Rite of Summer: Treading the Boards, Book 1 (5 page)

Joshua turned, all bravado gone. He walked, five steps later broke into a run and did not look back to see if anyone followed.

Half an hour later, in bed once more with the door securely locked and barred behind him, he was further from sleep than he had ever been. The images kept running through his mind, unbidden and…

No. He could not lie to himself. His fantasies had been made flesh, and the memories were welcome. Ashbrook and Cade were beautiful, both alone and together, light and dark, gold and onyx, sun and shadow. They moved with sure knowledge of each other’s bodies and with the confidence of old lovers, and Joshua ached in envy and thwarted desire.

His body stirred as he lay there. Alone, with no one to condemn him for his lusts, Joshua took himself in hand to answer. Ashbrook’s fingers were slender, strong and precise in their movements. He would know exactly where and how to touch, when to tighten his grip and when to tease with short, quick strokes.

Blood and heat rushed to Joshua’s prick as he closed his fingers around his shaft. It hardened in his hand, the smooth skin heating, stretching, throbbing as his prick expanded into the circle of his palm. He stroked himself with a few slow and languid tugs at first. His foreskin slid easily over the crown, sending little shivers of pleasure and heat rippling through him. It caught for a moment on the small gold ring that pierced his cockhead, the burn immediate. He flicked the ring with his nail, a jolt of pressure and pleasure reverberating down to the root of his prick and into his spine.

His last lover’s hands had been clever, his mouth hot and wet, capable of so many distracting things. That mouth had slid down over Joshua’s prick, so slick and slow. He had tongued at the base of it, worked his way back up to circle the head with such deliberate and drawn-out caresses that Joshua had been a shaking, trembling mess by the time Charlie had allowed him to come.

Yes, think of Charlie.
It was safer that way.

The gold rings that had winked in Charlie’s nipples had been a revelation, souvenirs from a voyage to far-distant lands. Joshua had vaguely expected tattoos, maybe scars. A sailor’s life was fraught with danger, and Charlie had been an able seaman, not an officer able to shut himself away in a cabin with charts and books. And then, alone in an inn room that smelled of wood smoke and wine, Joshua had peeled the shirt from Charlie’s body, with trembling and eager hands, and been unmade.

When Joshua had taken those rings between his lips, toyed with them in his fingers, Charlie had spent himself untouched—an amazing sight. Joshua had suckled at the metal, fascinated, rolled the ring between teeth and lips, pulled back at it and laved the sting with his tongue. Charlie had convulsed, cried out for God and for mercy before his prick jerked and he splashed wet, white and hot between their bodies.

Joshua had not known such a thing was possible until he saw it for himself. And then he
wanted
.

“Where else can it be done?”
He had asked, lying in Charlie’s arms, his body replete. He’d smoothed his thumb over the red marks of his teeth left on Charlie’s shoulder and arm, tugged gently on the leftmost ring and watched his nipple harden to a pebble. Then,
“That. I want that.”
It was the closest thing to impetuous madness he had ever allowed himself, his pulse beating loudly in his ears, the drumbeat of the ocean.

Dashing, fair-haired Charlie had done his best to talk Joshua out of his mad plan. He capitulated—finally, after weeks of henpecking—procured the necessary items with a warning and a fierce scowl.

That delicious night, alone in the bed piled high with pillows, Joshua gripped the headboard with both hands, his nervousness taking over. Charlie opened the brandy and drank, but didn’t swallow; he kissed Joshua with it, fed him the liqueur from mouth to mouth until Joshua’s limbs were loose and his body languid.

“You can still back out, you know.”

“No—I want this.”

He had come close to refusing when Charlie turned the needle in the candle flame, the metal glowing red-hot in the fire. Still, he steeled himself, gripped the headboard more tightly and imagined himself elsewhere. The pain had been brutal yet brief, the euphoria that drowned it moments later far more intense than any discomfort.

