Page 30 of The Soldier's Scoundrel
Jack paused in his recitation, looking intently at Rivington. Not for confirmation—he needed no confirmation to know he had spoken the truth. No, he wanted permission to go on. Rivington gave a quick nod and Jack continued.
“That’s all very easy. Here’s what interests me.” Oh God, was he really going to do this? Could he even stop if he wanted? “Who did Oliver Rivington play with as a child? You were lonely then too, I think. How happy you must have been to go away to school. You liked school for the same reason you liked the army—there were people everywhere. Of course you had to hide your . . . proclivities or risk being hated.” He took a step closer, and Rivington backed up. “Shunned.” Another step, and now Rivington was backed up against a monument. “Expelled. Cashiered.” Jack kept inching forward even though there was no place left for Rivington to go. “Arrested. Pilloried.” He braced his hands on the cold stone behind the other man’s shoulders. “Hanged.” A sigh escaped from Rivington’s chest and his shoulders dropped. “Believe me, I know. The loneliness is always there for you, isn’t it?”
Rivington made no sound, but even in the darkness Jack could see that his eyes were wide. There was more he could have told the man but that was enough. Instead he leaned forward. With a pang he saw Rivington tip his head forward. He was expecting a kiss. Too bad. Jack brought his mouth closer to Rivington’s ear. “What will you do with the remainder of your years, Oliver? So many days to fill without anything to do, without anyone who knows you for who you really are, too afraid to let anyone close?”
There wasn’t a lot that actually surprised Jack. Sometimes he wondered whether he was even capable of the sensation. But when Oliver Rivington hit him with a neat right hook in the middle of a West Yorkshire graveyard, he was truly astonished.
He sat there on the ground where he landed, fully intending to let Rivington hit him again. Likely he deserved it, even though he hadn’t said anything that wasn’t the truth. But instead he saw the silhouette of the other man’s lean frame as he limped out of the churchyard and down the street towards the inn.
Oliver paid for the entire bottle of brandy and tucked it under his arm to take upstairs, much to the consternation of the innkeeper. But he was not about to get foxed in the public taproom of the Crown and Lion. One little glass was not going to do the job. Nor would two, for that matter. There wasn’t enough brandy in the world to make sense of tonight.
Turner had been right, damn him, when he said that Oliver didn’t get angry often. He knew how to keep his head, even when thoroughly provoked. But if any man had ever needed to be punched in the face it was Jack Turner. Of course everything he had said was true, which only made it worse to hear. Those were the fears that assailed Oliver in the dark of night, when he couldn’t sleep and his leg hurt too much for him to do anything but lie there and worry: he would live a pointless life; he would always be alone, isolated by deep-rooted secrecy about his desires, haunted by shame about his past.
But to know that those fears were visible to another person—that was beyond the limit. He didn’t know or even care what kinds of tricks Turner had used to read the secrets of his heart. Likely he only had a knack for guesswork, but even if he had struck a deal with the devil, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he tried to frighten Oliver with secrets and fears that belonged only to Oliver himself.
He climbed the stairs at the inn with little trouble from his leg. That was something surgeons never thought to suggest—the restorative properties of a towering rage. He lowered himself into a chair by the hearth and knocked back a few mouthfuls of brandy.
No, he realized, Jack hadn’t tried to frighten him. That wasn’t it at all. Jack had said all of that to provoke Oliver. To push him away. And he would only have done that if he was worried about Oliver getting too close.
Oliver took another swig of brandy and felt the beginnings of a satisfied smile curve his lips. When he heard a knock at the door, he didn’t know whether or not he hoped it was an inn servant come to help with his boots. “Come in!” he called.
Jack stood in the doorway, his hands jammed into his pockets. “I’m an idiot,” he said without preamble and without stepping any closer.
“You are,” Oliver agreed, tipping the bottle back for another sip without taking his eyes from the other man. “Are you some kind of fortune-teller?” He had never felt as ignorant as he did when he asked that question. A fortune-teller, indeed. He was no rustic who hung bundles of weeds from the eaves to ward off evil spirits or the sort of fellow who paid ladies in turbans to read his tea leaves.
Jack’s face darkened. “No. Nothing like that. I see hints and I put facts together. Sometimes I’m wrong, but it’s not often.” Jack ran a hand along his stubble-darkened jaw, and the room was so quiet that Oliver thought he could hear the scratch of rough fingers against new beard. “My father was a confidence man and a crook. He taught me how to read people’s faces.” His jaw was set in a grim line. “I was an apt pupil, you see.”
