Chapter 24 #2
The vowsmith’s head emerged from beneath the tablecloth, his smile demure as his fingers edged toward the fall front of Nic’s breeches.
“I’m paying my debts. I told you I would.”
He unbuttoned the fall as he spoke and Nic groaned as questing fingers found his rapidly hardening cock. “What debts?” he asked, his groan becoming a laugh, which turned as abruptly back into a groan when Dashiell’s breath tickled his bare skin. “You know you don’t have any.”
“I know. I’m just making excuses to touch you.”
Nic meant to reply, but Dashiell ran his tongue slowly up his length and what even was rational thought anymore? The only man he had ever loved was kneeling between his legs, a tablecloth draped over his head and his fingers around Nic’s cock.
“You don’t have to do this,” Nic said.
Dashiell sat back, enough to look up at Nic through his lashes in a way that really didn’t help. “You don’t want me to?”
“Not what I said.”
“Then just sit there and put up with me doing something I’ve wanted to for a very long time.”
“Put up—” The rest of his words were swallowed into another groan as Dashiell lowered his head, taking Nic wholly inside his mouth. “Oh, fuck.”
A sensible man would have told him to stop.
A sensible man would have pointed out that the door wasn’t locked and they’d already come so close to being caught, but one look at the man kneeling between his legs and Nic could not speak.
The world out there no longer mattered—there was just him and Dashiell, and the vowsmith’s wet mouth making quick work of his straining arousal.
Adding a hand, Dashiell soon had Nic unable to do anything but lean back in his chair and bite back moans.
It wasn’t just the warmth of his mouth, wasn’t just his tight grip or his playful tongue, it was the knowledge it was him—the sight of Dashiell working hungrily almost enough to end him on the spot.
“Dash,” Nic said, his name a gasp, but if Dashiell cared for the warning, he didn’t heed it.
Didn’t slow. Just kept drawing Nic inexorably on toward his conclusion until his hips jerked, the movement uncontrollable as he smothered a cry.
Pleasure rolled over him, and on a final shudder the cry became a groan that sought to express the full extent of his appreciation.
As the sensation faded, Nic set his hand tenderly on Dashiell’s hair. And slowly, deliberately, the vowsmith swallowed and looked up.
At the impish expression on his face, Nic let out a breathy laugh. “You rotten, monstrous—”
“You’re welcome.” Dashiell grinned, nothing about his messy hair and his damp, reddened lips like the serious, proper vowsmith everyone else saw.
He licked those lips—slightly swollen in the aftermath—in a way that made Nic want to own him utterly.
“That was fun,” Dashiell added, his eyes half-lidded and his cheeks flushed.
“Although it would have been more fun had we risked it in the library.”
“In the—you are monstrous.”
“You said that already.”
“Well, excuse me if my brain isn’t functioning at the highest level right now.”
Dashiell slid out from beneath the table, but rather than take his own seat, he sat on Nic. Chest to chest and with his own cock hard against Nic’s abdomen, Dashiell snatched up the box they’d been translating.
“Now, where were we.” He cleared his throat. “Ah, we were at teth. After that is ek. Then woq.”
“How am I supposed to write anything down with you sitting on me?”
“You pick up the quill, dip it in the ink, then press it to the paper.”
Nic feigned taking an angry bite from Dashiell’s chest. “I thought being the smart-arse was my job and you’re meant to be the serious, studious one.”
“I thought so too, but being with you makes me feel giddy and slightly drunk, so you’ll have to put up with it. Now are you going to write this down or not? Ek. Woq.”
A fuzzy warmth spread through Nic that had nothing to do with what Dashiell had just done and everything to do with his words.
It had always been so easy spending time with him.
From their first days together as boys through to every moment they’d stolen since he’d returned—Dashiell the sun to which Nic turned without even thinking.
“Ven. Ek again. Amor,” Dashiell went on, turning the box to peer at the next line. “That’s an interesting one. I’ve only ever seen that used on old maps. Anyway, it’s followed by zef—”
“Slow down! I can’t write as fast with you crushing my legs to jelly.”
