Rite of Summer: Treading the Boards, Book 1 (18 page)

Yes,
he decided a few minutes later, sitting on the carved granite bench. This would do nicely. The rolling green side lawn extended away in front of him, the high and silent façade of the house a looming presence behind and the sun glimmering down from partway up the sky.
This is perfect. Silence, light and no people to confound me and make life difficult. If only it could always be this way.

“And good morning to you, stranger.”

Naturally.

Sophie sat beside him, settling down onto the bench as though she meant to stay awhile. Her hair was bound up beneath her cap, an apron tied around her waist. The sewing basket under her arm suggested her errand. “You’re hiding again.” She had dropped her accent, the false French lilt pointless when he knew full well that she was as English born as he.

“I am not in the mood,” he cautioned her. Normally her teasing could jolly him back to smiles from just about anything, but today was different.

“I see that,” Sophie began, deceptively mildly. “Are you and your lover on the outs again? He is causing you more pain than pleasure, on the whole.” She opened the basket and rummaged within, taking out a handful of tangled skeins of brightly hued silk thread.

“Sarah!”
Joshua hissed, the girl’s real name slipping out in his panic. He turned, scanned the lawn, but there was no one to be seen. “Still yourself, woman, or you will have me turned into a new flag over the house.”

“Still
yourself
,” Sophie-Sarah said. She picked through the tangle until she found the loose end of a pink thread and began to unwind it from its fellows. “We are quite alone. Why do you think I chose now to speak?”

“Regardless,” Joshua insisted, his cheeks growing hot, “it is no good for you to worry about my well-being and announce my crimes in the same breath.”

“What I worry about is your attachment to a man who leaves you looking like a widow in first mourning, instead of someone enjoying the flush of youth and love,” she said pointedly.

Joshua braced his elbows on his knees and ran his hands over his face, scruffing his fingers through the hair on the nape of his neck. “I am not attached,” he muttered.

“Hmm.” Sophie made a noise that he ignored. The pink silk caught and she worked the knot free with her nails, drawing out the skein to pile the free end in her lap. “And that is why you are a broody hen out here and he is sulking in the drawing room, naturally.”

“Ashbrook is sulking?” He spoke before he thought. That reaction was to be expected after Cade’s actions the previous night, he supposed. Foolish enough to think that he might be upset over
Joshua
or anything that he had said. Joshua was the interloper, the variable that had upset their careful balance. He had no right to feel proprietary.

“Oh indeed.” Sophie nodded solemnly, and he had fallen right into her trap. “He plunks one note upon the pianoforte, like so…” she tapped the air with a single, dramatic finger, “…and then he sits his chin upon his hand and sighs ‘aye me’…” Sophie pressed her palm to her cheek, “…like so. And then he faints for grief.” She flattened the back of her hand against her forehead and pretended a swoon, her head tipping back and her eyes closed.

“Wench.” Joshua snorted, a smile twitching at the corners of his lips.

Sophie beamed at him in triumph.

“I do not think to speak for him…” Joshua sighed after a minute.

He could not lie to her. There was little point. A certain lightness settled in his chest. To be able to speak of it, freely and without euphemism—it was a freedom he hadn’t imagined he needed. Or could ever have.

“I…like him well. He infuriates me,” he added quickly, and Sophie chuckled. “But I find myself at odds when he is out of sorts with me.”

“And that sounds like every marriage I have ever heard of,” she replied. “Except, of course, for the presence of his other lover.”

“That may well be over,” Joshua confessed. And he had been overlooking the obvious answer—Sophie had the ear of the rest of the house. She might know more than he did about the circumstances surrounding…everything, really. “Cade has been bedding Lady Charlotte, and Ashbrook caught him at it yesterday.”

That got her attention away from the tangled silks, her eyes going wide. He hadn’t expected the wide grin that followed. “That explains a great many things,” she said, almost to herself. “And I take it whatever agreement exists between you three does not extend to noblemen’s daughters.”

“Apparently it did not.” Joshua shrugged, the world seeming to fall into more tangible order the more he talked it out. “Ashbrook confronted Cade, Cade was vehemently unapologetic, Ashbrook and I had words, and now here we all are, at arm’s length to each.”

