by Bex McLynn
The true problem was a lack of visible patronage.
“There’s no ducal crest on a wrought iron gate. No footman in livery,” he told Trone. “Nothing declares that those behind these walls have been claimed and are protected.”
Also, the townhome’s location, bordering Chauden Gardens, was not ideal. But from what he researched about his brother, Naosim’s humble home was all that Trone could afford since the remainder of his quarterly living stipend supported the essentials that had to be purchased: food, clothing, bedding, furniture, medicine. Trone couldn’t touch ducal money until their father was dead.
Moving the recovery facility residents to Barbotière while the duke still lived was a reckless risk. A risk he could see Trone taking, but not Miss Fowler. Not unless she had no other choice.
Suddenly, his farsimi pinged at him. The motion sensor that he’d stuck to Miss Fowler’s bedroom door was sending an alert. That woman had bedded down at the crack of dawn. Now here she was, a few hours later, up and about.
“Atty?” Trone sighed.
Again, Atrates missed what his brother had said. “What?”
“Your assessment of the townhome?”
He suppressed an irritated growl. “Yes?”
“Spot on. I want your impression of Barbotière as well.”
Atrates stared at his farsimi. Sensors all over the home flooded him with alerts. Miss Fowler was on the move.
Mystified, he parroted back at his brother. “Barbotière?”
“Of course, Barbotière. Atty, haven’t you been listening? That’s where Ciss relocated the women.”
Ciss. He didn’t like that Trone used a pet name for her. He didn’t like that Trone siphoned from her. And god help him, he stood there stupefied, wondering why he even cared. Trone wasn’t a leech taking advantage of Miss Fowler. Many men and women, whose partner was the same sex, faced a true conundrum: they couldn’t siphon from their loved one.
Atrates wasn’t blind. Trone and Naosim genuinely adored Miss Fowler for her robust yet compassionate character. The lovers didn’t pander or placate her because she was a single hyper-frenetic woman, who generously let them siphon from her.
Yet, his gut coiled with jealousy anyway.
His farsimi pinged again. Now the back gate by the carriage house was opening.
Before he caught himself, he spoke aloud, “Where the bloody hell is she going?”
“Atrates.” His brother, in a rare moment, drew his given name out in frustration. “Are you listening? She’s going to Barbotière. You best hurry, unless you want her to leave you with the coach and four.”
Urgency rushed through him, flooding his muscles with adrenaline. He took off in a sprint.
She damn well wasn’t going to leave him behind.
Cisnetta opened the lancar door and waved Cobbs inside. “After you, good sir.”
Only Cobbs turned and cocked his head, staring at the open gate that led to the alley between the townhomes. Ridic would have to guide the lancar through that narrow alleyway, then navigate the pedestrian and horse traffic of Zentrale’s streets, before hitting the open roads and speeding them toward Barbotière.
She had no idea what she’d expected. Perhaps a coalmonger cart trundling down the cobblestones. Instead, she gaped as Major Geswin barreled through the gate, his legs propelling him a few steps as he came to a staggering stop.
And oh, her flaming cheeks, those legs.
Major Geswin had apparently gone for a run in Otaric exercise gear. A black short-sleeved shirt clung to his chest, and he wore fitted black pants that stretched with his movements. On his feet were flexible-soled shoes made of leather and breathable mesh with treads. She could see the mechanics of his muscles rippling with each step he took towards her. His broad chest, cut with muscle, heaved like blacksmith bellows as he panted. The mid-morning sun glistened on the sweat coating his matte skin, drawing her eye like a flickering candle in the dark.
He trapped her with his stare, his eyes bright with alertness and heated like a smoldering coal in a grate.
With a downturned mouth, he pointed right at her as he strode toward the house. “Wait.”
His deep voice thrummed inside her chest.
Cisnetta blinked and parroted back, “Wait.”
