Baron Hawthorn patted Alan patronisingly on the shoulder and launched into an expanded version of the story he’d come up with in Westminster, complete with vague gesturing at both stick and leg, hinting at dire wounds. Good old Sergeant Ross had saved his life in the Boer. Much lamented. Been pleased to connect with Ross’s only son back in England.
Alan couldn’t remember if he’d ever told Kenyon that his father had been an ice-cream seller, but it hardly mattered. Reality was being overwritten through sheer force of aristocratic authority. Kenyon—both an ardent voice for the kingdom’s military and an ex-Transvaal civil servant—gazed at Lord Hawthorn, Boer veteran, with increasing adoration. Alan swallowed a complex, wriggling mouthful of possessive feeling.
“—view it kindly if you’d help me keep an eye out for the lad’s prospects,” finished Jack insufferably. “I’m sure he’s acutely aware of the privilege, and all that, working here at the bastion of modern political thought.”
Alan managed to mutter something appropriate.
“Of … course,” said Kenyon weakly. “Talented lad. Asset to the newsroom. Always thought so.” His own sentences were falling into step with Jack’s.
Jack reminisced about the war a while longer, made an on-the-spot donation of fifty pounds to the paper’s ridiculous subscription fund to buy an airship for national defence, and trotted out the exact same arguments against the People’s Budget that Lord Cheetham had used.
Kenyon was practically floating half a foot above the ground by the time he ushered them back out of the office. Several pairs of eyes snapped down to notepaper or typewriter as they exited, and the melody of innocent typing followed them out into the corridor.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, that was even better than I expected,” Alan breathed. “If he doesn’t give me a sub-editor post by the end of the year, I’ll eat my hat. Maybe even one of your hats. With all that stiff silk, it’d be harder to get down.”
“Nonsense. I have full confidence in your ability to swallow stiff things,” said Jack, in that appallingly cut-glass tone.
Alan choked on incredulous laughter. He told his prick, rather desperately, that this wasn’t the time.
“Besides,” Jack went on, before Alan could muster a caustic response, “when you then leverage the position for one at the Sphere, the man can hold me to blame.”
“I don’t think he’d blame you for slitting his throat even if you made eye contact the whole time,” said Alan. “No, he’ll moan at you about my fickle lack of gratitude, and you can agree that the lower classes these days lack all sense of loyalty to their masters.”
The side of Jack’s mouth twisted. He leaned against the wall and propped both hands on the silver head of his stick. The motion was casual, but the shift of his weight caught Alan’s attention. Surprise rendered him ruder than he’d intended.
“Don’t tell me you actually have a war wound.”
“Nothing serious,” said Jack. “The Lord Hawthorn who remembers his war service fondly and with pride will of course talk about it at every opportunity.”
Alan laughed. “Hell, he was something, wasn’t he? I could write a story about him.” He was ready to put the thought away and pull it out again later, but Jack’s gaze caught him like a fishing line and held him.
“What kind of story?”
For Christ’s sake. Alan had never been asked to produce plot ideas while standing upright and fizzing with arousal.
“The kind of toff who’ll waltz in here and throw his weight around like that wouldn’t put himself out for nothing. Not for a gutter journalist like me. He’d do it because he expected something in return.”
“Something,” said Jack.
Too many emotions fought for attention. Alan was coming down off success and ignoring the ever-present groundswell of his guilt. He’d already made the mistake of fucking this man, hadn’t he? He couldn’t unmake it. He could only decide how much further he was prepared to go.
But writing was work. He didn’t want to be the one coming up with the stage directions for something real.
“Yes. I imagine he’d be impatient about it too.”
Jack looked briefly down the corridor as someone exited a door and headed away from them towards the street entrance. Then his attention returned to Alan. “And what precisely is the journalist offering?”
Deliberate; measured. Alan thought of how careful Jack had been, in his study, to be sure of Alan’s desire before he let himself off the leash. Jack Alston was mocking and infuriating, and the existence of his station was a travesty, but he was—he wasn’t—
Alan needed to stop thinking. He let himself be hunger, and shame, and little else.
He lifted his gaze.
“Use me.”
An expression with claws and teeth rose behind the brilliant blue of Jack’s eyes, visible in the way their corners tightened and a small sneer twitched beside his nose. He inhaled hard. “Come with me.”
The limp, if there’d been one, was gone. Jack’s legs ate up the corridor as he strode down it, rattling the handles of closed doors—opening those that weren’t locked, and giving an impatient nod to anyone inside before closing them again. As if he had more right to be here than the people whose workplace this was. As if interrupting or inconveniencing them was nothing. Alan knew it was mostly an act and still wanted to punch him.
And it was unbearably arousing, because Jack was exerting the full force of his arrogance in order to find an empty room in which to let this play out.
They did find one. It seemed to be where broken chairs and old cabinets were put to think about their sins: gloomy, smelling of damp, and with the ugliest greenish carpet Alan had ever seen.
His lordship slammed the door behind Alan and crowded him back against it. There was no key to turn in the lock. Alan’s heart snuck up his throat until he had to swallow hard to get it back down into his chest.
“You’re right,” said Jack. The sneer was in his voice now. “I’m not inclined to wait for what I’m owed.”
“My lord. I don’t understand—”
“I think you do.”
Alan’s mind kept looping on no lock! as his hands flattened on the door and his little finger banged painfully against the doorknob. He was spending a lot of time around doors lately. But none of his adventures in Spinet House could hold a candle to this.
A version of himself. That was what he needed, just as the man in front of him—broad and inescapable, close enough that Alan could see a shaving nick on his jaw and the exact shape of that broken nose—was a version of Jack.
“You think I’m that kind of man?” He let his voice shake. It would have shaken anyway. They were so close. Alan’s body was alive and humming. “You think I’ll let you have your way with me, in some kind of indecent—perverse—”
Jack didn’t bother to reply. He smiled the cruel smile of a card-player about to take his opponent for everything down to the shirt on their back and lifted a hand to flick mockingly at a lock of Alan’s hair. Then traced down the side of his face. Two blunt fingertips, barely making contact, but the touch sent shivers of sensation across Alan’s cheek.