“I don’t care for opera, actually.”
“Miss Eastwick, I demand you be sensible.”
Eleanor laughed against his chest, her breath hot, her small nails scraping against his skin. “I’m sorry! I don’t, though. I never have. I always preferred lieder and chanson.”
“Dare I ask why?”
Her nails skated down his chest to his stomach, scratching softly. His lungs were in danger of turning themselves inside out. He was one of London’s most notorious rakes, and this sort of soft intimacy was far outside his wheelhouse.
“It’s someone else’s words. Opera, I mean. You’re playing a character. I have to feel what the character is feeling. With art songs,Iget to feel. I get to interpret what the composer may have meant. You don’t have that sort of latitude in opera. Your director is going to have very specific ideas, and the actress needs to follow her directions. I know it seems silly, but —“
“It doesn’t seem silly to me,” he interrupted, quickly voicing his agreement. “I remember that night I heard you perform, Miss Eastwick. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”
She turned her face to his chest, and he felt the dampness of her tears. And you’re right back to where you started, you blithering idiot. Unlike earlier, she lays her small fingers with his longer ones, locking their hands together as she rubbed her cheek to his chest, stretching like a cat against him.
“I should be getting home soon. It’s probably very late. Sometimes my sister wakes up at night, and she’ll be upset if I’m not home yet.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he left the house in only his shirt and tailcoat, leaving waistcoat and cravat behind, but she was right. It was very late, and it was his fault that she was still in the house at this hour. He would see her home himself rather than waking Kestin’s sleeping sister.
“Thank you for the instruction on the delicate relationship between flowers and butterflies, Lord Stride.” Her voice was soft, but in it, there was a smile mirroring the small upturn of her mouth as his carriage pulled to a stop before the Eastwick’s home.
“I do hope you found it to be an enjoyable lesson, my dear. I take full responsibility for any ill effects you are feeling.”
The smile remained on her face as she shook her head no as he raised her hand to his lips. “Not at all, my lord. No pain and no regrets.”
By the time he was home, Silas felt a bit ill with himself. He hadn’t wanted to let her out of his carriage, and that in and of itself was a ghastly mistake, a portent of ill luck on the air, a tightening at his throat. That shift in his chest again as he looked over the bed where she had rested against him, where she had nearly fallen asleep, where he would have been content to let her stay for the rest of her days, wrapped in his arms, tucked against him.
Silas began to pace. Eleanor Eastwick was going to be going off to marry another man. That was the plan, and it was the right thing for her to do. Why then, he thought to himself in aggravation, did the thought leave him so unsettled? He was not meant for love. He would no sooner bring children into this world, children who would only know him for a few hours a day than he would name his horse Marquis in his place. He would not take a wife and leave her vulnerable to a cruel and conniving society. Fortune seekers abounded, and every other person he knew was a vagabond in their soul. He knew too well the faithlessness of noble wives, and the thought of another man — a man likehim!– fucking the woman he loved every day as he sat there, a worthless slab of stone, was too horrifying to even consider.
His plan was a good one. He had long considered his options, marshalled his resources, and thought through the ramifications of his actions. Maris would make a formidable Marchioness. Her children would carry on the Stride bloodline, inheriting Basingstone, the title, the lands, all of it. He’d already found a gargoyle in the far north, on some tiny frozen island, who was ready to end his time on this plane of existence. He bore enough passing resemblance to Silas that they could make it look believable. A tumble from the rooftop, shatter of marble. His sister would mourn, but then she would do her duty to the family, as she always had. Cadmus would be expecting him, and the Marquis of Basingstone would be no more. He had thought through his plan a hundred different times a week, in a hundred different ways, and it had always seemed like the best and only option. He hated that there was doubt niggling at the back of his mind now.
You don’t need to sit here feeling sorry for yourself. She’s just another pretty, untitled woman, and you’ve had plenty of chits just like her in the past. You’re not beholden to anyone.There was a pleasure house nearby, one he had visited before. It was not a brothel, but a true den of dereliction, a house where landed gentry and titled nobles alike came to slake their thirst for depravity in a shared space with each other. No names, no judgment, just mindless fucking, which was all he needed right now was to wipe his mind of the unacceptable softness the assignation with her had brought about.And if you leave quickly, you won’t give yourself an opportunity to change your mind.
It did not take him long to arrive at the white-gabled home. Inside, there was a sea of flesh, bodies writhing everywhere he turned. A young woman he knew to be the daughter of a baronet was on her knees before a thick-set orc, a line of drool connecting her mouth to the tip of his cock every time he pulled out to give her a breath, while behind her, a human looking man pumped away, eyes squeezed shut.
