Page 78 of Husband Material
“But think of your water footprint.”
“Is your way to distract yourself teasing me?”
“It’s working.” I grinned.
The other issue with the hour of all-nighter criticality was that it always passed incredibly slowly. I glanced around the room, looking for anything to occupy us. And it couldn’t be the bed because that was a one-way ticket to sleeping through Alex’s wedding. Unfortunately, while our surroundings were sumptuous in many ways, they were surprisingly short on entertainment. I suppose when you could ring a bell and get a servant to bring you a live peacock and a hand job whenever you felt like it, there wasn’t much need to also keep a Snakes and Ladders set handy.
Finally, my gaze settled on the fireplace, which was still crackling merrily and casting orange shadows over what I suspected was a very expensive Persian rug.
“Oliver?” I said.
He gave a little jolt. “Yes, I’m awake. I’m definitely awake.”
“Oliver,” I said again.
His eyes narrowed warily. “That’s your I’ve-got-an-inappropriate-idea face.”
I did. I totally did. “You see that offensively posh rug by that offensively pretty fireplace? That’s an actual fireplace with, like, fire in it?”
“I’d do a great many things for you, Lucien, but I draw the line at arson.”
Because Oliver kept relentlessly to a very sensible bedtime, I’d never seen him quite this dazed before. It was, honestly, kind of adorable. I stared at him. “Oh my God. How did you get toarsonfrom ‘We should do something to keep ourselves awake’?”
The slightest pause. “Be gay. Do crimes?”
“I was thinking more…be gay, have sex? You know, on the rug, in front of the fireplace. Because it’s here and I think we’ll regret it if we didn’t.”
Another pause. “You want me,” he asked slowly, “to make love to you in front of the fireplace?”
“Yes.” It came out a little more aggressive than I intended it. “Tenderly. In soft focus. With violins.”
“Well, I am quite tired, so I suppose that counts as soft focus. And while I’m sure there’s a string quartet somewhere in the building, I don’t think that would fall within their job description.”
“Fine.” I cast off my towel and arranged myself as seductively as I could on the rug. “Just. You know. Romance me, baby. Romance me hard.”
And Oliver, looking, I thought, significantly more awake thanhe had three minutes ago, crossed the room after me. He dropped to his knees and settled his body over mine, and I reached up my arms to embrace him. As it turned out, the whole fireplace thing hadn’t been totally oversold. The light painted us in tiger stripes of gold and shadows, and the heat fell over us gently like all the good bits of a blanket.
I can’t lie, I felt sexy as hell.
“Oh, Lucien,” Oliver murmured.
And I gazed up at him, too tired and too happy to resent to my own sincerity. “I love you.”
So. Yeah. That was a thing that happened.
Oliver and a fireplace and a soft rug. It was probably the least me thing I’d ever done, and I was okay with that.
I WASN’T SURE WHAT I’Dexpected Coombecamden Cathedral to look like. On the one hand, it was a cathedral, and cathedrals are usually pretty bling. On the other hand, Coombecamden was a tiny little postage stamp of a place that was considered a city only because of a weird religious convention from the fifteen-forties.
So I was at once impressed and disappointed when we followed the large and surprisingly boisterous wedding party into town—or what passed for town, since a lot of it was countryside because a surprising number of English cities were—and found ourselves headed towards a towering Gothic structure that, while it wasn’t exactly Westminster Abbey, also clearly wasn’t your local parish church.
“Okay, architecture boy”—I leaned over to Oliver, who was looking out of the window of the minibus with the kind of genuine interest that I was far too cynical to be capable of—“tell me about this one.”
“I think it’s probably a mixture,” he said. “It looks like a medieval core with additions down the centuries until at least the Victorians.”
I gave him a sceptical look. “How do you know that?”
“I don’t particularly,” he admitted, “but when a small town has a big Anglican cathedral in it, it’s usually old. Otherwise, itwould have been built somewhere more important. And since it hasn’t been downgraded to a church in the intervening centuries, it will have been added to over the years. If we go poking around, we might find some desecrated statues from the Reformation.”
