The clanking of silver against plate, the cheery prognostications for the future happiness of the newly wedded couple, the sheer inanity of the chatter of a dining room filled with well-fed members of the English nobility—Benedict could only stand the celebratory bustle of his sister’s wedding feast for so long. Nor the unexpected longing that overtook him each time Sibilla smiled with surprised delight upon her bridegroom, each time Sir Peregrine patted his wife’s hand or clasped hers in his. Even if Benedict ever found himself in love, found a person to whom he wished to pledge his troth, a man of his inclinations would never have the chance to stand up and declare his vows in front of his friends and family as his sister just had.
With this Ring I thee wed, with my Body I thee worship, and with all my worldly Goods I thee endow: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
He rubbed the tight muscles in his jaw. He’d never be allowed to express his joy in joining with the mate of his soul, not with the openness and freedom Sibilla and her new husband took entirely for granted. Not in church, nor in the midst of Pennington House’s ballroom.
Benedict’s head jerked as an amused laugh pealed out from across the room. No such unfulfillable longings seemed to plague Lord Dulcie, who had stood beside Sir Peregrine during the long wedding ceremony with nary a wistful sigh. And here, amongst company, he was in his element, drawing the attention of everyone within earshot with his amusing stories and scandalous gossip. Was it a blessing or a curse, to take such pleasure in the way things were, rather than rail and regret over what they should be?
But perhaps Dulcie did not long for anything different. Whenever Benedict saw him, he was always surrounded by a coterie of young men, rather than one special companion. Rumor among a certain set had it that each season, Dulcie made a particular friend of one or another young fellow new to town each year, but the same rumors also insisted that his attentions were as fleeting as a rainbow amongst the clouds. Was young George Norton, the son of the gentleman whom Benedict’s father had supported for a seat in Parliament, currently vying for the right to spend a few brief hours basking in Dulcie’s reflected glory? He certainly hung on the viscount’s every word.
Not that Benedict gave a tinker’s curse for whom Dulcie deigned to bestow his favors.
“A toast! A toast! Every married man shall toast his wife!” Theo, Lord Saybrook, thrust his nearly empty wineglass towards his new brother-in-law. He’d declared to anyone who would listen that he was celebrating finally having the responsibility for their troublesome younger sister taken off his hands. More likely, though, he was drowning his guilt at being talked into declaring that their youngest brother, Kit, who had just wed an entirely unsuitable Irishwoman, not be invited to this morning’s festivities. Damn Uncle Christopher for his stupid, pointless prejudices.
Benedict wrapped a piece of the wedding cake in a napkin—he’d promised to take one to Kit and his Fianna—then slipped it, and himself, out of the noisy ballroom. Uncle Christopher could be the one to make sure that Theo did not make too great a fool of himself today.
His footsteps took him not up to his studio—too many reminders of his creative frustrations awaited there—but to the small drawing room at the back of the townhouse, the chamber that had once been his mother’s favorite retreat. In it her own paintings, the landscapes of familiar views from the Saybrook estate and the exquisitely detailed watercolors of humble Lincolnshire flora, were kept in bound folios, not deemed grand enough for public display.
He picked up a volume and flipped through its pages, trying to shake off this damned melancholy.
With what patience and skill his mother had taught him to hold a black-lead pencil, to shape perfectly straight lines and full, rounded curves. To take his time and to erase his mistakes with his Indian rubber when his ambitions outran his ability. How he’d burst with pride when she’d declared his watercolor of the cathedral in Lincoln, the last painting he’d completed before being sent away to school, worthy of being framed and hung, when she would not even frame her own far more accomplished works. To look again at her paintings, to remember her soft, kind voice, the stroke of her gentle hand over his brow whenever he’d toss his brush down in frustration—it soothed him, even on a day like today, when restlessness and impatience pricked at him like a burr under a horse’s saddle.
“Your sister’s work? How did I not know she painted, as well as yourself?”
Benedict closed his eyes, willing away the awareness the soft-spoken words uttered behind him sent skittering down his spine. Why should he be surprised that Dulcie had followed him, after he’d given him such an ill-advised glimpse of his own longing during their last sketching session?
