A Husband for Hartwell (The Lords of Bucknall Club Book 1)

by J. A. Rock

  Warry guided him down onto the bed and stripped off the soiled stockings, his knuckles brushing against the dark, curly hair of Hartwell’s calves.

  “Warry?” Hartwell’s voice was so strained, the word sounded like the prelude to a deathbed request.

  “What is it?”

  “I have to piss.”

  With another sigh, Warry fetched the vomit-covered jug, careful not to touch the soiled parts of it. Hartwell got gracelessly to his feet, supporting himself on the night table. With his other hand, he fumbled in his drawers. Warry set the jug on the floor and turned away. It sounded as though Hartwell more or less hit his mark. Warry poured a glass of water from the washstand and attempted to get Hartwell to rinse his mouth and then spit into the jug. He took the vessel and the dirty clothes and deposited them outside the door, where the smell would not be so overwhelming.

  When he returned, Hartwell was sprawled on the bed once more, one arm dangling over the edge.

  “I fell into horseshit,” he solemnly informed the ceiling.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “I am humiliated.”

  “You certainly are.”

  Hartwell tilted his head toward Warry. Warry knew he should blow out the candle, that he was being wasteful, but the glow it cast on Hartwell’s handsome face was mesmerizing. “You saved me.”

  “I only wished to avoid a further scene. Someone needed to stop you before you did something even more foolish.”

  “Would you have helped me even if I had?” Hartwell’s seriousness gave him a paradoxically childlike air.

  “I doubt it. Most likely I would have allowed the constable to drag you out and then cart you off.”

  Hartwell laughed, but the sound was anxious. “Thank you.” He spoke sincerely. “I know I have disgraced myself tonight. I know you are supposed to be at the theatre with Balfour. I am sorry you are here instead.”

  “I’m not,” Warry said honestly but without kindness.

  Hartwell swallowed hard, then swallowed again. Warry did not wish to see him afflicted with the sorrow that often accompanied drunkenness in his father, so he searched about for a topic of conversation.

  “You helped me in a similar situation once,” he said. “Back when we were children.”

  “What are you on about?”

  “When I fell into the frog pond. I was freezing afterward. You pulled me out. You boxed my ears, but then you…looked after me.”

  The memory was coming back in more detail than he could bear. He recalled the child he had been, shivering, keeping his arms stiff at his sides and making no move even to hug himself for warmth. Hartwell had wrapped him in his coat and had ushered him inside the house and into his bedroom.

  “I probably pushed you in,” Hartwell murmured. “I was always doing that.”

  “Not this time. This time I fell. Took too much water into my lungs. I was terrified, thrashing about.”

  Hartwell nearly closed his eyes. “I remember. I was sss—so frightened of what my parents—and your parents—would say if they knew Becca and I hadn’t been w-watching you properly.”

  “You pulled the blankets up to my chin. You told Becca to go have Cook make me some soup.”

  He had stayed in Warry’s bedchamber until Warry was fed and warm and drifting off to sleep.

  “I wasn’t helping you.” Hartwell spoke brusquely, no longer slurring as much. “I didn’t want to face our parents’ wrath was all. I was supposed to watch you, and I failed. It was as simple as that.”

  Warry studied the line of his throat, the small bump of his Adam’s apple. “I don’t believe you.”

  Hartwell swallowed yet again. “I was scared…something would…I was afraid you were…hurt.”

  “I know.”

  Hartwell tore his gaze from the ceiling to meet Warry’s, candlelight flickering in his eyes. “I remember when we played soldiers. And you betrayed me.”

  Warry laughed. “One of my great triumphs.”

  “She says she does not even wish to be friends anymore. She said I was unf—unforgiveable.”

  “There is little you could do that Becca would find unforgivable.”

  “I have done it.”

  “You will speak to her again when you both have had some time to think.”

  Hartwell opened his mouth, but no words came out. Finally, he grimaced, and his focus returned to the ceiling. “Shouldn’t you be going?”

  “I should.”

  “You are not getting up.”

  “No,” Warry agreed.

  Hartwell crossed his bare ankles. “I am quite cold now. Though I know it is my own fault.”

