Heart (26 page)

Seb came with a sharp cry, spilling onto his belly. Elation filled him. Elation and something just… more. He opened his eyes to find Dex’s face inches from his, and all at once, he felt the missing link between them become whole.

He pushed Dex’s sweat-dampened hair away from his face, sucking in ragged breaths until he could speak. “Will you come somewhere with me tomorrow?”

A sleepy, sated smile graced Dex’s beautiful face. “Of course.”

D
EX
SPUN
a slow circle in the dilapidated farmyard, his face a picture of bemused confusion. “I don’t understand,” he said. “There’s nothing here.”

Seb rolled his eyes, trying to tame the childlike excitement threatening to bubble out of his chest. The excitement had been building since they’d climbed into the car and driven the forty-mile trip out of London. He grasped Dex’s shoulders and turned him back to the dilapidated farmhouse. “Not yet, but I’m hoping we can change that.”

“Change it how?”

“I want to buy it.” Seb pointed to the house. “That would be the restaurant. We’d live above it.” He gestured to the woods surrounding the farm. “We could get local ingredients from the woods. Meat from the farm down the road. Grow our own herbs and veg.” He turned Dex again and pointed to a cluster of outbuildings. “We could even keep a couple of those scraggly old nags you love so much.”

“Horses?”

“If you want.”

Dex was silent, and Seb held his breath, under no illusions that asking Dex to give up the newfound security of his life in London wasn’t huge. His weekly wage was nothing to Seb, but to Dex, it was everything. The most he’d ever had.

“You’d be my boss.”

“Not necessarily. You want to rescue horses, right? Like the place Tauna and Carric live?”

Dex nodded. He’d made no secret of his fascination with the farms that took in animals most sane people would have destroyed. “So?”

“So, you could work in the restaurant to pay for the horses. Help me source ingredients from the wild. Hell, Dex, you can do whatever you want. You don’t have to work here at all.”

Dex shook his head. “No. I like it here, I just… I don’t know what that means.”

“Is it because I’d own the building? Because that’s all it is. Metal and dust. I’d give you half if I thought you’d let me.”

Dex smiled, and Seb felt a flutter of hope in his heart. “I know you would,” Dex said. “But I don’t need you to. I just want to be where you are.”

“That could be here. If you want. You really like it?”

Dex looked around and his grin split his beautiful face in half. “I do. I love it, and I love you too… more than that.”

Seb’s heart beat a stampede in his chest. “More than that, eh?”

Dex stepped into his arms like he’d been there all along… like there’d never been a world where they weren’t together. “To the moon and back.”

About the Author

G
ARRETT
L
EIGH
lives in a small commuter town just north of London with her husband, two kids, a dog with half a brain, and a cat with a chip on her shoulder. She's twenty-nine, and now she's reached that milestone, she intends to stay there for the foreseeable future. Garrett has been writing just about her whole life, but it's been about three years since she decided to take it seriously. According to Mr. Garrett, it was either give the men in her head a voice or have herself committed.

Angst. She can't write a word without it. She's tried, she really has, but her protagonists will always, always be tortured, crippled, broken, and deeply flawed. Throw in a tale of enduring true love, some stubbly facial hair, and a bunch of tattoos, and you've got yourself a Garrett special.

When not writing, Garrett can generally be found procrastinating on Twitter, cooking up a storm, or sitting on her behind doing as little as possible. That, and dreaming up new ways to torture her characters. Garrett believes in happy endings; she just likes to make her boys work for it.

Garrett also works as a freelance cover artist for various publishing houses and independent authors under the pseudonym G.D. Leigh.

Social media:

Website: http://garrettleigh.com
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Garrett_Leigh
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Cover art enquiries: [email protected]