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Chapter 1
London, December,1802
“Are your pet empath and his terrifying viscount going to be eavesdropping, if I either punch you or kiss you?”
Sam Rookwood stared at his possible prisoner and possible love of his life, tried to figure out a way to answer John’s question without betraying his chief magistrate’s position or his own hurricane of feelings or both at once, and managed, “No?”
“Oh, all right,” John said, “good,” and slammed Sam’s townhouse study door shut and shoved Sam up against it. The night shimmered and crackled: London at Midwinter, candlelight and holly, rustling silk and supper-parties, ruby tiaras and emerald satin breeches, mistletoe and fortune-telling. Sam couldn’t think about a fortune, a future, right now.
He let himself be shoved. Flat against solid wood. The tangle of emotion did most of the work, trapping him even more effectively.
John Thynne was everything Sam remembered and everything he didn’t, after eleven years apart. More beautiful, if that could ever have been possible. Sharper, more refined, youthful attractiveness stripped to bare clean bone and pronounced edges. A thunderstorm of motion, a tumble of too-long black hair and blue eyes like winter mornings, body deceptively slim but strong. His skin glowed more golden these days, vivid temptation against the dark cut of his coat and the pewter hue of his waistcoat under that.
The years in Italy had in some ways been kind. In the touch of sunlight, perhaps, on lazy heat-soaked afternoons among history and sculpture and music.
Sam had a flash of picturing that, a bewildering up-ending of ache and awareness and loss. It took his breath away with longing: John having been happy, safe, sunkissed, at least for a time. John here, now, returned to England after so many years, on a chilly December night.
John stealing a damned painting right in the middle of Lady Carness’s supper-party, because John was a damned thief now and Sam’s magistrate’s soul was desperately trying to protest his own lack of protest.
John here in his townhouse. Not a Preternatural Division holding cell, no, not that, because Sam should’ve done that, and couldn’t, not even with the painting in question silently judging his choices. Not with John glaring at him, ice and midnight and tempests.
John right up against him, undeniable, vital, making Sam’s body coil and respond and throb with hunger. John, his John, the impossible glorious embodiment of every one of Sam’s failures, everything he wanted and couldn’t want, needed and did not deserve.
John’s hand found Sam’s left wrist and pinned it against the door. Hard. A hum of sound, under John’s breath, carried a steel-lace of music; Sam’s arm ended up over his own head, yanked upward by power.
Sam should have argued. Should have shoved John away. Should have used any one of his own skills, physical, street-honed, or preternatural. He wasn’t the strongest kinetic talent, but he could’ve fought.
He moved his other hand to the same spot, instead.
John gave him an actual smirk, lopsided, devastating. “Begging for it?”
“No. Yes. Gods. I don’t know. John—”
“Don’t say my fucking name,” John said, “don’t talk, don’t ask me for anything—” and kissed him. Deep, and incontrovertible. Almost angry, or desperate, as desperate as Sam felt: all edges and pain and raw emotion.
His mouth claimed Sam’s, drank Sam up, left burning imprints. When he bit Sam’s lip, the sting flared sharp. Sam’s knees nearly gave way.
John pulled back. Stared at him. “You’d let me do anything to you.”
Even disheveled, breathless, saying filthy words, John was ridiculously, wildly pretty; he always had been, even when they’d been so much younger, when he’d arrived with his mother at the Rookwood house, when Emily Thynne had been the most beautiful penniless widow in London and Sam’s father had married her just to own her. When Sam, aware that he was twelve years older than the new arrival, knowing his own father too well, had promised those big scared blue eyes that he, Sam, would always take care of his new family.
He had not been able to, in the end. He had not been able to help any of them. That weight pressed down across his shoulders as if his entire magistrate’s desk had landed there.
In this moment, he had John’s hand on his wrists, the hum of melody in the air, the way it’d always underlain John’s voice with song. Sam could’ve gone to both knees and begged. For release, for forgiveness, for John to fuck him on the study floor until he was screaming into the practical flat rug. Any of that. All of it. At once.
He admitted, voice a scratch, “Anything.”
“You’d let me fuck you. Right here. In your perfect proper Chief Magistrate’s study. In your perfect proper Mayfair home. You’d get on your hands and knees for me, and you’d beg, and you’d spend yourself all over that rug, if I wanted you to.”
“I would. J—” He’d almost said John’s name. He’d been asked—or told—not to. Sam swallowed back the hurt of it. “Please. Anything you want.”
John’s hand loosened, on Sam’s wrists. “Anything I want.” A different note of music threaded through his voice, complex, reed-thin. “You mean that.”
Sam nodded, helpless against the music, the sudden dark surprise in winter skies.
“I don’t trust you.” The tune caught, scraped, skidded across frayed strings. “You lied to me. You lied to your constables about knowing me. The world thinks you’re honest. Sam Rookwood, Chief Magistrate, viscount’s son. Upstanding. Respectable. I know better. I know you.”
Sam whispered, “I know you do.”
