Page 32 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
Georgie’s back was smooth and warm under Lawrence’s hands, his arse taut with thrusting. “I need to . . . ” Georgie said, his voice thick and needy.
“I want to watch,” Lawrence rasped out. “Show me.”
Georgie knelt back and Lawrence watched him, both cocks held tight in Georgie’s fine-boned hand. And then Georgie was shuddering, his seed spilling over Lawrence’s belly.
The sight of Georgie’s face as he spent was all it took to push Lawrence over the edge. His climax felt torn out of him, wretched and blissful and confused all at once, simple pleasure a mere fraction of the experience.
Georgie collapsed onto Lawrence’s chest, seed and sweat mingling, Georgie’s hair falling all over Lawrence’s neck. They lay together for a few breaths before Georgie rose, graceful as always. With economical movements he made use of the towel and bathwater to clean himself off. His lean muscles glowed in the firelight.
Lawrence sat up, meaning to do as Georgie did and tidy himself. But Georgie came to kneel beside him and wiped Lawrence’s belly with a wet cloth. He felt the muscles in his abdomen clench at the unexpected cold, at the strangeness of being touched by somebody else, the even more foreign sensation of being looked after by somebody else.
The strangeness started to spread over his body, a seeping sense of unbelonging. He did not know what to do, what to say, where to go.Not now.He cursed whatever forces made his chest feel as if it were constricted by iron bands, his lungs unable to take in nearly enough air.
But Georgie took care of that with the same matter-of-fact nonchalance he always adopted when ordering Lawrence about. “I’m for bed,” he said, extending a hand to Lawrence.
Lawrence grasped Georgie’s hand and rose. “Bed,” he agreed, and gathered that he was meant to leave. He could do that. He dropped Georgie’s hand, gathered up his clothes, and headed for the door.
His progress was checked by a hand on his elbow. “This bed, Radnor. Lawrence,” he corrected.
Lawrence turned and saw Georgie looking up at him hopefully, maybe even a little embarrassed. His usually sleek hair was tousled and disordered, his cheeks red from where they had rubbed against Lawrence’s beard.
Lawrence nodded.
The bed was scarcely big enough for one person, let alone two, one of whom was fourteen stone. But it turned out not to matter, because Georgie pushed Lawrence down onto the bed and climbed nearly on top of him, resting his head on Lawrence’s shoulder. Lawrence shut his eyes, and nothing existed beyond the scent of clean hair and the feel of sinewy limbs tangled with his own. They fit in the bed like this, Georgie molded to Lawrence’s side, hardly taking up more space than Lawrence alone. It was an alien sensation, being this close to another person, unfamiliar but not unpleasant, something Lawrence could imagine finding agreeable, given enough time.
“Are you all right?” Georgie asked, as if following Lawrence’s thoughts.
“I am,” Lawrence answered, and it was almost the truth.
CHAPTERTWELVE
Georgie hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but his eyes shut almost as soon as he settled in the crook of Radnor’s arm. When he opened them again, the first fingers of light had already appeared in the sky outside his sooty bedroom window. Carefully, he tipped his head to look at the man sleeping beside him. Radnor radiated heat, and at some point during the night one of his arms had landed heavily across Georgie’s middle. It was like sleeping against a wall of hot muscle, which ought to have been uncomfortable but was, in fact, the first time Georgie had been properly warm since arriving at Penkellis.
With a sigh of resignation, Georgie slid carefully out from under Radnor’s arm into the cold and made his way towards the north tower. He couldn’t stay here another day, that much was all too clear. It was a terrible nuisance, having a conscience. A year ago he would have cheerfully filled his valise with Penkellis treasures, stolen the earl’s secrets, and spared Radnor nary a thought on his way back to London.
But now, after so many years of working and scheming, with no purpose but to ensure that he would never have to face the grinding, dirty poverty of his youth, he was prepared to leave Penkellis empty-handed and with nowhere better to go. And all because of a heap of fine, useless feelings.
He was fairly disgusted with himself, but no matter how he turned the matter over in his mind, he couldn’t let Radnor—Lawrence, he thought with a rush of warmth—be a part of any swindle. He felt nauseated to think how close he had come to actually stealing the telegraph plans. And worse—he might have put Lawrence in harm’s way by exposing him to Brewster.
When Georgie pushed open the door to the study, he found the room cold and dark. He set about lighting the fire and a candle to work by. He took his time cutting a nib, refilling the inkwell, and arranging the paper so it was precisely aligned with the edges of the blotter. This was not a letter he wished to write, but after a lifetime of disappearing like so much smoke, he found that he couldn’t leave Radnor without a word.
But there were no words to convey what he felt, likely because he didn’t want to put a name to it. Any word he could come up with felt like stolen property, something that rightly belonged to a decent person, not Georgie Turner.
Instead, he set about the task of cataloging the earl’s notes. Over the past few weeks he had become familiar with Lawrence’s bold, scrawling hand and with the abbreviations and symbols he employed. Georgie took each stained, ripped, dog-eared sheet of paper and wrote a short synopsis of the experiment in his own much more legible hand. It was satisfying, this process of sifting through the products of Lawrence’s brilliant mind, and translating them into understandable prose.
Four pages in, he came across a paper that did not belong. It was a letter, still folded and sealed and addressed in shaky writing nearly as illegible as the earl’s. Georgie tore it open and read it, as he did all the earl’s correspondence.
And then he stared.
“Radnor?”
Lawrence heard his name being called, sound traveling through bedcovers and the fog of deep slumber. He ignored it and tried to fall back asleep.
“Radnor!” The voice was closer now, harder to ignore. A moment later, and it was accompanied by hands roughly shaking his shoulders.
Lawrence woke with a jolt. He was in a strange bed, a strange room, everything out of place. The mattress hit his back in all the wrong spots, the faint sunlight came in at a disconcertingly unexpected angle, and the fire was on the opposite side of his head from where it ought to be. Barnabus, who habitually slept behind Lawrence’s knees in an apparent effort to make as much a nuisance of himself as possible, was absent.
When he recalled that he was in Turner’s room, Turner’s bed, not a stitch of clothing on his body, he did not feel relieved.
