Clockwork Tangerine (9 page)

It was a delight more scintillating than standing in the middle of an electrical storm.

And promised to be just as wet.

Marcus’s cock slid in, its head pushing past Robin’s entrance and gliding into the tightness beyond. Panting, Robin spread his knees farther apart, hooking his heels onto the jut of Marcus’s hips as the man canted forward again, this time to rest his weight on his hands, his chest a mere few inches above Robin’s torso. A drop of sweat beaded down from Marcus’s temple, and the strain on his face was enormous as he held back his thrusts until Robin adjusted to the feel of his intrusion.

The dewy drop fell and struck Robin’s upper lip. He instinctively dabbed at it with his tongue, drawing on the salty sweet taste of the man’s body, and gasped.

This is Marcus. This is what he tastes like. This taste… this man… this is what will fill me for as long as I breathe.

It was a heady realization, and Robin lost his breath under its enormity.

Then Marcus began to move his hips, rocking his cock in and out of Robin’s hole, and Robin forgot it all, lost in the burning delight of his lover’s thrusts.

He’d never thought of sex as an elegant exercise. What little he’d learned about it before was colored by his dead parents’ infrequent couplings, heard through the thin walls of their room as he lay in the loft overhead. After that, his instructors were whores and other men, both less concerned about the romance of the act and more focused on the culmination. Sex to Robin was a sweaty, dirty business, stinking of bodily fluids and ripe with desperation.

Marcus Stenhill, Viscount of Westwood, was showing him it was so much more.

It was still wet and certainly messy. Their bodies strained to meet one another, slapping together and smacking wet skin on skin, but the glory of it shone through. Every tilt of Marcus’s hips brought a keener edge to the razor of Robin’s pleasure as Marcus stropped him to his climax. Marcus’s hands moved, gripping Robin’s thighs, and he lifted Robin up from the mattress, plunging deeper and deeper with every stroke until Robin thought he’d be split in two from the strike of Marcus’s heavy balls against his rear.

Then the wave of lightning inside of him broke from its stronghold and Robin was lost, his shoulders and back clenched in rigid release as his cock could no longer take the rising pleasure.

His seed was hot, coating Marcus’s chest and his own stomach. Stray drops splattered over Marcus’s arms, and he growled, taking one last enormous thrust to strike the nerves of Robin’s core.

The pacing grew slower but no less intense, especially when Robin felt his channel suddenly flood with the heat of his lover’s seed and the space left empty inside of him was filled with a wonder of belonging to… and claiming… the man making love to him.

“I love you,” Marcus whispered into the hollow of Robin’s throat. “I cannot live without you, Mr. Harris. Don’t ask me to. I beg of you.”

“Never leaving you.” Robin placed his hands on Marcus’s sweat-dampened temples. “I love you, Westwood… Marcus Stenhill. No matter what happens beyond us, we will have each other. I promise.”

The ache of his spread legs soon grew too much for Robin, and he shifted under Marcus’s weight. The man pulled free, slowly and messily, but Robin was left more saddened by the emptiness inside of him rather than concerned about the drying smears on their tired bodies.

After kissing Robin, Marcus reluctantly slipped free and collapsed onto the mattress, his chest heaving to catch up with his breathing.

“Well, I can tell you one thing,” Robin gasped, his own breath short in his lungs.

“What’s that, love?”

“I’m not thinking about that damned mechanical bird anymore.”

One Year Later—

M
ARCUS
S
TENHILL
cantered up to his country estate on the bay gelding he’d purchased from his eldest brother a few weeks before. The horse was the first sign of thawing between Brent and Marcus after the estrangement about Robin residing in Westwood Manor. His grandmother had been right. Brent needed time to adjust to the idea that Robin was as much of a victim of the Society as their father had been, but she encouraged Marcus to stand firm.

After all, she’d married for love as well. The elderly woman knew what she was talking about.

As one of the few people who knew the exact nature of Marcus’s relationship with Robin, she became one of the scientist’s most vocal supporters, and after the Dowager House on the property was renovated to serve as Robin’s workshop, she could often be found there, pestering him.

At first Robin was alarmed by the smothering affection, but he soon dealt with it as he endured all things, stoically and with an air of absentminded brilliance. To give himself room to think, he enlisted the elderly woman in his constructions, and she beamed with pride when a little girl took her first unaided walk with the help of Robin’s latticework struts. Anyone within hearing distance knew that she’d been the one to thread ball bearings into the struts’ channels, and Marcus spotted more than one tear on her face as she held her breath for that first wobbly step.

The manor was bustling with activity when he rounded the bend, and Marcus frowned, trying to recall if they’d invited guests. The pair of gleaming bronze peacocks he’d imported from Burma were nowhere to be seen, although he could hear the faint cries of one coming from beyond the stable. Instead of the birds strutting about the front drive, a cluster of carriages and curricles crowded the entrance and the main door had been left open, his grandmother’s creaky old apricot poodle gnawing on what looked like a cow femur on the front hall’s Persian carpet.

