Baleful Godmother Historical Romance Series Volume One

by Emily Larkin

  Come upstairs with me, please. Hold me, please.

  He bit the words back and turned away and climbed the stairs slowly, alone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  November 14th, 1808

  Whiteoaks, Wiltshire

  While it was enjoyable to go riding with Tish and Major Reid in the afternoon, it meant that Tom had to forgo his tryst with Lucas in the folly for the second day running. Tom wondered if Lucas missed it as much as he did—the physical closeness, breathing each other’s breaths, their cocks sliding together in his hand, the sense that they were so close they were almost inside each other’s skin.

  Lucas didn’t appear to miss it. He sat in the green and gold salon, eating plum cake and discussing his nephew’s upcoming birthday, as if he weren’t aching with need.

  “He’s mad about the knights of the Round Table,” Lucas said. “Imagines himself as Sir Gawain.”

  Sir Gawain had been one of the chaste knights, as Tom recalled it—which brought to mind a joke that he couldn’t relate right now, not with Tish sitting there, and Robert’s eldest daughter, Selina. And then he recalled Lucas, tense with shame, almost crying when he admitted he couldn’t have sex with women. Tom winced inwardly. Don’t ever make jokes about chastity in Lucas’s hearing.

  He brought his attention back to the conversation, and discovered that Lucas was speaking to him.

  “I was thinking . . . could you paint Sir Gawain, Tom?”

  Tom shrugged, and reached for a macaroon. “Of course.”

  “If I model for Gawain, can you make me look like Oscar?”

  “Of course.” The boy was back at Eton now, but Tom had a couple of two-minute sketches of him.

  He’d need a larger sheet of watercolor paper than he had, and an easel, but the Whiteoaks art room would have those. And he knew exactly the backdrop he wanted: the ruined castle. Tom opened his mouth to suggest this, but Tish beat him to it.

  “What an excellent idea! And I know the perfect setting: the folly! We should all ride over there tomorrow afternoon.”

  Tom closed his mouth. Actually, I was thinking just Lu and me. And then he gave an internal shrug. They’d get bored soon enough, watching him sketch.

  * * *

  But he didn’t start Sir Gawain the following day, because the sketching party became a picnic—not only Tish and Major Reid, but Sir Henry Wright, two of Lucas’s nieces, and two servants.

  Fuck, Tom thought, when he saw all the people assembled in the stableyard, and then he blew out a breath and told himself that he liked Tish’s company, and Reid’s, and Henry Wright’s, and if he didn’t get to touch Lucas until tomorrow, it wasn’t the end of the world, even if it felt as if it was.

  They all climbed the steps to the castle and entered the grassy courtyard. Sir Henry looked around and laughed and said, “Fabulous!”

  Tom’s grumpiness began to fade.

  “Isn’t it just? There’s a dungeon and a secret passage,” Tish said, and Sir Henry laughed again, and Tom found himself almost smiling.

  When Sir Henry saw the rusted chains hanging on the dungeon wall, he laughed a third time and said, “This is almost too good to be true!”

  Tom’s smile became a grin. “Wait till you see the secret passage.”

  “Where is it?” Sir Henry demanded.

  “You find it.”

  And after that, he enjoyed the afternoon, even though he didn’t get to touch Lucas. Tomorrow, he told himself as he lounged in the grassy courtyard eating macaroons and listening to Lucas’s nieces discuss the upcoming ball. Tomorrow, as he sipped lemonade and answered Sir Henry’s questions about the army and what it was like to be a general’s aide-de-camp. Tomorrow, as they all rode back through the park together.

  They dismounted in the stableyard, and it was all laughter and bustle—grooms and horses and people milling around. Tom caught Lucas’s elbow. “Tomorrow morning, straight after breakfast,” he said, brusque and businesslike, as if it wasn’t an assignation between lovers. “We’ll make a start on that painting.”

