🔥 The Emerald Study 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from
HIS LORDSHIP’S VERY BAD DECISION

Thank You for Reading! 💜

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve experienced Adrian and Nico’s journey from a crumbling estate to a life worth living. Thank you for giving their story a chance. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

The Emerald Study

Set three months after the epilogue. The cottage extension is complete.

The study was finished at four o’clock on a Tuesday, and by four fifteen I was standing in the middle of it with my shoes off, feeling the new floorboards through my socks and trying very hard not to cry about a room.

It was perfect.

Not my kind of perfect — the overwhelming, maximalist, every-surface-considered perfection that I brought to professional projects. Adrian’s kind of perfect: precise, considered, and quietly devastating. The emerald walls — our green, the ballroom green, the colour that had started a war and won it — were deep and warm in the late afternoon light. The built-in bookshelves lined two walls, already half-filled with the books we’d been accumulating: his architecture monographs beside my Italian design magazines, his first editions beside my dog-eared restoration manuals. The fireplace was small and functional, with a carved surround that Adrian had restored himself from a salvaged piece he’d found in the estate’s storage. The window looked toward the walled garden, and through it I could see the heated south wall and the espaliered pears and Finn’s wheelbarrow parked at a characteristic angle that suggested he’d been interrupted by something — probably the swan.

Adrian had designed this room for us. Every proportion, every material, every line of sight calculated with the architectural precision that was his love language and the emotional weight that was mine. The label on the original watercolour had said Ours, and now the room existed, and it was ours, and the distance between a framed drawing and a finished space was the distance Adrian Vale had travelled from a man who hid his paintings in a drawer to a man who built them into walls.

I heard him in the corridor. His footsteps — I knew them now the way I knew the house’s sounds, the specific frequency of Adrian moving through a space he inhabited rather than managed.

He appeared in the doorway. He’d been working in the main house all afternoon — board meeting, something about the summer programming calendar — and he was still in his shirt and trousers, cuffs rolled, tie loosened. His hair had the slight disorder of late-afternoon Adrian, the version that emerged after a day of being the earl and was ready to stop.

He looked at the room. He looked at me, standing in the middle of it in my socks.

“It’s done,” he said.

“It’s done.”

“The floorboards settled well. The expansion gap at the east wall is within tolerance.”

“Adrian.”

“Yes.”

“Stop talking about expansion gaps and come here.”

He crossed the room. He stood in front of me, and I put my hands on the loosened tie and pulled him down and kissed him, and the kiss tasted like late afternoon and home and the particular flavour of a man who had built you a room in your favourite colour and could not stop checking the joinery.

“We need to christen it,” I said against his mouth.

“The room has been finished for eleven minutes.”

“Eleven minutes is ten minutes too long.”

“You’d like to have sex in a room that hasn’t been cleaned yet.”

“I’d like to have sex in our room, in our house, on our floor, before the construction dust has even settled, because I have been looking at your watercolour of this room for months and imagining exactly what I was going to do to you in it, and I am not waiting for Finn to hoover.”

His eyes darkened. The shift was immediate and visible — the formal, post-meeting composure dissolving into something hungrier, the earl receding and the man arriving. His hands found my waist.

“What exactly,” he said, his voice dropping to the register that made my spinal column unreliable, “have you been imagining?”

“Take off the tie and I’ll show you.”

He took off the tie. I took it from him — the silk warm from his throat, still carrying the heat of his skin — and ran it through my fingers. Heavy silk. Navy. The one he wore to board meetings, the one that made him look like a man who owned things, which he did, including me, though he’d never say it that way because Adrian expressed possession through architecture and I expressed it through sitting on his desk and refusing to move.

I unbuttoned his shirt. Slowly. One button at a time, each one a small revelation — the hollow of his throat, the ridge of his collarbone, the dark hair across his chest that I followed with my fingertips because I always followed it with my fingertips, because Adrian’s body was a route I’d memorised and never tired of travelling.

“You’re going slowly,” he observed.

“I’m savouring.”

“You’re torturing.”

“Same word, different perspective.”

He shivered under my hands — not cold, the room was warm — and his breathing changed the way it always did when I touched him with intent: from measured to ragged in approximately four seconds. I’d timed it. Multiple occasions. The data was consistent.

I pushed the shirt off his shoulders. It fell to the new floorboards in a heap that would have offended Adrian twelve months ago and that he now tolerated with the resigned grace of a man who had accepted that proximity to Nico Rossi involved a certain amount of textile disorder.

His chest. His stomach. The lean architecture of his body in the late-afternoon light, the emerald walls making his skin glow warm. The scar on his shoulder blade from the chapel roof. The freckles I’d mapped in the bathtub and traced with my mouth in the library and counted during lazy Sunday mornings when neither of us had anywhere to be except beside each other.

