by KJ Charles
“Yes,” the Duke said. “That is unacknowledged. In this age of divorces and disloyalty, my Duchess has proved herself a hundred times over, yet the malice and envy with which she is greeted are unceasing. And it is worsened by your obstinacy. My wife is blamed because I will not tolerate the impertinent rudeness of my offspring! Was ever a man expected to endure the insults of his children as I am? And it is your behaviour that has done this, Hartington: yours and Caroline’s and Alexander’s and Annabel’s, because you resented that I, left a widower in the prime of life after a highly unsatisfactory marriage, considered my own happiness. All of you should be ashamed. All of you owe me and, far more, the Duchess a humble apology.”
“I, uh, I’m Alexander, sir. Not Hartington. And Caroline is dead.”
The Duke of Ilvar batted impatiently at the air, brushing that away. “A slip of the tongue.”
“I beg your pardon,” Alec said numbly. “And you are right, sir. I have done a great deal of thinking recently, and realised I have a great deal to regret about what happened in our family. We ought to be celebrating your anniversary. I am sorry we have not been on terms, sir, and I regret the part I played in it, and my—my youthful folly. It is a hard thing for a child to understand adult behaviour, but as a man now, I do understand, and I beg your forgiveness, and I will beg it of the Duchess if I may be granted an audience.”
Was that overdoing it? He caught a shrewd look in his father’s eyes and thought it might be for a panicked moment, then the Duke said, “And I dare say you’d rather be my pensioner again. Wouldn’t you?”
Alec straightened his shoulders. “Well, if you must have it, yes, sir. I was very young when the falling-out took place. If I had been older, I would have considered matters better. And I wouldn’t have cut myself off from my position based on an argument I scarcely remember and didn’t fully understand. But the fact is—well, I won’t deny I’ve found the last years a struggle to make ends meet, and I’ve an itch to return to my proper place, but that’s not all. I don’t want this poison between us any more, sir. When I encountered you at Lady Sefton’s—” He swallowed as noticeably as he could. “It struck me how much time has been lost over nothing. That I would have wanted to greet my father and stepmother as a son should. Whereas the only reason I dared approach you was that my pal Vane had found the Duchess’s bracelet.”
“A very sensible man, that,” Ilvar said. “One of Cirencester’s relations, he said?”
“Distant, yes. He asked me to convey his respect, and hopes that Her Grace was not too distressed by that unfortunate incident.”
“Most kind. Naturally she was displeased. Really, what is the world coming to when one can be garrotted and robbed in a private home in such a way?”
“Oh, outrageous, yes. I don’t mean to impose too far on your time, sir. But if it is possible, now or later, for me to make my apologies to Her Grace, I will wait on your word to do so.”
The Duke eyed him. “You wish for a reconciliation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And your brother and sisters?”
Sister. Singular. Cara is dead, can you try to remember that? “I...can’t speak for them, sir. We’ve rather fallen out.”
“Have you indeed? Let me be clear, Har— Alexander. If I am to acknowledge you once more, and if my wife chooses to forgive your years of insolence, which I do not say she will, we will expect you to respond to our magnanimity with gratitude and to conduct yourself accordingly. We will not forgive twice.”
“No, sir. I understand. I’m very sorry, sir, for everything. I hope to do better.”
The Duke nodded. “Very well, you may go. If I want you, I shall send for you.”
ALEC MET JERRY THE next evening. He’d dressed as perfectly as he could and practised a smile in the mirror until his face hurt, and he walked calmly in and didn’t kick any tables over, but all the same he could see the assessing look behind Jerry’s society smile.
“Hello, old fellow. All well?”
“Marvellous,” Alec said. “Absolutely marvellous. I saw my father and it went marvellously. Do we have to stay here?”
“Where would you rather go?”
“The place you took me after Lady Sefton’s soirée. The second one. Let’s do that again. Let’s do it now.”
“Will you have a drink first?”
“I’d rather not unless I have to,” Alec said. “And I’m a little tired of doing things that I’d rather not, but have to.”