  And tomorrow did come, and it was everything he’d hoped for—just he and Lucas alone in the folly, and when they made love in the dungeon, Lucas was as frantic as he was, and it was fast and fierce and almost desperate—and then they did it a second time, their kisses more leisurely, his hand slowly stroking them towards climax—and at the very end, Lucas cried out and Tom captured the sound with his mouth, just as he captured their seed in his handkerchief—and they stayed leaning into one another for several minutes, their cocks soft in his hand—and then Tom folded up the handkerchief and they buttoned their buttons and it was time to sketch.

  * * *

  He drew the great gothic arch first and then positioned Lucas in a heroic pose: feet apart, legs braced, shoulders back. “Here, hold this,” he said, giving Lucas a paintbrush. “Pretend it’s a sword—a little lower—yes, perfect.”

  He stepped back. Fuck, Lucas was magnificent. Even holding that ridiculous paintbrush, he looked valiant and resolute and dauntless and quite stunningly masculine. “You should see yourself, Lu. You look like you’ve just stepped out of a Greek epic.”

  Lucas went faintly pink—and that was one of the nicest things about Lucas: for all his physical beauty, he hadn’t an ounce of vanity. He checked his neckcloths in the mirror, but never his face.

  Tom drew quickly, humming under his breath, sketching in the lines of Lucas’s body: the strong throat, the broad shoulders, the muscular thighs.

  Once the outlines were done, they packed up and rode back to Whiteoaks, and after lunch he got out his color box. He opened the lid. Lucas peered over his shoulder. “Those all the colors you’ve got? Twelve?”

  “I can mix any color I want with these.”

  Lucas wasn’t convinced. He dragged Tom off to the art room and showed him all the watercolor cakes.

  Tom laughed. “Christ, Lu, there must be almost a hundred.”

  It was a visual feast: every color in Ackermann’s catalog—Dragon’s Blood, Chinese Vermilion, Iris Green—but although they looked beautiful laid out in their drawers, he knew most of the colors would swiftly fade. This bouquet of blues and yellows and reds and greens was for dabblers, for people who didn’t understand paint; his tray of twelve colors was all he needed.

  Tom laid down a graded wash of Prussian Blue for the sky, and left it to dry. The rest of the day sped past—riding with Tish and Reid and Sir Henry, the formal dinner, and after that, the ball, where he drank a little too much, and danced almost every dance, and flirted with all the pretty girls. The ballroom was crowded, and yet it seemed as if an invisible thread connected him to Lucas; he always knew where Lucas was, never had to crane his neck and search for him. They orbited each other on the dance floor, and the fleeting moments when their eyes met felt as intimate as kisses.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, Tom painted in the great gothic arch, the tumbled blocks of stone, the grass, the shadows. Lucas lounged against a crumbling wall and watched. Tom whistled under his breath, laying in each color, enjoying the simplicity of it—paint, water, brush—and yet also the challenge—the way the watercolors had a life of their own, a fluidity that was unpredictable. And underneath his pleasure in painting was pleasure in Lucas’s quiet companionship, a deep contentment that hummed in his blood.

  “You love it, don’t you? Drawing. Painting.”

  He glanced at Lucas. “Yes.”

  He was painting in the last strokes of green when Tish burst into the courtyard, soaking wet.

  Tom lowered his brush. “Tish?”

  “Reid’s horse refused at the stream,” Tish said, and her voice was too high, too tight.

  “Is he all right?” Lucas said sharply.

  “Perfectly,” Tish said. “Just wet. Can he borrow one of your horses, please?”

  “Of course,” Tom said, at the same time that Lucas said, “Take mine.”

  “He’ll need a change of clothes,” Tish said. She wasn’t wearing glo
ves and her hands were wringing each other, white-knuckled. “Tom? Could he borrow some of yours?”

  “Of course,” he said again.

  Lucas took the paintbrush. “Go back with them. I’ll pack up here for you.”

  Tom looked at Tish’s pale, taut face, and then glanced at Lucas. Julia had died after being thrown from her horse. Will you be all right alone?

  Lucas seemed to understand the silent question, for he gave a short nod. “Go.”

  So Tom went, clattering down the stone steps to where the horses were tethered. And when he saw Major Reid, he understood Tish’s agitation. The man was gray beneath his tan, shaking convulsively, his eyes almost wild.

  Tom had a vivid flash of memory: a scrubby gully, a creek, Reid bound hand and foot, sodden, half-dead, his breath rattling in his chest.

