Page 11 of Measure of a Man

Douglas’s head swivelled to follow his. “Are you expecting someone?”

“Not particularly. I’d rather hoped it was Lord Exeter. But your company and news are keeping me well enough.”

Douglas flushed, changing his grip on his papers. There was an edginess to him as he leaned forward that had not been there seconds before.

Ah, here it comes. And so he should look uncomfortable if he was about to tap Virtue for a donation.

“Well after I went to the papers there was some matter to attend to at my new club, err—Watier’s, and as you live so close, I thought I might call in and show you these.” He thrust his clutch of pamphlets forward. “My sister suggested it, as it is clear that we share some common interests. Really it’s because she finds me terribly boring when I go on.”

Here we go. Virtue cringed but took one of the proffered leaflets with a benign smile. Although, what a dashing young moralist was doing joining Watier’s he did not know. The place was an absolute pit of vice with young men losing their fortunes due to the club’s fondness for deep play. Unless he was only there to entice the players into morality with his comeliness and talk of sport.

Virtue flipped the pamphlet over revealing a lithograph of a shirtless brute of a man, hackles and fists raised. His muscles bulged like carriage wheels, his stomach looked like a tray of hot cross buns, and his hands might as well have been hammers. Beneath his legs on the floor was another shirtless man, but this one had been defeated. Neither chap looked like a moralist reformer, but⁠—

“Prize fighters.” Douglas sighed with a wistfulness. “There’s going to be another fight in Suffolk. But I’m sure you already know that. I only know as a man was standing on the corner of Bolton Street handing them out. Then he told me about a nearby bookshop where they had recently printed some pamphlets on physique building. I may have picked up rather a lot, now that I see them shared between us. But the thing is, you said that The Pillion needed to eat a lot of white meat to be that size, but look here, in this new pamphlet, it says he eats no meat or dairy, and that he subsists solely on pulses, vegetables, and fruit. No meat! Can you believe that?” Douglas leaned over him to unfold the page, revealing what Virtue assumed were three anatomically correct drawings of the man. The artist had added a rather snug fig leaf for modesty. He needn’t have bothered.

“Goodness. He’s a big fellow.” Had he said that too admiringly? Virtue moved on to safer ground. “Who’s he going against? Barnes? As useless as a porcelain door knocker.”

“Isn’t he just? Moves like he’s sea bathing. Not at all like The Pillion. Do you know, I think The Pillion might be my favourite. As a boy, I was wild for Mendoza, but gosh, I think The Pillion might be greater. The way he dances around, so light on his feet, but is never afraid to engage. Built like a townhouse.”

Virtue could see why. Some of these drawings were close to obscene, he was sure if they turned a few more pages the fig leaf would disappear. It was all rather more evocative than classical sculpture and the odd male nude at the Royal Academy. He’d never seen illustrations quite like it and was a little bemused that Douglas didn’t seem to realise exactly what he had in his possession. Surely the man could see that the

drawings were…well, stirring.

“You can borrow them if you like? Although, I don’t think you need much advice on how to maintain a figure.”

A sensible man would turn the offer down, but Virtue looked with some longing at the muscular figures again. “That may be, but I’m sure I’ll find something of interest in them. Thank you, Douglas. I’ll return them to you, say the Wednesday next? If you’re at home that is.”

“My sisters won’t be in,” Douglas replied gloomily. Virtue could see he’d grown accustomed to every gentleman he met trying to wangle an invitation for Miss Douglas’s cool sixty thousand.

“Well, I doubt they’d be interested in prize fighter diets. I can call for you, can’t I?”

“Oh!” The youth smiled blithely. “Yes, all right then, I suppose you can. In fact, please do. I shall eagerly await any of your thoughts on my hero.”

They both turned to look at the drawings one more time. “I reckon he could lift a man right up in the air.”

“I wish he’d ruddy lift me,” Douglas said excitedly, then coloured in a way that made it dawn on Virtue that Exeter possibly hadn’t been too far off the mark when he’d said Virtue had reeled in an admirer in Hyde Park. But while he might hold a small spark of admiration for Virtue, that was nothing to the bushel that blazed for The Pillion.

Alone at last, Virtue made his way to his bedroom. He didn’t feel particularly up to studying the images in his front room; the windows faced right out onto the street and if he closed the shutters in the day, people would think he’d turned into Dirty Dick.

He dropped the pamphlets on the trunk at the end of his bed. Did every attractive man have that effect on him, or just Exeter? Douglas was more pretty than handsome and James well…perhaps if Exeter didn’t exist and he didn’t employ the man, he might look in that direction. But James was a poor facsimile of what he wanted, as though the monk copying from the illuminated manuscript of Exeter’s beauty had smudged it with his sleeve.

The crude prints meant to show the power and strength of these modern gladiators were arousing. He’d never been blind to the notion that a man could want another man or what they might do to one another. Presumably every college boy in the land, had sniggered over Catullus at some point or another. Neither had he been blind to the illegality of the act. The risk of making love to another man was steep, but he’d always known, if he were honest, that he was prepared to risk it for Exeter.

They’d been close from their very first meeting, two peas in a pod, according to all who knew them. They’d built their lives and schedules around one another. Moving like magnets that clinked together at the poles until Exeter would whisper in his ear and Virtue would look into his friend’s blue eyes…and…he was calf mooning over him.

Virtue bit his lip, his hand moving to squeeze his prick through his trousers.

Had The Pillion stirred him in the flesh that day in Suffolk? His long dark hair flying across his face. His body bulky but quick. What caught him the most was the moments between punches when fighters grappled. Flesh caught by flesh; arms wrapped around one another in a devouring embrace. Sweat and dirt mixing. Both wearing the stench of the other man. And all of that was rather…intriguing.

While the goliath proportions of The Pillion’s body were admirable, it was Exeter who slipped into Virtue’s mind. Exeter didn’t box, but he was no slope-shouldered lord atrophying behind his bureau. His body wore muscles earned through gentlemanly and outdoor pursuits, and that had built him an oak-like figure.

The man was damned handsome and, as the younger Miss Cecelia Douglas had said, looked like a sun god. While she perhaps thought only of his golden hair and the pleasing symmetry of his face, Virtue’s own thoughts were earthier.

Their rides in Hyde Park, Virtue letting Exeter ride in front so he could watch his arse rise and fall in the saddle, his thighs in form fitting soft buckskin. Virtue wanted to press himself against him, to feel where he was hard and where he was yielding.

Memories of their evenings alone taunted him, when after dinner, Exeter removed his cravat and undid his shirt, how his throat moved when he swallowed, and the sculpted veins along his forearms when he rolled up his sleeves to play cards.

A powerful and mortifying thought took him, of what would have happened if he’d rubbed Exeter’s spend on himself; coated his cock with another man’s seed. If they’d frigged their cocks against each other in a slow grind. Exeter’s hands on his arse, holding him close and perhaps reaching lower, rubbing his taint or going further and⁠—