A Case for Christmas (The Lords of Bucknall Club Book 2)

by J. A. Rock

  “Yet you hinder me!” Gale sounded surprisingly frantic. “I cannot clear my mind of you and focus on the investigation. I see you before me whether I’m awake or asleep. I cannot narrow my attention to any detail without being brought up short by the thought of your eyes, your lips, your—your bloody beautiful hands. Your hands are wonderful, Chant. I don’t know why I have only just realised this. It was the eyes that had me before. You are a distraction, and a brutal one, and I need you to be gone.”

  Chant stared at him, stunned. Did he mean it? Did he really think of Chant so often without appearing to think of him at all? A mere day ago, Chant could have died of happiness to hear such words. Now, they seemed to strike his body like blows.

  “I think you are very drunk,” Chant said at last.

  “What a very dull and obvious conclusion.”

  “Sometimes the obvious conclusions are the most accurate.” He sighed as some of the furious energy left the air around them. “Let me see you home.”

  “Do not touch me.” Gale jerked back as though Chant had moved toward him. “I mean it. I can stand on my own.”

  “I had no intention of doing so unless you asked. I learned my lesson last night.” Chant hated himself for the bitterness of the words. It would have been satisfying to be able to brush Gale’s ill humour away like so much dust on his coat. To smile and shrug and reassure Gale that nothing Gale could throw at him would rock him. Instead, he spun on his heel and began walking away.

  “Do you think I was not frightened?” Gale called.

  Chant stopped, then turned reluctantly. He should go. He should go now and have nothing more to do with Lord Christmas Gale. Why was he allowing himself to be drawn back into this foolish argument? But this was the first time he had heard Gale admit to being frightened. He recalled what Warry had said about Gale being afraid. Simply afraid. “Yes. I imagine it was rather frightening to have a murderer threaten your life.”

  “I do not mean frightened of de Cock,” Gale snapped. “All bullies are rather the same, and he is far from my first and only tormentor. I meant frightened to tell you!”

  The words hung in the air between them.

  Chant rolled his eyes heavenward. “What reason on earth,” he asked, “have I ever given you to be frightened of me? I have tried gentleness, but you have mocked me for it. I have tried good humour, which you have met with disdain. I have tried at every turn to understand you, to excuse your rudeness as being of a piece with your brilliance, and I can do it no longer.”

  Gale took an ungainly step forward. “Not frightened of you. To—to tell you. To watch your concern turn to contempt. As it has!” he pointed out, with triumph in his tone.

  Chant shook his head. “Contempt, Gale? Can you, with your brilliant mind, really not tell the difference between contempt and a fear for your safety that will consume me if I let it?”

  Gale’s mouth moved very slightly. His tongue ran along his bottom lip. “It is not my fault that you are fool enough to care for me.”

  “Yet it is my fault that you are fool enough to care for me?” Chant’s temper blazed. He imagined it splitting the darkness around them like lightning.

  “Yes!” Gale insisted. “I cannot prove it through any scientific method, but it is true nonetheless.”

  “Do not tease me now. I am in no mood for it.”

  “I am not teasing. I do not know what this is. I am drunk. I am angry. I am in awe of you.”

  “I am angry too. And I do not trust you.”

  “Tell me what you need from me.”

  “For you to share something of yourself, Gale!” He faced Gale fully, his mouth open, his arms arrested in a gesture that might have been a plea or a move to strangle the other man. “For God’s sake, what I am asking is something most people give quite willingly!”

  He let his arms drop slowly to his sides. Let his shoulders down from where they’d been hovering near his ears. He scoffed, and the sound became a sigh.

  “I know,” Gale said quietly. “But I have said it before, Chant, and it is you who have not listened. Is it not better that I know the limitations of my own character and make you no promises than to tell you what you wish to hear and then prove it false in the end?”

  The words dropped through Chant’s body like so many stones.

  “I do not know,” Chant admitted finally. “I think just once I might like to hear something from you that is not an excuse for why the words I’m hearing are not kinder.”

