The Salisbury Key

I've just woken up and it seems to be January. Not only that, but it's a month today that my novel The Salisbury Key launches with Samhain, and I'd like to celebrate by sharing with you a couple of excerpts, one today and one tomorrow. I loved writing this book. In some ways it was a titanic struggle and in others it was a kind of delirious dance. Enjoy the excerpts, and look out for launch day on February 22nd (don't worry, I'll be reminding you :-)... Big, big thank you to Sasha Knight, my Samhain editor, to Josh for his wind-tunnelling (I may one day be able to retrieve my toupee from the treetops), and to my cover artist for capturing Daniel and Rayne so well. I know some of you don't like excerpts - and you have my sympathy - so stop reading here, those people, and, oh, just in case - ***Adult Content Warning!!!*** Excerpt Two is gentle and nice, I promise, and about archaeology. Oh, and a lethal bioweapon.

The Salisbury Key, excerpt 1

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…”