A Truly Perfect Gentleman

by Grace Burrowes

  “We will take each other to bed. Shall I undo your hooks?”

  “I can manage.”

  They had a sort of race, with Grey yanking off his boots and Addy pulling her dress over her head. His waistcoat and stockings went sailing onto the armchair. Her stockings and garters landed atop them. Grey’s shirt followed, then he stood, hands on hips, while Addy debated whether she was brave enough to take off her shift before they’d climbed under the covers.

  She would never again have this opportunity with him, never again find an intimate partner who inspired her to feats of courage. She raised the hem of her shift as high as her knees.

  Grey wore only his breeches, and while Addy watched, he unbuttoned his falls. The sight of him, tousled, nearly naked, his cock arrowing up along his belly… He crossed his arms, leaned against the bedpost, and waited.

  Addy drew her shift higher, to her waist, then over her breasts, then over her head. She tossed the wad of linen onto the pile of clothes and stood naked before her lover.

  Grey twirled a finger, and Addy turned, a new feeling blossoming as she slowly pivoted.

  This was… He liked looking at her. That was plainly evident. The sight of her aroused him, but also pleased him. With Grey, she could shed every pretense, every precaution and stand before him as God had made her.

  For the first time in her life, standing naked before a man felt marvelous. Not wicked, not uncomfortable, but joyous. She liked looking at Grey too, and he obliged by stepping out of his breeches and completing the heap of clothing on the chair.

  “I’m not…” Addy wasn’t young. She wasn’t old either, though. “I’m not as…” As firm, trim, round…? Perhaps, but also not as gullible, ignorant, or easily duped. If that was the price of maturity, Addy considered the bargain fair.

  “You are perfect,” Grey said, stepping close. “You are lovely and dear, and for the next two hours, you are mine and I am yours, and that is all that matters.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Grey had never been so upset, and yet, it took until Addy was smiling at him, not a stitch on her lovely person, before he could name his feelings for what they were.

  He was furious. Reeling drunk with rage. Not with gentlemanly resentment, frustration, or quiet longing. He was angry enough to march the wilds of Dorset for years, angry enough to lose his soul to the harp and never ransom it back.

  Addy was leaving him. He could feel the sorrow in her kisses, see it behind her smiles. She had decided to do him the great service of setting him aside, as a woman set aside a man she treasured because hers was the greater claim to honor.

  He could not argue using words, but he could argue with everything else he had to offer. He carried Addy to the bed, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat, and came down over her.

  An allemande was a slow, graceful elaboration on a courtly promenade. Grey treated Addy to caresses that meandered over her shoulders, arms, breasts, and belly. He turned her over, glorying in the feminine wonder of her back, elegant curves flaring out to generous hips and a well-rounded derriere.

  “I want to devour you.” Consume her present, past, and future. He crouched above her and draped his greater length over her from head to foot, reveling in the feel of their bodies pressed so closely together.

  She raised her hips. “Do you want…?”

  He wanted to bite her nape, though what she was offering became apparent before he’d done more than nibble. Grey had engaged in the usual frolics and depravities at university, albeit sparingly.

  He didn’t care to engage in them again now, when he and Addy might never make love again.

  “Stay right where you are.” He was off the bed and back, sheath in place, within the space of half a minute. “The next decision is yours, my lady.”

  Addy had rolled to her back and lay before him, rosy and naked. Grey had never seen a lovelier nor a more heartbreaking sight. She held out her arms, and he joined her on the bed even as he resolved to locate some damned restraint.

  Addy apparently had other plans for him. Her kisses were voracious and unrelenting, her hands were everywhere. She stroked Grey’s cock, then undulated against him until his sole defining ambition was to be inside her.

  “Grey Dorning, must I beg?”

  “Never.”

  He meant to go slowly. He meant to savor and cherish, as a gentleman ought to when saying an intimate good-bye. Addy arched up into the joining and seized him in a single roll of her hips.

