One day, Toby would meet the man who would love him and whom Toby would love in return, and Lucius did not want to be the someone in Toby’s past whom he felt he had to confess to that future lover.
No, better by far to have this one single memory of making love with Toby earlier today than for them to continue and then for Lucius to be left alone to live a life of regrets when Toby, having learned all he could from Lucius, left him to spend the rest of his life with another man.
Lucius drew in a shaky breath. “I am glad you have returned home safely once again, Toby.” He forced himself to speak pleasantly. “But in future, I really would prefer that you give Griffin some indication of what time or if you intend returning home for the night.”
Toby slowly lifted his head to look at Lucius through tear-wet lashes. “Give Griffin some indication…?”
The sign of those unshed tears was almost Lucius’s undoing. But he forced himself to remain strong and not to give in to the need he felt to gather Toby into his arms and hold on tightly. “Of course,” he answered briskly.
Toby’s frown was pained. “Did you not listen to a word I have said?”
“Of course I listened,” Lucius bit out. “You disbelieved my actions and words earlier and decided to go out with your friends this evening. I am attributing no blame to that,” he added as Toby would have spoken. “Once I realized you had gone out, I went out myself and spent a pleasant few hours with my own friends.”
Toby’s chest felt tight with suspicion as to where Lucius had been and who these “friends” might have been, as well as fighting back the tears he was trying so hard not to shed. Neither was particularly flattering when the former was from pure jealousy and the tears were for himself. For the mistake he had made in going out this evening and not staying here and talking to Lucius instead.
He really had felt completely befuddled earlier when he woke, half of him believing he must have dreamed the time in his bedchamber with Lucius.
Later, sitting at the club with his friends, surrounded by their loud and childish revelry, he had known he did not belong there. That he did not wish to belong there. That he wanted to go home. To be with Lucius.
But the Lucius he had come home to was no longer the warm and complimentary lover he had been this afternoon.
The duke now sighed heavily. “Toby, we had a…moment, earlier today, and a conversation afterward, during which I suggested the two of us might become lovers for a time so that I might…introduce you to the pleasures that can be enjoyed between two men. I also assured you there would be no recriminations if you decided against accepting my offer.”
“But I have not refused!” he protested.
“I am now doing so on your behalf,” Lucius stated evenly. “You are not the only one to reconsider the situation, and having done so, I believe it would be for the best if you were to gain your experience with another gentleman other than myself. Someone younger, whom you might relate to without, as you have accused, being made to ‘feel like a child.’ With that in mind, I have decided to go to my country estate in Kent for several weeks, possibly a month, to deal with business matters there in need of my attention, and to also give you the time and opportunity to meet and be with someone of your own age. If you like, I have a club where I can introduce you to—”
“You coward.” Toby pulled his arms from about the duke’s neck before scrambling to his feet and glaring at the older man. “You absolute fucking coward!”
Icy-gray eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?”
Toby gave a disgusted snort. “I did warn you that what I lack in stature, I make up for in character. And I might lack confidence and experience too, and not always behave rationally because of it, but you, sir, are the coward who has decided to run away from us.”
The duke winced. “There is no us—”
“For a few brief hours, there was. There could be again.” His chin set stubbornly. “If you are going to your country estate, then so am I.”
“I do not recall inviting you.”
“I am your ward, and where you go, I shall go also.”
A heavy frown settled on the other man’s brow. “You are once again asking to be taken over my knee and given a spanking.”
“Really?” Toby gave a taunting smile. “Would you like me as I am, or shall I pull down my breeches and drawers before prostrating myself across your very muscular thighs?”
Lucius’s resolve, his control, was on the point of snapping. One more audacious word from this delectable young man and it surely would snap.
“I am sure we would both enjoy having you touch my bare arse,” Toby tempted. “To touch it, to fondle it, to spank it—”
As he had predicted would happen, Lucius snapped.
