His Lordship's Downfall: The Complete Edition

by Josie Litton

  He almost hated her at that moment, that she would lie to him. What could be the purpose of that?

  “We’re all just human,” she said. “Alone, often afraid. We carve out islands for ourselves and cling to them grimly but that only makes us weaker. Whether we want to admit it or not, we need each other.”

  He didn’t, most definitely, yet still he persevered, not wanting to but still driven to know all of it.

  “But you did accept a contract--with me. Why?”

  The violet gown was still up around her thighs. She smoothed it down and took a breath, gathering herself.

  “They showed me your file. It was one of several I was given to study. They keep them on prospective clients; it’s amazing how detailed they are. I didn’t care about the others. I was…drawn to you. Who you are, what you wanted of me. You struck a chord. I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

  Another man might have been placated. He might have been even a short time before. But not then. He clung to the armor of his cynicism even as he suspected that not even it would be enough to protect him from her.

  Harshly, he said, “And that was all it took? Lust and curiosity, the sudden urge to let your darker side out for a bit of a romp?”

  “No, I would never have had the nerve. There was something else…”

  “Indeed? What about me could possibly have enticed you?”

  She took his hand in a gesture that he realized with a jolt was meant to be comforting. Meeting his gaze, she said the one thing that he was utterly unprepared to hear.

  “I know you were in Birmingham, Adrian. I know what you did there.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  They’d put them all, the young stalwarts rushed up from London, in a hotel a mile or more from the explosion. On the main floor, three conference rooms were knocked together to give them sufficient space to work. Desks, phones, computers, all were moved in overnight.

  The idea was that they would muster resources, deploy them where needed, field inquiries and the like. Instead, it all quickly degenerated into chaos.

  None of them had a clue of what to do. Their privileged births had not, it turned out, endowed them with superior wisdom and reason. They had not been gifted in the cradle with innate moral authority. Nor had the playing fields of Eton transformed them into leaders whom other men would willingly follow.

  People came and went, shouting orders that more often than not were contradictory. Frantic pleas were heard but not responded to. Television cameras were brought in to show the masses that Something Was Being Done. But in fact nothing was.

  Rage built up in him so slowly that he wasn’t aware of it until it was close to exploding. He heard himself at one point, shouting down the phone line, wanting to smash his fist into the face of the man at the other end. Finally, he realized that he couldn’t stay in that room, couldn’t be as helpless and useless as all those other men.

  He remembered going out into the street, following the smell and the sounds, until he came to a pile of still smoking rubble where rescue workers were digging. Someone handed him a hard-hat and a shovel.

  He dug, how long he didn’t know. Three days, more? Sleeping a few hours here and there on the ground. Eating whatever was handed to him, when he could stomach eating anything at all. Working alongside the other men, communication down to grunts, gestures, and the occasional curt, sensible direction. Thank god there had been some there who knew what had to be done and how to do it.

  They pulled four out alive--a child, two men, and a young woman. Also, a dog. All the rest--dozens more, mostly in pieces--went into the body bags.

  By the end, he could not have recognized himself. Covered with ash, hollow eyed, haunted. A canteen had been set up in a nearby church. He remembered stumbling into it, staring at the altar, struggling not to cry and failing.

  After that, it was all a bit of a blur. He didn’t recall returning to London. He did remember standing in the shower in the master suite of his town residence for a long time while wrenching sobs shook him.

  They were still conducting raids and rounding up suspects when he went back to work at the Home Office. To his surprise, there was no reprimand for walking out on his assigned duties. No acknowledgement either for what he had done. But a fortnight later, he was transferred to the Exchequer, a massive promotion leaping him over the heads of his peers, marking him as a man on the way up.

  In the aftermath, he sealed himself off. Refused to feel. Did his job with cool, ruthless expertise, making damn sure that he did know how to do it. He would never again be caught short like that. Women, sex, a growing list of more extreme preferences insulated him. He had a purpose, service to the empire. He didn’t need anything else.

  “I saw a photograph of you,” Jane said, “taken when you were helping one of the crews that were searching for survivors. You looked so young and overwhelmed but you were trying. That was what struck me. You were determined to help.”

  “You’re making too much of it,” he said. They were in the Rolls on the way back to the manor. He was still reeling from her admission. From their beginning, he had tried his level best to deny her humanity. All the while she was seeing his as no one else had ever done.

  With no idea of how to deal with that, he made a half-hearted effort to deflect it. “I doubt I was of any real use.”

  “You found a young woman. The report said you crawled into the wreckage when you heard her moaning, despite the threat that it would come down on top of you. You stayed with her for hours before a way was found to get her out.”

  “She lost her leg.”

  “But she’s alive. She’s married and has two children now. Did you know that?”

  He shook his head. “I never knew her name.”

  Jane leaned against him. In the soft exhalation of her breath, he heard the acceptance of what he had never had the courage to acknowledge.

  “It hurts more when you know their names,” she said just before she nodded off.