Jerry contemplated him for a second, then pushed his half-finished drink away and rose. “Quite right, it is awfully slow in here.” He tossed coins on the table. “Let’s go.”
It wasn’t far to the little hotel. They walked in silence; Jerry spoke to the desk clerk in a low voice; then they were in the room, and Jerry was locking the door. The curtains were drawn.
“Right,” Jerry said. “And?”
Alec opened his mouth, but he couldn’t speak. The sheer boiling rage and misery and shame had choked him for a day and a half, so that he could hardly control his voice to ask for a cup of tea, and his mind had raced with imaginary conversations, with George, with Cara, with Jerry, with his father. He didn’t want to say any of that now.
“Alec. Talk.”
“It went extremely well,” Alec gritted out. “I grovelled. I have a second appointment to grovel to Her Grace on Monday. My father couldn’t remember which of his sons I was and forgot that his daughter is dead in his hurry to tell me about how we have wronged him, a poor hard-done-by duke, left all alone after his wife— Christ. Christ.”
Jerry stepped close and put a hand to his face. It wasn’t an embrace, or even a comforting touch; more a steadying one, as though he were getting the right angle for a portrait. “Angry?”
“Yes.”
“Humiliated?”
“As badly as I have ever been in my life.”
“And you asked to come here.”
Alec shut his eyes briefly. “Yes.”
Jerry nodded. “Strip, and get on the bed.”
He didn’t speak much: none of those arousing promises, or threats. He made Alec kneel; he knelt behind him, pushed him face down on the covers, and stroked him to whimpering arousal, hand commanding.
“Are you close?” he whispered, as Alec moaned.
“Yes, but—”
“Shh.”
Jerry let his stand go, leaving it painfully rigid, and then Alec felt light fingers sliding between his legs, over his balls, up and back to stroke his arse, setting off a new wave of sensation. A slick finger pierced him, sliding in and probing upward to find the point of pleasure. Alec yelped.
“Shh,” Jerry murmured again. “Keep quiet until you’re close.”
His movements were tormentingly accurate, pressing inside Alec to toe-curling effect. Alec had never spent from this kind of stimulation alone; nobody had ever tried to make him. He rather thought he could. “God. Jerry.”
“Close?”
“Yes.”
Jerry gently withdrew his finger. Alec almost sobbed, and as he did he felt Jerry’s other hand running up his chest, pinching a nipple, bringing a new set of nerve endings to life.
And it went on. Jerry’s hands worked him, place after place, moving on every time the arousal brought him close to release, until the need was coming close to pain and Alec was begging aloud.
“Please. Please let me. I can’t.”
“Not yet.”
“Please!”
“You can come when I fuck you. Not before.”
“Jerry—”
“You don’t have a say in this. You wanted my control; you have it now.”
Alec closed his eyes, let himself slip into sensation. The feeling was dreamlike, lying naked in a darkened room, his world shrunk to nothing more than Jerry’s fingers and voice, aware only of touches, the throbbing need, and a dizzy sense of floating. When Jerry finally pushed him flat on the bed and thrust in, he felt oddly remote, as though the rough usage were happenin
g to someone else; when he came, prick untouched, he thought the climax might kill him with its force. He sobbed and gasped, spending helplessly over the counterpane as Jerry fucked him, and when at last Jerry gasped his relief and collapsed over his back, sweatily naked, Alec realised his cheeks were wet.
They lay in silence for several minutes. Alec felt emptied, as if the boil of seething emotions had been lanced and the poison drained away. He felt purified, almost, if that was the appropriate word for being buggered into insensibility.
Jerry crawled off him, and returned with a washcloth. He cleaned Alec up with gentle strokes, tossed the soiled cloth into a corner, and lay down beside him.
“Well,” he said. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
Alec stared up at the ceiling. The cornicing needed sweeping for cobwebs, and the plaster was cracked. Probably too much hard use of the room upstairs. A dingy hotel, the smell of fucking thick in the air, Jerry’s body warm beside him but not touching.
Did he want to tell him?