  “Be still,” he rasped. “For the love of all that’s precious, Beatitude, do not move. Do not breathe, and please, I beg you, do not clench at me with your—”

  She smiled against his neck—smirked, rather—as she gave him a sound, very intimate squeeze.

  He bore that, barely. “I want this to last.” Forever, damn it.

  “Sometimes we get what we need, not what we want.”

  What followed was excruciating pleasure. Addy, in a mood Grey could not fathom, teased him within an inch of his sanity, until he was a human tuning fork humming to the pitch of mounting desire. Enormous satisfaction lay ahead. He knew that both as a rational conclusion and as a bodily conviction, but on the far side of that satisfaction lay perhaps the worst grief of his adult life.

  Addy gently tugged on his chest hair. “Grey, stop being a gentleman. Let me give this to you.”

  “We give this to each other.”

  Those were his last coherent words for a good quarter hour. Addy sent him into a maelstrom of physical sensation that overwhelmed all thought, all hope and worry, to the point that he was entirely defined by what he shared with her.

  She held nothing back, her passion a ferocious testament to female bravery, and then she was quiet, apparently content to stroke Grey’s back and marvel at their lovemaking.

  Reality intruded several moments later with all the subtlety of a leaking roof. “I did not withdraw.”

  “I did not want you to. I used the sponges and vinegar.”

  He kissed her, grateful beyond words for that consideration, also heartbroken. She should be the mother of his children. He should be the father of hers.

  While their bodies cooled, Grey searched in vain for some way to keep Addy by his side. He was the head of his family, given many privileges, but also many responsibilities. Was there no way to meet those responsibilities other than an advantageous match?

  “Let’s cuddle for a bit,” Addy said, stroking his backside, “or steal a short nap.”

  She offered only a bit of cuddling, a short nap. Grey knew for a certainty that she’d decided to send him on his way.

  “As you wish, my lady.” He went behind the privacy screen to deal with the sheath, forcing himself to take the first steps toward the last shared moments. His reflection in the mirror showed a man who’d been thoroughly pleasured, but certainly not a strikingly attractive man. He was healthy, for which God be thanked, but no great physical prize.

  He’d found the occasional gray hair near his temples, and if he let his beard grow, more gray would evidence itself there. Grey is going gray, as his brothers said.

  If he waited another two years to marry, Dorset Hall would be a ruin, he’d be two years older and more worn, two years more deeply in debt. The fiction that he was anything more than an heiress hunter would have grown more worn as well. His brothers would be two years away from the status of young men seeking their way in life and two years closer to being poor relations.

  They needed him to marry well. Tabitha needed him to marry well. Dorset Hall and its tenants needed him to marry well. He could kick as many doors as he pleased, and none of that would change.

  “Grey, are you coming back to bed?”

  “Of course.” He used Addy’s brush to put his hair halfway to rights, mustered a smile, and returned to her side.

  She’d burrowed under the covers—no more gratuitous displays of nature’s wonders—and held the sheets up for Grey, then tucked herself against his side.

  “You show me

new pleasures, Beatitude. Will you allow yourself a respite in my arms?” Or would she deliver the coup de grace while he lay in her bed, naked and replete?

  “You must not let me sleep too long,” she said, hiking a leg over his thighs. “We have matters to discuss.”

  She yawned, patted his chest, and drifted into silence, while Grey watched shadows creep up the wall and awaited his doom. When he was certain she was truly asleep, he brushed the hair from her brow, kissed her temple, and allowed himself to whisper one, unassailable, hopeless truth.

  “I love you, Beatitude, Lady Canmore.”

  He felt a butterfly brush of her eyelashes against his chest. “I love you too, Grey Birch Dorning, Earl of Casriel, and that is why our affair has come to an end.”

  “Casriel is concerned for you,” Tresham said. “He’s concerned for all of his family, but especially for you.”

  Tresham delivered that salvo from the far side of the six-rowed abacus on Sycamore’s desk, which gave Cam the sense of being behind horizontal bars. The desk had once been Tresham’s, though use of it and the abacus had conveyed to Cam with the leasehold on The Coventry Club.

