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| Details |
| Author: | inkie |
| Summary: | Siamus finally (finally!) wins over the reserved Lord Graves. It turns out Graves may have a second prize in mind. |
| Rating: | A for Adults Only 18+ |
Chain: Siarenne
Rhenardt closes the door behind him and remains standing against it for a moment, as if to bar anyone from following.
Siamus, casually office-disheveled, rises from his desk with a smile and comes around it to greet him. “Graves. Her Grace said ye’d be coming by. I didn’t realize your business with her would be ended so quickly.” He offers a hand out amiably.
The older man ignores the gesture. He steps away from the door to meet Siamus halfway, seizes his hips in a bruising grip, and drives him back into the desk’s edge to kiss him. His mouth is hard and searing; he kisses like he means to leave a mark.
Siamus is hard almost instantly. He gets two fistfuls of the other man’s coat and hauls him close, and Rhenardt growls low in his chest: not a sound like a growl, but a growl, bestial and vicious. Siamus is briefly lightheaded with lust, his knees gone to water. He staggers, but Rhenardt, unyielding, keeps him upright, pinned against the desk.
Siamus wraps a hand around the back of the man’s neck, gripping hard, and bites his lower lip. He’s rewarded by that growl again and nearly laughs at the sensation in the pit of his belly, feeling half-drunk.
“It’s about bloody time,” he says breathlessly.
“Shut up,” snarls Rhenardt, and this time Siamus does laugh.
Some Danger Hugs Later
Siamus eases himself stiffly off the couch and stretches, loose-limbed and pleasantly aching. He rubs at the tender spot on his shoulder where the other man had bitten him — the skin unbroken, he’d had the presence of mind to check, only a deep bruise forming — then pads across the room to his desk to collect a pair of clean towels from the cupboard.
He tosses one across the room to Rhenardt, who is slumped down on the couch with his arm draped across his eyes. The towel lands on the Gilnean’s chest, and he lifts his other hand to lay over it. “I will not speculate as to why you keep towels in your desk,” he rasps.
Siamus laughs. “I should think ye wouldn’t have to speculate long.”
Rhenardt smiles faintly without lifting his arm from his eyes or the towel from his chest.
Siamus towels himself off, drops the towel on the floor, and crosses to the sidebar to pour two drinks. When he turns back, the other man is sitting upright, the towel laid modestly across his lap. “Where are my trousers?” Rhenardt wonders aloud.
“Does it matter?” Siamus asks, pausing to hand him a glass before settling again beside him. “Ye don’t need them just yet.” He reaches to twitch the towel out of the Gilnean’s lap, and Rhenardt’s hand closes like a steel band around his wrist; the man growls again, a dark warning this time.
Siamus gives his arm a quick, sharp twist to break the hold, and sits back. “I beg your pardon,” he says mildly, and lifts his glass to his lips.
Rhenardt exhales and grimaces. “No. No, I beg yours. I am not — it has been some time. I am… not always comfortable. In this form. Yet.” He glances over, an awkward apology written in his slate-colored eyes.
Siamus leans in to kiss him, offering the leisurely, lingering taste of whiskey on his tongue. Rhenardt makes a muffled noise — more a whine than a growl this time — and slides a hand into his hair as though hanging on for safety.
When Siamus draws back, he raises his own glass to the other man’s lips, though Rhenardt holds a drink of his own. The man drinks dutifully, his eyes on Siamus’ face, and Siamus smiles at him and sits back. “I find ye very comfortable in this form,” he says softly. “So if ye require more practice….”
That pulls a laugh from the Gilnean at last, and Rhenardt rests his head on the back of the couch, gazing up at him with a warmer light in his eyes. “You are absolutely shameless, Fallon,” he says.
“So I’ve been called,” Siamus agrees. “Someone has to be.” He drinks again, smiling wickedly at Rhenardt.
The Gilnean drinks as well, his opaque gaze traveling Siamus's form. When he lowers his glass, he reaches out to lay his palm across the bruise where he'd bitten Siamus's shoulder at the base of his neck.
He leaves his hand there for a moment, perhaps hoping that by covering the mark he can erase it. Indeed, when he lifts his hand and sees the bruise bared again, he makes a sour face. “Ah,” he says. “If you go to her again before this is healed, your wife will think me a savage, to mar her handsome husband so.”
There are a number of answers Siamus could make to this but won't: That he will certainly go to Avrenne again before the bruise is healed, no doubt in a matter of hours; that the lady herself has done the like with frantic teeth and nails, even if less brutally; that she might even be pleased and curious to see it.
Instead he says, “Your meeting was briefer than I expected. I trust Her Grace is being of good service to ye?”
The fleeting look that crosses the other man's stony profile, the way he shifts on the couch and looks away — none of these things is surprising to Siamus, as Avrenne's most ardent admirer. But they're certainly unexpected.
