“I do sometimes like to maintain an air of mystique,” Demeroven says.
Bobby forces himself to breathe evenly and begins to nestle his knife into the meat along the breastbone of the bird. He thinks he might know how the poor thing feels.
Beth looks around Albie with a raised eyebrow. “Oh? And what else have you been leaving out, when you know we’re always so starved for good gossip?”
“I don’t want to besmirch the honor of my paramour,” Demeroven says casually, spearing a carrot from his plate.
“Well, that won’t do. If MissBertram and Lady Gwen are starved for gossip, you can only imagine how much Meredith and I have wasted away these long months. Now tell us, who have you met, Lord Demeroven?” Lady Harrington asks as she daintily carves her bird.
“It’s no one titled, but I’ve been having some fun,” Demeroven says, and Bobby feels like his heart has sunk all the way into his guts and gotten twisted. He can’t even bear to lift his forkful of quail to his mouth.
Has he been too caught up in his own infatuation to see what’s clearly right in front of him? Demeroven has never wanted him; he made that very plain. He said friends, and friends only. So all the angst and daydreaming Bobby’s been doing has been for what? Just to break his own heart?
“But the relationship is private, and I need to respect the honor of my paramour,” Demeroven says.
Bobby considers simply running out of the room, feeling so wrenchingly mortified he could melt right into the floor. Then something brushes his ankle. He jerks in his seat, only just playing the movement off as a cough into his napkin.
It’s a foot. It’s a foot very pointedly brushing up against his leg. He blinks and finds himself beneath Demeroven’s gaze while Gwen, Beth, Meredith, and Lady Harrington begin putting together bets for who this mysterious paramour could be.
But Bobby’s eyes are caught on Demeroven’s. Demeroven, who is...running his foot up Bobby’s calf. He can’t be—is he—he can’t be talking about Bobby, can he? An untitled paramour with whom he’s been having fun but wants to keep private? It can’t possibly be Bobby.
But that’s his sodding foot making Bobby hardat the dinner table.
Demeroven smiles slyly and then turns back to Lady Harrington, gamely fending off every name the ladies provide while Albie sits back in his seat, eating with a little smile.
Holy shit. He— How can this man be so demurring and anxious and scared, and simultaneously be this hot and daring all at once?
And what on earth is Bobby supposed to make of Demeroven’s foot rubbing against the soft underside of his knee? How is he supposed to eat? What is he supposed todo?
Suffer, it turns out. Suffer in agonizing ecstasy, because Demeroven keeps it up all through dinner, long after Lady Harrington and the girls give up the ghost and go back to their normal gossip.
It’s only at dessert that Demeroven ceases to torture him, clearly too in love with Mr.Whiley’s soufflé to continue his sexual advances. It is remarkably good, and Bobby tries to focus on the decadent chocolate (apparently one of the only things Meredith’s been able to stomach reliably, which must be costing Albie a small fortune).
Every glance from Demeroven sends a charge coursing through his veins. Pinpricks of heat are bouncing all over him. Every single nerve is on alert. It feels like he might spontaneously combust.
It’s late. They’ve traveled all day. Meredith is with child. Surely, surely, that means they can end this torture soon and go to bed. And he can somehow... push Demeroven up against a wall, any wall, he doesn’t care which, and snog the living shit out of him until he’s crying with want as payback.
Because apparently they have a relationship, and he damnwell deserves to get some retribution for this dinner. More than that, he desperately wants to talk.
Of course, no one seems to care much about his fried nerve endings. The moment Lady Harrington deems dessert complete, they’re ushered upstairs by the whole staff. He tries to keep track of Demeroven in the fray, but he keeps being pulled in multiple directions.
He glances up the stairs just in time to spot Demeroven disappearing around the first landing when their housekeeper, Mrs.Tilty, takes his arm.
“We have missed you and the viscount,” she says seriously, looking up at him. “And you’ve gone and grown again.”
He laughs, watching the way her eyes crinkle and noting the few new strands of gray in the curls that peek out beneath her lace cap. “I think it’s just the distance, Mrs.Tilty. I’m much the same.”
“No, no, there’s something different about you,” she insists as they mount the stairs. “You look older.”
“I’m sure it’s just the travel,” Bobby demurs, though her words settle somewhere behind his breastbone.
He does feel a bit older. It could just be the time away—he’s always surprised by how it feels like the house stands still when they’re gone. Though, of course, this time it hasn’t. His bedroom corridor has been redone, he notices, taking stock of the new rose-patterned wall etchings in a dusky pink outlined with gold.
“Lady Mason had it commissioned. She’s been dreadfully bored,” Mrs.Tilty says, her voice low but amused.
Bobby tries to focus on the new wall decoration and not the fact that Demeroven is hovering outside the room across the hall from his.
“How have you been, Mrs. Tilty?” he forces himself to ask,not wanting to be so self-absorbed he neglects the housekeeper who raised him.