  Oh, fuck.

  “Took a toss, did you?” he said cheerfully. “Lord, but you’re wet, the pair of you!” And why was Tish wet, if it was Reid who’d fallen? “You’ll borrow my clothes, of course, Major! We’re almost of a height.”

  Back at the stableyard, Tish took Tom’s elbow in a pinching grip. “He needs something hot to drink,” she hissed in his ear. “And some brandy.”

  “He’ll get it,” Tom said, detaching her hand and giving her cold fingers a squeeze. “Don’t worry. You go and change.”

  He maintained a flow of light, cheerful conversation while he escorted Reid up to his room, found him a towel and a complete change of clothes, and plied him with coffee strongly laced with brandy. Reid stopped shaking. Some color returned to his face, but even so he looked more exhausted than any man Tom had ever seen, a creature of skin and bone, kept on his feet by sheer willpower.

  Tom wanted to put Reid to bed with a hot brick—but he could imagine the major’s affront if he made such a suggestion.

  He took Reid down to the salon and gave him a plate piled high with macaroons, and once Reid had eaten them all he sent him back to Marlborough in Lucas’s curricle, a groom sitting up behind him.

  “How do you think he is?” Tish asked, once Major Reid had gone.

  Tom looked at her anxious face and thought that Reid would be mortified if he knew she was worried about him. “He’s perfectly well. Stop fussing, Tish. It’d take more than a toss to upset a man like Reid!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  November 18th, 1808

  Whiteoaks, Wiltshire

  Sir Henry Wright left the next day, and Tom was sorry for it, because he liked the man. Wright didn’t seem downcast by Tish’s refusal of his proposal; on the contrary, his grin was wider than ever and there was a buoyant spring in his step.

  “He took it well,” he said to Lucas. Unlike Stapleton, who’d been as sullen as a penned bull.

  He and Lucas rode over to the folly, and climbed the ruined tower and kissed, and he said, “Do you want my hand or my mouth,” and Lucas chose his hand, as he always did. Some days were rough and fumbling and hasty, others slow and intense. Today was the latter: a long, leisurely build-up, gently stroking, stroking, stroking, until Lucas was moaning low in his throat and their cocks were hot and damp and desperate in his hand, and when Lucas begged breathlessly, “Oh, God, now, please, now,” he tightened his grip and pumped hard, and they both climaxed, bucking helplessly.

  Tom caught their seed in his handkerchief, and they stayed leaning against each other for long minutes, the smell of sex musky in the cold air—and then they straightened their clothes and went down to the courtyard and Lucas posed as Sir Gawain—feet apart, shoulders back, holding an old rapier—and Tom painted him.

  He hummed as he worked, and it was pleasant to be here with Lucas, just the two of them and the easel and the paintbrushes, but he found himself dissatisfied, too. He didn’t want to paint Lucas as Sir Gawain; he wanted to paint him as Atlas, as Samson, as Hercules, as Ajax Telamon. On canvases eight feet high, in oils. And he wanted to paint Lucas naked, the full glory of his body revealed: the muscular arms, the powerful thighs, the taut buttocks.

  But in those paintings he’d hide Lucas’s cock, block it with shadows or a fold of cloth, angle his body so it was out of sight. That cock—the Ox—was his alone. If he ever painted it, it would be only for himself to see.

  Tom imagined setting up his easel, laying out his brushes, choosing the colors for Lucas’s cock. Carmine, definitely, and vermilion and madder red. A hint of smalt for the strong veins. Orpiment for the golden nest of hair. And when he had everything ready, he’d get down on his knees and suck Lucas until that massive cock was thick and suffused and straining—but he wouldn’t let Lucas climax; he’d paint him instead.

  Shit, he was hard himself, now. Achingly hard. He wanted Lucas’s salt on his tongue, wanted to inhale his scent, wanted the hot, sharp taste of Lucas’s seed.

  He hadn’t had Lucas’s cock in his mouth in weeks, not since that first time in the dungeon.

  Tom looked at the watercolor, and he looked at Lucas, and then he laid down his brush and crossed to where Lucas stood.

