An Improper Holiday (3 page)
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Authors: K.A. Mitchell
around the fire.
He bowed over Charlotte’s hand and she offered him an almost imperceptible wink. Having delivered
Nicky to a marriageable female, Anna left to organize some other campaign.
“Lord Amherst, you must remember my brother, Capt—the honorable Mr. Stanton?”
Her eyes were full of laughter now. Sly minx.
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“But of course, Mr. Stanton.” He and Ian exchanged bows, Ian’s handsome face more wintry than the
wind battering the castle’s stones.
Charlotte turned to the tall blonde in half-mourning beside her. “And you will of course already be
acquainted with Mrs. Collingswood.”
Ian’s sister had the very devil in her. Emily Collingswood was his mother’s cousin and had spent a
great deal of time at Carleigh as a companion for Anna. Nicky no longer felt quite as put-upon by his
meddling older sister. He would rather have Anna fuss over him than deal with someone as inwardly
devious and outwardly guileless as Lady Charlotte.
The imp turned to her beleaguered brother. “You remember Mrs. Collingswood, of course. We met at
another of these Twelve Night fetes. Just before my first Season?”
Just before Ian had been sent away. The Twelfth Night when Nicky had finally persuaded Ian to take
full possession of his body—and damnation. He would be needing yet another stroll around the gallery if he allowed his thoughts to dally along that primrose path.
Nicky had been working so hard on that ultimate seduction, he should be surprised if Ian would have
remembered if His Highness himself had been in attendance at that Twelve Night.
But Ian surprised him. “You were Miss Graves then.”
“Yes, Mr. Stanton, how kind of you to remember me.”
“Lady Charlotte could do nothing but sing your praises on our journey home. She was awed by your
skills.”
How Ian missed both Charlotte and Emily nearly swallowing their tongues, Nicky could not imagine.
“Mrs. Collingwood, will you be favoring us with your long-remembered skill at the pianoforte?”
His clarification was met with a slightly audible exhalation of relief. “I should be pleased to assist my hosts in any way possible.”
Charlotte recovered her equanimity. “What would please me most at the moment is to rest before
dinner.”
Emily followed Charlotte’s lead. “Goodness, Lady Charlotte, you must be greatly fatigued from your
travels. If you gentlemen would excuse us, I believe I can show Lady Charlotte to her room.”
Many of the guests had already excused themselves from the reception. Supper would not be served
until after the midnight service and he expected most of the assembled party would take to their rooms to rest.
“Could someone be similarly dispatched to my assistance, Lord Amherst?”
Not “Would you assist me to find my room?” If Ian were not such an utter bloody idiot, they could be
enjoying hours of rediscovery before the celebrations began this evening. Instead, all Nicky could expect was assuaging his needs alone or suffering the dull ache of unfulfilled want.
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“Certainly.” Nicky nodded at a footman near the door who immediately stepped toward them. “Merry
Christmas, Mr. Stanton.”
The dark slashes of Ian’s brows drew into a sharp
V
over his eyes. Had he expected Nicky to plead with him? To throw himself at his feet?
“And to you, Lord Amherst.”
Ian had departed with the footman when Charlotte slipped back in through the doors to the hall.
Nicky held up his hand to ward off any more of her many alterations to their plan. “Please don’t delay your rest on account of my lonely despair. Why should your holiday be bleak?”
“A brief word, my lord?”
Nicky nodded.
“My brother claims to value his solitude, but I have known him all my life. If there is one thing he
cannot abide, it is being ignored.”
After a glance around the nearly deserted salon, Nicky offered her a lightning-quick salute. “I yield to your superior strategy, General.”
“Keep to the plan, sir, and all will be well.”
~ * ~
Ian was trapped. Pinioned as surely as if in irons.
And quite utterly mortified by having been laid low by a tight-fitting coat.
