Page 15 of The Last Crimes of Peregrine Hind
Sandy came with Peregrine’s mouth hot and sucking on his neck and their erections trapped between their stomachs. Peregrine followed him soon after.
After Peregrine had untied him and cleaned them both, he laid back down on the bed next to Sandy. Sandy’s heart stuttered as the highwayman ran his fingertips over Sandy’s mouth, his pale eyes burning into Sandy’s. What was Peregrine thinking right now? What was he feeling and wanting? More touching? More sex?
Did he want to tell Sandy—again—that this didn’t change anything?
The idea of that was unbearable. “The best part of being in bed with a rake is that I don’t expect you to croon sweet nothings to me after,” Sandy informed Peregrine.
The highwayman just gave him a bland look.
“Do I seem like the type to croon sweet nothings?” Peregrine asked after a pause.
“Well. No,” Sandy admitted. Peregrine seemed like the type to be found taming a wild horse up in the hills, or perhaps completing some quest that involved trudging through a barren wasteland and killing a dragon or something. There was nothing sweet about him. He was all flint and chill, with only rare glimpses of the deeply banked fire within.
But Sandy liked that about Peregrine Hind—perhaps more than was good for him—and instead of pleasuring Peregrine into a sleep deep enough for an escape attempt, Sandy propped himself up on an elbow so he could watch Peregrine’s face. “Then why are you in here still?”
A pause. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
The highwayman frowned. “I suppose I don’t want to leave.”
“A common reaction to my company,” Sandy replied with a grin. He slid his hand down to Peregrine’s cock to play it with it, thinking that was the real reason Peregrine hadn’t wanted to leave, but Peregrine caught his wrist and stopped him.
Sandy froze. That was a first, and it couldn’t be because Peregrine wasn’t interested in more bed-play—his cock was already stirring for more. But Peregrine seemed to ignore it, his eyes on Sandy’s face.
“Why didn’t you want to talk about Far Hope?” he asked. “Before, when I’d asked about it?”
Far Hope.
The question was so surprising that Sandy couldn’t even think of a way to deflect. He looked up into a veiled expression belied by an avid, searching gaze. That gaze betrayed something haunted and yet miserably alive, locked deep under the surface like living fire beneath the earth. But there was more than pain in the highwayman’s eyes. There was something that spoke of surviving, of prevailing.
Of strength, maybe.
Suddenly Sandy found that he didn’t want to deflect.
“Your voice is pure Devonshire,” Sandy said after a minute. “Did you grow up near Far Hope?”
Peregrine’s expression remained unreadable. “Close enough.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard any of the rumors about it? About what happens there?”
“My mother once said that they keep their own ways at Far Hope,” Peregrine said. “I’d always assumed it meant the Dartham selfishness was congenital.”
Sandy wanted to be wounded by that, but the truth was that his father had been a selfish and cruel man, and Reginald had inherited every drop of that selfishness and cruelty right along with the title.
At least Sandy wasn’t willfully cruel. Or so he hoped.
“It means there are secrets at Far Hope,” Sandy said, “and they all branch out from this one: there is a hidden kingdom inside the one we live in. It has many of the same citizens, but it’s invisible and it’s never spoken of to outsiders.”
Peregrine regarded him. “Then why are you speaking of it to me?”
“Because I want to, and because—this feels ridiculous to say, given that you’re planning to kill me—I trust you. Besides, I can always claim you tortured it out of me, if I survive this.”
“If you survive this,” Peregrine echoed, his voice betraying nothing, no confirmation . . . or refutation either.
Sandy planned on escaping before the matter of his survival became a pressing issue, but a small arrow of hurt—a lover’s hurt—burrowed between his ribs at the realization that Peregrine still intended to kill him. Silly, since his eventual death had been the bargain struck from the very beginning. But Sandy had grown so fascinated by this bleak force of a man, become so strangely affectionate toward him, and he childishly wanted Peregrine to feel the same way. Less for reasons of survival than for reasons that were perilously rooted in the organ beating in his chest.
“Anyway,” Sandy said, pushing all that away and down, down where he wouldn’t have to feel it right then, “this hidden kingdom is centuries old. Maybe older. And though its citizens are all over the island, Far Hope is its seat, its ancestral home.”