The dog stank to high heaven, much more so than the bone, and he grinned up at Marcus when he walked by, the ball of fur at the end of his groomed tail beating a steady tattoo on the foyer floor.

Having tossed his coat onto a receiving table in the foyer, Marcus strode through the manor, looking for someone to explain to him what the hell was going on in his house.

He got his answer on the bowling pitch in the east gardens.

Robin sat perched on what appeared to be a curricle of sorts, but instead of wheels, it sported giant scallops of inflated leather, much like a flattened zeppelin. There were no horses, but a pipe organ looking device sat on the back deck of the thing, its metal cylinders puffing and sucking furiously. Astonished, Marcus watched the thing with his lover in it rise up off the ground and float forward a few feet, and the small crowd of bookish-looking people gathered at the pitch’s edging let off a cheer loud enough to drown the organ’s wheezing.

Less astonishing was his elderly grandmother, wearing a pair of goggles and netting over a driving hat, pumping her fists up in the air in victory as Robin guided the contraption around the green.

“Isn’t it marvelous, Westwood?” Ducky shouted at Marcus, barely audible over the thing’s rattling, whistling engine.

“Hurry it up, Robin!” The dowager cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted at Marcus’s lover. “I want a turn at it before Ducky wrecks it!”

Robin laughed loudly and caromed the contraption over the length of the greensward, its propulsion leaving sprays of grass blades behind it. Avoiding the cheering and hooting group, Robin lowered the vehicle down in front of the gathering, his face lit up with a broad smile.

Jumping out of the cab, Robin nearly fell to his knees, and Marcus grabbed at him, remembering at the last moment he shouldn’t clasp the lanky man to his chest in an embrace. They were far enough away from the group for their conversation to be private, but anything overtly physical could be remarked upon. So instead, he patted Robin’s arms and grinned down at his lover in a bemused confusion, nodding at the still-puffing curricle as it was swarmed by the crowd.

“What in the Nine Hells is that thing, Mr. Harris?” Marcus gasped as his grandmother climbed up into the curricle. “And what the bloody hell does she think she’s going to do in there?”

“She’ll drive it. Well, glide it?” Robin tore off the goggles he’d been wearing to protect his eyes and grinned at his lover. “Did you see?”

“I saw,” Marcus laughed. “But what is it, love?”

The man before him was so different now. Health and joy brought a sparkle to Robin’s eyes, and more often than not, his oddly handsome face held a smile. It was good to see. And even better to wake up next to every day.

As well as go to bed with every night.

And Marcus thanked the heavens each and every day for his grandmother’s love of a very good tea.

“That, love—that is a flying machine. Well, sort of. It hovers. On a bed of air. Think of it, we can take the hills without worrying about a horse losing its footing or a steam engine’s brakes going.” Robin wrinkled his nose as he murmured the affectionate phrase under his breath despite the fact no one could hear them.

A large boom erupted from the device’s pipes, and Marcus jumped, startled by the melodic bursts of whistles coming out of the metal tubes.

“Is it supposed to do that?” His heart raced at the thought of having to explain to his brother how his grandmother somehow was scattered about the back lawns, torn apart by an air-skimming calliope.

“Sometimes,” Robin replied with a shrug. The noise didn’t seem to bother him, although Marcus noticed he’d taken a step back from the lawn. “Ducky tried to reconfigure the exhaust intake before I could stop him. I might need to recalibrate the equalizer, but it’ll be fine.”

Another boom shot out of the contraption, and the dowager broke out in a fit of giggles, accompanied by a joyous ditty from the device’s belly.

“What are you going to call this thing, then?” Marcus slid his hand down to the small of Robin’s back, caressing the spot he’d left a love bite on just that morning. “Besides a hazard?”

“I’m going to call it the Stenhill Peacock.” Robin grinned at his lover and pushed his spectacles back up his long nose. “Everyone will want one. As soon as I can figure out how to make it stop that infernal singing.”

R
HYS
F
ORD
was born and raised in Hawai’i, then wandered off to see the world. After chewing through a pile of books, a lot of odd food, and a stray boyfriend or two, Rhys eventually landed in San Diego, which is a very nice place but seriously needs more rain.

Rhys admits to sharing the house with three cats, a black Pomeranian puffball, a bonsai wolfhound, and a ginger cairn terrorist. Rhys is also enslaved to the upkeep of a 1979 Pontiac Firebird, a laptop, and a red Hamilton Beach coffeemaker.

Visit Rhys’s blog at http://rhysford.wordpress.com/

or e-mail Rhys at [email protected].

By
R
HYS
F
ORD

N
OVELS

Fish and Ghosts

C
OLE
M
C
G
INNIS
M
YSTERIES

Dirty Kiss

Dirty Secret

Dirty Laundry

S
INNERS
S
ERIES

Sinner’s Gin

Whiskey and Wry

N
OVELLAS

Clockwork Tangerine

Published by
D
REAMSPINNER
P
RESS

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com