Chapter Thirty-seven
BEN
I woke up to Dominic’s ever-reliable morning wood pressing against me.
“Morning,” he said when I blinked my eyes open. He looked disgustingly awake.
“Show-off.”
His grin widened.
The bed was warm and cosy, the central heating groaning somewhere in the distance. Dominic’s hand drifted lazily along my side the way it so often did whenever I was in reach.
I'd always assumed I knew what my life was going to look like. Not the details, perhaps, but the shape of it. Research I loved. Family around me. Eventually, someone kind to share it all with.
I'd never expected this. Never expected to look at someone and know that everything in me orbited around them. And I’d never dreamed someone would look at me the same way.
Yet here was Dominic, who seemed incapable of going five minutes without touching me, kissing me, or watching me when he thought I wasn't looking.
The thought filled me with a ridiculous, breathless sort of happiness.
Dominic frowned slightly. “What?”
“Just thinking.”
“You're smiling, but it’s morning.”
“I know.”
“It's alarming.”
I laughed and leaned forward to kiss him. Somehow I ended up under him and for some considerable time, I forgot that mornings were supposed to be endured, not enjoyed.
My breathing was still evening out afterwards when I became aware of noise at the bedroom door. A kind of rustling sound, and then an envelope appeared under the door, skimming the carpet for several inches as if it had been shoved through the tiny gap between door and floor as hard as possible.
Dominic kissed my shoulder before rolling out of bed to go and pick it up.
“Want to make a guess who our postman was?” he asked, holding up an envelope with DOMINIC AND BEN printed across the front. A good half of the letters were backwards, but I got the gist.
“Well,” I said, “open it.”
“Yes, sir,” Dominic responded, snapping off a salute, before getting completely distracted by the way I was stretching out luxuriously now I had the whole bed to myself.
He leaned forward, one knee up on the mattress, and kissed me, running his hand up my side in a way that made me shiver. “You’re insatiable,” I informed him.
“That doesn’t sound like a complaint.”
No. No, it really wasn’t. But neither of us was up for more than kissing and touching right now, and Dominic finally rolled off me. “Where’d it go?” he asked.
We eventually found Teddy’s envelope under Dominic’s left shoulder, looking decidedly crumpled.
He pulled out a sheet of paper, bedecked with gold-star stickers and wobbly drawings of balloons—or drawings of wobbly balloons. It was hard to be sure.
And in the middle, carefully written out in coloured letters:
YOU ARE INVITED TO MY BIRTDAY PARTY
there will be cake
and tressur hunt
and games. NO ADDULTS.
Teddy
“What’s a birtday party?” Dominic wondered, and I elbowed him.
“I’m more worried about the treasure hunt,” I said dubiously. “Is that such a good idea with dragons?”
Dominic grinned at me. “Can’t imagine anything better, personally,” he said. “The kids will end up fighting over the treasure long enough for us to steal all the cake.”
His phone buzzed on the bedside table, and for a moment, wariness flickered across his face as he read the message. Then, almost visibly, he caught himself.
He held out the phone to show me the text from Rhodri. Study, 10 o’clock.
“Okay,” I said, pushing myself up to sit against the pillows. “Which gives us, what, an hour?”
“Thought I was the insatiable one,” he said, dropping a swift kiss on my lips before beginning to hunt for clean clothes. “So much for a peaceful morning.”
As if Dominic and a peaceful morning could co-exist more than five minutes before he got bored and managed somehow to find himself in the middle of chaos.
We showered together, with difficulty, before pestering Glenys for a late breakfast, and then Dominic went to see Rhodri while I headed up to the records room. And all the time, I couldn’t stop smiling.
* * *
I had ninety minutes of peace. Ninety minutes in which I got myself organised after all the recent diversions, and found myself torn between fascination with what I was reading and disappointment that Dominic wasn’t yet here.
With him always came disruption, but he was also very good at choosing not to interrupt me when he knew I wanted to work.
And his presence here, the life he brought to wherever he was, counterbalanced all these old records of people long gone.
The door pushed open, and then I had a dragon draped around me from behind. Dominic was nuzzling my neck, hands running over my chest, squeezing briefly at my pecs. My dick’s instant response to his touch was utterly predictable.
“Find anything fascinating?” he asked me.
“Actually, yes. The fourth son of the first Arthur married twice. Not that that’s the interesting thing, but he doesn’t appear to have waited for his first wife to be decent enough to pop off before marrying the second, which means, effectively, the heirs on that line—”
He laughed, low and fond against my ear. “You know I was only asking to be polite.”
I tilted my head back and looked at him. He was happy. Glowing with it, almost.
“How’d it go with Rhodri?” I asked
He moved to sit on the table in front of me.
“Good,” he said, as I shifted irreplaceable old records away from his dangerously cavalier sprawl.
“I mean, good and not good, because I now know way more about the Hargreaves family than I ever wanted to. But…” he shrugged a little, and it failed completely to hide how much this meant to him.
“He said he’s bringing me up to speed so I can be present at discussions. ”
Not take part in them, I noticed, and Dominic was so sharp, he would have picked up on that immediately. Still, from what I’d gathered, it was far more than Rhodri had ever offered before.
“I now have a diary,” Dominic informed me, with a self-importance belied by the sparkle in his eyes. “It has meetings in, God help me.”
I couldn’t help it. I stood up, pulled him in by the front of his shirt and kissed him thoroughly. I loved him. I loved seeing him happy.
“I’m sure there’s a rule somewhere about the archivist not being allowed to molest the help,” he said, when we finally parted.
“Help?” I queried. “I think to deserve that title, you’ll need to do something more than sit there looking pretty.”
