Page 25 of The Last Crimes of Peregrine Hind
“So you’re taking us deeper into the moors?” Sandy asked in a doubtful voice.
“No,” came the low response. “There’s shelter nearby.”
Sandy sincerely doubted it, since they were still along the main road, and he knew there was nothing for another few miles until they reached the little parish village belonging to Far Hope. But Peregrine surprised him, and, after a mile or so, they turned onto a narrow lane bordered by low stone fences.
Though the light was still faint, Sandy could see the humps of white dotting the fields as they passed.
Sheep. Many of them.
Peregrine led them not to a shepherd’s hut but to what appeared to be an abandoned longhouse—a thatched stone-built farmhouse joined to a barn at the far end. Shutters hung at crooked angles from the small windows, and the front door had a greenish film growing on the wood.
Peregrine helped Sandy dismount and then alighted from the horse himself, striding up to the door with no hesitation at all and pushing it open like he’d been there a thousand times before. Since it was the perfect kind of hiding place for a highwayman, maybe he had.
Sandy watched Peregrine’s dark form disappear into the even darker house and weighed his chances of taking the horse and running, but Peregrine came back out before he could act.
“Come,” the highwayman said. “Now.”
Sandy followed him in, finding the highwayman already walking to the fireplace and getting to his knees as if to strike a fire. There was a stack of slender logs next to the hearth along with a small cauldron and a neat row of dried peat bricks; in front of the fireplace were two chairs and the frame for a cot.
It was rustic to be sure, but it looked like it was in regular use, and there were a few domestic touches deeper in the recesses of the house—a heavy Bible on a table, a spinning wheel, a small chair clearly built for a child. Sandy found it interesting that none of it had been burned. It would’ve certainly been more convenient to burn a chair or a spinning wheel than gather the scanty amounts of wood from around these parts, and it was hardly worth cutting and drying peat for a mere hideout.
The fire lit, Peregrine ducked out of the house again, and Sandy realized too late that he was walking the horse into the barn, because by the time Sandy decided this was his chance, Peregrine was rounding the corner and on his way back in. Even in the dark, Sandy could tell that the look Peregrine gave him was not an amused one, and Sandy slunk back inside.
Before he got to the fire, though, he felt that hand on his wrist again. He didn’t know what he expected as he turned—anger, perhaps, or more unfeeling chill—but what he didn’t expect was the unfiltered agony scrawled all over the highwayman’s face, now visible in the dancing light of the fire.
Peregrine hauled Sandy against his chest, his arms tight around him and his hands roving everywhere—in Sandy’s hair and along his back and even his backside—and then he pressed his face into Sandy’s damp hair.
“Stay,” the highwayman breathed. “Stay with me. Stay here.”
“Obviously I have to stay here,” Sandy muttered. “You dragged me here on your horse, remember?”
Peregrine ignored him, pulling back to cradle Sandy’s face in his hands. “I was so worried,” he said, his hands shaking against Sandy’s cheek and jaw. “When I woke up and realized you’d gone . . . ”
In the red-gold light of the fire, Sandy saw something he’d never seen on anyone’s face before when looking at him, not even his parents.
Peregrine looked at Sandy like he was everything in the entire world.
No. Sandy refused to melt for that. He was indeed everything to Peregrine, because he was the key to Peregrine’s revenge, and that was the only reason.
“Seems a little unproductive to worry when you plan on killing me anyway,” Sandy pointed out, annoyed and hopeless and hurt and suddenly so very tired. He wanted to be in a warm bed, in a warm room, with a warm lover petting him until he fell asleep—and damn it all to hell, he wasn’t picturing his townhome in London when he thought this, but the priory and his captive’s cell within it. And Peregrine Hind cradling him as he drifted into sweet, satisfied dreams.
“Alexander,” Peregrine said, his voice frayed.
“Don’t Alexander me, everyone calls me Sandy anyway, and you’re going to kill me, and?—”
“I’m not going to kill you,” the highwayman said softly. “Alexander. You’re safe. I’m not going to hurt you.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in. Sandy tucked his lower lip between his teeth and then released it. “Explain yourself.”
Peregrine, against all odds, gave a short little laugh. “There’s nothing to explain,” he said, looking down at Sandy. “I won’t kill you. I don’t think I’m capable of it at this point. Maybe I could have done it in that very first moment, when I knew nothing of you except your relationship to the duke, but then again, maybe not. I haven’t killed since the war, and I—” He sighed. “I can’t kill our chickens or pheasants at the priory. I can’t even hunt. I don’t . . . I don’t like it, how it feels. I don’t like how the nightmares still come to me sometimes, full of the voices of the dead. So I don’t know if I could have done it that night anyhow, but it hardly matters, does it, because now I do know you. I know how you smile and how you sigh, and the thought of you being hurt is like a bayonet through the throat.”
Sandy’s heart tilted and slid against his ribs, a thudding, foolish pulp of an organ. Because it wanted so badly to hope, and how asinine was that, that it only took a man saying he wasn’t going to kill him to make Sandy all doe-eyed?
“You really don’t want to kill me?” Sandy asked. “But what about Reginald? The ransom?”
“I don’t know,” Peregrine confessed, dropping his face closer to Sandy. “But a couple days ago, you said I might decide to keep you. What if I did?”
Sandy didn’t have an answer to that. He knew of lovers in the Second Kingdom who chose to have masters or mistresses in private—to be a captive of sorts to their lover’s commands. But it was always chosen in the normal circumstances when it came to sex and love and play.
