by J. M. Snyder
“We should be capable of handling one elemental,” Kit said. He certainly ought to be. “I’d like to know why it’s here, though. I’d rather resolve this case completely before I leave.”
“Before you go back to London,” Harry said. “To bookshops and museums and dinner-parties and pleasure-gardens and the opera and gambling hells and—and the world. The next case. Your next case.”
“Well, yes,” Kit agreed, a bit nonplussed. Surely Harry didn’t equate all those things, or expect that Kit did all of them? “I earn a living. Some of us have to.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Harry said. “I only meant…of course you’ll have another assignment. Other people to rescue. Not located out in the country. And of course you’d prefer to wrap this one up and not have to return. I’ll help as much as I can.”
“I appreciate that.” He set down a spoon, no longer quite hungry enough for the end of his chocolate custard. “After breakfast, then?”
“Yes,” Harry said, and fiddled with his own spoon, not eating his last bite either. “Yes, Constable.”
After this, mercifully, Kit escaped to his too-elaborate guest rooms, and glared at the too-elaborate bed-hangings, and grumpily sat down at the too-elaborate writing-desk. Delicate wooden filigree beamed at him. He scowled back.
Candlelight pooled and tangled in corners. The fire met and made friends with it, shedding warmth and light in defense against the dark and cold. Everything in these rooms, like everything at Fairleigh, glowed: alluring and lavish, wealthy but somehow kindly meant, like a big happy dog trying hard to be liked. Like Harry Arden’s ridiculous guileless smile.
Kit Thompson, who had seen the parade of fancy gentlemen who’d come to visit his mother, who these days bowed and met lords and ladies in ballrooms and heard both the rustle of silk gowns and the susurration of rumors and whispers and furtive malice, had not particularly ever been impressed by wealth. He liked having money, of course, and would not say no to Sam’s proposed increase to his salary—the Chief Magistrate liked having someone with Kit’s success to boast about—but in Kit’s experience nothing good came from the world of the aristocracy.
The writing-desk was irritatingly comfortable, despite the amount of decorative carvings. Just the right height. Wood like satin, polished and friendly.
He made a few notes: on elementals and hunger for life, on the servants he’d met, on the overall state of Fairleigh and the lands and the tenant farmers, on Miss Featherdale and any vested interest in the family’s prosperity.
He wrote, Harry Arden. He stopped.
He did not know what to write about Harry.
He did not know, because Harry was a problem; Harry was a frustration, generous and beautiful and apparently uncomplicated and happy at heart, unless that was all a lie as well. Another one of those secrets. Hidden stories. Ambiguities.
The firelight flickered. The house settled around him, easing into night.
Kit did not know how to think about Harry Arden, because when he tried he kept seeing the wide earnest blue of Harry’s eyes, feeling the bones of Harry’s wrist under his hand, knowing that if he’d taken one step closer their bodies would’ve been pressed together: Harry between Kit and the table, nowhere to run.
Harry would not have wanted to run. Kit thought, recalling the astonished unafraid lack of retreat, that Harry Arden would have been perfectly thrilled to find himself pinned against a table or up against a shelf of books, legs spread, shuddering and gasping while a man’s skillful hand forced him to the peak, climax thundering out of him.
Harry Arden had almost certainly, from the pinkness staining those freckles, never imagined such a thing; but that would make it even more delicious, if it would ever be allowed, if it ever could be. It couldn’t, of course; Kit did not make a habit of seducing innocents, much less the younger brothers of Earls, and Harry was still a suspect—assuming there was even a proper crime—and one with a secret.
But Kit knew that look. That expression. He’d seen it on the men he sometimes met at discreet establishments where certain needs might be satisfied. At certain clubs, where men or women might kneel or stand over someone, yield and dissolve into another’s demands or be wholly yielded to.
