When he got the tip of the cock inside him, he had a moment of panic, but he made his body relax and accept the intrusion, and it slid in. “Oh God.” He had been exaggerating when he called it enormous; in truth it was no larger than the average prick, but it felt quite sufficiently gigantic at the moment. It always felt like too much, he recalled, and that was part of what he liked about this act, the sense of being stretched and filled, the bite of pain that came along with the pleasure. This was what he had wanted. He twisted the cock to search out the spot that would make him feel like he was about to reach his crisis, and when he found it he moaned. Sam let out a choked sound and gripped the arms of his chair so tightly the muscles bulged beneath the thin cloth of his shirt. That was when Hartley stopped putting on a show and started . . . something else.
“Are you imagining that it’s you inside me?” he asked, his voice thready and low.
Sam cleared his throat. “No. This is you. You’re doing this. And I’m watching the most gorgeously filthy thing I’ve seen in my life.” He ran a finger beneath his collar. “Because you’re letting me.”
Oh God, why did he have to be so good? It would be easier if he didn’t always know what to say. Then Hartley might have some defenses left. As it was, his heart was as bare as his body, and it was too late to go back.
“I’m imagining it’s you,” he whispered, because at that moment it was true. He was imagining what it would be like to have Sam inside him, to share this pleasure equally. He imagined what it would be like to be able to have that. Not only the touching, but all of it—knowing how to care about a person, and how to let a person care about oneself. He tried to stroke himself, but his hands were shaking and he couldn’t get it right. “Would you—” He swallowed, not able to form the words. “Help me, Sam.”
Sam was on his feet at once, only pausing when he reached Hartley’s chair. “You mean it?” Hartley was naked, open, doing unspeakable things to himself with a glass prick and still Sam didn’t touch him without asking.
“Please,” he said, his mouth dry. He reached for Sam’s trousers, but Sam batted his hand away and got to his knees. Hartley nodded, because he didn’t have any more words, and Sam bent his head. The feel of Sam’s mouth on him, the feel of—oh God—that thing he was twisting inside Hartley’s body, it was so much, and it was so good, that Hartley let his pleasure crest. He held Sam’s head, calling out his name while spilling into his mouth.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Hartley was babbling.
“Shh.” Sam wiped his mouth against the back of his hand, then carefully removed the glass prick and put it aside.
“Let me touch you?” Hartley asked.
“Anything you want.” There was something in Sam’s face that made Hartley’s stomach do a flip. “Always.”
Hartley dropped to the floor beside him, tore open his trousers, and had his hands wrapped around him, hard and warm and all Sam. Sam hissed and swore and lay back to let Hartley have his way. Hartley licked and touched and in general gave him every bit of attention that a man could bestow on another man with a willing mouth and a pair of slick hands, because that was the least he could do.
“We have to eat downstairs,” Hartley said after they had gotten cleaned up. “In the housekeeper’s room. Otherwise Sadie and Alf have to go to a lot of trouble.”
Sam imagined that servants generally went to a good deal of trouble, because that was the point of servants, but didn’t question why Hartley seemed averse to this. Indeed, Sam would have eaten in a ditch, or on the roof, or just about anywhere Hartley required, and was baffled that Hartley didn’t seem to know this.
So they went downstairs to the housekeeper’s room and ate roast partridges and drank warm cider. It was perhaps the strangest company Sam had broken bread amongst: a disgraced gentleman, his cockney manservant, an exceedingly pregnant and unmarried cook, and himself, a black pugilist turned barman. Conversation oughtn’t to have come easily but somehow it did.
When Sam put on his coat and reached for his hat, the servants made themselves scarce, which more or less confirmed that they knew what Sam and Hartley had been about upstairs.
“Come to the Bell tomorrow,” Sam whispered, not sure why he was being quiet, except that they were standing so near to one another that a normal speaking voice would be too loud. They were still in the kitchen, near the back door that Sam would soon leave through, but neither of them were making any move to actually open the door.
