by KJ Charles
Pen pulled his head back after a moment, eyes not quite as languorous with pleasure as Mark would have liked, a distinct dawning wariness in them. “Uh…”
“You are bloody beautiful,” Mark told him. “That what you wanted?”
“For now,” Pen said. “What can I do for you?”
Mark tugged him forward. “Anything you fancy and nothing if you don’t.”
Pen’s eyebrow went up sharply. Mark kissed it. “Mate, we’ve all got our ways and mine is that I take no for an answer, all right? You tell me what suits you.”
“And what about ‘turnabout is fair play’?” Pen enquired. “I don’t need special treatment.”
“You’re not getting it,” Mark said. “I don’t ask for what’s not freely given, by you or anyone.” He wouldn’t be queueing up for a second go with a partner who didn’t care about his pleasure, needless to say, but he’d rather leave unsatisfied than feel like a problem, or a chore.
“That’s very gentlemanly of you,” Pen said. “You said anything I fancy, yes?”
“Only if—” Mark began, and almost swallowed his tongue as Pen slid with effortless grace to his knees. He had to brace his legs to keep control as Pen dealt with his buttons, and his exploring fingers wrapped round Mark’s painfully solid length. “God. Oh God, you beauty.” He sucked in a sharp breath as he felt the flicker of tongue, then a slow kiss of lips. “Oh, that’s good. That’s good.” Which was an understatement. Pen was moving with as much experience as enthusiasm—no question that he knew his way around a bloke—and Mark threaded his fingers into the silky mass of hair to hold on, and gave himself up to pure sensation. Pen took it slowly, almost tauntingly, licking and sucking, keeping Mark on the edge until he was making incoherent noises, and finally taking him deep into his throat, mouth and lips tight as Mark spent with a groan that sounded even to himself like agony.
They were still a moment, then Pen withdrew, dropping a final kiss on Mark’s wildly oversensitive prick, and sat back on his heels, wiping his mouth. Mark offered a limp hand to pull him up, and found himself pulled down instead so he was sat on the floor, back to the wall, getting his breath.
“Bugger me,” he said at last. “That was good.”
Pen grinned at him. “You’re welcome.” He hadn’t let go of Mark’s hand, and his fingers were strong and warm.
“Really good. All of it.” The mouth-fuck had been marvellous, but the part Mark reckoned he’d be reliving on his own was Pen grinding against him, lost in abandon. “You all right?”
“Oh, yes.” Pen grinned at him, lips glistening wet, and Mark smiled back, and wished to fuck they didn’t have other things to talk about.
Chapter 4
Pen put the kippers on the table, and poured Greta a cup of tea. “There you go. Breakfast for mademoiselle.”
He received a piercing look in return. “You’re very cheerful.”
“I am.”
“Is that to do with how late you were in?”
“Might be.” Pen leaned back, tilting his chair. He was feeling justifiably smug.
“And was that because you met anyone interesting?”
“Might have.”
Greta’s eyes narrowed. “Please tell me he had two arms.”
“As it happens, no.” He sat forward, bringing the chair’s legs down with a thump. “Is that a problem?”
“Maybe not. If you found out he’s working for and what he wants before you did anything, which you didn’t, did you? Pen.”
“I like him,” Pen said defiantly. “I do. He took me to a pub—Gret, it was exactly the sort of place I’ve been looking for. There were people like me, just having a drink. And the landlady knew him, he belongs there. And we talked, and…I like him.”
Greta’s face softened. “Properly like?”
“Very much.”
“Oh, Pen. But he lied to you.”
“Yes, I know. I don’t think he was lying last night.”
“Good. But did he tell you—”
“I didn’t let him,” Pen interrupted. “He tried. I said I didn’t want to know.” Greta stopped dissecting her kipper and stared at him. Pen gave the most insouciant shrug he could. “I wanted to see if I could trust him. I wanted to see if any of it, from when we first met, was real. I wanted not to feel like an idiot who can’t judge people. And he took me somewhere I was comfortable, and we talked about things, and…he listened. You know what it’s like making anyone listen about me, but he did, and I think he understood. I really do think so.”