  There was no sound now but the wind guiding a low hush through the nearby trees. Gale had no answer for that, then? Very well. Chant ought to have known from the beginning that they were oil and water.

  Very well.

  “You deserve to hear kind words.”

  Chant closed his eyes. Shoved his hands in his pockets. No. He was not going to look at Gale again.

  “There are so many I wish to speak to you, but I don’t know where to begin. And I don’t think I ought to begin now, for I am still approximately eight-tenths gin. I will not ask you to stay. You have shown me more consideration already than I have earned. But know that I admire you. And wish that I had done a better job of showing it.”

  No. God, no. Chant ought to press his hands to his ears and block out Gale’s voice—though it would be rather like shutting the barn door after the horse had gone out.

  Despite himself, Chant looked up. The ground seemed to shift under his feet as though he were a mouse on a rug and somebody had lifted the rug and given it a snap to dislodge him. As though he were the one in his cups.

  “If that is true,” Chant said, “then you have a decision to make. My affection for you is greater than it ought to be, and if you do not wish to share any part of your life, whether it be your investigation, your heart, your friendship, then I need to know that as soon as possible.” He held up a hand. “Not tonight, for you are not clear-headed. But when you are sober, I will require an answer. Because I cannot do this again, Gale. Cannot feel one moment as though I matter to you and the next as though I am a presence you barely tolerate. I cannot bear another courtship with a man who needs me less than I need him.”

  Gale did not answer, and Chant’s throat tightened.

  “I would give everything to you in this moment.” Gale said it with such naked sincerity that Chant was reminded just how disguised the fellow was. And yet Gale was steady on his feet, and there was no slurring of his speech. He looked rather like a child, alarmed to realise the full extent of the trouble he’d got himself in and desperate to make amends.

  Once again in spite of himself, Chant gentled his tone. “That is precisely what I’m afraid of. That you would give it all to me now and then shut down again when next my affection seems too much for you.”

  “You might be right. I do not know what I can give of myself, for I have never tried to give anything. Not to someone like you.”

  And that, Chant realised, was complete honesty from Lord Christmas Gale. His to take or leave.

  Somewhere in all this the distance between them had closed again.

  “If you give me another chance, I would—I will—attempt to discover what I might—” Gale swallowed audibly. “What I might give.”

  Chant could not quite look at him. “I don’t… know. I don’t know.”

  When Chant did glance at Gale again, he saw the same expression he’d seen yesterday when he’d started to kiss Gale, then shied away. Such a complete and gentle understanding on a face that was all sharpness and angles. “You have made your choice. I see it now. Please forget I said anything. Please go and let yourself have the peace you deserve. Free of me.”

  Chant could barely swallow. He bit his lip hard, anchoring himself with the small, sharp pain. And then he forced out the words: “I do not wish to be free of you. And could not be, even if I walked away and never spoke to you again. But Gale? ‘Try’ has to mean more than it has meant so far.”

  “I do hear you, sir. And you will not like what I have to say next,
but I will say it.” Gale sounded quite sober now, and Chant braced himself, for he knew Gale could wound with precision whether he intended to or not. “This fear that Reid has left you with. The fear that you will be abandoned, that nobody cares quite enough for you to remain steady by your side? You have my sympathy. But you do not have the right to ask me to be what I am not in order to allay your own fears.”

  Chant stared at him.

  Gale’s mouth thinned and then twisted wryly. “I am not so dense as you might suppose on the subject of human feeling. I have not asked for your gentleness, your good humour, your understanding. There have been moments I’ve appreciated all three and admired your ability to offer them freely. But I rather think the street goes both ways when it comes to sharing ourselves. I want those things from you only when you truly wish to give them—not when you fear losing my company if you are not gentle enough, kind enough, or if you do not feign good humour in the face of all life hurls at you.”

  Still Chant could make no reply.

