Tom’s muscles tensed slightly. “What? You mean sex? Of course I have.”
“I mean sex with a man.”
“Uh . . .” Should I tell him the truth? “Yes,” Tom said. “Once. I mean, not one time, but one man.”
Tom tried to decipher Lucas’s expression. Revulsion? Censure?
“Who was he?”
Jealousy. That was the expression on Lucas’s face: jealousy.
Tom relaxed. He stroked Lucas’s hair, drawing the golden strands slowly through his fingers. Arousal pulsed in his blood. His cock was taut and hot and aching. Not a painful ache, a pleasurable ache. “He was one of my commanding officers.”
Lucas’s forehead furrowed in a fierce frown. “One of your superiors took advantage of you?”
“Advantage?” Tom laughed. “No. It just happened.” And then he thought about this statement and amended it slightly. “Maybe he did seduce me, but only once he knew I wanted it.”
Lucas was still frowning severely.
“It was . . .” Lord. How to describe what had happened? “He was a colonel, and he took me as his aide-de-camp, and he was . . . He was one of the best soldiers I’ve ever met. He was absolutely fair, and he had a sharp mind, and he was brave and . . . and staunch—someone you could always rely on, you know?—and he had this way of telling jokes, when you least expected it, and . . . I fell a little in love with him. Which I hadn’t expected.”
He hesitated. How much of the truth would Lucas be willing to hear? But I didn’t love Colonel Armagh nearly as much as I love you. He bit the words back, and said, “I tried to hide it, but one evening we were in his quarters and we’d been drinking—there was some celebration or other, I don’t remember what—and we were both a bit top-heavy, and he was pointing something out on the map, leaning over me, and there was this moment when I wanted to kiss him—when I almost did kiss him—just a couple of seconds—and I made an excuse and got out of there as fast as I could. I was in a cold sweat all night, afraid he’d noticed, but the next day he treated me the same as always—God, that was a relief!—except that he had noticed, and a week or so later he brought out the brandy, and said he’d had good news from home, and we had a drink, and another one, and . . . and then he leaned over me again, his face this close to mine—” He held his hands half a foot apart. “And I wanted to kiss him—and . . . and then he kissed me.”
And the world had frozen for a moment.
Tom’s throat tightened in memory. “It was the most incredible kiss I’d ever had.” Until I kissed you. “The surprise, I guess, and all the months I’d been wanting him, and the fact that it was dangerous. Forbidden.” He’d returned Colonel Armagh’s kiss, dizzy with shock, dizzy with exhilaration. “He kissed me half-senseless, and then he got down on his knees and . . .” Tom’s throat tightened still further. His cock tightened, too. He shivered at the memory: Armagh unbuttoning his breeches, Armagh sucking him. “It was the best sex I’ve ever had. I came so hard I just about fainted.”
Lucas was staring at him, his mouth thin and tight, a sharp crease between his eyebrows—an expression Tom interpreted as jealousy.
“After that, we were lovers. Eight months. Then his brother died, and he inherited a baronetcy, so he sold out and came home.”
“Will you see him while you’re here?” Lucas asked stiffly.
Tom shook his head. “He’s married. Last I heard, his wife was pregnant.”
“Married?” The crease between Lucas’s eyebrows deepened.
“He’s got a title and an estate now; got to have an heir.”
“But . . . but he’s a back door usher!”
“Oh, Armagh likes women well enough. He just likes men, too.” He paused, and looked at Lucas’s face. How much should I tell him? “And he’s not really a back door usher. He’d rather roger a woman than a man. He used to say that women were more fun for swiving, but for oral congress, he preferred men, because men knew their way around a cock better.”
Lucas’s frown became quite ferocious. “He was using you.”
“What?” Where had Lucas got that notion from? Tom reviewed his last words. “You think he trained me up so he’d have a man to suck him? Of course, he didn’t! Armagh always gave as good as he got.”
For some reason, that made Lucas flinch.
“He wasn’t using me, Lu. He never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do.”
Lucas looked unconvinced.
“He wasn’t a dirty old colonel exploiting an aide,” Tom said, growing annoyed. “He’s only forty, and dashed good-looking, and clever and funny and brave, and I was in love with him.”
That made Lucas flinch again, but Tom was too cross to care. “And it was good. It wasn’t filthy or disgusting. It was good.” He took a deep breath, caught his temper, and exhaled slowly. “Armagh wasn’t using me. Trust me, Lu: he wasn’t.”