“Your turn,” he said, and pulled my shirt over my head with considerably less ceremony. His mouth found my shoulder, then my neck, then the spot behind my ear that made me gasp every single time, and his hands gripped my hips — the five-point grip, the original grip, the one that had started on a ladder in a ballroom and had been claiming this exact piece of my body ever since.

“The floor,” I said.

“The floor is hardwood. It’s new. It hasn’t been—”

“Adrian. The floor.”

He lowered me to the floor. The new floorboards were smooth and cool against my back, and Adrian was hot above me, his weight braced on his forearms, his face close, and the emerald walls rose around us like the inside of a jewel box — which was, I realised, exactly what he’d designed. A jewel box. A setting for something precious.

“I want to try something,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“I want you to use the tie.”

His eyes widened. We’d talked about it — late nights, post-sex, in the honest territory of two people who had learned each other well enough to ask for more. We’d discussed boundaries, signals, the specific mechanics of consent that mattered more than any knot. But we hadn’t done it. Not yet. The conversation had been the groundwork, and the groundwork was done, and I was lying on the floor of our emerald study looking up at the man I loved and saying: build on it.

“On you?” he asked. Not uncertain — clarifying. The architect, confirming specifications before beginning work.

“On me. My wrists. Above my head. Not tight — just present. I want to feel you holding me there while you take me apart.”

Something moved behind his eyes. Not hesitation — intent. The specific, focused quality of Adrian’s attention when it shifted from observational to operational. He picked up the tie from where I’d set it and ran it through his fingers, testing the weight, the give, the way the silk folded.

“If you want it off—”

“I say red. We talked about this.”

“I know. I want to hear you say it now.”

“Red means stop. I say it, you stop, no questions. But Adrian—” I lifted my head and kissed his jaw. “I’m not going to say it. I’ve been thinking about your hands and this tie for three months. I want to feel what happens when the most precise man I’ve ever met puts that precision into holding me down and making me scream in our emerald study.”

His cock twitched against my thigh. I felt it — the involuntary pulse through his trousers — and I grinned because Adrian’s body had never learned to lie, and the evidence of how much this idea affected him was pressing against me with architectural certainty.

He knelt beside me on the floor. He took my wrists in his hands — gently, reverently — and lifted them above my head. He wrapped the silk around them with a care that was so characteristically Adrian that my chest ached: three loops, a flat knot that wouldn’t tighten under pressure, the silk smooth against my skin rather than binding. He tested it — slid a finger underneath to check the tension, adjusted the wrap so the knot sat on the outside of my wrists rather than between them where it might dig.

“Good?” he said.

“Perfect. Now stop being careful and start being creative.”

He kissed me. With my hands bound above my head and the silk holding them there, the kiss felt different — amplified, concentrated. I couldn’t grab him, couldn’t pull him close, couldn’t direct with my hands the way I usually did. I had only my mouth and my body and my voice, and the constraint made every available sensation sharper, more urgent, more present.

His mouth left mine and travelled down. My jaw. My throat. The hollow at the base of my neck where my pulse was hammering so hard I could feel it in my teeth. He spent time there — his lips against my pulse, his tongue tracing the tendon, his teeth grazing the skin with just enough pressure to make me gasp and arch.

“Adrian—”

“I’m memorising.”

“You’ve memorised this. You’ve memorised every inch of me.”

“The room is new. The light is different. You look different in emerald.”

He moved lower. My chest. His tongue found my nipple and circled — slow, deliberate, the focused precision of a man who understood that repetition with variation was more devastating than escalation. He sucked, gently, then harder when I moaned, then added his teeth — a careful scrape that sent electricity from the point of contact straight to my cock — and I pulled against the tie for the first time. Not to escape. To feel the silk hold.

It held. His knot held. The constraint held me in place while his mouth worked my body, and the combination — the immobility of my hands, the mobility of his mouth, the emerald walls glowing around us — was producing a state of arousal so intense that my vision was already starting to blur at the edges and he hadn’t even reached my waistband.

He reached my waistband.

His fingers unbuttoned my jeans with the same deliberate patience he’d shown for every other layer — each button released slowly, his knuckles grazing my stomach through the parting denim, his grey eyes watching my face the entire time. Watching my reactions. Cataloguing. This was Adrian at his most devastating: the lover who studied his partner the way he studied buildings, learning every stress point, every resonance, every place where pressure produced the response he wanted.

He pulled my jeans down. My boxers followed. And then I was naked on the emerald-study floor, wrists bound in navy silk, and Adrian was kneeling between my legs in his trousers, shirtless, silver-templed, looking down at me with an expression that combined tenderness and hunger in proportions that should have been structurally impossible.

