Page 24 of The Wrong Rake
He spent hard, come spattering his belly, half-choked on Harry’s cock, everything going sparkling white.
Harry slowly withdrew from his mouth and let him get a full breath, but his vision took rather longer to recover.
He’d learned, from his experiences so far, that Harry kept his word.
With a smile, Simon closed his eyes and lay back, waiting.
He didn’t need to wait long. Slick fingers pressed between his legs, and Harry pressed soft kisses to his inner thighs, murmuring more filthy words, interspersed with the sweetest compliments: Simon’s beauty, and his wit, and his smile, and his eyes. The way he made Harry lose his mind.
By the time he turned Simon onto his stomach and pressed inside him, Harry had reduced him to a quivering mess, panting into the pillow and whimpering as Harry’s hand wrapped around his mouth again. He still ached from the night before, from being turned inside out for hours. And now Harry was doing it again, thrusting into him as if he had every right to use him how he pleased.
Oh, God, and he did, Simon would never refuse him…not when Harry had him inside out in his mind, too, and possibly even in his heart. He licked at Harry’s palm, moaning unintelligible words of pleasure and affection into his skin, and Harry picked up the pace, snapping his hips and driving Simon up the bed.
When he spent, he took Simon with him, the heat of his possession unbearably deep in Simon’s body.
Sweat-soaked and trembling, Simon lay beneath him, his reason fled. He’d need to return to his room. That felt impossibly distant.
Harry kissed his ear, unwrapped his hand from around Simon’s jaw, and stroked down to his throat.
“Next time you’re on top of me,” Simon whispered, praying that there would be a next time, and then gasped as Harry shuddered and thrust his half-hard cock even deeper, pulling on Simon’s tender hole.
“Christ,” Harry said roughly. “You’ll be the death of me. All of Boney’s armies tried, and you’ll be the one to succeed.”
“Mmm,” was all Simon could manage.
Harry laughed, leaning down to kiss the nape of Simon’s neck. “Sleep a little,” he said. “I can wake you in time to slip back to your own bedchamber before it’s too late.”
Simon wasn’t usually the sort to fall asleep and leave all the cleaning up to his lover, but this time, he felt, he’d earned the right to make an exception. His eyes slid shut as Harry kissed him again.
Chapter Ten
Harry had learned, over the course of many campaigns, that strategy was best left to the officer with the most thorough knowledge of the terrain—and while Harry would have been entirely in his element in a Spanish village surrounded by an ambush, society matrons and their vagaries couldn’t have been a more impenetrable mystery.
In that spirit, he set himself to do nothing the following morning but follow Simon’s orders to the letter. And that had brought him here, to the front steps of Mrs. Carlyle’s house on one of the most fashionable streets in Bath, standing with a twitching, sweating Adam Beaumont and a perfectly cool, self-possessed Simon.
“Give me your cards,” Simon had told Adam when they met for breakfast, in a parlor Simon had managed to acquire this time. “Both sets,” he added with asperity as Adam reached into his pocket. “Your own, and the ones you had made with my bloody name on them, you arse.”
Adam spluttered and demurred, but when Harry set down his coffee cup and made to stand, scowling in a way that’d had men far more hardened than Adam shaking in their boots, he mumbled something sulkily under his breath and handed a small stack of cards to his brother.
Simon had taken all of the ones with his own name on them and one of Adam’s own, and handed back the rest of the latter. After questioning Adam closely about Bath’s most notorious gossips and finishing the coffee, Simon nodded, stood, and declared them ready.
“I went down very early this morning and spoke to the innkeeper’s wife, and her account agrees with yours, Adam,” Simon said. “Mrs. Carlyle is our lady. And she’ll surely be too curious to turn away Major Standish, the notorious Simon Beaumont, and an unknown Adam Beaumont all on her doorstep together.”
And so it proved. Simon knocked, a maid took their cards, and only a few moments later they were ushered upstairs and into Mrs. Carlyle’s drawing room.
They found the lady, a blowsy woman of late middle age in an obviously expensive dishabille, taking tea on a sofa near the fire. Another lady of a similar age sat near the window, needlework in her lap, probably Mrs. Carlyle’s companion. They both appeared to be settled in for a morning of quiet domesticity. Harry winced. Visits could be made rather earlier in Bath than in London, but if Mrs. Carlyle took umbrage at the hour of their visit, Simon’s plan to talk her round could be scotched in a moment.
Harry rather wished he could turn tail and run, but like any good soldier, he had to face the first rank of the approaching enemy like a man, obedient to his officer’s commands. Simon had told him on the walk over that he must bear the brunt of the first introductions. “Trust me,” Simon had said. “I know what I’m about. Introduce yourself, do the pretty, and then introduce me, but not Adam.”
So Harry stepped forward with more determination than grace, and bowed as Mrs. Carlyle rose to receive them. “My humble apologies for calling on you at this hour, madam,” he said, “particularly as I have not yet had the honor of an introduction. Major Henry Standish.”
“I believe I know your mother and sister a little, Major Standish,” she said, her voice light and pleasant, but her eyes gleaming with eager curiosity. “I presume Mary Standish is your mother?”
“Yes, indeed, ma’am. And my mother has mentioned you more than once as one of her most valued acquaintance.” Harry had never heard of Mrs. Carlyle before that morning. “That has allowed me to presume upon you, though you mustn’t blame her. I’m here on a delicate matter that didn’t admit of delay, and I didn’t stop to request her to accompany me.”
He probably ought to have, now that he thought of it. But the explanations to his family…no.
“Of course,” Mrs. Carlyle said, her gaze skittering to Adam and Simon and back again. “Although I admit I had not thought to see Mr. Beaumont again, particularly inyourcompany, Major Standish.”
