The Lawrence Browne Affair

by Cat Sebastian

  Georgie goggled. How the hell special could a sheep possibly be? Never in his life had he been so glad to have been raised in London by proper criminals rather than left to the care of rustics in a backwater like this. “Mrs. Kemp’s caul,” he said, rubbing his temples. “I daresay that was intended for another round of hexes or some such.”

  The vicar made a plaintive sound. “Precisely.”

  “Do you not have a Sunday school where people can be disillusioned of this nonsense?”

  Halliday muttered something to do with money and time.

  “In case any further members of your addlepated flock come to you with tales of the earl’s dark arts, do let them know that I have turned his lordship’s quarters inside out without finding anything even remotely suggestive of the occult.” He let each word drop with acid crispness.

  “Ah yes.” The vicar shifted in his seat. “Quite.”

  “Was this spate of dark magicks”—Georgie rolled his eyes—“what motivated you to have the earl’s mental competence looked into? I gather he’s been in much the same condition for years, so what precipitated this sudden interest?”

  “Well,” the vicar stammered. “I received a letter.”

  “A letter,” Georgie repeated, dread pooling in his stomach. “What kind of letter?”

  “It would seem that an, ah, interested party—a connection of Radnor’s heir—might seek to have the estate put into a trusteeship.”

  “To have Radnor declared incompetent and seize his property, you mean.”

  “I’m not certain, but that’s my fear.”

  That would destroy Radnor. A loud, unfamiliar courtroom would be hellish for him.

  “This is quite beyond what I’m capable of investigating,” Georgie all but spat. “If you were concerned for his lordship’s well-being, you ought to have called in a doctor. You ought to have had Radnor engage a solicitor.”

  “He would never have consented to any of that,” Halliday protested.

  “True,” Georgie conceded, but he was still furious. At the vicar, at this unknown relation of Radnor’s heir, at Jack for having sent him here in the first place. At Radnor, for making him care.

  “I daresay even a warlock’s money is as good as anyone else’s, so we’ll try to solve this problem in the usual way. I need men to drain the gardens on the east side of the castle. His lordship needs a dry trench, and right now he has what looks more like a canal. I don’t know what the going rate is, but I’ll double it.” He trusted that double wages would tempt even the most superstitious souls, especially in a year that had seen such a bad harvest. “If the tenants like him, that will go some distance in stopping gossip and perhaps silencing this relation of his.”

  The vicar nodded his assent, and Georgie took his leave as civilly as he could.

  Outside, the sun had nearly set. They were in the first week of December, and the days were getting short. The crescent moon was hardly visible through the fog, and Georgie had to pick his way carefully to the lane.

  So somebody was out to make Radnor look like a villain. That really was the only explanation Georgie could come up with that didn’t involve widespread lunacy. Somebody had decided to take advantage of the local belief that the Earls of Radnor were a bad lot and mix it all up with a dose of superstition. But who, and why?

  Mrs. Ferris knew something, and likely Janet too. He could wheedle the secret from Janet in the usual way—compliments, caresses, promises that would never be fulfilled—but he didn’t have the heart. She was harmless. Hell, she was becoming a friend.

  There went another one of his pigeonholes, toppled over into complete chaos.

  The lane was still muddy from the other night’s rainfall, and Georgie was going to have a devil of a time cleaning his boots when he got back to his room. Even marooned in Cornwall, he wasn’t going to go about in soiled boots. He tried to stay on the edge of the lane to avoid the wheel ruts and lessen the damage.

  Penkellis loomed in the distance. Lit from behind by the setting sun and reduced to a silhouette, it didn’t look half as bad as it did in daylight. The ruined wing was hardly visible, and it was too dark to count the boarded-up windows. Straight and tall, Radnor’s tower looked almost noble.

  He must have gotten distracted and forgotten to watch where he was going, because he had wandered off the lane, and the next thing he knew he had landed arse first in cold water.

  “Bleeding buggering Christ!” He must be in Radnor’s trench. That sodding ditch had been waist deep, and now he was sitting in it, wet to the shoulders in muddy, freezing water. Now what the hell was to become of his boots, to say nothing of the rest of his clothes? It wasn’t like he could nip over to the tailor and equip himself. Not likely in bloody Penkellis, where he couldn’t even guess the direction of the nearest actual town. “Fucking fuck—”

  “Turner!”

