Page 37 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

“Are you trying to kill me?”

“Can you think of a better way to go?”

“Not really.”

“Well, then.” He squeezed Matty’s arse and gave it a pat. “On the bed with you.”

That was not an instruction Matty resented in the slightest until he realized that Warren was not joining him. Instead, he dragged a chair over to the bedside, adjusted the pillows so Matty could recline comfortably on his side, and took up his sketchbook.

“Really?” Matty groaned. “You’re really going to do this now? I confess, I’ve been half-hoping it was all just foreplay.”

“Hush, you’re a model, you’re not supposed to talk.”

“And what if I do?” Matty licked his lips, hoping to entice Warren over with memories of what he’d done the last time he had to keep Matty quiet.

Warren’s eyes flashed, sweeping up and down Matty’s body with obvious temptation.

But he resisted, turning back to his work.

His hand moved expertly over the page. “Then I’ll have to draw you with a gag in,” he said simply.

“But if I do that, I worry it won’t be suitable for the gallery night. At the end of the class, you know.”

“The gallery night?” What Matty could see of his own body was half-done clothing and his cock straining his buttons something dreadful. “Warren, if you draw me like this for the gallery night, with or without a gag, we’ll be carrying our certificates behind our backs on the way out.”

“Why?”

“Handcuff joke.”

Warren didn’t laugh, but went on drawing, unconcerned. “You ever used those off the clock, love?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Good fun.” He nodded to a well-notched bedpost. “Got stuck to that one once, though. Idiot lost the key in the pillows and was too drunk to find it. Had to go for help. Not my finest hour.”

“Is there anything you haven’t done in these rooms?”

Warren paused. He smiled to himself, as if surveying half a life of debauchery, before the smile softened. He may even have blushed, through it was hard to tell in here.

“This,” he said, not looking up from his paper. Though they’d been quipping back and forth, there was something very vulnerable in his voice. “I’ve never done anything like this. No one but Forester even knows I like drawing, much less seen me do it.”

The confession sobered Matty’s wit, though had the opposite effect on his wanting.

He fell silent at last, burning quietly and steadily with no outlet as he watched Warren watch him.

Matty hadn’t done anything like this, either.

Oh, he’d sat pretty dozens of times, was stared at, treated like an object under such dehumanizing circumstances that no guilt remained by the time the other officers relieved him of the role.

But Warren wasn’t doing that. He wasn’t looking at Matty like he was an inanimate work of beauty put there for his enjoyment.

Instead, he was studying like he wanted to preserve something fleeting and alive.

At first, Matty was nervous to move too much, but his adjustments were met with interest and more furious sketching.

After some number of minutes or hours (things had gone disconcertingly timeless), Warren got him a little glass of that liqueur and adjusted something on him that seemed more an excuse to touch him than anything else.

When he got back to it, Matty stopped trying to stay so still, and the more natural he behaved, the more focused Warren seemed to get.

He was clearly seeing something . Something that interested him more than mere looks.

Something Matty himself was ignorant of, but grew unbearably curious about the longer it went on.

At a certain point, he no longer knew what he was looking forward to more: Warren climbing into this bed with him at last, or turning that sketchbook around so Matty might see what he’d seen.

Warren finally slowed his pace, doing little bits here and there before putting the pad face down on his lap.

“Finished?” said Matty.

“For now.” He glanced at the work one more time, then put it back down. “I’ve got enough of what I needed. I should be able to finish the rest from memory. You can relax.”

“Can I see it?”

Warren hesitated, then shook his head. “Not yet.”

Matty was surprised. He hadn’t been shy about any of his drawings at all so far. The change was charming enough to dampen the disappointment Matty might have felt.

“Come here, then,” he said, moving over on the bed.

He half-expected some new excuse, but Warren stood up.

How long, precisely, he’d been sporting that cockstand while he sketched, Matty did not know, but it was instantly apparent that he’d found this whole enterprise as erotic as Matty had.

Though he’d been playing it cool again up until now, a distinctly hot eagerness took over as he got right on top of Matty without any hesitation, pressing their bodies tight together and sighing with obvious relief.

They were lost to it within seconds. The teasing and the looking and the wanting had gone on so long that to finally touch like this was pure heaven.

Once they started, it was wildfire, tearing at clothes, rubbing against each other, coaxing moans out of the other’s mouths.

Matty wanted this man like he could not recall wanting anyone before, and the most disorienting thing was how much Warren seemed to want him back.

His hands were eager; his tongue was desperate.

So suave, so clever, so put together he’d been, even that last time when he’d taken Matty’s mouth.

But the delay or the drawing or something had changed in him.

By the time they’d banished their clothes and half the pillows to the floor and slipped under the sheets, he looked nearly undone with desire.

If Matty could draw, it was this he would immortalize.

“Please,” Warren whispered, just under Matty’s ear, teasing the lobe with his tongue and panting. Matty could feel that first promise of Warren’s spend cooling on his thigh. “Please, sweetheart. I can’t wait another second.”

