Page 60 of Binding Their Hearts

“I’m not sure, actually.” Emma stood behind the kitchen island, beneath a trio of pendant lights, elbows on the counter and her chin resting on her bridged hands. Her expression claimed innocence, but she would never have Jay’s natural lack of guile. Too much shrewdness lurked in her eyes. “He didn’t name a return date.”

Two sets of footsteps clattered on the stairs, the oiled and polished wood that had likely stood for close to two hundred years and absorbed the excited noise of generations. Yet now the place sat vacant, its exuberance dimmed, its purpose unfulfilled. He could rectify that tragedy.

“This house is magnificent, Em.” He’d been so set on buying that he’d neglected to consider another path. The right place simply needed to come along before time ran out. This house could reset the clock. Perhaps something would become available down the street in the interim. “If the owner would be open to discussing a lease beginning this month, I would be most appreciative.”

Jay and Alice appeared at the top of the stairs, the latter nearly breathless, the former turning in a slow circle. “Whoa.”

“If that’s what you want.” Emma set champagne flutes on the counter. A line of four, empty, the crystal sparkling under the lights. “But why would you settle for temporary possession when you could own something forever?”

His heart stopped. Paralysis gripped him, the fear that could not dare to hope. “Don’t tease, Emma.”

Her gaze slid to his submissives, the lifelong partners he would publicly claim forever in less than two weeks. This house would be a worthy gift for them—a place to make memories and grow old together. A home within easy walking distance of their friends and their club, the greenery of the Common and the public gardens. A slightly longer commute for Alice, but about the same for Jay. An impossibly perfect home.

Alice slipped her hand into his, her fingers slim and strong. “It’s an amazing house, Henry. I could see us in it.”

Jay leaned into his opposite shoulder. “You deserve this studio. And did you see that den off the main suite? It’d be fantastic as—”

“As our playroom, yes, I did see that.” Tipping his head to Jay’s, he squeezed Alice’s hand. Once on the market, a house like this would go quickly. He would need exceptional luck and a strong offer to obtain it. “Thank you, my loves.”

Emma set a bottle of Champagne beside the flutes. “No teasing, Henry. Not about something so momentous. This house is yours, if you want it. Direct sale, no competition.”

“I do want it.” Relief nearly dropped him to his knees. He hadn’t failed Alice and Jay. They wouldn’t need to settle for the wrong fit and resent the house for what it would never be. A flood of warmth spread through him, and his heart beat out a new rhythm. Ours now. Ours now. “I am without words, Em. Thank you.”

Emma erupted in a girlish giggle as Jay whooped and Alice silently engulfed him in a fierce embrace.

“I was so hoping you would. And admittedly, certain enough of your taste that I brought the Champagne over to chill after you agreed to meet.” She lightly tapped the cork with a fingernail. “Would you care to do the honors?”

“I will”—with his arms draped around Alice and Jay, he migrated toward the kitchenette—“if you’ll tell me whose house I’m buying.”

“Randolph is an old friend of my father’s.” She stepped back, her wrap swirling, and produced a charcuterie tray from the refrigerator. “His wife paints. They’ve been spending more and more time at their home in France. She likes the gentler shore there, he says. And they have no children to save this house for.” She nudged the platter in Jay’s direction; Alice took the initiative to feed Jay pistachios one by one. “You might even be distantly related; his grandmother was a Bennett, he says.”

“Really?” His mother would almost certainly know; she was the custodian of family genealogy going back centuries. He eased the cork free; the pop echoed throughout the attic studio.

Emma shot him a sly grin. “I may have encouraged him to keep the home in the family and let it serve a purpose again.”

He poured four glasses, touched beyond measure. The label was one he hadn’t seen in ages—Emma and Victor’s private stock, the vintage a favorite for milestone anniversaries and the years-ago announcement of the impending addition to their family.

Eyes bright, she lifted her glass and inhaled the bouquet. “Shall we toast to the house?”

He stayed her hand. “Not the house.” He waited for Alice and Jay to raise their flutes as well, then held his aloft. The first toast belonged to the woman who’d pushed him toward the best pieces of his life. To meeting and claiming Jay. To pursuing Alice when he’d hesitated. To daring to dream he could manifest the life he wanted. “To the friends who know us better than we know ourselves.”

A chorus of agreement followed. And if Em brushed a tear from her cheek before she sipped, he was too much of a gentleman to mention it.

Chapter twenty-eight

Henry

The Bennett connection proved true—a bright constant in an otherwise whirlwind of a week. In the midst of the introduction by phone, agreeing upon a price, discussing which furnishings might remain with the house, arranging appraisals and inspections and contract reviews, attending various meetings, setting a move-in date, hiring a moving company, and beginning to pack, Henry related the entire saga to his mother.

On Sunday afternoon, she called and recited to him seven generations of family history. Her father’s father, Henry’s great-grandfather, had been a first cousin to Randolph’s Bennett grandmother. The house, built in 1830 by Erasmus and Abigail Bennett, had seen the birth of their shared ancestor—Edward Bennett, Henry’s great-great-great grandfather—in 1832. Edward’s oldest son had kept the house, leading down Randolph’s branch of the family tree, while a second son moved to Maine and established the branch that led to Henry via his mother. Which technically made Henry and Randolph third cousins, once removed.

The whole of it was fascinating, though perhaps not so much so that it ought to have required a phone conversation lengthy enough for two cups of tea. Particularly not when the apartment was a hive of activity: the rough thud of flattened cardboard becoming a box; the sharp ticking gear of the tape gun; the rustling crinkle of packing paper layered carefully around what even he had to admit was entirely too many sets of dishes—including the recent purchase for their Thanksgiving dinner party, now taking on new importance as a way of thanking Will and Emma for their extensive and thoughtful contributions to the success of both wedding and house hunt.

Jay, delightfully shirtless atop the kitchen stepstool, handed down piece after piece to Alice for wrapping and packing. They worked exceptionally well together; he could not find fault in their speed or process. But after nearly two hours of watching them from the living room as he listened to his mother’s unbridled joy in sharing family history, he could, and did, suffer the sting of guilt. Packing up the household did not fall under the umbrella of service submission—and even if it should, the task would suit only Jay’s desires, not Alice’s. More problematically, roughly eighty percent of the apartment’s contents were, in fact, Henry’s. And he, despite having objectively the most time for packing, also had the most painstaking of purviews: packing every scrap of his current studio for safe transport.

As he finally laid the phone aside, it was evening, nearly six o’clock. Moving day would commence Friday at 8:30 a.m. precisely, after Jay and Alice had been sent off to work with admonitions to come home to the new house. Which left perhaps four and a quarter days to complete the entirety of the packing. They would need to move faster, though all of them had spent the bulk of two hours each weeknight and all of Saturday—after his monthly class for newcomers, Alice’s final flogging training session with Leah, and Jay’s basketball game, or hoops hangout, as he termed it—on packing up their lives. The three of them existed amid stacks of boxes now, none taller than Alice’s shoulders lest the maze become impossible to navigate.

Attempting to project energy he didn’t feel, Henry pushed up from the seat with both hands. The right side of the room contained a clear path to the kitchen. He avoided gazing too long to the left, which was wholly consumed by what Jay and Alice had dubbed Fort Box.

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