Instead, while dressing, he'd heard the clink of free weights coming from the newly created workout room, and, a little too like Pavlov's dog for comfort, he'd gone there instead.

Tobias had a weakness for watching Noah exercise. Noah had kept himself in insanely good shape after leaving the police force, maybe even better than he had done while working for the law. He tended to do a lot of work without his shirt on since his change of employment, and while he wasn't ripped and cut, he was certainly firm and tight. Tobias rarely missed a chance to look his fill.

"You're in here early," Tobias said, watching Noah's arms curl so his biceps flexed.

Noah glanced up at Tobias briefly, then back at his biceps. "Nine, ten," he counted out loud. "Good morning. Thirteen..." He grunted his way through fourteen and fifteen, his teeth clenched and his brow furrowed.

Tobias found he had more than a passing appreciation for Noah's intensity, and he smiled to himself as he felt desire lick up his spine. It never failed -- Noah and weights, that was all it took. Well, Noah and just about anything, but the weights were a sure thing.

"I can't sleep alone," Noah explained, still panting. "In that great big bed." He gave Tobias a suggestive wink as he set the dumbbells back in their rack. "Plus, I'm heading into town today." He patted his face with a towel and smiled mischievously.

"I know." Tobias tried not to sigh. Usually, he had no issue at all with Noah having a day off from his duties as Tobias' submissive. Usually, Noah wasn't all sweaty and glossy from working out on his day off. "Do you and Phan have plans?"

Phantom, Tobias could hear, was in the kitchen making breakfast. It was his day off as well, but Phan didn't seem to think that Tobias was capable of making his own breakfast. Though why toast needed the noisy rattle of a frying pan on a gas range, Tobias didn't know.

"We do." Noah approached Tobias slowly. "Breakfast," he said, just as something clattered in the kitchen, "which you've no doubt noticed, and then shopping and a downtown, greasy dinner. This would be why I need the extra workout." He leaned close and kissed Tobias lightly on the lips. "Are you going to miss us?"

"I always miss you. Well, usually. There are times I'd happily send Phan to town just so he'd stop pinging around the house and making it hard for me to get paperwork done." Tobias slipped his arms around Noah and kissed him again. "But I suppose he does have a valid point that I'm supposed to do that sort of thing in my office and not here."

"Well, you did insist that Bradford give you that swanky office at the club and a very sturdy desk to keep all that paperwork organized. I have to admit I don't think of the farm as work, either. I tend to leave that mentality at the club. But I'm just a sub; who am I to tell my Master where to do his work, right?"

Tobias snorted. "You do it all the time."

Noah grinned. "But I pay the price."

"One of these days, I'll stop letting you get whatever you want." Tobias barely kept himself from laughing. Noah teased, but he was never actually bad; if there was something to discuss, they handled things far better that way than with mental tug of war. They both liked the teasing, however, and Tobias would have been bored with compliant and malleable submissives.

Even if having two of them was a bit of a handful at times.