  Warry reached out and tugged at the covers. Hartwell tried his best to lift his hips, and together they got his legs stuffed under the blankets.

  And then Warry stood, stripping down to his shirt and drawers.

  Madness, certainly. Brought on by his earlier act of self-pollution, perhaps. But he climbed into the bed beside Hartwell and lay there, stiff and afraid to shift in the slightest lest their bodies touch. But he could feel the warmth coming off Hartwell despite the man’s assertion that he was cold.

  Hartwell did not speak. Seemed scarcely to breathe. Then he gingerly rolled onto his side, facing away from Warry.

  “Relax, my lord,” Warry said drily. “We are merely going to sleep.”

  “Very well,” Hartwell whispered.

  Warry turned onto his side, and, after a moment’s hesitation, placed his arms securely around Hartwell’s middle.

  Hartwell’s breath hitched.

  “You will feel warmer soon.”

  “I do already.”

  “Sleep.”

  “I…”

  “I said sleep.”

  Hartwell murmured something Warry could not make out, and Warry longed to ask him to repeat it. But in another moment, Hartwell had placed his hands over Warry’s, and his breathing had slowed. Warry lay awake a long while still, wondering if perhaps madness was not quite so bad as people made it out to be.

  Chapter 13

  Hartwell woke to a pounding head and a vague sense of regret for things he could not quite remember. He blinked his eyes open. Surely his regret could not have been for the lovely young man lying on his side next to him, his shirt clinging to the smooth line of his spine. Hartwell couldn’t ever imagine finding himself regretful to wake like this. He reached out and placed his fingers gently on the curve of the young man’s hip, pinching the fabric of his shirt and drawing it up. A sliver of pale skin came into view, and the young man mumbled something petulant and sleepy, turning slightly as though he meant to burrow face-first into the pillows.

  Hartwell stroked that skin meditatively, and his brain awoke, as was its custom, a lot more slowly than his body. He was in Gale’s room off Russell Street, a pleasant enough little place, and one Gale retreated to in order to escape his horde of sisters, whose names he pretended never to remember. At least Hartwell presumed it was a pretence. For a man who could recall every detail of a newspaper article he’d read six years ago, right down to the punctuation, he’d often wondered if Gale’s vagueness when it came to his sisters was an affectation. Or perhaps Gale’s brain was as singularly peculiar as those same newspapers proclaimed, so fixated on minutiae that he really couldn’t tell Clarissa from Anne-Marie from Cordelia from Eugenie. The point was, Gale kept a room where his family could not find him, and Hartwell had been the beneficiary of it on more than one occasion in the past when he’d drunk rather too much. And on more than one occasion when he’d wanted to take a pretty young fellow into bed with him without risking either of their reputations. Gale’s landlady was rather fierce in her guarding of his privacy. So whatever Hartwell’d got up to last night, it couldn’t have been all bad if it had led to that.

  He rubbed a hand over his jaw as he yawned and was immediately assaulted by the stench of his own breath. Good Lord, his poor companion. Hopefully he’d been as drunk as Hartwell and hadn’t noticed.

  He s
tretched a languid arm to the bedside table where Gale kept a dish of comfits. He grabbed a handful and tossed them into his mouth, crunching softly.

  Hartwell traced his fingertip down to the dip of the young man’s spine, following it for the few scant uncovered inches that he could before it vanished inside his drawers. The young man mumbled again and shifted backward on the mattress, bringing his delicious arse into contact with Hartwell’s prick, which was standing proudly. Hartwell rocked his hips forward, a moment of glorious contact that had him shivering with delight, and wakened his companion.

  The young man flopped over onto his belly, sadly not in invitation, and then turned his head to squint at Hartwell.

  “Warry!” Hartwell exclaimed, aghast, sitting bolt upright in a way that made his aching head throb even harder. “What the deuce are you doing here? Do you mean to be undone?”

  “Wha…?” Warry blinked again, and then awareness seemed to crash over him as suddenly and sharply as a bucket of cold water. He scrambled off the bed, ending up on his knees on the floor, and stared at Hartwell balefully from behind a curtain of messy wheat-gold hair. “No! I am not undone! There was no undoing! And besides, why should I be the one assumed to be undone? You’re the one with the…the…”

  Hartwell drew the blanket over the evidence of his arousal. “Because you’re younger, and of a lower rank, and courting another man!”

