Page 56 of Once a Gentleman
Chapter Twenty-One
The work of preparing a half-refitted ship for sailing in less than two weeks’ time occupied nearly every one of Andrew’s waking moments after the day of Captain O’Neill’s visit. He rose before dawn, slipping away into the chill gloom of Portsmouth’s foggy streets just as the housemaids began to emerge from the upstairs.
He did his best to leave Kit undisturbed when he left his bed—for Andrew spent every night in Kit’s bed, now, by tacit agreement, so that Kit would be comfortably in his own bedchamber after Andrew departed—but Kit always stirred, and opened his eyes, and smiled. And those few fleeting moments when Andrew enfolded him in his arms, all sleepy and soft and pliant, and Kit murmured sweet farewells and clung to Andrew’s shoulders…oh, God, but those were enough to buoy Andrew up for the rest of the day.
In those moments, he could bring himself to hope he would win Kit, truly win him, and keep him forever.
But he could spare little time to brood over his chances, for the moment he reached the dock he was pulled into a whirlwind of timber and lists and warrant officers with a thousand questions, the smell of tar and salt, ropes and cannon and barrels of salted beef, that didn’t cease until he made for home well into the evening.
The first night, he returned to cold meat and cheese, hastily assembled by Samuel and laid in the study where Kit still sat at the desk, poring over a stack of mining reports. Kit partook with him; Andrew was horrified to learn, upon casually asking if he had not eaten enough of his dinner, that Kit had not had any dinner to speak of.
That he ate cold meat and apples every night.
Thatthishad been his life in Andrew’s home: solitary, cheerless, and with Andrew’s riotous life destroying any peace Kit might have had in his quiet occupations and dull meals.
Andrew took the time, before following Kit to his bedchamber, to visit the kitchen and explain his opinion to Mattson and Mrs. Felton—at some length—on their habit of allowing Kit to go without a proper dinner. Mrs. Felton expostulated with him, Mattson sneered, and it left Andrew seething with rage but unable to think of another way to handle the problem. He left to go up to bed wondering what might be on the table the following night, if anything.
For the first time, he cursed himself for his carelessness. He had, when he first inherited his uncle’s fortune, operated under the assumption that one could pay handsomely for loyalty, receiving the same service one would otherwise—only with more discretion than usual.
He had since learned that one could certainly pay handsomely for silence, but that the very nature of such an arrangement made one’s servants into one’sde factoblackmailers. And blackmailers never provided more than they were explicitly paid for, if that.
In short, his servants might not openly defy him, nor demand additional payment…but most of them more or less did as they pleased. Samuel was loyal to him for employing him when no one else would, and Mrs. Felton and the maids were really more idle than malicious and would have been perfectly adequate with a competent butler or housekeeper at the helm of the household.
Instead, Andrew had Mattson.
Which meant Kit would have Mattson to look after him and see to his comfort when Andrew had departed.
He went upstairs feeling several different kinds of foolish, inadequate, and irritated.
Stepping into Kit’s bedroom, greeted by his lover half-undressed and smiling shyly, only made those feelings far worse. Kit melted into his arms with a little moan, rutting his hips against Andrew’s in a way that was decidedly not shy at all.
Oh, bloody hell. Andrew wrapped him in his arms and kissed him, wondering how he had possibly earned this. He had neglected Kit’s comfort—indeed, actively worked to lessen it, out of spite and pique—and done nothing but show himself to be a libertine and a wastrel.
And in return, he had—this. Kit’s slender fingers stroking his back, Kit’s soft mouth opening under his, Kit’s pleased murmur as Andrew guided him to the bed and bent to lay kisses down the line of his throat.
He didn’t deserve it, any of it, and with Kit’s strictures against speaking of love still ringing in his ears, he did his best to show, through the worship of Kit’s body, how very much he appreciated the gift Kit had chosen to give him.
The next day he came home to cold meat, bread, and cheese laid out in the dining parlor.
It was really the outside of enough, but he had no idea what to do about it without causing a scene that would ruin Kit’s apparent pleasure that Andrew had chosen to dine with him in the first place.
“Will you dine with me every night, until I sail?” Andrew blurted out, after he’d blunted the edge of his ravenous hunger with what meager offerings were there. “I know it means waiting until a later dinner hour. I apologize for not having returned home in a more timely fashion the past two nights. I will do my best to be earlier.”
Kit set down his glass of wine, his lips glistening cherry-red from the sip he’d taken. Andrew found it so distracting he nearly missed Kit’s reply. “…no need to be derelict in your duties,” he was saying as Andrew managed to refocus on the words issuing from those lips, rather than thoughts of all the ways he wanted to enjoy them. “I have no objection to a later dinner. My father always—” And Kit stopped abruptly, cheeks flushing, white teeth pressing into that delectably plump lower lip.
No, damn it all, he would not be distracted again. Not when he had misstepped so gravely in mentioning what he knew of Kit’s family history the other night. Not when Kit had, for the first time, voluntarily mentioned something of his own past that didn’t relate merely to how he had not quite gotten fucked at Oxford.
“Was he the sort of respectable gentleman who preferred an earlier dinner?” Andrew asked gently. “My uncle was much the same. When he went to London, he always refused any invitation that would have him eating past six. In short, he did not dine out in town.”
Kit only stared down at his plate, lashes casting feathered shadows on his cheeks. Andrew longed to kiss the downturned corners of Kit’s mouth, but he held himself in check.
Kit deserved better than this miserable dinner, better than Andrew—and most certainly better than a lover who would treat his unhappiness with the condescension and arrogance of one who believed his own lovemaking could wash away the pain of the past.
“He could not properly be called respectable,” Kit said at last, with a noticeable hitch to his breath. “Not after the way he—not anymore.”
Andrew hesitated a moment, knowing that the wrong words would be disastrous. “A tragic end to a life doesn’t erase the respectable habits of a lifetime. I am entirely in disagreement with the Church of England on this point. If your father lived respectably, then he did. And as his son—Kit, love, whatever the world thought of him at the end,youcannot reasonably be expected to throw away all the affection you had for him simply because of one choice he made, in an extremity.”
And he dared to reach out, to cover Kit’s hand with his own where it rested on the table.