“I’m not sure I can ever show my face there again, after that errand Kate ran for you.” But he was smiling, if a little shyly.
“Nah, in Kate’s mind that’s the sort of thing every gentleman ought to have at his bedside.”
Hartley snorted and looked up at Sam. Sam wondered why until now he hadn’t fully appreciated their height difference. Maybe it was because they seldom stood this close. If they stood any closer, Hartley’s head might tuck neatly beneath Sam’s chin. Sam found that he wanted very much to find out whether it would.
“Hartley?” Sam asked when they had been standing there for several minutes saying nothing of importance.
“Yes, Sam?”
“Thanks for tonight.”
Hartley’s pale eyes sparkled in the dim light. “I ought to thank you. For my present.” He stood on his toes and kissed Sam’s cheek. “I’ll thank you for not making jokes about relevant body parts,” he murmured.
Sam was hardly capable of speech, let alone humor. The soft brush of Hartley’s lips against the stubble of his cheek was somehow more intimate, more precious, than anything they had shared before.
Chapter Eighteen
It had been months since there was a proper fight at the Bell, but Sam supposed all good things came to an end. Right when he thought the place was on the edge of becoming decently respectable, Alf had gotten into it with some drunk. Sam had stepped between the two bloody oafs to break them up, but not before a chair was broken and a good deal of ale spilt. Some idiot threw open the door and shouted into the street that a rare good fight was on at the Bell, and the constable appeared moments later. Sam spent the next hour repeatedly explaining that it had been a regular taproom brawl, not a prizefight. Merton had demanded to see the Bell’s license and insisted on inspecting the tankards to make sure they were the regulation volume. Sam’s heart raced and his palms grew damp despite knowing that everything was in order.
“The second time in a month,” the constable said, a smirk of satisfaction on his meaty red face. Ever since that dustup with Johnny Newton, Constable Merton had been prowling about the Bell every day, waiting for someone to put a foot out of line. This put a damper on the mood of easy comfort Sam had tried to cultivate at the Bell. “But I know there’s prizefighting and gambling on the premises, and I mean to shut you down.”
The man was a fool as well as a bastard. To anyone who knew the first thing about prizefighting, it would have been immediately clear that there was no boxing at the Bell. There were no bookmakers prowling about the edges of the crowd. The air smelled of meat pie, hops, and smoke from the bad chimney, not the blood and sweat of men fighting for their lives. And, frankly, if Sam had taken to organizing fights, he was pretty sure he’d have a bigger crowd than what he could fit inside the Bell.
“I saw one of your customers—” the constable put a nasty inflection on that last word that made Sam suspect he was referring to one of the black patrons “—collecting penny bets.”
Sam suppressed a groan. That was Mrs. McCaffrey, not a bookmaker. She also collected bets on things like whether Nick would make pork pie or kidney pie. It was all innocent. And they weren’t penny bets so much as farthing bets. “I don’t allow bookmakers at the Bell,” he said.
Most of the customers weren’t bothered by either the fight or the constable’s questions. Two men had picked up their mugs and moved to a table far away from the brawlers. While Sam dealt with the constable, Nick poured fresh pints for the people whose drinks had gone flying during the m
ayhem. All told, it hadn’t been as bad as it could have been, but it reminded him of how little he liked having anything to do with the police.
The constable left with vague threats of returning the next day. Sam suspected nothing would happen; the man had only wanted to throw his weight around and frighten Sam. And he’d succeeded—Sam knew he’d worry about it for days. He closed the door behind the last of the patrons, reached for his broom, and started sweeping up the splinters of wood from the broken chair. He was interrupted by a knock on the door.
It was Alf. He had wiped the blood off his face, but he’d wake up tomorrow with a proper black eye. “You. Go home,” Sam said sternly. “You’ve done enough for one night.”
“I came to apologize.” Alf scuffed his toe along the stone floor.
Sam grunted an acknowledgment and handed the broom to Alf so he could sweep up. While the lad swept, Sam grabbed two clean tankards, poured a couple of pints, and handed one to Alf.
