the friend who cannot ever win a game of billiards like a gentleman,” he pointed out wryly. “All your crowing and posturing is enough for a court jester.”
Brandon grinned. “There you have it. I will own I am a poor winner. An even poorer loser, as it happens, which is why it is bloody fortunate indeed that I lose so rarely. Although, you must admit that you were not focusing upon the table. Your thoughts were elsewhere. I have never known you to be such an unfulfilling opponent. As much as I enjoy whipping your arse, I prefer to do so sportingly.”
“I was distracted.” The admission was torn from him.
“Ah,” Brandon said. “I never would have known.”
His friend’s sarcasm was not lost upon Tom. “If you must know, I am reaching the end of my fortnight, and the nearer I draw to the conclusion of my agreement with Lady Southwick, the more desperate I become to prolong it somehow.”
“Oh, hell.” Brandon shook his head, his mien turning mournful now. “Desperation does not become you, Sid. You need to remain impervious. A fortress. You are thinking with your cock.”
“No one ought to know about that better than you,” he could not resist taunting.
Brandon’s conquests were legion. Married ladies, widows, young misses, courtesans. Two women at once… His wicked reputation was the stuff of legends. And yet, he somehow seemed as unaffected by any of it as ever. Now that Tom thought upon it, his friend had never been tied in knots over a woman. He had never fallen in love. Had never lost his heart or sense of reason. Had never blindly followed the path he assumed he was meant to take.
No indeed.
Brandon simply bedded women without a thought for consequences, and without developing any tender emotions at all. Which was, as far as Tom was concerned, deuced impossible. Because he bloody well had not been able to keep himself from developing an attachment to Hyacinth, no matter how unwanted it was.
Brandon cleared his throat. “I ought to know about it, yes. But we are not speaking of me now, are we, Sid? No, we are speaking of you.”
“Perhaps we ought to be speaking of you as well,” Tom suggested, his suspicions blossoming now that all these thoughts were churning in his mind. “You have never once lost your heart, never once desired to continue an arrangement beyond its initial terms?”
His friend did not hesitate. “Never.”
“Who was your last conquest, Brandon?” he pressed, unable to stop himself. “Her name seems to be absent from my memory.”
“A courtesan visiting from Paris,” his friend said smoothly. “I have forgotten her name. She was of little import, and for all that she promised herself capable of bringing me to my knees, the baggage scarcely brought me to completion. But that is neither here nor there. Do you know what you need, old chum?”
Another week with Hyacinth. And thereafter another. And yet one more. All the weeks he could have.
He shook his head instead of answering with the truth. “No, Brandon. As ought to be more than apparent by now, I do not.”
“A meaningless afternoon romp with a woman who is not the curvaceous little widow next door to you,” his friend said in a tone of pure, speculative evil.
“No romps,” he said. “And if you ogle Hyacinth again, I will have no choice but to blacken your eye.”
Brandon shook his head. “I despair of you, Sidmouth.”
That made two of them. He nodded.
“You are utterly hopeless when it comes to the fairer sex,” Brandon added.
Tom’s suspicions roared to life once more, crowding all the other, conflicting emotions warring within him. “Something tells me that you are as well, old chum.”
“Hmm,” was all Brandon said. Before adding, “Would you care for a whisky?”
Relief washed over Tom at the chance for further diversion and a change of subject. “I thought you would never ask.”
Chapter Fourteen
It was their last night together.
The final evening in their fortnight of passion.
The end scene, just before the curtains fell.
The thoughts became a litany, running through Hyacinth’s mind, echoing and ceaseless in its taunts. It followed her for the duration of the carriage ride to St. John’s Wood. Shadowed her up the pavements to Brandon’s love nest, a place she would forever remember with fondness and longing. Haunted her all the way to the cozy library where Tom awaited her, an open volume of poetry in his hands.
He looked up at her entrance, gazing at her as if he had never seen her