“Is there anything you want?” Dominic murmured.
Silas’s brow twitched. “What’re you offering?”
“Anything. What we do is all to my tastes. Is there anything you want, anything different?”
“Like what?”
“I’ve no idea. If you want me to fuck you?”
That earned him a look. “Not my idea of a good time, Tory.”
“Ever done it?”
“No.”
“How do you know, then?”
“Same way I don’t need to eat a plate of snails to say I don’t like ’em.”
“For a radical, you have the most hidebound view of the world,” Dominic told him. “I’ve had snails, in Paris. They were delicious.”
“Aye, but we both know you’re…” Silas made a turning gesture with his hand to indicate Dominic’s peculiar angle to the rest of mankind. Dominic thumped his arm. “Why d’you ask, anyway? You want to do that?”
“Not precisely. I want to give you what you want. If you want to turn things about, or fuck without games. If you want…I don’t know. Anything, Silas.”
Silas ran a hand over Dominic’s face, brushing the tumbled hair out of his eyes. “Not if it ain’t to your pleasure.”
“It’s your pleasure too, and in equal measure. I just would like to know that there’s nothing you’re missing.”
Silas snorted. “Missing from when? All the other beauties I’ve had in my bed? No. Or, at least—I’ll think about it.”
“Can I help you think?” Dominic suggested, trailing his hand over Silas’s hip.
Thinking led to palming, and heated murmurs, and kisses, and eventually them lying together, prick to prick and mouth to mouth. Gentle stuff, and long drawn out, since neither of them was young anymore, and this mutual pleasuring wasn’t what set Dominic’s blood alight. But it was still pleasure, because of the wonder in Silas’s mongrel eyes and because Dominic knew damned well what Silas wanted.
He wanted loving. He gave Dominic such brutal fucking, and he wanted love with the hunger of a long-starved man.
So Dominic kissed and whispered, stroked and cherished, and wove the most devious snare he could around his precious brute’s heart, and tried not to think about the clock.
They both twitched, some while later, when it chimed seven.
“You all right?” Silas asked.
“Yes, of course. I was just startled. You?”
“Aye. Aye. Thinking of…something, doesn’t matter. I don’t know, Tory. You say take a holiday—”
“It won’t be much of a holiday, starting up another shop.”
“No, true. Still.” He dropped an arm over his eyes. “Some people I know, they didn’t like me saying I wasn’t keeping up the work. Called me a coward.”
“Then they’re fools,” Dominic said.
“Easy said. Truth is, I am. I’m afraid. You know it.”
“Fear doesn’t make one a coward. Lack of fear can suggest one’s an idiot.”
Silas smiled briefly. “Well, there’s that. But if you’re afraid and it makes you back down—”
“You haven’t. And if you had, well, some charges are futile, and some retreats are necessary. You should hear Julius on the subject of heroic obedience to foolish orders.”
“Harry’s Julius? What does he know?”
“He was a cavalry officer at Waterloo.”
“Bollocks,” Silas said with force. “That fop?”
“I assure you. He returned from the war with a collection of medals and a very, uh, pragmatic attitude to heroism.”
“It’s a miracle we won,” Silas muttered. “All very well, but…”
“But what?” Dominic demanded, sitting up. “But you have to dedicate your life to a lost cause on the say-so of a band of beggars?”
“It ain’t lost,” Silas said. “We haven’t won yet, but the cause ain’t lost. Never will be.”
“Yes, it is. When will you see, curse it? People want to be ruled. That’s why there wasn’t the outcry you wanted against the Six Acts. That’s what you democrats don’t understand. Men don’t want votes; they don’t want responsibility. Look at the French. All that bloodshed, all of that Jacobin posturing. May the last king be strangled with the guts of the last priest, they cried. And what did they do? Exchange a king who ruled them for an emperor who wanted to rule Europe.”
“That’s not what the people wanted.”
“What people want is freedom to live their lives, and good rulers to make that possible in an orderly state. Your cries for unbridled liberty are cries for chaos. What sort of society arises from murder and upheaval?”