  Why the bloody hell was Radnor out here to witness his humiliation? Could he not be left to his muddy misery in peace? “What do you want, Radnor?”

  “To fish your skinny arse out of my trench.” And with that, Radnor stepped into the ditch and lifted Georgie against his chest, with one arm behind the knees and the other arm around Georgie’s back, as effortlessly as if Georgie were a newborn kitten. “Stop wriggling. There’s nothing about Penkellis that would be improved by the corpse of a secretary. Let me get you out of here.”

  Georgie might not be a great brute of a man like Radnor, but he was soaked to the bone, and his sodden topcoat alone had to add a stone to his weight. Nonetheless, Radnor climbed out of the trench without breaking stride. In any other context, Georgie would be content enough for the earl to demonstrate his strength upon Georgie’s person as much as the fellow liked, but being rescued from a ditch in such a sorry state was a bit much for his pride to take.

  “Hold on to my neck,” Radnor ordered, his mouth terribly close to Georgie’s ear.

  “Like hell I will. Put me down.”

  Radnor did so immediately, and Georgie landed on the ground with a revolting squish in his boots. He made a sound of disgust but kept walking.

  “Wait.” He noticed where the earl had brought him. “Why are we heading towards the kitchen door?” He wanted nothing more than to strip, climb into bed, and mourn the loss of his clothes. “Don’t tell me you’re suddenly concerned about the state of your carpets.”

  “So you can dry off.”

  “I can dry off in my own bedchamber, please and thank you.” His teeth were chattering, which made it hard to speak with the necessary sangfroid.

  “Aye, but I need to tell Janet to bring you a hot bath.”

  “What?”

  “You told me that was the proper procedure. The housemaid brings hot water for a bath lest one catch a chill.” Even in the dark, Georgie could tell that Radnor was having fun with this, the bastard.

  “Quite. That’s the procedure for earls, not for the rest of us.” Any acerbic dignity he was trying for was quite lost in the chattering of his teeth.

  “Doesn’t matter.” He held open the kitchen door and gestured for Georgie to enter.

  Georgie found himself turned over to the care of Mrs. Ferris. She took his coat and boots, promising to return them to some semblance of presentability. Janet was dispatched with pitchers of hot water to carry upstairs to Georgie’s bedchamber.

  When he turned around to thank Radnor, he found that the earl was gone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Georgie soaked until the water turned cold, trying to wait out the ruinous urge to towel himself off and promptly climb naked and uninvited into Radnor’s bed. It was tempting, the idea of Radnor’s warm body covering his own, pressing him heavily into the mattress.

  No, it was more than tempting. Apple tarts were tempting. New waistcoats were tempting. Stealing a gentleman’s hat was tempting.

  Radnor was disastrous.

  It was as if after a quarter of a century of blithely not giving a damn about anybody, he had accrued a surplus of damns to giv
e. First, old Mrs. Packingham, and now the earl.

  Right now, at the very moment he ought only to be thinking of how best to secure his own future and his family’s safety, he was instead so stupidly touched by the earl’s thoughtfulness in having a bloody bath drawn for him that he couldn’t even manage to wash himself without feeling that it was somehow Radnor’s hands rubbing the soap along his limbs, rinsing the mud out of his hair.

  Even now that the water was cold, he didn’t want to get out of the tub because this bath had been Radnor’s doing. The sad truth was that Georgie’s policy of not giving a damn had gone both ways. He knew how to charm and wheedle his way into almost any society, but once there he kept his marks at arm’s length; he kept his secrets and lies and any other vulnerabilities safe within a hard shell of indifference.

  And then Radnor had come along and turned his shell to mush, and his brain right along with it.

  As much as Georgie hated to admit it, it was, after all, pleasant to have somebody who wished to carry one out of a muddy mire, to ensure one was warm and cared for.

  Fucking pathetic, it was.

