“Silas?”
“Dom.” He rasped the word. “Ah, hell. I think about you all the time.”
There seemed to be less air in the room suddenly, less light, the space contracting around them. “About me,” Dominic repeated.
“You. I was at a meeting, but all I had in my head was you. What you’d say, what you’d think.” His fingers pushed through Dominic’s hair, over his scalp, making him shiver. “I want to talk to you, not other folk. In the fight twenty-five years, and I’ve never doubted for a minute, and then you…”
“My friend called me a Whig the other night,” Dominic whispered, and that was perhaps the worst sweet nothing ever offered to a lover but Silas’s expression showed he understood precisely what it meant.
“Ever since I kissed you…” Silas moved closer, lips so near Dominic’s, not touching, quite.
“Before. Wednesday by Wednesday.” Wednesday by Wednesday, week by week, I have become yours for the taking.
“Aye. Aye, that’s the truth.” Silas’s breath over his skin made it tingle. “It’s ruining me.”
“It—”
“Ruining me. Making me doubt, making me fearful—ah, fuck it.” Silas ducked his head and rested it heavily on Dominic’s shoulder. Dominic put his arms around him like an automaton. “Hell’s tits, what have we done?”
He sounded despairing, and Dominic felt a moment’s panic. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing. Except, I can’t seem to…Rot it. I thought about giving up.”
“Don’t do that,” Dominic said without thinking, and Silas’s head came up.
“See? That ain’t what you’re meant to say, is it? Jack Cade tells you he wants to give it up, before these God-rotted bills even pass, and you say ‘don’t’? What kind of bloody useless Home Office man are you?”
Dominic choked on a laugh, felt Silas’s shoulders shake, but it wasn’t funny and they both knew it. “Are you serious? You want to stop your, uh, work?”
“No. I don’t. I can’t. That’s my life, understand? All my life, everything I’ve worked for, my people.” He didn’t say friends. He never spoke of friends. It had occurred to Dominic to wonder if his grim, snarling, driven lover had friends. “I don’t want to, but I’m thinking about it. Because we fuck on Wednesdays? Because a highborn Tory deigns to look down into the gutter?”
“Don’t give me that,” Dominic said sharply. “You know that’s not what this is. You’re finding yourself less certain in your certainties? Well, so am I.”
“And you shouldn’t be,” Silas gritted out. “Where does this leave us after? Me turning my back on everything I ever believed? You handing in your resignation? Where?”
“After. After what?”
“After…Christ, I don’t know. There’ll be an after, though, won’t there? After I’m arrested, after I’m transported. After you find some gentry-man—”
“I had fifteen years to do that and failed,” Dominic said. “Why would that change now?”
“Because you got pretty eyes.” Silas sounded lost. “Such sodding pretty eyes.”
Dominic grasped his face, pulled him close, kissed him. Hard, leading this time. Pushed him backward, the pair of them stumbling together, mouths locked, until Silas’s back hit the wall, until he made a noise in Dominic’s mouth and grabbed his hair in one hand, arse in the other. They kissed ferociously, silently, each pulling the other closer, gentleman and ruffian locked together, until Silas broke off with a gasp.
“Coming on a bit strong, Tory.”
“I kneel for two reasons only, and the other one is prayer. It’s not how I am, not usually.”
Silas snorted. “Think I didn’t know that?”
“I know you did. That is one of the many reasons…” He didn’t know whether to say it. Whether Silas, with that dreadful look of shaken ground on his face, needed to hear the words or whether truth would just add to his burden.
Get on with it, Frey. “Listen to me,” Dominic continued. “I would very much like you to stop breaking the law of the land, particularly if these damned bills pass. I know why you do it, I—damn it—I respect why you do it, and I don’t want to see you lessened in your own eyes. You are an extraordinarily courageous, dedicated, wrongheaded sod. I know you love your country as much as I, even if it is a different country that we see.” He was staring into Silas’s eyes, willing him to hear. Nobody could call those eyes pretty, that nameless muddy mixture. “If you want to change your battle pitch to firmer ground, as it were, to stop risking your neck like the pigheaded oaf you are, it would be nothing more than good sense. But if you do not…I understand.”