Page 69 of Restored

Kit laughed softly. “Yes.”

Henry paused, then he said, “When I call you Christopher, I’m certainly not thinking of you as an agreeable whore.”

Kit stared him, shocked into silence.

“I’m thinking of someone rather wonderful,” Henry said. “Someone I admired from the first moment I saw him.” He paused, then added, “Earlier you said you were naive when I first met you. I wouldn’t say so. I would say you were kind and decent and generous. You were entitled to expect the same from others—fromme—and the fact you didn’t get that doesn’t point to any defect in you, Kit. I hate that you’d think that.”

Kit’s throat closed, unexpected emotion gripping him.

“I’ll call you Kit,” Henry said gently. “I’ll call you anything you want. I just want you to know that there was nothing wrong with you when you were Christopher.”

To his shame, Kit felt the hot prickle of tears behind his eyes and he pulled back, turning his head so that Henry couldn’t look at him as he calmed himself.

Henry sat quietly, but Kit could feel the man watching him, waiting.

When he felt he had himself back under control, Kit said, “Last week, after you left, I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened all those years ago.”

“Me either,” Henry said softly.

“I want you to know,” Kit said slowly, “that I forgive you, Henry, For not coming to see me before you left town. For sending Parkinson instead.”

Henry looked anguished. “But I shouldn’t have trusted him. I should have—”

“You saying that is like me calling myself naive,” Kit interrupted. “You trusted a man you had no reason to be suspicious of—you are not to blame for his betrayal, Henry.”

“I should have come anyway,” Henry said. “I should have told you myself.”

Their gazes locked. It felt as though all the years they’d been apart had melted away. Kit was suddenly very conscious that he hadn’t looked at another person so deeply, so intensely, since Henry had left him. This was more intimate than being naked, more intimate than being spread open on a bed for a punter to play with. Kit was gazing into Henry’s soul, and Henry was gazing into his. He had no idea what his own eyes betrayed, but Henry’s showed old pain and bitter regret.

Kit said, “What did you say in the letter? The one that Parkinson was supposed to give me?”

Henry was silent for several moments. Then he said, slowly, “I said things I’d never expressed to you in person. I told you… how very much I cared for you. How painful it was to leave you.”

Kit’s heart began to race very fast.

For a moment Henry seemed to wrestle with whether to go on. Then he said, “I asked you to write back to me. To send me word if you would be willing to see me again, once I had fulfilled my promises to Caroline.”

Kit’s stomach dropped. “And you never heard back,” he whispered, stricken.

“No. At first I hoped you just needed time, to come terms with what I’d done. Eventually I came to the conclusion I’d simply been deluded in thinking you had any fondness for me.” He gave a soft, humourless laugh. “Naive.”

That word again.

Kit shook his head, a sharp denial, but he couldn’t find words. And now he was remembering the long years of loneliness Henry had just described.

“The more I denied myself, the more tormented I became.”

Would things have been any easier for Henry if he’d had word back from Kit? If he’d known Kit was waiting for him?

And would Kit have agreed to wait for him?

Yes, probably. He'd loved Henry with all his heart. But Kit hadn’t seen the letter. He hadn’t responded, or waited. And in the long years since, their lives had diverged down two very different paths.

“… you were kind and decent and generous…”

Kit wasn’t that boy anymore. He’d become harder, more suspicious and protective. The man he was now was well suited to running a scandalous club—not so much to being on the other side of someone’s fireplace.

“Kit?” Henry prompted, and when Kit looked at him again, his grey gaze was vulnerable and uncertain.