Scrap Metal (36 page)

I stared at him. It was true that Archie now had time on his hands. Promoted to sergeant as he had wished, even commended for bravery, he had quietly resigned, as all this time he had been trying to prove a point to himself. When asked, he said he hadn’t counted on being shot at in between rescuing golf carts, but I wasn’t so sure.

“That’s good,” I said unsteadily. “I want you to be friends. Er… Do you get the impression I get there, with…?”

“With him and Shona? That he’s pretty much moved in? Yeah, I do.”

“I mean, she’s still saying she’s not his girlfriend.”

“He says he’s not her latest farmhand. But whatever. He bet me fifty quid I wouldn’t get you to go. That should cover the airport taxes.”

“Cam…” I wasn’t even sure which part I was protesting now. “No.”

“Why not? I’ve won my bet, haven’t I?”

I stared at him. A wave of surrender was breaking in me. It wasn’t just the holiday, though suddenly I could see the tower, the melting heat, the handsome Basque gardener turning away in disappointment as I came home early with my notes and my recordings. It was him—Cameron, the whole unforeseeable fact of him. Brave, fierce, faulty, every day setting out to further my interests, to put me first. Shocked into what might be a lifetime of nightmares by watching a man die, but ready to kill for me. Loving me.

I took his face between my hands. “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, you won your bet, you beautiful violet-eyed bloody demon, you. And when we come back…” I kissed him then turned him gently round so we could look down over the gorse-patched moorland, across the cliffs and out to the indigo sea. “When winter comes, and all this is wiped out in sideways rain the way it was when you first got here…”

“We’ll run it. We’ll get through it.”

“I don’t know if it’s a forever deal, a sheep farm in the middle of nowhere. But I want to try, for Harry’s sake. And I love it all when you’re here. It’s like you made it new for me. You—you
are
my forever deal.” There it was again, that dangerous, beautiful word. In Gaelic, wilder and lovelier still. “
A-chaoidh
.”

“Yes, forever, Nic.
A-chaoidh
.”

About the Author

Harper Fox is the author of six critically acclaimed M/M novels, including Samhain’s
Driftwood
and
The Salisbury Key
, and the bestselling
Nine Lights Over Edinburgh
and
Last Line
. Her novels and novellas are powerfully sensual, with a dynamic of strongly developed characters finding love and a forever future—after the appropriate degree of turmoil. She loves to try and show the romance implicit in everyday life, but she writes a sharp action scene too.

To find out more about Harper and see updates on her current writing projects, please visit
www.harperfox.net
.

Look for these titles by Harper Fox

Now Available:

Driftwood

The Salisbury Key

Can love repair a shattered life in time to save the world?

The Salisbury Key

© 2011 Harper Fox

Daniel Logan is on a lonely quest to find out what drove his lover, a wealthy, respected archaeologist, to take his own life. The answer—the elusive “key” for which Jason was desperately searching—lies somewhere on a dangerous and deadly section of Salisbury Plain.

The only way to gain access, though, is to allow an army explosives expert to help him navigate the bomb-riddled military zone. A man he met once more than three years ago, who is even more serious and enigmatic than before.

Lieutenant Rayne has better things to do than risk his life protecting a scientist on an apparent suicide mission. Like get back to Iraq and prove he will never again miss another roadside bomb. Yet as he helps Dan uncover the truth, an attraction neither man is in the mood for springs up against their will. And stirs up the nervous attention of powerfully placed people—military and academic alike.

First in conflict, then in passion, Rayne and Dan are drawn together in a relationship as rocky and complicated as the ancient land they search. Where every step leads them closer to a terrible legacy written in death…

Warning: Contains bombs, archaeology and explicit M/M sex, not necessarily in that order.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
The Salisbury Key:

I had tensed up momentarily, almost unable to bear this new touch. Now, having let go and leaned briefly into it, I could hardly bear the thought of it stopping. I eased back, ending it myself. I wanted his passion, didn’t I? That was all. “I know,” I said. “I know. Thank you. Now come to… Come with me.”

