Chapter Fifteen
Lysander had expected to spend the hours before Uriel’s visit vibrating at a frequency that would shatter Hamish’s mugs, but instead he’d woken up on Thursday morning with a strange, settled clarity that he didn’t entirely trust. He lay in the grey pre-dawn of their bedroom, one leg hooked over Hamish’s thigh, and turned the feeling over in his head, before heading into the kitchen to check in on Cassian and his morning practice.
Cassian had been incandescent since they’d agreed to the dinner.
He’d spent the previous afternoon scrubbing the cottage with fervour, attacking the kitchen tiles with a sponge and a bottle of Dettol while delivering a running monologue about Uriel’s qualities that Lysander had had to block out for the sake of his own sanity.
Beautiful soul.
Gentle hands.
Light pouring through him.
Lysander had nodded along and wiped down the surfaces behind Cassian, because Cassian’s scrubbing technique left a lot to be desired and he had a tendency to clean in spirals that missed great big sweeps of counterspace entirely.
Now Cassian was in the kitchen making chocolate mousse.
The recipe had come from Elisa at the library, handwritten on a piece of notepaper. The kitchen now looked like a chocolate bomb had detonated in it. There was cocoa powder on the ceiling, and Lysander was too tired to ask Cassian how it had got up there.
“It needs to set for four hours,” Cassian announced, sliding the bowl into the fridge carefully. “So nobody opens this fridge until dinner. Nobody.”
“I need milk for my coffee, Cass.”
“Then you should have thought of that before the mousse went in.” Cassian closed the fridge door and pressed both palms flat against it, as though the mousse might try to escape. “Four hours. The recipe says so.”
Lysander made his coffee black and took it to the kitchen island, where he sat and scrolled through his mobile while Cassian bustled around him, wiping surfaces that were already clean and rearranging the cutlery drawer for the third time.
All that nervous energy had to go somewhere, and Lysander was content to let it go into the cutlery.
Hamish came in from the garden with a wild look in his eye that Lysander had come to associate with plant emergencies. “The basil’s bolting,” he said, as though this constituted breaking news. He washed his hands at the sink, dried them on the tea towel, and opened the fridge.
“No!” Cassian lunged across the kitchen.
Hamish closed the fridge. “Right. The mousse.”
“Four hours, alpha.”
Hamish leaned against the counter and looked at Lysander. Lysander lifted his mug in a sympathetic toast.
By five o’clock, the cottage smelled of the lasagne Lysander had taken charge of. Somebody had to cook an actual meal and Cassian’s contribution to dinner began and ended with the mousse. Hamish had set the table in the small dining room: four places, using the good plates.
Cassian disappeared into his bedroom to get ready, and the sounds that emerged suggested he was trying on everything he owned.
Lysander watched Hamish open the fridge as he cut crusty bread into thick slices at the counter.
Hamish stood there looking at the chocolate mousse. It sat in its bowl, dark and glossy, topped with a lopsided swirl that Cassian had executed with a butter knife.
Hamish’s hand moved to the shelf where the spices lived. His fingers hovered over the sea salt, then closed around it.
“Hamish.” Lysander kept his voice even. “You will break his fucking heart if you sabotage the thing that he made for his Evermate.”
Hamish’s jaw tightened and the salt went back on the shelf with a sharp click. “Don’t call him that, Sander.”
“That’s what Cassian thinks Uriel is.”
“I remember him from filming.” He shut the fridge and turned around, folding his arms, his glasses catching the overhead light.
“Uriel is a full-on believer. Completely convinced he’s destined to be the next Lumineer, like his father.
Everyone up on his arse, grooming him for leadership like he’s the second coming.
” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Which he literally is, in their eyes. Why would he walk away from all of that, Sander? Tell me that. Why would the heir apparent to the whole operation throw it in to chase one omega across the city?”
“Maybe, Hamish,” Lysander said, “because Cassian got under his skin.” He set the bread knife down. “Cassian has a way of doing that.”
“Well, he needs to be fucking stopped,” Hamish said.
“For his own sake. If Cassian keeps looking like that and smelling like that and making those noises while he eats, that alpha is going to keep just wanting him—” He cut himself off.
“He needs to be made ugly, Sander. How do I make him ugly? Cut off his hair? Dump a bag of topsoil over his head?”