“You get into a lot of fights?” Sam asked.
“Long story,” the lad said, averting his eyes from Sam.
“How long?”
“The bastard was talking about Sadie.”
“Ah.” Sam figured as much.
“Don’t suppose you have any pie left?”
Sam laughed despite himself. Trust a boy that age to never have thoughts of food far from his mind. “No, we ran out hours ago.”
“Rats. Sadie and his nibs like the pork pie your brother does. And I thought to bring them some to distract them from the, ah . . .” He gestured to the bruise on his face.
Sam pressed the cool pewter against his aching head. “My brother’s been manning the kitchen on his own since my mum died. He can’t keep up.”
Alf nodded, as if considering the problem. “So you’re looking to hire help.”
Sam snorted. “That’s well down the list of things I need to get done around here.”
Alf took a long drink of his ale and studied Sam over the rim of the cup. “I’d do it, you know. Help out around here, I mean.”
Sam shot the lad a sharp glance. “I thought you were happy in your position.” Working in a pub would be a step down in the world for a gentleman’s manservant: longer hours and harder work for what he guessed was about half the pay.
“I don’t want to be a bloody valet.”
“But you do want to be a barman?” Sam asked skeptically.
“It would suit me better than ironing cravats and polishing boots. And I bet he’d agree.”
“He? You mean Mr. Sedgwick?” It felt strange to refer to Hartley in this way. It made Sam feel as if he ought to have been doing so all along, and all the whispered “Hartleys” had been somehow fraudulent. The man had servants, a fine house, a pile of money. Sam was the owner of a barely respectable pub.
“There’s no way he’ll keep on a servant who gets into scrapes. You should have seen the way he looked at me the last time I came home with a black eye. He and Sadie both. You’d have thought I was something that crawled out of the bogs.”
Sam guessed that Alf was exaggerating, and that any reaction from Hartley or Sadie owed more to the circumstances surrounding Alf’s fights than it did with the fact that he had been brawling. But he also knew that pointing this out wouldn’t convince Alf of anything he didn’t want to believe. Sam had a hard time believing it himself—he could imagine Hartley wrinkling his nose disdainfully at the idea of bloodshed or unruliness.
“Did you put anything cold on that eye?” Sam asked, and when the lad shook his head, he went to the back room to see if there was a slab of meat in the larder he could use.
He and Alf weren’t terribly different. They were both products of the East London streets, with the difference that Sam had the advantage of a somewhat profitable talent and Alf had the advantage of his skin. Sam was freshly appalled that he was going to bed with this boy’s employer. Hartley claimed not to have been raised a gentleman, but his brother had been a naval officer and his godfather had been a lord. He was enough of a gentleman to be miles away from Sam and Alf’s experience. All of that was so easy to lose sight of when they were together. But there was no future for them, and it was best for Sam to get that through his skull before he got in any deeper.
“You got robbed,” Sadie said when she looked at the haddock Hartley had procured and heard what he spent.
“I wasn’t going to haggle with the fishmonger. I have a bit of extra cash at hand and I daresay the fishmonger doesn’t.” Hartley had determined to take over the household marketing for the time being. Alf had once again gotten into fisticuffs with some boy who maligned Sadie’s fair name, and the quantity of tears and recrimination that Hartley had endured in the aftermath had been quite enough to last a lifetime. He was entirely willing to overpay for haddock if it meant domestic peace.
Sadie shook her head and went back to stirring the pot. “That’ll drive prices up for everybody else. It’s extravagant.”
“If you want to see extravagance, feast your eyes on this.” He dashed upstairs, returning with a cherrywood box. Nestled inside was a silver christening cup he had purchased during an afternoon of going from jeweler to silversmith, searching for the most lavishly useless baby present he could turn up.
“What in hell is a baby going to do with that?” Alf asked, peering over Sadie’s shoulder. He had a ghastly bruise on his eye that Hartley was trying to pretend he hadn’t noticed.
