by Con Riley
His Horizon
His MM Romances #1
Con Riley
Contents
His Horizon
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
About the Author
His Horizon
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED:
This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or business establishments, events or locales is coincidental.
This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission. The Licensed Art Material is being used for illustrative purposes only. All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
His Horizon © 2020 Con Riley
Cover artist: Natasha Snow
Editor: Sue Meadows
WARNING
This book contains material that maybe offensive to some and is intended for a mature, adult audience. It contains graphic language, explicit sexual content, and adult situations.
Created with Vellum
His Horizon
Temperatures rise when there are two cooks in Jude’s kitchen...
Jude’s drowning in guilt when he can’t save his family business single-handed. The last person he expects to throw a lifeline is Rob, a rival chef who once beat him to first place in a cooking contest.
* * *
Two chefs working together won’t be easy. Not when Rob is everything Jude isn’t—popular, extroverted, and a one-time hook-up. What’s worse is that Rob wears his heart on his sleeve while Jude’s still in the closet.
* * *
Jude’s dilemma doesn’t end there. Rob’s rescue package comes with conditions that mean sharing everything from the profits to Jude’s sleeping quarters.
* * *
Sleeping with the enemy will either be a disaster or signal a much brighter future, but only if Jude can meet Rob’s final condition and love him in the open.
* * *
Featuring opposites who attract, rivals to lovers, and an out-for-you storyline dripping with hurt-comfort feelings, His Horizon is the first in a shared-world series of standalone MM romance novels from Con Riley.
1
Jude Anstey came home to Porthperrin months later than he’d promised, clutching the mast of the Aphrodite as she skimmed the Cornish coastline. Thirty metres of sleek sailing perfection, the yacht raced the dawn and sliced through waves far too fast for his liking.
He shouldn’t need to grip her mast so tightly, his knuckles bone-white like the beach his village was famed for, but Jude couldn’t make himself let go. He couldn’t see that familiar crescent of white sand either, only some harbour lights in the distance, blinking through patches of sea mist. His stomach lurched at how soon those lights drew close, time suddenly passing so much quicker than it had while he’d been away on his travels.
“Looking a bit green about the gills, Jude.” His skipper’s gruff laugh gusted from his place at the wheel. “Anyone would think you were the new hire, rather than a seasoned old hand. Maybe you should stay aboard for another few months. Grow a stronger pair of sea legs.” His teasing was a distraction from the brightening of the horizon. It coloured the sea mist soft pink, gauzy banners between him and the village he’d done his level best to escape.
“Pretty place.” His skipper called out as the mist dissipated. “Quaint.”
Jude nodded rather than speaking. Porthperrin would be at its best right now before the summer season started, deserted, when its cobbled alleys would soon be clogged with noisy tourists. They were the lifeblood of the village, their cash sustaining local business, but he couldn’t help preferring when Porthperrin was quiet.
The outline of slate-topped buildings grew steadily clearer, cottages seeming to tumble down the steep hill to pile around the harbour, the Anchor pub where he grew up nestled right at its centre.
The pub would have been a sight for sore eyes if his return wasn’t empty-handed.
His eyes stung with that fact. With no news to share with his sister—good, bad, or very ugly—he’d have to confess his failure. As the Aphrodite carried him towards that fate, Jude blinked to clear his vision.
“Yup. It’s a pretty-looking place, all right,” his skipper added, oblivious to Jude’s distress. “But not half as pretty as the Maldives, so how about I get rid of the new hire? I’ll make that cheeky sauce-pot walk the plank. Maybe he could help your sister run the Anchor for the summer instead of you. Then we can get back to somewhere warmer. I can still make that happen, Jude. All you have to do is ask me.”
It was a tempting prospect, but Jude made himself shake his head.
“No? Where’s your sense of adventure? I’ll promote you if you say yes.”
Jude pulled himself together, loosening his death grip on the mast. “Promote me to what, exactly?” His voice was a dry rasp after hours of silence. His skipper usually let him keep his own counsel, but now he seemed to need a verbal answer. “I’m already your cook and bottle washer, let alone a tour guide for your rich clients.” Jude slipped into autopilot as the harbour drew close, working in synchrony to berth her. “What’s left that I don’t do for you already?”
“What don’t you do for me, Jude?” The yacht slid into a free spot by the sea wall, his skipper making the manoeuvre look easy, his attention fully focussed on bringing Jude home safely. He sent the new hire ashore before replying. “I can think of a few new tasks I could assign.” He cast a line shoreside, his usual stoic expression troubled. “You could call me by my first name, for a start. It’s Tom, not Skip, now that you’re off the payroll. And you could…” He was indecisive for once, instead of his usual cool, calm and collected. Tom scrubbed a hand through silvering, sea-damp hair. “Well, there’s a lot you could do differently Jude, if you wanted. With me, I mean. Together.”
