sighed, his hands beseeching, his face alight. “Oh, my lord, there isn’t enough time left in the week! A new day is coming—has come! For hundreds of years, physical science has consisted of exactly two things, and two things only: Rastin, and commentaries on Rastin.” The duke’s eyes had darkened, Rafe noticed, his face limned by the fire behind him.
“Ah, yes. I thought Chesney’s On the Velocity of Falling Bodies was particularly ingenious.”
Rafe snorted. “Certainly, if by ‘ingenious’ you mean ‘putrescent.’ Do you have it here?” The duke pointed and Rafe crossed swiftly in front of him, scanning the books on the shelves as he approached them. He pulled a book out of the wall and gestured with it. “Chesney was wrong.” He pulled out another book. “Fontanus wrong.” Another. “Chickering was wrong, too, though at least in an interesting direction.”
“Say more.” Tremontaine stood up and walked over to take the books from Rafe’s hands. When their fingers brushed, Rafe drew his away with a hiss. Good gods, were the man’s hands iron pulled from a fiery forge?
Rafe crossed quickly to take a seat on another couch. “What’s Rastin’s central principle?” he said, looking toward the books on the shelves to his left.
“Oh, my. It’s been years since I’ve read Rastin. Let me see . . . It’s the mind and the senses, yes? Nothing in the mind but what is in the senses . . . no, that’s not right.” Well, the Tremontaine library certainly had a varied collection. Trevor here. Geographical Exotica there. Delgardie. “Would you stoop to reminding a poor pupil?”
Rafe saw no reason to stop looking at the books. “Nothing exists in the world, my lord, that does not first exist in the mind and in the senses.”
“Please be so good as to stop calling me that.” Tremontaine sat on the other end of the couch. Rafe turned to face him but immediately cast his eyes on the space between them on the couch, where the blue of the damask shone vividly between violet stripes.
“Then what should I call you?” Rafe looked up. The duke’s eyes were a deep cornflower blue. Rafe tried for lightness. “My friend Joshua calls me pigeon, but somehow I don’t think that’s right. Hawk, perhaps?”
“Most certainly not.” Tremontaine’s voice was almost offended, the curve in his lips slight. Rafe felt feverish. “Call me”—the duke cleared his throat and paused—“do you even know my first name?”
“You mean it isn’t My?” No; the eyes weren’t just deep blue. There was a touch of the green sea in them as well.
The smile broadened. “Would that I were so lucky. No. It’s William.”
“All right.” Rafe shifted toward him on the couch. Why on earth should he feel a small thrill run through his chest? “William. So Rastin’s point is that reason is our guide in the search for truth, and observation nothing more than her handmaiden.” His hands illustrated his eloquence, animated, urgent. “The idea of isolating nature, of experimenting, to discover whether the conclusions to which reason has led us have anything to do with reality, is looked upon with horror. Observe nature out of its context, say Chesney and Chickering and Fontanus and all the rest of them, and it ceases to be either nature or an appropriate subject for physical science.”
“And you feel differently.”
Rafe swallowed. “How could any thinking man not?” His voice was thick with something that had to be frustration. “The earth orbiting the sun is only the beginning.”
“But aren’t you doing the same thing, coming up with an idea about the truth first and then using observation as its handmaiden?”
Rafe inhaled sharply. William smelled of apricots and cinnamon and something else he couldn’t name. “Absolutely not. The endeavor I’m engaged in is completely different.”
“Really?” William’s voice was mild. “Because it sounds to me as if you were indulging in exactly the failure of logic you find in your professors.”
Rafe’s breath caught in his throat and he sat up, very straight and very still. Suddenly Joshua’s voice rang in his head. You tend to ruin things for yourself. But his tongue would not be held.
“As if you cared at all anyway,” he said, his voice low, “about any of it. No, you just want to waltz on down to the University, slum it there until your moronic amusement is sated, stop for a moment and destroy the students, and come back to your fine house on the fine Hill to drink fine chocolate.”
He stared at William, his nostrils flared. In one fluid motion, William reached out, put his hand on the back of Rafe’s head, and drew their lips together.
For some time the spitting crackle of the fire was the only sound to be heard in the library of the Duke Tremontaine.
“I’ve always envied University men their hair,” said William at last, softly, fingering the leather tie that sent Rafe’s hair neatly down the nape of his neck. “I keep hoping that at some point long hair will come into fashion on the Hill.”
“How long have you lived on the Hill?”
“Twenty of my last thirty-seven years.”
“Someone is an optimist,” said Rafe.
William’s only response was to rearrange a stray lock of hair over Rafe’s forehead. “This is not at all the direction I was expecting our conversation to turn.”
“Nor I.” Rafe’s tone was casual, but he still felt as if he’d drunk far too much chocolate far too late in the day. “You still haven’t told me which way you voted today.”
“Other matters seemed more pressing.”
Rafe shifted his balance and a slight gasp escaped William’s mouth. “And now seem more pressing still.” This earned him a chuckle. “Nonetheless, I would very much like to know.”
“I suppose I could be persuaded to tell you.”
“And how might I do that?” He repositioned his hand. “Would this help?”
“Oh, most definitely. But what would be even more persuasive would be to . . . yes, that. Oh, yes.”
And for a time Rafe was unable to speak, and then it was William’s breath that had grown ragged. “But I am discomfiting you,” said Rafe, his eyes wide and innocent. “Forgive me, good my lord. I don’t know what could possibly have possessed me.”
William’s fingers moved to unbutton Rafe’s robe and allow it to fall, to untie and toss his shirt to the floor, forgotten, to run smooth hands up and down his skin, caressing peaks of muscle and valleys of sinew.
Rafe leaned back on the couch, closed his eyes, and smiled the small smile of the cat who has come upon a dish it thought empty and found it full of milk. His pulse slowed and he breathed more easily, now that he was back on familiar ground; this was a pose that he knew well. Joshua would be scandalized and delighted in equal parts. To say nothing, of course, of how Rafe might make use of what was happening to influence the choice of faculty on his committee. This man could probably exclude de Bertel with a flutter of his little finger. Smiling, Rafe extended his arms above his head, his eyes half closed, as William’s mouth found chest, collarbone, neck, throat, earlobe—
