by Emily Larkin
“Couple of hours.”
Lucas flicked back a page and there was his cock—just his cock—rising from its nest of hair, thick and sturdy.
Lucas’s thoughts lurched to a halt. His lips parted in horror. His gaze jerked to Tom.
Tom was eyeing him warily.
Lucas looked back down at the drawing and felt a surge of anger. A violation of privacy, that’s what this sketch was.
“I wanted to draw you while I remembered how you looked,” Tom said, in a neutral voice.
Lucas swallowed, and tried to tamp down his anger. “Why?”
“Because you’re fucking magnificent.”
His gaze jerked back to Tom’s.
“You’d put Goliath to shame.”
Lucas felt himself blush. He hastily closed the sketchbook.
“You’ve a cock like an ox’s, Lu.”
Lucas felt his blush spread, down his throat, to the tips of his ears, across his scalp. He thrust the sketchbook at Tom. “Well, yours looks like it’s wearing a helmet.”
Tom’s brow creased. “What?”
“It looks like it’s wearing a helmet,” Lucas muttered. “You know, one of those Greek ones. Corinthian.” Take the damned sketchbook.
Tom stopped looking wary. His eyes lit with laughter. “I’m going to call it that from now on: the Corinthian.” He took the sketchbook and flipped to a new page. “And I’m calling yours the Ox.”
Lucas reached for his tankard and took a hasty swallow. The ale was lukewarm and flat. He gulped another mouthful, and sat at the table. A pile of smaller sketchbooks caught his eye. He took one at random and hastily thumbed through it. Portugal.
He slowed, turning the pages, looking at the sketches of soldiers. Was Tom’s colonel one of these men? He flicked over a page—and halted. Good-looking, Tom had said. Clever. Brave. Liked to joke. “This is him, isn’t it?” Jealousy roughened his voice. “Your colonel.”
“Armagh sold out before Portugal.” Tom plucked the sketchbook from Lucas’s hand, glanced at the page, and gave it back. “That’s Major Reid. He was a damned good soldier, too. One of the best.”
“Was?” Lucas looked at the strong, handsome, laughing face captured in a few slashing pencil strokes. “He died?”
“He sold out after Vimeiro,” Tom said, and his tone held an odd note.
Lucas glanced at him. “What happened?”
Tom hesitated, and then shrugged. “Reid was an exploring officer. Reconnaissance. He used to go behind enemy lines in uniform.”
“In uniform? But . . . wasn’t that dangerous?”
Tom laughed. “Extremely dangerous.” And then he grimaced.
“What?”
“They caught him. The French. Just before Vimeiro.”
Lucas looked down at the handsome, laughing face Tom had sketched.
“We got him back the next day, but . . . they’d been a bit rough with him.”
“That’s why he sold out?”
“He sold out because he got the fever and it nearly killed him. Damned shame.” Tom sighed, and looked at the litter of sketchbooks on the table. “I’m starving. Want to go downstairs and eat?”
* * *
That evening, when Lucas retired to his bedchamber, he didn’t suggest Tom remain in the taproom; instead, he diffidently said: “I’m going upstairs if . . . if you want to come?”
They went up the stairs together, and undressed together, and climbed into Lucas’s bed together, and then the afternoon replayed itself: the bruising kisses, their cocks dueling in Tom’s hand, the dizzying orgasm.
Lucas woke in the dark, cold hours of early morning. He lay on his side and Tom was curled around him, holding him, and he had the same feeling of being safe and warm and protected that he’d sometimes had when he was a child.
He quietly cataloged the sensations: Tom’s breath feathering across the nape of his neck. Tom’s warm, solid chest pressed to his back. Tom’s arm heavy and possessive around his waist. Tom’s legs half-entwined with his.
The sense of warmth and safety deepened. Contentment stirred in Lucas’s blood and he knew—just as he’d known that afternoon—that he’d never been as happy as he was right now, in this cozy nest of a bed.
He laid his hand over Tom’s and interlaced their fingers and slid back into sleep. When he next woke it was daylight and Tom was gone. Only a dent in the pillow showed where he’d been.