“You’re gorgeous,” he said. Simply. Without performance. A man stating an architectural fact about a structure he found beautiful.

“Adrian, if you don’t touch me soon I am going to lose my mind.”

“Tell me where.”

“Everywhere. Anywhere. Your choice. That’s the point — I’m tied up, you get to decide, and I want you to decide, and I want whatever you decide to be—”

He wrapped his hand around my cock.

The sound I made was not a word. It was the auditory equivalent of a fuse blowing — a sharp, broken noise that came from somewhere deep in my chest and echoed off the emerald walls and the bookshelves and the fireplace. His grip was firm, warm, sure, and he stroked once — a full, slow pull from base to tip — and my spine bowed off the floorboards and my bound wrists strained against the silk and I heard myself say his name in a voice I didn’t recognise.

“Like that?” he said.

“Like that — fuck — like exactly that, don’t stop—”

He didn’t stop. He stroked me with the same meticulous attention he brought to everything — varying the grip, the speed, the pressure, reading my responses and adjusting in real time. His thumb swept across the head on every upstroke, spreading the slick that was gathering there, and I was already close — embarrassingly, spectacularly close, because the tie on my wrists and the emerald walls and Adrian’s focused grey eyes were a combination my nervous system had not been designed to withstand.

“Not yet,” he said, and removed his hand.

I made a noise that was approximately 60% frustration and 40% religious experience.

“Adrian Vale, if you just edged me on the floor of our new study—”

“I didn’t edge you. I paused.”

“That is the definition of edging.”

“The definition of edging implies a deliberate program of denial. This is a strategic intermission.”

“I am going to kill you.”

“Not while tied up, you’re not.” He smiled — the full, devastating, smile-with-teeth that I’d spent a year earning — and lowered his head between my legs.

His mouth on my inner thigh first. The spot he’d discovered in the bathtub, the skin that made me writhe and whimper and forget my own name. He kissed it. Licked it. Bit it gently, and my leg jerked and a sound came out of me that the house had definitely never heard before, because it was the kind of sound that only happened when a very composed British man put his very precise mouth on a very sensitive piece of your anatomy while your wrists were tied with his very expensive silk tie.

Then his mouth moved up. And over. And he took me in.

The first sensation was heat — wet, encompassing, devastating. Adrian’s mouth, which had spent forty-five years being careful and controlled and exquisitely formal, was currently performing an act of such focused, thorough, annihilating intimacy that the concept of formality ceased to exist. He took me deep, his tongue working the underside with a pressure that made my entire body seize, his hand wrapping around the base to work in concert with his mouth, and I pulled against the tie — hard now, needing the resistance, needing something to brace against while the pleasure built in waves that were rapidly becoming geological.

“Oh God — oh fuck — Adrian, your mouth, you’re — I can’t—”

He hummed. The vibration travelled through me like a shockwave. My hips bucked — involuntary, unstoppable — and he took it, adjusted, one hand pressing flat on my hip to hold me steady while his mouth continued its meticulous, devastating work.

He pulled off just before I crested. Again. The second denial was worse than the first — I was shaking, leaking, my cock flushed and rigid against my stomach, my whole body vibrating with the need to come that he was withholding with the surgical precision of a man who understood load-bearing limits and was testing every one of mine.

“Adrian — please — I need—”

“I know what you need.” He sat up. He unbuckled his belt. He undid his trousers and pushed them down, and his cock was hard and thick and flushed and I wanted it inside me with a desperation that transcended language and became something cellular.

“Please,” I said again, because please was the only word left that still functioned.

He prepared me with his fingers — slick, patient, thorough despite the urgency, because Adrian’s care was structural and could not be bypassed even when both of us were shaking with need. One finger, then two, working me open with the gentle precision of a man restoring a delicate surface — feeling for resistance, applying pressure where pressure was welcome, letting me adjust and accommodate and want more.

“More,” I said. “Adrian — more, I’m ready, I’ve been ready, I need you—”

He withdrew his fingers. He positioned himself between my legs, hooked my thighs over his hips, and pressed into me.

The stretch. The fullness. The specific, overwhelming sensation of Adrian filling me while my hands were bound and my body was open and the emerald walls surrounded us like the inside of a promise. I cried out — his name, or something that contained his name, or something that was bigger than his name — and he groaned in response, a deep, unrestrained sound that filled the study and made the bookshelves ring.

He moved. Not carefully. Not cautiously. Not with the patient, measured rhythm of someone who was managing his intensity. He moved with the full force of a man who had spent three months looking at a watercolour and imagining this — deep, steady, powerful thrusts that used his whole body, his hands braced on the floor beside my bound wrists, his grey eyes fixed on mine with the absolute, unwavering focus that was the essence of Adrian Vale.