  ∞∞∞

  Several days passed. Life took on an odd kind of normality. The gold sheath was gone, the cage returned. He slept on the floor of the room that Jane had made her own, on a mattress beside the bed. He told himself that he missed the dogs but in fact he liked hearing her soft breathing in the night.

  She continued to torment him but he sensed that her heart was no longer in it. Time was passing too swiftly; the month would be up before they knew it.

  Birmingham stood between them, a chasm he couldn’t cross. He knew now what she wanted--for him to feel. To acknowledge that he cared. To recognize the humanity of others and in the process to accept his own.

  He couldn’t do it. Partly, he was afraid but mostly he didn’t know how to. If he’d had wings to carry him across the chasm, the truth was that he would have used them. But he was earthbound.

  What would he do when she left?

  He didn’t want to think about that either.

  It all came to a head on a moonlit night after she walked away from the dinner they shared but scarcely ate. He thought he saw tears in her eyes and almost followed her. Fool pride and the simple sense of being in over his head stopped him.

  She didn’t come to bed. He fell asleep finally on the floor, missing her.

  And woke to the realization that he was no longer alone. Jane, clad only in moonlight, soft, warm, arousingly familiar, lay pressed to his side, the soft curves of her breasts against his back.

  He imagined her coming into the room, removing her clothes, kneeling down on the floor, stretching out next to him. Her arm curled over his chest, a slim leg entwined with his own. He could feel the strong, steady beat of her heart.

  Neither of them spoke at first. What was there to say? He distrusted words and suspected that she understood their power to deceive even more than he did.

  Her touch was feather light, drifting down his chest, over his abdomen to his groin. He held his breath when she came to the cage.

  Softly, she said, “I ha
ted when you wouldn’t let me come.”

  He thought back over those weeks, trying to recollect what had driven him to treat her so harshly. Thinking, too, of what she had said when he awoke to the consequences.

  Staring off into the darkness, he asked, “Have I become less toad-like since then, do you think?”

  He felt her smile against his skin. “That’s for you to say.”

  Slowly, he said, “Not too long ago, I told myself that you--being a woman and of the lower classes--could not possibly have felt the loss of reason and control anywhere nearly as acutely as I did.”

  “And now? Do you still believe that?”

  His lordship gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I’d certainly like to. Life would be so much simpler. But the truth is that you’ve seen the worst the world can do yet you still have the courage to face it head on and believe that it can be better.”

  “I’ve never felt that I had much choice.”

  “But you do just as everyone does. There’s always the choice to retreat into mindless pursuits, drugs, obsession with one ideology or another, whatever. Those islands you spoke of. I’ve done it myself in various ways.”

  He was silent for a moment before he added, “I began to suspect that my assumptions about you were wrong not when you knocked me out, caged my cock and chained me to the bed, although that was all certainly a clue. No, it took the discovery that you knew who Marcus Aurelius was. You had sought out knowledge instead of it being spoon-fed to you as it was to me. A wiser man would have grasped the implications of that at once. But even then, I resisted seeing you for who you really are.”

  Having started talking, sharing the thoughts that had been growing irresistibly in his mind, he found it difficult to stop.

  “You’re brave, insanely so--”

  “You admire courage.”

  “I can’t help it; the instinct to do so is bred into me. At any rate, I can’t escape the conclusion that since the tables were turned, as it were, you’ve behaved better and more decently than I deserve.”

  Softly, against his back, she said, “Do you mean that?”

  Not facing her somehow made it easier to confess to the shame he felt. What a singularly unpleasant sensation that was, made all the more so because it was richly deserved.

  “What I did was excessive. And cruel. I’m sorry.”

  He had said a great deal over the course of his life for mere effect--to manipulate, persuade, mislead, even to destroy. This was not one of those times. To his surprise--and even with a sense of relief--he spoke what he truly felt.

  Not that she was satisfied by that. Of course not. She was Jane and if there was one thing he could count on, it was that she wouldn’t go easy on him.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked.

  He took a breath, let it go and felt a crack opening up inside himself, letting in light where there had been none for far too long.

  “I suppose it comes down to the fact that I wanted--needed--some sense of being in control of something, really of anything. The truth is that I haven’t felt that way in years. Not since Birmingham, I think. And it’s been getting worse. There are days when I feel as though I’m living inside that poem Yeats wrote. You know the one.”

  It no longer surprised him that she would. On the contrary, he was counting on it.

  Quietly, she said, “‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold--’”

  Just as softly, he added, “‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned’. Not a pretty picture for the future of the world, is it?”

  “Is that what you think we’re heading toward?”

  “You said as much. How did you put it, hell in a handbasket? Colorful but that doesn’t mean you aren’t right.”

  “When I said that, you denied it.”

  “Of course, I did. No man wants to admit that his world is coming apart. Much less that he has no idea how to stop it.”

  They were silent for a moment, his lordship contemplating the strange sensation of confiding in someone with all the intimacy of connection that implied. He couldn’t remember when he had last done so.