Chapter Nine
October 10th, 1808
Whiteoaks, Wiltshire
Tom hadn’t visited Whiteoaks in more than two years. It hadn’t changed: a glittering, sharp-edged marble palace surrounded by perfectly sculpted parkland.
The curricle’s arrival brought Kemps hurrying down the long sweep of marble stairs.
Lucas’s oldest brother Robert—who’d inherited the palace a decade ago—wrung his hand enthusiastically and Robert’s wife, Almeria, embraced him and kissed him on each cheek, and their children pressed forward, half-shy, half-eager, calling him Uncle Tom.
It felt almost like coming home. He’d spent months of his life at Whiteoaks—practically every holiday while he was at school and university, almost every furlough since joining the army. He climbed the familiar stairs and entered the familiar bedchamber, the bedchamber he’d always had, across from Lucas’s, with a view over the park. When he stepped into the room he had the oddest sensation that the clock had turned back and he was eight years old again, accompanying Lucas home from Eton for the first time.
Tom stripped off his gloves and turned on his heel, and drank in the quiet grandeur of the room—the silk-covered walls, the four-poster bed with its blue and silver hangings, the Aubusson carpet, the moonlit landscape by Joseph Wright above the fireplace—and then he mentally placed it alongside the memory of his room at Riddleston Hall, small and dark and shabby, and gave a soft laugh. And Lucas wondered why I never invited him home.
But it hadn’t been just the shabbiness; it had been his father, too—the flaring rages, the drunkenness.
Tom grimaced, and turned to the footman who’d been detailed to wait on him. “I’d like a bath, please, Joseph.”
After the bath, Tom visited his favorite room at Whiteoaks: the gallery. He had to traverse almost a quarter of a mile of corridors to get there, but every staircase and every corner held memories. Here was the alcove where he and Lucas had hidden to ambush Julia and her cousin, Tish; and there the window seat from where Tish and Julia had ambushed them in return; this was the staircase whose banister they’d all slid down, shrieking; and that the door they’d tried to balance a bucket of water on top of—and failed; and over there was the window from which all four of them had watched Robert propose to Almeria in the garden. That last memory was the oldest of the lot, nineteen years ago now.
By the time he reached the long gallery, Tom’s mood was verging on melancholy. So many memories—and all of them with Julia in them. He almost expected to hear her voice echoing gaily in the corridors, almost expected to hear her rapid footsteps, her irrepressible laugh. A door opened ahead and a woman emerged, and for a brief, disorienting moment he saw her as Julia—and then he blinked and realized it was a housemaid.
The housemaid gave him a startled look and a curtsy.
Tom dipped his head in return, and stepped into the gallery, and paused. Paintings. Hundreds of paintings.
He exhaled slowly, and began an unhurried circuit, the landscapes first, and then, when he couldn’t avoid it any longer, the portraits.
The Kemps had a strong family likeness: large-boned, fair-haired, handsome. Here was the nabob who’d amassed such an extraordinary fortune in India, here was the son who’d married into the gentry and produced eight children, and here were the eight children, from Robert down to Lucas and Julia.
Julia looked like a changeling, a dark-haired little pixie in a family of blond giants.
Tom halted in front of the painting of Lucas and Julia. As portraits went, it was a fairly good one. Julia was prettier than she�
��d been in reality, but portraitists tended to do that: make eyes more lustrous, hair glossier, teeth pearlier. A subtle flattery that injured no one.
There’d been no need to enhance Lucas’s appearance; he already looked like a Greek god made flesh.
Other than Julia’s prettiness there were no flaws to the portrait—except that it was flat. There was no sense at all of who Lucas and Julia were. The artist had failed to capture Lucas’s quiet reserve and Julia’s vivacity. They might as well have been wax effigies, not people.
Tom stepped closer and examined the two faces. Lucas and Julia hadn’t looked like siblings, let alone twins—except when they smiled, and then the similarity leapt to one’s eye. But if the artist had seen that fleeting likeness, he’d been unable to render it on the canvas. All the portrait showed was how unalike Lucas and Julia had been. Lucas tall, Julia short. Lucas brawny, Julia slight. Lucas golden-haired and blue-eyed, Julia dark.