That was a lot to take in. Jude hadn’t seen the offer coming.
“What I’m saying,” Tom quickly added, “is that we work well together, professionally. We might work just as well personally if you stayed.” He busied himself coiling rope, his gaze fixed on it. “You’re a godsend in the galley—a top-notch chef as well as a born sailor. I like that you think before speaking.” His voice lowered. “We’ve built a good working relationship. Taking it further wouldn’t exactly be a hardship.”
“I have to leave.” As Jude spoke, a fishing boat chugged past. The Aphrodite bobbed in its wake, her deck rising and falling as if nodding in agreement. “I promised my sister I’d come home. I promised that months ago.”
Tom followed Jude as he jumped from the gunwale onto the sea wall steps, the granite gritty underfoot compared to the smooth teak of the yacht�
�s deck. He spoke quietly once they both stood shoreside, perhaps aware that the nosy new hire listened. “I know you promised to come home, Jude, but please listen to me. Take some advice from someone older.” He rubbed at his glinting stubble. “Finding someone you can work with so well, who knows what you need before you do, and who shoulders half of your load without asking….” His low chuckle was rueful. “Well, when you find someone like that who’s easy to look at as well, you’d be a damn fool to let them walk away without trying hard to keep them.”
“I… I didn’t know. Why didn’t you—?”
“Say something earlier?” Tom grasped his wrist, like Jude had clutched the mast only minutes before, his grip a squeeze of rope-roughened fingers. “Do you remember what you were like when I hired you?”
Jude thought and then nodded, that sick lurch of earlier returning.
“You were a wreck, Jude. Exhausted. How long had you been travelling for, by then?”
Searching. He’d been searching for months rather than travelling for fun, or island-hopping, like so many people his age. He hadn’t gone sightseeing in the Seychelles or snorkelled in warm Goan shallows. Instead, he’d scoured the Indian Ocean in search of news to bring home to his sister.
“Jude, it took a long time before you got your head straight.” Tom squared his shoulders and broached a subject Jude had only voiced once, drunk with grief and tiredness. “Your parents were lost at sea—”
“You don’t know that,” Jude snapped. No one did, for certain.
Tom’s nod was reluctant. “Okay. They were likely lost at sea, and you were grieving about that. I get that. I do. It took a lot for you to keep looking, despite the chances of them surviving being…” He winced before finishing. “…slim-to-none.”
Regret was a noose around Jude’s neck. It tightened with each reminder.
“A yacht the size of the Aphrodite can weather bad storms,” Tom said. “You know that. But a vessel the size of your father’s caught in the worst typhoon for decades, and him the only experienced sailor aboard….”
Jude’s throat constricted even further. Knowing all of that had been hard to live with during his first months crewing for Tom, his focus split between work and scanning each new horizon for a sign of his parents. Later, with Tom’s steadiness to ground him, Jude had found some plainer mental sailing, even if he still searched every port for a boat called the One for Luck that his dad had spent years building.
“I had to come home sometime,” Jude just about managed to get out, wishing he was anywhere else rather than home, right then. “I promised Louise.”
“Jude, you said that before, then you changed your mind.”
“It…it seemed too soon to give up,” he said. That was only a few months after the police had arrived midway through dinner service at the London restaurant where he’d worked. They’d told him news that had been life-changing, and from that moment onwards, Jude had been committed to proving them wrong. Coming home empty-handed like this though….
Tom released Jude’s wrist very gradually. “You can’t blame yourself for not finding them, Jude. Or for not finding any wreckage when you didn’t exactly know where to look for it. And you can’t blame me either for hoping all the way here that you’d change your mind one more time.” Jude shook his head instead of replying, so Tom continued softly. “I only want you to be sure. Really sure. You’re how old? Somewhere in your twenties? You’ll be racing through your forties before you know it, like me, with half the world left to explore. Just because you feel some family obligation to shackle yourself to a failing business—”
Anger let loose more words than Jude would usually spare. “I’m not shackling myself to anything. I promised I’d come back, that’s all, to help get the pub set up for the summer. And it’s not a failing business.” Okay, his sister’s messages hadn’t exactly been positive for a while that winter, but she’d sounded brighter whenever he called home lately. “The pub has always done okay in the past. Once the summer tourists arrive, it’ll be business as usual,” apart from his parents not being behind the bar, he thought, still no closer to acceptance. “Mum and Dad never meant to leave running the Anchor up to her for so long. It was only meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure before they were too old to enjoy it. We just need to keep the pub going until they get back. It won’t be forever.”
