Lucas knew he was drunk, he knew Tom was inexplicably in his rooms, but his thoughts had narrowed to a funnel and there was no space in his head for anything other than not falling over. The bedchamber slowly revolved around him and the bed seemed a very long way away and when he finally reached it, it took all his effort to sit upright on the edge and not collapse in a heap.
“Boots,” Tom said, and Lucas clutched the bedcovers and managed not to fall over when Tom yanked his boots off. The bed moved up and down like a dinghy and the bedchamber rotated slowly.
After the boots, Tom peeled him out of his coat and waistcoat and hauled the shirt over his head. “Smollet . . . does a . . . better job,” Lucas said.
Tom grunted a laugh. “I’m sure he does. Lie down.”
Lucas collapsed gratefully on the bed. The mattress rose and fell beneath him and the ceiling spun overhead. He squeezed his eyes shut. I am not going to throw up.
Lucas drifted away, and while he drifted his thoughts wandered inexorably back to Julia. Julia, with her sharp eyes and exuberant laugh and the way she’d had of knowing exactly what he was thinking.
Grief welled up in him, and with it was the ever-present ache of loss and the sense that part of him had been amputated, that he was missing an arm or a leg.
Dimly, he heard Smollet moving in the bedroom. Lucas closed his ears to the sounds. All he wanted was to be alone.
“All right, let’s get these breeches off,” someone said. The voice was not Smollet’s.
Lucas blearily opened his eyes. The person standing beside the bed wasn’t his manservant. This man had a bony, aristocratic face with patrician cheekbones and a high-bridged nose. You could tell just by looking at him that he was a nobleman’s son.
Lucas stared at him in fuzzy astonishment. “Tom?”
“That’s me,” Tom said cheerfully.
“But . . . you’re in Portugal.”
“Not right now, I’m not.”
“What you doin’ here?”
“We’ve already had this conversation, Lu.”
Lucas blinked slowly. “We have?”
“You are so drunk,” Tom said, and he laughed and shook his head. “Come on, Lu. Breeches.”
But Lucas’s fingers were like bunches of sausages, thick and clumsy. Undoing his buttons was beyond him.
“Let me,” Tom said, pushing his hands aside.
Lucas desisted in his efforts. He lay on the bed, his thoughts turning as slowly as the ceiling. Tom was back in England? Tom was unbuttoning his breeches?
Tom was unbuttoning his breeches.
Sudden heat flooded Lucas’s groin.
Tom stripped the breeches off, and then the stockings. Lucas groggily realized that he was naked but for his drawers, and that underneath his drawers, his cock was stiffening.
“Drawers, too,” Tom said.
Panic stirred in Lucas’s chest. No. But by the time he’d found his tongue, Tom had unbuttoned the drawers and tugged them down. “No,” Lucas said, but Tom had already tossed the drawers on the floor and turned away.
Lucas heaved himself up on one elbow and glanced down at himself. His cock was half erect, the crown peeping rosily from its sheath. His panic grew. Tom mustn’t see this. Tom must never guess.
He groped frantically for the bedclothes—a blanket, a sheet, anything—but the bed was tilting under him, and the covers seemed nailed to the mattress, and his cock was growing harder, lunging upright with all the energy of a young bullock.
“Where’s your nightshirt? I know I saw it somewhere. Ah, here it is.”
Panic strangled the breath in Lucas’s throat. He tugged frantically at the bedcovers. He mustn’t see.
Tom turned around, nightshirt in hand. His gaze flicked to Lucas’s groin, and then up to his face.
They stared at each other for an unbreathing moment, a moment that went on so long that Lucas thought he was going to asphyxiate—and then Tom gave a lopsided grin. “Like that, is it?”
“Drunk,” Lucas managed to say, horrified. “Happens when I’m drunk.” He covered his groin with a hand, shielding himself from Tom’s gaze.
“Does it?” Tom stepped closer to the bed, tall and black-haired and still grinning that lopsided grin, the grin that always took Lucas’s breath away.
“Nightshirt,” Lucas said urgently.
“I think we’d better deal with this first, don’t you?” Tom dropped the nightshirt on the floor. “Dashed uncomfortable for you otherwise.” He stepped even closer to the bed. His grin faded. His eyes, green and intent, were fixed on Lucas’s.
“Nightshirt,” Lucas croaked, in desperation.
“Not yet,” Tom said, and he pushed Lucas’s hand aside and wrapped his fingers around Lucas’s cock.
Lucas’s whole body jolted. His voice choked in his throat. “Aah . . .”
“Happy birthday, Lu,” Tom said, and he bent and took Lucas’s cock in his mouth and sucked strongly.
Pleasure surged through Lucas like a river bursting its banks. His bones turned to liquid. He collapsed back on the bed, dizzy with shock, befuddled with alcohol and astonishment. Tom was holding his cock? Tom was sucking him?
Lucas lay helpless, drunk on cognac, drunk on pleasure. The mattress rose and fell beneath him, and the ceiling spun above him, and his heart beat fast and hard in his chest, and each beat was a word, and that word was Tom.
Tom touching him. Tom sucking him.
The pleasure and the dizziness built. The mattress swayed like a boat tossed in a storm. The ceiling spun faster. Lucas squeezed his eyes shut against vertigo. His brain felt seasick—but the rest of him was rushing towards climax. His hips were jerking upwards and his hands were clenched in the bedcovers and inarticulate grunts were coming from his throat.
The sound of Tom’s name in his ears grew deafeningly loud—Tom, Tom, Tom—and then Lucas fell headlong into the most intense orgasm of his life, like a ship plummeting off the edge of the world.
On the heels of that explosion of pleasure came unconsciousness.