Page 8 of The Perfect Ingredient
Philippe Hessou de La Tour d’Auvergne.
PrincePhilippe Hessou de La Tour d’Auvergne, if you’re feeling particularly brave.
My first ruin.
He was the new boy at that dreadful private school outside Paris, the only Black student in a sea of pressed white collars and centuries-old, inbred bloodlines. His father was a Dahomean prince. His mother was a Parisian nobility.
Philippewas an aristocrat with “exotic” royal blood and more money than anyone could really count.
But he chose to be justHessou.
And I—awkward, lonely, fourth-son-Louis—fell in lust with the way he moved.
He was dangerous even at fifteen, smoking stolen cigarettes behind the dormitory’s chapel. I tasted him for the first time there, under the moonlight. We kissed behind painting easels, traded poems soaked in lustful sweat, slept curled on the roof under cigarette stars. And then he vanished. Berlin, Madrid, Cairo for a time. Letters, then silence.
And now he’shere, in Lyon,touchingme.
God help me.
“You’re living in Lyon?” I ask, breathless.
“Passing through. Looking for inspiration.” A smirk. “And you?”
“I bought a bakery.”
He raises a perfect brow. “Of course you did.”
I want to kiss him.
I want to taste him again.
I want to hear his voice against my skin.
But most of all, I want to tell him about the boy with the clumsy hands and the sacred cum. I want to ask if perfume and flavor are really so far apart. If lust can be turned into a glaze, warm and wet and meant to melt on the tongue in seconds… or if it’s better caught in a vial, sealed in glass, a scent that lingers on skin and linen long after the body is gone.
Or maybe both.
* * *
The front door slams, and the world dissolves into nothing but hands, mouths and heat.
Hessou’s place is exactly what I expected. A big apartment near Place Bellecour, discreet from the outside—shutteredwindows, ivy-choked gate—but inside, it’s unapologetic opulence. Marble floors, black lacquered furniture, a whole room lined with shelves of oils and tinctures in thick-stoppered bottles, a velvet fainting couch thrown casually beneath an enormous window.
We don’t stop to look at any of it.
He drags me through the hall and throws open the door to a big bedroom, with a bed so wide I couldn’t touch the other side even if I rolled.
His coat hits the floor, and my waistcoat follows. He yanks my shirt open, sending the last buttons pinging into the dark, while I grip his shoulders and bite his lower lip.
“Still greedy,” he breathes against my mouth, and I groan in reply, shoving his suspenders off his shoulders, scraping my nails down his chest.
I want him. I want to consume him. His skin, warm and flawless. His scent—mon Dieu, the scent of him—bergamot, sweat, and that ever-present curl of smoke still ghosting off his collarbone. I bury my face in his neck andinhale. It makes my cock twitch, takes me back to many years before. It makes me want totastehim where he smells strongest.
He laughs when I say that to him, biting his neck.
“Same filthy mouth,” he growls, and hurls me backward onto the bed.
I bounce, legs falling open, chest heaving. He strips my pants away and my cock slaps back against my stomach, already painfully hard and leaking. All I can do is moan as he crawls over me, shedding his pants as he goes, eyes burning. He presses his nose to my chest, my ribs, my belly—breathingmein. He’s always been like this. While I lick, he inhales. While I want the flavor melting on my tongue, he wants to coat himself in scent.
