Page 8 of The Last Crimes of Peregrine Hind
And while there was the small, pesky matter of Peregrine planning to kill him, Sandy still felt certain he could either escape or seduce his way free. Which . . . given the way it felt to be slung over the brawny highwayman’s shoulder earlier, Sandy wouldn’t mind in the least having to do some seduction. He’d seen Peregrine’s body fighting its response to his own the whole ride here, and he’d caught Peregrine staring at his mouth once or twice—or thirty times. The idea of unraveling that cold, grim mystery . . . well.
It wasn’t without its own appeal.
After all, if he lived to tell the tale, what was a bigger coup for a rake than being in a highwayman’s bed? Even the hedonistic denizens of the Second Kingdom couldn’t boast something that wild.
Sandy washed with a linen towel and some very chilly water and then changed into the clothes the highwayman had brought him. They were clean, but soft with wear and too big for his frame, which was shorter and more slender than Peregrine Hind’s. The breeches settled low around his hips, and the shirt opened nearly to his sternum.
He should have felt ridiculous like this, but he didn’t at all. He felt rather snug, actually—cared for. Which was an absurd thought to have about wearing a captor’s clothes. But they even smelled like the highwayman, like rain and like leather. Sandy found himself breathing deep to take the scent into his lungs, and then he wanted to shake himself. Very hard.
Because it was one thing for seduction not to be a chore, but it was another thing entirely to swoon over his jailer, even if that jailer was unfairly worthy of swoons. Even if that jailer had eyes like moonlight itself.
Which was funny. Sandy couldn’t remember ever caring about a lover’s eyes before.
Not a lover! he reminded himself. Captor. Future murderer. It wouldn’t do to forget that part!
Sandy was combing his hair when Peregrine knocked—a silly but almost endearing gesture, given the circumstances—and Sandy called for him to enter. Peregrine stepped in and then stilled.
“You may finish,” the highwayman said, his voice devoid of inflection. But Sandy saw the swallow of the thief’s throat as he watched Sandy pull the comb through his dark locks. “I don’t mind.”
“So generous,” Sandy murmured, finishing up and then tossing his hair over his shoulder as he regarded the impassive man standing before him. “However, I have to ask about what you plan on doing with me next. Am I to be kept in this room combing my hair forever? Like a mortal woman trapped in a fairy castle?”
“Not quite,” Peregrine said. “On the bed. Again.”
Sandy was about to make another sly remark when he saw what Peregrine had been hiding behind his back. Not coils of rough rope like he’d used to tie Sandy’s wrists earlier, but several lengths of what appeared to be silk.
Delicious images sloshed around Sandy’s mind like wine in a glass. “Oh,” he said.
“On the bed, Alexander.”
Sandy felt strange as he obeyed—full of dread and excitement and a heady mixture of both—and then he realized, as Peregrine stepped to the edge of the bed and took hold of his wrist, that he was trembling.
Peregrine met his gaze. “I won’t leave you tied up forever,” he said, misunderstanding the reason for Sandy’s shivers. “The others are returning, and I need to speak with them, which means we won’t have a guard at the door. And obviously you can’t be trusted, even for an hour or two.”
“Obviously,” Sandy said weakly, his heart thumping against his ribs as Peregrine cinched the silk around his wrist and then around the nearest poster of the bed. Then Peregrine moved to the other wrist, and then to a bare ankle, tying his knots firmly but not so tightly that Sandy lost feeling in his fingers or toes.
Sandy knew there was no hiding his fast-heaving chest, his hot cheeks, and above all, the insistent erection pushing against the front of his borrowed breeches, but it wasn’t until the highwayman was tying Sandy’s last ankle to the bed that he looked up from his work and saw what it had done to his captive.
Peregrine’s lips parted, and then his silver eyes shot to Sandy’s face—in confusion or in accusation, Sandy couldn’t tell.
“I told you I liked being tied up,” Sandy said as he twisted against his bonds, testing them. Every twist pulled at the fabric of the too-loose shirt, and so, as Peregrine watched, Sandy’s stomach above the waistband of the breeches was exposed inch by quivering inch. Along with the swollen head of his cock, which peeked rudely above the waistband and leaked onto Sandy’s belly.
“You like being tied up,” Peregrine repeated tonelessly.
Sandy wanted so dearly to make a face at him but was too aroused to pull it off. The tightness of the restraints, the spread position of his limbs, the sheer helplessness—it created a tide so deep and so urgent inside him that it was pointless to resist. It would be like fighting off the pleasure in a dream, or a release inside a lover’s mouth.
He would lose—and it was more fun to lose, anyway.
Peregrine’s face expressed nothing as he tied the final knot, but as he straightened, Sandy could see a new tightness to the way he moved. His face remained unreadable, but his hands were curling into slow fists, and his eyes had gone more black than silver.
He looked like—well, for an instant, he looked like he wanted to eat Sandy alive.
He left without another word.
Sandy didn’t make it long. With his bindings, the intoxicating smell of the highwayman wrapping around him, and the waistband of the breeches rubbing lightly against the underside of his prick, it was a foregone conclusion that he would spend all over his stomach, and he did. Sandy spent with long, jerking spills as he thought of the highwayman’s pale eyes and big hands.
He stared up at the ceiling in a daze, wondering how long Peregrine would leave him like this and how long he could stand it. Not forever wasn’t a very precise amount of time, and from what he could hear through the door, the other thieves had only just now made it to the sanctuary. He heard the clanking of cups and smelled the aroma of hot food, and then heard the low din of conversation.
What are they talking about? What to do with him while they waited to be paid his ransom? How to kill him once they had?
