Page 4

Four

Sandy

Sandy rather wished he’d been able to escape, but he had to admit to himself that the last three hours of his life had been livelier and more interesting than the last three years put together, which probably also meant that he should admit to himself that the last few years of his life had been rather unsatisfying. Decadent, certainly, but in a way that increased his restlessness rather than soothing it.

Maybe he’d needed a good adventure to shake things up a little.

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?

He wouldn’t be there to be killed, of course, having weaseled or fucked his way free, but he did wonder how Peregrine felt about killing him.

Would he feel reluctant, maybe? Remorseful but resigned?

It was a shame they’d met like this because Sandy would’ve very much enjoyed being tied to a bed by Peregrine Hind on a regular basis. But after Sandy escaped, it would probably be best if he never ran into Peregrine or his eerie eyes again, for the obvious not-being-murdered-for-revenge reasons.

A tragic thought.

Sandy tried to make himself focus on possible avenues of escape while he waited for the thieves to finish talking. He’d peered through the privy hole earlier, and it had indeed led to a steep drop, and the sacristy window was too narrow to be of any use. His only way out was through the door, which was possibly guarded, and he already knew he’d be no good at fighting off a guard.

No, he’d need to stick to his strengths. Seduction, lying...bravado and charm.

The woman thief might be the ripest possibility. If only he could remember where he knew her from. Was she a former lover? A friend of a lover? Someone connected to the Second Kingdom?

But Sandy’s mind didn’t stay on escape for very long. It was impossible to think clearly while tied up like this, smelling rain and leather and knowing Peregrine would walk in eventually and see that Sandy had spilled all over himself. What would Peregrine do when he did? Would he fix Sandy with that look, that hot, hungry look? Would he get hard? Would he reach out and touch Sandy with one of those big, rough hands...?

Lost in his imaginings, Sandy didn’t notice the door opening until it was shutting again and Peregrine was inside. Peregrine’s legs were long enough and the room was small enough that it only took him three good strides to make it to the side of the bed, and even in his lust-induced haze, Sandy noticed how quick and silent those strides were. Peregrine could move like a ghost when he wanted.

The highwayman seemed to take in Sandy’s half-lidded eyes, his quivering limbs, the spatter of semen on his belly. His eyes dropped to Sandy’s renewed erection, which surged happily at the attention.

“You’ve already spent,” Peregrine said after a moment. “And you’re still like this?”

“I told you,” Sandy said, meaning to sound indignant but sounding breathless instead. “I like being tied up.”

Peregrine’s hand stretched out, and then they both watched as he dropped his fingertips to the top of Sandy’s knee, right above the hem of the breeches. His fingertips rested there, over the woolen broadcloth, pressing lightly against the place where the muscles of Sandy’s thigh anchored to his femur. And then, agonizingly, Peregrine trailed his fingers up, up, up to Sandy’s hip.

Peregrine looked as if even he didn’t know what he was doing, like he was encountering a treasure he had no idea how to steal, and Sandy was too drunk with desire to tell him this wasn’t stealing. This wasn’t even seduction, if he was being honest.

It was desperation.

“Please,” Sandy whispered. “ Please .”

Peregrine gave him a sharp look, and Sandy realized that he must sound like he had earlier, in the middle of the road, when he was pleading for his life.

But this was something much, much more important.

Sandy lifted his hips as much as the restraints would allow, trying to twist into Peregrine’s hand, which stayed resolutely unmoving against Sandy’s hip. “Please.”

Peregrine’s mouth was a straight line. But his eyes—he couldn’t hide those hungry, blown-pupil eyes. He couldn’t hide the way he swallowed over and over, as if searching for control.

“Why should I?” the highwayman finally asked.

Good question. Why should he pleasure a captive—a captive he planned on killing, and who was the brother of someone he clearly hated? Sandy blurted the first thing he could think of.

“Revenge?”

Peregrine’s fingers lifted and then ghosted lightly over the inseam of the breeches, running over the place where Sandy’s testicles had drawn up tight to his body. “How is this revenge for me ?”

“Umm,” Sandy said, and then added an “ Ohhhhh ” when Peregrine’s fingers moved up to wander around the base of his cock. Sandy’s erection bobbed, the crown dripping clear seed and burning like hot iron in the cool air.

“Well, it’s humiliating,” Sandy mumbled. “I’m so humiliated right now. Please, Peregrine. Please.”

Peregrine’s eyes flashed with some indecipherable emotion, but whatever it was had him bracing one knee on the bed as he tore at the buttons holding the breeches closed. In an instant, Sandy’s prick was completely naked and then there was the hand of his abductor wrapping tight around him and stroking hard.

Sandy’s back nearly bowed off the bed, even with his limbs tied, and never had he felt so helpless, so depraved, as when the man who was going to kill him was pumping his prick with a hard and vicious fist. When the release came, it felt like it was pulled right from his spine, right from the very marrow of his bones. He spurted seed all over the highwayman’s fingers, all over his stomach again, and the highwayman didn’t seem to mind at all, seemed to like it, in fact, because by the time Sandy’s body was drained totally dry, Peregrine’s cheeks were flushed and his shaft was very visibly thickened in his breeches.

His eyes met Sandy’s, and Sandy saw shock there, and lust, and several other things besides. Peregrine staggered back from the bed, his hand still covered in the milky proof of Sandy’s release, and he stared at that hand as if he wasn’t sure how he’d ended up like this.

“I can return the favor,” Sandy murmured. “You don’t even have to untie me. You could use my mouth.”

Peregrine shuddered, the flush deepening on his cheeks, and Sandy knew he’d found a weakness. Peregrine wanted inside his mouth. Badly.

Maybe even other places...

But a huge crash resounded from outside the sacristy door, followed by roars of laughter, and Peregrine seemed to snap out of whatever spell had overtaken him. With a sharp shake of his head, the highwayman walked over to the table and, using the ewer and a fresh towel, cleaned his hand. Then he came over to Sandy and wiped Sandy’s messy stomach clean.

The thickness in the thief’s breeches was unabated, but Peregrine didn’t unbutton them to relieve his desire, and he didn’t—as Sandy secretly hoped—climb onto the bed next to Sandy and make use of him. Instead, the thief began untying him, loosening the knots and then checking to make sure Sandy could still move his fingers and toes.

When he was completely untied, Sandy sat up and stared at him. “Let me make you feel better with my mouth,” he said. “I’m very good at it.”

Peregrine bundled the lengths of silk into neat coils as the silence after Sandy’s offer filled the room. The highwayman’s eyes glittered behind his lowered lashes—glittered with something less than vengeance and something more than lust. Secret things that made Sandy’s pulse speed up. Finally Peregrine said brusquely, “I’m your captor.”

“I thought we went over this,” Sandy said impatiently. “It’s revenge. You’re getting revenge and stuff.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you’re trying to seduce your way free.”

“Well, that sounds like a winning scenario for both of us!”

Peregrine leveled a look at him.

Sandy did his best to look innocent, but the effect was doubtful since he’d just done very not innocent things all over his stomach. “Did I mention that I’m so very good at it and also how vengeful you’ll feel while it’s happening?”

“Good night, Alexander,” the highwayman said. “There will be a guard outside your door tonight. I’ll make sure they bring in some food and wine for you too.”

A sharp displeasure sliced through Sandy at the thought of Peregrine leaving. He wanted more bed-play, yes, but he also just wanted his captor here , with him. He wasn’t sure why, exactly. Maybe it had something to do with those secrets shimmering in the highwayman’s silver eyes.

“Peregrine!” Sandy called, but there was no reply. His captor had gone.