“I want to see your face,” he said. The words he said every time, the requirement that had become sacred between us. “Eyes open. I want to see you.”

My eyes were open. They were open and they were wet and they were seeing the most beautiful thing in the world — Adrian above me, flushed and fierce, the silver at his temples catching the emerald-tinged light, his mouth open, his breath ragged, his body driving into mine with a rhythm that was hitting the place inside me that made the universe dissolve.

“There,” I gasped. “Right there — don’t stop — don’t change anything—”

He didn’t change anything. He maintained the angle, the depth, the force — the structural consistency that was his gift and my ruination — and his hand found my cock again and stroked in rhythm with his thrusts, and the doubled sensation built and built toward something that felt less like an orgasm and more like a structural event, a seismic shift, the kind of full-system realignment that changed the landscape permanently.

“Nico,” he said. My name, spoken with the weight he gave to words that mattered. “Nico. Nico. Nico.”

Three times. Foundation, walls, roof. A complete structure built from two syllables and a voice that shook.

“Adrian,” I answered, and his name in my mouth was permission and promise and the answer to every question he’d ever been afraid to ask.

I came. I came so hard my vision whited out and my spine left the floor and my voice produced a sound that was neither a word nor a scream but something between them — a full-body, full-volume, full-soul release that the emerald study absorbed into its fresh paint and new floorboards and would hold there, I was certain, for as long as the room existed. My cock pulsed in his hand and my body clenched around him and the silk pulled taut at my wrists and every nerve I owned fired simultaneously and I was gone, gone, gone, and when I came back the first thing I saw was his face — open, awed, watching me come apart beneath him with an expression of such raw, undisguised love that the aftermath hit harder than the orgasm.

He followed. Three more thrusts — deep, urgent, his hips losing their rhythm for the first time — and then he was coming inside me with my name broken across his lips and his body shuddering and his hands gripping the floor beside my head and his face pressed into my neck and the sound he made was not quiet and not contained and not managed. It was loud and raw and free and it filled our room and our house and our life with the particular resonance of a man who had finally, completely, stopped holding back.

He collapsed against me. His weight settled onto my body — warm, heavy, real. His breath was hot against my neck. His heart hammered against my chest. His hands found my bound wrists and untied the silk with fingers that trembled, and when my wrists were free I wrapped my arms around him and held on and did not let go.

We lay on the emerald-study floor. Breathing. The afternoon light moved across us as the sun shifted, and the room was warm and quiet and ours.

“The floorboards,” I said, after an interval that might have been two minutes or two centuries, “held up well.”

“They’re engineered oak. Three-quarter-inch tongue and groove. They were designed to support significant dynamic load.”

“Dynamic load.”

“It’s a technical term.”

“You just used ‘dynamic load’ to describe us having sex on the floor.”

“The description is architecturally accurate.”

I laughed. He laughed. We lay naked on the floor of a room that had started as a watercolour and become a home, and the laughter echoed off the emerald walls and the bookshelves and the fireplace, and the room received it the way all good rooms receive laughter: by becoming more itself.

Adrian lifted my wrists to his mouth. He kissed each one — a small, careful gesture, checking the skin, confirming no marks, his aftercare as precise as his preparation. The silk had left no impression. The knot had been perfect. Of course it had.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For trusting me. With the tie. With the room. With the—” He paused. Searched for the word with the deliberate care he brought to choosing exactly the right material for a load-bearing joint. “With everything. For trusting me with everything, even after I proved I could fail.”

“You didn’t fail, Adrian. You learned. There’s a difference.”

“The difference is you.”

I pulled him close. I held him on the floor of our emerald study, and his head was on my chest and my fingers were in his silver-threaded hair, and through the window the walled garden glowed in the late light and the heated south wall held three hundred years of warmth and the house — our house, Ashcombe House — breathed around us.

“I love this room,” I said.

“I built it for you.”

“I know. That’s why I love it.”

He lifted his head. Grey eyes, warm, the laugh lines that Finn called “almost approachable,” the face of a man who had learned to want things and build them and show them to the world.

“You’re the best decision I ever made,” he said. “My very bad, very good, very permanent decision.”

“Permanent?”

“I have watercolour plans for the kitchen extension. And a preliminary sketch for a garden studio. And a structural assessment for a potential second-floor addition in approximately—”

I kissed him. He stopped talking about structural assessments. The emerald walls glowed. The house breathed. The study — our study, labelled Ours in his precise hand — held us in its new, green, permanent arms.

We were home. We were home. We were home.

← Back to His Lordship’s Very Bad Decision

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.