The Missing Page (Page & Sommers #2)

by Cat Sebastian

This seemed quite impertinent, and even more so for being accurate.

And then he realized why all these remembered details had unsettled him: under ordinary circumstances, houses didn’t remain unchanged for twenty years. Paintings were moved around. Carpets became too worn to be serviceable and were replaced or removed. Walls were repapered. Vases were shifted from the mantle to the sideboard. Blackthorn hadn’t been preserved; it had been left to molder.

He wasn’t loud or lumbering; it was just, as much as James hated to acknowledge it, a sort of innate charisma. Good looks too, he noted in irritation. This was probably why the great and good of the land sought him out whenever a member of the family began hearing voices or acting in an alarming way. He just had a presence. Not a soothing presence, and certainly nothing that could be referred to as a pleasant bedside manner. It was more that he seemed like he could frighten off whatever troubles afflicted his patients. Hundreds of years ago, he would have been precisely the sort of priest one would want to perform an exorcism.

One of the corners of Leo’s mouth ticked up in a tired smile. “A reading of the will. For God’s sake, James. I half expected to find you all shooting one another. Cabinets of exotic poisons left unlocked. Sharpened daggers mounted above the chimneypiece.” “Ah. I see. You came for the entertainment potential.”

Sometimes it was a kindness to let unpleasant things rest, but sometimes silence transformed an ordinary event into something darker, something taboo.

He was intensely aware of Leo looking at him, something careful and warm in his gaze, and he wished that he wasn’t the kind of person who needed to be looked at quite so carefully.

But Leo wasn’t his patient. He was his—lover? Friend? Both designations seemed inadequate, almost coy, when used to describe a person who was becoming the fixed point about which James’s world orbited.

Some people responded to brushes with death with an urgent need for sex. James did not. James responded to brushes with death with an urgent need for barbiturates or, failing that, a place to quietly panic.

Something in his mind was soothed by the knowledge that his watches and toothbrushes and cups of tea stayed in their proper places. It was the sort of behavioral tic that in anyone else Leo might have found silly, but he felt fiercely defensive of James’s carefully ordered world. He would cheerfully shoot anyone who mislaid James’s toothbrush, and was only stopped by the consideration that this would displease James and also cause a great deal of annoyance for both of them.

They had spent enough nights together, enough mornings together, that it was no longer practical to count them (it was thirty-two). Surely that was enough time for any reasonable person to get used to being…cuddled, or whatever this was. Leo doubted he had ever been cuddled in his life before he met James. He certainly hadn’t known that he wanted any such thing. When James touched him like this, he felt—Christ, he felt safe. And it didn’t make any sense. Leo’s career—hell, his life—depended on his ability to assess danger and seek safety, and he knew perfectly well that there was no possible peril that James could protect him from with a blanket and a strong forearm.

Leo loved that James, however civilized he was, liked the reminder that Leo was ready to be very uncivilized indeed on his behalf.

It was a little terrifying, how quickly he had let himself get attached to these people. To James’s people. They weren’t his own—they were borrowed, in the same way that his half of James’s bed was borrowed. But they still felt like his own. In reality, Leo didn’t have any people and he would do well to remember it.

But now he knew those worries were baseless; where another person might lie awake worrying about burglars or housefires, James worried about his mind. The worry would always be there, but he knew it to be far-fetched.

He had spent years thinking that Sir Anthony must have meant well. But now he knew that this wasn’t the case. Sir Anthony meant to make him feel as bad as possible. He didn’t know why, and at the moment he didn’t much care.

James didn’t have the words for it; he hardly had the emotions for it.

He didn’t know where that darling came from. He had never said that word before and felt like a pillock saying it now, but he needed James to know that he was cared for in a way that his younger self hadn’t been, even if it was by someone like Leo.

Leo stroked his hands down James’s arms, soothing and gentle, but James didn’t want to be soothed. Or rather, he didn’t want to need to be soothed.

That would be all well and good if Leo enjoyed living like that, but he plainly didn’t. James had caught him staring at the way his own few garments hung in the wardrobe beside James’s, and the expression on his face had been one of an almost shy satisfaction. He always took the same cup for his tea and returned it to the same hook in the kitchen after washing it with a care that sometimes made James’s heart ache.

He wanted Leo to know that he could have more than half a bed, half a wardrobe, his own special teacup. He wanted Leo to believe that they could have a life, a future, and that they could do it with one another.

It made something ache in Leo’s heart, made him long for something he preferred not to even think about. It made him wonder what it would be like to belong to a person, to belong to a place and a home the way these two belonged to one another, the way they so obviously belonged here.

James sat beside him before the empty hearth. “You seem to be doing a fine job. Not at building the fire. At…” He made the same vague gesture between them, accompanied by a wry smile. “Not that I have all that much experience. But I don’t have any complaints.” “That’s because you have low standards and you let people walk all over you.” James looked like he wanted to argue, but instead he sighed. “No, it’s because you’re a lovely man.”

“I can’t wait to see what you do next,” James said. For the first time in his adult life, Leo felt in danger of crying, so instead he cleared his throat and looked away and did useless things to the fire.

He ran his finger along the table where he habitually tossed his keys. It was probably just exhaustion and stress catching up with him, but that stupid table felt impossibly dear, almost miraculous in its familiarity.

“You know I would,” Leo said, coming up behind him. “The trouble is that I love you,” he said. “And it’s ruined me for gainful employment.”

He wanted a span of empty time filled with nothing but James and bright yellow sunshine.