  “No man can deal with something like that alone,” Jane said.

  “I was absent the day they taught trusting in others.”

  So softly that he almost missed it, she said, “Perhaps we can remedy that.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Adrian stiffened, aware of Jane’s hand moving once again, stroking down his back and over the hard-packed muscles of his ass. A tremor ran through him as she lifted his sac and gently stroked the pads of her thumbs over the sensitive skin beneath it.

  After what seemed like an eternity of denial, the sensation was almost unbearable. He could feel his balls drawing up as his cock swelled in its cage. A gasp slipped from him only to turn into a full-throated groan when she reached around, deftly undid the lock and released him. At once, pre-cum spurted from his crest.

  His heartbeat pulsed in his ears as she gathered the moisture into her palm and fisted him, stroking up and down his length with silken caresses. Softly, she murmured, “Hold on, all right? Just a little longer.”

  He heard the soft snap of a lid and caught the scent of lube. The instinct to protest rose up in him but he choked it back. He was on a precipice, dangling over the chasm. If he was ever going to fly, now was the moment.

  But to do so, he had to let go. Jane had brought him to the very edge but the final choice was his. He was a virile male in his prime. However much he relied on the keenness of his mind, his sense of himself was still largely physical. No surprise then that if he was ever to let down his guard and truly let another person in, that intimacy would have to be of the flesh as much as the spirit.

  Even understanding that, a strangled cry almost broke from him when she traced the cleft of his ass before the pad of her finger pressed lightly into it. Gently, she began to touch him, the slow, circular motions at once tantalizing and arousing even as they avoided what he had to assume was her ultimate target.

  Distantly, he was struck by the fact that she wasn’t in the least clumsy or uncertain. On the contrary, she showed every sign of knowing exactly what she was doing. That eased at least some of his anxiety. Clearly, Jane had made extensive use of those books he had so thoughtfully provided for her.

  Several times, she stopped to add more lube before resuming her erotic massage. Gradually, he became aware of her finger pushing very lightly against his anus. His muscles tensed only to relax a little when she gently cupped his sac with her free hand.

  On a breath of sound, she murmured, “If you want me to stop, all you have to do is shake your head.”

  He felt her heartbeat matching his own, felt the sweetness in her and the strength. A part of him stood aside, shocked at what he was allowing. But the rest, the core of him, could not draw back. Nothing lay behind him but a barren past. If there was any way forward, it required trusting the one person who had been able to pierce the barriers he had erected around himself.

  After several moments, during which he remained resolutely still, she resumed caressing him. Her lips brushed along the back of his neck and over the broad curve of his shoulder. The light nip of her teeth against his deltoid muscle sent a burst of pleasure through him powerful enough to almost, if not quite obscure the moment when she slid her finger into him.

  Almost at once, she stopped, giving him time to become accustomed to the novel sensation of being penetrated. Even to such a small degree, it was startling in the extreme. He had never been interested in receiving anal play; never imagined that he ever could be. Yet here, with Jane…

  “Breathe,” she murmured and slipped her finger a little deeper.

  His cock was throbbing, his balls so tightly drawn up that he had to struggle to inhale. His hands fisted into the covers, fighting the overwhelming temptation to take hold of her, flip her onto her back and grind himse
lf into her.

  The impulse wavered as she began to lightly stroke the ultra-sensitive part of him that she so unerringly found. No bigger than a walnut, it held--even more than his cock--the secret to bringing him to explosive release. Or not.

  Cruel goddess that she was, she varied the pressure and rhythm of her touch, holding him in thrall. He could feel himself building to an orgasm of cataclysmic proportions and felt a flicker of fear that he truly would shatter. There would be nothing left of him except the fragments of the man he had not become.

  Yet when the culmination came, it was unlike any he had ever experienced. Not a sudden, wrenching eruption of pleasure but a long, sustained series of peaks that went on and on, one cascading into the next.

  He barely noticed when her finger was replaced by something larger. It only served to intensify his pleasure.

  The barriers that had kept him even from himself dissolved. He felt with a raw, unrestrained joy that burned everything else away. As he shuddered to his final release, he was aware only of Jane’s arms around him, her breath warm on his skin, her voice the soft murmur that eased him into dreamless sleep.

  ∞∞∞

  His lordship woke to the twittering of larks in the bushes beyond the bedroom windows and a faint sense of tenderness in the area of his bum. Prompted by the dual realization that it was morning and that he had allowed himself to be fucked in the ass the previous night, he hastened to rise.

  Only then did he discover that he was no longer sleeping on the floor. Craning his head, he observed that the other side of the large four-poster bed--the very one where he had awakened a fortnight before in such distress--was unoccupied. On a happier note, it at least showed signs of having been slept in. When he leaned closer, he could just catch Jane’s scent lingering on the sheets.

  A quick glance down at himself confirmed what he had already felt. The loathed cage was gone. His cock, restored to its natural state, was at full salute. Extraordinary really considering what he remembered of the night before.