His brows drew together, and his lips quivered a little, and oh, fuck, if he started crying I had no idea what I was going to do next. I didn’t give a shit that he was a guy. I would’ve been at least as panicked and confused if he were a girl.
I was opening my mouth to try to say…something. You’re okay, or Please don’t, or something equally dumb. Instead, he burst out with, “I’m not a fucking kid!”
“Okay?”
“I mean, I’m turning eighteen in less than a year! I’m not a fucking kid, and I need to be able to have a life, and just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I can’t go out in public, you know? Like there’s something wrong with me, and they’re embarrassed when people see me and know I’m their son! I am so fucking over this. I’m done!”
By the end of his tirade, there were a couple of tears trickling down Sebastian’s face from his glassy blue eyes. The drizzle was coming down enough by now that I thought I could get away with ignoring them and pretending I hadn’t noticed, since his face was damp anyway.
I wasn’t sure what to say. Yeah, it sucked when parents were controlling, and having parents who tried to control you because they didn’t even like you? That had to be…well, I wouldn’t know. Mine didn’t care enough either way. So if what he said was true, I didn’t really blame him for taking off and running away from home, which it looked like he was doing.
But. I was just old enough that he sounded like a kid to me, a bratty kid who couldn’t wait to live life on his own terms and resented his parents for trying to make him follow their rules. He could be exaggerating. A lot. He could have been about to walk out of the house wearing glittery rainbow pants on his way to a job interview at a funeral home, and his mom said his clothes weren’t really appropriate, and it escalated from there…he could even be basically making this all up, his version of events that didn’t match reality.
Or, again, he was maybe telling the truth, and his parents were assholes. It didn’t matter, because either way, here he was alone.
Waiting for someone to pick him up. The alarm bells in my head started up again.
“Who’d you say was coming to get you again?”
His jaw set and he stared down at the sidewalk. I just stood there, silently waiting him out. I didn’t know Sebastian all that well, but I’d teased him enough at school that I knew he was never, ever able to keep his mouth shut, even when he really should have. Say something to piss him off, and then wait. He’d fill the silence and dig himself even deeper.
Fuck, I’d really been a douchebag. But at least right now I knew how to handle him.
“A friend,” he said at last, sounding like the words were dragged out of him.
Score. He was talking. “A friend?” And then I waited again.
A few long seconds dragged by. Another couple of cars turned at the light and drove on past, and the rain picked up. It was pattering down now, splattering in little pools on the bench and turning the streetlight’s shine into a fuzzy glow. I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my horrible uniform button-down.
Finally, the words tumbled out of him. “I mean, I’ve never met him, but he seems really cool. Like, he was willing to come and pick me up, and he lives two hours away! And he’s gay. He knows what it’s like. He got kicked out of his house when he was my age.”
The alarms weren’t just ringing, now, they were screeching and flashing and practically jumping out at me and hitting me over the head.
I tried to sound calm. Make him figure it out for himself. But if he didn’t, I was going to hogtie him and stuff him in my trunk if I had to, and take him…maybe to a relative’s house, maybe back home if I couldn’t think of anything else. Home with jerk parents was still better than raped and beaten and dumped on the side of the road.
“So how long ago was that?”
Sebastian looked up sharply. “What does that matter?”
I took a deep breath. Time to be a little more direct. “Sebastian, how old is this guy?”
Maybe he was more aware of how fucked up this was than I’d thought, because his cheeks went bright red, and now he couldn’t look at me again. “He’s older, but he’s not, like, old or anything.”
“Is he in college?” If he was under twenty-five, then there was a super slim chance he was just a dude with a crush on a younger guy and not a complete pervy predator.
Sebastian dropped the straps of his bag and crossed his arms over his chest, his shoulders folding in like he was trying to curl up into a fetal ball while he was standing. His face wasn’t getting any less red, and I could see how hard he was breathing by the shifting of his torso and the puffs visible in the chilly air.
“Is he out of college? Over thirty? Over forty?”
“He’s not over forty!”
I let that hang in the air for a minute in the ringing, defensive silence. “Not over forty. So, over thirty?” He pressed his lips together, like he hadn’t already said more than enough. “Dude. He’s twice your age. Like, he could be your father if he knocked someone up in high school.”
“It’s not what you think,” Sebastian muttered. He glared at me, tipping his chin up. I knew that look. He got that expression when he was about to try to fight back. “You just think the guy’s a creep because he’s gay. You’re a fucking homophobe!”
He threw that at me like it was a mic-drop argument-ender, and I almost laughed. I kept it down. Tact. I needed to have a little of it. “Imagine you were a girl —”
“What, because I’m gay? Because I wear girly pants and my name is a fruit?” He stopped, panting, fists on his hips, looking like some avenging gay angel.
I winced. Fuck, those sounded like direct quotes. From me. I took a deep breath. Yeah, I wanted to defend myself, or even apologize. But I couldn’t let him sidetrack me or we’d be here all night. “Because if a seventeen-year-old girl was standing here in the rain waiting for some guy twice her age she met online to come pick her up, what the fuck would you think was going on, Sebastian?”
