A Gentleman Revealed

by Cooper Davis

The office interior appeared dark and unoccupied, but it was Thursday. Alistair never deviated from his city schedule, not even—as far as Marcus had noted—on days of inclement weather. Shielding a hand over his eyes to peer beyond the watery panes, he strained to glimpse any stirrings within. He’d already rung the bell thrice. The weather was threatening, but surely with as devoted as Finley was to his profession, the man wouldn’t have begged off because of a little snow.

  What if he never made it home safely last night? What if brigands set upon my darling gentleman?

  Such questions had plagued him all the way home last evening, and upon his bedstead, and even more so with every passing mile toward town this morning.

  It was utterly unlike Alistair to abandon him with nary a word at the ball. He who was slavish to precise etiquette in every regard, and had been so courtly—and passionate—last evening. Yet Alistair had vanished like a phantom mist after promising to return to Marcus’s side directly.

  Nary a word, nary a missive . . .

  Marcus scowled in agitation and rang the bell again. This time, his summons roused some action from within the building. The sound of heavy footfalls could be heard, and then a shadowed, all-too-familiar form darkened the other side of the pane.

  Marcus stepped back, smoothing his greatcoat, standing tall. He tried to breathe, but he found his chest and lungs proved impossibly tight—and grew even tighter when the click of disengaging locks heralded the door’s opening.

  “Lord Marcus.” Finley gave him a thin smile, staring aloofly down his nose. “I’m surprised to see you today.”

  Marcus’s mouth fell open. He sputtered and then glared at the man who’d made his past hours a nightmare of imagined dire possibilities. “Sur-surprised?” he finally managed, his face heating.

  Finley gave him a mild nod. “I did not expect you.”

  “I promised that I would come today and escort you to luncheon.” Marcus searched the man’s guarded face. “We had an arrangement.” There. Stress the attachment that we agreed upon, only last night.

  “Oh, that.” Finley—not yet opening the door wide—studied his fingernails with a bored expression.

  Marcus huffed a furious sigh, then pressed forward, forcing his way past the threshold. “Move, you bloody clod!”

  The door slammed behind them and they careened together, Alistair staggering a precipitous step backward, Marcus barreling ahead. As they collided again, Alistair reached for Marcus’s upper arms, steadying him. That grip began scalding and strong, then turned gentle. Concerned, as Alistair moved his thumbs across Marcus’s arms. The man might be feigning disinterest and chill reserve, but his fiery passion still blazed beneath the absurd pretense.

  Marcus stared up at Alistair, who still clutched Marcus in his grasp. Alistair was breathless, rosy-cheeked. Beautiful as Marcus had ever seen him, which incensed Marcus further. It wasn’t fair that a man hell-bent on hurting him should appear at his handsomest.

  Alistair suddenly seemed to realize he all but had Marcus in a clench, and with painstaking precision, slowly uncurled his fingers as he set about releasing Marcus from his stronghold.

  Marcus turned the tables, seizing the other man by his forearms. “I demand to know why you abandoned me at the ball last night.” The words wheezed out of him, emotion straining his every breath.

  Finley pressed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose with a sniff. “You shouldn’t barge into His Majesty’s offices and demand anything, Lord Marcus, especially of a personal nature,” Alistair admonished him with a dour look of disapproval. “Anyone might hear.” The man wrested himself free of Marcus’s hold and gave his cuff a quick neatening.

  “Oh, fucking hell.” Marcus shook his head lividly. “I thought he was gone.”

  “Who?”

  “The officious, snot-nosed bureaucrat who only ever spoke to me one way—down his fucking nose.”

  Alistair’s cheeks stained with deep flags of crimson. “‘Snot-nosed’? You’ve some nerve.” He grazed a harsh look down the front of Marcus’s form. “What were you when I came into my majority, Lord Marcus? Barely out of your swaddling clothes?”

  Marcus wanted to slap the man. Wanted to take his gloved palm and haul off and punch that condescending reserve off his ruddy face. This change in demeanor was wholly irrational, without motivation of any discernible kind. There had to be something Marcus himself had done, some misstep, some overstep. “Whatever happened?” he whispered, throat tightening. “How did I offend?”

