Page 23 of The Last Crimes of Peregrine Hind
Eight
Sandy
Peregrine Hind, ex-soldier, present-day kidnapper, and Terror of the Queen’s Roads, snored. Rather adorably.
Sandy looked up at the man whose chest he was currently using as a pillow and couldn’t help the grin on his face. He’d never fucked like that, not once. Oh sure, he’d tried every position and sex act under the sun, but never had a partner allowed the use of their body for Sandy’s pleasure. Never had a partner waited patiently while Sandy learned what felt good, what he wanted, and then waited even more patiently as Sandy chased down a cataclysm that was more potent for the time it took to seek it out. Pleasure at Oxford—and then in the Second Kingdom once Sandy had been initiated at the age of twenty-one—had been a game, and the rules of the game were simple: if one cared too much, then one lost.
So he’d pretended not to care. He’d pretended that he was as jaded as the rest, because the alternative was either to abstain altogether or to take the way other people took—not without consent necessarily, but without concern—and he couldn’t make himself do that. Perhaps it was the influence of the Foscourts, or maybe the memories of his own parents’ selfishness, but he found he couldn’t use someone for pleasure unless he knew the using was at least mutual. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed the mutual using; he’d enjoyed it plenty! But tonight had been like discovering a new room in a house he’d always known, or a new chapter in his favorite book.
It had been a gift.
And wonder of wonders, he’d also somehow made this highwayman smile—and laugh. He’d seen the heat and the affection sparkling in Peregrine’s silver eyes, and it had been an epiphany, a vision. He doubted Peregrine Hind would ever be a joyful man—or even an easy one—but seeing the gradual thawing of the highwayman for him, for Sandy Dartham, was powerfully alluring, to say the least.
Sandy watched Peregrine sleep for a few more minutes, enjoying the way those stern features softened in repose—enjoying how, even in sleep, Peregrine’s arm clasped Sandy tightly to him. It was a possessive gesture, dominant and greedy, and Sandy loved how it felt so much that he could have stayed nestled there for the rest of the month. But when his stomach started growling with hunger, he slipped from the bed to hunt down something to eat.
The others still hadn’t returned from their attempt to rob the duchess, and so Sandy padded out in his breeches and nothing else, shivering a little at the cool air of the sanctuary after being curled against a warm thief for so long. He poked around the table, tearing off a piece of bread and chewing on it as he wondered how the other robbers were getting on with Judith and how Judith was faring. She was a cruel woman—she and Reginald were very well matched in that respect—but she had been doing poorly when they’d stayed over in Exeter during their trip from London, and Sandy had felt bad for her. There was nothing worse than traveling while sick, and no cure for it except to get home as fast as possible; he’d even arranged for an extra coach so that she and her maid could ride in more comfort without him crowding the seat.
Still eating his bread, Sandy wandered over to the table where Peregrine sometimes sat to do his work. Funny that robbery had the same endless stacks of paper running a dukedom had. Some of it must have been correspondences, Sandy supposed, with fences and innkeepers like the one in Exeter who’d informed the band about the duchess. He unfolded the paper on top, more out of idle curiosity than anything else.
And then.
And then he saw.
duke to pay one thousand in coin.
arrange place for payment and handing over the lord alexander?
post response by dawn tomorrow.
-x
Sandy sat in the chair, stunned. Not surprised, certainly, he’d known that Reginald would ransom him—although one thousand pounds was so far beneath what Sandy had estimated his own worth to be that he was a little offended—but he supposed he hadn’t considered the ransoming would happen this quickly. He’d thought that he’d have more time to escape, or to woo his freedom from his captor, or . . .
Or more time to stare into your captor’s exquisite silver eyes while he fucks you into a bone-shaking climax.
Sandy stared at the note, his mind twisted up around his thoughts, his chest feeling all twisted up too. He’d somehow forgotten what it had felt like to be on his knees, watching Peregrine’s finger curl over the trigger of a pistol. He’d forgotten that he had to escape, and escape quickly, because Peregrine was planning to kill him the moment Reginald handed over the ransom.
He’d forgotten because Peregrine made it impossible to remember.
Sandy swore at himself as he got to his feet. He knew better than to let a pretty face distract him—he knew because ordinarily, he was the pretty face doing the distracting. And that Peregrine’s face wasn’t pretty was beyond the point. He was lovely the same way the moors and hills around Far Hope were lovely, with a kind of lonely, elemental beauty. He fucked Sandy like Sandy had never been fucked before—not as a convenient playmate or as the means to an end, but like Sandy was the end itself. Like Sandy mattered.
And maybe it wasn’t the beauty or the pleasure that had so arrested Sandy, but Peregrine’s unflinching wholeness. Peregrine was, simply, honestly, grimly himself.
That, too, reminded Sandy of the hills around his childhood home. But that unflinching wholeness was the same reason Sandy needed to leave. Because Peregrine had never hidden that he was after revenge and revenge alone, and if Sandy had secretly hoped that his dimples and bed-play would endear the highwayman to him—at least enough to buy him his life—then it was time he admitted the enterprise had been a failure. Peregrine had said nothing about keeping him alive after the ransom, hadn’t betrayed even a sliver of willingness to do so. His wordlessness in the face of this note, which he’d so obviously seen, proved it to Sandy.
His death was still part of the plan.
Sandy looked at the note again, suddenly feeling like an invisible hourglass had been turned over. Reginald could be mustering the money for the ransom right now; in fact, Sandy couldn’t even be sure of when the highwayman had received the note. For all he knew, Peregrine had already arranged the ransom exchange, and Sandy was going to die tomorrow or the day after.
The reverie of being tied up and ravished into boneless pleasure was over. The cold truth had come to burn it away.
He had to run.
Now.
He set the note back where he found it, and he then went to the door of the sacristy to see if Peregrine was still soundly asleep.
He was, flat on his back and snoring softly, the sheets caught around his hips and one muscled thigh partially exposed. His lips were parted ever so slightly, his long eyelashes on his cheeks, his hair everywhere on the pillow. One arm rested exactly as it had been when Sandy had been snuggled next to him—as if, even while asleep, Peregrine was waiting for Sandy to return to bed.
