The Arrangement (Homestead Legacy Book 1)

by Alex Jane

  "What passes between you and the Alpha is none of our business. Unless," he added, with a serious look on his face. "Unless, he—that is to say—if he harmed you—"

  "Oh no," Gabriel blurted, surprised Solomon would even make the suggestion. "He would never— It wasn't that."

  "Good. Good." Solomon looked relieved. "He might be my Alpha but I won't tolerate that kind of behavior from him."

  Nathaniel might be a little rough, grabbing Gabriel a little too hard, but Gabriel got the impression it was from his lack of understanding of his own strength more than out of cruelty.

  As the morning went on, the thought lingered, making him wonder about Nathaniel and the way he'd put his hands on him. Or rather, the way he didn't. Wolves were by their nature tactile creatures who thrived on physical contact, platonic or otherwise. Pack members hugged each other, curled up together, even often platonically shared a bed. At the very least, they laid a hand on an arm or shoulder as they passed each other. And yet, all the days Gabriel had been in the house, he'd not seen Nathaniel interacting that way with anybody. The others seemed quite free with their touch but not with their Alpha.

  It would obviously be rude to point it out, and in some ways, Gabriel wasn't keen to hear the explanation for Nathaniel's isolation. But he did resolve to make more of an effort to be near his husband when the opportunity arose. And if one didn't, then he would have to make the opportunities himself.

  As luck would have it, he managed to manufacture one at lunch. After Nathaniel didn't emerge from his office to eat, Gabriel made a point of finding Solomon in the kitchen at the point when he had finished making up a tray of food to take to the study.

  "Do you think I could take that to him today?"

  Solomon shrugged and covered the plate of sandwiches with a silver dome to keep the flies off. "I don't see why not. Although I hope you're not expecting him to give you much in the way of conversation. Mostly all I get is a grunt. I like to think it's a thank you, but I rather suspect he's more annoyed at me for drawing his attention away from his papers to his rumbling stomach."

  "I shall do my best to not be too offended," Gabriel said with a smile as he lifted the tray with one hand.

  The study was thankfully on the first floor. Even on his best day, Gabriel wasn't sure he would be able to manage the stairs without spilling something. He managed to knock successfully and when there was a slight noise from inside, he took it as permission to enter, even though the sound could have meant anything.

  Having not been into the study before, Gabriel was eager to see how it was arranged. Although when he opened the door and walked in, he knew it would take more than a few minutes to adequately absorb what he was seeing.

  He covered his surprise by walking straight to where Nathaniel was curled over his desk, scribbling notes on a document. "I bring sustenance," he said, loudly, gratified when Nathaniel jumped a little. Clearly, he'd been totally engrossed and expecting Solomon as usual. "Sandwiches with beef and a little horseradish, a slice of the excellent pie Eunice made yesterday—I swear that girl is a whizz with pastry. Maybe we should set her up with a shop. She'd make us a fortune. There was a little pudding left, and some of the cheese you like so I think Solomon threw on some crackers for you too. Plus, coffee. Looks as if you'll need it."

  Nathaniel gawped up at him from his seat, only stirring into action when Gabriel threatened to plunk the tray down on a pile of papers, which he quickly scooped up with a mumbled, "Thank you," as he juggled the mess onto a stack of books.

  With his hands free, Gabriel wasn't quite sure what to do with them, opting for folding his arms over his chest and leaning his behind back against the desk. He hoped Nathaniel might say more, or at least look him in the eye, but when he didn't, Gabriel cleared his throat. "I wanted to say, I'm sorry. About yesterday. About throwing the…and yelling and…well, I wanted to apologize and say I appreciated the breakfast you made this morning."

  Somehow the words took all of the breath from his body and he was breathing heavily as if he'd run a race.

  Nathaniel didn't say anything, but he nodded slightly, which Gabriel took to mean he'd at least heard him. "Good," Gabriel said decisively. "Now that's out of the way, maybe we can address this."

  Gabriel made a wide sweeping gesture with both hands to indicate the whole room, and the utter, devastating chaos that reigned over it.