And put like that it was so simple, was it not? Except that he could find no easy remedy. No power on earth would compel him to play go-between now.

He opened his sketchbook, the pages falling apart to a well-creased spot in the binding. Ashbrook’s face looked back at him from a dozen different poses, each one a futile attempt to capture the radiance of his animated beauty.

“Indeed,” Sophie murmured, winding the loose pink silk around her fingers in careful layers, “I see how it is.” That skein wound, she tucked in the end and sat it carefully back into her basket. Green next, the slippery threads clinging around a rainbow of other colors so tightly that unpicking them seemed impossible. “Tell me, do you love Mr. Ashbrook for himself, or because he so desperately needs to feel lovable?”

That stopped him dead. Her question was a riddle and a paradox, for wasn’t the beauty of the human being in the yearning? In the
something
in people’s eyes that burned to be more than what they were? It was utterly missing in some, replaced by flat satisfaction and stagnation…

He was an idiot.

But he had never said “love”.

“Does it matter?” he asked finally.

“For you? Yes.”

She was not about to let him off the hook upon which he dangled. Fine, then. If he had to articulate it, he would.

Joshua’s fingers curled around the charcoal and he flipped to a blank page, the black smudges already creeping across his skin. He outlined a curve that became a cheek, a cheek that fed down into a strong jaw, a dark curl that brushed against a naked shoulder, the collarbone winging out in an arc that would seduce da Vinci himself in his quest for human perfection.

There had been bruises there the last time, stained by Joshua’s mouth. The marks had stood out, red and lush against Ashbrook’s skin, begging to be sucked at, bitten and made darker again. All in service of the fantasy that was the word “mine”.

“When I first looked at him, I saw a demigod,” Joshua began, biceps and triceps emerging on his paper as he’d seen them last, arcing under his lips and straining to the touch of his hands. “Beauty unparalleled and entirely out of my reach.” And then a mark, a love bite on the column of his throat, the crook of one finger and the callouses there from his playing, the cracks that bled onto his palms and stained his skin with red. “Now he’s human, frail and vulnerable in ways I could not have imagined.”

Sophie made a soft noise.

“And stronger in so many others.”

Ashbrook’s torso, the angles of his hips, dark shadows concealing the hollows of his thighs and the tangle of curls at his groin. Joshua smudged the charcoal across the divots and curves there, shielding Ashbrook’s prick from the viewer’s eye.

I share this with Cade, I will not share this part of you with the world as well.

Another soft sound came, not unlike a snicker, but when Joshua looked up, Sophie was diligently bent over her work, green silk thread coiling now around her deft fingers.

“I don’t know that I love him,” Joshua finally confessed, each word a painful admission. “Not as such.” He drew Ashbrook’s eyes, his eyelids closed, the shadow of his lashes skimming across his cheekbones. But that wasn’t the entire truth. Softer, then, the hole inside his chest hollow and empty. “But I do know that I very easily could.”

Sophie’s smile, when he met her eyes, was gentle, tender and utterly out of place. She reached out and closed the sketchbook on his fingers, hiding his ridiculous scribble from view. “Be careful, dear heart,” Sophie said, as warm as the summer sun that had risen higher in the clear-blue sky. “That is all I ask.”

“All?” he asked, his eyebrow arching with his grin.

“Well…” she tossed her head and laughed, “…if you’re offering, here.” She handed him her handkerchief. “Clean that mess off your hands and help me wind these skeins.”

It was too easy, too familiar, and Joshua took the kerchief with a soft chuckle. “As my lady commands,” he said, wiping the black smudges from his fingertips. She kicked him. That too was easy and familiar, and the chill inside him began, slowly, to thaw.

“Uneventful” used to be the highest praise Joshua could give his days, one blending into the next in an easy, unbroken rhythm. Until Ashbrook and the passion in his eyes, until Cade and his plays for power, and until the fractures beginning in the careful walls he had built to keep out the world. That this current day was uneventful sounded more like a curse than a blessing.

After leaving Sophie in the garden, he’d given himself over to wandering, traipsing across the fields and woods in a search of a decent background for Lady Amelia’s portrait. He found nature aplenty, but none of it sang to him.