Perhaps he did. Perhaps the best thing he could do with the gnarled, poisonous, thorny secret around which he’d huddled for years was to take it out and give it to someone who’d kick it like a football. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to carry it any longer.
“My mother was ill for years.” He wasn’t sure if that was the place to start, but it had to be somewhere, and if you could say anything for Jerry, it was that he was an active listener, sorting, thinking, probing. “She was never strong but after Annabel’s birth, she was, if not bedridden, certainly unable to do much at all. George was at school, but the rest of us were in Castle Speight, where we stayed because Mother couldn’t travel. Father—well, by then he’d met Mrs. Clayton, the estate manager’s wife. I was only seven, I had no idea what was going on, but I knew things were wrong. The servants hissed and muttered. Mother cried a great deal. It wasn’t a happy place.”
“I dare say adultery is very trying.”
Alec ploughed on. “It was more than mere adultery. Father was in love with Mrs. Clayton, passionately. I remember him shouting how Mother had never cared for his...needs, complaining about her weakness as though she’d decided to be ill to spite him. He told her—Cara and I were in the next room, listening—that she was denying him happiness with every breath she drew.”
Jerry sucked in a breath. “Ah. I begin to see.”
“You don’t. Because—” Was he going to say this? In this room, to this man, his body still stinging and marked by hard usage?
“It was in the night,” he said. “Cara had a nightmare. The rest of us were asleep so she went to Mother’s room, intending to slip in for comfort—Mother didn’t sleep well either—but when she was in the corridor outside Mother’s room, she heard Father coming. He’d have been furious if he saw her up, he’d have told Nanny to beat her. So she hid behind a sort of pedestal that held a bust. And Father went into Mother’s room. And—and she heard Mother say something to him, and he shut the door. Cara wanted Mother, so she stayed and waited for him to go. And in due course Father came out, and Cara waited a few minutes while he went away, and then went in. And Mother was dead.”
There was silence for a second. Jerry said, carefully, “When you say dead—”
“She was lying in bed, staring up. Cara said it was quite unmistakable. There was a lamp, burning low. And there was a pillow next to Mother’s head, and, uh, it was warm, and Cara said it was wet. A stained wet patch in the centre.”
Jerry sat up, a sharp movement that brought him into the corner of Alec’s eye. “Are you serious?”
“Cara thinks she fainted. The next thing she remembers—remembered—was a housemaid screaming, in the morning. She was taken out and the doctors were called. They said Mother must have had a seizure in the night and that it was her constitution failing at last.”
“What did your sister say?”
“Nothing,” Alec said. “She was ten. She had found her mother dead, and she’d seen— Jerry, he had our lives in his hand. You can’t blame her for not speaking out, for not saying, I think my father murdered my mother when he was a duke, for Christ’s sake, and we were all in that bloody shadow-filled castle full of echoes and medieval weaponry, and—”
Jerry’s hand closed over his arm. “Hey. Hey. Look at me. I said, look.” Alec forced his eyes to move. Jerry was staring down at him, and the tilt of his brows gave him an expression that was for all the world like concern. “How long have you been sitting on this?”
“Years. Cara didn’t say anything for a long time. It affected her terribly, I think in part because she was already sickly and people used to say all the time that she’d end up like Mother—”
“Dear God.”
“She became very withdrawn, very angry. She didn’t speak at all for a month, and then only in monosyllables. We thought it was because of Mother’s death; we were all devastated. But then, only a few months later, Clayton died. And once he and Mother were both dead, Father and Mrs. Clayton could marry. So they did.”
“Alec,” Jerry said. “You told me that Clayton’s death wasn’t ruled a suicide.”
“No.” Alec’s lips felt stiff. “And I don’t believe it should have been.”
“Your father—”
“He was at a public meeting some miles away. It wasn’t him. I think it was her.”
Jerry whistled. “He was shot, yes? His own gun?”
“Or one that used a similar bullet, and his gun had been fired. There were no footprints, but it had been a dry summer. He was shot from under the chin, where he might have held the gun himself. He bled to death, perhaps choked on his own blood, and was found a couple of hours later.”