But should he really throw all the blame on Dulcie? Had not his own instincts, betraying good sense, urged him to leave the festivities, hoping that Dulcie—no, that Clair—might follow?
“They are not Sibilla’s,” he said, his voice low. “These were done by my mother.”
Dulcie sat on the sofa beside him and tugged on the folio so that it sat half on Benedict’s lap, half on his own. Benedict’s breath caught at the closeness of Dulcie’s thigh, the brush of his arm against his side as he turned each page. But the viscount’s attention remained focused not on Benedict, but on the contents of the folio, examining each of the paintings with the eyes not of a loving child, but of an intelligent, opinionated critic.
Would Mother’s heart have beaten as quickly under the appraisal as Benedict’s did?
She had liked him, that golden, laughing boy he’d described in the letters he’d written to her from school, and encouraged her shy son to pursue a friendship with him. If she had still been alive, would she have helped him find that boy again, draw him out from where he hid, safe behind the varnish of his social smile? Or would she have counseled Benedict to forget him? Assured him that boy no longer existed?
“Quite accomplished she was, your mother,” Dulcie said when he had finished examining the final painting—Benedict’s favorite, a scene of a flower-strewn meadow on the Saybrook estate. “Such a dreamy, almost ethereal quality to them, as if she were painting her own visions rather than actual topological views. Did she ever submit her work to the Royal Academy exhibition?”
Benedict ran his fingers round the tinted border surrounding the painting. How lovely it would look, mounted in a simple gold frame. “I believe several of her friends urged her to do so. But she never valued her own talents highly enough to accept their praise. And my father thought it ill-suited of a viscountess to subject herself to such public display.”
“Did you believe so, too?”
“I hardly think the opinion of a mere boy would have changed his mind.”
Dulcie turned back to studying the picture. “Ah, yes, you had the misfortune to lose your mother at a young age, I believe?”
“When I was but fourteen.” Two years after he’d lost Clair. Each time, he’d thought he’d lose himself as well, his grief had been so potent, so overwhelming.
“A pity. She had a talent that many a professional would envy.”
Benedict closed the folio and slid it from Dulcie’s lap, careful not to allow his fingers to touch the other man’s thighs. “She would have been even better if she’d had the chance to see the works of Poussin, or Claude, or any of the old Dutch masters of landscape.”
Dulcie shifted to face Benedict. “But as the wife of a peer, surely she had the chance to visit many a private collection?”
“A few, yes. But during a social visit, one is hardly allowed the chance to contemplate one painting before being rushed on to the next.”
“Especially if its owner is prouder of himself for purchasing it than of the merits of the art itself,” Dulcie said with a grin.
“Yes! If you wish to understand on an instinctual level a painting’s composition, its use of line and shadow, the play of light and color, you must spend time with it, examine it in detail. Which you could do, if the country’s best paintings were not all held in private collections. Gather them in one place, a place open to any who wish to view them, and watch how England’s art would flower.”
Dulcie waved a careless hand. “There are other museums, on the Continent.”
“But my mother never had the opportunity to travel abroad, to study the great works of the past. How many other talented young artists are lost to the world, or never reach their full potential, for lack of the opportunities enjoyed by the wealthy, or the privileges granted the male sex?”
“How impassioned you become when you speak of your museum scheme!” Dulcie gave a lazy smile, one that belied the sudden tension in the air between them. “Eyes frowning, brows lowering, that teasing sulkiness about your full lips—why, it’s almost as if you were speaking of a lover, rather than a plan to make the world a better place.”
Benedict jerked to his feet. “Is that why you followed me? In search of a lover?”
“Bold words, Mr. Pennington. And if I answer with equal boldness, and say that I am?” Dulcie rose with far more grace from the settee than Benedict was sure he had.
“Is not Mr. George Norton already filling that role?”
“Not yet, although I have considered him. Teaching untutored youths in the ways of the flesh is a particularly piquant pleasure. But the more I see of you, the more I find myself unaccountably curious to know what it would be like to play with a more experienced man.”