Rhenardt looks down into his drink. “She is gracious with her time. I am obliged for the assistance she has offered.”
“Aye,” says Siamus, and feigns an interest in his own drink. “She’s a gracious lady, and a most capable one. Excellent coincidence that ye should have known her before; I'm always glad when she can retrieve a piece of acquaintance with her homeland.”
“I was acquainted with her father,” Rhenardt says stiffly. “She was a child.” He regards his whiskey coldly. “I knew her older sister a little.”
Siamus nods thoughtfully. “Abrielle, aye? I never had the honor myself, but I understand she was a beautiful girl.” He has a sip of his drink, savors the smoke-and-honey of the liquor on his tongue for a moment. He tips the glass to contemplate the whiskey's color in the low firelight. “I gather a man who knew the sister might think my Duchess an unlovely lady by comparison.”
Rhenardt turns a flint-sharp look on him. “What?”
Siamus regards him steadily, unsmiling now. “Did ye tell the lady,” he asks, “that ye couldn't understand why I'd hang a portrait of her?”
Rhenardt’s eyes widen, and there's a fleeting surge of — outrage? Panic? Both? in them. “What? Of course not. I told her that I couldn’t understand why her husband would hang so unflattering a portrait. Surely you have paintings that capture the lady better.”
“I have a great many paintings of Her Grace,” Siamus agrees. “I enjoy all of them, as I find each captures a different light of her. But I assure ye I haven't got a single one that does the lady justice in full, and so I’m obliged to choose which lights a guest might see her in. I happen to believe that one flatters Her Grace enormously.”
Rhenardt looks into his glass again. “She did explain it,” he says. After a silence, he adds stiffly, “I meant it for a compliment. I — did not expect her to hear it otherwise.”
“Ye must have a care,” Siamus tells him, “in the compliments ye pay Her Grace. She'll hear none as to her beauty or her charms. Ye court her instead with talk of her intellect and skill. She's not a ballroom butterfly, the Duchess Esprit; she's a lady of the highest-quality steel.”
Rhenardt looks up. His gaze is opaque and intent again; he appears to be trying to read something in Siamus's face or manner and discovering that it is written in a foreign language. “I understand, perhaps, why the lady is so devoted to you,” he says.
Siamus smiles at him. “No more than I am to her. Her Grace is the light of my life.”
Rhenardt seems to retreat further into stony stiffness. “Yes. I see.”
“Bear in mind what I say, if ye do intend to court her,” Siamus advises mildly. “She'll hear compliments as to the substance of her, not her shape.”
The Gilnean’s expression shifts again. “If I — ? You would not object?”
Siamus laughs at him. “Do ye think I can't sympathize with a man smitten by the lady? I'm often astonished she doesn't have courtiers flocking like lovesick lambs around her skirts. I won't have you insult the lady, if that were in fact the case, but I'll certainly not grudge ye paying her the attentions she ought to have. Did she not tell ye that?”
Rhenardt doesn’t answer; he has a sip of his drink, his gaze still steady. His eyes, Siamus decides, are not slate or flint after all; those stony shades are flat, unchanging. His eyes are storm blue, the dark of the sea before she looses her full temper, and there are currents running deep beneath.
Listen to that: he’s a bloody poet. He thinks of Tyrrell and has another sip of his drink. A poet with a taste for blue-eyed men.
“What are you smiling about now?” Rhenardt asks him.
“I have the soul of a poet,” Siamus tells him gravely. “And a taste for blue-eyed men. And shouldn’t I smile?”
“You do it a great deal,” the man observes. “It’s disconcerting.”
Siamus laughs again. “And you should do it more.”
“I do not think I often have much to smile about.”
Siamus leans forward to set his glass on the floor by the couch’s leg. “Shall I give ye something?”
That does make the Gilnean smile, ruefully. “You are either insatiable or incorrigible or both.”
“It’s both,” Siamus agrees. “Her Grace tells me the same, but not in that tone of voice, thank ye kindly.”
Rhenardt’s smile fades and he studies Siamus’s face. “Will you not mind?” he asks in his gravel voice.
Siamus lays a hand across his jaw. “Why should I mind any more than she minds this? I’m the lady’s husband, not her keeper. Treat her well and make her happy, and I’ll be glad to see it.” He sits back. “But if ye mean to court her, ye must court her well and seriously, and with an intent. Her Grace is not a lady who will be had lightly.”
Rhenardt bends to set his own glass down. “Unlike her husband,” he says.
“Unlike her husband,” Siamus agrees. He puts a hand on the other man’s thigh and shifts closer. “But Graves?” he says very seriously.
“Yes?”
“Ye must never send her flowers. Not without ye speak with me first.”