Not until he returned to the clearing and the fallen log, thick with the memories of Ashbrook’s lips, the tenderness of his hands on the sides of Joshua’s face, the way the light had played in his hair, bringing out highlights from the summer sun.

The words they’d spoken ran together in his mind, a blurred collage of thwarted dreams.

Come to bed tonight. / I miss you, I crave your touch / I will, I will.

He went back to the house.

The hallways were no better, the ringing of girlish laughter and the movements of the dozen family members and guests eliminating any chance for real peace and quiet. He’d read his book twice through and nothing else in the library could hold his attention. It was despite himself that he ended up back in the gallery, among his old and silent friends in their gilt and walnut frames.

Uncomfortable and unpadded as it was, the old bench set back against the wall was better than sitting on the floor. He folded himself down onto it and slouched there, elbows on his knees and his chin resting on his hands, the stillness broken only by the distant echoes of voices from downstairs.

Soon, he would go back to the quiet of the estate, the sprawling generosity of his studio, the tree-scattered hills that spread out toward the horizon. The days would continue to roll by in banality, unchanged except for visits to clients, visits from subjects for their sittings, dinners with his cousins-cum-patrons, where he simpered and smiled and lied about his life.

His own eyes stared back at him from his mockery of a self-portrait. The expression there was nothing at all like the face that stared back at him in the mirror every morning.

Charlie, bold, wild and free, would have hated everything about the complacent hypocrite he had become.

But not entirely, for even now a letter sailed across the Channel, pushed by fair winds to an unknown future.

So he might still be rescued from himself. If Sophie’s cousin’s employer had any need, of course, for a painter. It was a spark of hope, at least, that he was not as bad as all that. He still had the chance to change.

And what if my life could change still further?

He’d avoided thinking about it before, distracted himself with a thousand other things when his mind veered in that direction.

Ashbrook will never leave Cade.
Too much of him was already in Cade’s hands, under the most insidious sort of lock and key. Joshua had made himself as content as possible with the three-way friendship, though it was no secret that his affection for Ashbrook was far more particular.

It almost felt safe, now, to picture it. A cottage, a studio, the stars, all the things Ashbrook teased him about. And more.

The warm press of arms around him in the night, a firm, broad chest on which to lay his head. Ashbrook’s face cast in shadow, tilted up toward the sky as the sun splashed golds and vermilions across the clouds. Coming into the kitchen in the morning to the smell of coffee and bread, Ashbrook working at the kitchen table, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his fingers stained with ink and his hair still tousled from sleep. Spending the day in front of a canvas, color pouring out across the white field to take the shape of his dreams, working to the sounds of symphonies being rehearsed in the other room.

The world was not that generous.

The scuff of a foot in the doorway, deliberate and loud in the otherwise quiet hall, caught his ear. Joshua looked up, his heart picking up a faster pace, his hands suddenly clammy with sweat because he knew,
he knew
, who it was going to be.

Ashbrook looked well the worse for wear, his head bowed and his hands stuffed in his pockets like any vulgar workman. His eyes were shadowed—had he been crying? Whether he had or not, his hangdog expression and the woebegone slump of his shoulders said enough.

Joshua’s breath caught in his throat and he rose to his feet before he could overthink it. He did stop before he took a step, however.

I am done making a fool of myself over men.

Hah.

He should say something poignant, something meaningful and rich, words that would thrum in Ashbrook’s ears the way Joshua’s pulse beat in his, words so carefully chosen that they would shame writers in their craft. He needed to find the phrasing to explain himself, to make Ashbrook see how his self-destruction was unwarranted and unnecessary, make him fall into Joshua’s arms and repent of Cade and Cade’s cruelty entirely.

“I didn’t see you at breakfast this morning,” Joshua said.

Idiot.

“I didn’t come down.” Ashbrook came fully into the room, glancing behind him once before crossing the floor in a couple of long and hasty strides. “Last night…” he began, nervously at first. He gathered strength as he spoke, though, and the shadows under his eyes were not as dark as they first appeared. “I owe you an apology. I said things to you I did not mean.”