Joshua had had cause to regret over the course of the next few weeks, naturally, until the first time his cock hardened without stabs of pain. He had taken himself in hand that first time, so tentatively, so carefully, as though it were the
very
first time and he still imagined he might break. Until his thumbnail scraped across the ring and it shifted against the hard and glistening head of his prick, and he
understood
. He had released harder and more violently than ever before in his life, into his own hand, with Charlie watching and applauding his display.

It was like that even now, that brilliant rush of pleasure-ache and fullness, the wound long since healed and Charlie’s bones, crew and ship all resting at the bottom of the indifferent sea.

Two years since the storm took his ship down. Two years since Joshua had removed himself back to Horlock’s estate, there to paint portraits of large ladies with small dogs and retire at night to a cold and empty bed.

Now, though, he could close his eyes and see Ashbrook’s face, his lips, his hands. Two years was longer than any widow ever mourned a husband—he could have this without guilt. He could allow himself, just once, to indulge.

Joshua stroked himself again, ran his hand along the silk-soft skin of his prick, aching with the doubled need of unspent lust. A gentle tug at the ring sent coils of heat down through his groin, building and pooling at the base of his spine.

Yes, this he could have—the image of Ashbrook’s mouth, red, red lips that parted, plush and inviting, when he drew breath to speak. He would paint those lips with his fluids, rub his prick across them and press just the tip inside. Ashbrook’s tongue would curl around the ring, tug on it, suck at the place where the gold joined his body. His hands would clench around Joshua’s buttocks, urging him closer, pulling him in so that he could thrust deeper, slide heavily across Ashbrook’s waiting tongue.

His fingers would—

Joshua slipped two fingers into his mouth, his other hand still circling his cock. He sucked on them, laved them with his tongue, imagined for a moment that it was Ashbrook’s prick there, stretching his mouth open and leaving trails of salt-sweet across his lips and tongue.

His fingers wet, he let them slip from his mouth and trailed them down his body. They left streaks of damp on his skin, raising gooseflesh as he went.

He crooked his knee up, gripped tightly at the head of his cock and twisted his hand up to run his palm across the head. His other hand slipped between his legs, and he pressed the pad of one finger against his arse, traced circles of cold fire along the sensitive skin.

Fuck me.

It would have been easier with oil, but for one finger alone his body opened, slick with spit to ease the way.

Joshua shuddered and gasped aloud into the silent room, waited for a moment for the stretch and burn to fade into need. He rocked down into it, crooked his finger to find that ephemeral
something more
. It was not his own hand that fucked into him, opening him up and filling him, but those long and slender fingers that danced across a violin’s strings with such deceptive ease.

There—that made his prick jump against his stomach, a trail of precome leaving wet marks against the linen of his shirt. An impatient shove sent it up to expose the pale expanse of his stomach and the fine red-blond hair that trailed down to the nest of curls at the base. He fucked up into his own grip, rocked down onto his fingers and imagined Ashbrook’s fierce mouth. He could almost feel the nibbles at his hip, the way Ashbrook would suck Joshua’s balls into his mouth one at a time. He would take Joshua’s prick deep, so deep, into that perfect throat and swallow around him, his fingers twisting up firmly into Joshua’s body until he was nothing but a shaking mess of need.

Desire pooled deep inside him, and his balls drew up tight, tight against his body. Lightning flared behind his eyes, a white-sharp jolt that flashed out through his arms and legs, leaving his fingers tingling and his toes curled so tightly that they cramped. He bowed up off the bed, his emissions spurting wet and sticky across his stomach and his chest, coating his fingers with the evidence of his lust.

Later, his skin cool where he had washed and his clean shirt stiff against his skin, Joshua sank into bed for the third time that night. He should have been exhausted, his body sated, but his mind whirled at much the same pace as before.

He was hell bound. That much had been assured since his first hesitant, adolescent explorations in the hayloft, the lines of Thomas’s slim, brown body as new and exciting as discovering his own. How much more could covetousness possibly add to his tally of sins? At least there was one thing in his favor—it was nothing more than infatuation. And that, given time and distance, would inevitably fade.

After this torturous summer he would move on, forget Stephen Ashbrook, and they would all be the better for it.

Sleep circled, dubious, outside his reach. When he closed his eyes, all Joshua could see was a pair of green-flecked eyes and slim fingers playing a waltz upon another man’s skin.

