Page 65 of To Tempt a Troubled Earl
“I have…struggled to…” Kit began, then stopped.
“I have too,” Lando supplied, and briefly, their eyes met before Kit’s gaze dropped to the floor. An aching silence stretched between them. Lando pressed a hand to his tense hollowed-out belly.
“My uncle Charles and you always lived separate lives, did you not?”
Lando started at the sudden swerve. “Yes. By necessity. Charles had his soldiering and his life in Kent. And my sons were younger. At home more often. He visited when he could.”
“And you both paid the price. Throughout your time together. Not merely at the end.”
“Yes.” A sickening pain pulled at Lando’s chest with the memories of dozens of snatched afternoons, secret hurried rendezvous, handwritten notes burned once read. Memories of a love half-lived that he’d stored away since meeting Kit now resurfaced.
“I do not want that for you again, Lando. You are undeserving of it.”
As he clutched the brandy glass between his trembling hands, bracing for the agony ahead, a single tear trickled down Lando’s cheek. Helpless to stop it, he closed his eyes, letting others join. Perhaps things wouldn’t be so bad after all. He’d survived once; he’d survive again. Perhaps the memories of two half-lived loves knitted together made a whole. Fighting the swelling sickness in his heart, Lando wearily rested back against the armchair, heavy thoughts drumming in his head, a familiar melancholia already knocking on the door.
The first he knew that Kit had crossed the room to kneel on the rug before him was when the dry, warm heat of his palm pressed against Lando’s hand, teasing it away from the brandy glass.
“Lando, my love,” Kit murmured, his voice a honeyed balm. “That is not a future for you and me. We are both undeserving of it.”
Bringing Lando’s hand up to his mouth, he kissed the knuckles, keeping it there to caress, his breath hot against it. “I want us to live every day to the hilt. Together. I don’t want to waste a moment. I want to live freely with you or as freely as two men such as us are able. And…and if gifting me the Gartside estate is the only way that we can always be close to each other, then that’s what I shall allow you to do. And I shall accept your gift with pleasure.”
Knuckle kisses turned into mouth kisses. Sweet, tender caresses unburdened Lando of his jangling thoughts, turning them instead into pictures of sunny afternoons, the lazy, hazy sort of afternoons. Ones made especially for lovers chasing each other through long grass, for picnics, for sharing dishes of ripe strawberries, for helpless laughter, for seamlessly shifting into the next and the one after that.
Kit’s soft kisses bled into one another. Breathlessly, he claimed Lando’s mouth, sucking and licking, a little brutal and a little possessive, with his love running bold and strong through each and every one of them as if for the first time. And then his arms came around Lando, and for a long while, he just held him, wrapped up in his undying love. His kisses strayed to Lando’s neck, his jaw, and his hair. He licked up the tears from his cheeks, a few of his own mingled with them. He whispered his love, promised his everything, and more.
And then, despite having no music and the drawing room furniture an impediment to gallivanting, when there was a perfectly decent ballroom upstairs, Kit drew Lando up to his feet and performed a deep, ridiculous bow.
“I believe this waltz is ours, my lord,” he said.
Epilogue
NESTLED PEACEFULLY INthe foothills of the Kent Downs, there was nothing remarkable about the small village of Burham. Bands of intrepid pilgrims en route to Canterbury would have plodded through it without pause. The modest, stocky church of St Mary, standing on the edge of the village and built of local ragstone and flint, was of less interest still. Though, as Kit knowledgeably informed Lando, it boasted not one, but two ancient Norman fonts. In addition to an impressive octagonal stair turret.
He couldn’t see the sea when he stepped down from the landau, nor hear it. Nonetheless, Lando sensed its presence on the breeze, like a living thing, and he pondered whether it smelled the same wherever one was in the world. Charles would have known—as a military man he was much better travelled than Lando.
Yet another one of the many questions he had not been afforded the time to ask.
If one overlooked the rows of headstones silently presiding over their tufty, grassy mounds, then the graveyard in the lee of the southwest tower was anything but grave. The spring morning dawned warm and cheery, coaxing sweet birdsong from the oak branches high above their heads, and gave a fresh, verdant shine to mossy grass underfoot. A day for lovers, not death.
Though far from wealthy, Captain Charles Prosser had not been purse-pinched. Thus, his slate tombstone, sheltered under the sweeping boughs of an aged willow, was well-crafted, the florid lines of script and the two wreathes carved above and below etched as sharply as the day they were engraved.
In Loving Memory of Captain Charles Cedric Prosser 1782- 1818
Thou art gone but always remembered.
Oxeye daisies bloomed at the base, their golden centres scattered through the grass like a hundred tiny suns, a splash of joy in a place where none resided. With an ache in his throat, Lando plucked one, bringing it to his nose to inhale the sweet, subtle perfume.
“He was a good man, Lando,” Kit observed. He’d watched his lover from a distance at first, finding himself in the delicate position of wanting to pay his respects to a deceased beloved uncle, yet also tupping said uncle’s paramour. But now, he drew close.
“The best,” Lando agreed. “You have many of his finer qualities.”
“He would have approved of me finding love again,” Lando continued. “He hated being alone himself; he would not have wished it on me.” Stooping, he uprooted a weed from the carpet of grass and daisies at their feet. “I think he would have liked that it was with you.”
“Do you?”
“Very much.” Lando gave him a watery smile and ran his fingers lightly along the cold slate. “My love once rested with him under this chilled grey stone. There was a time—quite a long time, actually—when I wanted to lie down under it, too, next to my soldier, my hero, my very good friend.”
He gave the stone a gentle pat before stepping back. “But not now.”
