by Rhys Ford
The doctor, however, seemed more ashamed he’d seen her garters than her leg, and she tugged her skirts down as she righted herself.
“I’m married, I’ll have you know, and I’ll thank you to keep this quiet, Westwood. I don’t want my husband to call you out.” She sniffed and gave one more tug, removing Harris’s pants in one fell swoop. “He’s a crack shot. A police inspector. Perhaps you’ve met him? David Morgan? He transferred in from Scotland Yard.”
She covered her embarrassment with a flurry of words, so much like his grandmother that Marcus couldn’t help but laugh. When the doctor turned on her heels to face him, he quickly grinned in surrender.
“I give. Really. I have nothing but admiration for you, Doctor.” He inclined his head as much as he could while holding Harris’s torso upright. “And now I have an answer as to why you came out to a man’s home in the middle of the night just on the word he’d been injured.”
“Firstly, sir….” Horan tucked herself into a free spot on the bed to examine her patient. A flick of her hand and a corner of the sheet settled over Harris’s groin, hiding his private area from Marcus’s view. “I’d have come anyway. I’m a doctor. There are few enough who’ll work down here, and himself here does good work.”
“And secondly?”
“Secondly?” She peered up at him from over the span of Harris’s muscular belly, where she’d been prodding for internal injuries.
“Usually where there’s a firstly, there’s also a secondly,” Marcus replied with a smile. “Sometimes even a thirdly.”
“Ah, well, secondly then… yes.” Horan hoisted up her prosthetic leg as much as she could from under its fabric prison. “I do owe him greatly for this. I’d not have gotten as far as I have without Harris’s assistance. He’s a marvelous inventor. The Society’s members should have been hung solely on what they did to him. He was a child, barely into his teens, and they made him—a monster.”
“I don’t think he’s the monster. The Society was. They turned his ideas into nightmares.” He’d known of Harris’s involvement, but it was a distant thing, much like knowing where the sheep lived when his tailor made him a wool coat. It was so very different to be staring down at a helpless, attractive man. “It’s what happens when the naïve become prey. Anything good in them is perverted.”
He’d seen the Society’s perversions. They were a reality the world still could not shake loose from its memory. God knew he hadn’t.
The sight of his father’s chest flayed open by the metallic spider hidden dormant in the hallowed halls of law came to Marcus, an unbidden and horrific memory he’d sooner bury. Everyone—and in some cases, every creature—connected to the Society was tarred with the same blackened brush, stained by association regardless of their role. Harris was one of the few who’d escaped a death sentence, but he would drag around the stigma of betrayal and murder for as long as he lived.
“Ah, the poor boy,” the doctor murmured as she reached one arm under the man’s waist to feel his back. “He’ll be pissing blood for a week if I’m not mistaken.”
He couldn’t help but look. Needing something to take his mind off his father’s gruesome murder, Marcus glanced down at what the doctor was doing, only to find something nearly as horrible as his father’s flayed-open chest.
The mark of a Sodomite branded into the perfection of Harris’s pale skin.
It was livid, a mottled pink-and-tan blight burned deep into the man’s body. Nearly the length of a woman’s hand, the scar ran curved around the man’s right hip, a stylized S intersected by a small circle. It was the mark of someone caught in the unnatural act of loving a man, and Marcus’s belly clenched at the sight of it.
The once-Honorable Robin Harris now carried the shame of his perversion for any intimate to see. Any woman Harris bedded would know she lay with a perversion, and any man—any respectable man—would abandon Harris, for fear he’d be caught and branded as well.
Yet Marcus couldn’t stop staring at the shiny, slick area. For all its portent, the sigil was elegant, nearly as striking a piece of scrollwork as any found on an elaborate frontispiece. For all its initial beauty, Harris’s seared flesh had healed unevenly, puckered in some areas while stretched out to a nearly painful pinkness over his hip bone.
The mark was something whispered about behind closed doors and in the dark recesses of particular clubs, a fleshy boogeyman carrying with it a two-year sentence of hard labor. Suddenly, the slender man in his arms weighed more than the sum of his bones and flesh, and Marcus shuddered at the thought of what Harris had endured in earning his mark of shame.