Kit had not ever been ashamed of his own desires—growing up as an empath, with the succession of clients through his mother’s bedchambers, he’d known about the ranges of needs and wants from an early age, and he knew what true cruelty was, and what mutual delight could be—but he had promised himself, also early on, that he would not harm anyone. He’d not involve himself with anyone who did not fully comprehend what they might be doing. And he’d fuck a wayward slumming viscount or pretty-eyed heir to a shipping fortune if they offered, but he’d never let himself care for one of them: he knew he could not be one of them.
He couldn’t have Harry. So wrong. So unethical, in terms of the case, in terms of his own principles. In terms of suspicion and distrust and every damned rung of the social ladders between them.
But Harry had looked at him with those big blue eyes, and had licked those lips and blushed, and Kit wanted to explore every last freckle. To discover whether they’d hold the flavors of nutmeg and ginger and gilt and cream.
His cock stirred, liking this idea.
He did not mean to indulge the fantasy. But he permitted himself one more exercise of it: Harry shoved into bookcases, hair tumbling like broken sunbeams; Harry’s hands pulled up and bound in place, perhaps tied with that ever-loose cravat; Harry’s breeches undone but not entirely pulled down, enough for Kit’s hand to stroke him and tease him and make him sob and cry out for more.
He half-consciously pressed a hand to his own arousal. Breathing faster. The firelight sang along his skin; despite the brittle wintry landscape beyond, this room was thoroughly heated. Kit’s skin grew more heated with it.
He’d make Harry beg. He’d make Harry feel marvelous, every last sensation drawn out and worked to tantalizing heights. He’d learn what made those blue eyes even brighter and wild with need, every place Harry liked to be touched or kissed or spanked or held down.
Harry would learn as well, being introduced to all the yearnings of his own body, fine and strong and muscular as he was. And Kit Thompson, London constable and thief-taker, would fuck the beautiful Harry Arden, Viscount Sommersby, in the library, in that glorious aristocratic splendor of books, while Harry moaned in delirious pleasure and gasped Kit’s name.
Kit’s own breath skipped, splintered, broke; his cock was painfully rigid, a fabulous throb in his breeches; and he gave up and gave in and drew himself out, hand tight around the length. He groaned.
Harry would, he thought, be permitted to come while being fucked: with Kit buried deep inside him, with Kit’s hand on his cock, claiming his release, feeling it with hand and body and empathy, inside and out. Harry would be so gorgeous that way, thoroughly ravished and abandoned to bliss, anchored by command; those eyes would be radiant as jewels, as heavens, as peace, as Harry came apart for him, around him.
Kit groaned, swore aloud—the word fractured in the middle—and thrust frantically into his own hand, and spilled himself in a shaking rush of ecstasy.
Once his head had cleared, he swore at himself again. Not thinking. Unprofessional. Gods. No.
He managed to clean up in the wash-basin, and fortunately hadn’t left any evidence anyplace other than his own hand and his flushed cheeks; he turned from washing up and gazed at the writing-desk, at his notes. At Harry’s name.
Harry Arden. Who smiled like summer and held secrets like gold: a family treasure-vault, sealed by a vow.
Gods. Kit swore at himself a third time, decided to do something useful out of sheer dismayed penance, and considered the library.
Harry might still be in the library.
Harry likely wouldn’t be. Enough hours had passed; the household ought to’ve gone off to bed, or at least to private activities in private rooms.
He did not know whether this was an induce
ment to go to that book-lined snow-wreathed part of the house, or not.
He did not know anything. And he should have more self-control than that; he was Sam’s best constable; he was good at his job; he did not all but spend himself in his breeches like a schoolboy, gasping and picturing a puppy-pawed viscount with big blue eyes. With holiday-firework freckles.
In a fit of anger at himself, he grabbed the candle, went out the door, and stalked in the direction of the library.
He’d begun committing the house’s layout to memory already. Fairleigh Hall wasn’t complicated, a standard east-west plan; the foundations were medieval, but the renovations had been recent. The house opened up shadowy wings to guide him on, pleased to have a visitor. The hallway stretched ahead in calm indigo and silver, the hues of snowy night.
Kit passed the turning that led to the family wing of the house, and then stopped and did not pass that turning after all, frozen in place.