“Yes,” he said as he kept her locked down by merely pointing a finger at her. A finger that was attached to a large hand, which attached to a veined forearm, up to biceps that strained the fabric of his sleeves, and ended at stacked shoulders and the thick column of his neck. “Wait for me.”
He took long, ground-eating strides past her, straight toward the back door of the townhome. Her gaze trailed from the pillar of his neck, to his expansive back, down to a trim waist and the hard, round globes of his—
Ridic coughed. “Miss Fowler?”
Dazed, she turned to him, but immediately turned back toward Major Geswin.
The man was already gone, having entered Naosim’s home.
“Miss Fowler?” When she faced Ridic, he greeted her with a knowing, barely-there smile. Just a slight tug of his lips. “We are waiting then?”
Cisnetta exhaled, a grumpy noise that scratched her throat as she rolled her eyes at her own inanity. And somewhat chagrined that it had been witnessed by another.
“Yes, Mr. Ridic. We’re waiting.” She turned back to Cobbs. “Shall we settle in, then?”
Her black swan hopped into the lancar and immediately lay in the middle of the passenger bench.
Well, that was for the best.
After that glimpse of Major Geswin, she could very well imagine how unbearable the ride to Barbotière would be, sitting next to such a magnificent body.
She gratefully crawled over Cobbs, taking the far spot on the bench, and pulled her ledger from her bag. Ridic closed the passenger door, and when he slid behind the nav console of the vehicle, he raised the privacy panel that separated the forward and aft compartments. That was their standing agreement, because she chattered ceaselessly as she worked.
She flipped through her notes as she spoke to vendors on her farsimi. She confirmed orders, set appointments, and noted which forms she needed to file and contracts she needed to sign.
The lancar door opened, startling her. Cobbs flared his wings and hissed in warning.
Major Geswin, in a fresh uniform, slid into the lancar.
Slid? No. He swarmed into the compartment, compressing all the air as he infiltrated the space. Watching the mechanics of his leg—first with his boot planted on the footwell, then trailing her gaze up his thick thighs, solid backside, and trim flank—had her heart pounding in her chest and her palms slick with sweat.
God, he looked amazing in his uniform.
Cobbs, though, disagreed. He hissed and lunged at the major.
Cisnetta jolted, her hands dropping everything as she wrapped her arms around her flailing swan. “Major! Just give me a moment to calm him down.”
The major didn’t heed her warning. He wordlessly hip-bumped Cobbs as he settled on the seat. He gave her no choice but to let her ledger plop to the footwell as she gathered Cobbs onto her lap.
Cobbs’s mass of black feathers surrounded her, and although she couldn’t see the major, his presence engulfed her as the warm scents of man and soap filled the lancar. He smelled as magnificent as he looked.
Cobbs hissed again.
“You know, you’re holding the main course to a three-day feast,” the major said drily.
Cisnetta merely hummed and tried to not bristle on Cobbs’s behalf. He was a large cob, and that asinine comment had been made before, though no one had been able to make good on it.
After a moment, the major added, “You could feed a battalion.”
She shrugged and felt certain he saw her movement beneath Cobbs’s copious feathers. “You won’t be the first person who tried.”
“Tried?”
“To wring Cobbs’s neck.” Then she regarded her swan, because despite knowing him for years, there were some t
hings she’d yet to understand. “I think he may actually enjoy it.”
The major snorted. “That daft bird’s egg was shat from the devil’s anus.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s not how swans lay eggs, or any egg-laying animal for that matter.”
“You’ve stated my case for me. He’s unnatural.”
Nonsense. Besides, Cobbs’s quirk of character was understandable. One didn’t suffer trauma like her swan had done without being scarred.
Cisnetta hummed her reply, letting the major know that she’d heard him—because it was important that he be heard—but also letting him know that his barb didn’t stick.
She knew his kind; he spat words that drove people off. The major was a work-in-progress, and probably not a project that she would get to see to completion. She had other responsibilities, and it was exhausting to fret over someone who didn’t want to be helped.
