Chapter 8
Hugo remembered how small he’d felt when he’d stood in his father’s office and watched him burn his letters; letters he’d spent hours every week composing to inform his father that his grand tour was going splendidly and he was learning as much as he could.
Seeing flames flicker through the papers, and the ink turn the flames into shards of yellow and red and blue and green, had broken something inside Hugo that all the beatings and cruel words hadn’t been able to break.
He’d never be good enough, no matter how much he tried.
“Come with me.” He wanted to act before he lost his nerve. But with every step closer to his father’s office, the memories came flooding back. He almost never walked along this part of the hallway.
“Hugo. Lord Horden. You don’t have to do this.” Earnest laid his hand on Hugo’s sleeve.
“No.” He didn’t have to do it. He needed to do it. “I need to know that if I do something wrong, then bad things won’t happen.” He couldn’t let himself believe it without plenty of evidence.
“It’s probably hypocritical of me to try and talk you out of doing something dramatic but maybe you could start with something smaller, like swapping the sugar for salt in the kitchen?”
“Earnest. I’ll never be free of him in this house. He built it and his memory is everywhere. I want to start again.”
“Then burn it down if you truly think it will help you.”
Hugo spun Earnest around and pulled him into his arms. “I am probably going to rue the day I asked a free-spirited poet for advice.”
“When you say it like that, it does sound disastrous.” Earnest kissed him on the chin.
“More disastrous than having you camp on my front lawn with the press hovering all around and writing all manner of nonsense.”
Earnest kissed him on his left cheek, and then his right, then stood there, his mouth still close enough to kiss again, but with a wide grin spreading that Huge wanted to drink in. “They wrote that about me, not you.”
“They wanted to know what I’d done to you.” He breathed out and pushed Earnest away to continue his march towards doom, no, towards revenge. “How did you make them go away in the end?”
“My friend Adam told them all it was publicity for my new book and nothing to do with you. You were picked at random for the size of your ... lawn.” Earnest winked at him. Maybe it was the dread pooling in Hugo’s stomach but he didn’t believe Earnest’s lackadaisical wink. Was he hiding something?
He gulped. “I don’t understand.”
Earnest laughed, although Hugo thought he heard a tightness in Earnest’s joviality. “Neither did they.” Earnest dragged his gaze lower and stared at Hugo’s groin, sending a rush of heat up his spine and across his cheeks.
“Oh.” He hadn’t meant that; he’d been asking about the book or the rationale for camping on his lawn—was it just Earnest being dramatic after Hugo told him to leave, or something more—but now he couldn’t see anything except the promise in Earnest’s twinkling gaze.
If he was brave enough to contemplate burning down his father’s house, he could swallow down the rising panic and ask for the thing he really wanted.
No son of mine could be a molly. His father had said that when Sir Charles Price and his lover had been tried for sodomy and it was all through the newssheets.
Hugo had been only ten years old, and he’d assumed his father was angry at Sir Price for running off to Paris and leaving his lower-class lover to be convicted alone.
Abandoning a lover to such a fate was cruel.
It wasn’t until later that he realised his father thought loving another man was a sin to be avoided.
Once he worked that out and realised that he was just like Sir Price and his lover, he’d hidden those thoughts very carefully from his father, deep down inside him, and now the truth threatened to burst out and he wanted to be brave enough to let reality fly free. “I’ve changed my mind.”
Earnest raised one eyebrow but said nothing.
“I don’t want to burn down my father’s house, at least not yet. I want to do something that would horrify him first. And if nothing bad happens after that, then I’ll be free to demolish this ostentatious palace and build something more tasteful.”
“What could possibly horrify your father more than the notion of burning down his house?”
“I want—” He swallowed, his breath all shaky. “I want to impale you on his desk.”
Earnest’s smile lit up his whole body. “Lord Horden. I knew you were hiding something amazing under that stern exterior.”
“Is that ... yes?”
Somehow Earnest’s smile got even bigger. “It’s a yes please, absolutely, right now, this minute, please and thank you, yes, yes, yes. Drag me to this den of horrors and eradicate all the terrible memories with one brilliant fuck.”
Hugo wished he had as much confidence in his own abilities.
He’d never fucked anything except Earnest’s mouth.
A mouth that currently said the most wonderful things and if he ignored the anxiety flocking in his stomach, swooping like seagulls over a net filled with fish, he might just be able to let himself give Earnest what he begged for.
The idea of Earnest impaling himself was so hot, aided by the notion that he could let Earnest take charge and then no one would know that he didn’t have any experience.
“Come on then.” He grabbed Earnest by the hand, uncaring that anyone might see—although no one came to this part of the house now anyway—and marched towards his father’s office.
He kept his gaze on Earnest, so that he couldn’t see the pattern in the floorboards or the familiar paintings lining the hall or the way he used to imagine the wallpaper getting darker the closer he walked towards his father’s office.
No. He wasn’t that scared little boy anymore.
And then Earnest curled his fingers through his own.
He wasn’t alone. He threw open the door, heart in his mouth, as his body remembered. But it was different.
He stopped in the doorway, staring at the way all the furnishings were protected by sheets.
