Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
But Calvin Harrington wanted to leave, despite his frail and weakened state—and so Calvin Harrington intended to leave, even with his son watching him with worried eyes and fretting his hands, clearly torn between urging his father back into bed and wanting to get him out of this place.
Frankly, Brand doubted the wisdom of this. The elder Harrington looked as if he would collapse again at any moment, and his sudden return to consciousness didn’t necessarily indicate he was actually healthy, or his prognosis was any better.
But it wasn’t Brand’s place to say. Nor was he here to attend to Harrington the elder.
His concern was Harrington the younger, and at the moment Ashton looked as if he was on the verge of collapse himself. Hollows of exhaustion darkened his eyes, his pale, gold-tinged skin turned so ashen his pink mouth stood out like a bruise, his posture heavy and slumped. He’d tossed his coat off hours ago, leaving him pacing in his trim, well-fitted waistcoat, an elegant and graceful figure despite his agitated tension. More than once he’d nearly started arguments with the doctors, with his father, with Brand, before snapping his mouth shut and subsiding to restless silence full of simmering, muted glances. Resentment.
If his young Master didn’t collapse, Brand thought, he might well explode.
And there was nothing Brand could do about it—and he hated it.
Ash was too keyed up, not to mention focused on his father; the one time Brand had attempted to soothe and calm him, Ash had turned on him with a snarl and pulled away in a way that shouldn’t hurt as much as it did. Brand…did not feel right, at the moment. Something inside him felt strange and shaken, and it was tied directly to the hot-eyed, impetuous young man currently hovering over his father’s wheelchair while the nurses packed Calvin Harrington’s suitcase.
Brand was not accustomed to talking about himself, he thought. His life had been spent with the same family; his sister was still head housekeeper at the Newcomb estate in Liverpool. When one served with the same family since childhood, there was little need to disclose details that everyone knew as intimately as their own entangled life stories. And Brand…Brand was not prone to relationships. Not when few relationships could survive the level of service and attentive dedication required of a valet. The few dalliances he engaged in to explore physical urges and learn his own desires? Meaningless. They required no personal disclosure, no attachment, no loyalty.
They were nothing against the devotion he saved for his Masters, young and old alike.
And so Brand had never had occasion to speak of himself this way. To tell another his life, his thoughts, his feelings, and have them look up at him with wide, vulnerable eyes that seemed to need those bits of himself, vouchsafed and precious, to offer some anchor point in an unmoored world. He didn’t think Ashton would ever understood how shaken it had left Brand, to speak of such things and have his young Master lay his head to his shoulder and simply, quietly take them into himself.
He didn’t think Ashton understood many things, but Brand doubted the wisdom of telling him. Not when, at the moment, if he chose to act…he might do something reckless.
Like pick Ashton up in his arms right here, right now, in front of his father and the nurses alike—and carry him from this place and home, so that Brand could force him to rest.
It was setting his teeth on edge, watching Ash reel with exhaustion and be able to do nothing about it. To leave Ashton’s needs unattended, to stand here a stiff and useless statue, was anathema to Brand’s every existence. And if this took much longer, he didn’t know if he would be able to control himself.
Ash glanced up from watching the nurses and caught Brand’s eye, before offering a wan smile and looking away again. Brand grit his teeth, hands slowly clenching into fists behind his back.
Ten more minutes, and he was putting an end to this whether Calvin Harrington was ready to depart or not.
He closed his eyes, taking a slow, measured breath and attempting to settle the snarling agitation under his skin. This…wasn’t like him. He was being irrational. Unreasonable. Possessive. He wasn’t even sure why, yet young Master Ashton…
There was something in Ashton. A quiet and aching need, a wordless plea that seemed to have gone unanswered for years. A question, searching in those dark blue eyes, and raising a buried and hungry thing inside Brand that whispered an answer.
Even after he had told Ashton exactly what it meant to him to serve…no, he didn’t think the young Master understood.
Brand was not whole unless he was shepherd to a lamb, and right now every soft and tender and vulnerable thing about Ashton Harrington was begging for Brand to protect him, possess him, do for him so that he might never need do for himself again. That hungry thing inside Brand needed someone to depend on him. He’d never wholly understood it—if it was about care or about control or about something else.