Page 7 of Moaning Under the Mistletoe
Oscar was too busydealing with the current financial problems of the club over the next few days to think much about the comment about lunch. Obviously it meant nothing to the man, since he hadn’t kept his appointment for the day after they’d fucked. Lunch at the club wasn’t a bad idea; they could get people to spend more by having better food. Currently they provided small snacks but nothing substantial. If people ate, they’d come earlier, stay longer, and probably drink more. One of the social rooms could easily be converted into a dining room with a nice ambiance if he could find enough cash flow to pay for the upgrade. Judging from the finances, Uncle Ismail had been more focused on making people happy than on ensuring the club was solvent. Most of the membership income had been spent on entertainers.
“Mr Mardin?”
“Otto.”
“A note has been delivered for you.”
“Thank you.” He took the folded piece of very nice paper, smooth and weighty. Expensive.
The Earl of Bennington invites you to join him for lunch at Whites, two hours hence from receiving this note.
It wasn’t signed or stamped or even dated and had no return address. Just an arrogant, yet polite, assumption that Oscar wouldn’t be too busy to turn him down. He knew who the man was, of course, because he’d asked Otto who’d provided the man’s code, which allowed Oscar to check the man’s financial records with the club. Everything was kept in a double-blind system to protect their members, real names were never written down, only a code applied to a membership number and everything ascribed by number after that. No one knew the code, only Ismail, but thankfully his will had included reference to a bank vault and inside Oscar had found the code book. He learned it by heart and kept it safely held, locked in the basement of the Wilton-Thomford-Fossingly Bank, with only himself having access. And no one except himself and his solicitor knew the vault existed. Even with all of this, it’d taken him half a day to go to the vault with the code and sit with the code book to work out the real identity of the man who’d fucked him so spectacularly. Lord Ambrose Livingstone, Earl of Bennington.
“Otto. I will be out for a few hours.”
“Yes, sir.” It didn’t matter how many times he asked Otto to call him Oscar, it never stuck. He should be used to it after a month.
“I’m a plain mister, Otto.”
“I know, sir, but Mr Ismail preferred that.”
Oscar nodded. “A hard habit to change, I suppose.” He’d wondered a few times in the first few days at the club if Otto and his uncle had been together, but then he’d met Otto’s common law wife, Ruth, a quiet woman who ran his household with a gentleness that showed her strength of character given the difficulty of her journey towards becoming a woman. He loved that his uncle’s club—his club—gave people like Otto and Ruth a chance to be happy.
“Yes. Your uncle was a good man, but sometimes he needed reminding that he was important to this club. He suffered from a sadness sometimes that debilitated him, especially when he returned from visiting ... certain people.”
“Who?”
Otto’s nostrils flared. “It was always worse after visiting his brother.”
“He visited my father?”
“He liked to hear about you and your siblings, but your father disapproved of his life, and it was never an easy visit.”
Oscar shook his head. “I never knew.”
“He wasn’t allowed to meet you, but he made sure he knew all about you and he followed your progress at school and afterwards.”
“Oh.” Oscar had always assumed his father was an ordinary man and now he was seeing him in a whole new light, and not a good one. To banish his brother for running a club that provided happiness to so many people, to himself, left him with a twist in his stomach. “Thank you for letting me know.”
“I’m sorry that you were never able to meet him.”
“So am I.” He was surprised to feel tears prickling his eyes and he batted them away. “I’d better get ready for lunch. It would be bad form to leave an Earl waiting.”
“An Earl?”
Oscar gave the invitation to Otto. “He wants to show me some other clubs to see if it’ll give me ideas to help this club.”
Otto’s eyes widened and Oscar realised he’d probably said too much. Well, he shrugged. He usually did that, running off at the mouth instead of keeping mum. “Um, I suppose you should forget that you’ve read his name?”
Otto chuckled. “I might refer to all our members by their code numbers, but I do recognise some from the newssheets. Your Earl is making waves in Parliament as part of the Abolition Committee.”
“He’s not my Earl.” Oscar wouldn’t dare claim that after one—stunning—interaction, and now a belated lunch invitation.
Otto nodded. “Understood.” Was that a smirk flickering on the corner of Otto’s mouth?
“Isn’t there something you need to be doing?” Oscar needed to get away from this uncomfortable conversation. People like himself and his uncle didn’t get to have happy endings, not like Otto and Ruth, who only got theirs because Ruth accepted a smaller life to stay safe from the world, and Otto worked hard to keep her safe. Even their happiness came with a large cost.
“Yes. You need to get ready for lunch. Whites has a certain standard of dress.” Otto’s warning did nothing to quell the unsteadiness in his chest. Nothing in his life so far had prepared him to have lunch with an Earl. Why did that seem more stressful than being fucked by one?
