‘I want to be happy with you,’ Cassian whispered. ‘Or sad with you, or angry with you, butwithyou.’ He swallowed. ‘If that’s what you want, of course. If you don’t, or not any more, I do understand. My position is going to make everything very tiresome, and I conducted myself appallingly, and I’m not terribly special other than being a duke. I know all of that. But I’ve spent the last three weeks falling quite desperately in love with you, and even if I have already ruined everything, I need you to know that I love you, I wish I hadn’t hurt you, and when I did, it was never, never for something as foolish as a bet. I was hollow, and you letme be there. I want to be with you. So the only question is if you’d like to be with me.’
‘It’s not the only question. I wish it was that easy.’
‘Do you? Really? Oh God, Daize. Please tell me I haven’t spoiled everything and I swear I will make this easy, or at least possible. It has to be possible.’ Cassian slid to his knees again, by the chair, urgently grasping Daizell’s hands. ‘You’re so generous and ridiculous and wonderful and – my good, my very good Daize.’ He bowed his head over their joined hands. ‘I hurt you, and I missed you, and I love you.’
‘Cass.’ Daizell whispered it. Cassian’s hands tightened on his. ‘I missed you too. I wanted there to be something for us.’
‘There can be. There has to be.’
‘But what? I have to know. I need to. It’s been so lonely and so pointless and I thought I had something with you—’
‘Daize—’
‘I can’t be thrown away again. I don’t know why people find it so easy to throw me away.’ He blurted that out, feeling the horrible childishness of it: the bewildered realisation that his mother cared only for his father, and his father for nobody at all. ‘My parents, and everyone I thought was my friend, and Martin, and then you – no, let me finish. I can’t keep only mattering when other people care, because they always stop caring. I can’t be disposable all my life.’
‘I don’t want you to be!’
‘But if I can’t see you or be seen with you, or visit you – what do you have in mind? That I should sit somewhere rural and wait for you to call when you’re not busy with your dukedom?’
‘I’m not asking that at all. I want youwithme, and I want you to have your life back. Surely we can manage that between us. I’m a duke, and you’re brilliant.’
‘No, I’m not. I lurch from crisis to crisis and I ended up in gaol! What sort of companion is that for a duke?’
‘One that changed me,’ Cassian said. ‘And you’re entirely wrong. You tracked Martin down and got my ring back. You saved a child’s life. You taught me how to negotiate the world and kept me safe when I was a hopeless greenhorn and came to save me when I was kidnapped—’
‘Igotyou kidnapped. You rescued yourself.’
‘You stole a horse to come to my rescue!’ Cassian said indignantly, and then his mouth twitched. ‘Which perhaps was not entirely sensible. But I wouldn’t have even thought to do something about being kidnapped before I met you. I only had a knife with me because I was copying you, and the way you deal with the situation in front of you. Not in that awful efficient way of bear-leaders – I had the most tiresome man on my Grand Tour, always sweeping in to make everything easy for me, and demonstrating how wonderfully competent he was all the time, which meant I never did a thing. You’re not like that—’
‘No. I’m really not.’
‘Good!’ Cassian said vehemently. ‘I don’t want another person to run my life for me. I’m fighting off dozens of them as it is. I want to do things for myself, and I want to be myself, all of me, and I want you with me because if I tried to do it alone the castle walls would come pushing in again, and the duty and the ceremony, and my space to be Cassian would get smaller and smaller until I was squeezed to death. I need you to be the person who keeps the space clear and who doesn’t let me hide away from the world, or disappear under a pile of ermine. When I was with you, I told stories in an inn and peoplelaughed.’
‘I knew you loved that,’ Daizell said, his heart aching like a bruise.
‘You showed me how. You looked so pleased with me, for me. I need you, Daize. I dare say I could manage on my own. Perhaps I could still be Cassian without you. But I don’t want to.’
Daizell made a noise in his throat. Cassian let go his hands, grabbed his shoulders, and kissed him, and Daizell sank into the kiss, feeling tears running down his face, not caring.
He’d come back. He wanted more. They surely couldn’t have more but he still wanted it, wanted Daizell, and that knowledge was everything. That knowledge plus Cassian in his arms again, the grip of his fingers, the urgency of his kiss.
They didn’t speak as they stripped one another, Cassian pulling the gown off Daizell’s shoulders, Daizell wrenching off Cassian’s sadly battered cravat. There wasn’t much to say, unless there was far too much, and the silence was soothing. Lips and fingers and skin could do the speaking for now.
Daizell pulled Cassian to the bed, laid him down, and lay with him, relishing the closeness as much as anything. He could simply have stayed there and held him, but Cassian’s hands were roaming frantically, urgently, as though he needed to persuade himself Daizell was really there, and his need was contagious. Daizell hauled him round, so he lay on his back with Cassian over him, and Cassian crawled down his body, kissing his way as he went, and got his mouth to Daizell’s prick.
‘Oh God,’ Daizell said aloud, on a breath. ‘Cass. Please.’
Cassian had a clever mouth, he knew. They’d done this a couple of times, but he was giving it everything he had now, using lips and tongue and teeth and the roof of his mouth, sucking hard and soft, changing the pace as though he wastrying to drive Daizell out of what passed for his mind, and by God it was working. The Duke of Severn, giving him the gamahuching of a lifetime. He’d got his fingers in Cassian’s hair at some point, grabbing a handful, and Cassian’s hands were hard on his hips, because he was only using his mouth, keeping this going for an agonisingly long time that passed far too fast. Daizell moaned and bucked under him, and spent in his mouth with sobs of pleasure that could all too easily have been the other kind.
Cassian stayed where he was crouching over him for a moment, then made his way back up the bed to pillow his head on Daizell’s chest.
‘Really, you ought not be a duke,’ Daizell said at last. ‘You should do that professionally.’
‘I try to please.’ Cassian’s head was heavy on him. ‘I’m not assuming I’ve been forgiven, by the way.’
‘You don’t have to make anything up to me. I don’t know if I understand what it’s like to be you, but I heard what you said. I don’t suppose there was ever a good moment to sayBy the way, I’m a duke. And I don’t blame you if you weren’t able to trust me, in your position.’
‘I did! Ido. It wasn’t that.’