Determined to return to her actual work, she shifted Cobbs away from the major, then began blindly patting the footwell for her ledger.
“Here.” The major jabbed her shoulder with a rounded edge.
He held both her ledger and farsimi in his expansive grip.
“Oh.” She smiled at him as she sat upright. “Thank you.”
She took them from him as best she could manage, but since one of her arms remained wrapped around Cobbs, her farsimi slipped from her grip and plopped onto the seat bench. She was left gripping her ledger while she coddled her bird and inhaled the enticing smell of warm, soapy man.
A frenetic tremble passed through her, but she would not let it ruin what she’d stumbled into: a wonderfully blissful moment.
The major tapped the cover of her ledger with his blunt fingertip. Dear god, she was a goner for hands. The backs were veined with corded strength. His hands looked powerful, yet last night she’d watched them gently part flower petals.
Now there was a rousing visual. His fingers parting her ‘petals’ with as much intense focus and care that he’d displayed in the garden.
His voice, with its enticing, deep clicking Otaric accent that reminded her of a heavy clog notching into place, rumbled through the confines of the lancar compartment. “Why don’t you use a data-slate?”
Each moment spent with the major meant Cisnetta surrendered another bit of herself to his encroachment. She’d noted his affect this morning. When she’d applied magone gris to her skin, her mind’s eye replayed the sight of his strong hands handling the delicate magone blooms. The image jolted her to her core, ratcheting her constantly nagging frenesia-induced arousal into an aching need. In the privacy of her bedroom, she’d moaned as her thighs trembled and sweat slicked her skin.
As quickly as that, all things magone—the flowers and skin creams—had fallen to the major’s unintentional seduction. She would forever associate the man with the flower.
But her ledger? Her beloved, ‘it-truly-was-an-extension-of-her’ ledger?
How bloody unfair, that her ledger had literally fallen into the major’s hands. Trone—who shared many characteristics with his brother, despite the major having a grafted Otaric sire—also had large, veined hands from years of playing follis at university and boxing. Her employer had snatched her ledger from her hundreds of times to gain her undivided attention. It had pulled nothing but agitation from her.
The major, though, had simply tapped his fingertip upon her precious ledger once, and now she found herself clutching her tome in her grip, imagining that the heat of his whole palm warmed the leather.
She knew it would always be this way now. Slathering herself in magone or flipping through her pages—the heart-pounding, thigh-clenching image of his hand would sear through her every time.
“Why not?” he asked.
Ah, she had let a silence settle, hadn’t she?
He wanted to know why she didn’t use a data-slate. The technology was paper-like sheets that one could write on, and the words would be transferred to a device, like a multifunctional farsimi. But that was her problem.
“And what would I save the data to, Major?”
She hadn’t meant to sound bitter. Trone was doing what he could to channel his finances to the Magone House. Besides, people had managed hospitals and schools and boarding houses before the Otar had arrived with their marvelous technology. What she was experiencing right now was nothing more than covetous envy.
“Atrates,” the major said, looking out the lancar window.
She pushed down and compressed Cobbs’s fluffy plumage, causing him to squawk in annoyance. “Pardon?”
“You may call me Atrates, not Major.” His voice came clipped, sounding an awful lot like a command.
But she also heard the request too.
“Very well, Atrates.” Trading names was nothing but a few more waddling baby steps between them, yet her palms tingled and her voice caught in her throat, forcing her to swallow. “Then it’s Cisnetta, if you will.”
Chapter 6
Atrates flung the lancar door open the moment the vehicle pulled to a stop before the carriage porch of the dowager manor. He practically threw himself from the car, taking large, lusty breaths of the country air.
He hacked out a chest wrenching cough.
Magone scented the air.
In his harried attempt to clear his Otar-grafted olfactory passage of her magone perfume, he’d dragged another cloud of the floral fragrance into his lungs.
