Epilogue
Eight months later
“Oh, God,” Kit gasped, and flailed, catching hold of Andrew’s hair in one hand and the coverlet in the other. “Your mouth, Andrew. I missed your tongue!”
“Tell me again,” Andrew murmured against his arse. He lifted his head for a moment, eyes glittering, the clear, pale blue of a bright winter sky. “Tell me you love me, Kit.”
Kit couldn’t help his grin. “I love your tongue. Oh—bloody hell—” And anything else he might have said was lost in a wail of agonized pleasure as Andrew did—something—with his fingers and that wicked tongue together that had bright spots swimming in his vision and his body arching up, helplessly under Andrew’s command.
He told Andrew he loved him, more than once, and then screamed it to the ceiling when he replaced his fingers with his cock and filled Kit again and again, until he thought he might break in two.
At last they were both so spent they could do nothing but lie together, Kit on his side after rising to wash, Andrew wrapped around him, the stump of his wrist resting against Kit’s belly. His arm twitched, just a tiny bit, and Kit laid his hand on his forearm and petted him until the arm went still. Andrew had told him that he could feel his fingers sometimes, and that the urge to move them became an irresistible, torturous compulsion. Kit couldn’t imagine it, but he did his best to soothe him in moments when he could tell those strange feelings had Andrew in their grip.
Andrew mentioned it very little, but he had smiled, his eyes bright, when Kit told him that he could please him more with one hand than any other man had ever achieved with two.
Kit saved his moments of shaking, terrible fear of what Andrew had endured—and what he continued to risk by going to sea—for when his lover was elsewhere. He couldn’t add to his feelings of unhappiness over what he had lost, and Andrew’s pride in his career was not something Kit would risk spoiling.
He had stayed home for two months, but then he had resumed active service, going on several voyages since. He’d only been home for a day. They’d spent it in bed. The accounts, and everything else in the world, could wait.
Still. Mundane concerns couldn’t be put off forever, particularly as Kit’s stomach had begun to growl.
He stirred, only for Andrew to hold him more tightly, nuzzling into his neck with a contented sigh. Kit wriggled against him. Andrew’s cock went from soft to rather interested.
No, no and no. He needed his dinner, or he wouldn’t survive the night Andrew probably had planned for him.
“We must dress,” he said. “Enderby’s very serious about putting dinner on the table at seven o’clock sharpish. If we don’t appear, he may grow angry and take a lesson from Mattson, and pour our soup into your hat.”
“Why notyourhat?” Andrew mumbled, clearly half asleep. “Hang Enderby, and hang bloody Mattson, I don’t care about him. He and that bastard Dowling can have all the joy of one another. I only wish you’d arranged for both of them to be actually hanged. I’d have applauded you for it.”
Kit laughed and shook his head. Good God, Andrew and Enderby really were two of a kind. Kit had gone his whole life without anyone in his vicinity even contemplating the murder of a butler, and yet here he was, under the same roof with two of them.
Andrew had finally asked about the changes to the household some hours after his return home from Spain that day, and Kit’s explanation had left him shouting with laughter and kissing Kit breathless.
“Well, you ought to applaud me just as much for organizing the household sufficiently that we are able to dine at all,” Kit said.
Andrew propped himself up on his elbow and peered down at Kit’s face.
“I always applaud you. Kit, love, you truly are…” He trailed off, his lips twitching with a smile, gazing at Kit with something that could only be described as pure, soppy adoration. “I love you,” he finished, as if any other words would be inadequate.
Kit thought of teasing him, as he did sometimes.Making me earn it all over again, Andrew called it, though he said it with a laugh and usually when he had Kit in some extremely compromising position: on his back on the desk in the study with his legs over Andrew’s shoulders, once, and on another occasion quite bent over the table in the dining parlor, attempting not to knock over the wine and laughing as he struggled.
But Andrew had only just come home. His sensibilities were always more delicate when he had been away for a time, since he had not yet lost all his fear that Kit would be gone when he returned—not that Kit would have revealed that he knew Andrew felt that way for the world. Andrew had his pride, like any man. More than most men, in fact.
So he simply said, “I love you, too, more than anything,” and watched Andrew’s face light up like the sunrise. He couldn’t resist adding, “I’ll love you rather less if you don’t let me at my dinner, though. Really, Andrew. I pay you the magnificent sum of one hundred and twenty pounds per annum to feed me properly.”
A wicked grin spread across Andrew’s face, and Kit quailed, though he tried not to show it. Oh, dear. When his lover looked like that…
“Perhaps I’m feeling frugal today,” he said, his voice low and husky, his cock nudging up against Kit’s arse again. “If I don’t feed you, I can save a few shillings. Best to keep you distracted with other things.”
“I’m hungry.” Andrew flipped Kit to his back and began to kiss his way down, circling a nipple with his tongue. “Truly. Oh, but you don’t have to—oh all right,” he sighed, and then moaned, and then—was quite thoroughly distracted.
They would have their dinner.
Later.
“I love you,” Andrew whispered against his hip, and Kit smiled helplessly, running his hands through Andrew’s hair.
Much later. And if their hats suffered for it, so be it.
The End
