Chapter Twenty-Four
KIT HAD NEVER entered Lando’s bedchamber, though the hidden door in the panelling had tempted him more than once. Being invited into this private space was being granted permission to unveil another even more intimate layer of the man.
Muted, classical simplicity was very much à la mode in and around the ton . The clean, sleek lines of Grosvenor Street’s reception rooms were replicated at White’s, at Rossingley, and had even reached the home of Kit’s former employer, Sir Brandon Gower, out in the provinces.
The fashion had bypassed Lando’s sumptuous bedchamber. As Kit stepped farther into the room, his dazzled gaze flitted like a butterfly from flower to flower. Far above his head, gilded hunting scenes ran amok across the plaster ceiling in lavish detail fit for a king’s drawing room. Below, his boots sank into the richly patterned fitted carpet as though standing on a mattress made of goose feathers. The white marble chimneypiece was wide enough to home a small family, the inferno merrily blazing away within sufficient to warm an entire village. Red silk walls and opulent upholstery complemented cream-and-burgundy silk bed hangings, themselves enriched with panels of delicate ivory-coloured embroidered flowers. The bed was a warm hug, an inviting haven of indulgence, steeped with pillows, throws, rugs; every item beckoning him closer.
Naturally, all of this passed him by in the blink of an eye because of…Lando, naked, in a huge claw-footed tub facing out towards the park. Shrouded in fragrant steam, he idly sponged a long pale arm while enjoying the view. Unable to tear his eyes from an entirely different view, Kit reached out a hand to steady himself, sucking in a deep inhale. What a glorious scent. What a glorious sight!
“I sense you bring excellent news, darling.” A ripple accompanied Lando’s greeting as the arm sank underwater. In proportion with the vast bedchamber, the bath easily hid his body, leaving only his head and shoulders visible, his blond locks damp and curling at his nape, resting on a cushioned pad. Around his neck looped a heavy rope of pearls.
“W…what?”
The thick pearls circled his long neck twice, glistening. Two droplets of water trickled down his cheek.
“I said, you must have excellent news. Your fists are hanging by your sides and unclasped.”
“Yes.” Kit’s limbs took on a loose, fluid quality. “Forgive me, I was…”
With a tilt of his chin, Lando indicated to the fireplace. “Pritchard has towels warming. Would you be kind enough to pass them? The water is cooling.”
“Of course.”
Kit thought back to his own ungainly clambering out of his bathtub earlier that day, accompanied by much cursing and sloshing of water, despite Jasper’s assistance. Lando’s graceful transition from lying to standing, shamelessly bare, was seamless. Generous streams of water cascaded down his chest, sheening his flat belly, slicking the treasure lying long and pale between his thighs. The man was as flawless and polished as the white marble of the chimney breast behind him.
“You are wearing pearls,” Kit stated needlessly. “While bathing.”
“For your rendezvous with Gartside.” Lando flashed his small, neat teeth. “For luck.”
Lando made no effort to cover himself. Or, in fact, dry himself. Kit drank in the perfect arrangement of shoulders, limbs, chest, and belly.
“The…ah…towels?” Lando murmured after a minute or so. Raising a slim hand to his neck, he fingered the pearls. His lip curled in that suggestive, crooked way he had.
“Yes.” Kit swallowed, his gums and tongue thick and sluggish as if unsure of their purpose. “You are wet,” he added uselessly.
Lando brought the pearls to his mouth. He ran the tip of his tongue around one. “One normally is after bathing. You could dry me off.”
The towels were thick and soft. Warm, too, from the fire. Kit began with Lando’s face, tenderly dabbing at the dampness. Lando stayed perfectly still.
“Gartside. His visit,” he prompted as Kit rubbed the towel in slow circles across Lando’s chest. Lando’s member was half hard now; Kit’s own arousal throbbed painfully against the placket of his breeches. As he swept the towel lower to catch a few drips making their way down Lando’s belly, he ghosted over Lando’s arousal and a possessive, needy sound escaped his throat.
“You are so…ugh…” Kit breathed.
A pearl clacked against Lando’s teeth.
“You are…” Kit tried again, a coherent response failing him. “That man’s name has no place in this bedchamber,” he managed instead. “Not now. Not here with…” His eyes were drawn to where Lando mouthed the pearls. “You need drying very carefully.”
Lando chuffed, and with a circling of his hips, brushed his shaft against Kit’s thigh. “Look. I’m still very wet down here.”
