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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.

These were not the normal circumstances.

“You truly won’t kill me?” Sandy whispered.

“I won’t.”

“And you won’t allow one of your band to kill me?”

“I won’t,” Peregrine repeated firmly. “You are safe with me. With us. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you this sooner—that I didn’t see it sooner. When I think of being apart from you...” Peregrine didn’t finish his sentence.

Instead, he brushed his mouth over Sandy’s with a kiss that felt as vulnerable as it was brief. The highwayman was still trembling, Sandy realized, still shaking with relief and maybe other emotions too raw to name.

Sandy was shaking too. It felt too good to be true, and he didn’t know if it was hope or doubt that made him shiver so.

And then Peregrine’s mouth was back on Sandy’s again, hungrier this time, the relief tasting so much like urgent, clawing need, and Sandy felt the same need rising in his blood. There was so much he didn’t know, so much he didn’t trust and so much he hoped for anyway, but this— this— he knew. He knew flesh, he knew groans and throbs and seed.

He pressed himself tighter to the highwayman, sliding his hands up to Peregrine’s neck as Peregrine kissed him again and again, his hot tongue slashing into Sandy’s mouth with desperate strokes, and then they were stumbling back, back until Sandy was against the wall. Below, their hips met and pressed and rubbed, and Peregrine braced his hands on either side of Sandy’s head so he could push in harder, grind his hips against Sandy’s even more. Their clothed cocks slipped rigid and thick against each other’s, and Peregrine’s kisses were so, so hot, and Sandy couldn’t stand another moment without Peregrine inside him, he simply couldn’t.

He struggled out of the coat and then unbuttoned his breeches, turning as he did.

“Alexander,” Peregrine groaned, and Sandy decided right then and there that he liked when Peregrine called him that. He hardly ever heard Alexander ; he’d been Sandy since he was a child. The irrelevant spare, the pet. But Peregrine used his full name like he was a king or an emperor.

A ruler in his own right.

It used to scare him, that possibility, whenever he thought of what might happen if he was still Reginald’s heir when Reginald died and had to take over the Second Kingdom. It still did terrify him, but for the first time in his life, it electrified him a little too. Like maybe he could be a ruler if Peregrine thought he could be.

“Don’t make me wait,” Sandy said breathlessly, bracing his hands next to Peregrine’s on the wall. “ Please. ”

The highwayman uttered a soft oath, but his hands dropped to his own breeches, and then Alexander heard him spitting into his palm.

“You wanted it like a soldier?” Peregrine asked, the wet, blunt head of his cock entreating entrance to Sandy’s body. “This is much the same.”

Then a thrust which felt like a sword of fire.

Sandy had done this before—a rake didn’t fuck his way through London without the occasional impromptu swive with no oil on hand—so the initial discomfort wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise was the man behind him, who wasn’t trying to hammer in and out right away, who added more slickness when it was needed, who was already reaching around to take Sandy’s erection in his calloused palm and giving it rough, satisfying pumps as he let Sandy adjust to him.

Maybe it was the hand pleasuring him, or maybe it was the time Peregrine gave Sandy to relax into the invasion—or maybe it was just that it was Peregrine Hind, and with him, Sandy felt a deeply arousing combination of imperiled and safe.

Whatever it was, he was soon panting and moaning into the wall, rocking his prick into Peregrine’s hand, fucking himself back on the thief. Which had Peregrine rubbing oh so wonderfully against the essential spot inside him. Sandy’s testicles drew up tighter to his body, and astonishingly fast, he felt himself ready to surge in Peregrine’s grip.

“Soldiers,” Sandy gasped, “can’t have been this considerate.”

“Consideration is a rare thing in the tents,” Peregrine admitted.

“Show me.”

“As you wish,” Peregrine grunted, drawing back to give Sandy a series of rough strokes that had his knees threatening to buckle.

The grunting behind him continued, each grunt matched with an arrow of pleasure right through Sandy’s core, stabbing up into his belly, and he watched the big shadow on the wall behind him, all male, all brutal, all hellbent on this raw, primal act.

With Peregrine’s cock hot and stroking, with the sound of the highwayman’s pleased grunts and the crackle of the fire, Sandy’s climax tore through him, tore him right in half. He let out a long cry that was nearly a wail, his organ seizing hard in Peregrine’s fist and then striping the wall in front of him with seed.

All of him must have been clenching and contracting, even the hole Peregrine was fucking, because Peregrine gave an animal noise and followed Sandy over the edge, his hips working to keep himself deep as he emptied himself into the man he had pinned against the wall.

They both panted there for a moment, breathing hard, slumping forward until Sandy’s head was against the roughly plastered wall and Peregrine’s was against the back of Sandy’s neck.

“What do you think of the soldier’s way of doing things?” Peregrine asked, and Sandy just laughed.

“I think I’m ready to enlist tomorrow.”