Chapter Seventeen #2
“Lie here a moment. Rest yourself. Tell me about your trip to Norwich. I have never visited.”
“I thought the purpose of coming here was to eat. To endure a picnic.”
Rollo laughed. Was there nothing Lyndon could say to pierce that excellent humour? “All in good time, Fitz. But let me warn you, I’m the picnic that talks back.”
He lifted his head from his makeshift pillow to sip at his wine. Thanks to the awkward position, a few ruby drops dribbled down his chin. Eyes bright with amusement, Rollo wiped them with the back of his hand before his pink tongue darted out to lick them up.
Though shaded by trees, the picnic spot was still awfully close to the house.
Too close for anything other than picnicking, and Lyndon’s ballocks sensed a long, achy afternoon ahead.
More so when the pup patted Lyndon’s leg and then, as if checking his belongings were all present and correct, let his light fingers wander along it.
“Ravish me with your words, my lord,” Rollo declared lazily. “This fine weather puts me in a romantic mood.” He closed his eyes against the sun. “Undress me with your cleverness. Touch me with your soul. Seduce me, Fitz.”
Reaching the end of their travels, the young man’s long fingers took up thankfully modest residence on Lyndon’s lower thigh. Perhaps his ballocks might get a reprieve after all.
“I’m not entirely convinced much seduction is required,” Lyndon observed.
“One, your hand is already touching my person. Two, you have invited me here, alone, to this sheltered spot, when we could so easily have eaten in the dining room in the presence of Greaves. Three, at your request, I am informed those baskets contain some of my favourite delicacies, and four, you are halfway down a glass of good wine.” Which has brought a rosy flush to your cheeks that I would like nothing more than to kiss away.
“Oh, and lest we forget—five, you have already seduced me. Twice.”
“Oh, don’t be such a curmudgeon. Do it anyway. Romance me, Fitz!”
“For heaven’s sake. Must I?”
“Yes, you must. Otherwise, I shall keep all the pigeon pie to myself.”
Lyndon adored Cook’s pigeon pie. Gingerly, he lay down, but on his side and propped on an elbow so he could keep his eyes peeled for marauding ants and wasps.
Most certainly not to admire the set of excessively fluffy eyelashes feathering his companion’s cheeks.
It was a wonder they didn’t get tangled up in themselves each time the pup blinked.
The day’s temperature had reached its peak, and a sliver of perspiration coated the youth’s smooth upper lip.
Dampness darkened the roots of his pointlessly showy blond hair.
With his mere existence Rollo was successfully seducing Lyndon, laying bare Lyndon’s own seductive inadequacies without even trying.
What should he do? Romance and he were barely acquainted.
Compliment his attire—again? Concoct an impromptu ode?
“I’m waiting,” Rollo said in a sing-song voice. “There will be no pigeon pie.”
Frowning, Lyndon tried to recall the romantic sonnets he’d been forced to learn by rote at school. Alas, only snatches of the most popular verses came back to him. Oh well, he’d improvise.
“‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’” he began.
Rollo clapped his hands with delight. “Do! Do! I am a mere swoon away from melting already.”
“Fine.” Lyndon grinned. “But be careful what you wish for.”
Pursing his lips and straining at the edges of his memory, Lyndon adopted the grave baritone of his old English tutor.
“‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ Thou art more sweaty and this heat is more hellish—rough winds today would be greeted with joyful abandon, and thou goest on and on interminably when more than anything, I’d like my lunch and then a peaceful postprandial snooze. ”
He clamped his mouth shut, at risk of producing an undignified giggle. “Art thou happy now?”
Rollo gave his thigh a well-deserved slap, then giggled himself, a sound warming Lyndon’s bones better than the smoothest of French brandies.
“You are a beast, Lord Lyndon, of the most delicious kind. And your grammar is atrocious. You and Willoughby would be splendid chums. You could concoct dreadful odes together.”
Opening a pale, glittery eye, Rollo held up an admonishing finger. “Just one minor point, my lord: I do not sweat. I sparkle. My papa always says—”
“Oh, good. I wondered if your papa would be joining our picnic. When I’m finally allowed to have the blasted picnic. That’s a strong hint, by the way.”
Grumbling, Rollo sat up and began passing bread and cheese to Lyndon. “I was about to say my papa’s a great fan of bastardising Shakespeare to suit his needs. He would have found your impromptu verse hilarious.”