If Kit looked, he might explode. “So is your back,” he answered. “Turn around.”
As Kit swept the towel down the valley of Lando’s shoulder blades, he traced its path with his tongue, his open-mouthed kisses claiming every inch of hot damp skin. He rested his hand at Lando’s hip, holding him lightly in place as he trailed the cloth along the curve of his spine, lingering on the swell of his pale, smooth buttocks. When he dragged an edge down Lando’s divide, Lando arched back into him with a moan.
“I need drying there very carefully.”
“You are soaking,” Kit agreed hoarsely.
His desire was too loud for words. Too intrusive. Unstoppable. Palming himself through his breeches, he dragged the towel up again, a little deeper this time. Lando widened his stance, gripping the side of the tub for balance. As Kit dried that hidden part of him most thoroughly, with his other hand, he squeezed Lando’s bare buttock, rubbing himself against it.
It was not enough.
Abandoning the towel, he sank to his knees. Like succulent ripe fruit, Lando’s two pert mounds hovered inches away from his mouth, arching back into him. Tempting him. Kit had never performed such an intimate act—had never desired to—but then, he’d never been presented with such a delicious spectacle. Spreading Lando with his thumbs, he licked an obscene line down Lando’s crease and was rewarded by a sharp gasp.
He pulled back. “Too much?”
Lando pushed into him with a sigh. “Not enough.”
Kit licked again, this time keeping his mouth there. Lando writhed in pleasure, spurring him on. Kit lapped at the delicate pink star quivering under his tongue, tasting it, mouthing it. The taut flesh softened, he watched it unfurl and open, aware of his own shaft leaking like a lead pipe and just as hard. Lando’s sounds of pleasure echoed around the room in counterpoint to Kit’s obscene slurps.
“I am spoiled…” Lando gasped, writhing away from him. “No bath shall be complete until you undo me like this afterwards. I shall demand it after every single one.”
“You shall have it, my lord.” Ye gods, how wonderfully indecent Kit felt, himself fully clothed and his lover splayed open for him. “Whenever, whatever you wish, it is yours.”
“I wish to kiss you.”
Kit stood, spun Lando around, and pulled him into his arms. Frantically, he claimed his mouth, bruising Lando’s ripe lips with the intensity of it. Dragging him closer still, Kit closed his fingers around a clutch of pearls. As his own need threatened to drown him, he pushed Lando backwards. “And I wish you to be on the bed. Now.”
Kit loosened his cravat, urgently extricating himself from his finery. Spread out waiting for him, Lando toyed with his damned pearls. With his other hand, he fondled himself, teasing the hood of his prick up and down.
“Damn your tailor,” Kit cursed, wriggling like a worm on a hook. There was a slight tearing sound. “This coat is too blasted tight across my shoulders.”
The buttons were cursed, too, all ten pretty enamel ones adorning his waistcoat. A series of soft chuckles erupted from his lover as he wrestled with them, gaining in delight as Kit shook off his undershirt like it housed an angry wasp. He sat for his boots, in the nick of time remembering he hadn’t been put on this fine earth purely for Lando’s entertainment. Considering his lover was the one stark ballock naked and dripping soap suds, he shouldn’t be the one now chortling like a burst drain.
“It’s those blasted pearls.” Kit flung his stockings across the room, then groaned, clutching his sore ribs like a loon. Hip, head, and ribs be damned too. “They have addled my brain. You will be the death of me, Lord Henry Orlando Fitzwilliam Albert Duchamps-Avery.” With a sudden move, Kit pounced on his squealing lover. “But, by heavens, it will be a most marvellous way to go.”
Wrestling Lando higher onto the pillows, Kit took charge. Both of his man and the damned jasmine oil. As Kit’s slippery finger sought entry between his parted thighs, Lando’s eyes widened. Already slack, he arched up into Kit’s touch. As he whimpered, Kit smiled.
“You like that, don’t you? Pleasure yourself on me.”
Lando shuddered, and one finger became two. His head fell back, and Kit sucked and nipped at his neck. He buried his tongue in the hollow behind his ear, shared his hotly gasped air. Kit was thoroughly spoiled, too, for any other man.
“Now,” Lando panted, “Now, Kit. Please?”
How Kit loved that little desperate please. Kneeling up, he helped himself to some more oil and took himself in hand, coating himself from root to tip in a showy, generous manner.