“Was he in love with you?” Lucas said stiffly.
“A bit. About as much as I was with him.”
Lucas’s lips tightened. “Did you . . . you know . . . do it with him?”
Tom didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Once. Armagh said I needed to know whether I liked it or not, and it was safer to do it with him than with some molly boy in a backstreet alley. So I did.” He shrugged. “I didn’t like it. Armagh was right: it’s more fun to swive a woman. And as for being swived . . . it was . . .” He tried to find the words to describe the sense of invasion, of powerlessness. “It made me wonder what women think about sex, whether they actually like it.”
He studied Lucas’s face, and saw the censure there. Fuck it, I’m not going to feel ashamed. “It wasn’t awful—although it did hurt a bit—but I felt as if . . . as if I had no control. I felt . . . I don’t know, helpless. I guess some fellows like that feeling, but I don’t. I was glad Armagh didn’t want to do it again.” Listen to me, Lu. “So, you see, when I say I’ll never ask you to be a back door usher, I mean it.”
Lucas broke their eye contact.
Tom stared at him in frustration. The warm sense of intimacy between them was gone. His hot, taut, aching arousal had extinguished. Damn Lucas for being so narrow-minded. “So that’s my sordid past,” he said, trying to keep his voice light and cheerful. “I’ve had sex with half a hundred women, and one man. Two, counting you. What about you?”
A dull flush crept along Lucas’s cheekbones. He sat up and buttoned his drawers.
Tom sat up, too. “How many, Lu?”
Lucas ignored him, and fastened his breeches.
“What?” Tom said. A hard note crept into his voice. “It’s all right for you to ask me who I’ve swived, but not for me to ask you?”
Lucas turned his head and looked at him. “No one,” he said flatly. “All right? No one.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” Lucas climbed off the bed. His face was tight again, his lips compressed, his movements jerky.
Tom caught his wrist and yanked him back down to sit. “What the devil do you mean no one? I was there the first time you did it. I saw you go up the stairs. You and that highflyer you’d chosen.”
Lucas turned his head and looked at him. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to; his expression said it for him—bleak, bitter, ashamed.
Tom released his grip on Lucas’s wrist. “But I saw you go up the stairs.”
Lucas turned his head away. “Well, you didn’t see me in the bedroom, did you? I might as well have been a eunuch.”
“But . . . you never said anything.”
“Would you have?” Lucas looked down at his hands, and clenched them together. “She was pretty, I could see that, but I just . . . I just couldn’t . . . it just didn’t work.”
“Jesus,” Tom said. “So you’ve never . . . ?”
Lucas clenched his hands until the knuckles whitened. “I’ve tried twice since, and it doesn’t work. I can’t do it.”
“You did it with me just fine,” Tom said.
Lucas grimaced, and stared down at his fists.
“What about, um, tossing off? Can you . . . ?”
Lucas flushed crimson. He averted his head and gave a stiff nod.
So, Lucas could have sex with his own hand, but not with a woman.
Tom tried to imagine what it would be like to select a courtesan, to strip naked in front of her, and be unable to perform. He winced inwardly.
The lightskirt wouldn’t have laughed at Lucas; she’d have tried to coax him to arousal—sex was her trade after all, and she’d have wanted Lucas for a customer. Any whore would. Among a clientele of paunchy, middle-aged men, Lucas would stand out like a gift from the gods. His golden good looks, his physique, his wealth . . . whores would line up for his patronage. The three women he’d selected wouldn’t have given up easily. They’d have fondled his balls, teased his cock, stroked and licked and sucked and nibbled—until finally they admitted defeat—and Lucas would have dressed again, mortified and humiliated.
No wonder he didn’t try a fourth time.
Tom felt slightly sick. Sick with guilt. All these years he’d been jumping in and out of women’s beds, and Lucas had been alone and celibate and thinking there was something was wrong with him—and he hadn’t noticed. “Christ, Lu, you should have said something.” He hooked his arm around Lucas’s neck, pulled him close, kissed his cheek.
“How could I?” Lucas said, and he sounded close to tears.
Tom tightened his grip. He must have been very lonely. Very unhappy. “I’m sorry. I should have noticed.”
Lucas didn’t relax against him; he stayed stiff, tense, miserable, his head slightly averted. “You weren’t here most of the time.”