Because
come to bed
was a problem. I was still sleeping on my own side of the double up there, and what I should have spent today doing was clearing out Jason’s clothes, which I didn’t need, not pretending to sort through his books, which I did. I tried to envisage rolling around in the sheets I still hadn’t changed, the wardrobes looking on in silent witness. I came to a halt in the hallway and felt Rayne gently collide with me. We both looked through the open living-room door at the sofa.

I said faintly, “What do you… What do you want?”

“Christ, Logan. I think I want you to fuck me, and I’m not even sure what that entails.”

I felt my eyes widen. “Not seriously.”

“What—about the fucking…?”

“No, you idiot—about the not
knowing
. I can’t—”

He cut me off impatiently. “No, for God’s sake. I know the—biological details. I just can’t imagine it being good.”

“Well, I’ll attempt to show you, but…” The sofa wouldn’t do for that. Quite apart from recent memories of Jase ploughing me down onto it—he loved that, to consummate passion while people went about their ordinary business, back and forth on the pavement outside—I needed space, or the demo would end up just as uncomfortable and awkward as Rayne probably feared.

I saw him seeing my problem. He was so alert. I could imagine being in a relationship with him, enjoying his delicious quickness, the sense of his being in pace at my side. No. Just a fuck. A good one, for preference, but that would be all.

He glanced upstairs and made a wry face at me. “I get it. Want to go to a hotel?”

Now there was a certain seedy, dreadful charm in that. Salisbury wasn’t long on establishments where you could book an afternoon room, but maybe we could find somewhere. Stay overnight to make it look good, screw each other blind and stupid and maybe get all this out of our systems in one fell swoop.

I swallowed, feeling faintly sick. That prospect felt worse—by just one shade, but definitely—than doing it in Jason’s bed on the day after his funeral. “God, no.”

“Okay. Well—don’t you have a spare room up there?”

I thought about it.
Dan’s rumpus room
, Jase had once called it, in affectionate disgust, passing by its open door. “Yes,” I said. “Of sorts.”

“Neutral ground?”

“Just about.” It would have to be. Apparently there wasn’t enough guilt in the world to stop me starting my slow burn. Heat like summer lightning, flickering all over the surface of my skin… He saw that problem too, and this time he didn’t say anything. He just took my hand.

So we each took up a position on either side of the bed, and between us we cleared it in painful silence. I would have felt much better if he’d laughed at me for my untidiness or for the range of my taste in books. I hadn’t always been a serious-minded student, and there were layers of history here—Frederick Forsyth novels and training manuals from the short time in my life when I’d wanted to be a commercial airline pilot.

But Rayne had thoughts of his own to occupy him. His hands moved efficiently, lifting off one stack after another. Eventually the mattress appeared. There was a pale blue undersheet on it, but that was all. I reached to brush dust off this and to tug it straight.

“God,” I said. “That looks a bit clinical. I’ll go and get a duvet.”

“No,” he said. I looked up at him. He was standing with his hands on his hips, surveying the mattress in much the same way as I’d seen him assess our next bit of dangerous ground on the plain. “Don’t. Putting a duvet over this isn’t gonna make it any better.”

I straightened up. Leaning on the wall, I folded my arms. “Better?” I echoed. There were things that I could tackle in a lover—initial shyness, mistaken ideas about anatomy—and things that I could not. Things that people had to straighten out for themselves. “Do you think what we’re going to do is bad?”

“What—morally? God, no. It just doesn’t fit…what I thought I was. What I thought I was going to be.”

“Which is?”

He shrugged. “Very boring. Wife and kids.”

With anyone else, I’d have laughed. I wondered what he thought was going to happen to him here on the spare-room mattress that would deprive him of the power to marry and reproduce. But he was pale, the rainy light and the expanse of sheet setting tired, nervous shadows under his cheekbones and eyes.

I said, “You can still have those things, can’t you? Did it ever occur to you that not getting killed in Iraq might be a better idea, if that’s what you really want?”