  At home, his mother's study was immaculate, everything ordered and in its place. Even when he'd visited Thaddeus Fletcher, who seemed to attract disorder with his office full to bursting with books and binders, even there everything was neat and tidy in its own way.

  Nathaniel's study, in complete contradiction, looked as if there had been a terrible accident involving a library and a meat grinder. The room itself might have been quite light and airy if he could have pulled back some of the drapes. Except, of course, that possibility was rendered moot by the fact it was almost impossible to reach the windows. There were two large desks and cabinets of various descriptions as well as glass-fronted bookshelves around the walls. And almost every inch of every surface—including the floor—was littered, nay piled high, with a thick layer of papers, and books, and books left to lie open, and binders, and folders, and dust. So much dust.

  Gabriel's mouth sort of flapped about as he tried to find the words to encompass all he felt as he gestured with his hand. "I thought when Solomon said you had no secretary that it might be a territorial issue. But no. Clearly you are merely protecting yourself from the sort of lawsuit that might be issued when a poor person is crushed to death by a stack of falling documents. Or perhaps after they contract some yet undiscovered but fatal lung rot caused by all the fungus that's likely to be growing under this…this…this stuff. Lord knows, we would be overrun by the medical community looking for samples while they try to come up with a cure. Maybe the American Journal of Medicine would mention us. Or perhaps National Geographic? A colony of rats could be living here in this room and we'd never know."

  "Are you quite done?" Nathaniel did a passable job of sounding as if Gabriel was merely being tiresome and he was unbothered by his rantings.

  "No. No, I don't think I'll ever be done. Seriously," he said as he reached out and grabbed a handful of papers resting on the top of a box, shaking the dust off them and coughing to make his point. "How can you work like this?"

  Nathaniel keened in pain and rushed to take the papers from him, drawing them from his hand oh-so carefully, as if they were made of spun glass, and placed them right back where Gabriel had taken them from. "Please don't move anything. I have a system."

  Gabriel barked out a laugh. "No, you don't. You have myopia. The fungus is already eating your brain."

  "Everything is laid out exactly where I need it." Nathaniel looked around, holding his hands out as if he could pat everything into place. "Just…just leave it."

  "You'll get consumption from sitting in here with all this dust."

  "Weres don't get consumption." Nathaniel scowled and sat back at his desk.

  When he raised the silver cover on the tray and picked up a sandwich, Gabriel couldn't help but mutter, "Oh god, I can't believe you eat in here."

  The last thing he was expecting was for Nathaniel to look him right in the eye, open his mouth comically wide, and take an enormous bite of the sandwich, horseradish oozing out of the corners of his mouth as he bit down.

  A laugh bubbled up and burst out of Gabriel before he could stop it, and he was pleased to see Nathaniel smiling around his mouthful as he struggled to chew. Once he'd managed to swallow most of it, he shrugged. "It's not that bad in here."

  Gabriel huffed in amused despair. "Oh, it is. So bad." He gazed around a little longer before saying cautiously, "I could help you, y'know? It is kind of my place after all, to help you. I could implement the same system my mother used or we could combine it with whatever sorcery you have going on here now. We could do things gradually as not to upset your delicate system but there must be a bett
er way than this, Nate. There must be."

  It wasn't until later, Gabriel thought, perhaps, it was only because he'd absentmindedly used the informal name he had called Nathaniel as a child, that such a look of vulnerability had come over his husband's face, and had him agreeing. "Yes. I suppose—if you think so. Perhaps it might be all right to straighten the…yes. If you think so."

  5

  It took surprisingly little time for Gabriel to find himself settled in his new home. The weeks went by in much the same way as they had done back when he lived with his pack. From day to day he was busy, not exactly run off his feet, but it did seem that every hour was occupied in one way or another.

