Chapter Fourteen
The clatter of hooves, the shout of a groom, and then a booming laugh in the courtyard below shook me out of my concentration on my paperwork, and I lifted my head and blinked at the clock on my desk. Half past eleven. Government officials had been in and out, singly and in groups, the Surbini ambassador had dropped by to ambush me with more issues with the trade agreement—in the guise of thanking me for the party the night before, of course.
Other than that, Mattia had brought piles of paper and taken them away again, and nearly four hours had passed without my pausing to do more than refresh my cup of coffee.
Benedict had examined the pot, the cup, and the cream and sugar when he left me in my study shortly after eight, and had promised to be back before noon to see to my lunch. We hadn’t spoken except for brief, practical exchanges.
We’d been mostly quiet the night before, too, after we’d finished in bed. He’d run my bath for me, laid out the bathmat, and then made himself scarce in my sitting room, all without saying a word.
The silence had given me more time than I’d wanted to think. I’d always either done those things for myself or had a servant take care of them, and it had never even occurred to me how intimate they were.
As soon as it had occurred to me, I’d done my best to drive the thought out of my mind, which left a lovely vacancy into which vivid recollections of dancing with Benedict, being all but carried out of the ballroom by Benedict, and being fucked within an inch of my life by Benedict could rush. Any remaining space in my mind was filled by the laughter of my courtiers. The result had been a mostly sleepless night, made all the more unbearable by the need to remain still and not draw Benedict’s attention to my restlessness.
Work had been something of an escape this morning, but now whoever had decided to cause this disruption had ruined that for me too, damn it.
That laugh broke out again as I approached the window, and this time I recognized it, though I could hardly believe my ears. I knew who I’d see before I looked out: my cousin Tavius dismounting from his horse, his servants and guards doing the same all around him, the courtyard swarming with palace staff coming out to get them settled.
Oh, gods. Tavius? Why in the world would he have come here? Now, of all times?
Fuck. Of course. It’d been twelve days since my liaison with Benedict had become public gossip, and in that time someone had written to Tavius. And of course he’d come at once, probably determined to protect me from Benedict, whom he’d always detested. He’d almost certainly made the same assumptions that I had at first: that Benedict meant to kill me, usurp the throne, fuck me into compliance, or use magic on me, in whatever sequence seemed most convenient to him.
Tavius would be furious with me for what he’d see as self-destructive weakness and folly.
My stomach sank with disappointment and dread, and then curdled with guilt an instant later.
I ought to have wanted to see him. I ought to have been thrilled! The sons of two close sisters, Tavius and I had grown up practically like brothers, as my mother had taken me on long, frequent visits to Tavius’s parents’ estate throughout my childhood. Only a few months older than me, Tavius had always been bigger and stronger—but he’d never used it against me. Quite the contrary. We’d learned to swim together in a pond a quarter mile from the manor, and when I’d been out of my depth, Tavius had let me ride on his back until I gained the confidence to strike out on my own. I’d always trusted him to look out for me.
But his mother and mine had some kind of falling out when Tavius and I were adolescents. We’d seen little of each other for several years and then picked up a relationship again throughout our teens and early twenties after my mother had gone to the convent, with me visiting him fairly often at his hunting lodge—including three years ago, when I’d spent that disappointing night with his friend.
But he’d never visited court much, and I hadn’t seen him since he’d come for my father’s state funeral shortly after that hunting trip, first too overwhelmed with shock and grief and then too busy with the business of ruling to take any holidays.
I’d missed him, of course. But even our correspondence had fallen off and become sporadic. Tavius had never been much of a letter-writer.
A light rain had started misting down, and Tavius tossed his reins to a groom and strode quickly for the shelter of the palace, disappearing out of sight.
He’d be at my study door within a few moments, quite possibly without even pausing to let a manservant clean his muddy boots. Tavius had always been loud, brash, and unconcerned with mess and disturbance—usually the cause of it, in fact. Gods, even if I managed to calm him down, it’d be impossible to get any work done with him rattling around the palace and trying to drag me out of my study and into the nearest keg of brandy—and away from Benedict.
Not that I’d manage to calm him down. As soon as he heard about what had happened at the ball last night…
Fuck. I dropped into my desk chair too heavily, yelping as it sent a shock through all the soft parts of my rear, and put my head in my hands. Mattia hadn’t said much, but he’d confirmed, when I asked him, that the palace and the city were abuzz with the story.
Damn it, damn it, damn it to hell. Tavius couldn’t have chosen a worse moment to descend upon me if he’d tried.
“Lucian! Where are you hiding?” Tavius’s voice carried clearly through the study door from somewhere out in the corridor. Double damn it.