  “Is my arm wrong?” Lucas asked.

  “No,” Tom said, and he caught Lucas’s chin in his hand and kissed him.

  Lucas made a muffled sound of surprise, and then he dropped the rapier and kissed Tom back.

  “This time I’m not giving you a choice,” Tom said, when they broke for breath. “I get to choose.”

  “What?” Lucas said, and then, “Tom . . . no . . .” as Tom knelt, and then after that Lucas didn’t say anything coherent for quite some time.

  * * *

  The afternoon passed leisurely, peacefully. Tom let each color dry before laying down the next, and while he waited, they lazed in the cool, winter sun and Lucas told him about the estate he’d inherited in Cornwall, describing the old stone house, the fields with their crooked walls, the bright blue sea. “The bailiff’s teaching me how to manage the farm,” Lucas said. “I know this’ll sound stupid, but . . . I really enjoy it.”

  “It doesn’t sound stupid.” Tom could easily imagine Lucas as a gentleman farmer, tramping over fields all day, mud caking his boots, wind tousling his hair, sun tanning his face. And he could just as easily imagine Lucas in the evenings, sitting quietly by a fireside reading.

  “It’s different when it’s your own place, y’ know?” Lucas said, plucking grass blades. “There’s nothing for me to do here, but at Pendarve it’s all mine. I want to do the best I can.”

  “Of course you do.” Tom climbed to his feet. “I’d like to see Pendarve.”

  “Next month,” Lucas said. “I promised Robert I’d stay for his birthday—he’s a bit prickly about turning forty—but we can go straight after that.”

  Tom mixed the next color, and thought of the sketchbook with the musket ball buried in it. A sick feeling grew in his belly. What if these three months are all the time we have? What if I never see Lu again after this?

  That thought sat at the back of his brain for the rest of the day, as persistent as a damned horsefly. He found himself aware of seconds winging by, minutes slipping past—time that he would never again share with Lucas. At four o’clock he packed up his color box. There wasn’t much left to do—a few shadows that needed deepening, some glints of sunlight in Sir Gawain’s hair.

  They rode back together slowly, enjoying each other’s company without needing to talk, but Tom’s awareness of time passing persisted. It was as if he had an hourglass at the back of his skull and he could hear the whisper of each sand grain falling.

  They dismounted in the stableyard. Tom wanted to hook his arm around Lucas’s neck and pull him close for a kiss, right there, in front of the grooms. He turned away and unstrapped his painting kit from the saddle and went upstairs to his room.

  A letter was waiting for him, propped on the mantelpiece.

  Tom stared at it, and felt the same sense of doom that he always felt before a battle.

  He ignored the letter while he washed, while he changed for dinner, but once those tasks were accomplished he could no
longer postpone the inevitable.

  He picked up the letter and reluctantly broke open the seal. The message was brief: General Wellesley required him back in London to give his testimony.

  Tom placed the letter back on the mantelpiece, then he went down to dinner and spent the evening pretending that he wasn’t desperately in love with his best friend.

  Chapter Sixteen

  November 19th, 1808

  Whiteoaks, Wiltshire

  Whiteoaks was slowly emptying, his brothers, sisters, cousins and their assorted spouses, children, nursemaids, abigails, and valets departing. When Bernard told him he was leaving that morning, Lucas suppressed a silent Thank God. When Tish told him she was leaving, too, he felt the opposite emotion. “Must you?”

  “Yes,” said Tish. “Come to the library; I need to talk with you.”

  “Sounds ominous,” Lucas said. “Should I be worried?”

  Tish didn’t reply. She led him briskly to the library, closed the door, and stood with her back to it, her eyes intent on his face. “How are you?” she asked bluntly.

  Lucas gave an inwards flinch. He fixed a smile on his face. “Never been better.” He strolled to one of the tall windows.

  Tish followed him. “Truthfully, Lucas. How are you?”

  “Never better,” Lucas said firmly, looking out at the winter-bare rose garden. “Do you think it will rain? I hope not. That painting’s still not quite finished.”

  “Lucas, the truth.”

  He turned his head and looked at her, still smiling. “I told you—”