  Sycamore set the abacus on the floor. “Did Casriel tell you he was concerned, or did he merely hint about, seeking information that’s none of his business?”

  Tresham rose and prowled across the room. The mastiff of the day—Caesar? Comus?—watched him, but didn’t bother getting up from the hearth rug. Sycamore had learned from his brother Will that dogs were better at judging human moods than people were. If Tresham were truly agitated, that hound would be anxious, not calmly watchful.

  “Casriel has made such general inquiries as one brother can about another, though he certainly hasn’t pried. He’s worried that you’re failing and that you either don’t realize it or you won’t admit it.”

  Not quite. “Grey expects me to fail. They all do, with the possible exception of Ash, who I had hoped would throw in with me.” Though Ash had problems of his own, and they were not problems likely to be solved by spending every waking hour at a gaming club.

  Tresham stalked to the reading table and studied schematics Sycamore had drawn of a plan to pipe water from a roof cistern into the retiring rooms and kitchen.

  “If your brothers expect you to fail, Dorning, then you must prove them wrong, of course. That doesn’t mean you keep them guessing for no reason.”

  Sycamore leaned back in his chair and propped his boots on the corner of the desk. “Do you see Casriel coming around of an evening, having a look for himself? Do you see any of my various concerned siblings taking an interest in this place?”

  “Maybe they are doing you the courtesy of allowing you some privacy, some time to get on your feet. Maybe they have other challenges comparable to the one you face. Maybe they are engaged in the doomed endeavor of securing a wealthy bride, in case some brother who has never managed a commercial venture should fall upon his skinny, arrogant arse before all of London.”

  Tresham peered at the drawings, while Sycamore considered his words—his accusations.

  “You claim Casriel is marrying for my sake?”

  “This is clever,” Tresham muttered. “I would not have thought to bring the piping down through the linen closets. The pipe is less likely to freeze if it’s within the building, but heaven help you if a pipe bursts.”

  “Heaven help me if the roof leaks. You should hear Grey hold forth about the eighth biblical plague, the leaking roof.”

  Tresham rolled up the drawings and rapped Sycamore on the top of his head. “I have, at length. He has nightmares about leaking roofs. Nightmares about his daughter having no dowry. Nightmares about his brothers needing his aid and him being unable to free them from debtors’ prison.”

  Sycamore rose, snatched the plans from his guest, and smacked Tresham soundly across the chest. “I am not a new midshipman to be chastised, even if you are my landlord. Casriel never complains to me. All I hear from him is, ‘Let me know if you need a loan.’ That’s all any of us hear from him, as if we’re indigent incompetents rather than well-educated, hardworking fellows.”

  The dog whined softly from the hearth rug.

  “Perhaps you’re both,” Tresham said. “Well-educated, hardworking, indigent incompetents. I know this, though: Casriel is prepared to prostrate himself on the altar of the advantageous marriage, and that is not because he wants to build a folly by the lake at Dorning Hall, or because he’s developed a sudden infatuation with Miss Sarah Quinlan’s eyebrows.”

  Sycamore set his plans on the desk. “We don’t need a folly. We have the real article, an abbey in ruins with a picturesque stream running by in case a fellow needs to do some fishing on a summer morning. If ever I could not find my oldest brother, I knew exactly where to locate him.”

  “Among the ruins.”

  Marriage had turned Tresham preachy. “Whiling away a few hours with a fishing pole.”

  Tresham stepped closer. “Fretting over how he’ll afford a decent match for his illegitimate daughter. Worried about replacing the damned roof on Dorning Hall. Distraught that his countess will have no dower house. Guilty because the tenant repairs are not up to the moment. Exhausted because he’s the only peer of the realm I know who shears sheep, stacks hay, mucks out ditches, and repairs stone walls.”

  “Grey likes to work hard.” Sycamore had viewed that as an eccentricity, like Papa’s preoccupation with horticulture, or Oak’s fascination with the visual arts.

