Chapter Nine #3
Fitzsimmons loomed over him, still impeccably attired, not a hair out of place, and hardly out of breath. “You have dirt and a leaf on your sleeve, pup,” he observed and made to brush at it.
Rollo batted him away. “Because you put it there, you damned bacon-brained half-wit.” He prodded Fitzsimmons in the chest. It was like prodding a sheet of iron. “Answer the damned question.”
The lord fixed him with a blunt, haughty stare. “You and that man were about to commit acts unseemly at a country dance.”
“Which is precisely why I left the country dance and traipsed up to this bloody thicket, a good way beyond the country dance. And even if I was, what business is it of yours anyway?”
“You…you belong to me. You’re in my charge; therefore, you’re my business.”
Rollo glared, long and hard, at this great hulking creature, his smug arms folded across his substantial smug chest and his thick, expressive, smug eyebrows knitted together like two fearsome devil horns.
Underneath them, flat brown eyes glared back at Rollo with a cool intensity the younger man failed to match.
If Fitzsimmons had presented a smaller target, Rollo would have bunched up his fist and planted him a facer, right on his self-satisfied sneer of a mouth.
Instead, he smoothed his hair and straightened his cravat, trying for all the world to behave like a chap in the company of nobody but his valet.
“I’m nineteen years of age, my lord,” he spat with as much contempt as he could muster. “I’m in no one’s charge, and I belong to nobody. And you’re not much of a Latin scholar.”
For the briefest of seconds, the lord appeared nonplussed, allowing Rollo to conjure up his most chilly stare, worthy of his father’s repertoire.
“If you were,” Rollo explained, “you’d know that interruptus follows coitus, and not the other way around.”
As a cutting riposte, it fell horribly short of the Earl of Rossingley’s icy standards, but for a young man with his now very limp cock waving in the breeze, it could have been a lot worse.
Satisfied he’d removed most of the foliage from his coat, Rollo poked himself back inside, taking his own sweet time.
The lord’s eyes flicked down, then just as swiftly flicked away.
The faintest tinge of colour stole across his cheeks, and Rollo’s hand stilled at the fall of his trousers.
You belong to me, he’d said. Surely…surely not.
“Oh, I see,” Rollo said softly. “It’s like that.”
A dry twig cracked underfoot as he took a pace closer to where Lord Lyndon stood rooted to the spot. As if pulled by a magnet, the lord’s dark eyes again dropped to where Rollo’s fingers still loitered.
“You like what you see, Fitz?”
“I see nothing,” he snapped, “except a foxed young fool about to shame his father’s good name.”
“My father’s good name is none of your business either.
” Employing the same wide-eyed innocent stare he’d used with great success on the countryman not fifteen minutes earlier, Rollo gave himself a slow, deliberate rub.
“So why do you appear so discomfited, my lord? Am I to believe you want some of this too?”
Lord Lyndon shoved him away, hard enough to send him careening back into the undergrowth. “You’re a damned fool, pup, messing with a man like Ralph Hart, and not fifty yards from where any person could spot you.”
“A man like what? Oh…you mean…” Recovering his balance, Rollo gave a sly wink. “…a man that you…have a familiarity with too? Is that it? My sincere apologies if I’m trespassing on your territory, Fitz.”
“Your insinuations are insanity, boy,” hissed the lord. “I am only acquainted with Ralph Hart because his family were the gamekeepers on Ashington land for over one hundred years until that lazy oaf got himself the sack.”
Rollo nodded slowly. “I see. Then your reason for such disapproval must be because he shares the same tastes as myself. Or is it because he is one of the lower classes? Gamekeepers? Stable boys and the like?” He tutted. “I’m sorry, Fitz, would you prefer I stick to only pleasuring swells like you?”
“Damn your eyes!” Venting an angry roar, the lord grabbed Rollo by his cravat.
His hot breath gusted against Rollo’s cheek, and Rollo’s nostrils filled with the sharp musk of brandy, cologne, and clean, solid man.
“I mean leg-shackled men. Ralph Hart was born and bred in this village. He’s a wife and three brats at home.
He’s a drunkard, a sodomite, and barely holds down bits and bobs of honest work as it is.
Drives the mail coach once a day from Beccles to Norwich—rumour has it he thieves from it when opportune; mail certainly goes missing more often than not.
He scrounges a bit of gavelling work at harvest, and not much else.
The man’s the devil’s own trouble, but do you want his brats turfed out and in the workhouse?
” His warning finger was inches away from Rollo’s face.
“Because I’ll tell you this much, boy. That’s what will happen if Ralph Hart gets caught messing about with the likes of you. ”
Pushing Rollo away from him, his lips twisted into a sneer.
“Your prancing, frolicking ways might be all the rage in the ton, or at your beloved Rossingley, where every last man and his bloody horse is a damned invert. But not here. Not here in Goule. The folks won’t stomach it from one of their own.
They still have a quack healer in the village.
Not fifteen years ago, a woman was stoned to death accused of being a damned witch. ”
“He approached me,” cried Rollo.
“Ralph Hart can approach the King of bloody Siam if that’s what he wants!
But if rumours get around that he’s a sodomite, then he’s out of a home and a wage.
And over my dead body will the Fitzsimmons or any guests of the Fitzsimmons be a part of it.
I’m not having his wife and brats on my conscience, and neither will you.
And I’d wager all the tea in bloody Siam that your wonderful, damned papa would be of the same damned opinion. ”
Rollo glowered at him even as hot tears pricked his eyelids.
Ye gods and damnation but his lordship was right.
He could almost hear his dear papa’s voice in his ear, whispering more or less the same words because God knew he’d never stoop to shouting.
But of all the people to put Rollo in his place, did it have to be this bloody man?
Had Rollo learned nothing from writing out endless lines?
From being sent to this godforsaken backwater with his tail between his legs?
“Some bloody hellraiser you are!” he lobbed back, but it seemed to land on deaf ears.
Lord Lyndon had already turned his broad shoulders away and now descended the slope at a brisk canter.
Brushing at his eyes, Rollo scrabbled around for an insult, an accusation, mockery.
Anything but an admittance the insufferable lord was right.
Anything to pierce this man’s impenetrable armour.
And then, he recalled the heat in those smouldering, polished mahogany eyes as Rollo’s hand had lingered at the fall of his trousers.
The something indefinable in that glance from the same playbook as the come-hither one Ralph Hart and Rollo had exchanged outside the barn, what seemed a lifetime ago now.
Rollo selected the only weapon certain to wound.
“You can’t even summon the courage to admit what you really are, can you, Fitz?” Angrily, he brushed at his face, wet with self-pitying tears. God, he felt a long way from home. “I might be young, and foolish with it. But at least I have that. I’ll always have that.”
For a second, the lord’s pace faltered, then picked up even faster than before as if Rollo had never spoken.