No, he’d been off soldiering, while Lucas had been back in England, without any lovers, without a best friend—and for the past sixteen months, without a twin sister.
Tom’s sense of guilt increased sharply. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He remembered their first kiss, rough and fierce and clumsy. “In the mews . . . was that the first time you’ve kissed someone?”
Lucas nodded, and inhaled a hitching breath, and rubbed his face roughly.
He’s almost crying.
“You do it very well,” Tom said, pressing his mouth to Lucas’s cheek again.
“No, I don’t,” Lucas whispered.
“Yes, you do—better than Colonel Armagh, and I used to think no one could be better than him.”
Lucas shook his head.
“But if you disagree, we can practice some more.” He laid his lips to Lucas’s cheek a third time. I love you, Lu. “Come on, Lu, make up for lost time . . .”
Lucas inhaled another hitching breath.
“Take pity on a poor soldier . . .” Tom said, in a quavering voice.
Lucas huffed a faint laugh, and then sighed. Some of the tension drained from him.
Tom kissed the very corner of Lucas’s mouth. After a pause, Lucas turned his head and kissed Tom back, hesitantly, almost shyly.
They kissed sitting up, and then, after several minutes, Tom drew Lucas down to lie on the bed again. He kept the kisses light; this wasn’t about sex, this was about reassurance and comfort. Slow, tender kisses. And he could scarcely believe that Lucas had never kissed anyone else; he was so good at it.
He told Lucas that, when they came up for air. “You’re way better than Armagh.”
Lucas blushed, and shook his head.
Tom leaned in and caught Lucas’s lower lip between his teeth, nipped lightly, nipped a second time, then turned his attention to Lucas’s throat, nibbling his way downwards, pushing the collar aside, tasting the salt on Lucas’s skin with his tongue, testing his shoulder muscles lightly with his teeth. He opened the buttons of Lucas’s shirt, found one of his nipples, pinched it.
Lucas inhaled a short, sharp breath.
Tom laughed. “Like that?” he asked, and pinched again.
Lucas groaned low in his throat. “Yes.”
Tom spent some time on Lucas’s nipples, licking, biting, sucking, teasing. Each twitch Lucas made, each stifled moan, stoked Tom’s own arousal. It was always a powerful experience to give pleasure to someone and this time it was more powerful than it had ever been before, because it was Lucas—Lucas whom he’d loved for years but not dared to touch.
Finally, he abandoned Lucas’s nipples and returned to his mouth. This time their kisses were urgent, fierce. They gripped each other close, mouths clashing, and then Tom found himself on his back and Lucas was kissing his throat roughly, licking and nipping, nothing gentle or leisurely about it at all—hungry, burning kisses—and then Lucas dug his strong teeth into the curve where Tom’s neck met his shoulder, and Tom jackknifed on the bed, pleasure searing from his scalp all the way to the soles of his feet.
Lucas stopped biting. “Did I hurt you?”
“Christ, no,” Tom said hoarsely. “Do it again.”
Lucas hesitated, and then obeyed, finding the muscle, biting.
Pleasure jolted through Tom again. A strangled sound came from his mouth. His cock gave a huge surge. I’m going to spill in my breeches. “Stop,” he said frantically, and Lucas did.
Tom sat up hastily. “Sorry,” he said, unbuttoning his breeches with fumbling speed. “Just need to take care of this.” He practically tore the buttons off his drawers. His cock lunged out, deep red, straining. Tom grabbed it and pinched hard beneath the head.
His eyes winced shut. He pinched even harder.
His urgent arousal slowly dwindled to more manageable levels. He found himself able to breathe again, able to open his eyes.
Lucas was staring at him.
“Sorry,” Tom said, flushing. “Just about spilled all over myself.”
Lucas didn’t say anything. Tom tried to decipher his expression. Shock? Revulsion?
Great, he told himself. Just when things were going so well you’ve managed to disgust him. He shoved his cock inside his drawers—still hard, but not in imminent danger of disgracing him.
“No,” Lucas said.
Tom stopped, and looked at him. “You want to see me?”
Lucas blushed scarlet and didn’t meet his eyes.
Tom revised his assessment of Lucas’s expression. Not shock or revulsion, but curiosity.
He stopped trying to cram his cock into his drawers. He opened the plackets wider and let Lucas look at him.