  “I said as much to you last night. But perhaps I did not make myself clear. I have seen you angry. I have seen you afraid. I have caught glimpses of your grief. And all those things, more than the promise of whispered reassurances, drew me off the pier tonight and into your arms. I did not truly fear your contempt in telling you what I’d done. I feared that you’d care for me anyway. That you would offer me a second chance when it would be better for you to be rid of me. Do not offer me one now unless you mean it. For I cannot think straight. Indeed, I have not been able to for the past forty-eight hours since we stood on that terrace together. I cannot make the decision of whether I am worth the trouble for you.”

  Chant looked out across the river now. At the beauty of the moon’s rippling reflection in the water, and the signs all around of human waste and industry, the bits of refuse that punctured the pool of silver light. What a fool he’d been to think Gale did not truly see him. And what a fool he was if he thought that being seen by the man would ever be the same as being loved by him. But Gale was right. Chant had made himself out to be the victim of Gale’s guarded heart, when in a sense, he had guarded his own even more closely.

  “All right,” Chant said at last. “If you wake tomorrow and find you still mean what you’ve said tonight, then… then tell me.”

  “I am not so drunk now,” Gale said quietly.

  “Still. Let us take the night to think.”

  If they agreed to try again, they must knock down at least a section of the wall between them. And yet, how could he ask a man who lived such a private life to reveal his secrets? Especially when he could only imagine what Gale would say if Chant were to reveal his own. If he were to let Gale see, truly, that his gentleness, good humour, and understanding were no more than a convincing illusion.

  If he were to tell Gale what he’d done, all those years ago.

  Chapter 13

  Gale awoke with a pounding head and a taste in the back of his throat he imagined one could only get by sucking the bristles of a street sweeper’s broom. He groaned and blinked into the unwelcome morning light, slowly bringing his surroundings into focus. It took a moment for him to realise where he was, and that it wasn’t the familiar paper hangings of his room in Russell Street that his blurry gaze fixed upon. Instead, he realised, with mounting horror, he was at home. Good Lord. He had a vague memory from the night before of being somewhat rescued by Chant, but any relief he might have felt—although, if he were honest with himself, there was not much relief to be found in such abject humiliation—was drowned out immediately by the fact that Chant had apparently delivered him home into the care of his mother. Such a sin felt unforgivable—even more so when Gale hadn’t even managed to rise from the bed before she was bustling into his bedroom, flinging the curtains open wide.

  “Christmas, darling,” she said. “Do get out of bed. Your friend is here for tea.”

  “I don’t have any friends,” Gale muttered. “Besides, who invited him?”

  “I did, of course,” his mother said.

  She opened his bureau and began to dig through it for clothes.

  “Am I allowed no privacy at all?” he grumbled.

  “Oooh,” his mother said. “Is this where you’ve hidden your copy of The Maiden Diaries?”

  “I certainly have not,” Gale said, shoving his bed clothes off and sitting up. His head ached and throbbed like a fresh bruise. “I’m much more depraved than that, I’m afraid. You may find there’s a copy of Justine tucked away under my cravats.”

  His mother laughed brightly.

  Gale stared at the floor for a moment as he was assailed by memories of the previous night.

  Oh, it was all coming back. With far too much clarity.

  He was to make a decision with his head clear—there seemed no chance of him achieving that state anytime soon—about whether he and Chant were to try again. Try again at what, precisely? He and Chant had yet to do anything more scandalous than embrace. A line of Chant’s from last night hit him: “I cannot bear another courtship with a man who needs me less than I need him.”

  Gale’s heart pounded in time with his head.

  Well, if it was a courtship Chant wanted, then Gale must tell him no. Obviously. They were not courting, they had never been courting, and they never would court. Gale would never court anyone. Had Chant felt that was what they were doing? Or were headed for? Gale must disabuse him of the notion at once.

  Oh, yes, there it was: a memory of raging at Chant for occupying all of his waking thoughts and for ruining his investigation. Calling Chant’s hands beautiful—his hands? They were very nice, but they were hardly the part of Chant’s anatomy that intrigued him the most—and eventually telling Chant he would give him everything.