He’d seen candlelight. Not his own. Wandering the hall near the Earl’s private rooms. Here, and now, in the crevices of night.
He flattened himself against the wall. Blew out the candle. He’d find his way back in the dark.
He eased closer, to the corner. He risked a glimpse, a stretch of empathic powers, a searching.
He found Harry Arden.
Harry, leaving his brother’s rooms. Harry, looking and feeling worn-out and drawn and distressed, white as a specter in pale eerie candle-flutter. Harry, who stood motionless for a moment in the corridor, head bowed and broad shoulders slumped, as if feeling a deep pain somewhere inside; and then went to another door and opened it and slid noiselessly inside. A flicker of fire gleam flared, and got cut off by the door’s closing.
Kit remained frozen amid chilly air and expensively new-papered walls and the smoke-drift of his own dead candle.
Harry Arden. In the Earl’s rooms. Late at night.
In that suddenly darker night, Kit went soundlessly back to his own guest rooms. He sat down upon his guest bed. He gazed at his notes, and Harry’s name. He deliberately did not think of what he had just done, of what he had allowed himself to want, in connection with what he’d just seen.
He would still need to deal with the elemental itself. He would need proof, if Harry Arden were truly behind the sabotage at Fairleigh, behind his brother’s ill health.
If, he thought. Could that if somehow be true? Might another explanation exist?
He could not think of one.
And he had no proof. And perhaps it had been innocuous: Harry concerned for his brother’s health, paying a depths-of-night call.
He could do one thing, from here: he could ensure that Edward Arden, Earl of Fairleigh, remained alive.
Kit shut both eyes, reached out, reached for that cool wry frail determination. He’d found it before, laced through the same way Harry was with love for the estate, the responsibility, the people. He wove listening strands through silent hallways and servants’ quarters, through low murmurs and sighs, through dreams and caresses and anxieties and fears: letting them flow across his senses.
He found Edward. He found, to his surprise, a sense of serenity: a sense of healing, in fact. A ripple that felt like repair, like delicate stitches in a torn fragile bit of cloth, taken by a sure hand, the way his sister would mend a cherished heirloom shawl. Edward was sleeping, and felt better than he had that morning: stronger, at least for now.
Kit, puzzled, withdrew. Reached instead for Harry Arden’s radiance.
And flinched, and jerked away.
Harry felt so empty. Bruised, sore, overextended: he was sleeping as well, the unshakable sleep of a man who had given all but the last of his strength. He felt contented, though; whatever he’d done, however depleted it’d left him, he must’ve considered it worthwhile.
Kit did not understand. But even his lightest mental touch became another demand; Harry, sleeping, stirred. A response to someone needing him.
Kit pulled away so fast he physically fell over onto the bed. The bed did not mind, and cradled him stoically; Kit lay there for a moment getting bearings back, staring up at blue and gold canopy hangings. Harry’s headache bounced off the inside of his skull.
His notes, he concluded, were altogether inadequate.
Harry Arden, he thought again. Harry, and a secret. That secret and his own desire and, yes, the glittering spark of the challenge all gathered up and became a tantalization.
He would find out the answers.
At the moment he was also exhausted; some of Harry’s enervation had sunk into his bones. And he’d need strength for the morning. For whatever might be going on in this house.
He meant to at least turn down the covers and slide into the expanse of bed. He truly did.
He did not recall falling asleep, but when he woke the sky had become the slate-slab grey of an icy Yorkshire morning, his fire had gone out, and frost lined the visible tree branches beyond his bedroom windows.
Chapter 6
Kit discovered himself the first person in the breakfast room, shivering and glowering at frostbitten windows, heavy thick rugs, silver dishes of bacon and eggs and kippers and toast. He’d planned to be first, under the circumstances, though he’d not been certain he’d manage it; he did not know the household routine. No servants were present; no surprise, though, given the informality he’d been met with.
He scowled at the bacon and eggs. Of course the Earls of Fairleigh had food displayed in silver dishes. Even in the face of snowbound roads, Edward and Harry wouldn’t starve. Harry—
Harry. Who had been leaving his brother’s rooms in the dark. Moving soundlessly. Long after any reasonable person should’ve been in bed.
