Don Juan hadn't gone farther than the parlor once he was through the floo. He started off in an armchair, then as the minutes ticked by he rose and paced, then as they kept ticking he made himself a drink. Thank Merlin he hadn't taken Dean's suggestion to wait at the house. Five minutes, indeed. He tried to convince himself it was fine; he'd known the woman upstairs needed more than five minutes if Hudson was doing it properly. On the other hand, the longer the time stretched on the more he worried that Hudson wasn't going to show at all. He'd seemed insistent about it, but what did Don Juan really know about what he was thinking? Hudson had pretended to be casual while the woman was downstairs with them, too. And that was setting aside the possibility that Hudson might have needed to stay in order to do damage control. There might not have been anything inherently suspicious about one man visiting another, but Don Juan didn't know her or what she was like. And there were clues that there was more going on, if she knew what to look for. Don Juan had been barefoot when she arrived, for one. Hudson clearly hadn't been expecting him. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility that she'd pieced together more than she should have and Hudson had needed to spend time talking her down.

He did come, in the end. Don Juan was perched on the arm of a sofa when the fireplace lit up, tense. "And now they're squared away?" he asked. First things first, that. He wasn't sure where he and Hudson stood emotionally or romantically, particularly not with this new wrinkle of women in their nightgowns — but he was sure Hudson would tell him if there was a risk they'd been discovered.

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