“Oh? Do you write with your legs?” Dashiell said, shifting his weight until Nic could feel his hardness pressed even more firmly against his stomach.
The urge to scream at the world, to hold Dashiell tight and never let him go no matter the consequences, was difficult to subdue, and tears stung Nic’s eyes.
“Zef. Lejorn. Si and—oh.” Dashiell sat back, and turned to look at the page Nic had been writing.
“Ven ek,” he said, before reading back along the line. “Wow.”
“What is it?”
“This box,” Dashiell said, bringing it between them, “would, in a public space, defy at least three laws. It’s not only smithed shut and semi-invisible, but those last sigils are for undisclosed reporting, and there’s an old curse added in for good measure.
It has been proven to be nonsense, but it’s illegal for guild smiths to use it all the same. ”
Nic stared at the box. “Perhaps… perhaps you ought to go and let me finish. You have your oath to consider.”
“As I sit here on top of the opposing principal of my current contract, having just joyfully sucked him off?”
Nic huffed a laugh. “When you put it like that…”
“It sounds ridiculous, yes.” Dashiell swung his leg over Nic and stood up. “Although I am worried. This seems less ‘fun trick box’ and more horrifying trap. I’d want to be sure—really sure—I knew the purpose of every sigil before opening it.”
On the mantelpiece, the large clock started chiming the hour, only for a collection of Nic’s automata to join the chorus.
Dashiell sighed. “I love all your creations, but I do wish you could make one capable of pausing time. There is nothing I want to do less right now than go dress for dinner.”
His voice held a hint of derision, such an everyday thing made absurd.
“Although if it comes to that, there is nothing I want to do less than be negotiating your marriage contract. Especially knowing that as soon as it’s done I have to walk out that door and not know when I will see you again.
I—” He spun away, running his hand through his hair, gripping a handful for a desperate moment.
“I can’t even be here for you when the royal vowsmiths descend en masse.
And I can’t lie—between a slew of dead bodies and a nonexistent estate, sorting out both the Requisite Care Clause and the audit is going to be hell. ”
“Those aren’t your messes to clean.”
Dashiell turned back, his smile crooked. “No, but is it so terrible that I want to take care of you? Want to protect you from all that? And no, don’t remind me that you can take care of yourself; I know you can. I just don’t want you to have to do it alone.”
The words were like a fist squeezing Nic’s heart. What could he say? To voice his frustration with the world would achieve nothing. That within days Dashiell would walk out of his life was an incontrovertible truth Nic had just been ignoring for his own sanity.
“I don’t want to do this,” Dashiell went on, frustration flaring. “I don’t. I cannot leave this house without knowing when I will see you again, but whenever I think about how next we can meet…”
He trailed off, leaving the problems to hang silent between them—Nic’s lack of freedom while his father lived, that he could not leave his mother, that Northumberland was a very long way from London.
And that was before they even considered the future risk to both the contract and Dashiell’s career should it ever become known that he and Dashiell were lovers.
Someone with a grudge, someone like Lord Ricard, could challenge it and force repayment of the dowry sum.
All things they both knew, all things neither could say.
Dashiell had said he hadn’t been born a man who could ever hope to love Nic, but Nic hadn’t been born a man who could love at all.
“I shouldn’t have been born a Monterris, huh?” he said, desperate for a moment of levity. “Quite the mistake on my part.”
Dashiell gripped his shoulders. “We will find a way. We must. I cannot bear a future in which there is no us.”
Us.
The word landed in Nic’s chest like a lead weight, stealing his breath. What he wouldn’t give for a future that contained such a word.
A knock sounded on the door and Nic pulled from Dashiell’s hold, glad of the moment to breathe. “Yes?”
“His Grace wants to see you, my lord. In his study.”
Nic had started toward the door, only to pause at the unfamiliar voice. Normally, summoning him was a task Master Everel would perform—the voice of an unknown servant further evidence of just how much had gone wrong since the lock-in began.
“Right, thank you,” Nic replied through the woodwork rather than risk anyone catching sight of Dashiell. “Tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes.”