“And now you use those skills to insult people in graveyards. I see.” Oliver knew Jack also used his skills to help people, but now was not the time for patient understanding.
“Like I said, I’m an idiot,” he said gruffly.
Oliver gestured for Jack to sit in the chair across from his. Remaining seated while talking to a man who was standing made Oliver feel like an invalid, or like he was talking to a servant. And he didn’t want either of those thoughts to intrude at the moment.
Jack approached, but instead of sitting he went to his knees and put a hand on Oliver’s boot. Oliver thought his heart might stop. “I only told you the bad things.” Jack’s voice was somewhere between a grumble and a whisper. He looked like a supplicant and sounded like a sinner. “I could have told you that you’re loyal and honorable and just sickeningly decent. I could have said that the way you care about such a poor sap as Wraxhall, the way you would do anything for your sister, including dirtying your hands by hiring me—no, don’t try to tell me it was otherwise—those things say more about who you are and what you mean to the people around you than any of that shite I told you in the graveyard.” He kissed the inside of Oliver’s knee and then looked up, not needing to ask the question out loud.
Not needing—or not able? What Oliver saw in the other man’s eyes was a mess of confusion. Jack Turner was not a man on whom confusion rested easily. Oliver was touched and also terrified to realize that he was not the only one out of his depth.
Oliver swallowed. “Not as an apology.” He hoped Jack understood. He didn’t want this—whatever was about to happen between them—to be recompense for what Jack had said earlier. Oliver had come this far wanting something like a seduction, and he still wanted it. He wasn’t going to let Jack pass this off as a way to even the score.
Jack’s eyes darkened and one corner of his mouth turned up in something that could almost be mistaken for a smile. He tugged off one of Oliver’s boots. “Not as an apology.” He pulled off the other boot. “But because I’ve been thinking about this for days.” His big hands slid slowly up Oliver’s thighs. “Years, even, if I’m being honest. Thinking about how your cock would feel in my mouth. How you would taste. The sounds you’d make when I sucked you.”
“Oh Christ.” He could listen to Jack talk like that all night.
“I think it was watching you handle the horses,” Jack continued. “I’ve never been able to resist a man with talent.” He worked open the fastenings of Oliver’s breeches, and even that glancing touch was enough to force Oliver to bite back a moan. “I can’t remember the last time I wanted to do this so badly.”
It was an unexpected torture to hear Jack’s words of desire but not have his touch. Oliver wanted to tilt his hips towards Jack, but that would be shameless, maybe even pathetic. Desperate with need, he forced his body to remain still, to wait. And when Jack threw him a sly look he knew this was part of the man’s plan.
“Cruel,” Oliver murmured. He took hold of Jack’s collar and bent down for a kiss. With each stroke of his tongue he thought, This is ours. It wasn’t something he was doing to Jack, or Jack was doing to him. Neither of them owned it. It was theirs. This was what he had wanted; as much as the physical pleasure he wanted the sense of shared desire, mutual longing. This was no frantic, embarrassed effort to satisfy a need.
He stroked his hands along Jack’s broad shoulders, savoring every ridge and furrow he could feel beneath too many layers of wool and linen. It would be lovely to see as well as feel those muscles, to touch that darkly curling chest hair he had once glimpsed.
But then Jack slid his hand inside Oliver’s breeches and pulled out his erection, and all Oliver could do was watch as the other man leaned forward to lick the already wet head. And then—oh God—all at once he sucked Oliver’s cock deep, deep into his throat. The wet heat of Jack’s mouth, the slide of his tongue, the slight moan he made when he had taken Oliver to the hilt—it was all too much. It was going to be over too soon. He wanted to tell Jack to make it last, but he was too out of his mind with lust to find the words.
Instead he brushed back the strand of hair that had fallen onto Jack’s forehead, threading his fingers in that too-long hair, not guiding Jack’s movements so much as trying to experience this moment with as much of his body as possible. Only once did Jack glance up at Oliver’s face, and he tugged his gaze away immediately, as fast as you’d pull your hand away from a hot stove.
Oliver tried to hold back his release in order to earn himself a few more seconds in Jack’s mouth, but Jack was relentlessly stroking the underside of Oliver’s cock with his tongue and there was nothing Oliver could do to delay his climax. Stammered blasphemy was all he managed by way of warning, and then he came in a surge of pleasure and regret.
Jack froze, his head still bent over Rivington’s lap.