Chapter Five

Guests were not expected for breakfast at any particular hour, thank goodness. Stephen rose late, the soft bed pulling him back down into hazy dreams every time he began to wake. He lay there for a while, even with his eyes open, feeling the warmth surrounding him, the way the pillow sank down beneath his head, the delicious ache in his body from the previous night.

He should get up, take some time to practice before eating. He needed some pretense at a respectable schedule if he was not to drift entirely into indolence and excess.

The lushly appointed conservatory looked different in the bright light of morning, the dark, sultry night replaced with clear sunshine and a gentle breeze. He amused himself by sitting in the armchair they had defiled the night before, to run his scales. It gave him a clear view of the open door as well, which triggered its own memories.

Beaufort.
How long had he been watching, and how much had he seen? Enough, obviously. If Stephen had noticed him earlier, could he have been convinced to join them? He and Evander coupling would make a gorgeous picture. (Because of course it had been Evander who drew his gaze. Evander would settle for nothing less.)

The fingertips on his left hand ached with the delicious soreness of use after two days of nothing, and the heady smell of rosin lingered in his nose. His stomach churned and growled, demanding attention. Breakfast first. The rest would have to wait.

The earl was already in the hall when Stephen came down the stairs. He was dressed for riding and pulling on a pair of leather gloves. “Good morning!” Coventry greeted him effusively. “I trust you found your accommodations to your liking?”

That, he could answer in absolute truth, given his silk and feathered nest. Imagine what it would be like to have that as one’s normal state of being! It was no wonder the rich preferred to stay at home and have guests come to them.

“I’ve never known better,” Stephen replied, and Coventry’s smile grew wider. “Your house does you great credit.”

“And my cook does me more so!” Coventry patted his girth with a self-deprecating laugh. “I’m riding out now—my physician is after me to improve my exercise, and the weather is fine. We shall have a little hunting to begin the day. Horlock and Cade are already at the stables. Feed yourself and join us.”

There was his first dilemma of the morning. Should he accept and spend the morning riding in the sunshine—which would also include listening to Coventry wax on to his friend about his properties and cottages, taking the occasional potshot at some poor defenseless grouse, and watching Evander at his most sycophantic in front of
two
earls—or demur and risk spending the morning with no one around but a gaggle of giggling girls and their mother hens?

There was always the conservatory.

“With your permission, sir, perhaps tomorrow?” Coventry’s ebullient smile began to fall toward a frown, and Stephen hastened to explain. “Two days on the road did not lend itself to practice time. I should put some hours of work in before I get any rustier.” Waggling his fingers in demonstration put off Coventry’s visible disappointment.

“Of course.” Coventry nodded his permission. “Very understandable. It will be a better group tomorrow as well, once Downe and his sons are here. We shall make a proper party of it and bag some beauties for the table.” He clapped Stephen jovially on the shoulder. “Enjoy your practice. I hope we shall have the honor of enjoying the fruits of it.”

“If my strumming and plucking amuse you, then it would be my pleasure,” Stephen replied in an equally jovial tone. He clasped his hands behind his back in an attempt at the casual ease that this sort of conversation demanded.

Coventry gave him a look that suggested he’d said something wrong, but he simply nodded again. “Something to be arranged then,” he said, a little cooler toward Stephen than before, and headed for the front doors. “Have a good morning, Mr. Ashbrook.”

Why couldn’t every conversation be as amiable as those with his friends back in the city? Every word spoken here had to be selected like fruit at market, turned over and measured in the hand to check for bruises and for poison.

Bread, jam and coffee procured, Stephen ate quickly before anyone else wandered in to trap him in a conversation. Without Evander to use as a distraction, he would inevitably misstep in some other hideously unfortunate way.

The sun was streaming in through the tall windows in the conservatory by the time he returned to it, and the dark wood of the beautiful pianoforte gleamed like burnished bronze. On a whim, Stephen opened the lid and ran his fingers along the keys. It sang to him, not as perfect a sound as Rosamund’s, but with its own sweet charm. He let his fingers glide across the keys of their own volition and struck up a sweet, simple dancing tune that seemed to send the curtains to pirouettes. Here he had no audience, no critical composer standing guard, only music, a faint summer’s breeze and the midmorning sun to warm him through. The tight knot between his shoulders eased and released, tension ebbing further from him with every passing moment.