Cursing himself and his missing valet, he stomped over to the pull cord to summon a servant. With
both arms held behind his back, he was reduced to yanking at the cord with his teeth. As he waited,
panting, he berated himself for leaving his valet back in Oxfordshire. Ian had been on the outs with Timpet since his return and couldn’t say for sure whether the frost had ensued because Ian’s maiming destroyed the cut of his coat or because Ian had dragged the chap to Norwich for nearly a year. He could say that as unappealing as this trip to Carleigh was, it would be far more so with Timpet’s icy glare and glacial silences.
A slender man with silver hair and an elegant mien entered his room. Before Ian could even explain
his predicament, the man slipped around Ian and freed his aching shoulders with a quick tug on his cuffs.
“Thank you. Thank you indeed…?” He let his intonation rise. He would definitely want to leave this
fellow a generous vail.
“Simmons, sir.”
“Thank you, Simmons.”
Simmons brushed the jacket and placed it in the wardrobe with his other clothes.
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Ian could manage buttons on his own, his right fingers having become astoundingly dexterous in the
last eighteen months, but Simmons’ quiet efficiency at finishing the small rows on Ian’s waistcoat was so unlike the huffs of Timpet that Ian let his hand fall to his sides.
“There are several gentlemen enjoying whiskey and tobacco in the India Room, sir. Will you be
joining that party?”
“I prefer to rest. I’ll take my dressing gown for now.”
“Very good, sir.” Simmons turned up the left sleeve with far more ease and grace than Timpet.
“While you’re resting, sir, I could stitch up your shirts for you. Then you wouldn’t need to risk a pin jabbing at you.”
Why had Timpet never suggested such a thing? Ian couldn’t count all the pinpricks he’d received, or
the number of times his sleeve had fallen into the soup or the marmalade or once across the face and into the generous décolletage of the vicar’s wife in Mundesley.
“That would be much appreciated, Simmons. Tell me, how was I fortunate enough to receive you as
an answer to my summons?”
“As Lord Amherst was aware that you did not travel with your valet, sir, he instructed me to stand
ready to offer any assistance you might need.”
“How thoughtful of him.”
“Yes, sir. His lordship has a very generous spirit.”
In plainer speech, Ian was such an invalid Nicky felt compelled to act as maiden aunt, managing Ian’s
life. He thought of telling Simmons he would need no further help, but it was apparent he did and such a pointless action would no doubt make Nicky feel further compelled to discuss the matter with Ian. That was something to be avoided. An end to future pinpricks and even more so any future embarrassment caused by the impertinent actions of his sleeves made Simmons’ offer impossible to refuse.
Simmons had already draped most of Ian’s upper wardrobe over his arm. “I shall return these before
you’ll need them for the evening, sir. Please call if you have any other needs arise.” He slipped out of the door as gracefully as he had managed everything else.
Simmons’ innocuous comment regarding arising needs brought Ian back to painful awareness of that
moment when Nicky had touched him.
After his discharge from medical care, Ian had not expected an immediate return to his previous
health, but as the months passed it seemed that Badajoz had cost him more than his arm. Once he recovered from the fever of infection, his body had reclaimed its former vigor—save for one particularly vital organ.
While Ian at first had enjoyed the respite from his prick trying to order him about, he grew alarmed when aside from an occasional dream, it seemed nothing sparked his particular interest.
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An attack of impotence was hardly something to be discussed with peers. He could not even imagine
visiting an apothecary to explain the difficulty. Apparently there was no need. His cure was at hand. That brief contact with Nicky accomplished what Ian’s will had not, gifting relief and agony in equal measures.
It took only picturing Nicky’s generous mouth and Ian fumbled to release the fall of his trousers. The joy he’d heard when Nicky said his name became Nicky groaning it as Ian sucked him to completion. His
prick lengthened, filled, ached. He stared at the head pushing through the foreskin, almost amazed. One stroke of his hand and the sensitive shaft was bared. He took a grip, the pressure of his fist at once familiar and strange. Arousal pulsed down his legs, up his spine, blotting out sense.
Another stroke, tighter, turning his wrist. Deep rich pleasure rippled out from his belly until he had to bite his lip to contain a groan. How long? God, how long had it been? How had he gone without this
delicious agony?
