the socks and stood to greet him. “Angelo gone?”

“Yup. Put him in a taxi back to his hotel. He’s driving home tomorrow.”

“Will he be okay on his own?”

Harry shrugged. “It’s up to him to say if he’s not. I gave him a cat for Dylan’s dad, though, if it’s any consolation.”

It was. Thanks to Harry, the farm now had more cats that a Greek holiday resort, and the more of them he gave away, the better. “It wasn’t Macky, was it?”

“Of course not. I know you can’t sleep without him. Hey, are we going surfing tomorrow?”

I ignored the question—we went surfing every morning we could these days—and got up in his face. “Dude, you’re the only fella I can’t be without.”

Harry smiled and wrapped his strong arms around me. “Can’t see you ever having to be, so I guess we’re both happy, eh?”

And then some. In his quiet way, Harry had turned my world upside down. I had a life now, a future, and heart fit to burst every time I looked at him. Happy didn’t even come close.

* * *

Harry

The retreat opened almost a year to the day since I’d first set foot on Whisper Farm. Angelo and Dylan came down from London, Rhys too, but thankfully they’d somehow just missed each other.

“Shame,” Joe said when Rhys’s flying visit had come to an end, and Angelo and Dylan had just arrived. “I was looking forward to some mad drama and make-up orgies.”

I rolled my eyes. “Angelo’s a bad influence on you. Are you sure you don’t want to try the club again?”

Joe shuddered, and I laughed, because for all his brass, Joe was a private soul. Fucking in public . . . sharing me with someone else would never be his bag, so as fun as it had been to catch a glimpse of the world my brother and our shared friends called home, we wouldn’t be going back.

Didn’t stop him beckoning me to the bedroom window later that night, though, and pointing across the farm to the retreat’s chalet site. After a day of introductory outpatient clinics, Angelo and Dylan were the only guests staying over, and they were fucking with the lights on, blinds up, and the windows wide open.

Joe nuzzled my neck. “Do they know we can see them?”

“Probably not, though I reckon Angelo gets a kick out of making you blush.”

“He does not make me blush.”

“Liar.”

“Valid.” Joe shrugged. “Sorry. You know I love you.”

“I do. And I don’t blame you for gawping at Angelo. I’ve told you before that those two used to turn me inside out just looking at me until I found out they knew Rhys.”

“They don’t—uh—play together anymore,” Joe said. “Rhys told me in the pub that he’s trying to quit the sex club, and smoking too.”

“Interesting. Maybe I’ll never have to confess after all. Did he say why he’s quitting? The sex club, I mean. Not the fags—that won’t happen.”

“Oh, ye of little faith. But nope. And I didn’t ask about either. I was enjoying my own smoke too much, and I wasn’t drunk enough to talk about the sex club. He said something about helicopter training later on, but that might’ve been about something else.”

“Awesome.” I rolled my eyes, then let my gaze wander back to the window. Angelo was hauling Dylan onto his back and curving his body around him, slamming into him hard enough to make my eyes water. The physio in me was proud of how strong he was, given how tough the last few months had been for him, but the rest of me was torn between mildly mortified and horny as hell.

Joe was apparently happily settled in the horny camp. He dragged me away from the window and sat on the edge of the bed, lining his face up with my crotch. The man had a blow-job fetish, I swear, and my dick was in his mouth before I could blink. He swallowed me whole. My hips thrust forwards of their own accord, and my groan rang out in the thankfully empty house.

I didn’t let Joe have his own way for long, though. He’d got the better of me a few times in recent days, and I was game for some revenge. I reclaimed my dick and pulled him to his feet while I stripped his clothes.

Then I shoved him face first on the bed and climbed over him, rubbing my lube-slick cock between his thighs, pressing against him. We’d stopped using condoms months ago, and it was in moments like these that I was grateful for it. When I felt his smooth skin against my dick, and then the tight, wet heat of him clamping around me as I slid home.

I fucked him slowly, revelling in his deep moans, my hands leaving imprints on his flawless back. His injured stomach was finally completely healed and I no longer had to be careful with him. Grabbing his hair and tilting his head back for a crazed kiss. Sinking my teeth into his shoulder. It was rough, primal, and so fucking dirty it was never going to last long.

Joe began to unravel. His entire body quaked and trembled, and his frantic warning poured petrol on the fire in me. I picked up the pace and fucked him harder, faster, deeper, and the answering bolts of pleasure made me lose my mind.

I came with a high pitched, breathless cry. Beneath me, Joe convulsed. He fisted the sheets and hunched his shoulders, his guttural shout muffled by the mattress. Blood roared in my ears, but I somehow found the equilibrium to rub his back and whisper in his ear. “I got you.”

For long minutes, I lay on top of him, absorbing his laboured breaths like they were my own, but eventually, I rolled off him, and we sprawled out with our legs tangled together. Joe was shaking—with laughter.

I scowled at him. “What’s so funny?”

He pointed at the window. “You do realise they can see us too?”

It hadn’t even occurred to me, but when I tried to care, I realised that I didn’t. How could I when nothing on earth mattered to me more than having Joe in my arms? Especially when he was naked, laughing, and staring at me from behind his sex-tousled hair.

I pushed the damp strands out of his eyes. “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For today, for yesterday . . . for tomorrow. I wouldn’t be who I am now without you.”

“Works both ways,” Joe said. “I’d probably be doing time with my old man if it wasn’t for you.”

I shuddered at the thought. Jonah had been sentenced to six years in prison for possession of the firearm found in Shadow’s stable, and the only blessing from that had been his extended sobriety. Joe had yet to visit him, but I took Emma every fortnight.

“Don’t go to sleep on me just yet.” Joe knocked his knuckles on the side of my head. “I want to ask you something.”

I forced my heavy eyes open. “What is it?”

“You know how you made me keep back some of the land around the old stud? So the retreat is in both of our names?”

“Um . . . yeah?” I’d done that so the farm benefitted from the retreat as much as I did. The boost from the land sale and regular income from the rent had allowed Joe to take some much-needed time off—to ride Mani on the beach and ride the waves like he’d been born on a surfboard and not in a saddle. “You’re not going to try and give it to me again, are you?”

“No, I’m going to give you my house.”

“What?”

Joe sat up and reached over me to the bedside table. In the drawer was an envelope, which he tossed to me while chewing on his lip. “Don’t get all huffy. It’s only fair.”

“What is?”

“That we share everything. You put half your business in my name, so I want to share mine with you—the farm, the house . . . everything.”

“You can’t give me the farm, Joe.”

“I’m not giving it, I’m sharing it. Listen, will you?”

There was humour in his kaleidoscope gaze, but fire too. I took the envelope and scanned the documents inside. Everything was as he said—the house, the farm was mine as much as it was his if I signed on the dotted line.

“Please, Harry,” Joe whispered. “I need this—I need everything we have to be ours.”

I couldn’t refuse him. I signed the papers and as I thrust them back at him, the final piece of our puzzle slotted into place. I’d had a life before Joe—before the farm and the new life we’d built together, but I’d never belonged anywhere like I did here with Joe. Over the past few months, I’d turned down a second book deal and gone back to blogging, and a weight that had dragged behind me since childhood had faded away.

His, mine, ours, it didn’t matter. “Joe?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

THE END