Andrew toyed with his pen, the quill sliding through his fingers. Much though he tried to prevent it, his thoughts kept returning to the handsome, arrogant aristocrat he’d found in Newgate Gaol that morning. The intimacies of the encounter forced their way back into his brain every time he pushed them out. He could taste the other man, feel the hard body against his and the arms holding him firmly. Everything about the embrace was so different from a woman’s soft caresses. Except for the silky softness of Shaw’s lips, a startling contrast to his inert strength.
Andrew would not lie to himself. He loved it, loved the way Shaw felt under his hands, loved the masculine, spicy scent pushing its way past the stink of the cell. He had suppressed those feelings for so long he had persuaded himself they didn’t exist anymore. Now he could not.
He should not dream. He had work to do. Gazing down, he saw the lines of neatly scribed words, the black ink against creamy white paper. What did it matter? Lord Frobisher was pursuing a claim for five miles of marshland from his neighbor. Who cared about marshland? Lord Frobisher brought a case every few months, and he was one of Andrew’s best clients. But what was the point?
Not when Andrew had rediscovered the passions of his youth. He had put such concerns aside at Oxford. Working for his law degree had left him precious little free time. He was one of the students who’d worked and left university with a degree mainly because he needed it. Without it, he’d have had to stay in the family business. Now he was independent, wealthy by many people’s standards, including his family’s, and respectable.
Most of all respectable. He could not consider Darius Shaw as anything but a temporary inconvenience, a man who might help him out of his predicament with General Court. Nothing else. After they had cleared up that matter, they would never meet again.
A ludicrous sense of loss filled him with dismay. He had barely met the man. Shaw probably kissed Andrew out of a sense of devilry, daring him to do something about it. He seemed like a man dancing on a tightrope, or at the edge of a cliff, seemingly unaware of the chasm below him, but miraculously escaping his doom. One day he would meet his end, and the results would not be clean.
Lord Shaw was likely to end his life abroad. If he was lucky. The authorities here clamped down on activities like the ones at Mother Fleming’s, once it was put under their noses.
Giving up on work, he picked up his penknife and set to sharpening his quill. Once he had the nib finely carved, he started on the next one, which he’d sharpened only yesterday. But it gave him something to do, and the repetitive task would settle his mind.
Unfortunately most of his caseload was of the repetitive, tedious kind. But it paid well. Such cases funded this house and his office in chambers. Modest by the standards of the Shaw family and their noble relatives, but grander than anything Andrew had known before. What was more, he’d earned every penny of its price.
That had to mean something.
The doorbell clanged, the slightly off-key note making him wince, as it always did. He should buy another, but he doubted he would find one that suited him any better, and the seller would most likely think he was running mad. Nobody wanted a doorbell that chimed a precise pitch, surely.
A gentle tap on his door heralded the entrance of his manservant. He carried a card, the left corner turned down. Andrew did not need to know who waited for him. The man’s presence filled his house. “Show him in.”
As he spoke, the clock chimed the half-hour. He’d changed when he got back from Newgate and ordered his clothes fumigated, as he always did. He kept a special suit of clothes for the times he was forced to visit prisoners, which admittedly did not happen often. Fastidiously, he refused to allow the prison stink to permeate the house, and changed in a small room off the kitchen downstairs. The maid would clean it. Even the court stank. Because of that care, he had never contracted gaol fever, nor had he brought it home for anyone else to suffer.
A swish of expensive fabric told him Lord Darius had entered the room. Taking his time, Andrew got to his feet and lifted his head to meet his guest’s eyes. Familiarity had not accustomed him to the startling blue, nor to the intensity of expression he found in the cerulean depths.
He did not bow. “Welcome, my lord.”
“Darius,” the man said. “My name is Darius. I prefer that my friends use it.”
“Andrew,” he responded numbly, wondering if he’d somehow been manipulated. Did Darius mean what he said, or was he trying to bring them closer together? He had no way of knowing, but he could not afford to allow the man too close.
Too late now. He’d allowed the intimacy of using first names.
Darius acknowledged the word with a brief nod.
Andrew came around the desk. “Please come upstairs. I let time run away with me, I’m afraid, or I would have been waiting for you in the drawing room.”
Darius glanced around. “I like it here. It reminds me of my father’s study.” He turned to follow Andrew out of the room. “He chooses the smallest most unobtrusive room he can find and makes it his own. At home in the country he has his study close to the library, but if you did not know it was there, you would walk straight past it.”
“It sounds perfect.” Andrew would love a place to hide away like that. An office where he could be sure nobody would disturb him.
“You sighed.”
Andrew opened the door and bowed Darius through. He raised a brow, smiling, and accepted the courtesy. “I did,” he said, closing the door carefully. “I am constantly in danger of interruption. That is all.”
“I imagine your life is full.”
“You could say that.” He had certainly done his best to fill it. That way he didn’t think about matters he should not. He found closing the shutters on his thoughts easier. Except when this man was close to him. Why should an arrogant lord touch him more than any other man had for years? Remind him of what he’d turned his back on so long ago?
He moved away from the enclosed space before the door into the wider area beyond. “I work downstairs and receive many of my visitors here. But I have been called to the Bar, and for that I have chambers in the Inns of Court.”
Footsteps behind him told Andrew his guest was following him across the black-and-white tiled hall. “You don’t seem to work as a barrister as often.”
Planting his foot on the bottom step, Andrew paused. “No, I do not. I was young and idealistic when I worked to take silk. To be truthful, my lord, there is little money to be made at the Bar. I wished to make a difference, or so I thought, and to take a hand in affecting the laws of our country. Precedence and case study are made at the Bar, for the most part. However,” he continued briskly, “I soon discovered the more lucrative practice of acting as a solicitor.”