Life is good for physician Cameron, explorer Blake, and scholar-duke Ashley, or so it seems. They’ve moved in together, Cam’s practice is going well, Blake’s published a new memoir, and Ash is planning to build a library with his inheritance. But that inheritance is exactly Ash’s problem.
He never expected to be a duke, with Parliamentary politics and an estate to manage. Ash isn’t even good at household accounts. And he’s got a lecture to give to the Royal Antiquarian Society in a week. He’s trying his best, but he’s overwhelmed, and an upcoming anniversary only adds a reminder of family loss.
Ash believes Cam and Blake love him now, but will that still be the case when he finally admits to needing help?
Tonight’s reading had been organized by Blake’s publisher Murray, at the home of someone Ash did not know, though her name sounded familiar: a Lady Flemyng, a countess in her own right, and luxuriously wealthy. Almost the instant he and Cam arrived, he realized why: Maria Flemyng had hosted a reading of Blake’s work before, and not only that, she’d decorated her home, as much of it as could be seen amid the crush, with Blake.
Everywhere. Sketches. Pillow covers. Embroidered likenesses. Collected playbills from the stage productions. Commemorative plates. And, of course, all the books: every travel journal and memoir, every voyage. From the ruined castle explorations in the Rhine valley to canoes along winding South American rivers to mountain-hiking in the Alps, and all the encounters in between: the flirtations, the seductions, the lonely beautiful widows -- or, in some cases, married ladies -- who begged for a taste of the adventure.
Blake had not written about the encounters with men, of course. On any usual day Ash would feel smug about that -- those interests weren’t for everyone to know, and in any case Blake was his and Cam’s, and only theirs, now -- but he was too busy being horrified. An uncomfortably large and lopsided version of Blake’s face was looming at him from a hand-painted decorative screen.
“Fucking hell,” Cam breathed, just loud enough for Ash to hear, “I love the man as much as you do, and I’ve never been inclined to paint his eyebrows that size…”
“I think the relative size is unintentional.”
“Why did I leave Edinburgh,” Cam uttered, staring at the commemorative plates with the series of Blake Thornton, explorer, in various supposedly native costumes. “Why. You lot are insane, in London.”
“Didn’t you already own two of his books?”
“That’s a normal amount!”
“And one of the plates?”
“That was a present from a client! We’d chatted about books! She’d been shopping!” Cam scowled at the closest copy of Blake’s Voyages in Greece and Cyprus, expensive binding on blatant display. “And it doesn’t even look like him. Nowhere near good enough.”
“Not arguing the point,” Ash agreed helpfully. “I bought one because it was dreadful. He tossed it out a window.”
“Was it the one with the feathers in interesting places, or --” Interruption arrived, in the form of their hostess coaxing everyone away from tea and biscuits and into the drawing room. Blake’s face was everywhere here too; but the real person straightened from leaning against a bookshelf and chatting with his publisher, and pushed too-long rakish hair out of his face, and found Cam and Ash to gaze at, with visible relief.
“Hello,” Ash said. “You look lovely. And I’m looking forward to your reading.” Blake did: in simple black and white, no flamboyant colors, but it suited him. The dark hair, the muscles of someone who’d scaled mountains and forded rivers. Those thighs.
Here in Lady Flemyng’s drawing room he couldn’t go and lick the thighs, or order Blake to get on both knees and pleasure him with that wicked and talented mouth. A pity.
