Page 14 of A Life Imagined
His expression was so hungry, so reverent, that Mathias couldn’t fucking stand it.He let out a growl and shot across the man’s chest.
Rayan leaned forward and brought his mouth to the tip of Mathias’s spent cock, his tongue flicking across the head, before pushing it past his lips.Releasing him, Rayan raised his chin, and Mathias moved to kiss him, soft and tender.
After he’d returned himself to his pants, Mathias picked up a towel from the bed and wiped the slick from Rayan’s skin.Then he eased onto the sofa, and Rayan lay back to rest his head in Mathias’s lap.
“So, was it everything you’d hoped?”Mathias asked, pushing Rayan’s hair back from his forehead with his fingers.
“We are talking about the tour?”
“Careful.”
Rayan’s eyes danced with amusement.Mathias wasn’t in the habit of fishing for feedback.
“It was exhausting.Like being interrogated while plied with information at the same time.”
“I did warn you.”
“Where were you earlier?”Rayan asked after a moment.
Mathias considered lying, but what would that accomplish?“I went to see my mother.”
Rayan sat up with a jolt.“Your mother’s in Paris?”
“She is.”
“You asked her to come?”
“Please, you should know that the farther I am from my mother, the better.”He stared at the last slivers of daylight as they stretched across the carpet from an opening in the blinds.“After all this time, she decided to move back.”
“And you helped her?”
“I did.”
Rayan smiled.“You’re a good son.”
Mathias gave a snort of laughter.
“You are,” Rayan repeated, insistent.He looked at Mathias, his brown eyes serious.“She’s lucky to have you.”
Mathias shifted as if to brush aside the sentiment.
“She grew up in Paris, didn’t she?”Rayan asked.
“Up until her mother left, and then she moved back with her father to his family home.”
“Where was that?”
Mathias paused.“Calais.”
Rayan’s eyebrows shot up.“You never told me that.Did you use to go there to visit?”
“We only went once, that I can remember.I must have been nine or ten.She wasn’t on good terms with her father.When she left school and ran away to Canada, he cut her off.She thought returning to France with his only grandchild might put her back in his good books—make sure she didn’t lose out on her inheritance.”
His recollection of that visit was hazy.It had been strange to witness his mother deferential and pleading.His grandfather was a large, imposing man with a shock of white hair and a weary face.He didn’t smile once the whole time they were there.It had been Mathias’s first encounter with a grandparent, and he felt—yet again—he’d been set up for disappointment.Guillaume Beauvais was not the doting type.
“He thought even less of me than he did of her.Said it was an embarrassment for a bastard boy to carry the family name.He came from a long line of wealthy paper merchants and owned a house in town that had been in the Beauvais family since the Revolution.Guess I was a blight on the legacy.”Mathias had liked the house, though, with its grand staircase and sweeping views of the ocean.“The man never changed his mind.When he died twenty years later, my mother got nothing.He left everything to a local conservation group.So, when they put the house up for sale, I bought it.”
“The house… That’s your family home?”