Those nights in Spain before Badajoz, as Ian lay awake imagining what horror or boredom the next
day might bring, he had sought the lethargy release could offer. Some of his men, even some of the officers had turned to each other, and Ian himself had turned a blind eye to it all. He was scarcely in a position to reprimand them for acting on the memories that brought Ian gasping and shuddering in his fist. The grip of a man’s body milking his prick, the act of domination, the exhilaration of another man’s surrender.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t see a look in the eye of some of the other officers, or become aware of broad shoulders and narrow hips, whether the admirable physique was found beneath the pale complexion of his fellow countrymen or the swarthier cheeks of a Portuguese, and it wasn’t only fear of a court martial and public humiliation or even a hanging that kept Ian from acting on the longing. It was fear that such an act would never measure up to the memories, and an equal part of fear that it would. That he would fall into such a craving for it he could never right himself again.
It was safer to live unaware and take his ease only in that best and worst memory, Nicky split wide on Ian’s prick, the clench of muscles as Nicky’s body shrank and tightened in pain as horribly right as it was exquisitely wrong.
Ian sped up his strokes, and just as it had those long nights on the Continent, the burn of shame in his gut somehow doubled the sweetness of pleasure filling his balls. He pressed hard with his thumbnail on the slit, the pain bringing him over the narrow edge. A moment to hope his aim at the chamber pot stayed true before his body seized and he jerked out that long, hot flood, legs wide, head flung back, mind’s eye fixed on the image of his seed splattered across Nicky’s face.
~ * ~
Ian might have done better without that brief release, for it only intensified his awareness of Nicky as the guests gathered in the hall to don wraps for their brief walk to chapel. Although were he not so attuned, he might have scarcely seen Nicky at all. Every time he sought a glimpse, Nicky was engaged in
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conversation with some gentleman or a lady, a conversation that usually ended in great merriment for both parties. On one occasion the conversation was with Charlotte, but Ian was too far away to hear what
brought such a rosy hue to her cheeks. As Charlotte had taken up such respectable company as the Widow Collingswood, Ian had felt safe in leaving her side.
The lady glanced his way, and Ian averted his gaze. Collingswood. He remembered hearing about him
now. Captain Collingswood had been with the Third Division, killed during the looting that followed the victory at Badajoz, killed—as Ian had heard it—by his own men. He felt her gaze upon him and offered her a bow, approaching them to offer his sister his arm as they went to the small church, but Nicky swept
Charlotte away, smiling down into her face.
Quite at point non plus, Ian checked and turned the offer of his arm to Mrs. Collingswood. She
accepted as graciously as if she had not noticed his faltered step, laying her gloved hand on his coat. “How very thoughtful of you, Mr. Stanton. Your sister speaks highly of you.”
Ian had gone from reading classics in his purple robes to the buff and scarlet of a second lieutenant, with no time at all to learn how to converse with a lady. What did one say in such a case?
“Oh. Ah.”
“And Lord Amherst also.”
“She has known his lordship since she was just out of the schoolroom,” Ian explained.
Lacy clumps of snow still fell, yet slowly enough that the cobblestone path was well-cleared by
servants wielding stable brooms. Hundreds of candles in the chapel threw enough light to gild the small drifts with a gold luster. Such a view coupled with the light scent of horses from the brooms made Ian fancy the sight and smells recaptured the Nativity.
“Oh, no, sir, you mistake me. Lord Amherst speaks very highly of you. Though I am certain he is
much in Lady Charlotte’s esteem as well,” Mrs. Collingswood said.
Ian glanced ahead. Now that Nicky was in the vestibule, he had surrendered his hat, and his hair
gleamed with as bright a halo as any of the saints portrayed in the stained glass windows. But Ian knew the lie in that. He had seen Nicky with those very curls upon awakening, twisted up on his temples like a
satyr’s horns. An apt resemblance as Nicky was then wont to pipe a suggestion to lure Ian back into bed.
Somehow the weight of his responsibilities, whether an examination or a translation to be given that day, never felt as pressing when Nicky looked like that. Pure devilry at great odds with his cherubic features.