  Alistair’s eyes slid shut, and he pressed an unsteady hand to his brow. “Marcus . . . Marcus.” The words were a bit slurred. “How shall I deal with you and this perpetual haranguing? We had a moment, but ’tis done now. You introduced me to the pleasantries of a kiss. I now introduce you to the realities of a cut direct.”

  “This isn’t direct. It’s the most obtuse, inscrutable behavior imaginable. You don’t just shut a person off without an explanation or a kind word. Not when hearts are involved. Not ever, full stop.”

  Marcus searched the other fellow’s face, and Finley decidedly avoided the glance, staring down the hall as if looking for someone. But the only sound, apart from their ragged breathing, was the heavy metronome of the grandfather clock at the corridor’s far end. “We’re alone, aren’t we?” Marcus asked, swiveling his gaze back to Alistair. “You told me to keep my voice down, yet we’re the only ones here. Are we not?”

  “I sent them all home because of the imminent blizzard. But that,” Finley snapped, “does not give you license to behave riotously in His Highness’s palace offices, Lord Marcus.”

  “‘Lord Marcus’? How stuffy and proper you suddenly are. You can’t simply expect me to forget last evening. Not when you revealed your true nature. That passionate, hidden side you keep walled away from everyone else—except me.” Marcus poked him square in the chest. “Stop hiding.”

  Alistair released a low, throaty rumble, but his expression was mirthless. “Hiding? Me? Bloody impossible, or haven’t you noticed?”

  With a stomp of impatience, Marcus blurted, “Just tell me what the devil is wrong.” He reached out and touched Alistair’s chest again, but this time it was a tender caress. “Something that transpired at the ball? I sincerely want to understand.” Marcus swallowed down his heartache and disappointment, and the immense roiling anger that desperately craved an outlet. “You’d not make such an abrupt about-face, not toward me. Not after what we shared last night.”

  Alistair tilted his chin up, composing his face into a near-expressionless mask. “I simply came to recognize the folly of our consorting further. Was made to understand the fruitlessness of extending the dalliance.”

  “Made to understand? By whom?”

  Alistair flinched. It was the slightest blink, but Marcus caught it and moved even closer. He seized Alistair’s ungloved hand and pulled it against his own chest, placing it over his heart. “Alistair, please. Did someone . . . Was something said to you? Were you accosted or . . . was it my brother who—“

  “Not he. None need say a word. I merely chose to take an honest . . .” Alistair’s flush intensified and he swallowed. Hard. “An honest gander at myself.” He wrenched his hand from Marcus’s grasp and pointed at the hall mirrors. “Those looking glasses are brutally frank.”

  “The looking glasses? Whatever are you on about? You’re not making sense—“

  “I am being realistic!” Alistair thundered, looming over him, standing tall to his full height. The smell of whiskey was on the man’s breath. “I have crashed to earth, Lord Marcus. My practical nature demands that I face the truth. You do not belong with the likes of me.” Finley’s head snapped to the side, but Marcus still saw him cringe. “And I—I . . . shan’t ever truly have the likes of you.”

  Marcus seized him by the shoulders. “You are wrong. Take me to your office now and I shall prove precisely how wrong
you are.” Marcus slid his hands down the length of Alistair’s arms, skating fingertips over muscle and the soft linen shirtsleeves. “By the time I leave that office, sir, we shall have lain as one.”

  Those words, apparently, proved Alistair’s undoing because with a growl of desperate possession—and without a measure of restraint—Alistair Finley ran at him. If two paces could accurately be categorized as charging, that’s what the gentleman did.

  Marcus’s lean body was captured in a lunge, seized within a frenzied encircling of thick arms. Alistair’s heart pounded thunderously against Marcus’s chest, the staccato beat vibrating into his ribcage. Then, the whole of Alistair’s domination gentled. Large, warm palms cupped Marcus’s chilled cheeks, and soft, warm lips melted against Marcus’s own. The man’s aching groan filled Marcus’s mouth, chased by Alistair’s tongue, which delved inward. Possessing. Marcus yielded, but not without asserting possession of his own.