But he was flirting with a mistress when his one true love lay untouched in her felt-lined bed.

A flip of the latch on the violin case and he lifted the lid, exposing Rosamund’s sleek brown lines to the light of day. Her maple body and spruce neck had been made in the Stradivarius style, her skin polished to a gleam by years of careful waxing. She settled against his collarbone as though made to fit. Or perhaps, over the years, he had grown to accommodate her shape.

Stephen needed no sheet music for this. The exercises poured forth as purest muscle memory—first scales, then fingering. Once his hands were loose again he set to playing Evander’s “Adagio”, slow and sweet, the first piece he had ever written for Stephen. The notes were lazy winter evenings entwined in each other’s arms, new wine and old cheese eaten from willing and supple fingertips. It was hope and promise and a thousand other things that, like those long, dark nights, had begun to fade in the light of summer and years of slow disillusion. The music, at least, was his to keep.

The sun was at its zenith in the sky by the time Stephen set down his bow. His fingertips tingled and blood rushed back to them as he placed Rosamund back in her case. The world outside called to him, the breeze at the window toying with his hair. A walk, then, and a chance to explore on his own. There was as of yet no sign of the hunting party’s return.

Stephen left the house by way of the kitchen doors, a hunk of fresh bread in one hand and a piece of good cheese in the other. Coventry had not been wrong about his cook. Gravel crunched beneath his feet once he was out of the kitchen yard. The light danced merrily through the leaves of the trees that shaded the path, casting dappled shadows over the ground. The breeze rustled through them, and birds sang somewhere, and it was all exceedingly quiet and dull.

Where to now? He could explore the garden or wander down the drive and take a walk toward the small village they had passed on the way in—

No. Lady Charlotte and her adherents were coming around the corner of the house and making their way in that very direction. Charlotte had a basket over her arm, covered with some fancy embroidered cloth, and Miss Talbot wound daisies between her fingers as she idly knotted them into a chain. Lady Amelia followed them closely, a couple of ladies’ maids making up the last of the party as chaperones. Miss Talbot stopped suddenly, reaching behind to jerk the train of her dress, somehow caught in Lady Amelia’s shoe.

The squabbling began and Stephen pressed himself back into the shadows. Whatever they had planned for the day, he wanted little part of it. Conversation there would be the same as at dinner, no doubt, all discussions of people he only knew as faces in an audience or names on a newssheet. He turned and faded away, heading off along the path toward the garden that had been his first temptation.

The jeering voices of boys were more of a city sound than anything he’d expected on an estate, and Stephen turned off the path and moved through the trees to follow the noise.

A girl stepped lightly across the lawn, her dress simple and plain, her dark hair bound up around her head and a large basket tucked beneath one arm. She steadied the basket with the other, resolutely not looking behind her at the stableboys, baby-faced but tall enough to be almost considered men, who catcalled to get her attention. She stooped—perhaps she had fallen?

And Stephen broke into a run. “Oy!” Stephen shouted, and the boys stopped.

The girl straightened, her basket on the ground, and whipped her arm. Something small and round struck a stableboy and he turned to run, his friend hot on his heels. The girl threw again and again, pelting them with a hail that struck heads and backs and fleeing legs. By the time Stephen got close, he could see the hard, green crabapples in her hand.

“And stay gone!” she shouted after them. “And you, sir…” she laughed, her accent French, with faint shades of something else in the undertones, “…are you a knight in shining armor, come to save me? As you can see, I do not require it.”

“No ‘sir’—good Lord!” Stephen replied, his hands coming up to forestall her. “I’m only a common man, trying, on occasion, to be a good one. Mr. Ashbrook, at your service.” He bowed.