Chapter Nine
“I fail to see why you are smiling,” Lucius drawled late the following morning as he glanced at the young man riding astride the horse beside his own. “Your arse must be on fire this morning.”
Toby burst out laughing. “I am happy because last night I gave you pleasure, slept in your bed beside you, and this morning, I am here with you, on my way to your country estate.” He shot Lucius a sideways glance. “As I said I would be.”
Yes, he was, Lucius acknowledged self-derisively, very much aware this young man already had the ability to twist him round his delicious and highly suckable little finger.
Perhaps it would be best to change the subject from the one that would force him to acknowledge just how deeply Toby had already burrowed beneath his skin. “Going to my estate has reminded me we need to discuss the best way of keeping up the maintenance and smooth running of your own estate in Gloucestershire.”
Toby smiled. “Who do you think has been running that estate since my father fell ill a year ago?”
Lucius’s eyes widened. “You?”
“Of course.” Toby nodded. “With the assistance of the very able estate manager I employed, a Mr. Gable, who alerts me to any problems as they arise. See, I am not such a child, after all,” he added teasingly.
After last night, Lucius knew he would never think of Toby as being a child ever again. Toby was young in years, yes, and inexperienced, but he was also every inch a man.
A man Lucius was fast becoming obsessed with.
His admiration for Toby had only increased now that he knew he had for the past year, as well as caring for his father, Toby had been successfully running the estate he had now inherited. Toby was a remarkable young man.
Lucius also had to acknowledge he had no strength of will left to deny the younger man anything. Toby’s taunts in the library last night might have caused Lucius’s control to snap, but the night that followed had sealed Toby’s immediate fate.
* * *
Lucius leapt from his chair beside the fireplace, turned Toby around and wrapped his arms about the younger man’s chest. He now effectively held Toby as a prisoner within his embrace, Toby’s back pressed against Lucius’s front.
“It is not my intention to touch and fondle your arse,” he warned softly against Toby’s ear. “But I do intend to spank it until you are incapable of sitting down for a week!”
Toby glanced back at him in challenge. “Then what are you waiting for?” He pressed and then rubbed the globes of his arse against the aroused bulge in Lucius’s evening breeches.
Lucius gave a growl before biting painfully on Toby’s earlobe. He barely gave the young man time to recover from the surprise of that assault before his teeth bit into the tender flesh visible above Toby’s shirt collar. His intention was to suck on that flesh until he was sure he had left a bruise.
As a mark of the ownership he had previously rationalized he had no right to ask for, let alone take?
Lucius pushed such disturbing thoughts aside as he released that bruised flesh to look over Toby’s shoulder and down the length of his body. He watched his own hands as he lowered one of them and unfastened the buttons on Toby’s breeches. Once that fold of material had fallen, he pushed
the front of Toby’s drawers down until they rested beneath his balls, completely baring his beautiful cock. That long and swollen member was once again engorged, the bulbous top bright red and glistening with pre-cum.
The skin of Lucius’s hand was much darker than that of Toby’s cock as he wrapped his fingers about that pulsing length. He stroked and pumped it until Toby groaned his pleasure and his head fell back against Lucius’s shoulder.
“Is this what you want?” Lucius challenged. “Answer me!” he insisted as Toby continued to murmur his pleasure.
“Yes,” Toby gasped. “It is everything I have fantasized about since I was sixteen years old.”
Lucius stilled. “What?”
“That was the last time I saw you until a week ago,” Toby answered him almost dreamily. “My father had sent me to the drawing room to keep you company while he finished dressing. The two of you were going out for the evening.”
“I remember.” Lucius did remember. Vividly. Toby’s golden curls and pouting lips were unforgettably sweet even as a sixteen-year-old.
Toby nodded. “You looked so wonderful in your evening clothes. So tall and broad and…and simply magnificent.” His cock pulsed in Lucius’s hand. “So much so that I could barely string two words together when you questioned me as to whether or not I was looking forward to returning to school.”