“It’s horrific, isn’t it?” Horan murmured, nodding at the scar. “That’s how they punished him, you know? A vigilante group targeted him. Sent a man ’round to seduce him and then brought him up on charges. The boy never stood a chance. Damned lords and their revenge.”
“Not all lords.” He hardened at the slander, drawing himself up as much as he could. “I certainly didn’t. If I’d known—”
Horan’s chin lifted, a small challenging tilt to her head. “What would you have done, my lord?”
She was Harris’s mouse, come to pluck the thorn from a lion’s paw, and in that moment, the mouse donned her armor to slay the man’s dragon if it was needed. Bemused, Marcus wondered if he had someone who’d do the same for him. Sadly, the only one he could name would be his grandmother. Whether or not she could was a very different story altogether.
“Would you have spoken up for him? The mechanisms he’d created in his workshop had their purposes twisted to destroy our Empire, but no one cares of the genius behind them, only the tragedy they’d caused.” She pressed on. “Would you have spoken up against his incarceration? Even if you knew he’d been searching for some kind of escape from the burden of his shame? Especially when that search led him to another man’s arms?”
“Yes. I would hope I would,” Marcus murmured as he brushed Harris’s inky hair from the man’s battered face. “I would hope I would have it in me to do so. I would hope to be a better man than those who condemned him.”
“So many of us begged for leniency for him. The court literally turned a deaf ear to every single one of our pleas.” Horan’s stern expression melted away, leaving a faint blush to her cheeks. Her hands were still on Harris’s chest, but her eyes were sharply focused on Marcus’s face. “Do you really think it would matter? Your one voice—as much weight as a noble might have—would your one voice have been heard?”
“I would hope it would,” Marcus admitted softly. “Especially since it would be the voice of a man whose father died by one of Harris’s devices. I certainly hope they would have listened. And I would have spoken—if only I’d known, Doctor Horan. If only I’d known.”
Three
HE WAS naked.
That much Robin was sure of.
He also knew he hurt. His body made certain he knew that. It ached. Mostly in his joints, although his skin appeared to be tender in spots. His head also pounded, and he could only hope his vision was merely impaired because he wasn’t wearing his spectacles.
What he didn’t know was how he got home and who exactly stripped him of his clothes, but that appeared to be the least of his worries.
Robin was more concerned about the identity of the rugged, handsome man snoring in a wing chair pulled up close to his bed. The man was fuzzy around the edges, but he was clear enough for Robin to catch his breath in shock at his appearance.
He was familiar, achingly so, and when Robin squinted to get his eyes in focus, he found out why. The snorer was the man who’d pulled him out of the beating he was taking. There had to be at least one pair of glasses on the table next to his bed. He’d gotten into the habit of leaving them about the house, and, sure enough, his fingers closed over his spectacles when he fumbled about long enough to find them.
Then he really wished he hadn’t, because the stranger slumbering in one of his worn-out wing chairs was gorgeous. Even more so once Robin could see him clea
rly.
“Gods in hell, what happened?” he croaked and rubbed at his throat, wondering if he’d sucked down a mouthful of sand sometime after the beating he’d taken.
Obviously, the blows to his head hadn’t rattled his brains too much, because he clearly remembered every firm line on the man’s face. At first, Robin believed he’d been rescued by a hallucination. Handsome, broad-shouldered men didn’t wander into Little Orient and step in between a troupe of attackers and their victim.
Apparently, this one did.
Robin took the time to study the slouched man. From all appearances, it didn’t look as if he’d be waking soon. His mouth was slightly open, and a touch of spit glistened on his lower lip. His dirty-blond hair appeared infuriated at something, poking up every which way from his skull. It was endearing, in a way, softening his harsh features with a boyish tousle.
“Or you stuck your finger into one of my generators and fried yourself,” Robin mumbled as he looked around for his clothes. “Because that’s what my hair looks like when I do just that.”
