Chapter 6: James, Stanton Reach, Malaya

I loved my delicate, devoted Jane. I had known from the first years of my service with her family that she was the one I would want for my wife. I just had no expectation in those early years that she could ever be mine. But I had a secret—a deep, dark secret. Although I wanted Jane—in fact needed her for the position I intended to have in English society—and would happily sire children off of her, I had darker, more forbidden lustings. Even as I watched Jane grow into a fine young woman and increasingly sensed that she turned her interest to me, my eyes drifted away to Damian, her younger brother. My feelings toward Damian had led me to other boys—couplings that I thoroughly enjoyed—but now it was more necessary than ever, in the eyes of society, to marry and have children.

Damian was angelic and sensual, innocent and a natural flirt all in one. The Venetian sculptors would have fought with each other for the privilege to render him in stone and master him in their beds in another era. I wanted Jane for my future position and to establish my own line and fortune—but from the moment Damian reached his teenage years I lusted after him, dreamed of taking and possessing him with an ache in my loins that would not be quenched—even as I joined with other men. I was a mad man in my desire to have both the sister and the brother, and I blame what I did on them—not just in being the objects of desire that they were, but also in casting their eyes of speculation and acceptance on me in the first place.

If Jane had not shown such an interest in me, I never would have had the courage to approach her father for her hand. He laughed at me, as I would have understood was quite fitting if my eyes had not been blinded by desire and ambition. I was merely the family solicitor—I was not in the same world as Jane. Stephen Stanton treated me with disdain—me, whose family had served his for generations—had, in fact, been more responsible for the Stantons’ accumulation of wealth to support their position and lifestyle than the Stantons had been themselves. And his wife, Maude, standing in the doorway of the library at the country house, looking at me with those dead eyes—mocking me in my moment of overreaching—throwing her accusations of my lifestyle in my face even while she was staring at her husband rather than me.

If only the two of them knew what I lusted to do to their only son as well as to their daughter.

I fled the estate, crushed by my rejection, shamed by Maude Stanton’s damning accusations. Having every reason to believe that the refusal of Jane’s hand would be followed by dismissal as the family solicitor and the total crumbling of my life.

And then the other secret—the deeper secret even than my desire for the young Damian—a secret that could never be revealed. The accident of the turned-over motor car that took the life of Jane and Damian’s parents. The accident that wasn’t an accident. The only event I knew of that could, if it came to light now, crush my plans and my every desire.

Jane was trusting and ready to believe what she wanted to believe. She did not question that it was true—that Stephen had given me his blessing to wed her shortly before the accident. And from that time forward it was almost as if the gods approved of the steps that I took, that they threw open doors for me. The virtual expulsion of Damian from Summerville School shortly before Jane and I wed and the quite reasonable need for the new stewards of the Stanton fortune to survey their domains had neatly come together in the plan to withdraw to Malaya for a time.

Malaya was perfect for me. There, in isolation, I knew I would find a way to quench both my ambition—the need to start of family of my own to inherit the Stanton fortune and position—and the desire to have Damian as well.

It was thus that I arrived at the Stanton rubber plantations on Malay’s isolated eastern coast, traveling alone to prepare the great house for Jane’s arrival but keyed up and with nerves drawn as tight as they could be—and nearly consumed by raging desires and needs.

I was nearly thrown off stride when first I arrived at Stanton Reach. I had corresponded for years with the plantation manager, Bradford Blandin, but until I met him in the flesh, I had no idea what a handsome and sensual man he was. There had been rumors whispered through my family, of course, of the closeness of Stephen Stanton and his overseer, rumors that were brought to mind that day Maude had upbraided me for my reputation while staring down her husband. But I had no idea that they had been more than jealous rumors to explain away Stephen’s generosity to his overseer. Not everyone in Stephen’s family or my firm had agreed with his transfer of shares to the overseer, although Stephen had explained it away as giving Blandin a reason to see that the business in Malaya prospered.

As powerfully built and plantation work hardened as Bradford was, he was both knowing and compliant, no doubt able to look right through me from the first day we met and seeing how tightly wound up and eaten with lust I was. And I was equally able to see him for what he was—and knew that the rumors about him and Stephen had foundation.

“You fucking hypocrite” was the first thought that now came to my mind. “Typical hypocritical English aristocrat” was the next. The nerve of the almighty Stephen Stanton upbraiding me as he did for my sexual peccadilloes when I had asked for Jane’s hand right before his wife lit into me. All along he was as much into buggery as I ever had been. I regretted now that that fall down the ravine had not come years earlier.