I jumped up and practically dived for the door. Mattia had gone off on an errand to Lord Zettine’s office, which meant Tavius—aggressive by nature and a little too attached to his status as the duke’s favorite cousin—would be facing down Benedict’s humorless officers within seconds.
Both of my door guards had their hands on their sword hilts as I burst into the corridor, with Tavius coming to a stop a few feet away, his brows already drawing into a frown and face red with brewing anger.
For a strange moment, he reminded me so powerfully of my father in one of his tempers that my heart gave a skip and I froze in place.
But then Tavius saw me and his face split into a smile, and he looked almost like himself again. Older, of course, with a few harsh lines in his face he’d never had before, but still my cousin Tavius. I shook my head to clear the vision away and stepped forward between my guards, smiling too despite how mixed my feelings were. Tavius and I both had blond hair, and we resembled each other rather strikingly—and he’d inherited his build from his father, obviously, whose height and bulk were similar to my own father’s. So it wasn’t so odd, really, that Tavius could momentarily remind me of him.
But gods, that had given me a turn that it’d take a glass of wine to recover from.
“Lucian, call off your dogs,” Tavius said. “I’m your bloody cousin, not a threat to your throne!”
“Let him pass,” I said, and the guards hesitated and then drew aside, allowing Tavius to stride forward and pull me into a bear hug that made me oof as all the air was knocked out of my lungs.
For a moment I let myself relax into his embrace, wrapping my arms around his back and giving him a friendly thump, which he returned enthusiastically enough to have me laughing and wincing. Some of my worry melted away in the familiar warmth of his touch and the faint scent of home and family that somehow clung to him, no matter how much time had passed since we’d seen one another.
When I pulled back and looked up into his tanned, ruddy face and the eyes that were so much like mine, I almost felt happy he’d come.
And then that feeling evaporated instantly as he said, “Glad to see me?”
I bit my lip to keep in the automatic litany of apologies that tried to spill out in response to the challenging edge to his tone. He’d invited me to his lodge several times over the last three years, and I’d had to turn him down each time, much to his annoyance—even though he hadn’t made the effort to travel, either. And now he knew perfectly well I wouldn’t be glad he’d come to chastise me over Benedict, but if I said so, he’d turn it around on me.
Damn it, he’d put me on the defensive with four little words. Family could be so fucking overrated.
“Of course I am,” I said, and his eyes narrowed. Ugh. I hadn’t sounded convincing even to myself.
“Are you?” He’d started to redden, puffing up his chest. “What the fucking hell, Lucian? That fucking ass Rathenas? Have you lost your mind? I had to come and talk some sense into you!”
Fuck, I’d forgotten quite how loud Tavius could be, and how overbearing. They’d be able to hear him halfway across the palace, and there were two pages and two guards standing a few feet away! “Come into my study and talk there, Tavius, this isn’t the place for—”
“I see you’re not denying it!” I winced and couldn’t help shooting a glance at our small audience, who were all leaning forward, unashamedly agog. “We need to get you out of this palace. Away from that bastard. Somewhere you can clear your head and have a bit of fun. If you’ve picked up with him, you’re clearly desperate. Or he’s muddled your mind somehow, because you’ve always hated him as much as I—”
Oh, gods preserve me, the guards would report this to Benedict, I knew they would, and even though I’d always been openly hostile to Benedict in private, and he had no illusions, somehow the thought of him knowing how I’d spent years abusing him to Tavius made my lungs seize up.
“Lunch!” I practically shouted, needing to do anything to head him off until I could get him somewhere more private. And Tavius could always be influenced through his stomach. “We’ll—find some hot punch to drive out the chill. My cooks can send up all your favorites. Roast beef and anything else you fancy. Whatever you’ve heard, I’m sure I can explain it.”
No chance of that, actually, but at least he could rant and carry on where not as many people would hear him. I took him by the arm, trying to tug him away, down the hall and away from the administrative offices. We could go around by a back corridor that would get us to the semi-formal area of the palace where we entertained extended family or visiting dignitaries in smaller groups.
“Fine,” Tavius said, “but I swear to all the gods, you’d better not be trying to put me off!”
He slung his arm around my shoulders, giving me a bruising squeeze, and began to list all the delicacies he expected the cooks to prepare for us on the double, damn it, and without messing about. Out of the corner of my eye I caught Captain Venet practically twitching with the urge to intervene.
“Run to the kitchens, post haste, and order it all,” I muttered to the closest page, almost drowned out by Tavius’s booming voice, and the lad nodded and scurried off, leaving the other to close my study door and remain at his post.
Tavius kept his grip on me, striding quickly enough I had to trot to keep up, and the guards fell in behind us.