“Harsh but true,” he agreed, sliding off the table. “Okay, we got a little sidetracked these last couple of days. What do you want me to do?”
“I need to be far more systematic than I have been,” I confessed.
Dominic looked alarmed. “Ben, no. Not systematic.”
“I’m serious.” I gestured towards the nearest pile of records.
“I’m now going to work through the archive chronologically, and I’m refusing to be distracted by anything from a different period, no matter how interesting.
I need to establish the family lines properly first, which means pulling together references from wills, court records, marriage settlements—anything that provides enough information to identify people and their relationships to one another with a degree of certainty. ”
Dominic stared at me with deep suspicion. “You say court records like other people say passionate affair.”
“Because court records are useful.”
“God, you’re hot,” he said. “Come here and talk history to me.”
As though he needed to ask.
DOMINIC
Ben was sprawled half across me, warm and heavy and entirely too distracting. Every so often his fingers drifted absently over my chest as if he were mapping something there.
“You’re very quiet,” he observed eventually.
“That’s because I’m contemplating the horror of becoming respectable,” I told him.
His lips twitched. “You keep looking at that diary.”
I glanced again at where it sat on the bedside table. For reasons known only to himself, Rhodri used a paper diary. And he obviously expected me to.
“It’s ridiculous,” I said. “It’s literally just meetings.”
“But it means something.”
There was no pressure in the words. No attempt to force me into some kind of emotional discussion. Just Ben, quietly seeing far more than I usually wanted anyone to see of me.
“A handful of meetings and a diary don’t erase years of being treated like a disappointment,” I said finally.
Ben shifted slightly against me, making sure I knew he was there.
“No,” he said softly.
I hadn’t realised until then how badly I’d needed him to say that.
“But,” I admitted after a moment, “I can actually see a future now.”
His fingers stilled.
“One that isn’t entirely dependent on Rhodri waking up in a reasonable mood,” I added.
I was still to some extent subject to his whims. I knew that.
This morning, he’d treated me like a puppy who needed training and who might, if left unsupervised, pee on the floor.
It was a huge step up from how he’d always treated me before, but I wasn’t willing to put up with it indefinitely.
Once I’d found my feet, things were going to change.
He could teach me. He could even tell me when I was being a muppet—and he undoubtedly would. Frequently. But sooner or later, we were going to have discussions rather than Rhodri making pronouncements. I’d make sure of it.
For all I knew, he was feeling his way through the new way things were between us just as much as I was. And I had a hell of a lot to learn from him, now he was willing to share it with me. Maybe there was room for even more change than I dared hope.
I played idly with Ben’s hair, loving the way he snuggled even closer against me as I did.
“I wish I knew what I did to make him see me differently,” I said, more to myself than to Ben.
Because if I’d known what it took, maybe I wouldn’t have had all those years of being excluded, of helpless anger and wasted time.
He stilled, then sat up and looked at me. Oh no, serious historian face.
“You sound like you think it’s your fault that Rhodri couldn’t see what was right in front of him,” he said.
“I don’t know why he changed, but it wasn’t because you weren’t enough before.
Mortimer could see who you are. I could see—well, maybe it took me a little while to overlook your more…
idiosyncratic qualities.” A grin lurked in his eyes before he grew serious again.
“But don’t you dare blame yourself for Rhodri’s choices. ”
I huffed, and drew him back down. Idiosyncratic qualities, my arse. “They’re part of my charm,” I told him, and filed away everything else he’d said to think about later. Or not.
“What do you think about this council idea?” I asked.
“You mean the council itself, or you having a role?”
“Both, I guess,” I said. Because if Ben disapproved of the concept, he’d probably have good reasons.
“Well, it’s unelected for a start, which isn’t great,” he said.
He wasn’t looking at me, still tracing patterns on my chest. “But then, dragons don’t really do democracy.
And from what I understand, the council would have the power to change anything it wanted, so it could always turn itself into an elected body. ”
He sat up again, alarm on his face. “God no, don’t do that—you know what we’re like. It’ll be the biggest and strongest who’ll fight their way on and have their own way, bullying the rest of us into compliance.”
“Noted. No democracy,” I said. “Maybe a benign dictatorship?”
He lay back down, head on my shoulder. “That doesn’t make it sound any better, but yeah. With dragons, I think it’s the safest way.”
“Mortimer was careful to tell me he was selecting for other traits as well as strength,” I told him and he made a satisfied sound in response.
“And about me being a member?”
It was ridiculous how exposed I felt. I loved Ben. I trusted him absolutely. But asking like that, opening the door for him to say, in his kind way, that I had many strengths but I just wasn’t up to this kind of responsibility—I thought it would kill me from him.
“Don’t worry, it’s not like I’ll have time with all my very important meetings,” I told him quickly. “I’m actually being allowed to talk at the one with the Hargreaves, though I think Rhodri’s giving me a script.”
“Dominic,” he said softly, when he was sure I’d finished. “I think you’re exactly who we need on that council. You care.”
I swallowed hard and stared up at the ceiling with burning eyes.
“I mean, as long as you don’t start mandating sword-fighting or in-flight somersaults because you think it would be fun,” he added.
Now there was an idea. Before I could get too far down that road, Ben kissed me. “Do you want to do it?”
“Yes,” I said instantly. I really did. Even though I didn’t know exactly how it would work, I wanted this.
“Do you trust Mortimer?” he asked next.
“No,” I said, then hesitated. “But in this, I think I do.” I combed my fingers through his hair. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to take anything he says on trust without verification.”
“Well okay then, Councillor,” Ben said, as if it were that straightforward.
And when I thought about it, perhaps it was. Until the first disaster, anyway.