A Fashionable Indulgence (Society of Gentlemen #1) (26 page)

Richard shifted, evidently not finding that an obvious proposition. “Yes,” Harry repeated. He felt she was rubbing it in a little.

“Good,” Verona said. “I’m giving half to you.”

“What?”

“You can’t argue,” Verona said gleefully. “I heard you agree and so did Edward and Richard. You gave me the money for the license— Oh dear!” She shot a half-guilty look at Richard, who looked more resigned than surprised. “You helped me with everything you had, just when I needed it, and
if a woman be a moral being at all, she should be held to moral principles no less stringent than any that constrain a man.
And you gave me that book in the first place. You can’t change your mind now.”

“You and I need to have a discussion about your reading matter, Harry,” Richard muttered.

“I, uh.” Harry looked round helplessly, then simply held out his arms and Verona flew to them.

“I’m so happy,” she whispered into his shoulder. “You have to be happy too.”

M
AY 1820

“Very elegant,” Julius said.

Harry smiled at him. His new waistcoat was a point of some pride, a charming blend of blues. It set off his eyes, and the lapis pin in his cravat, to perfection. “Yes, it is rather. I’m looking forward to tonight.”

They were going to dinner at Richard’s home, which was no longer Harry’s. He had moved into the set of rooms opposite Julius’s just a month ago: lodgings for single gentlemen. He would rather have shared rooms, many men did without thinking twice, but that felt too risky. Divided by a hallway, they could merely be good friends in the world’s eyes. It would do.

“I regard tonight with the liveliest apprehension,” Julius said. “I suppose it will be invigorating, if nothing else.”

“There will be a lot to talk about,” Harry said, with some understatement.

Julius made a face. “That there will. I have been on less eventful battlefields than London over the past few months. My nerves may never recover.”

“They’re made of steel cord and you know it.”

Julius put his hands on Harry’s shoulders. “On the contrary. I was quite looking forward to simple country life before you became inconveniently wealthy. It would have been so relaxing. Well, come on then. I suppose we should go if we’re going.”

Harry caught his hand to pull him close. “Wait. Kiss.”

Julius angled his head, meeting Harry’s mouth. He kissed with such precious care, as if every time was a gift, as if to be together was a small victory to be celebrated. Perhaps it was. His chin was smooth, lips soft, and Harry leaned into the kiss, feeling the gentle stroke of a tongue against his.
I taught you to do that. I taught you to kiss.

He ran a hand down Julius’s back, over his arse, pulling him close. “Maybe we could be late.”

“Rag-mannered,” Julius said, kissing his throat. “Have I taught you nothing?”

“Hardly anything at all.” Harry purred with pleasure, arching his neck to give Julius better access. His tongue and lips nipped and licked upward, making Harry tremble, until his teeth closed on Harry’s earlobe.

“Oh God. Stop it! If you keep doing that—”

“You will be in a state of excitement throughout dinner,” Julius murmured. “You will be inclined to come back home instead of opening another bottle with Ash, or discussing your philanthropic efforts with Absalom all evening, and then we will be back here in peace, and I will fuck you boneless, which is what I have wanted to do all day if you hadn’t so inconveniently gone out.” He nipped again at the fleshy part of Harry’s ear, sending shudders through him. “And therefore, my Harry…indulge me.”

For Susan Lee, who asked me to write a story

I owe huge thanks to Susan Lee, Natalie Baron, May Peterson, and Alexis Hall, all of whom gave their time and thoughts on this story so generously. I am very grateful to the Loveswept team for all their hard work on the cover, blurbs, editing, and marketing. My agent, Deidre Knight of the Knight Agency, is simply magnificent.

With much love to my family: my parents and parents-in-law for their unstinting support, my kids for their fixed belief that I’ll be able to buy them a swimming pool sometime soon, and my husband for always.

K
.
J
.
C
HARLES
is a writer and freelance editor living in London. She has two kids, one cat, a shed to write in, and a big mug for tea—she’s not sure what else you need in life. Find K.J. all too often on Twitter or on Facebook.

kjcharleswriter.wordpress.com

Facebook.com/kjcharleswriter

@kj_charles

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The Tory lay on his back, eyes shut, sated. His face was flushed, lips reddened, skin marked all over by Silas’s fingers.

Christ, he was good to look on.
“Here.” Silas handed him the glass and sat on the bed. “What’s this, then?”

The Tory took it without looking. “Hermitage. It’s a French wine, from the Rhône.”

Silas had no idea where that was, nor why it mattered. But it did matter to the Tory, clearly, and it had cost nothing to ask.

He sipped at the Hermitage, which the Tory said in a Frenchified way. At first it had that dryness on the tongue that he didn’t much like, preferring beer or porter, but he knew by now that once you got a little way down the glass, the taste could grow on a man. “Very fine.”

The Tory opened his eyes then. He looked tired but deeply contented, all passion spent. He smiled, and Silas smiled back. “It’s good to see you.”

Silas moved his glass to chink against the Tory’s. “You too. Been well?”

“Not so bad. Work. You?”

“Aye, busy enough. Lost one of my assistants a few weeks back.” Harry Vane, reclaimed by the noble family his father had abandoned, and swept off to become a gentleman. Silas wasn’t going to mention that. For all he knew of good society, which was nothing, the Tory might even mix in Harry’s new circles. He didn’t think much of a good young radical, or even an idle one like Harry, going off to become a gentleman, but he wasn’t going to put the boy’s future at risk with idle talk. “And it’s too damn hot.”

