The thought didn’t pain him.At least not on Kitty’s account.
Malcolm didn’t stay in the barn for long.He circulated amongst his employees, trading pleasantries, and watched the dancing.He spoke to some of the older folks, those who had known him as a boy and who had known his grandfather and was grateful for the kindness he found in those exchanges.
But before long, he found himself tired of the conviviality.The night was beginning to get raucous, and he had no desire to see more.
As often happened with him, he had come to the barn in the hope that he would feel more at ease there than he had at Parkhorne.But the truth was that the barn and its revelers fit him little better than the fine people down from London.No, as usual, the only people he felt true ease with were his siblings.Only they seemed to understand the strange life that attended being one of the offspring, bastard or legitimate, of Mr.Alexander Salisbury.
He left the barn and inhaled the soft night air.Then he began his solitary walk home.He was happy for Ezra, he thought, and knew that soon the man would have not just a wife, but a family.
That thought stung more than it would have yesterday.
While he had never been sorry to avoid the awkwardness of courtship, it pained him to imagine never being a father.It was a strange regret, when his own father had been so derelict.But—still—it was how he felt.His single state generally gave him little pain, besides the inconvenience of lust.But then there was, too, this strange, intermittent yearning after fatherhood that he couldn’t understand.
As he walked back to his room, he knew the reason for this irritating melancholy.
It was her.
Miss Scarlett Perkins.
He had never seen or conversed with a woman who interested him, tempted him, so much.She seemed to embody, much more so than poor Kitty Rogers, everything in women that it pained him to give up.
And it wasn’t just her beauty, although it tortured him.
No, it was something in her air, he thought, as he opened the door to his chamber and, as he often did, undressed quickly, without lighting a candle.He slid between his sheets.
She had a softness about her which was not weakness.
An intelligence that had nothing of shrewdness in it but nevertheless carried bite.
Strange, he thought, he could still smell her scent on him, even though it had been hours since they had parted.
It was delicate, citrus-tinted.
As gorgeous and subtle as she was.
He inhaled and it hung in the room, all around him.
He felt himself go hard.
He imagined how good it would feel to stroke himself and think of her.He imagined pushing down the bodice of that infernal dress and touching her delectable breasts with trembling fingertips.He imagined finding that apex between her thighs with his tongue.The sounds she would make.He could imagine, in short, all the pleasures that would never be his to claim from her.
With his cock hard and raging, he shut his eyes.
No.
He needed to be stricter with himself.
He could not allow himself to lust after all the things he couldn’t have in this life.
And so, even though he wanted to desperately, even though her scent—somehow—was all around him, teasing his senses, he closed his eyes.
Soon, he was fast asleep.
Chapter Nine
Once more, MalcolmBrown awoke mid-orgasm.
But this one, he immediately knew, was different from all the ones that had ever come before.