“Okay, okay. But ask yourself this, Jude: you had a great career in London, didn’t you? Or the start of one, anyhow, if you really were a semi-finalist in that best-chef competition.”
“I was.” Now that contest felt as if it happened to a whole other person.
Concern etched deep lines across Tom’s forehead. “I know you were. I looked it up after agreeing to hire you,” he admitted. “I read about how you were tipped to win before you got the news about your parents.” He met Jude’s gaze and held it. “And I read that if you won the competition, you planned to use the prize money to set up a place of your own in London. You’d grown up cooking pub grub, you said in one interview, but you thought fine dining was special. You certainly wowed our charter clients with your menus.” Tom glanced at the pub Jude had grown up in. “Do you truly think you’ll find anything as special here?”
Anything as special?
Jude’s gaze slid to the front of the pub too, peeling paintwork visible as the sun rose, too much maintenance here for one person alone. Guilt weighed heavily, like the black anchor painted on the sign above the pub’s front door.
Tom’s voice dropped. “Or maybe you’re determined to come back because of someone special, instead? You know, I couldn’t help feeling there was a subtext to the interview I read. It mentioned sparks flying during the contest between you and another contestant. Rob, wasn’t it? Rob Martin?”
Jude’s brain conjured a mental image of someone he’d tried so hard to forget.
“The interviewer implied you two were opposites. Said you were deadly serious about winning while this Rob guy was a joker who only played at competing. Was it a case of opposites attracting, Jude? Is that why I never noticed you pick up anyone the whole time we sailed together?”
“No,” Jude murmured, doing his level best not to see the feathers of Rob’s laugh lines superimposed over Tom’s deep ones, or Rob’s wide smile when Tom’s lips lifted slightly. “Rob Martin’s not my type.” Jude also tried not to relive the one kiss they’d shared the night before a typhoon changed the course of his life. “He doesn’t take being a chef seriously. Or anything else, for that matter.”
“No? So why was he competing?”
“To annoy his father.”
Tom squinted, so Jude explained, abbreviating a story he’d taken months to think over. “His dad’s got a whole chain of five-star restaurants that he expects Rob to take over. I don’t know why when Rob doesn’t deserve them. He’s bone idle, but I guess blood’s thicker than water.” And wasn’t that exactly why Jude had left London the moment his parents went missing? “He only ever flirted with me for the cameras.”
“So if there isn’t someone special here for you, maybe you could think about me? I think we’d be good together.” Tom tugged him closer. “Tell me you haven’t ever thought about it. About us.” His touch skimmed from Jude’s wrist to his elbow, thumb pressed to the hollow where his pulse surged. Then it skimmed over the swell of biceps before coming to rest on Jude’s shoulder. “Because I did,” Tom said, plain and honest.
From this close, Jude could smell the engine oil ingrained on Tom’s hand, and a hint of the peppermint tea he favoured, his hold on Jude rock-steady. “You never let on. I didn’t have any idea.”
“I wasn’t about to come on to you while you were so low. And then I decided not to while you still worked under me, in case you felt pressured to say yes. Now that I’m not your boss, I can ask.” Tom made it sound so easy. “So, what do you think?”
It would be easy—so easy—to say yes.
Jude could spend the summer cooking for Tom’s wealthy clients while cont
inuing his search.
Tom faked a glower at his new hire who blew him a kiss. “I should have asked you before I signed up that sauce-pot.” Tom sighed. “He’s going to be nothing but trouble.” Then he focussed on Jude again. “Yeah, I should have asked you before, and then showed you what you’d be missing.”
Jude moistened suddenly dry lips to find Tom studying his mouth, intent, his lips parting as he leaned in. Jude almost met his mouth—wanted to for a split second—until something inside pulled him away from Tom instead of towards him. The new hire seemed to agree with that decision, hefting Jude’s duffle up from the deck to dump it between them.
“So you’re staying?”
“I have to, at least for the summer.”
“Okay.” Tom nodded, firm, as if he’d come to a decision. “Do what you have to do here. Get it out of your system, Jude, and then call me on the satellite phone. Call me,” he repeated as if he was issuing his usual orders—scrub the deck, hoist the sail, start a new life with me. “You call me, and I’ll change course; sail wherever you want, if you ask me.”
Sea legs struck Jude as Tom untethered lines and jumped down onto the deck of the Aphrodite, issuing instructions to Jude’s replacement. He braced himself on the sea wall to keep from following as the yacht that had become home headed into open water, leaving him stranded where he’d finally have to face the music.