Page 10 of Once a Gentleman
Chapter Five
The crash of shattering crockery jolted Kit from a sound sleep. He didn’t know the hour, but it had to be late. Kit had stayed at his desk—Turner’s, really, but Kit was the only one who’d used it for the past fortnight—until nearly nine, and then retired to his chamber to read for several hours, attempting to ignore the revelry of Turner’s guests downstairs.
It was, in any case, far too late for anyone to be breaking china in the corridor—almost certainly the vase on the occasional table across from his bedchamber door. The top-heavy thing was always half an inch from tumbling down and smashing on the floorboards where the carpet didn’t reach the edge. He lay still, his heart pounding but his mind, and the rest of his body, still sluggish.
The moaning that followed pulled him to full wakefulness.
One low groan, and then another, in distinctly masculine tones. A thump, a tinkle of porcelain shards, and then another moan, and another soft thud.
Kit rubbed his hands over his face, attempting to clear the remaining haze of sleep. He had hoped for a quiet night, but he ought to have known better.
Turner went out most evenings, returning so late that Kit never even heard him come in the house. Twice since Kit’s arrival, though, including that night, he’d returned earlier and with a raucous crowd in tow: men with their cravats hanging loose, glazed-eyed and reeking of spirits and tobacco smoke and musk, and stumbling, drunken, shrill-voiced women with their skirts rucked up and paint on their lips and cheeks.
Kit had fled the first time, darting through the kitchen and up the back stairs before he could be noticed. This evening, he’d already been in his room when Turner and his friends invaded the house, but he’d tiptoed to the end of the corridor and peered down at the hall from the top of the stairs, carefully keeping himself to the shadows so as not to be observed in his turn.
He’d caught a glimpse of Turner himself, sauntering in with one arm wrapped about the waist of a laughing light-skirt, and the other fondling the arse of a young man with indecently tight breeches and no coat.
Scandalized in a way that would have given the crowd below fuel for hours of mockery and laughter, Kit retreated, pressing himself against the firmly shut door of his bedchamber with a heaving chest and tight-shut eyes. It was too late; he’d seen far more than he wished already. Kit had no objection to any way a man, or men, or men and women in combination, could wish to pleasure one another—in private. But to display such debauchery to the world! Were they not mortified to be seen so?
But at the very least, the mystery of Turner’s slipshod servants had been solved, and Kit attempted to think of that, rather than dwell endlessly on the picture in his mind of Turner’s hand on another man’s body. With such endless material for blackmail at their disposal, why would they ever trouble to discharge their duties? Their employer could hardly turn them out without a character, since he lacked one of his own.
Kit seethed uselessly over the inconvenience it caused to himself, worried equally without recourse over the potential for a scandal that would envelop him along with Turner, and cursed Turner’s utter lack of concern for either. It had not been a pleasant two weeks in his new home.
And now some drunken sot had ventured upstairs, and knocked over the furnishings, and was no doubt lying injured on the floor in a pool of some combination of his own bodily fluids that Kit did not wish to contemplate.
Breakfast and hot water were nearly impossible to acquire, luncheon consisted of sandwiches, and dinners were cold meat and cheese. He built his own fires in the morning and lit his own candles of an evening.
And now he was to be denied even a full night’s sleep.
It was really the outside of enough.
Kit sat bolt upright, tossing the bedclothes aside. He had no dressing gown, that having been one of the many comforts he had sold early on, and he cursed as he snatched up his coat from the back of a chair and tugged it on with vicious haste. He was a secretary, not a—a servant in a bawdy-house, employed to toss ape-drunk fools out on their ears. And unless the particular imbecile outside his door was Turner himself, and perhaps even then, Kit was quite prepared to stand on whatever dignity a man in his nightclothes and a coat, with his cheek creased by his pillow, could possess.
Turner, that bastard, probably owned a dozen dressing gowns, not that he had the decency to wear one when he wandered about the house.
He flung the door open, with a, “What the devil do you think you’re—” which died on his lips as he took in the scene before him.
It was Turner.
It was not, however, only Turner. Kit’s employer was pressed against the wall of the corridor, right beside the fallen table and smashed vase. Between him and the wall was a writhing, wriggling figure with hands clutching at Turner’s back and one leg wrapped around his hip.
A very male, very breeches-clad leg.
Time seemed to grind to a halt, with all motion ceased and all sound faded into nothingness. Turner had abandoned his coat, and also his shoes; the fine linen of his shirt displayed, rather than hid, the strong muscles of his back and shoulders. His tight breeches outlined the hard curves of his arse, shifting with his every movement as he ground his body against that of his partner in this horrifying, wanton display.
The fumes of brandy in the corridor were well-nigh choking, and beneath that Kit detected a whiff of the mingled arousal of two men well on their way to completion.
A sound Kit would deny until his dying day burst out of his throat. It wasn’t quite a squeak. Not at all a squeak, dammit, although it pitched a bit higher than Kit’s usual low tenor.
Whatever it was, it pulled Turner from his preoccupation with his companion’s neck. Turner whipped around, still pinning the other man’s hips with his hands, but focusing his attention entirely on Kit, eyes suddenly bright and observant despite how foxed he had to be.
“Mr. Hewlett,” he said roughly. “My apologies for disturbing you.”
The other man rolled his hips and murmured something indistinct, leaning in to press his open mouth to Turner’s collarbone.
Kit couldn’t tear his eyes away. A flush of heat roared through him, tingling in every limb and turning his face into an inferno. That mouth, so open and wet, so obscene—what would Turner’s skin taste like? Salty, and laced with fine brandy, rich and hot and extraordinary. His breath came in labored gasps.
“Mr. Hewlett? Are you ailing?” Turner sounded far sharper.