Sweetheart again. Matty tried not to be too overcome. It was a pet name and a lark and the sort of thing one said in mo ments like this, but Matty was miles away from his reason and the word rang like bells through his whole being no matter how he tried to stop it.

While Warren rummaged in the bedside drawer, Matty went to his hands and knees, shocked when he raised his head to see his own face staring back at him, Warren naked and kneeling behind him, looking like the very wildest of wild dreams.

“What the devil?” he muttered. He must not have noticed when all the pillows were in the way, but there was a bloody mirror tacked to the headboard. “You Fox lot are going to hell. Every last one of you.”

Warren laughed like a bloke who, Matty remembered, probably didn’t believe in quite the same hell, and wasn’t about to let it stop him either way.

He kissed his way up Matty’s back, tailbone to nape, finally resting his chin on Matty’s shoulder.

They locked eyes in the mirror, and in that moment, that throwaway word, that offhand sweetheart rang straight back down Matty’s spine, the same way the kisses had come seconds before.

He liked the idea of being, not just Warren’s friend or his fuck or even his muse.

But being his sweetheart. He didn’t kid himself that he was any such thing, but he coddled the thought anyway.

Sweethearts. He’d never had one of those.

Overcome as he was now, he could do nothing but pretend to himself that it was true.

“Ready for me?” Warren whispered.

“Well past,” Matty gasped, pressing back. He’d happily take Warren with the least of provisions, but his sweetheart was more chivalrous than all that. It was tongue first, then slicked fingers, then…

He could see Warren’s face in the mirror as he pushed inside, his rapture perfect and a thing impossible to capture by even the best artist. That expression and the pleasure Matty felt beneath him was all here and now , it was all movement and sweat and the living gasps and moans there was no need to stifle in this nest Warren had built for him for no reason but care.

Dear God, maybe they weren’t anything so sweet as sweethearts, but Warren was still risking so much to be here with him.

So bloody much. They both were. But how could they regret it for a second, if the seconds had been even half as perfect as they were right now?

Warren gripped his hips tight and threw his head back as he found his climax in a hard, messy rhythm, eyes squeezed shut and mouth open.

There was a hand stroking Matty (whether it was his, Warren’s, or some combination would be lost to him by morning next), but it was the sight of Warren in the mirror, mixed with the hot contact, that did him in.

Matty dissolved at last in a peak beyond his imagining before his strength or maybe just his will gave out and he collapsed upon the ruined pillows with Warren still on him, still in him, kissing his shoulders and licking his neck until they found it within themselves to disengage.

Face-to-face now, Matty wanted to say something. But Warren found words first.

“Don’t leave,” he whispered. He was still panting, black strands plastered to his forehead with sweat, gripping Matty’s hand and looking far more family-boy than wily bartender all of a sudden. “I’ll come up with any excuse you need. But don’t leave. Not yet.”

That Warren thought for even a moment that Matty would rush out the door made him wonder about the quality of the other lovers he’d taken in this room.

Matty knew from club gossip and hints from Warren that there had been plenty of those—indeed, he had a good sense that the illustrator of those notches on the bedpost was right here with him—but the stories were always set as jokes and mishaps.

Matty was struck by a chilly notion: Warren wasn’t a renter, but he did work here.

When he sneaked off from his post for a bit of fun, was he treated as a real companion?

Or just another beautiful club amenity? Did his lovers run out the door when they were finished for a fresh gin, leaving sticky pillows and old liqueur glasses for the man whose job it was to deal with them?

A sense of grim comradery hit Matty right in the stomach.

There were certain…quirks…when one’s visage was the source of his paycheck.

It was very hard to be taken seriously. To secure a promotion.

To get permission for a guest. To be treated like there was anything going on behind a set of eyes that earned their keep by being seen as much as they did by seeing.

“You’re all the excuse I need.” Matty kissed Warren’s damp forehead. “I’ll stay as long as you want. Hours. All day. I’ll make Mr. Forester drag me out by the ankle kicking and screaming, if you ask me to, Warren, I swear to God.”

Warren smiled at the notion, then rested his head on Matty’s chest, swirling a lazy finger through the hair he’d been able to stop obsessively trimming during his stint as an “artist.” While he was still a bit ambivalent about the beard, he didn’t miss that task one bit, and decided then and there that he was done with it.

“You’re dear to me, Matty,” Warren whispered. “I don’t know when it happened. But you’ve become very dear to me.”

“And you to me,” Matty replied without a moment’s hesitation.

Warren snorted out a sleepy giggle. “What the devil are we going to do about that, d’you think?”

Matty had no idea. This was terribly inadvisable new territory they were in. Inconvenient. Unwanted.

And absolutely irresistible.

Instead of worrying about it, though, he wrapped his arms around his unlikely lover and kissed the top of his head. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out eventually.”