A Private Gentleman (41 page)
Read A Private Gentleman Online
Authors: Heidi Cullinan
face fell. “I c-can’t dance,” he reminded Michael.
Michael gave him an impatient look. “It isn’t terribly difficult to dance, dear
Albert. I can teach you in a trifle.”
“M-many have t-tried,” Wes said, sensing disaster and wishing to avoid it.
“All have f-f-failed.”
“Half an hour,” Michael declared. “Give me half an hour to teach you, and if
I can’t, then I shall believe you that you are in fact unteachable, and I will never
bring up the subject again.”
Wes rubbed at his forehead, hating this with a fiery passion, but not seeing
any way out, either. He sighed. “Very w-well.”
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They ended up in their parlor, all the couches and chairs pushed back and
rugs rolled up. Michael stood in the center of the room, held his arms up, and
gestured with his wrist. “Come here, please. I can’t dance with you from fifteen
feet away.”
Wes came forward, lifting his hands into dancing position. Michael nodded
in approval and slipped into his embrace. This made Wes’s body hum. He’d
never danced with a man before. He found he was more relaxed already. This
was so much better. Though he knew it would still end in disaster.
“All dances are patterns,” Michael explained. “The trick is to find the basic
pattern and teach it to your feet. As the leader, you’ll also need to guide the
dance steps of your partner, who in this case is me. Even then, however, you
stick to the same pattern. When you’re ready, you move a bit about the room.
You must look out for furniture and, if there are others dancing with you, other
couples. But essentially, Albert darling, that is all there is to dancing.”
Wes’s eyebrows lifted briefly. Put like that, it didn’t sound difficult at all.
He had to give Michael credit—Wes did better with him than he’d ever done.
While they were dancing side by side, Wes mimicking Michael, he did quite,
quite well indeed. When Michael stood before him, mirroring his steps, he also
did fairly well.
And then Michael stepped into his embrace, Wes tried to lead, and it fell to
pieces. Every single time.
“Sorry,” Wes murmured, blushing furiously. “I t-told you—”
Michael lifted a hand and waved him into silence. He stared thoughtfully at
Wes for several seconds. “Hmm. Do you know, it never occurred to me before,
but—yes. Why not?” His smile became wicked. “Again, my lord.”
Wes raised his arms, swallowing a weary sigh. Michael kept grinning, and
he shook his head.
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Heidi Cullinan
“No, darling.” He shifted Wes’s hands, placing one on Michael’s right
shoulder and clasped his other hand with his left. “This time, it’s you who will
follow me.” When Wes blinked, Michael continued grinning. “The same steps,
but this time beginning with the other foot. I’ll lead the way. You only have to let
your body move in the direction I tell it to go.”
Wes felt a bit strange, he had to admit, as if he had been unmanned
somehow. And yet—well, hadn’t that been Michael, only moments before? Had
he thought him unmanly?
A bit,
he admitted to himself.
No longer. For Michael moved Wes with strength and grace about the floor,
and when Wes tripped, he recovered them so smoothly that anyone watching
them wouldn’t even have known. For what felt like hours, they simply turned
about the room, Michael humming a tune softly under his breath to give them
time and rhythm. They danced, and they danced, and they danced.
Lord George Albert Westin was dancing.
All these years. All these
years
, an entire lifetime of years of parties, of home dances, dances at school—his sainted mother even had been frustrated with him
for not being able to dance. The tutors. The daughters of mothers who hoped to
win favor with the marquess by helping him with his socially awkward son.
“Teach him to dance,” that was the excuse. What everyone meant, of course, was
Teach him how to be in the world. How to get out of the house. How to be able to bear a
party without passing out. How to not disgrace the family. How to dance, not just in the
arms of a woman, but in life.
Michael’s mouth brushed Wes’s ear, and Wes could hear the smile in
Michael’s voice as he said, “It didn’t even take me fifteen minutes.”
Wes wanted to laugh—laugh, cry, shout, leap through the air. For the first
time in his life, even, he wanted to run out into the street and run up to strangers
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and shout in their faces and spin them around.
I can dance. I can dance, and I can
speak. I can love, I can laugh—I can live. There’s nothing wrong with me. There never
was. I just needed to find the right way to do it. The right place to do it.
He looked down at Michael.
The right man to do it with.
Wes stopped dancing—not tripping, just stopping, and he held Michael fast
about the waist, clutching him, drawing him close. Shivering, he shut his eyes
and buried his face in Michael’s neck, drawing in deep draughts of him.
“Albert?” Michael called softly. “Are you all right?”
Wes pulled back, swallowing hard. He looked Michael in the eye, but he still
couldn’t say anything. He touched Michael’s face in wonder.
“Albert?” Michael stroked Wes’s cheek.
“Yes,” Wes said, spirit soaring, his throat full of words, and his tongue—at
least for this moment—content to get completely out of the way. “Yes. I am
perfectly fine.”
Wes bent and kissed his lover, at which point, though his words were still
ready to slide out on command, he had no need of them at all.
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About the Author
Heidi has always loved a good love story, provided it has a happy ending.
She enjoys writing across many genres but loves above all to write happy,
romantic endings for LGBT characters because there just aren’t enough of those
stories out there. When she isn’t writing, Heidi enjoys knitting, reading, movies,
TV shows on DVD, and all kinds of music. She has a husband, a daughter, and
too many cats. Heidi also volunteers frequently for her state’s LGBT rights
group, One Iowa, and is proud to be from the first Midwestern state to legalize
same-sex marriage.
Find Heidi on the web at:
Website
: www.heidicullinan.com
Twitter:
www.twitter.com/heidicullinan
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/pages/Heidi-Cullinan
He followed all the rules…until one man showed him a dozen ways to break them.
