Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
“Are we friends?”
“I think we’re getting there.” Brendan’s smile was small, but filled with gentle teasing. “With a few extra perks of the relationship.”
Cillian could still feel the lingering echoes of those perks throbbing inside him with a molten feeling that just made him want it all over again. He flushed, looking down at their clasped hands.
“…friends is good,” he murmured. “And…you may be right. My timing is still a little off.”
“Just by a microsecond.”
“But it’s still telling,” he said with a touch of frustration that hadn’t really been entirely at Brendan to start with. He was still missing his mark. “It’s like that one off note in a symphony. It’s tiny, but it throws everything else to shite and then it all sounds like mud.”
Brendan rumbled thoughtfully. “May I offer one bit of advice?”
“As soon as I recover from the heart attack from you actually asking.”
A flat stare fixed on him. Cillian smiled sheepishly.
“…yes.”
“Forget that you’re Cillian Tell.” Brendan turned Cillian’s hand over—and began to walk the fingers of his other hand up his wrist lightly. “If you really want your delivery to be natural and your timing to be flawless, you can’t recite memorized lines word for word. You have to be the person who would naturally say those things without needing to stop and think what he’s supposed to remember.” Walking fingers stopped just below Cillian’s elbow, at his cuffed jacket sleeve. “That means you won’t always use the exact words in the script. Something more natural will come to you on its own, but it’ll eliminate the microsecond delay that makes your delivery seem subtly forced.”
Underneath that walking touch Cillian relaxed, leaning back against the sofa. “How do you do that?” he asked. “Just…immerse yourself in being someone else that way. I kind of sink away, I guess, but I’m still there underneath it. The other person is just a costume, even if I get caught up in the feelings until they’re…really deep, for me. Real.”
“I become them by learning them. Their history. We get little notes with the scripts, so I think about what’s in their history. What it would do to them, what it would say about them. The demeanor they’re supposed to project…why are they that way? Is it deliberate, or simply a side effect of their general mindset?” Brendan said. “I ask myself why. I ask myself who I would be in their situation. How it would change who I am, and how I see the world—and then I look at the world around me through that lens. I touch, taste, smell, see, hear…and react to those five senses as if I were this other person, not me.”
The entire time Brendan had kept walking his fingers up and down, the touch barely there, but it was the rhythm of it that had Cillian sighing, his tension and irritation quietly melting. His eyes had slipped closed without realizing it, but now he cracked one open as Brendan asked,
“Do you want to try it?”
“…maybe.” Cillian frowned, forcing himself to focus instead of just dozing off. Richard’s past…his life with his family, growing up as the heir to a duchy, his military service abroad, the fact that even after his service he almost never came home, preferring to travel—so what was he running from? And how did he feel about being dragged back home for a title he didn’t want and that only came at the loss of his father? “So right now, am I Richard Kerrington talking to Brendan Lau, or Richard Kerrington talking to Landon Cheng?”
“You are Richard Kerrington having an illicit tryst with Landon Cheng.” Brendan stroked the center of Cillian’s captured hand, coaxing his fingers and palm to unfurl…and Brendan bent to press his mouth to the sensitive center of Cillian’s palm. “Right under his betrothed’s nose.”
Cillian’s gut sucked in with a little tingle. “Brendan!”
“Not Brendan,” he corrected with an arched brow—and just like that, that cold demeanor fell over him, transforming him into the icy earl who would do anything to keep an unworthy suitor away from his daughter…even taking that suitor for his own. “Landon.” Even the name emerged differently, a breath of baritone ice, yet still those lips hovered over Cillian’s palm, tickling erotic-rough whispers into his skin. “My daughter is but a maid, and your blandishments fall on uncaring ears, Mr. Kerrington.”
Stay in character.
But he couldn’t stop a quick, “…I thought you didn’t want me to call you Daddy.”
Brendan froze. His eyes narrowed.
“Oh, that is it.”
He let Cillian go, then, rising to his feet—but only to move in a trim turn, even his posture the militant grace of Landon Cheng, as he caught up the two wooden dowel rods they’d been using as rehearsal props in the place of rapiers. He tossed one of the dowel rods at Cillian lightly.