There were no clothes. The bedsheet would have to do. Wrapping the linens up around him as best he could, Robin put his feet to the floor and promptly tumbled over, falling flat across the sleeping man’s lap.
In times of great stress, a man’s body should rise to the occasion and be graceful, or at least hardy. Robin’s was neither. Normally, it was a state he was used to, and he had grown accustomed to falling over his own feet or slamming his elbow into the edge of a table. If there was ever a time when he could have borrowed a tincture of masculine ideal, it would have been as he was flailing to free his legs from a nest of bedsheets and somehow avoided the large, handsome man sleeping not more than a foot away.
He landed square on his rescuer. And to make matters worse, Robin was pretty certain his bony knee dug a deep furrow into the man’s crotch.
That woke the man up.
His hands came up and cupped Robin’s ass, bared since the sheets’ ends remained firmly under the heavy feather mattress where someone had tucked them in. It’d been too long since Robin felt another’s touch, much less the strong caress of a man’s fingers on the delicate skin of his back and rear.
His face burned with embarrassment.
His cock stiffened and begged for more.
He went with the embarrassment. It was a common enough emotion for him to deal with. Arousal was something best dealt with in the privacy of his own room… alone. Preferably when he wasn’t spread apart over a man’s lap as if he were begging to be taken.
Life was not a penny dreadful, and he certainly wasn’t a fair maiden needing to be rescued from thugs.
Even if, for just once in his life, Robin wished someone would.
And the man certainly had done just that.
He nearly embarrassed himself on the other man’s pants leg when his strong fingers dug into Robin’s hips. The touch felt so right… not like he’d had much experience with anyone’s hands but his own, but those hands seemed to know exactly where to glide over and where to stop.
Mostly, they knew how to cradle Robin’s unresponsive body and flip him back into the bed he’d just fallen out of.
In reality, Robin would have been more appreciative of the man’s massive strength and graceful maneuvering to lay him out on the feather ticking with seemingly little effort. Mortification overruled any other emotion, because Robin’s turgid cock bounced along with him, waggling about like a buoy set adrift on the high seas.
“I have you, crowling. You’re not quite up to walking yet.”
Robin almost corrected him, saying he’d swapped out one bird for another, but the posh, diamond-cut tones of the man’s voice dropped him speechless. Or would have if he weren’t already dying in shame at his cock’s happy little dance. To his credit, the aristocrat didn’t blink an eye. He did, however, retrieve the sheet and tuck it around Robin’s hips while ignoring the now wilting pecker creeping back down between Robin’s parted legs.
“Let me get you some tea.” The roll of his voice deepened Robin’s interest, and when the man turned to fill one of the porcelain cups sitting on the side table, Robin drank in the length of the blond’s body. He wanted to linger, but after stopping quickly at the hard rise of his ass, he jerked his gaze back up to the man’s face at nearly the exact moment the man brought his eyes up. “Cream? Sugar? Lemon? There’s a few digestive biscuits on your saucer. We’ll want to get something in your stomach other than the beef broth the doctor will want pushed on you.”
“Black.” He scowled briefly, annoyed at the rasp in his voice. His penis seemed to be the only working lower appendage on his body, although he could definitely move his toes. Curling them over, he flexed his feet, satisfied he’d not lost the use of his legs. “I don’t think I have any—”
Robin was going to say the pantry was fairly bare of any amenities, but a silver, three-tier tea tray proved him to be a liar. It was bristling with goodies, from shortbread cookies to chunks of Shropshire cheese. When he thought about it, as Robin peeked around the man’s broad shoulders, he didn’t even own a tiered tea tray, much less a silver one.
He was about to inquire about the tray when he took a good look around his room. It was different somehow. Brighter and… vivid. It took him a moment to realize the room was clean. Probably cleaner than it’d been when he first moved in to the empty brownstone.
The street lamp outside shot a sunset of colors through sparkling clear panes, a feat Robin thought unimaginable after he’d nearly broken his neck trying to get a bat carcass off one of the casings. He’d left the thing to rot, and a few hours later, a crow helped itself to the easy meal, leaving a splatter of shit behind for payment.
