Chapter One
“Excuse me, Captain?”
Thomas Malone tensed at the words. Judging by the speaker’s tone, he had a fair idea where this conversation was leading, and it was nowhere good. He turned to face the young guard who was hovering at his elbow. “What is it, Sam?”
The young man fidgeted. “Only, you said watch the duke and let you know if he does anything that might be a problem, and I turned away for a minute and now he’s, um. Well, he’s disappeared, is the thing.” Sam ducked his head to avoid Thomas’s gaze. “So, I thought that I’d better tell you?” The sentence ended like a question and Thomas had a pang of sympathy for Sam, who’d only been working at the castle for a month.
He suppressed a sigh and did his best to school his expression. There was no point in taking his frustration out on the messenger. This was his own fault. He should have known that bloody Evan bloody Devere, Duke of Ravenport, would turn out to be more than a match for a junior guard. The man was slipperier than a wet cat.
“Thank you for telling me. Where was he when you last saw him?”
Sam’s brow creased. “Last I saw, he was sharing a jug of wine with that visiting earl, the tall one?”
Thomas glanced around the room and his suspicions were immediately confirmed. The Earl of Aramanthe wasalsomissing.
Bugger.
“Leave it with me, Sam,” he said before striding out of the ballroom, past the couples in all their finery who were watching the king and his husband performing a waltz, past the servants in their best livery carrying trays filled with wine. Thomas made a beeline for the staircase at the rear of the castle that led to the bedrooms and then headed upstairs. By the time he reached the top, the sound of the musicians playing was nothing but a faint echo.
As he approached the suite of visitors’ rooms where the Earl and Countess of Aramanthe were being housed, he heard other, less refined noises—ones that were far too familiar, at least where the duke was involved.
“Oh, yes! There! Harder!”
Thomas stopped at the end of the corridor leading to the bedrooms, closed his eyes, and let out the sigh he’d been holding back. Why did this happen almost every time the duke was left alone with a visiting dignitary?
When Thomas had taken over as Captain of the Royal Guard some months prior, the duke had been out of the country. He’d returned to Lilleforth several weeks ago, around the same time as the ambassadors for the current round of trade talks had begun to arrive, and had proceeded to flirt with a variety of visitors to the kingdom, charming more than one of them into bed.
Thomas was still finding his footing as Captain of the Royal Guard, and while it wasn’t strictly part of his job, he’d taken it upon himself to keep a weather eye on the duke in order to extract him from any potentially awkward situations.
His motivations were purely selfish. Thomas didn’t fancy being sent into battle just because a bloody duke had started a war by debauching the wrong person—no matter how annoyingly attractive said duke was. And if that meant Thomas had to stand here and listen to the sounds Evan always managed to draw from his partner, then escort him safely back to his own rooms before he started a diplomatic incident, it was a small price to pay.
A tiny, petty part of Thomas was tempted to go and knock on the door and spoil their fun, but on second thoughts he held back. He’d made the mistake exactly once of opening a bedroom door unannounced in his search for the errant duke, only to find a naked Evan balls deep in the representative for Weatherstone, who had been bent over the foot of the bed.
To make matters worse, Evan hadn’t even paused in his fucking. He’d just laughed and asked if Thomas would like to join them as he’d thrust forward in long, even strokes that made the muscles in his thighs flex in a most distracting manner. The man on the receiving end had been so lost to pleasure Thomas doubted he’d even noticed anyone else was present.
Thomas had stammered an apology and backed out of the room, but the sight of Evan’s long muscled legs and gorgeous arse had been burned into his memory ever since.
It truly was a magnificent arse, a perfect peach of a thing. If it had belonged to anyone else, Thomas would have been tempted by the offer.
It was just a shame its owner was such an irresponsible, addlepated fool.
Because that was what the man was, first and foremost—a fool. A handsome fool to be sure, but a fool nevertheless. The duke was charming, but his head was so empty that if there had been a single sensible thought in there, it would have rattled like a penny in a water jug.
His official position within the kingdom was something of a mystery—possibly because he wasn’t responsible enough to be put in charge of any one thing. He seemed to drift in and out of the country, travelling far and wide before reappearing in Lilleforth, usually leaving some tale of inappropriate behaviour in his wake.
There was a reason he was known as Evan the Embarrassment.
The duke sailed through life like a brightly dressed, slightly confused peacock, showing no interest in etiquette or diplomacy or politics. Instead, he spent his time bedding anyone who took his fancy and amusing himself drinking and carousing. He was easily distracted and prone to woolgathering. Thomas had lost count of the times in the past weeks that he’d found Evan coming out of the wrong bedroom in the guest quarters and had to guide him to his own rooms.
He sighed again and leaned back against the stone walls, getting comfortable. He had learned that Evan liked to take his time with his lovers, and judging by the glassy-eyed expressions of pleasure he’d glimpsed on the faces of those staggering out of his rooms, it was time well spent.
Thomas fought down a twinge of envy. It had been months since he’d bedded anyone. Between coming to grips with his promotion, training his new recruits, and now babysitting the duke, there simply hadn’t been time—which was a crying shame. There was nothing he would have liked better than to find a young man in town and take him back to his cottage for a night of fun and fuckery. Instead, here he was, holding up the castlewalls and doing his best not to become aroused by the moaning and panting that echoed through the corridor.
The noises drifting from the bedroom grew louder and more frequent, the words replaced with incoherent shouts of pleasure. Thomas shifted against the wall, crossing his legs as his cock twitched despite himself. It didn’t help that he could so easily picture the smooth, round globes of Evan’s arse. Not for the first time he wondered if maybe he should have taken Evan up on his invitation.
No.
Unlike Evan, Thomas wasnota fool. Evan might only be the cousin to the king and he might have commanded all the respect of a damp duck, but hewasstill royalty, second in line to the throne in fact, and Thomas was under the employ of the king. He had no intention of risking his nice new job and the comfortable cottage that came with it just for a quick fuck with a pretty idiot.
