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“You haven’t been out canoodling with other men when I was away?” Brian cooed, insinuatingly. “I find that very hard to believe from the man whose schedule not even Moses could part.”
A wicked smile crept along Paul’s lips. They were in his bedroom, the sweet aroma of a long-desired meeting hanging heavy in the air. His head was propped on his hand, his body set in the lounging position of kings and sheiks. “I’ve been too busy babysitting your brothers and bringing home the proverbial bacon.”
Brian pulled down the house coat hooked on the bathroom door. His gaze was naturally caught on the tantalizing piece beneath his friend’s navel and the toothsome rump it was connected to, but no sooner were they both strewn in a heap silk damask, dyed in a regal shade of red. “What a dutiful husband you are, but you know what they say about dull boys and their work.”
“Every evening I am forced to pay penance for my good deeds.” Paul donned the robe. It wasn’t lost on Brian that his company chairman had omitted slipping on his briefs in the process. His mind stirred with memories that would come in useful on solitary days when the sun was out and his soul was light. “Your mother is expecting you later tonight. Some sort of welcome home party, I gather.”
“More like a family inspection.” Brian clambered onto the foot of the bed and plumped along the sheets.
“I really think you ought to go, Brian.”
Brian draped his body beside Paul’s long, slender frame. “Oh, do you?”
Paul threw his arms around Brian’s neck and kissed him. “Yes,” he said. “If nothing else but to scandalize your mother with an obscenely detailed account of how you’ve ravished the living daylights out of me.”
Brian fell back in a fit of laughter. “Oh dear, imagine that! It wouldn’t be just Mother left scandalized!”
“Might be the best thing for your family,” said Paul, curtly. “A good fright to shock some life into their systems.”
He rose and entered the small en suite. He relieved himself, washed his hands, and splashed his kiss-strewn countenance with cold water. It was surreal to see the so-called “human machine” in this stripped-down fashion. Come Monday Brian would sit in a roundtable with this man and know precisely which suit leg concealed the ink-blot of a birthmark. “Forgive me if I’m being presumptuous,” Brian put in, “but your parents…do they know?”
“My sexuality or lack thereof is no one’s business but my own.” Paul sat on the edge of the bed. The hair that would typically fall in line was now disheveled. He grabbed the diary from the nightstand. “That is to say, no. I shouldn’t think so.”
“It would have been a modern marvel had you said yes.” Brian stared at the amber spotlight beamed on the ceiling. “It doesn’t help that our industry makes it especially difficult. We live in a society where anything marginally unconventional is seen as blasphemous. Who can you trust to crack that harmless joke to? Word gets around.”
“It was you who kissed me first, Brian,” said Paul, matter-of-factly.
“It could have been argued that I wasn’t in my right mind,” he said, suddenly. “We were strolling the grounds of the convalescent home, for goodness sakes.”
“What I mean is, despite your trepidation you trusted me—not Ann, not your brothers, not your antediluvian mother: me—when I had given you no explicit reason to do so.”
Brian fingered his mustache. “I suppose I did.” Then, softening his phrasing with an awkward chuckle, added: “Perhaps the two of us are more obvious than we let on?”
Paul turned round. The look he wore was not that of even feigned amusement. “I’d rather not like to think that was the case. If it’s all the same.”
Brian parted his lips, then retracted on better judgement. Once upon a time when Merroney was slightly more enigmatic than he was currently, Jenny had detected a feminine energy within him that rivaled her own. Jane had scornfully agreed, and Ted had provided the masculine response with an unsavory gesture all too familiar from the smoking rooms of the Old Boys’ Club.
Brian skulked behind Paul and coiled his arms around his waist. “You’re too handsome to be straight, Paul.” He lay his cheek along the man’s hair and let his honey smooth words emulate the Bartok still dancing in his ears. “Much too handsome. Although in the beginning your relationship with Claire did give me pause, your devotion to Sir Neville however…”
“My dear Brian,” Paul closed his book and set it aside, “as financial advisor you are to report on the facts and figures, not fictions and fancies. Let’s not move the goalposts while we’re ahead.”
“As you wish, my liege.” Brian slipped his hand between the slit of Paul’s robe, resting his fingertips between the soft, white thighs. “But what of these goalposts?”