There was little challenge in finding a partner who appealed to his sensibilities. Silas moved the woman’s hand over the bulge of his clothed erection, pushing her fingers in a way that made the movement feel clumsy and unpracticed, the wayhershad felt, but as soon as he let go of her wrist, the stranger’s grip was sure and proficient, her hand tight as she undid the front of his trousers, drawing his stiffened shaft out.
She suckled on his cock tip and squeezed his knot, her hands moving one over the other, from root to tip. It was pleasurable, but it wasn’t at all what he wanted. She squeezed his sac and massaged his knot as she took his cock down her throat, his fingers tight in her hair and his wings stretching open, but it wasn’t what he wanted. He came with a choked groan, balls tight and knot pulsing, but it wasn’t atallwhat he wanted. Normally, he would have stayed for another hour or two after his first spill, enjoying himself with a bevy of beautiful women of various species, but that night he only felt numb and quickly took his leave.
Once home, Silas returned to the empty bedroom they had occupied, staring at the rumpled coverlet, his nose still able to pick out a soft whisper of lilac in the air. The scream that ripped from his throat was primal, the closest he had ever sounded to his nearly feral ancestors, and the credenza to his right paid the price for his sudden, incomprehensible rage. The fine wood splintered against the wall where he flung it, the chaise following it.
He needed to get out, to get away, to see the sky and the moon and breathe the icy night air, needed to getawayfrom the feeling that was clawing at his chest. He would return to Basingstone. It was too late to reach the manor that night, but if he took wing and did not wait for his carriage and horses, he could cover a good bit of ground before dawn. He would ensure he was safely tucked away on some village church rooftop before daybreak and then complete the journey the following evening.
He would leave that night, leave right now, and put this evening behind him, this evening and the way she’d felt in his arms, the unrestrained sound of her laughter, and the maddening, intoxicating smell of her far behind him. Back to Basingstone, where Eleanor Eastwick was unable to follow.
“And if I have to hear one more bloody word about it, I’ll set fire to the whole thrice-damned countryside myself!” His shout rattled the windows in their casements, making the candles at the edge of the room waver. Silas paced behind his desk, fury and aggravation practically radiating out of his long, pointed ears. “Do I make myself clear, Kestin?”
Before him, the mothman stood unaffected. Bored, even. Silas flared his nostrils and gnashed his teeth, fists balled at his sides, but his steward only sniffed.
“Crystal clear, my lord.”
His fingers trembled at the brandy decanter once the steward had taken his leave. A cut crystal glass, three fingers of the amber liquid, a memory flash of the port he’d shared in her shabby but cozy library. He made a noise of frustration in his throat, furious at the unloyal treachery of his own mind. Silas had been tense and on edge since he’d arrived a day earlier, snapping at anyone unlucky enough to cross his path, and Eleanor Eastwick was solely to blame.
He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, saying yes to this mad plan in the first place. He was not a matchmaker, was no marriage broker. Marriage was the last thing in the world he wanted. What would he even know about the bloody subject?! Efraim Ellingboe had placed his trust in the wrong gargoyle, and it would have been smarter to simply say no from the start. At the very least, he reminded himself, he ought to call the whole thing off with the girl before they progressed any further, as quickly as possible, let her know he’d offered as much assistance as he was able, and wish her well.
Silas had never considered himself to be possessed of an extraordinary intelligence. With each day that passed, each day that she remained in his purview, he thought, throwing back the brandy as if it were some back alley pot shop brew and not a fine varietal, the supposition became a certainty.
His skin itched, feeling snug around his bones as if he’d gone to bed wet, shrinking up in the sun. His mind was a tangled mess of frustration and desire, annoyance and irritability, and he found himself drifting from pastime to pursuit to profession with little care or cognizance of anything around him. His temper was short, his patience in short supply, and seemingly worst of all, his cock was an aching agony, stiffening in the slightest breeze every time his nose caught the scent of the freshly bloomed lilacs around the moon chapel. It made no matter how often he emptied it — jerking himself in a mad frenzy until he seized, spilling like a green boy, or else, making good use of Lady Derrybrook’s firm grip and willing mouth, fucking dairymaids and a duke’s daughter, trying and failing every day to purge his loins of the hot, hard desire they’d developed for Eleanor Eastwick, but it was no use. His knot pulsed in a cadence that seemed to echo her name and hers alone.