  “All the time, Sycamore? Does he like to work hard from dawn to midnight in every season? I’ve seen the earldom’s books. His staff at the Hall is more pensioners than able-bodied servants because he’s cut back as much as he dares. He’s let out every acre and building he can rent. He’s reduced the stables to only working stock, not a single brood mare. He sells everything, from cheese to jam to wicker baskets, at the local markets, and he hasn’t had a new pair of boots for three years.”

  Tresham paced away, clearly not finished with his tirade. “He’s put spinning wheels into every cottage on the property, so the estate can sell not only wool, but also finished yarn, thus keeping more of the proceeds. If he could buy some looms… but he hasn’t any working capital. He’s too busy sending his brothers to university, repairing roofs, and courting young women who see him only as a title for sale.”

  The longer Tresham ranted, the more Sycamore felt like an eight-year-old who’d used Mama’s best French embroidered coverlet to build a blanket cave.

  Not that he’d made that mistake more than once.

  “You’re saying he’s rolled-up. The Earl of Casriel hasn’t a feather to fly with.”

  Tresham braced a hand on the mantel and stared at his boots—shiny, likely not a year old. “He’s been shrewd to the point of genius, he’s worked harder than any man should have to, and he’s denied himself much, but he’s one person, Sycamore, with many dependents. While you were frittering away a term at university, he was dredging the millpond at Dorning Hall. I don’t mean he was striding about on the bank, giving orders, and offering encouragement. He was in the muck, wielding a shovel.”

  That picture was easy to imagine, for Sycamore had seen his brother wielding shears, a hay fork, a draft team, a mason’s trowel…

  “He likes to work hard,” Sycamore said again, though he heard doubt in his own voice. “Papa was the same way, always planting this and inspecting that. Putting up another glass house or adding to the conservatory.”

  Casriel had reduced the size of the conservatory by one-third, selling the enormous glass panes and custom iron framing to a neighbor who’d come into a fortune.

  “When Casriel asked me to look over his books,” Tresham said, “he gave me the estate journal he’s been keeping for the past ten years. I saw, day by day, what filled his time. There’s hard work, Sycamore, and there’s indentured servitude to a losing proposition. If Casriel had any alternative to marrying for money, he’s explored it, probably more than once, and found it inadequate.”

  “You’re saying this marriage scheme is a last resort?” The question was uncomfortable, because last resorts were inherently bad options, which was why they were left for last.

  “What do you think?”

  The dog rose, came over to Sycamore, and licked the back of his hand. Cam gave the dog a pat for its kindness and then another because petting a dog soothed a troubled soul.

  “I think you have never had brothers,” Sycamore said, “so you don’t understand how complicated fraternal relationships can be.”

  “Caesar, come.” Tresham made a hand gesture, and the dog padded to his side. “I would not have leased you this place unless I believed you’d make a go of it. I know it’s early days, but you owe your brother an accurate report of your status. He’s making decisions based in part on how his siblings fare and what he anticipates they’ll need from him. The least courtesy he’s owed is correct information.”

  Downstairs on the empty club gambling floor, somebody was singing the old Jacobite ditty Charlie Is My Darling, though the voice was male. Charlie was the young pretender to the British throne, a Scottish upstart best forgotten by the history books.

  “My brothers don’t see me, Tresham. They see a young lad always getting into scrapes, one desperate for attention any way he can get it. They don’t regard me as particularly bright or hardworking, and they expect me to fail.”

  And Cam had obliged their expectations on any number of occasions.

  Tresham headed for the door, the dog at his heels. He gave Sycamore one last pitying look. “Unless you want Miss Sarah Quinlan redecorating Dorning Hall for the rest of her days, you’d best stop feeling sorry for yourself and take a look at your brothers as they truly are. Casriel has carried the full load on his own for years. You’re not little boys anymore, though if you lot are any example of how brothers behave, I’m glad I don’t have any.”

  He left, closing the door softly, taking his hound with him.

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