On my second night in the great house, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sounds of distant drums. At first I did not know what had awakened me—or even where I was—but as I drifted up from sleep, I became aware of the drums, the increasing beat seemingly in tune with the palpitations of my heart, and the smell of tobacco overtook my senses. I looked over to the doorway out onto the veranda and saw the gleam of ash at the end of a cigar.

Bradford Blandin, languidly leaning against the doorframe in profile, was silhouetted against the moonlight streaming in from the edge of the veranda. He was naked and holding his dick in his hand, which was engorged and jutting out from his body.

I struggled into full consciousness and he turned his face to me, hearing me stir. By the time I was sitting up on the edge of the bed, he was kneeling in front of me and opening his lips over my cock.

He lay, looking up at me in silence, on his back, butt cheeks on the edge of the bed and legs spread as I crouched between his thighs and fucked him hard and deep, releasing all of the pent-up sexual frustration of that long trip around the tip of Africa with Damian so near to hand and so obviously willing, but yet still untouchable.

Twice, three times I released my seed, strong and deep inside his channel, and each time when I would have withdrawn, Blandin wrapped his legs around my waist and held me there until the fires of desire raged again. And he moved his pelvis against my loins, bringing me back to the edge of want and beyond, until, silently, he had milked me of all my frustration. I knew now the reality of the stiff competition the talented and beautiful Maude had endured—and perhaps the reason she had exulted at the family’s move back to England from Malaya.

“How did you know?” I murmured as we lay together in the great bed afterward.

“It was clearly written in your face when you arrived,” he whispered. “Not only that you were possessed by a deep need, but also from the way you looked at me, that I could help you satisfy that need.”

“I shouldn’t have,” I responded at length. “My wife and brother-in-law arrive soon. There can be no complications.”

“No complications are necessary,” he answered. “I am here to serve your family. I claim nothing, will say nothing of it. If you need me, you know where the overseer’s house is, there across the lake. If you don’t, so be it.”

He left me then, and I slept the sleep of the dead. In the morning, he was waiting for me after breakfast with the horses and we rode out to survey the morning tapping of the trees without comment. I admit that much of the tension that had wracked my body for weeks had drained from me and I fully intended on visiting the overseer’s house that night. There was something in the mixture of Blandin’s well-muscled, powerful body and the compliance of that same body to my pounding cock that intrigued and aroused me. And I admit that it gave me a small thrill to be able to enjoy what Stephen Stanton once had and had been forced to give up.

Still, he wasn’t Damian. He wasn’t a delectable fourteen-year-old boy.

I knew that I couldn’t take up with my overseer seriously, though—that this would be yet another complication of my life that, once Jane and Damian arrived, I could not manage. I needed to strip away my desires—to concentrate on Jane alone, at least until she had given me children to solidify my hold on her family estates—rather than to add to them. But my want for Damian still ate at me and the thought of the powerfully built but fully subservient, compliant, and available Bradford made me hard, and I seemed powerless to stop myself. The very next evening, after standing on the veranda of the great house and smoking my cigar and looking out in the direction of the overseer’s bungalow, I was fighting for control, knowing I could not go to him and equally knowing that I would.

As I stood there, I saw him, Bradford Blandin, standing in the shadows of the break in the trees that marked the path around the lake to his bungalow. Standing there, looking at me, not beckoning to me, but unmistakably offering himself.

It was only the intervention of the major domo, Fahmeed, that saved me from going to Blandin. But it was a hollow gesture; I just traded one fetish and complication for another one.

As I turned toward the stairs down off the veranda, Fahmeed materialized from the shadows, barely discernible at first in the darkness, but as he moved into the light cast from the open door into my bed chamber behind me, my senses were charged with a sudden jolt of the exotic in this tropical setting. As usual, all Fahmeed wore was a sarong tied low at his waist, below the tantalizing curve of his belly. Tattooing ran rampant across his nut-brown skin, pulled tight across his well-muscled body.

“Fahmeed,” I exclaimed. He was always at hand, when needed, during the day, but this was the first time that it occurred to me that he might be just as ever present during the night. What if ... what if, I thought, with a sudden flash of anxiety, he had been in the shadows, in attendance on the previous night when Bradford Blandin had come to my bed. There was something disquieting about Fahmeed, something that made me wary and slightly fearful, and he proved out my anxiety now.

“Yes, I know,” he said in a low, melodic voice.

Had I voiced my fear out loud? Surely I hadn’t. But Fahmeed spoke just as if I had—just as if he could read my every thought.