  “And you’re engaged to my sister!”

  “No,” Hartwell said, drawing a hand across his eyes. “I am not.”

  Warry’s gaze was suspicious. “You say that, and yet I thoroughly suspect you and she will make up.”

  “No,” Hartwell said again, “The engagement is well and truly done. And so it is your reputation that will suffer most if it is discovered we were abed together, you fool.”

  He had a flash of memory, both terrible and wonderful, of lying on his side last night with Warry’s arms wrapped around him from behind, Warry’s breath tickling the hair on his nape, and how, addled with drink and still shaken with his tumble into horseshit, he’d dozed off feeling impossibly light and warm.

  Daylight, it seemed, had shattered last night’s strange closeness because here they were again, at each other’s throats like a pair of dogs, growling and snapping.

  Wouldn’t it be something to rise and lift Warry by the arms, to manhandle him back onto the mattress, and for them to screw like a pair of dogs? Hartwell’s mouth closing sharply on the side of Warry’s neck, on the crook of his shoulder. Each time he would gentle the bite after savouring Warry’s cry; he’d keep his teeth anchored softly in the skin and flick the sore spot with his tongue. He’d kiss and lick at the flexing muscles of Warry’s shoulders as he pounded into him from behind.

  Wouldn’t it be something to truly undo him?

  Warry was staring at him as though he might be in possession of similar thoughts. For one moment, Hartwell thought about commanding him back to bed. Begging quietly, through kisses, for another chance. He wouldn’t push Warry away this time. He had neither the strength nor the desire to resist the young man before him.

  “You’re such a coward,” Warry said simply.

  Hartwell would have thought himself inured to any further hurt from Warry. Yet Warry had shown himself last night to be by far the more grown-up of the two of them, and the words pierced him almost as deeply as Rebecca’s had.

  Warry continued. “I cannot make up my mind whether I am more vexed with you for not going at once to put things right with my sister or for sitting there”—his voice began shaking, though not with fear—“staring at me as though you have never wanted anything more in the world and yet remaining silent.”

  “Warry. It is my duty—”

  “Fuck…your duty.” Warry put a long pause after the word fuck as though he needed a moment to be sure he had actually said it.

  “Then come back up here,” Hartwell said crisply.

  Warry’s eyes widened nearly imperceptibly.

  “Come on then. I’m not the one cowering on the floor. Come back up here and learn what it means to be undone.” There. The gauntlet was down. Let Warry show himself to be all bluster.

  Warry hesitated. His shoulders lifted as he drew in a long, uneven breath. His gaze dropped to the floorboards.

  “I see I am not the only coward here.” All the coldness Hartwell attempted to infuse into his tone was undercut by a ruefulness he could not mask.

  Then Warry rose, and it was Hartwell’s turn to sink back slightly. Warry climbed onto the bed, knees digging painfully into Hartwell’s shins through the bedclothes until he was straddling him, and they were face to face. Hartwell dug the remains of the comfits from the grooves of his teeth with his tongue, then swallowed hard.

  “Well.” There was no hope of keeping his tone light. His throat was rough with the vestiges of sleep, with the force of his desire. “Here we are.”

  “Shut up.”

  Hartwell’s prick stiffened further.

  Warry reached out and felt Hartwell’s cheek with the tips of his fingers. Hartwell knew he’d have a shadow about his jaw—his beard grew as fast as the mythical beanstalk—and he imagined holding Warry from behind, burying his face in the man’s neck, feeling Warry tense at the rasp of Hartwell’s rough cheek against his smooth skin.

  Hartwell held his gaze, letting him explore. Warry’s fingers curled in toward his palm, and his thumb moved across Hartwell’s lower lip.

  God, my God, I’m not going to last long enough to undo him.

  Warry’s thumb moved to his upper lip, and Hartwell waited until it had nearly completed its circuit before nipping suddenly.