An Improper Holiday
© 2009 K.A. Mitchell
As second son to an earl, Ian Stanton has always done the proper thing.
Obeyed his elders, studied diligently, and dutifully accepted the commission his
father purchased for him in the Fifty-Second Infantry Division. The one glaring,
shameful, marvelous exception: Nicholas Chatham, heir to the Marquess of
Carleigh.
Before Ian took his position in His Majesty’s army, he and Nicky
consummated two years of physical and emotional discovery. Their inexperience
created painful consequences that led Ian to the conviction that their unnatural
desires were never meant to be indulged.
Five years later, wounded in body and plagued by memories of what
happened between them, Ian is sent to carry out his older brother’s plans for a
political alliance with Nicky’s father. Their sister Charlotte is the bargaining
piece.
Nicky never believed that what he and Ian felt for each other was wrong and
he has a plan to make things right. Getting Ian to Carleigh is but the first step.
Now Nicky has only twelve nights to convince Ian that happiness is not the price
of honor and duty, but its reward.
Warning: Just thinking about reading this book in 1814 could get you hanged, so the
men in this book who enjoy m/m interaction of an intimately penetrative nature are in a
hell of a lot of trouble.
Enjoy the following excerpt for
An Improper Holiday:
When at last the door opened, Ian spun ’round to be relieved of his coat,
sufficiently irritated by Simmons’ delayed arrival to forgo his usual greeting.
Perhaps the fellow had been overindulging in whatever libations were being
offered to celebrate the day in the servants’ hall because the valet was clumsy
rather than deft, struggling just to ease the coat from Ian’s shoulders.
“And I shall be retiring, Simmons.”
Instead of the expected “Very good, sir,” the man left his arms pinned
behind his back and brushed his fingers beneath Ian’s cravat. The unanticipated
contact awakened Ian’s skin, his flesh alight with delightful ripples of sensation.
“What the devil?”
He would have turned to face the man, but Simmons stepped closer, hands
moving to remove the starched tie while pressing his hips intimately against
Ian’s arse.
The shock and terror in his gut, even the pain of his confined shoulders,
could not dampen the rush of arousal evoked by the touch, by the strength of
another man’s embrace.
“Simmons. I must ask that you remember yourself.” Ian twisted free,
retreating to place a wall at his vulnerable back, but his all-too-vulnerable front
was exposed to—Nicky.
The identity of his assailant did little to mitigate Ian’s dismay.
“Are you mad?” Ian struggled with his coat, anger lending him sufficient
strength to tear one of the sleeves from the body.
Nicky locked the door and removed his own coat. “It is Boxing Day, after all.
Simmons has the evening off, as do almost all of the servants. Surely you would
not deprive the man of his well-earned holiday.”
“It is not Boxing Day for another hour,” Ian asserted as the solemn toll of the
chapel bell made him a liar. He flung his torn coat to the floor.
Nicky’s cravat parted company with his shirt, revealing a neck still defined
with the strong tendons Ian had once traced with his tongue. Quelling thoughts
of other flesh his mouth longed to revisit grew more impossible with each piece
of clothing Nicky dropped onto the Aubusson rug.
“What are you doing?”
“I am preparing for bed. That bed.” Nicky indicated the four-poster in the
center of the room.
“Is the castle so crowded the son of the house has been turned out of his
rooms?”
“If it pleases you to think so.” Nicky straightened, torso bared to Ian’s gaze.
Firelight gilded Nicky’s skin, gleaming on the fine hairs of his breast,
drawing Ian’s eye to the waist of Nicky’s breeches where the hair thickened and
darkened. The garnet on his signet ring flashed as Nicky’s hands moved to those
buttons.
Ian shut his eyes. “No.”
“No?” The amusement in Nicky’s voice had Ian looking again, forgetting
what imminent danger had prompted his action. But Nicky only bent to remove
his shoes and stockings, gifting Ian with the sight of the firm curve of his
backside under the tight kerseymere breeches.
Nicky brought his hands to rest above his hips, fingers disappearing under
the waistband. “Is it truly no or is that what the good soldier, the dutiful second
son, feels compelled to say?”
Ian’s throat burned as it tightened, but he could not look away.
“Whom do you seek to save with your denial, me or you?” Nicky persisted.
He stepped closer, but made no move to touch Ian. “Why are we to be denied
pleasure when you must know how precious and brief life is?”
“The risk of—”
“You threw yourself against a wall of French rifles in service to your father’s
idea of honor. Can you not permit yourself something your own honor knows is
right? How can it be wrong when we both desire it?” Nicky shoved his breeches
down and stepped free, the proof of his desire standing proud and hard.
As swiftly as snow falling off a steep roof, Ian’s body dropped into a pit of
raw need. He made a last effort to find any handhold which might keep him
from the abyss.
“I do want…”
you
“…this, but only what we did before. We cannot, I will
not…” He tried making a gesture to communicate the specific deed.
“Bugger me?” Nicky grinned. “Fuck me?”
Despite Ian’s shock, the coarseness of Nicky’s words brought a faster beat of
blood to Ian’s prick. That unabated grin suggested Nicky knew damned well
what effect he had wrought. His next step brought Nicky close enough to try the
truth with his hand. Fingers traced the outline of Ian’s prick beneath a layer of
wool and linen, a light pressure that offered nothing beyond exquisite torment. A
quick hard rub against the crown, dragging the linen across the damp skin until
heat pulsed from the tip, the touch as unerringly accurate as Ian’s own.
Pleasure stole his breath as surely as a fist to the stomach. Sucking the air
through his teeth, he reached a hand to Nicky’s shoulder, hips tipping into the
caress.
Nicky leaned forward until his breath moved against Ian’s ear. “While I find
your concern utterly charming, what makes you believe you could take my arse