The side of Jack’s mouth twisted. He leaned against the wall and propped both hands on the silver head of his stick. The motion was casual, but the shift of his weight caught Alan’s attention. Surprise rendered him ruder than he’d intended.
“Don’t tell me you actually have a war wound.”
“Nothing serious,” said Jack. “The Lord Hawthorn who remembers his war service fondly and with pride will of course talk about it at every opportunity.”
Alan laughed. “Hell, he was something, wasn’t he? I could write a story about him.” He was ready to put the thought away and pull it out again later, but Jack’s gaze caught him like a fishing line and held him.
“What kind of story?”
For Christ’s sake. Alan had never been asked to produce plot ideas while standing upright and fizzing with arousal.
“The kind of toff who’ll waltz in here and throw his weight around like that wouldn’t put himself out for nothing. Not for a gutter journalist like me. He’d do it because he expected something in return.”
“Something,” said Jack.
Too many emotions fought for attention. Alan was coming down off success and ignoring the ever-present groundswell of his guilt. He’d already made the mistake of fucking this man, hadn’t he? He couldn’t unmake it. He could only decide how much further he was prepared to go.
But writing was work. He didn’t want to be the one coming up with the stage directions for something real.
“Yes. I imagine he’d be impatient about it too.”
Jack looked briefly down the corridor as someone exited a door and headed away from them towards the street entrance. Then his attention returned to Alan. “And what precisely is the journalist offering?”
Deliberate; measured. Alan thought of how careful Jack had been, in his study, to be sure of Alan’s desire before he let himself off the leash. Jack Alston was mocking and infuriating, and the existence of his station was a travesty, but he was—he wasn’t—
Alan needed to stop thinking. He let himself be hunger, and shame, and little else.
He lifted his gaze.
“Use me.”
An expression with claws and teeth rose behind the brilliant blue of Jack’s eyes, visible in the way their corners tightened and a small sneer twitched beside his nose. He inhaled hard. “Come with me.”
The limp, if there’d been one, was gone. Jack’s legs ate up the corridor as he strode down it, rattling the handles of closed doors—opening those that weren’t locked, and giving an impatient nod to anyone inside before closing them again. As if he had more right to be here than the people whose workplace this was. As if interrupting or inconveniencing them was nothing. Alan knew it was mostly an act and still wanted to punch him.
And it was unbearably arousing, because Jack was exerting the full force of his arrogance in order to find an empty room in which to let this play out.
They did find one. It seemed to be where broken chairs and old cabinets were put to think about their sins: gloomy, smelling of damp, and with the ugliest greenish carpet Alan had ever seen.
His lordship slammed the door behind Alan and crowded him back against it. There was no key to turn in the lock. Alan’s heart snuck up his throat until he had to swallow hard to get it back down into his chest.
“You’re right,” said Jack. The sneer was in his voice now. “I’m not inclined to wait for what I’m owed.”
“My lord. I don’t understand—”
“I think you do.”
Alan’s mind kept looping on no lock! as his hands flattened on the door and his little finger banged painfully against the doorknob. He was spending a lot of time around doors lately. But none of his adventures in Spinet House could hold a candle to this.
A version of himself. That was what he needed, just as the man in front of him—broad and inescapable, close enough that Alan could see a shaving nick on his jaw and the exact shape of that broken nose—was a version of Jack.
“You think I’m that kind of man?” He let his voice shake. It would have shaken anyway. They were so close. Alan’s body was alive and humming. “You think I’ll let you have your way with me, in some kind of indecent—perverse—”
Jack didn’t bother to reply. He smiled the cruel smile of a card-player about to take his opponent for everything down to the shirt on their back and lifted a hand to flick mockingly at a lock of Alan’s hair. Then traced down the side of his face. Two blunt fingertips, barely making contact, but the touch sent shivers of sensation across Alan’s cheek.
Then Jack pushed those fingers between his lips, without warning or ceremony.
Alan made a sound. It was stifled. He knew himself and his desires; he’d walked their boundaries pretty fucking thoroughly after nine years of being the Roman. If he’d thought about it specifically he would have agreed that yes, having Lord Hawthorn’s fingers shove over his tongue and fill his mouth would be likely to send blood rushing to his cock.
He wouldn’t have known the half of it.
He closed his eyes, because he could already feel and taste and smell the man in front of him, could hear the small, wet noises of his own mouth, and sight was going to be—too much. He shrank his world down to the insistence of those fingers and the way it felt to suck them and let his tongue explore. It was as if a string were tied to the base of his cock and the other end tugged hard whenever he swallowed. Brown light gathered behind his eyelids. His breath was hot and then it was forgotten, irrelevant.
“Christ,” Jack said, hoarse. “You want it so much, don’t you?”
Alan coughed as the fingers withdrew. He cracked his eyes open and managed to glare. “No.”
“Nice try, Mr. Ross. I know exactly what sort of man you are. You followed me in here panting for a prick in your mouth, and that’s what you’ll have.”
Alan could have resisted the push to his shoulder, but he let it bear him to his knees, his traitor mouth already watering further. The ugly carpet was surprisingly comfortable. Or perhaps it just beat wet cobbles. Or perhaps the rest of Alan’s body was so warm with anticipation, howling with so much need as Jack took commanding hold of his hair, that he wouldn’t have noticed if he’d been kneeling on spikes.
He let his hands rest on Jack’s legs. The wool of those black trousers was incredibly fine and light.
A tug at his hair raised his face. He wasn’t ready for it. The skin of his cheeks and forehead felt exposed, naked to the elements, to the wild sunlight and strange sleet that was the way Jack stared down at him now.
“Fuck,” said Jack. It was soft and bruised-sounding. It didn’t sound like an act.
Alan swallowed. Waited. Jack’s fingertips rubbed against his scalp, sending a new and delicious set of shivers to join all of those already on duty. His lordship seemed reluctant to release Alan’s hair for long enough to unfasten his own trousers and drawers.
So Alan did it for him. He wasn’t unfamiliar with handling a gentleman’s garments from this angle, though it had been a while. And Christ, he was motivated.
When he drew out Jack’s prick, already halfway hard in his hand, there was a sharp inhalation from above him. Alan wrapped his fingers around the base and thought, hilariously, silk hats.