Then he lined himself up.
Nothing compared to that first thrust. Unhesitating and unapologetic. In that moment, he swore Lando’s soul was tangled with his. Buried to the hilt, he held still, mesmerised by his lover’s parted lips, his silent cry of pleasure. Pulling almost all the way out, Kit poured himself into him again, his hips slapping against the back of Lando’s thighs. Lando slid down the pillows, and he grabbed onto Kit’s shoulders, his nails digging into the firm flesh.
“Hold on tight,” Kit gasped. He had one hand around his lover’s neck, the blessed pearls caught up in his palm, the other wrapped around the bedframe. As his lover opened up, he pounded into him, harder, faster, deeper until Lando was laudanum running through Kit’s veins, and Kit, a hungry, greedy addict. Between them, Lando’s shaft lay hot and heavy; with every stroke, Kit rubbed against it between them. Lando trembled, his channel tightening around Kit’s prick.
“I am close to spending,” he breathed, his mouth merging with Kit’s.
Kit squeezed a hand between them, closing it around Lando’s leaking member.
“Then spend for me, my love. And I shall do the same.”
*
“I MUST ADD bedsport to your list of talents, Kit,” observed Lando lightly. Still damp from his bath and now from his exertions, his blond locks curled sweetly across his forehead. “My mattress may never recover. And your…your tongue—” His cheeks flushed a delicate hue. “—is singularly gifted.”
“I have never done that…there until now,” Kit confessed. “In fact, I have never lain in a bed with another man until you, though I have partaken of my share of men. But not lain with them. Not like this.”
Those faceless mollies and Lando didn’t warrant the same sentence. Pillowing his head in his arms, Kit sleepily gazed up to the complexly patterned ceiling and the swashbuckling adventures played out upon it. He frowned. On closer inspection, some of those innocent hunting scenes weren’t what they had first seemed. That swarthy knight, for instance. Kit blinked, then blinked again to be quite sure. The one without the helmet and the exaggerated codpiece. He wasn’t…with that…that other knight. Was he? And was…was that his memb…? Ye gods.
“Quite.” Lando gave a little cough. “You were saying, darling.”
Flushing, Kit turned his regard to the safer, plainer silk hangings draping the bed, adorned with lilies, though rapidly averted it to the carved wooden scrolls at the foot because those water nymphs were…good Lord. Closing his eyes was simpler.
“I was saying I’ve never tupped in a bed.”
“And is it to your liking?” Lando’s nimble fingers curled around the trail of thick dark hair tracking down the centre of Kit’s belly.
“I’d say so. Mostly, I’ve done it stood up against alley walls or bent a man over in a dark corner. An occasional swift tumble on a well-used sheet in the back room of the coffee house down on Field Lane when funds have allowed. But never like this, never on a soft mattress made up with linen sheets.” And never with one as fine as you .
He turned to where Lando lay on his side, drowsily watching him from under the lids of those silvery eyes. Like a lazy lion waiting to pounce. “And…and I’ve never taken the role you…you have just taken,” he admitted. “But I wonder, with you, whether it would give me pleasure.”
“Then I should find it most pleasurable too.”
Closing the gap between them, Lando rested his head on Kit’s chest. His ribs didn’t mind one bit.
“This is new to me also,” Kit remarked. “Lying here afterward and speaking my heart.” He huffed a laugh. “Tupping you makes me garrulous.”
“In some ways, this can be the best part.” As Lando’s cool fingers trailed up and down Kit’s side, Kit didn’t think he was wrong.
The fingers tapped on his chest. “Though no conversation or music is so pleasant to my ear as your strong heartbeat.” Lando turned to press his lips against the skin overlying it. “Every second and every minute you lay unconscious spoke only of my empty future.”
With a shake of his head, Lando tutted, his breath fluttering against Kit’s thick pelt. “How selfish I sound. You, so unwell, and me, only thinking of myself.”
Kit squeezed Lando’s fingers, bringing their hands, now knitted together, to his mouth to kiss them. “If I had been capable of conscious thought, then I daresay I would have been thinking of you too.” He grinned down at the blond head. “You consume far too many of my thoughts these days, my lord.”
“Then may these days stretch forever.”
Kit kissed his fingers again. “Amen to that.”
Sighing contentedly, he nuzzled against the top of Lando’s head. He’d never felt a need to kiss a man as much as his lips sought any part of Lando and marvelled that his need for him was not sated despite their recent exertions.