“Someone has been in here.” He had told the staff that no one was to go in there, but someone had covered the furniture. The books on the shelves weren’t dusty. He blinked, suddenly uncertain and not knowing why.
“By the looks of it, your staff have been cleaning in here.”
“Yes.” He probably should be annoyed that they had defied his instructions, but seeing the room covered in white sheets gave it a ghostly feel that was completely different to when his father had dominated the space. He swallowed.
“How nice it must be to have staff.” Earnest slipped his hand away from Hugo’s and he watched him saunter towards the sheet-covered desk. “I take it this was your father’s desk?”
He tried to say yes, but the word stuck in his throat.
Earnest tilted his head, considering him for a second and Hugo wondered what he saw, then Earnest grabbed the sheet and tugged.
It flew up in the air, billowing, just a ghost might, revealing his father’s desk underneath.
It was much smaller than he remembered. In fact, everything in the room was smaller, less significant than how he remembered it.
Earnest sneezed, apologised, and then, as if to prove .
.. something, Earnest twisted around and sat on the desk, his legs dangling over the side.
“I would never dare do that.”
“Do it. I bet nothing bad will happen.” Earnest’s grin radiated around him, pulling him over there, and before he could think too hard, he sat on his father’s desk. Ass on the surface, legs hanging over the side. Earnest laughed, leaning towards him and kissing his cheek. “Is that so bad?”
“No.” He wanted more kisses like that. “Logically I know he can’t hurt me anymore, but my stomach is sore and...” Before he could say more, Earnest placed one hand on his stomach and the churn turned instantly to heat. He shivered. “More, please.”
Earnest’s smile widened. “My pleasure.” And before Hugo could retort, something about mutual pleasure or his pleasure, Earnest straddled him and kissed him, frying his ability to speak or think.
Earnest’s knees gripped Hugo’s hips and every thought was replaced with the need to remove all the fabric between them.
He wanted his hard cock to touch Earnest’s, not this frustrating closeness with the barrier of their clothes between them.
But Earnest was kissing him and one of them, maybe both of them, was moaning, and he didn’t want to stop the kiss so he could talk.
Instead he leaned back on his elbows, and Earnest chased his mouth until they both collapsed on the desk.
If he turned his head slightly, he’d be staring at his father’s sheet-covered chair, so he didn’t.
He kept his gaze on Earnest’s amber brown sparkling eyes and poured all his worry and wonder into the kiss. Suddenly Earnest sat up.
“Shall we?” Earnest pulled a small bottle from the pocket on the inside of his jacket. The tiny brown bottle with a small cork in the top looked like it’d been designed for eau de toilette.
“Is that?” Hugo remembered that Earnest had mentioned oil would make it better for him.
“Yes.”
“But when did you get it?”
Earnest blushed a little. “This is my personal supply. I keep it in my jacket just in case.”
“And you didn’t think to mention this earlier?”
“Hugo, my precious Earl, you should hear the disdain in your question. Perhaps you ought to take great pride in the knowledge that I was so distracted by you that I forgot.”
His own cheeks bloomed with heat. “What nonsense you talk.” He wanted more. The very idea that his presence had Earnest unable to remember his own stash of oil was enough to help him forget that he was here in his father’s office.
“I am a poet.”
Except he couldn’t forget and he couldn’t suppress the shudder that made his shoulders shake.
“What’s the matter?”
“This place. It’s ...”
“Very boring?”
“Excuse me?” Boring was not how he would have described it. Tortuous, painful, scary.
“Oh come on, Hugo. This office looks like your father visited the offices of ten other Earls and made an exact replica. I bet even the books are precisely what anyone would expect an Earl to read. Homer, agricultural tomes, a few other Classics so he could pretend he was well read. Nothing interesting and most of them with the pages still uncut.”
Hugo glanced around the room, as if he was seeing it for the first time, and it did look like every other aristocratic office he’d ever been in. “I think the Duke of Ervington has that exact painting above his fireplace.”
“The exact one, or a similarly dull landscape?”
“No. I think that one exactly.”
“Oh this is too perfect. Don’t tell me your father had such little imagination that he copied the Duke of Ervington’s office right down to the paintings? Is this desk even original or just a replica?”
Hugo didn’t know, but something about the tone of Earnest’s voice made him want Earnest more than anything else in the world.
He didn’t care about the stupid desk anymore or his mean father or the things he’d said or done to Hugo years ago.
Hugo pushed Earnest off his body and Earnest squeaked.
Then Hugo stood on the floor, stripped off his pants, and held his cock, stroking it once.
Earnest’s eyes widened and his mouth hung open. “Oh, Hugo. You are magnificent.”
“This? You want this?” He gave himself a lazy stroke and the sound Earnest made was decadent. He stood there to defy his father’s words—he was a molly, and damned if he wasn’t going to enjoy himself—and he lifted his chin and breathed in, filling his lungs with the slightly musty air.
“I thought you’d never ask.” Earnest slipped off the desk and tore off his clothes, tossing them away and making a mess of Hugo’s father’s office in a way that made his suck his breath in between his teeth, until he reminded himself—again—that his father was gone and nothing bad would happen. Something good might happen instead.