  Sighing, he toweled himself off and quickly stepped into a pair of loose trousers. No sooner had he pulled on a shirt than the door creaked slowly open behind him. He spun around, assuming it would be Janet come to fetch the bathwater, and for one mad moment hoping it was Radnor.

  Barnabus, tongue lolling, trotted through the door and hopped onto Georgie’s bed.

  Georgie snapped his fingers. “You. Out.” But the dog continued digging through the bedding. Moving to the doorway, Georgie patted his leg and whistled. That earned him a bored look from Barnabus, who arranged himself on the bed in a shaggy circle.

  “You’ve left no room for me.” As if the mongrel could be reasoned with. Force was out of the question, because Georgie couldn’t lift an eight-stone dog who didn’t want to cooperate. He took hold of an edge of the coverlet and tried to tug, but Barnabus only shifted to the exposed sheet, leaving Georgie with an armful of blanket and still no place to sleep.

  “Well, that didn’t work,” said a voice from behind him. It was Radnor, leaning against the door frame, one hand jammed into the pocket of his dressing gown and the other carrying a stack of books. “This is what happens when you make a practice of bribing a dog with bits of muffin. You earn yourself an acolyte.”

  “I’ll take an acolyte over a ravening beast any day.” Georgie had been fairly certain that if he kept the dog stuffed to the gills, he wouldn’t become the mongrel’s next meal.

  “He’s harmless,” the earl said unconvincingly. His dressing gown was parted at the neck, revealing a triangle of dark hair.

  Georgie suddenly felt exposed. Unlike the earl, Georgie was not accustomed to going about in shirtsleeves. But Radnor’s gaze drifted downward and lingered at Georgie’s chest, and then lower, as if he liked what he saw.

  And god damn it, but Georgie’s nipples went hard. A shiver of awareness traveled through his body.

  “You’re cold,” Radnor said, a wrinkle appearing between his eyebrows.

  “Oh. Yes. Quite.” It wasn’t a lie, even though cold had nothing to do with Georgie’s shiver.

  Radnor deposited the books on a table, then poked the fire and added a log. “This room is drafty.”

  “The entirety of Penkellis is drafty, my lord. That’s what comes of not having the windows replaced or the chimneys repaired in a century or two.”

  The earl shrugged. “I don’t feel the cold as much as you do. It’s a matter of surface area. I have less surface relative to mass compared to you.”

  Georgie raised his eyebrows. “Indeed you do.” He let his gaze rake up and down over some of that surface area. And who could blame him?

  “With the result that less heat escapes through my skin than does through yours.”

  Really, it wasn’t possible to listen to this kind of talk with any semblance of equanimity. Surface area, mass—bugger it all to hell. There was no reason all this learned flimflam ought to go straight to Georgie’s cock, but it did so anyway.

  “Perhaps you could extract your dog so I can sleep in my bed.” Georgie’s voice was sharp, with no finesse whatsoever.

  And Radnor did precisely that. He didn’t need to be told twice when it came to Georgie’s comfort, did he? With one fluid movement and a ripple of flexing muscles visible through his threadbare dressing gown, he scooped the dog against his chest and headed for the door.

  “Oh, before I forget,” Radnor said over his shoulder, “I brought you some books.”

  “Books?”

  “You were disappointed to find that the books in the library are unreadable. I found some novels in my own collection.” He gestured to the pile of books he had placed on the table.

  “How did you know I like novels?” And who would have guessed that Radnor had a collection, of all things?

  “A guess,” Radnor said. “Good night.”

  “No.” Georgie winced at the stupidity he was about to commit. “Stop. Put Barnabus by the fire.”

  Radnor regarded Georgie over the dog’s head. “I hadn’t realized you had taken a fancy to the dog, Mr. Turner. Hear that, Barnabus? Your affections are returned, you lucky fellow.” He crouched to set the dog on the thin rug that sat before the hearth. “I was out walking with him when he saw you tumble into the ditch, you know. It was too dark for me to see, but when he saw you fall he gave a howl and ran off towards you.” He was still crouched, petting his dog, and looked up at Georgie with the faintest hint of a smile. “I’m afraid he scarpered when he realized he wouldn’t get any biscuits.”