“Nothing, I should hope,” Hartley said. “I gather that the point of these things is that they can be easily sold down the line, either by the child when she’s grown or by the parents if they hit a rough patch.” Hartley wasn’t entirely certain, not having been raised in a household where babies—or anybody else—had precious baubles. But it seemed a prudent practice to give a child something to hock later on, and meanwhile the cup was pretty, so Hartley approved.
“Bless me.” Sadie stared at the cup as if it were a holy relic. “My sister and I had a pair of those silver sauceboats that are meant to feed babies. Of course nobody used them,” she said. “They sat on a shelf in the best parlor. I ought to have taken mine away when I ran off, I suppose.”
“You didn’t run off,” Alf pointed out. “And you didn’t have a chance to take anything with you.”
“This is too fine for—” She gestured at her belly. “It’s not right for me to have it. I can’t accept.” She pushed the silver cup across the table and her eyes filled with tears.
“It’s not for you. It’s for the baby,” Hartley said. “No, that’s not true. It’s for you too. You said yourself that you had something like this. Surely it’s proper for your own child to have such a thing.”
“This baby will be the bastard of a disgraced lady and a married man. It’s hardly the same.”
“Indeed it’s not.” Over the past weeks Sadie had supplied Hartley with the essential details: she had been seduced by a handsome young soldier who promptly abandoned her, she refused to marry whatever ghastly suitor her parents had supplied to remedy the situation, and her parents had turned her out. “You were dealt a bad hand, Sadie. But what would you need to make the most of it? I’m certain you don’t want to be my cook for the rest of your life.”
“It’s not a dream come true, but the work I do for you isn’t any different from what I did for my parents, the main difference being that you pay me and don’t call me names. And you don’t think worse of me for this.” She gestured again to her belly, but this time let her hand linger there. “Also, now I have my own kitchen with a proper range and it’s glorious. Well, I suppose it’s your kitchen,” she said, looking at Hartley.
“No,” Hartley said. “It’s yours. And so is that christening cup.” He felt insistent that she take that cup, that she and her child have what would have been theirs if the world were fair and right. He wasn’t such a ninny that he believed in fairness, and at this point he didn’t even know if he believed in ladies and gentlemen. This muddle-headed thinking was what came of associating wit
h the likes of Will, he supposed. All he knew was that he cared for Sadie and wanted to make things right for her.
Sadie looked down. “I couldn’t go back to Devon and I wouldn’t want to. Now, try this and tells me if it needs salt.” She blew on a spoonful of some kind of gravy or sauce and held it out for Hartley to taste. “It’s béchamel sauce for the haddock.”
“It’s delicious,” he assured her. It was velvety and rich. “Fit for a king. Everything you make is superb.” He had tepidly appreciated the finest delicacies prepared by skilled French chefs in the grandest houses, but he found that he actively craved the simple dishes Sadie made. It had taken him days to realize this was hunger, and to wonder how long he had lived without it.
They’d share the haddock with Alf, eating together in Sadie’s little parlor, three people who ought never to have found themselves around the same table. He looked forward to these suppers more than he had any elegant dinner. Admitting this to himself felt like releasing something he had held clenched in his fist for so long that he had forgotten it was there, and he didn’t know if he was casting off a burden or losing a prize. Thus far, he was a disgraced gentleman. But if he carried on like this, dining with his servants and purchasing his own haddock, he’d be something else entirely. While he knew that being a gentleman wasn’t all he had once believed, he didn’t know what would be left of his life if he renounced all claims to gentility.
“Everything I cook here turns out better than it did at home,” Sadie said, tasting the sauce herself and adding a sprinkle of something green. “Partly it’s the range. But I think it’s also because things taste better when you aren’t miserable.”
“I see,” Hartley said. Was it possible that he had been miserable until now? He didn’t think so. He had been frozen, insensible to both pleasure and pain. If so, presently he was thawing, and the process was as strange as sensation returning to a frostbitten limb, and it left him feeling peculiarly vulnerable.
A Gentleman Never Keeps Score Page 17