Greta put her fork down, carefully. “You know I’d be turning handsprings if you found someone like that, and I hope you have, but—sweetheart, you believe people. You know you do.”
“Yes, but I’ve been so suspicious—”
“Your ‘so suspicious’ is how everyone else gets out of bed on a sunny day,” Greta said over him. “You want to believe in people, that’s the problem.”
“Don’t you?” Pen demanded. “Wouldn’t you like to meet someone you could trust?”
“Yes! That’s why I’m suspicious, because I know perfectly well I’d like to. Mother—”
Pen held up a hand; Greta stopped. She didn’t have to say it. Their mother had been all too ready to place her faith in someone, anyone—first their unknown father, then Erasmus Potter. It had ruined her life and nearly theirs.
“I’m not like that,” Pen said. “I’m doing perfectly well with just us. I might want to meet someone, but I don’t need to. I made a judgement about Mark, and I think I’m right. And you can see for yourself, because he asked me to meet him today to discuss it.”
“Did he now?”
He had indeed, sitting by the wall of the dingy back room with his arm round Pen’s shoulders. “He said it would be a good idea if you came too. It’s up to you.”
“Oh, I’m coming.” Greta slid her knife along the kipper’s spine, pushing flesh off bone. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”
—
Mark had asked that they meet at his office, and given Pen a card. M. G. Braglewicz—Enquiries, in Robin Hood Yard. It was only a little way down Holborn, which was a reminder that Mark had lied through his teeth about being lost in Fox Court on their first meeting.
Pen tried not to think about that. He wanted to think about Mark’s shrewd, light blue eyes under furrowed sandy-brown brows, intent on his face as he tried to understand. About the way he’d listened.
Pen had wanted to fuck last night, and that could be unsettling. The fact of being desired as a man was sometimes enough to set off his dizzy spells and the nausea in which nothing felt right. If Mark had grabbed for him, or insisted on touching, which he’d had every reason to think he could—
And he hadn’t. He’d asked, and listened, and not made assumptions. He’d been—not passive, that wasn’t even close to the word, but patient, enough that Pen hadn’t felt pushed into anything, and he’d heard Pen out with a few questions and a shrug. Imperturbable: that was what Mark was. As if you could tell him, I’m not a man, or I’m the Emperor of Abyssinia, or I like cake, and he’d react much the same way. That so? Fair enough.
It was all Pen wanted out of life: for people to let him be himself, Pen Starling, nothing more or less or different. He didn’t want special treatment, only what other people had, which was to walk down the street without having to dress up as someone else.
That sometimes seemed absurd, on the days he enjoyed the set of his shoulders and wondered how he’d look with a beard. It was only clothing. There was no meaning contained in a dress or a pair of trousers, no natural law that said painted faces had to belong to bodies with breasts. It was a convention, that was all. It shouldn’t matter. But then, the sounds of speech were arbitrary too, if trzymajmy kciuki meant the same thing as cross fingers—and yet words mattered. Pen knew exactly how much unnatural and molly mattered when they were shouted at you, and it did no good to dismiss them as only a string of sounds.
The plain fact was, Pen’s mind
didn’t always fit his body. Jaw, beard, shoulders, prick: they all said one thing, and it wasn’t him. He couldn’t change what parts his body had—and he wouldn’t have wanted to, because the other set wouldn’t have been right either—but he could change how it looked. Long hair and eye paint, jewellery and scarves: he put adornments that said woman on a body that said man, and together it added up to something else. To him.
All that meant nakedness felt difficult, sometimes, and Mark hadn’t demanded it, or touched where he hadn’t been invited. Pen wasn’t sure which had been more overwhelming, the desire or the fact of being listened to. Mark had listened, and asked, and thought about Pen as he was. Mark liked his hair, understood that people came in more than two types, and wanted to see him again, and Pen couldn’t help the spring that put in his step.