  “Quite right,” Georgie managed, trying to put some acid into his voice just for show. “If he had come whimpering for sweeties, I would have pulled him into the ditch beside me.”

  “Mean-spirited of you.” The earl was now smiling outright, a curve of soft lips set in his beard, and Georgie shivered again as he remembered the feel of both against his skin. Radnor’s unearthly pale blue eyes were in on the joke, crinkling warmly at the corners. “You still look cold.”

  Georgie shook his head. “I’m not bloody cold, Radnor.”

  “Oh? You look—”

  “I’m not cold.” The man didn’t know enough to distinguish cold from arousal, and Georgie could not let that stand. “Come here.”

  “Pardon?” He rose to his feet, plainly bewildered.

  “I’m going to show you that I’m not cold.”

  Understanding dawned across Radnor’s face. His eyebrows flew up, but he didn’t come any closer. “Are you, now?”

  Peeved, Georgie folded his arms across his chest. “Well, if you’ll let me.”

  “Over the last few days you haven’t acted like someone who wanted me within ten yards of him, let alone—”

  “I’ve been awful, I know.” Georgie ran an anxious hand through his damp hair. “I don’t have my head on straight when it comes to you, to be frank.”

  “I see,” the earl said, his voice a trifle hoarse. He clenched his fists, his body rigid.

  “Come here,” Georgie repeated, knowing he was on the verge of disaster and proceeding anyway.

  The room was small and Radnor crossed it in two strides. Georgie could feel the heat coming from the bigger man’s body. And then Georgie was being hauled against the earl’s chest, and he had never felt as safe and totally imperiled as he did at that moment.

  So Turner liked being pressed against trees and walls and what have you. Lawrence could do that. He could and would press the man into any surface the fellow pleased. He shoved Turner against the closed door of his shabby, drafty bedchamber. Turner’s mouth opened for him, or maybe it was his own mouth opening for Turner, but regardless, the end result was a hot slide of tongue over tongue, and a whimper from the other man’s mouth.

  But that whimper didn’t mean pain, or if it did, Turner didn’t seem to mind, because he kept on.

  Lawrence let his hands roam over the other man’s back, tugging Turner’s shi
rt up by the handful to reach cool, smooth skin. The sight of his secretary in a rare state of dishabille, an elegant hand on one slim hip, arguing with a sleeping dog, had charmed Lawrence to the core of his being. He wanted to touch and admire every inch of the man, and was about 90 percent certain that this was exactly what Turner wanted as well, that what they were doing was right and sane and good. But that remaining 10 percent was terrifying.

  That balance of uncertainty was where Lawrence’s madness lay, whatever wires in his mind were prone to short circuits. But Turner seemed to understand that, because a second later his shirt was simply gone, and he tilted his head to the side, presenting Lawrence with an expanse of soft neck to kiss. Lawrence complied, pressing his lips against the curve where neck met shoulder. Turner sighed, and Lawrence let his mouth drift upwards, to the soft underside of the other man’s jaw, surprisingly rough with stubble. He licked the place where the stubble began and heard a faint gasp.

  Against his own hip, he felt the pressure of Turner’s erection. Oh, thank God. He had been feeling like a rutting dog, walking around with a full cockstand scarcely concealed by his dressing gown, but if Turner was in the same condition then it could hardly be objectionable, could it?

  Lawrence lowered his hands, cupping Turner’s arse and pulling him higher and closer, letting him feel how hard Lawrence was. Then Turner’s legs were wrapped around Lawrence’s waist, and he was pinned between the wall behind him and Lawrence’s own oversized frame in front of him. But he seemed to like it—he was responding to Lawrence’s tentative thrusts with his own.

  “Just like this,” he gasped.

  Lawrence felt his dressing gown being pushed out of the way, and then the press of skin against skin, chest against chest. Turner’s deft hands were everywhere, as if he were trying to learn the topography of Lawrence’s chest by touch alone. He felt his secretary’s efficient fingers trace the outline of muscles in a way that sent desire spiraling down to his cock. Then—oh Jesus—Turner’s index finger drew a circle around one of Lawrence’s nipples.