Royal Indiscretion, chapter 36 (Patreon)

Wow... work has gotten crazy busy. I've even missed my home workouts because I have been scrambling.  But I still have good news on the workout front. I have now lost five and a half stone.  See, I like measuring in stones because it looks so nice and little.  See, I only had to lose five and a half stones. That's it.  We're not going to discuss how many pounds overweight I was/am. So here's your chapter.

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Yves rested his hand on Doug’s broad chest. Physically, Doug was a god. Yves felt insubstantial lying next to him, but despite his strength, Doug’s hands whispered across Yves’s body. He was a contradiction, and nothing like Yves’s assumptions of American footballers.  “Thank you,” Yves said.

Doug gave a little huff. “Why are you thanking me? You were fifty percent of that very excellent sex.” He tightened his arm around Yves. He had such strength that Yves felt safe. Intellectually he knew his father’s wealth and influence were more powerful, but in this moment, his heart felt protected.

“Thank you for seeing me as the sort of man worth taking this risk for.”

Doug kissed Yves’s shoulder. “You are a good man, and you are worth taking any number of risks for. Every time you imply otherwise, I want to hit your father.” His voice grew hard when he said the last part. Yves couldn’t remember the last time someone had denounced Duke Gerard in his name. When they were children, Albert had sometimes taken Yves’s side, but then boarding school had curtailed that habit. However, Yves did not want Doug to focus on Duke Gerard because he would not come out the winner in any conflict.

“He was hardly the only person who contributed to my upbringing. If anything, Duke Gerard foisted most of my upbringing off on a series of nannies and tutors supervised by Hagan.”

“Good. Get me a list, and I will consider punching all of them.”

Yves laughed at the image of Doug punching Yves’s year three language teacher—a prim man with a ridiculous mustache who had endlessly belittled Yves’s inability to conjugate in German. “I'm fairly sure that would end in a prison sentence.”

Doug made a show out of considering that, drawing his lips into a moue. “True. Which is why I plan to have fantasies about it rather than actually doing it.” He tried to kiss Yves’s shoulder again, but Yves shifted. Their lips met and tingles went all the way down to Yves’s toes. He cupped Doug’s face and groaned when Doug tightened his arm so their bodies pressed together. Despite the fact that he had just come, Yves felt the embers of lust glow. However, it was too soon. After a minute, Yves let his head fall onto Doug’s shoulder. He was half lying on Doug now, but Doug didn’t appear to mind.

Yves closed his eyes and felt the rhythm of their bodies, the way breath moved their chests and the slow glide of Doug’s fingers across his back. The room was so quiet that Yves could hear the ticking of the old fashioned clock. Doug traced one circle for every three clicks of the second hand, and the regular pattern lulled Yves into a trance.

After a long time, Doug interrupted the perfect stillness. “Are we going to deal with your father though?”

Yves sighed. He had never been good at dealing with reality, and he wasn’t any more prepared for it now. “I'm not quite sure what you think we should do. Personally, I plan to get my revenge by living happily somewhere outside his control. I can’t do any more than that.” The sense of powerlessness nagged at Yves, but he had grown used to ignoring that particular irritation.

“But you love your land.” Doug shifted away, and Yves felt that half inch of space like it was a chasm—one that real life was threatening to invade.

“I do.” Yves had found his sobriety while walking the fields and feeling the wind. The hot sun and cool breeze had washed away parts of himself that Yves had always hated. “But that is a rather recent love. My title and my land were nebulous constructs through the vast majority of my life. My grandfather gifted me with the title and the castle when I was too young to appreciate them, and as I got older, I had very little interest in that sort of isolation. I would rather sneak out to the city and dance to drugs. So as much as I do love my land, I can let that go.”

Doug ran his hand over Yves’s bare chest. “You sound emotional just talking about your land now. Do you really think you could walk away?”

Yves hadn’t realized that he had failed to police his emotions. He was usually better at hiding how he felt. “I am emotional, I suppose, because in my head sobriety is connected to the land. I would not go as far as to call myself the Fisher King, but I am afraid of losing that connection with both the land and my own sobriety, but that is not quite the same thing as having a deep, abiding love.” Yves wasn’t sure what he felt about his land and his title. In some ways, they were a burden—a tool his father used to manipulate him. “If I didn't associate my land with rediscovering myself, perhaps I wouldn't even feel that connection.”

Doug shifted, pulling his arm out from under Yves and tucking it under his head. “You really believe that?”

He sighed. “I'm not sure.” Supposedly therapy had taught him how to connect with his emotions, but Yves had simply become more aware of how difficult it was for him to admit to his own feelings.

“That's why I hate walking away.” Doug stroked Yves’s hair. “It feels like letting your father win, and you have a right to keep your land and your castle and your family. I like Lady Anne. What gives that asshole the right to take any of that away from you?”

The question made Yves deeply uncomfortable because it felt like an invitation to whine. “Given how many blessings my birth has given me, I don't have cause to complain. I am a well-educated, articulate man. I speak six languages. Others have it far worse.”

“Someone always has it worse,” Doug said, “but that’s not a reason for accepting shit from the world. I mean, plenty of people have way worse fathers than I had. That doesn’t change the fact that my father is an asshole.”

Yves grimaced. Complaining had never changed much, and if he had to give up his county and his family, that seemed like a small price compared to the hardships others suffered. When others fled their countries, they ended up in refugee camps, not in a posh hotel with a multimillionaire lover. With a sigh, Yves settled on his back and stared at the ceiling. He hadn’t thought of himself as a refugee, but in a way, he was. He couldn’t go home or access any resources. His money had come from the Duke, and he was unlikely to send Yves any more.