They just had to get this mysterious piece of information out of the way.
It couldn’t be much. He’d lain awake for an hour or so last night thinking about it, and concluded that it must be his mother’s family. She’d told them a little about her father, a respectable grocer, and had wept over the fact that she could never return to the family home. He and Greta had made that impossible by their birth, or so she’d said. Maybe this was family forgiveness for her sins?
That, or it was the Potters, but Pen thought Mark wouldn’t take their side now even if he’d taken their money at the start. Mark was a decent, fair man. Anyone could see that.
“I’m not worried about this,” Pen said aloud as they turned into the yard.
Greta shot him a glance. “Glad to hear it.”
Mark let them in on the first knock, as if he’d been waiting. He was plainly dressed in the usual brown jacket and trousers, the arm cut off rather than sewn to a pocket. Pen was getting used to the way that looked.
He smiled. Mark smiled back, but it looked a bit forced.
“Pen. Miss Starling. Come in.”
There was a fire going in his room, tea things out and the kettle on. Pen and Greta took chairs in a silence that felt a bit apprehensive, no matter what assurances Pen had made himself. Mark didn’t look like he thought this was trivial.
Don’t be absurd, Pen thought. What could there possibly be?
They waited in silence as Mark made the tea. Pen wondered whether to offer help and decided against it. Mark was clearly capable of doing it one-handed, even if the sequence of acts looked awkward to an observer and the teapot was surely heavy. Pen had the impression he wasn’t a man who liked to ask for help.
At last Mark sat, facing them, each with a cup of tea. He had a table by his chair to put the saucer on.
“Right,” he said. “Thank you for coming. Well. You know that I was set on to find you, professionally.”
“We do indeed,” Greta said.
“What I’d meant to do was check I had the right people and then pass that on to the person who set me on to find you. Only, it’s got a bit more complicated than that. A lot more complicated. And I think I need to tell you what’s going on because”—his eyes flicked to Pen—“I can’t go on with me knowing and you not. It ain’t right and I’m a bit worried, to be honest, because if I can find you, so can someone else.”
“What someone else?” Greta demanded.
“I’ll get to that.” Mark put his cup down. “All right, let’s start with your mother. Did she ever tell you about your father?”
“She named us Repentance and Regret,” Pen said. “That told us everything we needed to know, I think.”
“Nothing else?”
Pen glanced at Greta, who shook her head. “Only that she wished she’d never met him and prayed that we never would. I assume it was the old story: he took advantage, she paid the price. It happens.”
“It does, yeah. Except this time, he married her.”
“Married?” said Pen and Greta together.
“I’ve seen a page from the church register. He married her—”
“Wait a minute,” Greta said. “If Mother was married why would she have pretended she wasn’t? She’s a religious woman, she was always ashamed, and we did not grow up in a kindly world for unwed mothers. Why—”
“Let him tell us,” Pen said. “But I agree. If Mother was married, she’d have said so.”
“I think she was afraid,” Mark said. “She was a grocer’s daughter, sixteen, beautiful, virtuous, and she met a man. A rich man, angry with his family, handsome enough, I dare say. She wouldn’t bed him outside marriage and he wasn’t villain enough to force her. Or maybe he wanted to stick one to his family, I don’t know, but either way, he married her. He made the bargain, had his way, and then decided he didn’t want to pay the price after all. So he cooked up a plot with the parson who’d officiated at the wedding to falsify the records and hide the truth. I’d guess he threatened her to keep her mouth shut. I’m sure she was frightened and hurt and bewildered, her husband turning on her like that. Probably he persuaded her of all sorts of consequences if she spoke out. And then she learned she was with child. I know for a fact she wanted to protect her children, that she wanted you recognised as his, but—well, making a claim like that against a powerful man wouldn’t be easy, any more than a girl in a godly family carrying a fatherless child. So she ran away. She went wandering into the world, sixteen and friendless, and landed up with the Potters, and mostly she kept her silence. She did try to tell the Potters the truth once, but they didn’t listen.”
