Arden scowled.
“Sweet and soft. Dreamy and romantic.”
Arden bared his teeth, but it was half-hearted.
…he wasn’t wrong.
“Whimsical,” Beckett said. “Silly.”
“Now look here,” Arden said, and poked him in the chest with a stiff finger.
Beckett caught his wrist, drew Arden’s hand behind his own back, and nudged him in between Beckett’s slightly spread legs, arching subtly over him.
Arden sputtered into silence, lips parted as he gazed up at Beckett.
“Adorable. Gentle.” He rubbed a thumb over Arden’s chin, over his pouting bottom lip. He sighed. “So gentle as you are, pet. Never known a soul like it.”
Arden shivered.
“I love you for these things. I’ll love you for even more as we move on, all three of us together, and I learn you better.” He leaned down and said against Arden’s mouth, “You are, after all, the easiest man in the world to love.”
That hadn’t been Arden’s experience of life so far. When Beckett said it, though, he believed it.
He believed that they were going to be happy, the three of them:
Jack, sleeping in his bed, exhausted from the burden of his station, and from setting it aside to ride and join his lovers.
Beckett, determined to boss Arden about and make sure he got what he—Arden—wanted.
And him, Arden. An omega who was in his thirties and only just beginning to realise what happiness could mean. That it was in his grasp.
That all he had to do was reach out, be brave, and take it.
He slipped his free hand into Beckett’s, and held on.
CHAPTER 41
JACK
Jack slept like the dead, and gods above, his body had needed it.
He woke at lunchtime, had a brisk splash at the washstand in water long gone cold though his valet had replaced last night’s ewer with a fresh one at some point, and by the time he made his way to the breakfast parlour, Magda was tidying away the empty plates.
“Your Grace,” she said, dipping a quick curtsy but not stopping her work. “Shall I bring you breakfast? Or is it lunch you’ll be wanting?”
“Neither, thank you, Magda,” Jack said. “I’ll grab something from the kitchen.”
He strode through the halls, clattered down the back steps, and made Cook jump when he burst into the kitchen.
Marl, sitting at the large, well-scrubbed table and sipping coffee from the earthenware mug that was particularly his and he’d been using for as long as Jack could recall, didn’t flinch. He merely raised an eyebrow at Jack, who shot him an answering eyebrow.
Marl’s lips twitched.
“When is he going to start behaving as is befitting his station, is what I want to know?” Cook said loudly to the workbench, transferring small golden tarts filled with dark ruby jam from a tray to a cooling rack. “Or is it time for us to give up hope? It’s not as if he wasn’t raised proper, oh no. Yet here he is, an old man coming up fast on forty and?—”
Jack crossed the room, took hold of her dangling apron strings, and gave them a brisk tug, just as he used to from the moment he could crawl and his nursemaid, one of Cook’s nieces, had to tote him about with her wherever she went or else he’d escape the nursery again.
Just as he’d continued to do until he decided he was too grown-up at six years old for such obvious displays of affection, at which point he’d progressed to less obvious displays that garnered more exciting reactions, such as gathering caterpillars from the garden and tucking them into her lettuces, sneaking spiders into her lidded pots, and popping toads into her sacks of potatoes.