  There was grunting and grappling betwixt them, their kiss evolving into something scorching. Marcus found himself thrust backward against a coat tree, his hip wedging against one arm.

  His hat went flying from his head, but Finley did not stop moving into him, upon him. No gentleman had ever come at Marcus with such abandon, not in all his life. He answered that passion, sliding his gloved hands about Alistair’s neck. He stroked his fingers through those heavy locks of raven hair as he pulled Alistair even closer. Aching to hold the whole man, to map every inch of his wondrous body, from the crown of his head to the tip of that erect manhood that was proclaiming itself squarely against Marcus’s belly.

  Alistair Finley—Marcus decided then and there—was endowed like a bloody stallion. Marcus dared to slide a hand between their bellies to stroke the man’s thickened cock, and was answered by a slight shifting of their bodies. With a distressed sound, Alistair broke the kiss, panting against Marcus’s cheek. They’d wound up half atop the bloody coat tree, with Marcus’s back pressing into hooks and an umbrella.

  “Ouch.” Marcus laughed, elbowing the offending article aside. “A spindly umbrella was obviously not the length I had designs upon.”

  “Apologies,” Alistair murmured after a moment, but his hands remained on Marcus. One palm at Marcus’s waist, the other cupping his jaw.

  “When such ardor is the cause, I’d welcome apologies from you quite often.”

  Alistair didn’t smile or laugh, but pressed his lips to Marcus’s forehead. “I should not have kissed you now. And I should never have abandoned you at the ball—not without explanation.”

  Marcus nodded, said nothing. Hoped the man would continue.

  “Yestereve—after our kiss—I realized something. That I’d allowed fanciful hopes to overwhelm the harder realities of our budding courtship. I saw that, in my spinsterhood, I had become a bit naïve.”

  “You are not a—“

  “Spinster? Yes, you keep arguing that point.” Alistair offered him a self-effacing smile. “You must know how enormously flattered I’ve been by your interest. A man like me? Oh, so very swept up in your enthusiasm. But I floated back to earth in the wake of our garden embrace.” Alistair drew in a breath. “Just now, I lost myself again, soared heavenward briefly. But this must end. In truth, it has ended already. For me.”

  Marcus searched Alistair’s face, desperate to understand. “We’d settled into this courtship and now you’re what? You’re breaking it off with me?” Marcus demanded. “But you plainly know that the only thing I desire is to be your husband.”

  With a livid curse, Alistair bent and snatched up Marcus’s hat. “Fine. If you must understand the ways of the world, then follow me. But I shan’t promise to protect your delicate, romantic sensibilities if you cross the threshold of my private office.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Alistair stood in front of his massive desk, peering at Marcus over his spectacle rims. “Look at me.” It was a forceful command, issued by a man accustomed to having his simplest directives heeded.

  Marcus couldn’t help but submit, rising to his full six feet, and tilting his chin up slightly. Alistair mirrored the action, standing even taller before that antique desk, thrusting his powerful shoulders back. The pair of them remained just so, eyeing each other, sparks of masculine fury flying between them.

  Marcus pointedly noted the unstoppered whiskey decanter on the sideboard behind Alistair’s desk. “Did you honestly not expect my visit today? When I’d pledged to call upon you?”

  Alistair swallowed visibly, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I’d not expected you, not in this inclement weather.”

  “Nor after you abandoned me last night?” Marcus fired back. “Otherwise you might have begged off the liquor a bit longer?” Marcus wondered precisely how full that decanter had been a few hours earlier.

  “It’s hardly novel, you witnessing me in my cups.” Alistair turned to his desk, seized a half-filled highball, and drained it in one urgent gulp. His eyes grew a little blearier, sadder. “You know precisely who and what I am. Don’t feign surprise about my appreciation for spirits.”

  “I simply chose to overlook the inclination in my pursuit of you,” Marcus said, calmly as he could manage.

  Finley pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his long nose. “I own a ledger’s worth of flaws, Lord Marcus. However, the most insidious one is the true extent of my imbibing.”

  “I’ve some notion just how much you consume.” Marcus kept his tone barely composed, watching Alistair slosh whiskey into his glass again. The man was clearly hell-bent on proving his point, and Marcus refused to react to the provocation.

