If asked, Robin wouldn’t have thought that precision was the quality he’d have most desired in a bed partner who was about to apply his mouth to Robin’s cock. But then, he’d never have conjured up the way Edwin held Robin down with a palm splayed low on his stomach, and worked with calm, thorough care from the root to the tip, laying open-mouthed kisses and gliding his tongue against the sensitive skin as though shaping words in a new language. As though painting runes into it. Even the air of the room seemed like a caress, now, as though Edwin’s new house was bending itself to Edwin’s will and creating for Robin a room the exact blood-warm temperature of his body.
Edwin kept a hand on Robin’s slick length, paused between mind-sparkling little sucks of the head, and rolled his own blond head on his neck as if ironing out a knot in the muscle. The action was a casual, fussy one. Robin had seen Edwin do it twenty times when they were in the library as he closed one book and reached for another. Robin laughed silently, his stomach vibrating beneath Edwin’s hand, and Edwin shot a glance up at him, instantly wary. Robin licked his dry lips and tried to stare his gratitude out through eyes that felt gritty with pleasure.
“That feels incredible. Honestly.” Robin slid his fingers into Edwin’s hair. “Do you mind . . .?”
Edwin didn’t push into Robin’s hand, nor did he pull away. He thought about it. There was no reason for that to be arousing, but it was. And when Edwin said, “Not at all,” with a whisper of hoarseness to his voice, Robin groaned and let his hand tighten, tugging Edwin back down onto him, and stopped thinking entirely.
Robin fell asleep almost at once after returning to his own room, and woke on the verge of sunrise as the curse took him in its awful grip. He struggled back to himself from a crimson haze in which chopping the damn limb off was beginning to sound like a legitimate solution.
There was no getting back to sleep after that. He dragged a chair over to the window, which looked out onto a surprisingly lovely sunrise in watercolour shades of pink and yellow that stretched across the gardens. Rose-fingered dawn. Robin might have been a mediocre scholar, but some things stuck.
The butler delivered Robin’s clothes. His shoes had been polished. Trousers, shirt, and waistcoat had been washed and brushed into respectability. The tears in the clothing had even been mended with stitches so tiny and neat it was tempting to call them magical. Robin ran his thumb over the lines of repair as he dressed. He made a note to ask Edwin more about domestic magic—a note that disappeared promptly from his mind when he entered the breakfast room and his nose, scenting kippers and curry, informed his grumbling stomach that he was famished.
After breakfast Edwin spent some time shut up with the butler and housekeeper, presumably sorting out further business related to the legalities of inheriting an estate via blood, soil, and silver pendants. Robin, extraneous once more, went for a walk in those parts of the garden that did not contain mazes. He struck up a conversation with one of the under-gardeners, of which he learned there were four, and that the number of visitors happy to pay for a tour of the house or grounds was enough to make this position much sought-after among the gardeners and groundskeepers of the county.
Edwin had not inherited a magical mystery so much as, it seemed, a legitimately lucrative tourist attraction.
By the time they set off for Penhallick, Edwin had filled the boot of the Daimler with a double armful of books from the hidden study behind Flora Sutton’s mirror. He was quiet during the drive: not quite skittish but preoccupied, and speaking only to give direction from the map unfolded across his knees.
Robin didn’t want to press against what seemed a deliberate drawing-back. Should he assume that Edwin would say something, if he wished the topic to be broached at all, or was Edwin waiting for him? Should Robin simply ask if what had happened between them could happen again, or if it could even be the start of . . . what? Robin’s mind was trying to fit itself around an unfamiliar shape, an implausible future as fragile as Edwin’s snowflake. All he knew was that he didn’t want to let this slide beneath the surface of their tentative friendship as though it had never happened.
No game of Cupid awaited them at this arrival to the Courcey manor house. It was raining desultorily, soft patters of it against the roof of the car. Edwin stirred from where he’d been gazing out the window, sometimes idly cradling his fingers and dropping them before any spell could be fully formed, and sat up.
“Five pounds says they didn’t even notice we were gone,” he said.
“Why not make it ten? Now you’re a man of means and all.”
“Don’t remind me.” Edwin paused. “As a matter of fact, I’d prefer it if you . . . kept quiet on that score. At least for the moment. I don’t know how my family’s going to take it, and I want to tell my mother first.”
Edwin went inside while Robin stowed the car in the converted stable and remembered just in time that there was nobody to look after it. He found a rag and gave it a quick wipedown before heading into the house itself. He intended to go straight to the willow rooms and change clothes—perhaps even find Edwin in the middle of doing the same, and find some tactful way to gauge the man’s interest in a revival of the previous night’s activities—but Edwin himself, still in yesterday’s clothes, met him a few steps inside the front door.
Edwin’s eyes were wide and his shoulders were held brittle and stiff. “There’s been a complication,” he said.
“What kind of—” Robin began, and then heard a burst of familiar laughter coming from inside the parlour, and knew exactly what kind.
Most of the Walcott party was arranged on various pieces of furniture. Every one of them was wearing a different expression; every one of them turned to look as Robin entered the room, Edwin on his heels.
“Sir Robin!” said Belinda, looking effervescent and modern in a pink walking suit. Her expression was one of delight with an edge to it. “Look who’s turned up and agreed to come boating with us this afternoon.”
Robin turned his attention to the girl next to Belinda. Her attire was much more sombre: the dark grey of mourning wear. She rose to her feet when she saw him.
Robin said, “Maud?”
She was already halfway across the room, face pinching into a frown, and she snatched up one of Robin’s hands in hers so that she could press it. Robin let her hold tight enough to steady the fine tremor of her fingers that meant there were too many unfamiliar eyes upon her. She could turn her laugh on like an electric light, but she couldn’t quash this. Robin wanted simultaneously to embrace her and to shake her, but she’d have appreciated neither.
“Robin!” said his sister, aghast. “Darling, whatever happened to your face?”
“I had a disagreement with a hedge,” said Robin. “More to the point, Maudie, what are you doing here?”
“I’m here for the shooting season. What do you think, Robin? I’m here for you.”
“How—what—how did you even know where I was?”
“Your typist told me,” she said promptly, releasing his hand. “Miss Morrissey. I liked her.”
Robin opened his mouth with a storm’s worth of further one-syllable questions building inside it.
Maud went on hastily: “I went to the Home Office. And I asked, and asked, and asked, and eventually someone managed to track down your new office for me.”
“Maud—”
“I didn’t lie,” she said. “Although . . . I may have let some very nice men make a teensy few incorrect assumptions about the nature of the home emergency that led me to be trying urgently to find you.”
Robin’s head was threatening to throb. “Home emergency?”
Maud cast her green eyes down, then peeped them up at him. She looked altogether forlorn. Robin could only imagine half of the civil service turning gruffly avuncular in the face of this look, and the other half tripping over their tongues to make themselves agreeable to the owner of those eyes.
“I broke Mother’s favourite vase,” she said meekly.
Robin stared at her, anger and disbelief bubbling up through him, but somehow by the time it hit his throat it was laughter. He exhaled a long chuckle, helpless, and Maud’s eyes creased with relief.
“Did you honestly?”
She nodded.
“The—” He gestured a bulbous shape.
“The hideous one she inherited from Great-Aunt Agatha,” Maud confirmed.