“They didn’t listen to much,” Greta said tightly.
“And she told the midwife and a doctor at your birth,” Mark said. “She made sure she got a letter confirming that. She didn’t register your births—she might not have known you could, back in those days—but she got a letter written, signed, and dated, and she made sure they put your father’s name on it. She did that for you.”
Pen glanced at Greta. “So we have a father. A legitimate father. He sounds awful.”
“Shocker, honestly. He’s dead now, but you haven’t missed much.”
“Glad to hear it,” Greta said. “Why do we need to know about this ghastly man?”
“Because of who he was,” Mark said. “I told you, rich. Also powerful. Ah, hell. He was the Earl of Moreton.”
There was a silence.
“Sorry,” Pen said at last. “The what?”
“Earl,” Mark said. “The sixth Earl of Moreton was your father.”
“Our father was an earl,” Greta repeated. “An earl. Are you serious?”
“Completely.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am,” Mark said. “I made sure. It’s why I didn’t trot this out right away.”
“And he let us live as we did?” Pen demanded. “He let Mother go into the hands of the Potters? Have you any idea what those men were like?”
“Some. I’m not telling you this so you can be pleased about having blue blood—”
“Good!” Pen snapped. “Because I’m not!”
“Listen, Pen. Your father was the Earl of Moreton. He’s dead. You’re his son, his only legitimate son. Are you following me?”
“You mean, he left us money?” Pen asked cautiously.
“Jesus,” Mark muttered. “No. He left you everything, because that’s what earls do with their heirs.”
“Heir…to an earldom,” Greta said, as though trying out the words. “You can’t mean—”
Mark’s light blue eyes were on Pen, compelling. “You’re the Earl of Moreton. Your surname isn’t Godfrey, it’s Taillefer. You’re Lord Moreton, and you’ve got a big house and a coronet and a sodding great heap of money to go with it. Congratulations, Pen. It couldn’t happen to a better bloke.”
“I’m not an earl,” Pen said. The panic was rising in his throat. “I am not.”
Greta grabbed his hand. “It’s all right.”
“No it isn’t!”
“It’s mostly all right,” Mark said. “All the earldom bit, that’s clear enough. But I’ve not finished, I’m afraid.”
“Wha
t else could there possibly be?” Greta demanded. “You just told us Pen’s an earl!”
“Your father—Edmund, his name was—he married again, without troubling to divorce your mother. Bigamy. The parson blackmailed him, and it looks like eventually Edmund had enough. Seems he hired a man to kill the parson.”
“Kill?” Pen repeated.
“He wasn’t a good man. Things got complicated, and it looks like he ended it himself, to avoid facing gaol or the drop.”
“Sweet God,” Greta said. “Have you any more good news?”
“Yeah. The killer’s still about, and he’s still working.”
“What?”
“The vicar was killed a certain way,” Mark said. “Not kindly. And then the Potters put that notice in the paper searching for you. They’d found out you were the earl, and they wanted a slice—”
“I bet they did,” Greta said. “If Erasmus thought Pen had a shilling he’d want elevenpence of it.”
“He might have,” Mark said. “Only, he was killed a week ago, in the same way as the parson. And that was after your father had died.”
Pen stared at him. He looked extremely serious.
“But—why—?”
“I don’t know. This started with your father, the earl, paying a man to silence anyone who knew he was a bigamist. That man shut up the parson, attacked a couple of other people, and turned on your father. We assumed he’d disappear then, but he hasn’t. He killed Erasmus and had a go at another chap who your mother had set on to find you.”
“What?” Pen yelped. “Mother?”
“She came to London,” Mark said. “She was looking for you.”
“She said if I didn’t marry Erasmus, she’d never speak to either of us again,” Greta said. “She told me, us, that we—we had to obey, that it was our only choice—”