Page 18 of It Takes Two to Tumble
“Then stand back while I have a go.” He shucked his boots and threw them to the ground. He stood on the branch in nothing but his breeches, shirt, and braces. “Ready?”
Good God, he was really going to do this. “It’s getting dark. You’ll drown.”
Sedgwick laughed. “I’ve been swimming in this lake night and day my entire life.” And with that he took hold of the rope and was flying over the lake. He hit the water with a splash that reached Phillip’s trousers, and even through the fabric Phillip could tell the water was icy. As he waited for Sedgwick to surface, Phillip found that he was holding his breath.
When Sedgwick finally appeared, he was smiling brightly. “The water’s lovely,” he said, a bald lie.
“Is it?” Phillip asked. “Then you ought to enjoy a good long swim.”
“I’d feel stingy hogging all the lake to myself. Miserly. Very wrong. It’s a mortal sin, I’m nearly certain. You really ought to come in and keep me from vice.”
Phillip tried to keep his face stern. “I’ll pray to one of your saints.”
“No, you won’t. I think you’re an atheist. And, what’s a good deal more concerning to me at this moment, a coward who’s afraid of some cold water.”
“I thought you said the water was lovely.”
“And so it is.” Sedgwick’s teeth were chattering. “In a bracing way. Now come in.”
If there was a way to resist this man, he hadn’t found it. Phillip unwound his cravat. He threw it and his waistcoat to the ground, hoping they didn’t get too muddy to put back on later. Then he pulled his shirt over his head.
“I didn’t realize it was to be that sort of swim,” Sedgwick said, and the overt flirtatiousness of it nearly knocked Phillip into the water.
“I don’t fancy a walk back to the house in a freezing, wet shirt,” Phillip said, striving for a normal tone of voice, whatever that even was in this situation. “You’ll envy me my dry clothes, just you wait.”
And then, chasing an old forgotten joy and the flicker of hope that he might feel such a thing again, he dove in.
The water was freezing. Ben thought he must have gone mad to have even considered jumping in. He hadn’t any intention of getting in the water, but he couldn’t spend another moment on that branch flirting with Dacre. And there was no question that they were flirting. Ben might be inexperienced but he wasn’t a fool. Jumping into the lake seemed his best and most dignified mode of escape, but the only thing he could do to lessen the horror of the cold was to lure Dacre in too.
Dacre surfaced beside him, dark hair slicked back from his forehead. They could both stand at this depth, but just barely. “Fuck shit bollocks,” he ground out. “Bugger.”
“A bit chilly?” Ben strove for a level of insouciance that wasn’t possible when your teeth were rattling in your head.
“F-fuck yourself.”
Ben laughed. He was too cold for proper arousal, otherwise he might take undue notice of the breadth of the captain’s shoulders, the spare musculature of his upper arms and chest. And he didn’t want to let his gaze linger on things he might not be able to stop himself from remembering when he was warm and dry and alone.
“Oh, that’s a pity,” Dacre said, and for a second Ben thought the man knew Ben’s private imaginings. But his gaze was on Ben’s shoulder, and Ben had the notion that he was being ogled through the water. “I was afraid that would happen.”
“What?” He looked down at his chest, thinking he’d see a leech or some other underwater horror.
Dacre slid two fingers under the strap of Ben’s braces and lifted the sodden fabric slightly away from Ben’s body. “Too bad, really.” He tugged slightly, and Ben drifted closer, his body nearly weightless under the water.
“What do you mean?” Ben whispered. He didn’t know whether he hoped or feared this really was about leeches and not something entirely different.
“This,” Dacre said, and brought his free hand up to Ben’s shoulder, plunging Ben underwater. The last thing Ben saw before ducking beneath the frigid water was the captain’s face lit with a wicked smile.
But it was better to be under the water, away from the night air that seemed to chill him even more than the water, away from tempting sights and smiles. So he stayed underwater and swam as far as he could before coming up for air. By then he was not precisely warm, but slightly less freezing.
Dacre was swimming towards him with a neat hand-over-hand stroke. “Warmer if you keep moving,” he said, treading water by Ben’s side.
“Bastard,” Ben said without heat. He was too cold to be serious. He did the only thing a man could possibly do, which was to take hold of the captain’s hard, slippery shoulders and dunk him beneath the water in return. Dacre surfaced laughing and shivering, taking his plunge as his due, as a necessary part of whatever code of retribution he had triggered by dunking Ben.
By then the sun had fully set, and their only light was a crescent moon that hung low in the sky. But the night was clear and the moon reflected off the lake, so they could see enough for safety.
Or at least they wouldn’t drown. Other kinds of safety, Ben couldn’t vouch for. If he spent another minute in proximity to Dacre’s bare torso, he might start stroking it.
Worse, he felt like Dacre wouldn’t mind.
