Page 16 of Christmas in Paris
They had been assured that, by the time they were back this evening, their bags would be moved to the new room, one without a leaking roof. And that was done. Their trunks were both on the bed.
Wait.
The bed. Singular.
It was a very big king-sized bed. But there was undoubtedly only one of them, and two of them. Simon walked slowly into the room, looking around, as though perhaps another bed would appear from nowhere. But the room, while very nice, wasn’t particularly large, and there was no other bed hiding anywhere.
“We’re going to have to ask for another room,” Simon realized. While he had no objection, none at all, to jumping Ray at every possible chance, this didn’t look good. This could get him in a hell of a lot of trouble.
“Why?” Ray asked, and Simon turned to look at him, a little bit stunned that he would even have to ask. Ray was a smart guy usually, not the sort of person who would miss things as obvious as this.
“There’s only one bed,” Simon pointed out, trying to keep his voice gentle. “If someone found out—”
“Simon,” Ray interrupted, head tilted fetchingly to the side and green eyes flirtatious. “It wouldn’t suck to be in the same bed as you every night. And when has anyone but us ever been in our hotel room? None of the kids have shown an interest. I’m sure they’re sneaking to each other’s rooms, but we’re old and boring. Why would they bother?”
Simon frowned, poking at that mentally to see if it made sense. He thought it did, but then again, he wanted it, too, so badly that he wasn’t sure he wasn’t just trying to make it fit. Because spending three more weeks wrapped in Ray’s arms every night, bringing each other to intense orgasms over and over again, that pretty much sounded like heaven. He wanted it too much, and anything he wanted this much was suspect because of that.
“It’s true,” he said slowly, looking into Ray’s smiling face. “No one’s looked.” The teenagers were all far too caught up in their drama to care much about what the adults were doing. Simon would be surprised if any of the thirty students gave much thought to it at all.
“And if they do, we have a couch. It’s easy to just say that we’ve been alternating sleeping there.”
Ray was making some pretty good points, Simon had to admit. He smirked a little, then stepped closer, letting his hand slip over Ray’s achingly beautiful face, tracing the high cheekbones and brushing over the full, arched bow of his lips. He couldn’t hold back a moan when Ray parted those lips and sucked the tip of his thumb into his mouth.
The simplest little things were so deeply erotic when it came to Ray. It took next to nothing for the younger man to get him going. Just the brush of lips against the sensitive pad of Simon’s finger, and Simon was ready to go.
“Let’s just take this chance and run with it,” Ray murmured, breath so soft and lips so sweet as they moved against Simon’s thumb. The logic appealed to Simon. Hadn’t he just been thinking about how he wasn’t the sort of guy who got chances like this? Was he going to ignore it when it did happen?
Ray was helping him to live a life, if only for a few more weeks, that he had given up on. And it was sure the hell not a chance he was going to miss. So he gathered the sexy young man close to him and kissed him to seal the deal.
* * *
Simon liked people, he did. And the kids in his class were pretty decent human beings. But Simon had been watching them almost nonstop for two weeks now, and honestly, he was getting a little burned out.
And that was why it was such a big surprise—like a gift from above—when he arrived for a tour that they had booked at the Louvre museum to find that they had cheerful tour guides there, clearly expecting to take over the whole job. That explained why the tour itself had been so expensive.
All he had to do was leave his phone number with the head tour guide, and he was free for the rest of the day, barring emergencies. That meant he couldn’t exactly go far, but it still felt like freedom.
He felt both lighter than air and incredibly guilty as he walked away. But even a glance at the email confirmation from Louvre told him that his package included tour guides, so the kids were in safe hands. He was off the hook.
“We could go back to the hotel room,” Ray whispered, leaning in so that only Simon could hear, not that anyone was listening to them. But it was good to see that he had some discretion, considering that their relationship wasn’t allowed.
“I like your idea, except that we shouldn’t go too far,” Simon pointed out, not without regret. It was all too easy, and a whole lot of fun, to imagine rolling around in bed with Ray during the daylight hours.
“Oh well,” Ray quipped, his tone light. “I guess we’ll just have to wander around Paris together. It’s a hard job, but someone’s got to do it.”
“You can always go help the tour guides with the kids, if you’d rather hang out with them,” Simon shot back, grinning at Ray’s exaggerated horror at the idea. It wasn’t that either of them didn’t like kids, Simon knew. It was just that it was a bit of an endurance test watching thirty teenagers all the time. Luckily, they’d all been pretty good so far.
As they left the museum, their hands brushed lightly together, the softest kiss of skin against skin. At first, Simon considered just pulling away, but then he realized that they were safely anonymous. The only people who knew them in town were not going to see them, and in the hustle and bustle of the busy tourist area, it was doubtful that anyone was paying them any attention.
So he very gently, ready to pull away if the younger man minded, wrapped his fingers around Ray’s hand. Ray gave him a surprised look, and he was sure that he’d gone too far, but then a grin touched Ray’s full lips, and he slipped his fingers between Simon’s, turning it into a much more intimate handclasp.
In the rush of joy that simple action brought, it was so easy to just, for once, ignore the worry. Yes, this was dangerous. But he had known all along that getting involved with Ray at all was going to be dangerous. So what? He was happy right now, for once in his life.
They just wandered together, keeping a close eye on the streets so that they were always within ten minutes of the museum. Otherwise, they just chatted, and window shopped, laughing at all the tourist shops around.
“But really, is New York any better?” Simon asked. There were tourist traps all over there, too. It took him a second to figure out why Ray looked so sad at the simple question until he remembered the other man’s situation. They had been getting along so well that Simon had forgotten that Ray hadn’t traveled as widely as he had.
“I don’t know,” Ray said, and his tone was completely without any trace of venom, but that didn’t stop Simon from feeling like an asshole.
