MM Romance · Historical Romance · Slow Burn · High Heat
A month of open country. Nowhere to look but at each other.
New South Wales, 1835. William Holt has been hired to guide an English heir west. A month through the mountains, the plains, the red country past Bathurst. William knows, from the first night at the inn, exactly who George Ashford is.
George doesn't know him at all.
George has come out from England to find out why his family's station is failing. They're sleeping together long before they reach it.
But William has been carrying something since that first night. And arriving means it can't be carried much longer.
A month on the road with nowhere to sleep but beside each other, and a law that could hang them both. Slow to arrive, explicit when it does.
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Explicit sexual content (M/M)Convict transportation and its aftermathHistorical criminalisation of homosexuality, including the death penaltyViolence, including a firearm and a stabbingScarring, describedEmployer and employee power imbalance
Sample
He took tea from the innkeeper’s wife and sat at the far end of the common room where the wall met the corner and his back could rest against something solid. The tea was weak and hot and he drank it without paying it much attention. The room was filling slowly – two men by the fire, another at the long table near the door, the sound of boots on the stairs.
The door opened and the cold came in with two men.
The first was nobody. Colonial clothes, new on him. He stepped aside immediately to let the second man pass.
William saw the face and his hands stopped moving.
Not shock. Something he did not choose. In his chest first. Then his gut. Then his legs. He did not move. He could not have said if he was breathing. The cup was still in his hands. He checked that. It was.
The face was older. Twelve years older. The boy’s smoothness gone but the structure underneath still there, still the same, the dark eyes and the dark hair and the way he held his mouth. The way he stood. That was what made it certain. Not the features alone but the way the body carried them – the shoulders back, the head level, the same as they had been.
William knew him.
The air in his lungs stopped moving. He breathed out through his nose, slow, and it started again.
He swallowed once. Ashford had not looked at him yet.