  Gale drew a shuddering breath. What in the hell had got into him?

  Was this what it was like to be in love? Did it make a man stupid?

  It had certainly made Hartwell stupid, but if love was a plummet into idiocy, Hartwell had only been standing on a step stool to begin with. Gale was standing on a chimney sweep’s ladder and had a lot farther to fall.

  He glared at his mother’s back as she went through his bureau. “Why did you invite Chant for tea?”

  His mother sighed and turned, holding a dressing gown. She tossed it to him. “I suppose it’s too much to ask you to dress correctly, but I am old fashioned enough to believe one ought to at least cover one’s nipples before taking tea with friends.”

  Gale yanked his gaping shirt closed with a huff, and then stood and shrugged on the gown. “You are avoiding the question.”

  “I am getting to it in my own time,” she replied with an airy smile. “And I invited Chant because he was kind enough to bring you home last night when you were so deep in your cups you almost drowned and because the girls and Elise like him. I also like him. I think he is a very pleasant young gentleman indeed.”

  Gale tied the gown closed and tugged his fingers through his unruly hair. “I suppose I could do with a cup of tea.”

  “Even some cake, if you can keep it down,” his mother agreed.

  He glared at her again. “I was not so deep in my cups as you think by the time I got here.”

  No, by the time he had accused Chant of not being fully honest with him, his drunken fog had lifted somewhat. At the point where he’d suggested Chant walk away for his own good, he’d been very nearly sober. And after Chant had refused to walk away and instead had hailed them both a cab, Gale had been in something of a trance. So much so that he hadn’t noticed Chant was taking him to the family house until it was too late to protest, to demand to be taken to Russell Street instead. So much so that he scarcely recalled getting into bed.

  “No, you were certainly yourself enough to tell me my new nightjacket made me look as though I’d skinned a zebra.”

  “Oh God,” Gale said, recalling the garment. “I may lose the contents of my stomach just thinking of it.”

  She lifted an eyebrow and one
side of her mouth, then headed for the door. “Hurry down, dear.”

  Just to spite her, he made his way to the door as slowly as possible.

  When he reached the drawing room, he heard stifled giggles—never a good thing. He noticed Chant first because, apparently, his mind would not let him notice anything else. Chant looked well in a coat of deep blue, a silver-and-black waistcoat, and breeches that were, it seemed, just a bit tighter than they needed to be.

  Gale swallowed.

  And then he noticed his sisters.

  They were standing in a line—now was probably a good time to take a formal count so he would know precisely how many he had—rather than sitting, as would have been natural for tea. All of them were smirking. At least two were outright snickering. They wore their usual day dresses, but their accessories were preposterous. Gaudy jewellery that could only have belonged to their mother. Satin sashes in colours that made his head resume its pounding. Half of them had their hair in piles atop their heads; the other half had their locks curled tight as springs. Elise was most definitely wearing rouge, and Eugenie’s face had been powdered into oblivion.

  “What on earth is going on?” he demanded. His voice was too full of gravel to make much of an impression.

  “We are putting on a production!” Clarissa announced. Her sash was the colour of a lemon, and she’d pinned jewelled brooches to her bonnet.

  “No,” Gale said at once. “No, you are not.”

  “Prepare to be entertained!” Helene entreated.

  Gale turned to his mother helplessly. “Mother… ?”

  “Don’t look at me. Your father’s fault. All of you.”

  Chant came and stood by him, and then all Gale could concentrate on was the slight shiver that went across his skin, and the heat that crept up the back of his neck. “I do love to be entertained,” Chant said in a low voice.

  “It is a tale of depravity!” Anne-Marie declared, striking a pose.

  “Oh, absolutely not,” Gale said.

  “Of murder!” Cordelia ran to the pianoforte and began to play what Gale supposed was meant to be spine-chilling music.