“That it is. I’m going down to the country this weekend.”

“Very nice. Back next week?”

Silas tried to appear to be asking it idly, but there was a definite twitch to the Tory’s lips when he replied, “By next Wednesday, I think.”

Silas shoved him, not hard, and the Tory sat up a little, making space. Silas moved to lie alongside him, feeling the heat of the Tory’s bare skin.

“I finished the book,” the Tory said.

“Oh, aye? What’d you think?”

“Good. Terrifying. Strange. I can’t understand why you like it.”

“Why would I not?”

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d agree with it. After all, its burden is the need for man to keep in his place—”

“What?” said Silas incredulously.

“The overreaching man dares to play God, and pays a terrible price. Abuses the natural order and creates a monstrous thing.”

“Bollocks,” Silas said. “That ain’t what it’s about.”

“It’s what happens.”

“No. What happens is, he creates, he’s responsible for, something that should be”—Silas waved his hand vaguely—“great and strong, something that he owes a duty to. And he says to it, ‘Go die in a ditch, I’ll have my big house and pretty wife.’ And it says, ‘You don’t get to live in a grand house and ignore me. Do your duty or I’ll tear you down. Treat me like I’m as good as you, or I’ll show you—’ ”

“—that I’m not,” the Tory interrupted. “The creature murders—”

“Because he ain’t given a chance to live decent,” Silas said firmly. “You treat men like brutes, you make ’em brutes. That’s what it says.”

“No, you create brutes when you distort the rules of nature and the order of things,” the Tory retorted. “That’s what the book’s about. It’s obvious.”

“It ain’t. You think the author meant that?”

“You know the author?” The Tory looked intrigued. “Who is he?”

“She.”

“What?” said the Tory incredulously. “A woman wrote
Frankenstein
?”

“Mary Shelley,” Silas said with some satisfaction. “Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin’s girl, that is.”

“The—female who finally married that appalling poet? Good God. A woman.”

“And what’s her sex to do with it?” Silas demanded, and they were off.

It wasn’t as if he lacked for debate in his life. Silas ran a bookshop that specialized in political philosophy. His nights and evenings, except Wednesdays, were taken up with pamphleteering, writing the often seditious libels at which he excelled, attending meetings of the people who could no longer bear the stranglehold of the rich on England’s neck. He had been in the struggle since he’d had his eyes opened at the age of sixteen by Euphemia Gordon, a radical firebrand and agitator for the rights of women, and he’d never stopped—for gaol or flogging or the threat of worse. He believed in the cause, dedicated his life to it, hated the aristocracy and the gentry and the conservatives who let the people starve and who wanted the working man kept in his place.

And then, on Wednesdays, he went to bed with the most dyed-in-the-wool Tory he’d ever met in his life.

Millay’s was an assignation house. Not a whorehouse, nothing so honest, but a place where gentlemen who liked gentlemen could meet gentlemen like themselves. It was no place he’d normally set foot, but he’d been asked special. “Someone I want you to meet,” his friend Jonathan had said. “Gentleman set to get himself killed. Take a turn at him before he manages it.”

Silas could see it too, that first night. The Tory had all the look of a man who was going to let his desires drive him downward, and Silas had very nearly walked away. He didn’t play games, and he was damned if he’d use any of the filthy toys of violence laid out in the room. Whips and chains made him sweat to look at them, and he’d told the Tory to his face, “If you want that, you can get it from someone else.” But he’d had him all the same, because he wanted a man, and the Tory had been there. Silas had been damned rough with him too, because that was what was wanted, and because if you had the chance to take it out on one of the bastards, why wouldn’t you?

It had been good, withal. Good enough that he’d agreed to do it again when the Tory, face averted, had suggested it. No danger of being caught, and the house was clean and dry. Might as well. And he’d come back, and…

There had been no whips or chains or the usual toys of the house laid out. Nothing at all but the covered mirror, the chair, the bed.

And Silas had remembered the Tory’s fingers skimming the ridged skin of his back where the scars of flogging would never quite fade. The Tory had noticed the scars, and maybe even Silas’s twitch at the table of torture implements, and after that, all the toys had been removed. Consideration was what it was, and something inside Silas had shifted, just a little bit, at that moment. That tiny piece of thoughtfulness from a gentleman who wanted to be swived into the gutter but who noticed how the man in the gutter felt.

Christ knew quite how it had grown from there. How they had between them delineated the Tory’s needs, and the things Silas wouldn’t do, and the ways that Silas could know what the other man wanted without making him say it. How he’d learned to read the Tory’s body, and to enjoy the games that weren’t games at all, unless they were. He couldn’t remember which one of them had started talking, how long before the first bottle had been laid out and was waiting upon his arrival, what day Silas had first said, “Have you read…?” and how long before the Tory had handed him a book and said, “Tell me what you think.” When the tupping had become just one part of the night’s pleasure.

That was their Wednesdays. That had been their Wednesdays for a full year now, only a handful missed, until Silas felt as though his life ran from Wednesday to Wednesday, with everything in between just marking time, and the very sound of
Thursday
was enough to make him snarl at his shop boy for the aching, empty week to come.

They still didn’t know each other’s names.