Lysander bit back his grin. It shouldn’t have been sweet, watching his alpha spiral into protective fury over another omega, but the fact that Hamish cared this much about Cassian’s safety was the single biggest green flag Lysander had ever encountered in a partner.
Bigger than the banana photo, and even the beard.
He crossed the kitchen and wrapped his arms around Hamish from behind, pressing his face into the warm stretch of cotton between Hamish’s shoulder blades. “Our little boy is growing up.”
“Our little boy is going to get himself eaten alive by a cult leader wannabe.”
Lysander smoothed Hamish’s shirt against his chest with both palms, flattening the creases left by a morning of agitated movement.
“You are going to be nice to Uriel tonight. You’re not going to tell him weird little anecdotes about Cassian to try and scare him off.
It won’t work anyway. The things we find strange about Cassian are probably just completely normal to someone who grew up in the same compound.
” He straightened the collar that Hamish had been fussing with earlier.
“But you can ask him the cutting, insightful questions that you’re professionally known for. ”
“Like: are you trying to drag Cassian back into a cult that’ll require him to surrender himself to a fifty-one-year-old man he’s deathly afraid of?”
“Yes.” Lysander patted his chest. “But not in those exact words. You know how to be subtle, Hamish. I’ve watched that globophilia documentary you did, and I saw how you managed to stay completely straight-faced while that man tried to convince you there was nothing sexual in it for him at all, even as he sat there bollock-naked on a giant weather balloon. ”
Hamish’s mouth twitched. “That was different. Gary was harmless.”
“Gary was naked on a weather balloon.”
“It’s a legitimate sensory interest.”
Lysander pressed a kiss to the hinge of Hamish’s jaw.
“You didn’t flinch. You asked him about pressure thresholds and nodded along as though he was describing how he liked to brush his teeth.
That’s what Cass needs from you tonight.
” He pulled back just enough to meet Hamish’s eyes.
“Uriel gets the Hamish McNally treatment. The full, polite, devastating audit. And if he’s genuine, we’ll know.
And if he’s not, we’ll know that too, and we’ll bring Cassian around, because we have to. ”
Hamish exhaled through his nose. “Fine. But if he touches Cassian’s wrists, I’m putting him through the wall.”
Lysander kissed him properly, standing on his toes to reach. “He’s a very big alpha, Hamish. He’s got huge shoulders from all the manual labour around the Family of Light’s farm. I don’t think you have a chance.”
Hamish flashed him a look of profound betrayal, and went to hoover the living room when Lysander commanded him to.
? ? ?
The doorbell rang at six-fifteen.
Cassian was off his stool and down the hallway in a flash. Lysander heard the front door open with force, followed by a careful silence, and he set off after Cassian at a far more sedate pace.
Cassian was standing just inside the open door with his hands clasped behind his back, his whole body angled towards the man on the threshold. His long pale lashes were cast low and his voice had climbed into that breathy, pliant register that made the hairs on Lysander’s arms rise.
“Hi, Uriel. Hi.”
He didn’t touch him. His fingers were laced together tightly, and his bare feet had planted themselves a full metre from where Uriel stood on the welcome mat, as though the physical distance between them was the only thing keeping him tethered to the floor. He was vibrating with the effort of it.
Uriel filled the doorframe. He was even taller than Lysander remembered from the café, his broad shoulders built up to impressive proportions by years of manual labour.
He was holding a bunch of native flowers wrapped in brown paper, and his pale eyes moved from Cassian to Lysander as he approached.
“Thanks for having me,” Uriel said. He held out the flowers to Lysander.
Cassian took them instead and clutched them to his chest, his eyes shining, his fingers whitening around the paper-bound stems.
Hamish appeared at Lysander’s shoulder. His gaze swept from Cassian’s trembling form to the large gap between him and the alpha. He caught Lysander’s eye and mimed a silent, exaggerated retch behind Cassian’s back.
Lysander bit the inside of his cheek and stood aside to let Uriel in.
The lasagne came out of the oven bronzed and bubbling, the béchamel crusted golden where it had caught the heat. Hamish set it on the table between the four place settings, and the dining room filled with the rich, meaty smell of it.
Cassian picked up the serving spoon before anyone else could reach for it and carved out a slab of lasagne so enormous that it barely fit on Uriel’s plate.
Cheese stretched in long, elastic threads between the dish and the portion, and Cassian sawed through them with the edge of the spoon before settling the plate in front of Uriel.