Page 18 of Provoked
Helplessly, David reached for William’s head, wanting to guide him to his quarry. But then it all became farcical, silly. He couldn’t get hold of William, kept bucking his hips in a fruitless search for a warm, wet mouth that was proving to be completely elusive. He was almost weeping with frustration by the time he woke up, his limbs snarled in the bed sheets.
He lay, shaken, staring at the ceiling.
He hadn’t thought of William in a long time—until this business with Euan. Now, in the depths of night, he found himself remembering the very last time he’d seen his friend, leaving Midlauder in his father’s carriage, bound for Oxford. David had been working in one of his father’s fields when the carriage had rumbled slowly past. He’d glimpsed William looking out of the carriage window and had run to the road, waving madly, getting there just in time to see the carriage disappearing into the distance.
That last glimpse had been fleeting. The time before had been a week earlier. That was the day David’s father had almost disowned him. Because of a kiss.
The dream version of William might try to take David’s cock in his mouth, but the real William never had. There had never been anything like that between them, no matter what David’s father might have thought. Just a handful of kisses. Three to be precise. Three heart-thundering, soul-stealing kisses.
David knew it was wrong to get down on his knees and take a man’s cock in his mouth. He lived with the torment that visited him every time he succumbed to his weakness. Those kisses with William were different, though. David had never been able to truly reconcile himself to what his father had said to him the day he’d caught them—that their kiss was evil in God’s eyes.
He’d pleaded with his father to understand. He and William were loving friends, like David and Jonathan in the Bible. But his father had just become more and more enraged until finally he’d cracked and knocked David to the ground with a punch from one of his work-hardened fists.
The love David had felt for William all those years ago had been pure, untainted by the lust that troubled his dreams now.
As he lay there in the dark, sleepless in his lonely bed, David wished he could recapture that feeling. If only for one hour.
Chapter Six
“You’d better stay for dinner.”
It wasn’t so much an invitation as an order, though Chalmers was smiling as he leaned back in his chair. They’d been working in Chalmers’s study all day, honing the argument for the first hearing of Mr. MacAllister’s case tomorrow. The clock on the mantelpiece had just chimed six.
“Mrs. Chalmers has invited some young gentleman visiting from London for dinner,” the older man continued. “I think she’s got Elizabeth married off to him already, in her own head.”
“In that case, I shouldn’t intrude,” David said as he tied up his papers in a loose bundle.
“Nonsense. It’ll be no trouble to lay another place for you, and it always does to have more than one eligible gentleman at the table when there are four young ladies.”
“I’m hardly eligible,” David scoffed.
“You’re alive, aren’t you?” Chalmers said drily. “Besides, you’ll be eligible in time. Maybe you’ll end up occupying some great baronial pile like our friend Mr. Jeffrey.”
David laughed. Jeffrey was an original, and his choice of home reflected that. Chalmers, however, was more typical of their profession. He lived in the New Town, in a terraced townhouse, right at the end of a long, curving crescent. It was precisely the sort of house that David hoped to live in one day. And who would not? Who would not prefer the elegantly mathematical symmetry of the New Town to the tumbledown filth and clutter of the Old Town? No wonder Chalmers had asked David to come to his house to work on the case rather than travelling in to the Lawnmarket, where he’d have to push his way through hordes of hawkers and beggars and prostitutes before he even reached the faculty library.
Chalmers gave a yawn, peeling off his spectacles and scrubbing his hands over his face as David packed up his papers.
“Well, we’ve done a good day’s work,” he said, rising from his seat at the desk they’d shared all day. “And I, for one, don’t intend to give it another thought before tomorrow’s hearing. Let’s have a drink.”
David smiled at how unfazed Chalmers was at the prospect of tomorrow’s hearing. If David were doing the speaking, he’d have spent the whole evening going over his submissions again. But his role tomorrow would be limited to listening and note-taking.
Chalmers crossed the room, walking past a full wall lined with books. Legal treatises, historical monographs, philosophical works. The man, David had discovered, was a bibliophile. But for now, Chalmers was happy to ignore his books, stopping in front of a cabinet in the corner of the room which, once opened, revealed several decanters. He withdrew one, half full of amber liquor.
“Water of Life,” Chalmers said, smiling. “Would you like a dram, lad?”
He was pulling out the glasses already. David’s acquiescence was a formality, but he gave it anyway.
“All right, then.”
The measure Chalmers poured was generous and the quality of the whisky was excellent, the taste smoky on David’s tongue.
“It’s from Islay,” Chalmers said. “Do you like it?”
David nodded. “That’s a rare malt.” He swallowed the last bit and put the glass down on the polished wood.
“Have another.”
David gave in to temptation. “Just one more, then, thank you.”