  Early mornings were spent helping Abel with the first chores of the day—mostly as he was up before anyone else—which sped up the process and gave Abel more time to help Solomon later in the afternoon with some of the more difficult tasks of preparing the house for Gabriel's pack members who would soon be moving in. Solomon still kept a tight hold on the management of the household, a position that would generally be filled by the Alpha's mate, but Gabriel was happy to slide into the role of lackey and help out where he was most useful. He wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty and it was nice in many ways to get to spend time with each of Nathaniel's pack—feeling more and more that they were his pack as time passed.

  After lunch, Gabriel and Frank would decamp to the glasshouse and spend a few hours trying to fix what had been so heinously neglected. Solomon had been a little put out at first when Frank had moved in, getting the idea it was in an effort to oust him from the garden, but it took no time with Frank's natural charm for Solomon to see that the young man was going to be a great asset. The two of them would spend long hours talking in hushed tones over pots and leaves, running soil through their fingers and waving their arms around to point at different parts of the garden.

  Gabriel stayed out of it, sitting apart from them on the steps to the terrace—his grubby hands wrapped around a sandwich, and a glass of sweet cider sitting next to him—as the two men walked the borders of the lawn, absorbed in conversation and completely oblivious to the informal lunch laid out for them. More than once, Gabriel had sensed a presence behind him, before being cast into a long shadow.

  Nathaniel would ask something like, "What are they talking about?" and Gabriel wouldn't need to look back to know his husband would be standing behind him, his waistcoat hanging loose as he sipped his coffee, with one hand in his pocket, squinting out into the sun over the garden.

  When Gabriel would only shrug and mumble, "I have no idea," Nathaniel would grunt and make his way back to the dark comfort of his office. The exchange became such a habit, Gabriel came to look forward to it.

  Evidently, Frank had grand plans for the garden in general, which Solomon thoroughly approved of and which put the restoration of the glasshouse to shame. Being that they centered around increased food production rather than a purely aesthetic enterprise, the majority of Frank's time was spent there. When he was otherwise occupied, he did make sure Gabriel was adequately provided with chisels and brushes and paint so he might begin scraping away the old peeling paint on the iron structure, brush away the worst of the rust, and then paint each section as he finished. Gabriel pretended the work was loathsome, but in reality, he didn't mind it, it was just that progress was so interminably slow. It helped when he had some company, if Frank was digging the beds, or when Abel assisted him, or even when Isaac came to visit for the day and filled the air with his unending chatter as he soaped the glass or passed a paintbrush.

  Generally, Gabriel only spent a couple of hours at a time working on the glasshouse, whittling away at the old shell, piece by wretched piece. Gradually, as he cleaned each pane and freshened the paintwork around the glass, the structure began to reveal its beauty, emerging from the moss and mold like a delicate lacewing sloughing off its cocoon.

  After washing up and changing into something more suitable, Gabriel would join his husband in his office for the remainder of the afternoon and continue the much more arduous task of reordering his papers. Or potentially, simply ordering them as it was hard for Gabriel to imagine Nathaniel had ever had any semblance of reason for things being arranged the way they were. Sometimes he wished he'd never offered and had stuck to fixing the glasshouse. At least the vines didn't yell at him, or practically sob every time he moved something, or undid his hard work as soon as his back was turned. Nathaniel was the devil and Gabriel had no compunction about telling him so either.

  What made the project all the more difficult was it became clear, as time went on, that Nathaniel really did know where to lay his hands on any contract or correspondence at any given time. But as Gabriel learned his system, whenever he thought perhaps he should leave his husband alone to do things his own way, a strange thing began to happen.

  It was almost nothing of note at first, a comment here or a question there, but after a couple of weeks, Gabriel realized that during the scant hours they spent together, he and Nathaniel had begun to talk. It wasn't much: Gabriel relaying his progress on the glasshouse, or what Ruth was making for dinner, Nathaniel explaining how he'd come to acquire such-and-such a property, or some tale about dining with his banker that had Gabriel howling and gasping for air as he held his aching stomach. There were still long stretches of silence only filled by the rasp of Nathaniel's fountain pen, perhaps some music from the Berliner in the corner, and the shuffling of papers—along with the occasional sneeze—from Gabriel, but slowly it felt very much as if they were beginning to know each other once again.