Never mind that Kit himself had been up. He knew he personally was a suspicious bastard, but he wasn’t out to murder an Earl.
No, his crime had been imagining everything he couldn’t have. And never would, now.
The betrayal raked across his soul like claws. It shouldn’t; there was nothing to betray. Nothing between him and Harry.
Only a shared moment, an intimation of heat, the closeness of bodies in a library. The grip of a hand on an ungloved wrist.
He crossed arms. Prepared for a confrontation. Feet planted.
Conversation came down the hallway, light and airy as the weather wasn’t. Harry Arden was saying, presumably to his brother, “—so of course there I was, halfway through singing ‘The Milkmaid’s Lost Pail’ with Mr. Parry, since he was feeling so much better, when his wife came in, and she looked at me like I’d grown two new heads—”
“What did you expect, when everyone thinks you’re too—”
“If you say dignified I’ll upend a bowl of porridge on your head.”
“We’re returning to our childhood classics? Keep an eye out for fish where fish aren’t meant to be. No, anyway, I would’ve said too innocent to know those songs. No one thinks you’re dignified, Harry.”
Harry, unbothered by his brother’s commentary, laughed.
The laughter preceded them into the breakfast room. Twirled around with forks and muffins and serving-trays. Turned the ordinary into the spectacular, and came back to support Ned’s careful steps.
Harry didn’t quite play nursemaid, but very obviously tailored that active stride to remain at his brother’s side. They had dressed finely but warmly, neat and casual; Harry was more plainly ready to forge out into the estate and find an elemental, having put on sturdy boots and a sensible shirt, and carrying a greatcoat over the arm that wasn’t unobtrusively next to Edward.
Kit stared at the amusement, the solicitous affection, and couldn’t square that with last night’s clandestine movements or his own sudden leaping pulse of want. Seeing Harry, hearing Harry laugh, went straight to someplace dark and smoldering inside him and stayed there, a knot of perplexed profound need.
He wondered whether Harry would laugh in bed that way: unguarded, free, wholeheartedly happy.
And it might all be untrue. False. Concealing
greed and treachery.
Unable to work out the paradox, and angry about it, he hurtled that direction, “What were you doing in the Earl’s rooms last night?”
He hadn’t intended the words to land that harshly. He was better than that, better at his job, at being professional, at reading a suspect. The question fired itself. Like a bullet from a pistol.
Both Arden brothers froze beside the breakfast table. Neither answered, though they met each other’s gazes before swinging back to Kit.
“Sit down.” Harry pulled out a chair for his brother, eyes not leaving Kit’s. “I’ll get your breakfast. Constable, why would you ask me that?”
Good, but not good enough; Harry Arden wasn’t practiced at evasion. Neither was Ned, who accepted the chair but put a hand up over his brother’s. “Harry, I can handle this—”
“I saw you,” Kit said to Harry, rawer than he’d planned it to be. “I saw you.”
“Yes, I was visiting Ned, but I…” Harry hesitated. “There’s no good explanation, is there? Not after I’d told you I’d meant to go to bed.”
“I can think of one. The title’s awfully tempting, isn’t it? Especially with your brother ill. And an elemental close at hand, for conveniently bad weather, chills and sickness and no way to send for a doctor—”
“That’s absolutely dreadful,” Harry said, “like something out of a Gothic novel, how can you even think—”
“People do worse. Every day.”
“You can’t possibly believe that I would hurt my own brother—”
“I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re capable of.” Too sharp, too sharp and brutal; but his heart felt sharp and brutal too, splintering apart on the idea that summer-sunflower Harry Arden could be a calculating murderer. Someone Kit had nearly reached out to draw closer amid books, the person Kit had found ecstatic release while thinking of—someone Kit had wanted—
He snapped, “Answer the question.”
“Oh, drat,” Harry said, managing to make the word sound dirtier than half of Kit’s London-gutter vocabulary. “Ned, can I tell him now, or—”