“Gartside offered two hundred pounds.” Kit allowed himself a quick flare of satisfaction. “If I secure the deal as his, and another fifty pounds when it’s done. I accepted, naturally; the money will be delivered here by this evening.”
“Then we should celebrate. We have him in our grasp.”
“We do,” agreed Kit hesitantly.
Lando tilted his chin up to look at him. “I sense it does not give you pleasure.”
“Oh, it does.” Kit half-smiled. “That vile man is trapped; this will not end well for him. Though…” He shifted. “I still have a suspicion it will end awkwardly for me too.”
“Shhh.” Lando pressed a finger to Kit’s mouth. “Don’t say that.”
“I must. I cannot deny the uneasiness in my bones. It heralds a natural end to our association too. As cocooned as I am now in this…this—” He swept an arm encompassing the opulence surrounding him. “—splendour, nonetheless, I am masquerading as someone I am not and fear being apprehended by the hour.”
“You know I will do everything in my power to prevent it,” replied Lando swiftly. “Robert and I have an idea and though I confess to not having the finer details thought out, if it fails then I am a peer of the realm. Even in these enlightened times, my word carries weight. It pains me, too, that you are at risk.”
“I chose of my own free will to go along with your plan,” countered Kit. “I knew the consequences. And Gartside’s downfall is worth it.” He sighed heavily. “But even if I wriggle through this, there still remains the thorny problem of Mr Clark. Granted, he is trouble of my own making and should be of no concern of yours, and yet, he is on my trail. I have broken the law on many occasions, and I do not wish for you to become tainted by an association with a common thief such as I. When this Gartside business is put to bed, if I walk away a free man, then I must escape his clutches by returning to Kent. I will use Sir Brandon’s and my uncle’s connections to seek honest employ.” He pecked the tip of Lando’s finger then let it go. “And Rossingley is quite a few miles from Kent.”
Lando drew himself up onto his elbows, his worried eyes roaming Kit’s face. “Do not speak of that now. Not when we have this…us. We are a beginning, not an end. It does not have to be that way. My brother, Robert, thinks we may come through this unscathed. He has made enquiries regarding Clark. You must put your trust in him. And in me.”
Trust . It walked hand in hand with love, even if occasionally it lagged behind. As Lando offered it so sincerely, so bravely, how Kit wished he could grab it with both hands.
“I am saddened that I struggle to see the future as clearly as you, Lando. But I must carve my own path. Regrettably, that cannot be at Rossingley, where I have neither home, family, or connections, nor here in London. Most definitely not here in London, not if I wish that path to be a lengthy one. Though, it pains me to say it, as I wish for nothing more than to spend my days in close acquaintance with you.”
Lando’s glittery eyes beseeched him; he looked anxious. And beautiful. “Then let us not try to see the whole future”—his voice trembled with hope—“Let us live by the day. Let us see to the end of this Gartside business and then speak again as we do now. Frankly and openly as lovers and friends. Can you do that for me, Kit?”
His lips met Kit’s urgently as if showing the future to Kit if only he had the courage to believe in it.
As they broke apart, Kit answered, “I have said it before.” He smiled and shook his head. “There is nothing I will not do for you. Especially when your body lies naked on mine and your lips”—he chased them again—“taste so sweet.”
Lando’s fingers stroked across Kit’s mouth as if learning the shape of it. His gaze dropped. “I know it is not polite to speak of one lover whilst in bed with another. But if I may, there is something I must share with you.” He toyed with Kit’s earring, rolling it between his finger and thumb. “I hope it is not too much too soon. But I can think of no other way to reassure you that I shan’t allow anything dreadful to befall you. Robert and I will never let that happen.”
“I shall try my utmost to believe that to be true.”
“I grieved Charles’s passing terribly, Kit. For three long years. And yet, at the same time, even in the depths of my melancholia, I understood all things must pass and even grew to accept that he had been my allotted portion of joy.” He gave a rueful smile. “That the precious short time we had together was my due. And I did not complain. Mourned, yes. God, how I mourned. But not complain.”
He swallowed as if it pained him. “And…and then you came along. And it seems our Lord has seen fit to afford me a second allocation of joy. One I shall not squander. So, though your path today may be covered in rocks and stones, it will not be that way forever. When all is said and done, we shall be together. I promise.”