“Show us what you got, greenhorn,” one man teased. “Put that pretty mouth to work.”
“Watch and learn, my friend. I’ll show you how we blow things in Texas,” Felix joked before bringing the long pipe to his lips.
My entire body seized up, and I froze where I stood.
Felix’s wide red lips wrapped gently around the pipe, but it might as well have been around my cock. I felt the memory of his lips on me and shuddered.
“Holy fuck,” I breathed, watching him.
As he blew and worked the pipe with his mouth, his arm muscles continued moving. The pipe spun in his nimble fingers, and the glowing gob began to expand. He placed a colored cane onto the glass and continued spinning the pipe. The color swirled around the glass gob, making a unique design. He quickly added another colored cane and began intertwining two more while adding them to the object. While he was twisting the colored canes onto the gob, he kept glancing up at Calum and his men and joking with them.
Watching his face bright and full of happiness was breathtaking. He looked so easy, so free. I could see how much fun he was having and remembered with sudden clarity the reason for his visit to Gadleigh.
It wasn’t to sleep with a prince. It wasn’t to fuck around with someone he’d just met. And I could tell now for certain that it wasn’t to lie his way into a celebrity exposé for the tabloid press.
He’d come for the glass. He’d come to appreciate something that had been a part of my family’s history for hundreds of years. Something I knew very little about but that clearly he embraced with every part of his being.
I suddenly felt like I was missing something important—something I never knew I’d been lacking.
Felix put his design back into the fire and spun it for a while before bringing it out. It was clear there was more molten glass on the design now. He brought the pipe back to his lips again and blew.
The clear glass around the original design began to open and expand, encasing the design in a clear glass ball.
It was mesmerizing. The man wasn’t just the chemist geek he’d portrayed. He was an artist.
He moved to a steel table and pressed the item to the table, flattening its sides until it resembled a pyramid with a colorful twisted design inside.
As Felix walked the pipe back to the fire, Calum followed him with another pipe.
“Punty here, Felix. Whenever you’re ready,” Calum offered.
I saw them transfer the item Felix was making from one pipe to another before Felix put the item back into the fire. As he leaned over, his damp shirt rode up his back, revealing a strip of skin above the electric blue waistband of his underwear. Andrew Christian underwear.
Fuck.
I wanted to see him in nothing but that underwear. With the sweat of the glassworks still running down his back and the heat of his skin under my palms.
My heart thundered in my chest as I continued watching him work from my semihidden spot by the doorway.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the muscles of his back and arms, the way he shifted his weight as he moved around the space. The easiness to his interactions with Calum and his men. He was a completely different man than the nervous guy who’d stumbled into my hidden study the day before.
This Felix was confident and strong, creative and engaging. Relaxed and happy. I wanted to throw the man over the large steel table and fuck him six ways to Sunday. My dick pounded in my jeans, and blood roared in my ears. The man was a damned masterpiece, and I wanted him all to myself.
“Sir!” The bark was so sudden, I jumped, nearly tripping over my own feet. Calum stood just inside the door gazing at me. “Didn’t you hear me? I called your name twice.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, brushing nonexistent dust off my knees in an effort to hide my erection in my lap. “Woolgathering.”
Once the fear had deflated my cock, I straightened up and followed him into the studio. He held out his hand toward Felix with obvious pride.
“Look who’s surprised the hell out of us with some moves,” he declared. “Young Felix here is a glassmaker himself.”
I watched as Felix turned from his position near the melting furnace and recognized me. The pipe he held swung in an arc toward the ground, and I shouted at him to take care. He jerked his arms back up, nearly missing smashing the delicate design against the hard wall of the furnace.
“Shit,” he blurted. “Fuck.”
One of Calum’s assistants tutted over him, offering to take the apparatus and hold it until he was ready to continue working on it. Felix handed it to him and shook out his arms, as if cramping muscles had caused the inattention rather than surprise at my arrival.