  It would have been over-reaching to suggest a bond was forming. They had not mated and Gabriel had not formally accepted Nathaniel as his Alpha. Gabriel thought perhaps his husband might ask him to state the fact aloud once Gabriel’s pack had fully integrated—to set a precedent for the others—but until then, he wouldn’t offer. But there was definitely something there, some pull in his gut that eased to a warm glow whenever Nathaniel was near. It soothed him and he was happy to ignore it, instead enjoying the little peace they had found between them.

  Come the end of the day, once dinner was eaten and the last of the chores were complete, if Gabriel could convince Nathaniel not to work all night, the pack would gather in the sitting room to play piquet or bridge or read. Once Gabriel discovered a piano in the drawing room under a dustsheet and had co-opted Abel into dragging the heavy old thing over, he would play badly and the others would sing enthusiastically. Sometimes, he would move the gramophone in from the office and they'd push back the furniture and dance.

  All but Nathaniel who would pretend to read, tucked away in his high-backed chair in the corner, although Gabriel could tell he was faking as his lips would fight a smile whenever they sang bawdy music hall verses that made Abel blush, or when a laughing Eunice would slap Gabriel the umpteenth time he trod on her toes.

  All in all, he found he didn't hate his life and couldn't wait until his two packs could become one. So it was unsurprising when something happened to disrupt their happy routine.

  It was a Tuesday, overcast and breezy out in the garden but sweltering as usual in the glasshouse. Lunch had been a light soup that had left plenty of room for the meat pie accompanying it and the fresh figs Frank had picked that morning, much to Abel's delight. Still, Gabriel's mind kept wandering to dinner as he inspected the leading around one of the windows.

  After spending a frustrating hour trying to persuade the mechanism which opened the vents in the roof on the north side of the building to move, he'd left the damn stupid thing to soak in an oiled rag for a while and hoped to distract himself with other duties as he sweated through his shirt.

  The distraction worked perhaps too well when a feminine voice from the open doorway made him jump out of his skin.

  "Well, if I had known that the help had become so attractive lately, I might have come home sooner."

  Spinning around, clutching his chest like an old man, Gabriel couldn't help a wide smile break out ov
er his face. "Madam, you better hope my husband doesn't hear you talk that way or I won't be the only one having a heart attack."

  Priscilla laughed, a light but hearty sound, and launched herself from where she had artfully leaned up against the doorframe into Gabriel's arms. Hugging her tightly seemed natural as breathing, even though Gabriel hadn't clapped eyes on her for more than ten years.

  Evidently, the time apart hadn't made Priscilla any less familiar either. "Husband," she squealed as she pressed her face into his shoulder and squeezed the life out of him. "It sounds so good to hear that. And I can call you brother finally!" More squeals and squeezes ensued.

  Laughing, Gabriel peeled his sister-in-law off his front and held her at arm's length. "Come on." He chuckled. "Let me look at you."

  Priscilla blushed but dutifully stepped back and let him do just that. It was Priscilla, no doubt, even though a decade had turned her straw-blonde plaits into honey-colored curls under a feathered hat, and her plain print pinafore into a smart traveling suit that showed off her tight waist and womanly hips. The smile was the same, her scent, and laugh. Gabriel couldn't help himself and hugged her again. "I'm so glad you're here," he whispered. She only laughed and held him tighter as if she returned the sentiment threefold.

  They held hands as they walked back across the lawns to the house, Gabriel quizzing her about her latest trip and Priscilla asking after his father and the family. Gabriel had decided to abandon his work for the day to spend some time with Priscilla. She agreed enthusiastically on condition he change his shirt and help her surprise Nathaniel who was out for the afternoon on some business matter. They chatted happily right up until they came to Gabriel's room.

  He stopped and started to open the door with his free hand but Priscilla kept walking until he pulled her back with a laugh. "My room's here, silly."

  Frowning, Priscilla looked from Gabriel's room, down the end of the hall, and then back again. "Why would Nate move from the big room? That makes no sense?"