That hit home. He flinched a little. “I can take care of myself. I’m not a girl.”
Inspiration struck. “Yeah? So you a misogynist now? Girls can’t take care of themselves, girls are weak, whatever?”
Sebastian gaped, his jaw dropping open. It snapped shut with a click I could hear over the soft whisper of rain and cars crossing at the intersection.
I decided it was now or never; I needed to press my advantage and get him the hell into my car before this asshole showed up and I had to get in a fight. I didn’t fight much, because I never saw the point. I also didn’t fight much because I was starting to fill out my six-foot-three-inch frame, and most guys didn’t want to go there.
Why I’d be willing to throw down on the side of the road for Sebastian — well, I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t need to think about it right then. It just was.
“Sebastian, any guy in his thirties who wants to pick up a high school kid is a creep. Gay, straight, whatever. Like, off the internet? I mean, it might be different if you were friends because you met in real life doing some hobby or something. Like if you got to know each other because you played in the same hockey league, or whatever.” He snorted, and I couldn’t help smiling. “Okay, maybe hockey was a bad example. Church. Putting on a play. Whatever.” I loved hockey. Sebastian wasn’t a jock, and that was putting it mildly. “If this dude is really your friend, he’ll be happy to meet for coffee later, right? He won’t mind if you change plans. If he only wants to get you alone at night, he’s probably not looking for someone to talk to.” A guy that old wanting to meet a high school kid for coffee sounded a little creepy, too, but it would sure as fuck be better than this.
Sebastian stared into space, chewing on his lower lip. Another car turned left, and this one slowed down and almost stopped just before the bus stop. When I turned to look, it sped off.
“I can’t go home, though,” he said finally, sounding defeated. “I mean, I don’t have anywhere to go if he doesn’t pick me up.”
/> “Why don’t you come to my place?” Fuck, what was I saying? But I kept going. “I don’t have a guest room or anything. I mean, it’s a studio. But I have a carpeted floor with a blanket. It’s not raining there. I think I have some hot chocolate. It’s not much, but I can put a sleeping bag —” I cut myself off, flustered as hell. Why did I suddenly sound like a real estate agent listing my crappy apartment’s amenities? He was lucky I was offering him a place to stay at all that wasn’t a wet bus stop or some pervert’s basement, right?
By the way Sebastian was smiling, he thought I sounded like a moron too. He hesitated, glancing along the street as if weighing his options, and then looked back at me. It turned out he was a lot nicer than I was, because he didn’t laugh at me; all he said was, “Thanks, Aidan.”
I grabbed his duffel bag and slung it in the back seat of my car, relief flooding me and making me a little weak in the knees. Fuck, what if I hadn’t happened to drive by? We had people in common on Facebook. I probably would’ve seen ‘Share this post about a missing high school student’ in my news feed within a day or two.
Once Sebastian was settled in the passenger seat, I jogged around and jumped in myself. I didn’t have enough money to get us both a burger, and I had no idea if Sebastian had any money and didn’t want to ask and make it sound like I thought he owed me, so I headed for my apartment. We’d need to eat ramen. Wouldn’t be the first time, wouldn’t be the last. But at least Sebastian was safe.
Four hours later, I staggered out of bed to a thunderous pounding on my front door, shouting voices and the crackle of radios, muffled whoops and blips from the cars outside, and Sebastian’s worried, “Aidan? What’s going on?”
I should’ve stopped to think about that question before I flung the door open, but I didn’t. I was thrown to the ground, my cheek pressed into the gritty carpet, a knee on the small of my back, cold air flowing in over my bare legs. All I could see were boots and the edge of Sebastian’s sleeping bag. He was arguing, yelling, while the cops rattled off my rights and tried to talk him down.
I didn’t find out the answer to Sebastian’s question until later, but what was going on was pure shitty luck. The car that’d slowed down? The driver was a woman who worked with Sebastian’s dad. She’d seen him, in the dark at a bus stop and about to get in a car with a bigger and older guy, and she’d written down my license plate and called his parents and the police.
As I was dragged away in handcuffs, with two cops telling me that a sick kidnapping gay rapist fuck like me was going to have a great time in prison, all I could hear was Sebastian shouting my name and that I hadn’t touched him, hadn’t hurt him, hadn’t anything.
The Replacement Husband
Available on Amazon
Owen Honeyfield lives a goddess-blessed life. His picture-perfect courtship and engagement to the man of his dreams is proof of that. But when his betrothal takes a disastrous turn, Owen’s only hope to restore his tarnished reputation comes from a most shocking source—the cold, disturbingly sensual brother of the man who just shattered his heart and abandoned him. Perhaps he’s not as blessed as he’d always thought…
Arthur Drake is accustomed to cleaning up after his impulsive and selfish brother. After all, he’s done it his whole life. The latest debacle, though, is much worse than usual. This time, his brother’s actions have threatened not only their family name, but Arthur’s own happiness. The only honorable choice is to marry Owen. But while he knows he can repair the damage to his beautiful new husband’s reputation, mending his broken heart might prove infinitely more difficult.