“I remember that too.”
“But I doubt you know that I have spent the past four years, since I first realized my desires were centered on you, fantasizing about the two of us being together. The first time I pleasured myself, it was to images of you inside my head, and you have featured in every one of my sexual fantasies since.”
Lucius was speechless at this admission. Toby had desired him when he was sixteen years old? And in the years since?
“Do not stop!” Toby protested as Lucius removed his hand completely from Toby’s cock, the younger man frowning up at him as he was spun around. “What are you doing?”
Lucius’s hands slid down until they grasped the delicious globes of Toby’s arse. “Did my spanking you feature in any of those fantasies?”
“Yes! Oh God, yes…”
“Then I suggest you try to remember that when your arse is stinging so badly, you beg me to stop. Perhaps then you will remember not to challenge me in the way you did earlier,” Lucius warned before he resumed sitting in the armchair beside the fireplace. He pulled the younger man over his thighs and wrenched down his breeches and drawers to mid-thigh, revealing the bare curves of Toby’s arse, before his hand landed painfully on one of those perfect globes. “Remember this too.” He slapped the other deliciously rounded cheek. “And this, and this, and definitely fucking this!” Each “this” was accompanied by a smack to that delectable flesh.
Lucius’s frustration with the evening, with the emotions Toby aroused in him, along with the knowledge this beautiful man had wanted him for years, was such that he landed a dozen more blows to that delicious and rapidly reddening flesh. Which was when he realized the younger man was groaning in pleasure rather than pain, and rubbing the fullness of his cock against Lucius’s thigh.
The little devil was seeking his own relief against Lucius’s leg!
“Stop that,” Lucius bit out as he landed a hard smack to the tender skin at the top of Toby’s thighs. “I mean to punish you for your earlier impertinence, not give you pleasure.”
The younger man’s face was flushed and his eyes overly bright when he glanced over his shoulder at Lucius. “At the moment, they appear to be one and the same thing.”
Lucius breathed out his frustration. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Well, you could continue spanking me, as we both seem to be enjoying that, but you might also consider touching and fondling me until I release?” Toby suggested hopefully.
Lucius closed his eyes to shut out the tempting sight of Toby’s reddened arse cheeks. He had never spanked anyone before in his life, had never needed to do so when his previous lovers had always been in awe of him and only too eager to give him anything he wanted. Consequently, Lucius had never needed to inflict physical punishment upon a lover, let alone then have that lover ask for more of the same.
For all his years of sexual experience this, being with Toby, was new territory for Lucius.
This near obsession he seemed to have developed for the younger man.
Toby’s admission of Lucius featuring in every one of his sexual fantasies to date.
The heat of Toby’s arse cheeks beneath his hand.
The hardness of Toby’s arousal pressing against his thigh.
Hearing Toby begging for more of the same, and knowing, accepting, all that had happened because he had spanked Toby, now seemed to have taken Lucius over a threshold he wished to explore further. With Toby. Only with Toby.
“Or perhaps it is now my turn to touch and fondle you?” Toby murmured as he turned slightly and slid to the floor to kneel between Lucius’s thighs. “Something else I have fantasized about to the point of obsession.”
That admission robbed Lucius of the willpower and strength to stop the younger man as he unfastened the fold of Lucius’s breeches and the tie of his drawers to release the heavy length of his engorged cock.
Toby gasped as he sat back upon his heels, totally unselfconscious about his upstanding and angrily aroused member. “Your cock is so much longer and thicker than mine. Than I ever imagined it was. I shall never be able to… Surely it will not fit?” He gave a pained frown as he stared at Lucius’s thick and rigid shaft.
“When the time comes, it will fit,” he assured gruffly. “We will have explored and played together much more by then, so that it will hardly hurt at all when I penetrate you.”
Toby looked up at him. “Will you allow me to penetrate you too?”
