“Only if you want.”
“I want,” Daniel said softly, licking his lips and glancing at me. “And I think you would want too.”
That had always been enough for me, and it wasn’t going to stop being enough now.
“Okay.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want,” Finn said. “We can talk about it after dinner, on the way, so we’re all on the same page. I just…I think it might be a good way to let off some steam after dinner. I don’t know if you’re as nervous as?—”
“I am,” I interrupted, taking his hands and kissing his fingertips.
He gave me a soft smile and his shoulders relaxed, barely, but they relaxed. “I want them to like the both of you,” he admitted.
“They will.”
“I want them to understand why…” Finn bit his lips and stopped himself from saying the end of his thought.
I hated he still felt the need to censor himself around us, but I respected the way he kept his feelings close to his chest. Finn held tightly to his heart, but that didn’t mean he didn’t use it, that he wouldn’t share it.
“They will,” Daniel said. “Dinner will be fine. You know it’s impossible to not love Sophie, and then afterward we’ll go out to celebrate.”
“I don’t want you to think I go there often,” Finn said quickly. “Or that I want something different from what we have.”
Over the years, I’d played around with things that some people might have thought were kinky—handcuffs on occasion, playful spankings, some dirty talk. But I knew kink went much deeper than I’d ever imagined, so I’d never thought a place like that would be a place for me. Not to mention, it wasn’t anything I took seriously. It was a role play, a game, not a constant presence. Maybe I had misunderstood the concepts, the rules.
“Finn.” My voice caught on his name, and his nostrils flared. He and Daniel both looked at me expectantly. “Get on your knees.”
He went down gracefully, chest heaving with every breath.
I looked at Daniel. “You too.”
He went down next.
Shoulder to shoulder.
“Kiss each other,” I whispered.
And they did. Slow at first, and then deeper. Finn tangled his fingers into Daniel’s hair and angled their mouths into the right position. Daniel moaned and Finn held him steady, and I worried that seeing the two of them finally unleash on each other might be my undoing.
“Stop,” I rasped.
And they did.
Finn and Daniel pulled back from each other, a thin string of saliva stretched thin between their lips. They stared intently at each other, and Finn wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Dinner first,” he said, lips still shining from Daniel’s spit. “Then Rapture.”
CHAPTER 36
DANIEL
Finn was all nerves on the way to Cunningham’s, his thumb drawing a rough circle across the top of Sophie’s hand as he drove. I’d let her have the front seat and resigned myself to the back, perfectly content to watch the way she loved him. It was a wild chain of events that had gotten us to that moment, from the first night I met Finn, back when he was still wrapped up with a couple who didn’t appreciate him, to the bedraggled way he showed up on our porch for the first time, to now. To this night, this moment, when the three of us were in love and he was driving us across town to meet his family.
For years, Finn had a standing Friday night dinner date with his brothers, but as all of the brothers had recently found themselves in relationships, they’d made the decision this Friday should be an exception to the rule. The restaurant was loud and busy when we arrived, and the hostess met Finn with a fresh Manhattan and waved the three of us to a private dining room in the back. I didn’t miss the scathing look Sophie shot at me when the hostess passed Finn his drink. Her jealousy was adorable.
There were two brothers present when we arrived. Marshall, I recognized from earlier in the week at the office. He stood protectively beside a much younger man I assumed to be hissecret fiancé. There wasn’t a ring on either of their fingers, but there wasn’t a ring on Finn’s finger either so that didn’t mean much. In the middle of the room was a table set for ten, but nobody had taken their seats yet.
“Can’t believe you beat me here,” Finn said to the man I assumed to be another of his brothers. They didn’t look similar at all, the man broad to Finn’s lanky build.