  Alistair turned to him, the glass poised at his lips. “Yes, you know my nature. Yet nothing about my character has dissuaded your interest.” Alistair laughed bleakly. “Therefore, forgive me, but I must insist you know me better still. My doing so appears the only way you’ll finally—truly—fucking relent.”

  Alistair pulled his trousers up about his belly with a rough tug, “So, have that honest gander at me. Here and now, in the privacy of my office, give yourself an abundant eyeful. I shall even aid you in that process.” Alistair swiftly unbuttoned his waistcoat, allowing it to bow open across his husky middle.

  Soft linen emphasized the curve of his form, clinging in a fashion that Alistair plainly imagined unbecoming, but the sight nearly turned Marcus mad with desire. That expensive fabric caressed the man’s grand form, fitting so sensually that Marcus’s hands started to tremble.

  Alistair caught Marcus’s roving gaze, and planted both hands upon his hips imperiously. Expensive braces peeped out from beneath the satin waistcoat, fastened just at the top of sophisticated trousers. Marcus envisioned unfastening those braces, and his prick punched upward within his own britches. His mind turned wild with images of stripping Alistair bare, glimpsing that gorgeous body without any covering whatsoever.

  Next, Alistair folded his beefy arms across his chest. “You’re gaping. Seeing the truth now, at last,” he harrumphed in satisfaction. “Imagine were you to glimpse the unholy rest of me.” Those dark eyes went wide with emphasis.

  “Actually, I’m finding it impossible to envision otherwise.” Marcus slid a gloved hand to his own front pleat, where it bulged sharply, and caressed himself. “This,” Marcus said pointedly, “does not lie, Alistair.” Marcus creased the fabric of his trousers, allowing it to reveal his profound arousal. “Do you see how I react to the thought of you, fully bared to me?”

  Alistair made a sound of revulsion. “You can’t mean to want this.” Alistair palmed both hands about his full girth, emphasizing precisely how over-large he believed himself to be. “I am trying to let you out of this arrangement, practically begging you to leave it—and me—be.”

  “Yet what I wish,” Marcus replied carefully, “is to remain with you.” Marcus closed the distance between them. “How can you imagine this handsomeness could ever make me f
lee? Hmm?”

  Alistair jerked his head to the side. “Stop. Marcus, stop!”

  “No, I shan’t. You owe me this much, after leaving me last night.” Marcus fingered one of the man’s exposed suspenders. “Although I should chastise these braces of yours. They’re counteracting my greatest desire—witnessing these trousers wholly undone and about your knees. Now, then”—Marcus stroked that suspender all the way to Finley’s waistband—“then I could give you the appraisal you wish for. You see, I want every inch of you.”

  “Every godforsaken inch?” Alistair winced, shoving at Marcus’s hands. “Of a corpulent man like me?” The words were a plaintive, broken cry. Emphasized in a fashion that Marcus couldn’t grasp, as if they carried strange, very particular significance.

  “Bloody hell, Alistair, that’s wholly inaccurate.”

  “Rotund, then!” Alistair shot back, raising his eyebrows as if daring Marcus to disagree. “Grossly rotund.”

  Marcus’s jaw went slack. “That is likewise horridly untrue.”

  Alistair tossed his hands up, thundering his next words at Marcus. “You’ve blinders on, Marcus, because your predilections run to stout men. Lord Everett Farnsworth? Of a very similar immensity as me.”

  “Everett does not signify between us.” Marcus caught Alistair by the jaw, forcing their gazes to lock. “I never loved him.”

  Alistair blinked at the words. “But you wanted him and we are of a type,” he whispered finally, then stormed to his decanter for further comfort. He stood there, staring down into the mouth of the crystal container, but then spun to face Marcus without refilling his glass. “Would you believe I now weigh some twenty-three stone? I suspect even Lord Everett cannot match my size.”

  Even with his waistcoat unbuttoned and only in linen shirtsleeves, Alistair remained prim and tall in his braced suspenders, impossibly elegant in his expensive spectacles. And impossibly gorgeous, too—flushed from drink and profound arousal.

  Marcus shook his head. “Lord Everett,” he said honestly, “could never touch the handsomeness of you.”