“Oh, I don’t really want them. I just…” He went to the window and carefully pulled at the cords of the blind until the slats were almost closed. Then he turned to face me. “Do you know what I wanted? I wanted to find some poor woman, marry her and squeeze a handful of kids out of her. Then be a perfect husband and father for the rest of my life, so I could shove my perfect fucking family in the face of…something that I don’t think even exists anymore.”

I repressed a whistle. His eyes were blazing. “Okay,” I said. “You can still have
that
, I suppose. But those are some bitter bloody reasons, Rayne.”

“You think I don’t know?”

I dropped a last handful of books and came towards him. We met in the narrow space at the foot of the bed. He went into my arms with a faint noise of surrender, and for a moment I held him there, tight as I could. He was shaking.

“C’mon, soldier,” I whispered to him. “You’ll be all right.”

I left him unsteadily beginning to unfasten his shirt and went into the bathroom, my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my fingertips. They fumbled at the door of the cabinet, and I stopped for a minute, trying to calm myself. There were considerations, weren’t there? Things I hadn’t had to think about in years. Jason and I had stopped using condoms almost immediately, once I’d moved in. I’d had my blood test, just in case, and it never crossed my mind to question him. He was my professor. He was Jason. I supposed, staring at my hollow-eyed self in the bathroom mirror now, that that might have been stupid. That I might have told my younger self to act different.

Did we even have any? I started pulling things out of the cabinet to see. Oh, Christ—there was one of Jason’s exquisite little jars of lubricant. I set it aside, shuddering. I’d need something—lots of it, with a first-timer—but even the scent of that stuff would make the introductory session a short and disappointing one. My cock was softening now at the sight of the bloody jar. Thank God—farther back, a tube of the KY we had used for less ceremonial occasions. That would do, but still didn’t solve the problem of the—

“Logan?”

I started, dropping the tube into the sink. Turning round, I saw Rayne leaning in the bedroom door. He was stark naked, and even with the light behind him, that was a sight to stop my breath. He had something in his hand. “Bringing condoms seemed presumptuous,” he said thoughtfully, giving the packet a chuck and catching it. “But then
not
bringing them seemed a bit presumptuous too, so…”

The truth is out there. Way, way, way out there!

Mummy Dearest

© 2011 Josh Lanyon

The XOXO Files, Book 1

Drew Lawson is racing against the clock. He’s got a twenty-four-hour window to authenticate the mummy of Princess Merneith. If he’s not at his boyfriend’s garden party when that window closes, it’ll be the final nail in their relationship coffin.

The last thing he needs traipsing on the final shred of his patience is brash, handsome reality show host Fraser Fortune, who’s scheduled to film a documentary about the mummy’s Halloween curse.

The opportunity to film a bona-fide professor examining the mummy is exactly the aura of authenticity Fraser needs. Except the grumpy PhD is a pompous ass on leave from his ivory tower. Yet something about Drew has Fraser using a word he doesn’t normally have to draw upon: please.

With no time to waste—and a spark of attraction he can’t deny—Drew reluctantly agrees to let Fraser follow his every move as he unwraps the mummy’s secrets. Soon they’re both making moves behind the scenes that even the dead can’t ignore…

Warning: Whoso shall ever open this tomb, er, book shall suffer the curse of the Pharaohs. Okay, maybe not. But set aside a chunk of time for marauding mummies, too many cosmopolitans, illicit sex in hotel rooms, and other non-academic shenanigans.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Mummy Dearest:

When the movie was over we walked back to the hotel along quiet and by then mostly deserted streets. The scent of wood smoke drifted in the sparkling night air. Every so often someone in costume appeared in the distant peripheral of our vision, as though at the far end of a telescope. Kids. Teenagers. Milking the last few minutes of the spookiest night of the year.

“What time is it?” I asked as we walked past a house where a jack-o’-lantern sat on the porch steps, eyes glowing eerily, yellow mouth laughing silently.

Fraser checked his wristwatch. “A quarter to midnight.”

“The witching hour.”

“Yep.”

After that we seemed to be out of things to talk about. I was coming down from the booze, and I felt tired and depressed when I remembered the fight with Noah. Which was every couple of minutes.