“Somehow, I doubt that.”
Nothing Lyndon had ever done in his former existence as a rogue about town had ever met with the Earl of Rossingley’s exacting approval. He had no reason to believe seducing his precious second son would either.
“You have the wrong impression of him entirely, Fitz. After all, he begat me, so he can’t be all bad.”
Lyndon should have argued that point on principle alone. But he was too hot and too sleepy. And Rollo was feeding him tasty morsels directly into his mouth as if his own hands had suddenly stopped working. Being so indulged was far too lovely to interrupt.
“My father wouldn’t have sent me here if he didn’t believe there was some good in you,” the pup prattled between popping delightful slivers of pigeon pie between Lyndon’s lips. “He cares too much for me to put me in the company of a poor influence.”
As Rollo reached up to place a honeyed walnut on Lyndon’s tongue, Lyndon took his wrist, his fingers easily wrapping around it.
“And if he knew of our sport in the nursery?” Lyndon asked. “And drawing room? What then?”
Rollo shrugged. “He is aware of my preference for men. He shares it himself.”
Lyndon traced the path of a fragile blue vein with his thumb. “But a preference for me in particular?”
“He is, of course, unaware. But his opinions on the matter are not relevant. I may not have yet reached my majority, but I am still master of my own desires.”
Lyndon chuckled. Lately, his own enslaved him. “You have mastered frustrating me and very little else.”
With his belly full and his empty plate—a tasty lure for crawling insects—placed well clear of his person, Lyndon lay down again. As his eyelids drooped, he clasped his hands behind his head. Sun, wine, rich food, and a perpetual state of arousal tired him out.
Next to him, Rollo picked at the cold cuts, wittering on about how he enjoyed them with Cook’s piccalilli, yet at bloody Rossingley, they also ate them with a ferment of fennel.
Personally, Lyndon thought that sounded vile.
Nonetheless, Rollo’s light tenor, endlessly washing over him, was soothing.
Lyndon would never admit that, of course.
He’d already made a cake of himself admiring the pup’s slender form.
The compliment had slipped from him as Rollo topped up his wine before he’d had time to rein it back in.
And then he’d pointed out that the slenderness extended to his fingers too—Lyndon had even held one up for closer inspection whilst rubbing his thumb along that bony little wrist, holding on to it for far longer than necessary.
Bloody idiot. So, he decided to shut up for a bit.
“All this romantic twaffle is exhausting,” he announced sleepily. “I need to recover. Which means silence, pup.”
As the scarred old branches of the beech trees whispered to one another, Lyndon’s mind drifted in that rare, comfortable twilight haze, which only the very best of afternoon naps reliably delivered.
Not quite awake but not asleep either, he inhaled a few long deep breaths, letting the sweet scents of the wild Norfolk earth waft up his nose.
Somewhere above his head, a lethargic orchestra of songbirds composed a few half-hearted sonnets, far sweeter than his own.
A drop of something warm and damp landed on his forehead.
And then another, heavier this time, against his temple.
Most odd. Lyndon didn’t think he’d been snoozing for more than a few minutes and not a single cloud had marred the sky all day.
Furthermore, the rest of him remained perfectly warm and dry.
Begrudgingly, he prised opened one eye, expecting to see clouds gathering through the green canopy of beech leaves.
Instead, Rollo loomed over him, his face awfully close and grinning like a court jester.
“What the devil are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing. I’m kissing you. Or trying to.”
As if to demonstrate, he bent closer and briefly pressed his lips to Lyndon’s mouth. Soft and light as a feather. Then he pulled away. Lyndon frowned, dabbing a finger against where Duchamps-Avery had kissed him.
“Why?”
Rollo chortled. “My mouth has already tasted your cock, so I thought it was time I tasted your lips.”
Lyndon’s member thickened at the reminder. He glanced back towards the house. Alas, it had not moved farther away during his snooze. “Is that something sodomites do? Do they not simply fornicate in order to attain bodily release?”
Rollo’s smile stretched even wider. “Do you not kiss your female lovers?”
Lyndon grimaced, remembering one particular experience which had felt akin to drowning, all too slowly, in a sea of ratafia and spit. “If I must. When one is not paying in coin, then they generally expect it.”
Rollo rolled his eyes. “Your charm knows no bounds, Lord Lyndon. Did you kiss your boyhood friend?”