Their differences had gone deeper than mere appearance; they’d been opposites, two halves of a whole—Julia, exuberant and full of mischief, her tongue running on wheels, enjoying being the center of attention, delighting in making people laugh; Lucas quiet and steady and watchful. Julia messy, shedding hair-pins and tearing flounces; Lucas immaculate. Julia always plunging into trouble; Lucas rescuing her. It was Julia who’d fallen into the lake; Lucas who’d pulled her out. Julia who’d climbed a tree Lucas had deemed unsafe; Lucas who carried her home when she’d tumbled from it. It wasn’t that Lucas lacked courage—he’d climbed a much higher tree—but he considered his risks before he took them, whereas Julia, spontaneous and reckless, had never considered risks at all.
And she had died because of that recklessness—putting an unfamiliar horse at a fence it couldn’t jump, something Lucas would never do. Lucas had never overfaced a horse in his life; he had too much good sense, too much innate caution.
Tom stared soberly at the portrait. Twins, and yet so different. Gravity and Levity, someone had dubbed them once, but as sobriquets went, it had missed its mark. Lucas liked to laugh, he just did it more quietly than Julia. He’d done everything more quietly than Julia.
Tom studied the painting. This isn’t how I would have painted them. In his portrait Julia would have been at the center, talking animatedly, not pretty, but lively, her hands outflung expressively, and Lucas would have been off to one side, leaning against the wall, smiling as he watched, his pride in her clear to read on his face.
Two halves of a whole—and now Julia was dead.
Chapter Ten
Lucas ate his dinner without tasting it. The feeling that he was missing a limb, that part of him had been amputated, was back.
For the past sixteen months he’d carried that feeling with him—and for four days it had gone. Four days when his every thought and emotion had revolved around Tom: panic and shame, passion and guilt, and happiness. All wiped away, now that he was back at Whiteoaks.
He ate mechanically, smiled mechanically, spoke mechanically, aware of Robert watching him out of the corner of his eye and Almeria sending him worried glances.
Tom was worried, too. Lucas could see it on his face. There was no merriment in those green eyes tonight.
Lucas chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, and finally dinner was over. Almeria and the girls withdrew. The brandy and port were placed on the table.
“When’s everyone else arriving?” Tom asked.
Lucas listened with half an ear, sipping his brandy, wishing he could drink the whole bottle and then climb the stairs to his bed and pull the covers over his head and sleep forever. A name caught his attention. “Tish? When does she get here?”
“Next month,” Robert said.
Lucas nodded, and looked at the brandy decanter, and resolutely didn’t pour himself another glass.
“Shall we join the ladies?” Robert said.
They filed out of the dining room. Tom caught Lucas’s wrist, halting him. “Lu, are you all right?”
No. He felt numb, frozen, as if everything inside him had congealed. “Perfectly,” he said.
“No, you’re not.”
“Tired,” Lucas said.
“It’s more than that.” Tom touched the back of Lucas’s hand, a light, fleeting caress.
A surge of panic broke through the numbness. Lucas recoiled, his heart hammering. “Not here. Someone will see.” And he turned and almost ran to the drawing room.
* * *
Tom tried to speak with him again before bed, halting him in the corridor outside their rooms. “Lu—”
“Not here! Someone might see!”
“There’s no one here. Look, empty.” Tom gestured along the corridor in both directions.
“Someone might come,” Lucas said stubbornly.
Tom ignored this comment. His expression was uncharacteristically grim. “Something’s wrong. Is it Julia?”
Lucas turned his head away. Of course it’s Julia.
Tom took his hand. “Lu . . .”
“Not here!” Lucas tore his hand free and shoved Tom away so hard that he almost fell over. He wrenched open the door to his room and fled inside, slamming it shut behind him. His breath was rapid and shallow, panicked.
“Sir?” Smollet said, lifting his eyebrows.
Lucas caught his breath. He essayed a stiff smile and an attempt at cheerfulness. “Lord, I’m tired.”