  Warry jerked his hand back, then laughed, the sound a release of tension for them both.

  Hartwell grinned.

  “Do not!” Warry commanded on a snicker.

  Hartwell reached for his wrist and guided Warry’s hand back to his mouth, then he slid his lips around Warry’s first finger, sucking gently.

  Warry’s breathing grew rapid. He squirmed on Hartwell, the movement shifting the fabric of his drawers so that it beautifully outlined his hardening prick.

  Hartwell ran his tongue across the pad of Warry’s finger, then sucked harder.

  “Hartwell,” Warry whispered, not so much in plea as in wonder, as if he were trying to reassure himself that Hartwell was real, that this was truly happening.

  Hartwell could have used such reassurance himself.

  He flicked Warry’s finger several times with the tip of his tongue, then withdrew. He slid his thumb to the pulse on Warry’s wrist and pressed lightly, then leaned forward and kissed Warry’s palm.

  Warry’s voice was low. “If this is what it is to be undone…I cannot say I mind it.”

  “This,” Hartwell growled, “is merely a prelude.”

  He gripped Warry’s hips, fingers slipping down the waistband of his drawers to trace his hip bones, which produced a startled moan and a lovely contraction of Warry’s stomach muscles. He hoisted Warry closer to him. Kissed him fiercely while his hands found their way under Warry’s shirt, pushing the fabric up and exposing his slender waist. The sight of all that bare, smooth skin could drive a man mad.

  He hooked an arm around Warry, cupping the back of his neck in order to kiss him more thoroughly. Then he moved his hand south, sliding it down the back of Warry’s drawers.

  Warry’s moan was deeper now, and he leaned forward, sticking his perfect arse out so that Hartwell might have better access. Hartwell palmed one firm, muscular cheek, and caught Warry’s tongue between his lips, sucking hard as he squeezed Warry’s arse.

  Warry’s hands were planted on the mattress on either side of Hartwell’s hips now, and his arse was lifted so he was nearly on all fours. Hartwell fumbled for the string of Warry’s drawers, smiling against Warry’s mouth as he found one end. He tugged, the knot came undone, and the drawers slid off Warry’s hips. Hartwell undid his own drawers and shifted upward, lifting Warry with him. Now they were both kneelin
g, drawers pooled around their knees, and Hartwell jolted, gasping like he’d been punched as Warry’s prick brushed his own.

  Warry whimpered desperately and pushed his hips against Hartwell’s.

  Hartwell had been deeply, deeply wrong about which of them was to be undone. As the hot length of Warry’s prick rubbed against him, he called upon every reserve of strength he had to maintain control. He gripped Warry’s arse and held him as hard as he could against his own body, kissing the side of Warry’s neck as his fingers dug into firm muscle. Those whimpers—of shock as much as pleasure—were absolute music. The way his head tipped back in surrender as Hartwell licked the salt of sweat from his neck and then tugged the skin in his teeth.

  “Hartwell.” The name was the softest exhale but held as much desperation as if Warry had shouted it. Warry’s hands were under Hartwell’s shirt now, sweeping across his chest, and Hartwell paused just long enough to remove the garment entirely, tossing it to the floor and then kissing Warry once more as he tugged Warry’s shirt up and off. The cuffs caught on Warry’s hands, and Hartwell seized the opportunity, winding the fabric around Warry’s wrists and giving him a light shove so he fell back on the mattress, his new bonds pulling tight.

  Warry stared up at Hartwell, his eyes glazed over with lust. His bare chest moved in and out with shallow breaths that sounded almost painful. There was a vivid welt at his throat where Hartwell had bitten and sucked.

  My mark, Hartwell thought with satisfaction, thinking smugly of Balfour looking upon it.

  His desire waned.

  Balfour. Balfour couldn’t be permitted to see the mark. Warry would be…God.

  It was just as Warry said. He was a coward. At once too craven to claim Warry as he wished and too weak to resist him either, even when it was clearly best for everyone that they avoid each other.

  Need seared his body. He wanted to place a thousand marks like that all over Warry’s skin—each one a brand, each a warning to Balfour and a promise to Warry.

  “What is it?” Warry whispered anxiously.