The name seemed to spark some kind of recognition in her. “Sophie Armand, at yours.” She curtsied prettily, despite the last few apples still in her hand. She dropped them and scrubbed her hands off on a kerchief tucked into the waistband of her apron. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get this back up to the house. My mistress will be expecting me.”

She bent to pick up her basket but he got there first, hoisting it with ease. It was heavier than it looked, filled with damp muslin, and he upwardly revised his first impressions of Sophie’s strength.

“Permit me,” he said easily when she began to protest. “It’s a bit of a walk yet.”

Sophie’s fists went to her hips. “I could never! You’re a guest of his lordship’s…”

“Ah, so you do know me!”

“…and it would not be proper.” Something in the imperious tilt of her head reminded him of Margaret, and he forced the half-tempered pang of regret back into the recesses of his mind. His sister was at least a hundred miles from here, his memories of her years old, and this girl was a stranger.

“Then stop me,” he teased, and she pouted.

She tried to grab for the handles and he began walking, his long stride putting her at a disadvantage. “You were right and I was wrong,” Sophie said after he slowed and she caught up. Her brow furrowed at him dangerously. “You are no gentleman.”

“But I am your chivalric knight…” he slowed to match her pace, “…and I will see you safely delivered. Are you here with one of the other guests or for Lady Charlotte?”

“I serve the Countess of Horlock,” Sophie replied.

The name rang a bell—the sharpened old axe at dinner who had a strong preference for candlelight. More importantly, though why it should be so he couldn’t quite say, Lady Horlock was Mr. Beaufort’s patroness, which meant that
this
girl could know
him
and the secrets in his sea-storm eyes. For no reason in particular, Stephen’s pulse beat a little faster.

“I’m her abigail and no one of importance.”

“Do they teach bowling at French girls’ schools?” he asked, and her head jerked up. Why should that question make her wary? “You’d make quite the addition to a cricket team.”

“If more girls were taught to throw, m’sieur, some might be permitted to stay girls longer, instead of being made women before their time.”

“Point well taken.” He hitched the basket up a little higher on his hip, giving himself a moment to think. “Mr. Beaufort makes an interesting addition to the summer’s party,” he said after a moment, as casually as he could. There was no reason
not
to ask after one of the other guests, and it was safer for him to enquire about a fellow gentleman than, say, the countess. “We do not see him at all in London. At least, not that I can recall. Does he not like town?”

“He prefers the country these days,” Armand replied, and the look she gave him was sharp and penetrating. He resisted the urge to squirm under it, returning it instead with wide and unblinking eyes.

“Does he have a wife or sweetheart secreted about in some small cottage there?” he asked. If he kept his tone as light and casual as possible, then she would not suspect the faster thrum of his pulse, nor the lump in his chest that formed at the idea. “I find it hard to imagine willingly trading in the energy of the city for a pastoral life, not for a man who could easily sell enough canvases to make a good living on his own.”

“There’s no Mrs. Beaufort, not as far as I know.” She raised an eyebrow. “I shall let him know about your interest.”

While there was nothing to it at all, Stephen’s blood ran briefly cold.

“Though, if you have a sister in mind for him, I don’t think she’ll find him to her satisfaction.”

There were a dozen things she might have meant by that, but that hardly mattered; if she exposed his clumsy curiosity to Beaufort, then at least
he
would be able to put two and two together. Unless Beaufort had told
her
, in which case…

In which case Stephen was doomed before he had begun, so he may as well carry on as he had been. Trying to unravel probabilities and plots made his head ache.

“No, no, sister,” he replied with all haste. “And there’s no need to pass on any message. I was only making conversation.”

“Hmm,” she said, and did not explain herself.

They had reached the kitchen yard and Stephen set the basket down upon the low stone stoop with cheer more forced than natural. “And here you are delivered, fair maiden. Will this suit?”

“It will. Though why I should thank you for something I never asked for is beyond me.”

His expression must have betrayed his startled amusement. Perhaps she thought he was flirting and was responding in kind? That thought sank like a stone, and he winced.

“I am doubly chastened, then,” he replied, more subdued than before. She shook her head at him with a moue of irritation, lifted her basket and headed inside with a deliberate and disdainful flick of her skirt.