“You take a risk, revealing such things to me.”
“No more of a risk than you once took. Sending that impassioned letter to me when you were a mere schoolboy.”
“My letter.” The blood rushed to Benedict’s face. “You did receive it, then. I was never certain.”
“Well, in a manner of speaking. My father opened it, then read certain parts to me aloud.”
“Your father?” Benedict’s stomach fell. He’d pictured Dulcie reading his letter a million times—laughing, sneering, sharing it with his friends, shredding it into tiny pieces and feeding it to the pigs. But that it might have been intercepted by a parent—that he’d never once imagined. “Lord, Clair. I’m so terribly sorry.”
“Yes, as was I when my father informed me that I would not be returning to school again.” A wry smile crossed Dulcie’s face. “And when he forbid me to write back to you. I did so wish to tell you how accomplished I found your translations of Xenophon.”
“Accomplished?”
“Yes, accomplished. From what my father shared with me, your translations were not only remarkably accurate, they were rendered in quite elegant prose.”
“The accuracy and elegance of my prose—is that what you remember about that letter?”
Dulcie crossed his arms and perched on the arm of the settee. “Well, Father did mention something about certain amorous wishes you expressed towards my person. But he did not deign to share any of the more salacious details. Perhaps you’d like to tell me of them now?”
Benedict felt his flush spread to his ears. “I’m no longer a child, smitten by calf-love for the most popular boy at school.”
“No, you are certainly no child.” Dulcie’s eyes roamed with shocking directness up and down Benedict’s body. “And I am no longer a boy who must heed his father’s orders. If I wish to write to you, or to sit in front of you half-garbed while you take my likeness, or to grab what I imagine is your eager and lively prick and frot you until you spend in my hand—why, who is there to object?”
“No one,” Benedict whispered.
“No one,” Dulcie echoed, then reached up to pull Benedict’s head to his.
God, he was kissing Dulcie, pressing his lips to Dulcie’s, nudging his mouth open and shoving his tongue deep inside it. No, not Dulcie, but Clair, the boy he’d worshipped from afar for so long, the boy still there beneath the man he’d spent months warily circling.
Whenever he’d dreamed of this moment, he’d imagined gentleness, something sublime, even spiritual. Yet this kiss was crass and lewd, all tongues and teeth and need. Not just on Clair’s part, but on his own, his body thrumming with the sheer necessity of his desire. He wanted to bite Clair, devour him, suck him down like sweet honey from the comb.
Punish him for staying hidden for so long.
“God, Pen,” Clair whispered, his voice low, yearning. “I’ve missed you so.”
With a groan at the sound of that old pet name, Benedict pushed him to the wall and shoved a leg between his. Yes, there it was, Clair’s cock rising against his thigh, twitching under the pressure. Slim and elegant and proud, he’d imagined it, just like the man to whom it belonged. God, would he have the chance to actually see if he was right? The thought was almost enough to make him spend there and then.
He grabbed Clair’s waist, forcing him to hold still as his own hips pressed and released, pressed and released. Clair clutched at Benedict’s arms, as if trying to stop himself from falling.
A loud thump jerked him from Clair’s hold. His mother’s portfolio lay on the floor beside them, jostled from its perch on the table by the intensity of their rutting.
Clair gulped in a deep breath, then swiped a thumb over the swell of Benedict’s lip. “Well, well. It seems someone has learned a few things about kissing in the years we’ve spent apart. Alas, this is neither the time nor the place to discover how far your studies have progressed. Perhaps, after Friday’s meeting. . .”
Benedict blinked, struggling to shake free from the daze of arousal. “What meeting?”
Clair laid a silencing finger over his lips. “No questions. It’s a surprise I’ve arranged, particularly for you. Be ready; I’ll fetch you in my carriage at half past five.”
He grabbed Benedict’s neck and pulled him down for one last lingering kiss, leaving him open-mouthed as he made for the door.
“And bring your sketching pad and your charcoals. And your best arguments in favor of establishing that museum you’re so intent upon. I’ve some people I think might be interested in hearing them.”
With a wink and a grin, Clair sauntered from the room.
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