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“So vividly that you lie in bed at night and stroke your cock to the memory of it?” Derek murmured, leaning in so that his lips brushed Jonas’ ear. “Because that’s what I do. I go to my bed alone and think of you and I in Paris, hiding in those brothel rooms and paying the whores to leave us be.”
“Derek, stop this.”
“That first night we must have lain in bed and kissed for hours,” he went on, ignoring Jonas’ plea.
Jonas’ body had begun to react, his cock growing hard against his placket. Derek lightly traced his cockhead through the fabric. “You were so sweet and tender. You kissed me as if you were starving and I was the banquet that had been laid out before you. I have never been kissed so well in my life.”
“Stop, goddamn you,” Jonas hissed, wrenching away from Derek as if he had been burned.
His face had taken on an adorable flush across his nose and cheeks, and even the tips of his ears were ruddy. Derek was seized with the desire to kiss the tip of his nose just to push him closer toward the edge. But he did not wish to press his luck so soon in the evening.
“Well?” he prodded with a raised eyebrow. “Do we have a deal or not?”
Jonas gritted his teeth and muttered a foul curse. Derek’s cock throbbed in response, desire jolting through him at such speech falling from those pure lips. Jonas was a gentleman in every sense of the word and hardly ever used foul language. When he did, Derek found it imminently arousing.
“I will have your word that no one will know of this,” Jonas replied. “And upon what little honor you possess, you will swear to leave my sister alone if I win.”
Derek nodded in agreement. “One game is all it will take. Beat me, and she will be free of me. But if you lose—”
“I do not intend to lose.”
Derek laughed and hooked his finger in the waistband of Jonas’ breeches. From beneath the folds of his shirt, crisp hairs tickled Derek’s knuckles.
“If you lose … you are mine, dear Jo."
ChapterThree
Jonas watched Derek pull a deck of cards from the breast pocket of his coat. They were in the bedchamber of the whore again—the angelic-looking being who was, apparently, quite a favorite at Perdition. Upon Jonas’ arrival the slender, blond man had been surrounded by gentlemen competing for his company. Being inside this room, where such a man plied his trade made Jonas’ stomach tremble. His belly clenched with a fierce and ugly sensation when Derek set the cards on a small table near the fire before striding to an Oriental-style cabinet in the corner. Derek appeared far too comfortable in this room.
“Care for a drink?” Derek asked, retrieving a decanter and two glasses. “Giles keeps a rather fine claret on hand.”
“Giles, is it? You are certainly familiar with the personage and bedchamber of a flagrant whore.”
The glasses hit the table with a clink, and Derek grinned while pouring the spirits. “Is that jealousy I hear?”
“Of course not,” Jonas scoffed. “I suppose it should not surprise me that you would consort with prostitutes. Rumors of your exploits reached me all the way in Devon.”
Shrugging out of his coat, Derek draped it over the back of a chair. He then loosened the buttons at his wrist and began rolling his shirtsleeves to his elbows.
“Surely you have not forgotten how lonely it is to live with the inexcusable crime of loving your own sex. It is such a solitary existence when one has no one else with which to find companionship or succor.”
Jonas sighed. “It isn’t as wonderful as you make it out to be. I love my family, but I can hardly stand to be in the same room with any of them when I am constantly questioned over when I will take a wife.”
“Ah. So, you have not changed your mind on that front?” Derek gestured for Jonas to sit across from him and began shuffling the cards. “The game is vingt-et-un. You will deal.”
Jonas shed his coat and sat. “I see no reason to bring a woman into an inevitably loveless union.”
“Not even for the sake of someone to spend your lonely hours with?” Derek asked, stacking the cards neatly in the center of the table. “Not even for the prospect of a child or two to carry on your name?”
Jonas scowled into his claret before taking it up and gulping it down all at once. His hand shook as he laid the empty glass down. His nerves were frayed enough as he imagined what might happen if he lost this game, and now Derek wanted to prod into the conundrum he had wrestled with for years.
“Not even for those reasons,” he muttered. “And while we are on the subject, I cannot fathom why you would wish to subject my sister to such a union.”
Derek fiddled with the sapphire ring adorning his little finger. “I adore Julia and you know it.”
“Not in the way you should to be a good husband to her.”
Jonas went rigid when Derek’s cognac eyes lifted to meet his. The firelight glowed against the irises, infusing them with tones of amber and gold. His smile was mournful, and his eyes flashed with such heat that Jonas grew warm beneath his collar. That gaze arrested him, holding him as an unwilling captive to his baser desires and forbidden needs.