“Well, yes…but…we were mere…boys. And friends. Experimenting.”
“Yes, but did you enjoy it?”
A flash of colour—the bright yellow walls of the nursery—seized Lyndon’s mind.
Two blunted swords and a wooden chest. Carefree laughter.
His dearest Will in his worn breeches and thin cotton shirt, his long solemn face regarding Lyndon’s as if the answers to the entire universe were contained within.
But then the face changed, became fairer, the shirt crisper; loose linen trousers replaced ragged wool breeches.
“Yes. Very much.”
Lyndon reached up to cup the narrow nape of Rollo’s neck. He pulled him closer. “But I shall enjoy this more.”
A fleeting second passed before their mouths met. A pause in time, during which Lyndon drank in the perfect bow of Rollo’s upper lip and the sweeping curve of the lower, his delicate beauty, like grace itself, coming towards him.
Lyndon wanted to grasp it and claim it and never give it back.
Rollo kissed as prettily as he walked. Their first was long, slow, deep, and soft.
Blissful, in fact. Yet terrifying, all at the same time.
With a tight knot of want pooling in his belly, Lyndon rolled him onto his back, the better to devour his mouth.
A few years had elapsed since Lyndon’s own had been used for kissing.
With relief, he discovered it still knew what to do.
When at last they parted, breathless and panting, Lyndon gently slid off him. He lay on his side, feasting his eyes on Rollo’s flushed, bruised lips. “For a small, capricious sprite, you have an unnerving ability to unman me,” he murmured.
Unable to resist, he slid a finger into the corner of Rollo’s mouth and ran it across the swollen bottom lip. Against the fall of his trousers, his cockstand still throbbed uncomfortably. “If my servants weren’t nearby, I’d strip you bare and take you right here.”
His lover sucked the finger into the wet heat of his mouth in a manner leaving no room for misunderstanding. He might as well have been doing it to Lyndon’s cock.
“It is only because your servants are nearby that you haven’t already thrice had that pleasure, my lord. Though to be smothered all afternoon in your tender kisses is a more than adequate substitute.”
Lyndon preened even as his skin pinked, the blush likely not escaping Rollo’s pale, sharp gaze. As that same gaze cornered Lyndon’s own, he folded one of Lyndon’s big hands in his smaller one as if the hand was his to do with as he pleased.
“I have stirred up emotions you wished lay dormant,” Rollo stated. “You believed yourself cured of attraction to another man.” He smiled gently. “Your marvellous kisses suggest that you have concluded it is a tiresome condition for which there is no cure.”
“Yes.” Lyndon faltered at the candid summing up.
A strand of unhappiness reminded him how undeserving he was of praise.
“I…here…with you, I find I am the very thing I wielded against Benedict in a cruel attempt to bring him down. I used my knowledge of his predilections against him. Were it not for your father’s intervention, Benedict’s position as one of the most regarded dukes in the land would have tumbled.
He would have been humiliated and shamed.
And lost his well-deserved contentment forever. ”
Lyndon swallowed, that damned break in his voice returning with a vengeance.
“But if our roles were reversed, he would never have done the same to me. Not for all the gold, tea, brandy, or damned tobacco smuggled through the Thames docks. And still, the man has found it in his capacious heart to forgive me.”
“You would like to make your peace with him, yes?”
“Yes,” answered Lyndon carefully. “When I was exiled here—” He gave Rollo a wry look. “—I was still too angry, too proud to properly express my remorse.” Blowing out a long breath, Lyndon examined their joined hands. “And perhaps too ashamed. But now, there is much I’d like to say to him.”
Rollo nodded. “Excellent news,” he declared softly.
“Is it?”
“Oh, yes.”
Even before it spilled from Rollo’s delectable lips, Lyndon sensed trouble brewing.
The sly expression crossing his lover’s face was too reminiscent of his damned papa.
Sealing Lyndon’s doom, Rollo brought Lyndon’s hand up to his mouth and kissed each finger, one by one, before his lips curved into an enticing smile.
At that moment, Lyndon doubted there was nothing his companion could do or say that would meet with his disapproval.
Well, almost nothing.
“The day after tomorrow,” Rollo said, “the Duke of Ashington arrives at his solicitor’s office in Norwich on business. I have arranged that we, too, shall visit. A light lunch is planned, and then the duke is of a mind to tour your charitable venture.”