Page 7 of The Ruin of a Rake
Chapter Four
Julian was starting to fear that bringing Courtenay to the opera had been a tactical error. For one, Courtenay seemed to take up twice the space of any normal man. It wasn’t his size—indeed, Julian found himself repeatedly confirming that Courtenay was not much larger than he was himself—a bit broader in the shoulders and perhaps an inch or two taller, but he was hardly a giant. No, Courtenay simply arranged his body with no regard for anyone who was forced to share space with him. Instead of sitting on the chair like a normal person, he positively sprawled, propping one of his long legs on the empty seat before him and stretching an arm along the back of the empty seat to his side.
They had the entire box to themselves, but Julian was acutely aware of all the places where their bodies almost—but not quite—touched. Every breath brought him into acute danger of one of his limbs meeting one of Courtenay’s. And that was a fate he ardently hoped would not come to pass, for reasons he chose not to dwell on.
It was all he could do to keep his attention on the opera. Actually, that wasn’t true, because he had no idea what had happened thus far beyond the usual foreign singing, and it was nearly the interval.
And then there was the matter of Courtenay’s reading material. To have brought any book whatsoever to the opera was eccentric at best. But Courtenay, somehow managing to lounge decadently in the stiff-backed chair as if he were reading in bed, for God’s sake, had brought the blastedBrigand Prince. Why bring any book at all, unless it was to demonstrate how bored he was with his company? As if his posture alone didn’t communicate that fact quite sufficiently.
Occasionally, for whatever purpose, Courtenay would read a passage aloud.
“Listen to this, Medlock.” Courtenay lowered his voice so as not to be heard by anyone in a neighboring box. This was, ostensibly, polite, but the raspy quiet of his voice, combined with the darkness, suggested an intimacy Julian did not want to think of. “Don Lorenzo has caught Agatha traipsing through the haunted abbey. Do you think they’ll finally take one another’s clothes off?”
Julian nearly protested that it wasn’t an abbey (it was a monastery), it wasn’t haunted (the eerie noises came from imprisoned monks, not specters), and this was hardly the sort of book in which the characters took off one another’s clothing (more’s the pity). But he reflected that a highly specific knowledge of the contents ofThe Brigand Princewas not something Julian Medlock ought to know in his capacity as a gentleman.
Instead, without looking at Courtenay, he murmured, “Is that so?” in the same polite tone one would use with someone who was tiresomely complaining about a toothache. They did not need to be friends. They did not even need to befriendly. All Julian needed to do was indicate to the world that Lord Courtenay was a person a respectable gentleman could be seen with.
And seen they were. For the entire performance, Julian had been acutely aware of glances darted their way, opera glasses aimed towards them. “You might try sitting up straight,” he hissed. “Please recall that we’re here to create the illusion that you’re not an unfit companion for an impressionable child.”
Instead Courtenay slid his chair into the shadowy recesses of the box, and then proceeded to cross his ankles on the seat before him, adopting a posture that signified contempt for the entire enterprise: the opera, society in general, and Julian in particular. The least he could do was pretend to be grateful for Julian’s efforts. Julian didn’t know what his sister saw in the man. But it didn’t matter. He was discharging his obligation to Eleanor, and then it would be over.
“Agatha’s frightened,” Courtenay said. He still hadn’t looked up from the book, which Julian might have found flattering under other circumstances. “But not nearly as frightened as she ought to be, if you ask my opinion. Lorenzo—that’s me, you know—grabs her by the wrists—”
Julian could not let that go by. “My understanding is that people popularly assume Lorenzo to be modeled—physically, at least—after you, but unless you’ve spent time manhandling maidens in monasteries, you can’t properly say that Lorenzoisyou.”
“Who’s to say that I haven’t? I can’t recall doing anything untoward in a—you’re quite right, it’s a monastery, not an abbey. How clever of you to remember.” Julian cringed at his slipup. “But I can’t pretend to remember every last one of my sins. Since you’ve read the novel, let me ask you who you think Agatha is? Norton is certain that she’s supposed to be Mrs. Castleton’s oldest daughter, but I’ve never laid eyes on the girl, much less seduced her, so it seems an odd thing to have us pawing at one another in Italy.”
“Agatha certainly doesn’t paw anybody,” Julian said. Courtenay—he meant Lorenzo, dash it—was the only one who could properly be said to paw.
“Oh, yes she does,” Courtenay said, flipping through the pages. “Agathagripped Don Lorenzo’s cloak. ‘Give me my locket,’ she cried, twisting the heavy velvet in her small, white hands, until Don Lorenzo had no choice but to bend towards her, or otherwise risk tearing the valuable fabric.”
That was a grossly out of context passage. “That’s hardly pawing,” Julian hissed, indignant on poor Agatha’s behalf. “She needs the locket to prove that she’s the prince’s rightful heir. And he’s trying to abscond with it, so of course she wants to stop him.” Before he could think better of it, he had shifted over and taken a new seat beside Courtenay. “Give me that.” He took the book from Courtenay’s hands and closed it firmly.
“But she goes on holding his cloak for three pages. Lorenzo doesn’t make the slightest move to get away,” Courtenay murmured. “He just lets himself get pulled to and fro by a slip of a girl.” He was silent for a moment, and Julian dared to hope that this topic was closed. “That’s what I don’t understand. How did the author know?”
Julian tried to focus on the foreign lady who was singing onstage, but he could not let that remark pass. “Know what?”
“That it’s precisely the sort of thing I like.”
“Velvet cloaks? Jewel theft? Depriving decent people of their birthrights?”
A low chuckle. “No, the manhandling.”
A spasm of lust jolted through Julian’s body and settled in the neighborhood of his cock. He tried to keep his attention on the stage, not on the image of Courtenay engaged in anything resembling manhandling.
“You like to intimidate women,” he managed. “How unsurprising.”
“Good God no, I mean it the other way around. That’s why I think it has to be one of my former lovers who wrote it.”
“The other way around,” Julian echoed.
“Being manhandled. Having the manhandling done to me. Not that I mind it either way, to be frank.”
Julian knew he ought not to pursue this line of conversation. The less said about Courtenay’s bedroom preferences the faster his obviouslyinsaneprick might recover. And the less said about this infernal novel, the better. But his traitorous cock, which had woken up at the wordmanhandling, had ideas of its own. “And so you think one of your conquests wrote this novel?”
For the first time, Courtenay turned to face Julian. Julian could feel the man’s gaze on him, even as he forced himself to attend to the stage, to his own shaking hands gripping the arms of the chair, and his stupid, stupid prick. “One of my... What an odd way to put it.”
“It was written by a gentleman,” he heard himself say, and hoped Courtenay didn’t notice his hoarseness. “It says so, right on the frontispiece.By A Gentleman.” He knew Courtenay got up to all manners of mischief, but somehow it had never occurred to him that Courtenay fancied men. Julian’s prick had never paid closer attention to a conversation.