Robin left the shit too. He didn’t survive two years in New Bedlam only to end up smeared over the cobblestones beneath his bedroom window.
Now the shit was gone, there was a strange tea tray on his lemon-oil polished side table, and a handsome, large blond aristocrat was helping himself to a selection of tiny cakes Robin knew hadn’t come from his kitchen.
“Sip it slowly. You’ve been in and out of it for nearly three weeks now.” The man returned to his previous perch in Robin’s battered wing chair. “A fever took a good hold of you. You had the doctor and I quite worried.”
The chair creaked under the man’s weight. It was sturdy enough, made with solid oak and stuffed within an inch of its seams, but its tapestry fabric was faded. The chair had never been fine enough for front room use and certainly wasn’t something he’d have offered gentry, but there the man sat, legs stretched out in a comfortable repose as he regarded Robin with a keen smoky-blue gaze.
“I should apologize for letting you sleep when I first brought you home.” The man grimaced. “And in case you hadn’t noticed, your doctor’s a remarkable woman. A virago beyond belief. It’s probably why women normally weren’t allowed to be medical physicians. It’s hard to argue with someone you know can birth a child and get up the next day to tend to the house when you’re sitting around whining because you’ve turned your ankle.”
“She’s a good doctor,” Robin croaked, finding his voice rusty and harsh. His throat was dry, caught in a dustbin, and he drank a slurp of his tea, finding himself suddenly thirsty. “Elle’s the only one who’ll see to me.”
“So she said.” The man nodded once, then sipped at his own cup. “Oh, you should know your housekeeper gave notice. I brought in some of my own staff. Really, my grandmother hires too many people as it is, so it’s nice to have some place they can actually work. There are only so many times you can watch someone rearrange a vase of flowers in the front hall before you start to wonder if they can’t be off mucking out a closet or something.”
“Mrs. Conrad is gone?” He’d fitted her with a new eye a few weeks ago and needed feedback on how it was working out. Robin set his empty cup on the bed and rubbed at his face, knocking his spectacles from his nose. Grabbing at his glasses, he let those drop too and sighed. “Damn it
. I needed to see how her eye was doing.”
“The mechanical one? Ah, she seemed to see out of it fine. Well enough to pack your cutlery into a sack when she left. There wasn’t a damned spoon in the house when I went to go make Doctor Horan a cup of tea. Took care of that. The spoons. And the tea. Figured Horan would tear a strip off of me if I didn’t get her a decent cup while she worked on you. I’d already crossed her in letting you fall unconscious. Apparently, you are supposed to keep a concussed man awake, but if my jostling you didn’t do the trick, nothing would have. And I’m rambling.”
The man looked sheepish. Probably much more so than Robin looked himself, although he’d have given the blond a run for his money when his cock was poking about. Putting his glasses back on, Robin was reassured that, yes, the large man sitting next to him definitely had a contrite expression on his rough, handsome face.
“I’ve been sitting with you since I brought you in, and I’ve been talking up a storm because the doctor said you’d hear… something. I didn’t want you to think you were alone,” the man confessed slowly, his deep voice rumbling out of his broad chest. “Now you’re awake, and damned if I have any idea what to say to you. Any suggestions?”
“Just one,” Robin cocked his head and murmured. “Who the hell are you?”
AS QUESTIONS went, it was a valid one. Marcus had to give Harris that. Shifting in his chair, he leaned forward, took the teacup out of the man’s lap, and placed it on a small table by the bed. There was barely any space left on it. The recently hired upstairs maid tried to organize its contents as best she could but called it done after neatly stacking notebooks, pencils, and, oddly enough, empty spools of thread. Harris’s searching for his glasses had sent the stacks tumbling down like playbills, but Marcus found a bit of space for the delicate porcelain.
“More apologies, then.” Marcus inclined his head at the other man. “We’ve had this conversation before, but I think your fever probably burned it away. I am Marcus Stenhill, Viscount Westwood—”
