A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel (The Doomsday Books, #2)

by K.J. Charles

powerful thighs made for riding. Luke certainly wouldn’t mind riding them, a thought he put firmly aside.

Lord Oxney was so obviously a man who gave people chances: there was a very kind heart under the thick muscle and temper. It made him staggeringly easy to manipulate. Luke made a silent vow that nobody else would be doing that while he was here.

“A nobleman’s guide to courting a countess? Step one, take the lady’s hand and praise the delicacy of her skin with a salute.” Doomsday adopted a decidedly effete upper-class voice for that, simultaneously turning his hand and arm in a wonderfully elegant manner, offering Rufus his palm just like a lady. Rufus took it, bowed over it, and kissed it.

“Madam, your eyes are as brown as, uh. I don’t know. Bread?” Doomsday’s downswept eyes swept right back up. “Bread?” “I couldn’t think of anything else brown. Hot chocolate? A good beef stew?”

“But even if you weren’t fully aware of what was happening at the time, it will have been there—the fear of power, and hostility. Knowing you have been abandoned and could be again. Feeling you should be a part of something but you aren’t.”

“Damned if I can see what you’d do to make this cheerful,” Oxney said, looking around. “Well, burn it. A fire would be cheerful while it lasted.”

That was why he’d fucked him: because for all his vaunted brains, Luke was painfully aware that he did not love intelligently. So he tried his best not to love at all. He chose as partners men who could fuck with friendliness and part without dramatics, because he had control of his life these days, and didn’t intend to lose it again. But there was still a kernel of him that was a desperate, lost, hungry thing, and no matter how hard he tried to starve it out, it was always there, poking its head out at a sniff of affection, howling for more, making him hopeful and vulnerable and stupid.

Fortunately, Oxney—a good man, a responsible master—was clearly determined not to act on the attraction between them. Unfortunately, he wasn’t doing the sensible thing of ignoring Luke and confining himself to orders, or behaving like a prick so as to earn a healthy dislike. Instead he was kind, he was amusing, he cared for Luke’s well-being and his feelings, and thought of his wants, and appreciated his work, and stood up for him, and was in every respect the sort of man one could fall hopelessly in love with if one didn’t know how staggeringly stupid that would be.

Worst of all, he had nobody to blame but himself. (And Oxney, if one could blame a man for being too protective, smiling too much, and possessing an excessively nice pair of forearms.)

At the age of thirty-three, Rufus thought he might be set in his ways, and wasn’t troubled by the fact. It was his body and he’d use it as he pleased, whether that was with men or with nobody at all.

“Spitting it out is the last thing I’m going to do. I want you in my mouth. Like this, now.”

He was considerate in ways that made Luke feel stupidly soft and vulnerable and cared for; he was brawny and bulky and mouth-wateringly good to look at, and it was all so unfair that Luke could have cried.

He knew very well Luke was a weakling for his arms.

It was called Hope All Saints. He was standing in the broken ruins of Hope in the rain, like the stupidest Gothic hero in the stupidest book.

A fellow officer of Rufus’s on the Peninsula had had a knack for bloodcurdling campfire tales, including one about a sorcerer who raised men from the dead. Rufus wished that such magic was possible. He’d give anything for ten minutes with Elijah Doomsday.

Rufus leant forward, propping muscular forearms on muscular thighs, powerful shoulders rounded. Luke’s mouth went dry.

He’d never had much truck with shades of grey. A man was honest or dishonest; a course of action was right or wrong. Luke Doomsday had upended all his certainties. Rufus believed in honesty as the bedrock for relationships of whatever kind; Luke had lied to him consistently, deliberately, and outrageously, over weeks, drawing a poisoned line through friendship and intimacy. It was the worst betrayal of Rufus’s life, and he wanted to forgive it so much that he had to curl his toes inside his boots to set his will.