“…fine to eat our lunch here, but tonight we’ll be going down to the city, damme, somewhere with music and dancing and no bloody mages…”
Tavius’s voice washed over me as my mind raced in frantic circles. Benedict would arrive at my study soon expecting to find me and be furious that I’d gone off somewhere without him, Mattia would return from the chancellery and be confused, none of my work would be done, and worst of all, Tavius would pour me a glass of something strong from the sideboard decanters the moment we reached the parlor, and I’d have to refuse to drink it (because if I disobeyed Benedict and drank something he hadn’t approved twice in the same twenty-four hours, I probably ought to hope it killed me before he caught up with me), and then Tavius would explode with even more questions, and then…
“—somewhere we can have a proper revel,” Tavius was bellowing as we approached the intersection of this corridor with the one that would lead to the dining parlor.
He paused for breath, and I interjected, “I can’t drink the whole night away, Tavius! I need some sleep, and besides—”
“We’ll sleep when we’re dead! Besides, you don’t need sleep, you can spend the night on a cock that isn’t that fucking son of a bitch’s—oh, buggering fuck, where’d you come from, eh?”
My heart skipped a beat, a shock jolting me all the way down to my toes as Benedict strode around the corner and came to a sudden halt. Tavius skidded to a stop and me with him, my feet sliding out from under me for a moment. I had to cling to his side to stay upright.
Benedict’s gaze flicked from Tavius, to me—lingering, with a hard intensity that had me trembling with the desire to run away—and then to the guards, finally settling back on Tavius. Benedict’s eyes narrowed and his jaw went tight.
He’d heard every word. Did he think that was what I wanted? To spend the night on a cock that wasn’t his?
“I came from the barracks,” he said slowly, each word deliberate, as if he were biting them off one by one, “where I command. In this palace, where I live. With Duke Lucian, whom I protect. What about you, Lord Tavius? I didn’t know you’d been invited.”
Behind me, a slight jingle and rustle suggested the guards were bracing themselves for a fight. So was I. Tavius had stiffened against my side, his arm heavier around my shoulders, and I could hear his teeth gritting—and practically hear the fizzing of his blood as it bubbled in his veins. Benedict’s hand had moved to rest on the hilt of a long, curved knife at his belt, his fingers flexing.
All at once, I lost my patience with their posturing. What did they even have to fight over, really? At twenty-eight, I had the right to choose my own bedmates, even if I chose poorly. (Very poorly.) Tavius might feel that the proprietary authority over me he’d taken on as my slightly older cousin when we were children still applied, but—it didn’t.
And Benedict didn’t need to protect me from my own cousin. He didn’t have the right to dictate which of my relatives I invited, or welcomed without an invitation.
He certainly didn’t have the right to be offended that I might want to take someone else to bed. Especially since I didn’t even intend to bed anyone else, tonight, anyway. And would I even be able to find a cock in the lower town that Benedict hadn’t already seen? For fuck’s sake.
No, they were simply using me as an excuse to establish which of them was the biggest man in the room, like a pair of cockerels who’d strayed into the same barnyard.
My body ached from Benedict’s use of me, my eyes ached from weeping in the middle of the night like a fool, my ears ached from Tavius’s tactless shouting, and I’d spent the morning buried in heaps of paper. No, I had no more patience left.
And unfortunately for them, while they might be taller, broader men with bigger swords and hasty tempers, I was their ruling duke. Perhaps all I had to do to reassert control was…reassert it. They could come and have a civilized lunch with me, or they could go fuck themselves, or each other, or stab one another, or whatever else they wanted to do, somewhere else very fucking far away from me.
I straightened my spine, both literally and figuratively, and shrugged off Tavius’s arm.
“Lord Benedict, if you’re here to join us for luncheon, you’re very welcome,” I said crisply, and completely insincerely, in the same tone I typically used when instructing the clerks and secretaries and solicitors who really kept the duchy running smoothly while men like Tavius and Benedict swaggered about glaring at one another.
To be fair, the duchy would have ceased to exist during the past decade without Benedict’s military talents, but that didn’t make his current behavior less childish. Perhaps he’d decline and save me the misery of dealing with the two of them in tandem.
“Neither the Dowager Duchess’s son nor my cousin need an invitation,” I went on. “But both of you will be eating elsewhere if you delay me on my way to my own luncheon, because I’ve been working all morning with only a single pot of coffee that went cold hours ago, and I’m famished. And Tavius, I’m not going to listen to a lot of shouting over my meal. Save your arguments for later or don’t come at all.”
Without waiting for either of them to agree or not, I set off around the corner toward the dining room, lengthening my stride and smiling sourly to myself as Benedict’s guards fell in smartly behind me and left both their commander and Tavius to follow if they chose.
Or perhaps they’d do me a favor and fall into a pit instead, damn them. Family, lovers, and lovers who were also some definition of family were all so very, very bloody overrated.