Deven and the Dragon - Eliot Grayson Page 0,44

and headache and sour stomach he’d had all night were now a little more understandable…

Deven, bloody buggering hell. Deven. Fiora groaned again, and then clutched at his temples as the sound reverberated through his skull. Deven must think him a halfwit, giggling about stone penises and then spilling ale on himself and then…

Fiora sat bolt upright with a gasp of horror, grabbing fistfuls of his hair. He’d — what had he done? He couldn’t remember. He looked about him wildly. How had he gotten to bed? Fiora flung back the coverlet, staring down at his own half-clothed body, his heart pounding.

He wasn’t naked. He wasn’t…sticky, or anything like that. Was he? No, not sticky precisely, although every inch of his skin seemed to be exuding stale beer.

Gagging, Fiora stumbled out of bed and made it into the bath before choking out bile and pure misery.

Oh God, oh God, what if he and Deven had done…anything at all might be too much. The curse, which Fiora had spent countless hours analyzing and deconstructing, still wasn’t entirely clear on the meaning of ‘with a lover lie.’ They might not have finished the job, but what if Fiora had taken Deven in his mouth? That wouldn’t leave any physical evidence. Fiora shuddered with mingled lust and horror at the thought that he might have swallowed the evidence.

Deven could be dying at that moment, breathing his last in his bedroom downstairs…it had been too many hours. The sun was pouring through the windows at an angle that made it mid-morning at least.

Fiora staggered to his feet again and tripped his way out of his room and down the stairs. He had to get to Deven, see him, quell this terrible fear that was gripping him around the lungs and stealing his breath.

Andrei stepped out of the study as Fiora rounded the corner of the stairwell.

“My lord!” he cried, taking in Fiora’s state of smelly, barefoot, half-dressed dishevelment. “What’s the matter? What ails you? Other than the obvious,” he finished dryly, wrinkling his nose.

At any other time, Fiora would have wanted to sink through the floor in embarrassment. “Deven,” Fiora gasped. “Deven, I have to get to him, what if he’s dying? Andrei, let me pass!”

“Wait,” Andrei said, sidestepping as Fiora tried to dodge around him. “My lord, wait, stop a moment. Mr. Clifton is fine. I saw him out the window, walking in the garden this morning. He’s fine.”

Andrei’s words finally penetrated the miasma of hangover and panic obscuring Fiora’s mind, and he slumped against the wall, breathing hard and nauseated all over again.

“Oh, Andrei,” he moaned, covering his face with his hands. “Thank God. I thought I might have — I thought we might have — ugh,” he finished miserably.

“‘Quicker than a thought,’ as you recall,” Andrei quoted. Andrei knew every word of the curse as well as Fiora did. “Not only was Mr. Clifton perfectly well last night, but he assured me that nothing of the kind had taken place. Since his protestations seemed sincere, and his state of health confirmed his story, I chose to believe him.”

Fiora’s nausea intensified to the point of pain. Deven and Andrei had talked about it? Talked about whether or not Deven and Fiora had…oh, fuck. Fiora’s face burned and his hands shook. Oh, God, he was never drinking again.

And then the obvious knocked him over the head like a paving stone.

“When?” he demanded, lowering his hands and glaring at Andrei out of no-doubt bloodshot eyes. “When did you talk to Deven last night?”

Andrei’s look was somewhere between pitying and grimly amused. “When he carried you to bed like a sack of ale-soaked potatoes, my lord.”

Carried him. To bed. Because he had, apparently, drunk himself into unconsciousness.

Deven had carried him to bed. Not in the way Fiora might possibly wish Deven — no, wish someone would, but simply because he had no choice but to haul him around after he proved he couldn’t hold his liquor. An obligation. An annoyance. A drunken, giggling, stupid burden.

His esophagus tingled as bile began to rise up again. The image of a heap of sodden, ale-soaked potatoes, squishy and disgusting, appeared in Fiora’s mind’s eye.

“Ohhh,” he moaned, and sprinted for the bath again.

Chapter Twelve

It took two hours and a whole pot of coffee for Fiora to begin to feel like himself again. He only toyed with the toast Andrei had sent for from the kitchen along with the coffee; it was presented stone cold, with only half a pat of