“Did anyone ask Mrs. Clayton for an alibi?”
Alec snorted. “As though a lady would shoot her husband at point blank range. Poison is the woman’s weapon, everyone knows that.”
“Or a straight razor. And I know at least one who favours a broken bottle.”
“Yes, well, Mrs. Clayton wore black to the inquest, and claimed that she had been at home by herself, and nobody could prove she hadn’t. One police officer did ask questions—after all, it was common knowledge her husband had refused to grant a divorce—but he was very severely slapped down. There was an acting Chief Constable at the time, you see, hoping to be confirmed in the role, and my father extended his patronage.”
“In my experience the long arm of the law usually has its palm out, but I’m a little surprised they’d cover up a murder.”
“I’m sure they thought they were covering up a suicide,” Alec said. “Mrs. Clayton’s affair with my father was ruled to be irrelevant gossip. The missing ring was used to demonstrate that someone else had been in the area while Clayton was dying or dead, and was thus the prime suspect, and an open verdict was recorded. And six months later they were married.”
“Do your siblings know of all this?”
“Cara spoke to us about Mother after the wedding,” Alec said. “It was difficult. She’d been half mad, you see; we were used to her shouting and storming off. George took a while before he believed her—he didn’t want to, quite understandably. And when he did, he was furious all over again because she hadn’t told anyone. It wasn’t fair. She was ten, she’d had a terrible breakdown, and in any case, what could she have done? Mother was dead, the doctors had called it a seizure, and anything we said against the Duchess was ascribed to malice. George tried, even so. He went to the Chief Constable and asked him to reopen the investigation into Clayton’s death.”
“Any good?”
“God, no. The man went straight to Father to assure him he didn’t place any credence in this silliness. That didn’t go pleasantly, afterwards.”
Jerry took that in for a moment, then he lowered himself to lie on his side, propped on an elbow, his other hand still on Alec’s arm. It was almost, not quite, like being held. “Does your father know you suspect him?”
“Cara accused him to his face, in the end. That was what happened e
ight years ago. He told us all that she was no longer his daughter, not until she apologised, and that we had to cut her out of our lives or we would be nothing to him either.”
“Which would be the response of an innocent man as well,” Jerry said. “To be offended rather than afraid. I suppose you’re quite sure of your sister’s testimony.”
“Yes. I believe her absolutely. And the reason he behaves as though he’s been insulted is because he feels it. We’ve been so unpleasant to him, we didn’t appreciate his need, his right to marry Mrs. Clayton; we don’t understand that his first marriage was inadequate and things had to go as they did. Do you know, the doctors had told him Mother shouldn’t have another child after me? He was told it might endanger her life, but he still got Annabel on her. He ought to have everything he wants, it’s as simple as that. He spoke to me as though he was entirely the wronged party. He said I owed him and the Duchess a humble apology for my obdurate refusal, for making her life difficult, and—and I did, I apologised—”
“Shit.” Jerry’s hand tightened, and Alec found himself pulled over, so that he was pressed against Jerry’s bare chest, an arm over his shoulders. Jerry holding him close, for comfort. His heart thumped. “Shit and derision, Alec, all this would have been useful information before I sent you off there. How the devil did you get through that?”
Alec tried to smile. “Cheap tart under Waterloo Bridge, remember?”
“You bloody fool. What the devil are you playing at? This isn’t a robbery.”
“It is.” Alec reared back in sudden panic. “It has to be.”
“It is not. The point of a robbery is that whatever you might invest in the job, you come out making a profit. What the merry hell do you think this is going to cost you, between your siblings and your self-respect? Do you propose to do this till August? Is a handful of jewels worth this?”
“It’s not about jewels.”
Jerry made a sound in his throat that was very close to a snarl. “No, it’s not. It’s about revenge, and I am not a revenger. I’m a jewel thief, and if you’re using me as a tool for your vengeance, you and I will not be working to the same end, and we are going to get caught. I’m not having that.”