“Shush.”
The great yew outside the window might have yielded more.As Rollo squeezed tighter, Fitzsimmons tensed.For a moment, it felt more like they were wrestling than embracing.
“What the dickens do you need comfort for?”Fitzsimmons groused.“You’ve only just had your ballocks emptied.Is that not enough?”
Rollo eyed him sternly.“I have been so unbelievably homesick these last few weeks.Rossingley is far, far away from this drawing room.My papa is a fair and reasonable dictator—our home is short on rules.One of them, however, is that when a person suffers distress, another seeks to comfort.”He squeezed Fitzsimmons’s middle again, for emphasis.“Like this.We both need this.You, because dwelling on the past saddens you, and me, for my homesickness, even though my family live forever in my heart and in my soul.”
“I’m astonished there is room for them.Your heart is clearly jammed full of trite, romantic flummery.”
Rollo grinned.The Fitzsimmons of whom he was growing awfully fond had returned.He turned his head to rest it against the soft white linen of the other’s shirt.Woodsy cologne filled his nostrils, and a solid thump resounded in his ear.Rollo wished they were in a bed instead of the middle of the drawing room.
Still barely tolerating him, Fitzsimmons remained stiff as a tree trunk.
Rollo braced his feet.“Drop your shoulders, Fitz, and place your arms around me as I am doing to you.”
“This is even more foolish than sword fighting,” Fitzsimmons muttered.Nonetheless, two strong arms curled around Rollo’s narrow back.For several minutes, they stood that way, one rigid as a pencil, the other trying his damnedest not to grind his fresh cockstand against a firm hip bone.
“Tell me,” Rollo asked.“When were you last embraced?”
Fitzsimmons’s low chuckle rumbled beneath Rollo’s ear.“Is that what this is?”
“It’s a facsimile of one, yes.More of a work in progress.Very much like your oils.We could call this oneA Study in Discomfiture.”
Another rolling chuckle reverberated beneath his ear.“I would cuff you for that.”The lord’s nose and mouth skimmed over the fine ends of Rollo’s hair.“If I didn’t think you’d enjoy it.”
Rollo’s urge to rub himself against the man’s nether regions intensified.“My papa declares a warm embrace a cure for most ills.”
“Sometimes, I feel as though your papa is in this room with us.Surely, he doesn’t believe this…this thing we’re attempting to be even more efficacious than oil of lavender?”
Rollo giggled.His lordship’s posture had softened, now less a pencil or a tree, more a malleable but sturdy willow branch.Progress indeed.“That very much depends upon where one is applying the lavender oil, my lord.”
Chapter Seventeen
THEY WERE STILLin a bloody hold.Or embracing, or whatever the damned pup called it.Five minutes later!
Just when Lyndon thought he’d have to suggest something devilishly uncomfortable along the lines ofshall we continue this on the settee, Rollo tipped his head up from its nest on Lyndon’s chest to regard him.
“The servants remember you as a lively child, but not a bad one,” he said.
“How generous of them.”
“You were always polite and charming.They say you suddenly changed.”
“For better or worse?”Lyndon already knew the answer.
“Mmm.Worse, I’m afraid.”
“I must sack them all immediately.”
Rollo—Lyndon enjoyed testing his Christian name in his mind far too much—chuckled, locking his arms around Lyndon even more tightly.“They are very fond of you.And loyal.They fret for your happiness.”
“Yes.I believe they do.”
Lyndon leaned into the warm, slight body wrapped around his own.A body so insubstantial, Lyndon felt a sudden urge to pick Rollo up, sling him over his shoulder, and carry him up to bed.
Instead, as if they were a pair of starstruck lovers, he continued the damned foolish clinch.His defences against Rollo were as robust as a paper lantern.He had prised almost all of Lyndon’s deepest regrets from him as easily as peeling a plum; a knife to the throat would have been less efficacious.And in Lyndon’s bloody drawing room of all places, his refuge.He should draw the embrace to a close before any more truths and sorrows—the worst of him, in fact—bled from his soul.
Yet, a minute later, they were still entwined, thus ensuring even more words and confessions would pour from him as though Rollo had turned on a bloody tap.
