“What are we going to do?” Graeme asked, feeling so much younger than he was.
Fortunately, serious Art was confident and decisive. “We’re going to do the best we can to support each other,” he said, pulling Graeme back into his arms. “We’re going to band together, the three of us, to get the fashion show where it needs to be, to fight off the evil specters of Giorgio Esposito and Dean Renfer?—”
“Dean who?” Graeme asked.
“Never mind about him or about me right now,” Art said. “You and Ryan are the ones with deadlines. First and foremost, we need to help each other get all the fancy fashion and garden designs done. We’ll deal with our little triad once we have two seconds to stop and breathe.”
Graeme suspected Art had his own challenge that he hadn’t shared yet. But he was right. There were gigantic fish on the table to fry at the moment, and they needed to work together without getting tied up in relationship drama to get everything done.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m willing to help wherever and however I can. But we will need to deal with us eventually.”
“Oh, we’ll deal with us, alright,” Art said, lust lighting his eyes.
Graeme laughed and went all wiggly inside. He was running headlong into the wildest part of his life yet.
FIFTEEN
Life was full of choices,and at the moment, Art had mixed feelings about the ones in front of him. Not when it came to Ryan and Graeme, of course. There was no choice there.
After finally convincing Ryan that Graeme had had more than enough space and what he needed now was intervention, he’d gone to Graeme’s place and discovered he was right. Graeme had been in much worse condition than either Art or Ryan had dreamed he would be. Art had kicked himself for waiting so long as he’d sat Graeme down for the heart-to-heart that should have happened weeks ago.
It had been a good conversation, and if Art had had fewer scruples than he did, he would have ended the conversation in Graeme’s bedroom with his sweetheart’s ankles up over his shoulders and his cock buried deep. People always assumed he had no morals at all, but they couldn’t have been farther off the mark. Art considered himself deeply moral about the things that mattered to him, and both Graeme and Ryan mattered. A lot.
Which was why they were all sitting around the drafting table in Ryan’s studio on a rainy August afternoon, writing and sketching away at the projects that would, if everything wentwell, save their careers. If they went wrong? Well, that was something Art refused to let happen to the men he loved.
He sat back from where he’d been poring over several ancient diaries from past Hawthorne family members, racking his brain to come up with a way to make the gamekeeper’s cottage excavation, and indeed everything he’d been doing at Hawthorne House, palatable enough that the university would bless him for being there instead of dragging him before an ethics committee and firing him.
He had just been reading Countess Barbara Hawthorne’s last diary, in which she was an old woman expressing her sorrow for Queen Victoria over the loss of her beloved Albert. But as fascinating as the thoughts of Ryan’s great-great-something-grandmother were, Art was far more interested in staring at the man himself.
“Still no luck?” he asked, glancing between Ryan and Graeme, who sat on opposite sides of the table with Art at its head.
Both Ryan and Graeme looked up from their sketching. It amused Art to no end that they looked at each other, intensely, before turning almost in unison to look at him.
Sexual tension crackled through the air. It was enough to make Art laugh. The three of them wanted each other so badly, but now that they’d gotten over the surprise of their potential throuple, they were hiding behind the excuse of work to avoid all the conversations and logistics that were coming.
“I’m not quite there yet,” Ryan said. Art would have giggled at his choice of phrasing if he didn’t look as if he was about to shit a brick from the amount of stress he was under. Ryan threw down his pencil, leaned back in his chair, scrubbed his hands through his hair, and said, “Gloria has a whole team of sewers on standby, and she’s already put together the first few pieces I’ve sent her. But I’m not at all confident in those designs, orthis entire concept. ‘Garden Party’ has been done a billion times before.”
“Are those outfits going to be of any use if you change your mind about the concept?” Graeme asked, looking as sweet as a ripe peach.
Ryan blew out a breath and let his arms drop. “I can probably use one or two pieces, but none of them are key to the concept. I keep trying, I must have sketched a thousand designs at this point, but…nothing. I hate it all.”
The man was painfully uptight about it all. Art had offered to ease things for him a few times in the last couple days, but Ryan had turned him down every time. Their tryst in the studio the week before had been a one-off, and if he had to guess, he’d say that Ryan and Graeme’s adventures in Cornwall had been a one-off, too. Ryan needed about ten-off at this point.
“How about you?” Art asked, turning to Graeme. “How are the garden designs coming along?”
Graeme huffed and scribbled one last thing on his paper before glancing Art’s way. “I want to get this right,” he said. “Mrs. St. Ives is being incredibly kind to me. The least I can do is to give her enough choices so that she knows I’m really interested.”
Art grinned and reached out to touch his arm. Graeme was the most earnest, bottled-up person he knew. Whether the man was aware of it or not, his perfectionist people-pleasing was definitely linked to being raised in a world where the adults constantly harangued him with specters of a miserable afterlife for sinners, which included gay men in love with two guys at once and people who did a lazy job at work in equal measure.
Contrast that with Ryan, who was clearly wrapped up in knots over Giorgio Esposito and whatever inferiority complex-slash-fear of failure he was stuck in. Ryan knew he was a brilliant designer because he’d had a brilliant career for years in Milanbefore some bastard yanked the rug out from under him. He didn’t want to be hurt again by having something he loved torn away from him a second time, so something inside him was stopping him from investing in it enough to be hurt by losing it now.
Add Art’s own tumultuous feelings over the possibility that he could lose his job if the university got wind of his unconventional romantic life and decided it didn’t reflect well on the university, and they made a right old mess of a triad.
“Right, that’s it,” he said, slapping the table, then pushing his chair back and standing.
“That’s what?” Ryan asked.
“What’s what?” Graeme asked a split-second later.