Lucius had never allowed any man to do so. Had never wanted any man to have that physical or emotional power over him. But Toby…? “Perhaps,” he agreed slowly.
Toby licked his lips as he once again stared at Lucius’s cock. Lucius felt the release of pre-cum from the slit at the tip of his cock in response to the heated eagerness of Toby’s gaze. He groaned low in his throat as Toby lowered his head, lips parted, to take Lucius’s cockhead into the heat of his mouth.
Lucius gave another groan and his head fell back as he slid farther down the chair to allow the younger man easier access. He watched between heavy lids as the long fingers of one of Toby’s hands curled around but did not meet about the width of Lucius’s cock. Instead, it acted as a support for that heaviness as Toby’s stretched lips began to move up and down, his tongue a hot rasp along that throbbing length.
To be able to relax the muscles at the back of the throat, as Lucius had earlier, took practice and patience. But Toby tried his best, taking in over half of Lucius’s length before conceding defeat and allowing his hand to pump the remainder.
The juicy sounds of Toby sucking in and then slowly moving up the length of Lucius’s cock now filled the room, along with Lucius’s increasingly louder groans as his climax approached with a rapidity he wished he might control but knew he had none left. Toby would have his way, and what Toby obviously wanted now—demanded—was for Lucius to fill his mouth with his creamy cum.
The moment Lucius felt one of those fingers pressing against the sensitive ring of his anus, again as he had done to Toby earlier, Lucius knew the fight for that control was lost.
He threaded his fingers through Toby’s silky curls, whether to push him away or pull him in deeper, Lucius could not say as his release ripped through him with a suddenness that completely robbed him of breath. It shot hotly along his length before spurting fiercely into Toby’s mouth to be eagerly swallowed down as the young man waited for the next spurt. Time after time, Lucius released, until he felt completely drained, his cock oversensitive to the licking rasp of Toby’s tongue.
“Enough, love.” Lucius eased Toby’s head back, his cock slick and glistening as it slowly slid from between
Toby’s red and swollen lips.
Toby chuckled as he crawled up into Lucius’s lap, his arms again about Lucius’s neck as he rested his head on his shoulder. “Did I learn my lesson well?”
“Some might say too well,” Lucius allowed dryly. “You would certainly go to the top of the class if there were any others in it.”
Toby’s lifted his head, eyes narrowed. “But there is only me.”
The younger man said it as a statement, but Lucius recognized it for the question and uncertainty it was. “Only you, Toby.” He stroked those golden curls. “For the time we are together, there will only be you for me.” His expression hardened. “I expect the same fidelity from you, because I do not share.”
“Nor I.” Toby was silent for several more seconds. “You did not— You did not go with anyone else this evening?”
“No. Did you?”
“No.”
Lucius sighed his relief with that answer. “Then we are agreed to be exclusive with each other for as long as we both wish to be so.” He had now given up any idea of resisting Toby. Mainly because he had no resistance with which to do so.
“Yes.” Toby became silent again before chuckling huskily. “We must both look thoroughly debauched sitting here with our cocks hanging out of our breeches.”
“We do,” Lucius acknowledged lazily, too physically and emotionally satiated at this moment to care.
“We should go to bed,” Toby murmured long minutes later.
“We should.”
Still, neither of them made any effort to move.
“Might I sleep in your bed with you tonight?” Toby broached shyly after several minutes’ silence.
Lucius knew he should say no but… “You may.” The thought of being parted from Toby, even for the few hours of sleep, did not appeal to him. After all, it was leaving Toby to his own thoughts and devices that had caused the rift between them earlier today. “But there will be no more lovemaking tonight, for either of us. Not because I do not want you,” he continued as that hurt expression returned to Toby’s eyes. “I have said we will take this slowly, and that is what we will do,” he added sternly. “Sleeping in the same bed will suffice for now.” Spending the whole night with another man was also something else that Lucius had never done.
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