rhubarb and honeydew with malt and hot fudge
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Dinner
Rating: PG
Challenge: Rhubarb ‘My Treat’ #24: no one would have to know (an affair), Honeydew #21: seduction
Toppings/Extras: malt, hot fudge
Wordcount: 654
Summary: Horatio Newson and Verity Ashdown dine together.
Notes: PFAH; Verity : When the lights are down. I am so awful at writing these two. I do like them though.
She looked so gorgeous in her spilling dress of pale peach-pink, with her lashes low over her honey-coloured eyes and bright, bright lips. Horatio could tell that she was impressed by the view but she was reluctant to admit it-they were at the very top of Bristol Spire in a cushy little restaurant and Britannia City was spread beneath them, blazing brightly for hundreds of storeys. Every walkway was studded with circular lanterns and the lit-up windows diminished to dots before fading through the layer of the Smog far, far beneath them. He watched her eyes widen in pleasure as another bike whizzed through the air somewhere below them, leather-clad rider hunched over its gleaming handles.
“Would you like to ride one?” he asked, amused. “It’d be different, hey?”
Verity turned back to him with her brows pinching together ever so slightly, lip still stretched in a half-smile.
“I’m a horse-rider,” she said loftily. “Always have been. Edward always said you can see it from the way I walk.”
She liked mentioning her husband. She did it just to piss him off.
“How wonderful,” Horatio replied, returning her smirk. “There aren’t many horse-riders around today, I’m afraid to say. Not unless you’re pretty fucking rich.”
“You’ve got no excuse,” Verity responded, almost accusingly.
“What can I say? I had things to do.”
“Really,” she said mildly, reaching for her glass and taking a sip of wine. Her eyes were focused on him now, and Verity had such eyes, real heartbreaker’s eyes: round and soft and brilliant brown. She always knew exactly what she was doing, and in all honesty Horatio was a little perplexed as to why she had seemed so intent on becoming his mistress and seemed very happy to remain so, not that he minded at all. Perhaps it was a ploy to allow her out and about a little more, always on his arm of course but seeing the world nonetheless.
If that was the case, she just seemed weirdly eager for sex, that was all.
And she didn’t seem to feel the need to be discrete in the least.
Neither of those things were bad: the first for obvious reasons, and the second because Ashdown gave such pretty little flinches when Verity wrapped her arm around Horatio’s waist in front of him. He was just baffled by it. It seemed strange, like he wanted him to see, to know.
Rubbing it in Ashdown’s face was his job, damn it, not hers!
Not that he was sure Ashdown cared-he had pretty much told Horatio to feel free to murder his wife when she had first been kidnapped, which was colder than Horatio had ever expected. And now he spent almost every night rollicking around the city with his best buddy Pia Rees, not returning until the early hours of the morning and doing fuck all when he was meant to be helping him get rid of those pirates.
It was turning into a mess. Which he supposed was why going out for a meal made such a nice difference. He was a busy man and he had become even busier once he’d sent Miss Merritt out to sea-the look on her face had been worth it but he had started to realise that he had been seriously underestimating her usefulness as a PA-and he had things to look into that weren’t do with the pirates. The black ops were just that: black ops. They happened behind closed doors. They were a tiny facet to a multi-faceted company.
Nonetheless that didn’t stop them from apparently taking over his life, with Walshe and Kirby constantly bursting into his office at all hours waving their arms around about something.
It was nice to have dinner, he reflected, as he felt Verity’s foot press against his. Even if it was with one of the most baffling people he had ever met.