Page 12 of The Lawrence Browne Affair
“What I see is a man who had a moment of . . . I don’t rightly know what. Nothing remotely unsafe, though.”
Lawrence could have laughed at the man’s naïveté. “Go home, Mr. Turner.”
Turner snorted, such an unexpectedly rude noise from the polished and tidy secretary that Lawrence turned to look at him before he could remember that it was a bad idea. The man was leaning against the wall between the two open windows, his ordinarily smooth hair ruffled by the wind.
“Oh, how nice to be an earl,” he said, “and not have to worry your tangled head about how other people keep body and soul together. I was counting on this position, my lord.”
“You’d rather stay here and be killed?” Lawrence challenged.
For some reason this made Turner laugh. “Are you planning to kill me?” Bland unconcern, not a trace of fear. “Somehow I doubt it.”
Lawrence stared at him. “I threw a book at you before I had known you even a quarter of an hour.”
“Oh, you’ll have to do better than that. Where I come from people stab one another when they’re serious about doing harm. My own father was in the habit of throwing chairs when he didn’t get his way—when we had chairs, which wasn’t often by any means. The rest of the time he threw empty bottles of gin. A book? Six inches clear to the left of my head? Either you have pathetically poor aim—and it can’t be that, since you manage an ax competently enough—or you only wanted to pester me.”
Pester?Pester?Lawrence stood and crossed the room in two easy strides. His sense of panic from earlier was quite gone, replaced by the urgent and inane need to prove that he was a threat to his secretary’s safety. “You’ve heard of my brother? My father?” He saw recognition in the secretary’s expression. “I am from the same stock. The same blood. The same brutish body, the same dangerous mind. You ought to go to London, I tell you.”
Turner arched a single elegant eyebrow. “They say your brother murdered his mistress and disposed of her body and that he somehow contrived to kill his wife. Are you in the habit of murdering women?”
Lawrence shook his head in frustration. “No, but—”
“Men?” Turner asked, and surely it was Lawrence’s imagination that the man’s voice went silkily suggestive on that single syllable, as if he were not talking about murder but something else entirely.
“I’m not in the habit of murdering anyone, for God’s sake.”
“Do you wish you were?” Turner’s tone was now conversational, as if he were asking whether Lawrence took his tea with lemon or milk.
“Of course not, but you’re missing the point.” With a single, menacing forefinger, Lawrence touched Turner’s chest. He had meant for the gesture to be intimidating, but it felt strangely intimate. Before he knew what had happened, Turner had taken hold of Lawrence’s large, calloused hands in his own fine ones. Lawrence didn’t know if the man was motivated by kindness or self-defense, but he found that he was holding hands with a person for the first time since he was a child.
“Here’s how I see it, my lord.” Turner’s voice was cool and unconcerned. “You’re not quite cut from the same cloth as most people. But you’re hardly mad or dangerous.”
Not cut from the same cloth? The sheer understatement ought to have been amusing. Lawrence tried to focus on the need to get through to Turner, but all he could think about was the warmth of Turner’s skin against his own. “You yourself pointed out that the telegraph and battery could kill us.” Which may have been a lie Lawrence made up to keep his secretary’s hands off the device, but it also served the purpose of convincing Turner that he was employed by a dangerous lunatic.
Turner rolled his eyes. “Please. This time of year, men go about the countryside shooting pheasants and acting like it’s perfectly normal when one of them comes home peppered with shot. Nobody calls those fools mad.”
“You’ve been here a week.” Lawrence tried to master himself despite the light pressure of his secretary’s fingers against his wrists. “You can’t possibly think this household is normal.”
“Of course it isn’t normal. You eat nothing but ham and apples, for God’s sake. You dress like a stableman. And your house is a shambles. But if none of that bothers you, then it doesn’t bother me.”
“Botheringdoesn’t enter into it, damn you—”
“And I suppose if that’s what it takes for you to accomplish everything you’ve done, then so be it.”
“Accomplish?” God damn it, Turner was stroking the inside of Lawrence’s wrists with his thumbs. And for some reason Lawrence seemed to feel this touch in his cock. Was there a nerve that went from the wrist to the prick? Another sign of incipient madness, then.
“Your inventions. The communication device.”
The telegraph. God yes. He tried not to think of how badly he wanted it to work, to have a way to remain in his refuge but perhaps not be quite so isolated. “Nearly all my servants have quit,” he said, returning the conversation to the solid ground of his lunacy.
“Yes, well, thatisinteresting,” Turner said. “I’ve been wondering about that. Did you notice they left without pocketing any of your valuables?”
“What?” Perhaps it was the way Turner was leaning against the wall, looking up at him through a thick fringe of lashes, that made Lawrence’s cock feel so heavy.
“I assure you, the standard procedure when taking leave of a violent and despised employer is to nick a candlestick or, at the very least, a couple of teacups.” Turner’s voice was only loud enough to be heard a few inches away. “But that didn’t happen here. There’s such a quantity of dust and cobwebs around the house that one would see straightaway if anything had been removed, and it’s quite clear that nothing has been disturbed.”
“What on earth does that have to do with anything?”
“If you’re such a dangerous monster, such a trial to serve, then why wouldn’t a servant help himself to a bit of silver? In the name of justice, naturally.”