God, would he never be rid of her?
Even more disconcerting, did he want to be?
Riding in the lancar with her had left him battered and riled as his arousal rose, over and over, yet never actually swelled. He gave his crotch a disgusted yet grateful glance. How could she do this to him? Have him relieved yet frustrated?
Ridic, a driver long in the duke’s employ, skidded to a halt as he rounded the front of the lancar, presumably en route to hold the door open for his passengers. Atrates simply scowled at him. He could hold a door for a hissing hellion and the cob’s perfumed, complicated mistress.
The swan tumbled out first, spreading its wings wide while it hissed and squawked, grumbling like a curmudgeon. Then it took a brief flight, skimming the front stoop’s steps, before landing and waddling right into Atrates’s mother’s home.
He’d glared at the swan too long and missed Miss Fowler’s—Cisnetta’s—exit from the lancar.
He’d meant to offer her his hand.
Instead, she stood next to him and stretched, and his Otaric hearing caught each sharp pop of her joints and her stress-relieving moan. That soft, pleasurable sound shot straight to his crotch and gave his synten barrier a precise strike.
Of all things on Gisth, his cock actually twitched.
“Don’t you simply love the country?” Cisnetta asked on a sigh. “The space is glorious. No buildings obscuring the view. So many places to run.”
Atrates had started to tune out her pastoral babble until she’d gotten to that last bit. Places to run?
He glanced about, assessing the estate with the eyes of a soldier who’d been battling on the Continent for years, rather than as a child.
He saw tracts of cleared land dotted by outbuildings and low three-rail fences. Dense copses encompassed the acreages, bordering the sun-soaked, exposed area with deep shadows.
Bloody hell. This place was more of an indefensible position than the townhome had been.
During his gobsmacked visual sweep of the area, Cisnetta had alighted the steps and passed through the open entry door. The threshold sucked her inside like air rushing toward an incendiary detonation.
Atrates followed. With one swift jump he bypassed the four steps and landed in a crouch before the doorstep. He rose, strode through the door, and drew up short, a hand’s breadth from a flesh-and-blood blockade.
He knew a head housekeeper when he saw one, but this woman was new.
Then again, how would he know if she'd ever been in his mother’s employ? The duke never let him set foot on his own property.
The head housekeeper grunted at him as she folded her arms across her bosom.
He jutted his chin, indicating what lay behind the housekeeper—the brightly lit hall and the sound of Cisnetta gaily greeting everyone she encountered. “I’m with her.”
“Sure you are.” Madam Blockade continued to glare at him. “State your purpose.”
Atrates narrowed his eyes at her. “You let the insane swan in the door, but you’re questioning me?”
“I question everyone.”
He believed it. Madam Blockade leveled him with a cold, hard stare—hinting at the iron in her spine that not many people possessed. He knew her role. She was there to reinforce that he was ‘other.’ That he was ‘different.’ That he was unwelcome.
Madam Blockade canted her head, yet kept her laser-gaze on him. “Besides, Cobbs’s a gentleman while he’s here.”
Another woman stepped out into the hall behind the head housekeeper, practically staggering under the weight of the swan in her arms.
Cobbs, that swain of a swan, pressed his head up under the woman’s chin, nestling with her, as she cooed and babbled to him.
Atrates huffed. The damn unfaithful cob was cuckqueaning Cisnetta.
“For all the—” He called out, “Cisnetta!”
Madam Blockade scolded him with a rough, throaty hush. “Mind yer manners. These’re quiet hours.”
From the back of the hall, he heard the squeaky footsteps of rubber on polished wood.
“Yes, I’m here—” Cisnetta, wearing battered wellies, came clomping down the hall. “Oh, Nellah! Well done, as always, but this is his mother’s house.”
Nellah never took her scowl off of him. “Yes, I know it.”
Atrates returned to the glaring battle between himself and the head housekeeper. “And you still didn’t let me in?”