It’s not long before the lines between duty and passion blur, and Arthur finds himself in the inconvenient position of falling for his new husband. Will his love be enough to convince Owen to let their marriage of convenience become the happily ever after they both deserve?
This is an M/M romance set in an alternate-universe Regency with waistcoats, awkward tea-drinking, and pagan goddesses on the loose. It is the first in a series, but it can be read as a standalone.
Reviews of The Replacement Husband
“I loved Arthur and his fierce need to protect Owen and his ability to remain steady in the midst of Owen’s uncertainty. And that he laughed when Owen threw a pillow at his face.”
– Kirstin at Gay Book Reviews
“…the book was fantastically written, it was romantic and sexy and sweet and I loved that the villain got his comeuppance. What more can you wish for?”
– Mari at Bayou Book Junkie
“This twist on the historical worked very well for me.”
– Lucy at Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words
Read on for an excerpt from The Replacement Husband, available for sale and in Kindle Unlimited on Amazon.
The moors spread out on either side of him like an unrolled parchment. A particularly crumbly unrolled parchment, filled with the details of religious practices in ancient Pythia, perhaps. Although Pythia had at least been known for its fig wine and moonlit dances among the olive groves. Owen frowned. He was probably being rather too kind to Trewebury and its environs. If anyone could produce a single drop of fig wine within a hundred miles, he’d eat his unfashionably low-crowned hat.
And as for moonlit dances — Owen sniggered at the thought of his staid father, belly straining against his brown-striped waistcoat, cavorting in the moonlight. It would take a deal of fig wine to bring that about.
The moors had very little to recommend them, too, in any light. They had a certain bleak grandeur, Owen supposed, but mostly they had drizzle, and low, prickly bushes that caught at one’s ankles, and the occasional surly sheep.
And Owen. He was there, seemingly for always, and seemingly always alone.
He could forget that, though, once he reached the cliffs that bounded the moors to the west. The glory of the ocean spread out before him seemed temptingly close despite the hundred feet of cliff-face that stood between him and it. Gulls swooped and wheeled, their calls echoing the shrill and terrifying cries of Mirreith, their patron goddess. And Owen’s, due to the sigil she placed on his body while he was still in the womb. At least he had their company — the gulls and the goddess. Although the latter had been marked by her absence since troubling to claim him some decades before; Owen would have welcomed some sign of what her plan for him might be, even if that came in the form of a portentous seagull.
He watched for a little while, but the gulls did nothing but circle, occasionally diving down to examine some presumably delicious bit of slimy ocean detritus on the shore below. If the goddess meant him to take some meaning from that, he lacked the intelligence to discern it.
With a sigh, Owen turned back, away from the setting sun and toward home, where his parents would soon expect him for dinner. He tramped across the moors as often as he could escape on his own from his family’s dull and respectable home, for there was simply nowhere else to go. Trewebury was more than a mere village; it was the local market town and busy enough in the mornings when tradesmen and farmers plied their services and wares in the central square and along the several streets that led into it. But it was entirely devoid of anything that could excite a young fellow of two-and-twenty with no interest in the girls who flocked to the market with their baskets.
Not that Owen would excite them, either. Trewebury was small enough that everyone knew of the goddess-touched in their midst. He wished, most passionately some days, that he could hide what he was. The town’s young women either giggled at the very thought of him, or — often worse — thought to treat him as one of their own, an impulse he knew had its root in kindness, but one that left him feeling less of a man but not nearly a woman, either. He tried not to think of what the town’s young men thought of him; if they thought of him at all, Owen suspected it was in terms he would not find flattering.
The sun sank deeper into the heavy bank of fog closing in from the sea, and the moor before him lost all its remaining color. One stray shaft of light still highlighted the
top of a granite tor about a mile distant, the gently rolling swells of grass surrounding it only the gloomier and more featureless by contrast. It didn’t matter. He knew this stretch of moor as well as he knew his own bedchamber.
Owen set a course just to the right of the tor, planning to scramble down a bit of hillside and meet the path that led around the foot rather than circling to it across flatter ground. Just as he reached the top of the slope, the sound of hoofbeats startled him out of his reverie, and he jumped, slipped, and with a cry, went tumbling down.
There was the scrape of gravel on his palms, and the slide of scree beneath his flailing legs; the ground and the sky whirled in a sickening dance, and then he landed flat on his back with a crunch, his head swimming. He blinked, and flinched as a few more bits of gravel pattered down.
When he blinked again, a dark, rather wavery shape blotted out what was left of the light. A giant frowning hat? That couldn’t possibly be right. Owen tried to push himself up onto his elbows, only to be gently but firmly pushed back down again.
“Don’t try to move,” said a deep rasp of a voice. “You’ve most likely struck your head on something on the way down.”
The shape removed its hat and resolved into a broad-shouldered gentleman, his face still too blurry to make out in detail — except for the outline of his expression. Of course. It was the man’s face that was frowning. That made a great deal more sense.
Owen tried to laugh, felt very sick, and rolled to the side, retching and barely able to see, and then not seeing at all.
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