Page 41 of To Defend a Damaged Duke
For a long minute, they contemplated each other.Tommy made good use of his pocket square, using one hand as best he could, considering Ashington was clearly reluctant to part with the other.As the duke toyed with Tommy’s fingers, his gaze turned wistful.His smile faded.Now it was over, he seemed more like the diffident duke again.
“That’s a melancholy face for a man who has recently had his ballocks drained,” Tommy teased.
The duke chuckled softly.“Melancholy is not my intention.I…” He ran his fingers down Tommy’s arm, almost absently.“Given the juxtaposition of what we have shared and the invidious situation in which I find myself, I feel trapped between a rock and a…a place of utmost calm.And it is a most peculiar sensation.”Cautiously, he glanced up as if braced for rebuttal.
Nothing was further from Tommy’s mind.“That our lives have circled back to each other is a curious miracle, indeed, Your Grace,” he agreed.
“Unwittingly, Lyndon has done me a huge favour.”The duke toyed with Tommy’s sleeve.“Despite the hellish mess he’s created.”
“If that were true, I would rejoice.But I cannot see how.”
A mother-of-pearl button at Tommy’s cuff commanded the duke’s utmost attention.“If it were not for his actions, I wouldn’t be here with you.He has forced me to cease being scared of the unknown and start being more scared of never knowing.”
Tommy frowned.“Never knowing what?”
The duke shook his head.“Would you mock me, Tommy”—he moved his favours onto the next tiny button along—“if I confessed that I do not, that is to say, I have…I have never had a successful coupling with a woman?To completion?”
“No.In the course of my life, I have sought my pleasure lying with both sexes,” answered Tommy truthfully.“But I would not make fun of any man who has had to endeavour to be that which he is not.”
“You are a compassionate man.”A sad smile played at the duke’s lips.“Your forgiveness of me is testament to that.But what if I confessed that I have never been with a man either?I have… After we—after you and I were no longer— I…I have only ever been with you.”
When the duke dared look up into Tommy’s eyes, his own were full of anguish.“Would you mock me now?And mock the pretence I have just executed, pretending to be a rogue?When I am no closer to that than…than a Franciscan friar?The sting of my brother’s bitter accusation wounds me ever more, does it not?”
Stunned, Tommy said nothing.He’d bedded countless men and women.In his distant past, he’d have done anything with anyone—man, woman, or beast—if they were willing to part with a few coins.Everything he was and everything he owned to this day had come at a high price.
Did he envy the duke’s innocence?No.The horrors of his murky past had served Tommy well, making him stronger and more determined than ever.To never have done any of that?To have never known the sensation of skin on skin, that precious little death, that fleeting moment of perfection?
“Say something, Tommy?Please?”
Pushing back a lock of hair, Tommy looked down into a pair of brown eyes flecked with shards of gold.Eyes brimming with pain.He then pressed his mouth against each tender lid.“Why?Why have you not?”
“Because on that dreadful day, not only did I tie your sweet hand behind your head, but my own too.And I have lived with it bound tightly there since.Too guilt-ridden to set it free, too undeserving.And too aware of my own desires, desires unfitting for a future duke.Too fearful of what would happen if I did.”
“But not now,” urged Tommy.“Not now we have found each other.”
How could someone feel so familiar, like a favourite pillow or the knotted wood grain of his desk, and yet so new?Like his home, and yet be part of a strange and untouched place, a place he’d yet to explore.But God, how he wanted to.
Tommy reached for the duke’s wrist and kissed it as he had kissed his eyelids.Unbinding it in his mind, setting it loose.
“No.”The duke allowed himself a cautious smile.“Though our timing is despicable.How can I woo women when my heart is wooing you?If not for Francis and Isabella, I do not think I’d have the strength for the plan.”
“You don’t believe you can appeal to Lord Lyndon’s better nature?”
“I do not believe he has one.”
Chapter Sixteen
STEP ONE OFpublic rakery commenced the following day with Rossingley strong-arming Benedict into his tailors on Clifford Street.It was the sort of expedition that, if it held any redeeming qualities, Benedict had yet to glean them.
Privaterakery, on the other hand, had much to commend it.However, Francis’s teasing as Benedict had helped himself to an ungodly amount of ham at breakfast made him wonder exactly how private his spooning with Tommy had truly been and also to ponder whether Lyndon wasn’t his only brother adept at listening at doors.
As he trailed after Rossingley, feeling like a duckling shadowing its mother, Benedict replayed his intimacies with Tommy.His own behaviour had confused him.Faced with Tommy’s beauty, his impulse was to possess it, to give it weight.To order it about!All the odder as it warred with his weak nature in every other aspect of his life.And that Tommy—clever, experienced, controlled Tommy—had gifted himself so pliantly was…
“Shield your eyes, my darling.These are not for you.”
Truly in his element, Rossingley swept past fifty shades of charcoal grey cloth as though they weren’t there.Wasting no time in ordering the tailor’s apprentice to tidy them away, he proceeded to issue a lengthy prescription for all manner of garments and in a rainbow of colours and fabrics.Benedict prayed his friend was making some opportunistic purchases of his own.Alas, no.
For several long minutes, the earl fingered a length of emerald-green before laying it over a bolt of dazzling fuchsia-coloured silk.Nervously, Benedict waited.“Adds an air of assurance to any neutral palette,” the earl commented finally.“Fuchsia is the new black, don’t you know.”