“I need a job,” Yves said softly. Duke Gerard had tried to shove Yves at a vocation, but Yves had never before felt like he needed to work.

“You speak a lot of languages. I bet Caro could find you work as a translator.”

“I would have to get certified,” Yves said.

Doug propped himself up on one elbow. “What would that take?”

“I have no idea,” Yves admitted. He just knew that one of Hagan’s jobs was to check the credentials of any translators hired when Duke Gerard had meetings. 

“You’ll figure it out,” Doug said without a hint of a doubt. He started to chuckle. “What will your father think if you become a well-respected translator?”

“He’ll be shocked,” Yves said. The Duke probably expected Yves to end up in a gutter. 

“What an ass,” Doug muttered.

Yves smiled. “That he is.” He felt no need to defend the family honor. After hearing King Alfonse’s story and knowing how parts of the family had reacted to Lady Anne’s mother, Yves had decided that his family had no honor to defend.

“You know,” Doug said in a thoughtful voice, “when you thought your father had spread a rumor about me being a homophobe, you were scared that the rumor would ruin my career. I wonder what would happen if someone started a rumor that your father is the true homophobe.”

“Nothing,” Yves said with disgust. “Absolutely nothing would happen.”

“You can’t believe that.”

“Being a king is not the same as working for someone else. There is no contract, no negotiations, no salary. He will be the king when King Alphonse dies, and no rumors would stop that.”

“Stop it? Maybe not.” Doug sounded thoughtful. “But you said it yourself—being a royal today is not like it was a few hundred years ago. A lot of his power is ceremonial. If the people thought he was an ass, wouldn’t the legislature vote to take some of those powers away?” Doug’s smile grew a little wicked. “No one wants to hang with a homophobe, no one except other homophobes, and the legislature wouldn’t want good old Gerard fraternizing with those sorts. He could end up being a king that no one wanted to talk to, and that castle where the king lived, would your father have to live there?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it. He has his palace.” Yves couldn’t imagine the Duke spending much time in the king’s castle because it was old and impossible to improve because the structure was designed to withstand cannonball attacks, not to accommodate modern ductwork.

“Too bad.” Doug ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip. “Still, we could make his life really uncomfortable.”

“This is unwise,” Yves warned. He had learned the folly of challenging the Duke early and often. 

Doug rolled closer so their bodies pressed together. “Your father already wants to get rid of you because you link him to a murder. Do you really think we could piss him off any more than he already is?”

Yves sighed. “I sometimes worry that you do not understand the trouble you have landed in. You clearly underestimate the levers of power that a royal can still manipulate.”

“I don’t know royals,” Doug admitted. “But I know power and powerful people. I also have a history degree. George Washington said a good offensive operation is the surest means of defense. He’s right—in football and power. If we sit here and give your father time to think up ways to strike back, he’s dangerous. But if we keep him on the defensive, if he’s busy trying to make nice with people and convince them not to listen to the rumors, then he’ll be too busy to strike back.”

“He’ll make nice with people, as you put it,” Yves said, “and he’ll send Hagan to strike at us.”

“And then we’ll deal with Hagan, but at least we’ll tie your father up and make him miserable.” Doug studied Yves’s face for long enough that Yves started to get uncomfortable. “If you don’t want to do this, then I won’t. He’s your asshole father, so you get veto power here, but I want to do this.” Doug leaned closer. “I really want to do this.”

Yves sighed. Duke Gerard was a brutally efficient man. Yves’s preference would always be to avoid him, but now that Doug had traced the outline of danger, even Yves could see it. The Duke would not want to give Yves the power to implicate him in that murder and Yves no longer assumed that his father would limit any assassinations to those that affected only one’s character.

“He’s dangerous. The harder we push, the more dangerous he will become.”

Doug nodded. “I respect that. So we don’t go for a dive play, even if that’s the safe call. We run a naked bootleg instead.”

“Either you have suffered a stroke and lost the ability to speak English or my tutors skipped a few lessons.”

“They skipped lessons on football jargon.” Doug sat up. “If we tried confronting your father head on in a dive play, he’d take us out.”

“Indubitably,” Yves agreed.

Doug looked down at him with a quizzical expression.

“What?”

“I’ve just never actually heard anyone use that word.”

“AT least that is a word. I am fairly sure naked and bootleg do not belong together.” In fact, Yves had no idea how one could be naked if one had boots or a boot leg. English was an odd language.

“A bootleg is when a quarterback fakes handing the ball to someone when he plans to do the heavy work of running himself.”

“And a naked bootleg?”

“When he sends all his blockers running in other directions and makes that run undefended. No one expects a quarterback to take that kind of risk, so the other team will assume that an undefended quarterback is out of the play. The ball is gone.”

Yves moved to sit next to Doug. “How does this apply to the Duke?”

That seemed to cause Doug to pause. “We make him think we’re undefended… that someone else is running the ball into his territory.”

“Like who?”

“A guy like that has to have enemies,” Doug said. “We convince the Duke that his enemies are trying to make the Stenbocks look bad, and he’ll take his eye off us.”

“This feels dangerous.”

Doug caught Yves hand in his. “You get the veto power here. If you tell me to leave your asshole father alone, I will.”

Yves pressed his lips together and tried to sort through the thoughts spinning through his head. Part of him wished Doug were a stereotypically aggressive American. Then he would take the choices away from Yves, and Yves could avoid feeling any responsibility for the outcome. Part of him dearly wished for that.

However, that was not in Doug’s nature, and Yves would not wish for him to change.

“I’m not vetoing the idea,” Yves said. “I’m simply warning you that my father is dangerous.”

Doug smiled widely. “So am I.”