* * *
Lucas’s second-oldest brother, Hugh, arrived the next morning with his wife. His youngest sister, Sophia, and her husband and children and two nursemaids arrived later that afternoon. Tom tried three times to speak privately with him, but each time Lucas pushed him away. I shouldn’t have brought him here. He’ll betray us.
The next morning, he hid in the library with a book, but Tom found him there. “Look, Lu—”
“No!” Lucas said, pushing past him, heading for the door.
Tom caught his wrist in a grip like an iron manacle. “For God’s sake, stop running away!”
Lucas tried to jerk free.
Tom tightened his grip, digging his fingers in painfully.
“Let go of me!” Lucas hissed. His numb grief was gone; in its place was panic. “Hugh’s a clergyman.”
“So?”
“So, if he sees us—”
“If he sees us he won’t think twice about it. He’s seen us together thousands of times.” Impatience was tight on Tom’s face, making him look sterner, older. “We’re going riding this afternoon. Just you and I. Two o’clock.”
Lucas shook his head.
“For Christ’s sake, Lu, if we don’t spend time together people will think something’s wrong.” Tom released his wrist, and poked him in the sternum with hard fingers, pushing Lucas back a step. “Riding. At two.”
* * *
Lucas reluctantly went riding at two o’clock. The horse caught his tension once he’d mounted, prancing and sidling in the stableyard, but Tom made no attempt to talk, setting the pace first at a brisk trot, and then a canter. By the time they reached the Marlborough Downs, Lucas felt the tension in his muscles starting to unravel.
The downs were good galloping country. They rode hard, not talking, and when they finally pulled up, Lucas felt more himself than he had in months.
Tom came up alongside him—not too close, not too far—and Lucas was abruptly ashamed of the way he’d behaved the past two days. Whatever else Tom was to him, he was his best friend.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “I needed that.”
Tom nodded.
They rode back more slowly, dropped down off the downs into the Whiteoaks park, trotted through the winter-bare bluebell dell, jumped the stream. “I want to take a look at the folly,” Tom said. “Do you mind?”
Lucas shook his head.
Whiteoaks’ folly sat atop an outcrop of rock amid several acres of woodland, a little ruined castle with a dungeon and a tumbledown tower and a secret passage. They left the horses at the bottom and climbed the steps to the grassy courty
ard.
Lucas felt his mood darken. They’d spent hours playing here as children, he and Tom, Julia and Tish. Hide-and-seek, ambushes, battles, play-acting. The great stone walls still seemed to echo with their voices. If he listened hard enough, maybe he’d hear Julia.
“The dungeon still got those ridiculous chains?” Tom asked.
Lucas nodded.
They clattered down the stairs to the dungeon, where daylight shone in through an iron grille, illuminating heavy chains dangling on one wall. Tom uttered a half-laugh and shook his head. “So faux.” And then he turned to Lucas and the amusement drained from his face and something fierce and intent took its place. “Right.”
Lucas took a wary step backwards. “Right, what?”
“This,” Tom said, and then it was the Brook Street Mews all over again: Tom shoving him back against the wall, kissing him until Lucas could no longer think, then kneeling and sucking him to an orgasm so intense he saw stars.
Lucas leaned against the wall afterwards, trembling, dazed. Dimly, he was aware of Tom still at his feet, refastening his breeches. His thoughts lurched and staggered in his head as if he was drunk. Jesus. He slid bonelessly down the wall until he sat alongside Tom.
Tom put an arm around him and pulled him close.
Lucas rested his head on Tom’s shoulder. He felt like an egg that someone had broken. He was in a million pieces. A million tiny pieces. He drew in a shaking breath. It hitched in his throat, caught in his chest—and then, to his horror, he started to cry.
Tom tightened his grip. “It’s all right, Lu. It’s all right.”
Lucas cried harder than he’d ever cried in his life, so hard he could barely breathe, and Tom held him, and rocked him, and whispered, It’s all right, Lu. It’s all right.
Finally, the tears stopped, but he didn’t pull away, and Tom didn’t stop holding him. His breathing steadied, the tears dried on his cheeks, and still they sat, huddled against the wall in the dungeon. “I felt her die,” Lucas whispered. “I was on my way back from Marlborough, and I felt it. I knew. I knew she was dead.”
