“And yet he routinely spends time with the ton and isn’t a courtesan?”Maurice was hung up on placing Earnest in the correct class, and it wasn’t very fun.Sebastian hardly needed the reminder that he wasn’t in the same class as the Duke.
“You have probably heard of him.Sir Earnest Pashley.”
“The poet.”Maurice’s eyebrows were doing a lot of work tonight.
“Yes.Is it so hard to countenance that I might be friends with a poet?”
Maurice blinked, before schooling his face into that expressionless visage that Sebastian saw so often.He realised how infrequently Maurice did that around him, and maybe that was an important detail that he should ...No, that was better off not being thought of.
“Pashley?Wasn’t he in the newssheets for camping on the Earl of Horden’s lawn for a month?”
“I’m sure that rumour is vastly exaggerated.”It had been only a few days before Adam had hauled the heartbroken Earnest to his rooms.Earnest had written some sorrowful poetry, and Nobbie’s letter about the incident had been rather amusing.
“Somehow I imagined your friends to be less dramatic.”Maurice appeared quite bothered by this.
“And I have never imagined you have any friends.”Sebastian immediately regretted the mean retort as Maurice struggled to hide his hurt reaction.Maurice dabbed his mouth with his napkin.After a silence that dragged on, leaving Sebastian to fidget with his own napkin, Maurice finally made an audible breath.
“It is true that forming genuine friendships is difficult in my position.People tend to see the title and what it can do for them, rather than the man holding it.”
Oh ...Sebastian hadn’t intended this conversation to get so serious.His damned heart was going to get involved if this kept going, so he pushed Maurice away in the only way that he could.
“Imagine being an orphan.Unseen and unwanted by everyone.”Sebastian kept his gaze steady on Maurice’s face.Neither of them backed down.Sebastian shouldn’t find the intensity so damned hot, or could he allow himself to enjoy it?No.Down that road lay misery.
Chapter 11
Maurice’s skin chilledat Sebastian’s response.It wasn’t a goddamned competition for who had it worst in life.Sebastian, obviously.Literally everyone in England had a harder life than he did and he wasn’t about to claim that anything in his life was truly difficult, and yet when Sebastian dismissed his frustrations around finding genuine friends, it annoyed him.It didn’t make his problems any less real just because they weren’t as big as other people’s, did it?
“I might not know what that was like, but—”
“But nothing, Maurice.You sit here in your big house with all your servants and you go to parliament and make decisions about what is best for us, the ordinary people, without knowing what it is like to be us.”
He couldn’t argue with that logic and so he paused before responding because he didn’t want to make it about his reaction—or about him—and he wanted to discuss the problems associated with him having power and privilege, or at a bare minimum acknowledge that he knew he had them.
“Cat got your tongue?”Sebastian crossed his arms across his chest.The fabric of his jacket hid his strong pectoral muscles, which did nothing to stop Maurice remembering how they’d looked as Sebastian had thrust into him.The memory of the strength across his chest and shoulders as he cradled Maurice’s head with those practical hands made Maurice want to tug at his cravat.It was suddenly hot in here.
“No.I have learned that it is best not to respond immediately without thought.”
