Rainbow Snippets: Thirteen years…

Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.

Because To Target the Heart is on sale for 99c until the 17th, I am sharing a snippet from that this week. It’s also involved in a giveaway, which I’ve linked at the bottom.

Little lead-up. This comes the morning after Darshan initiated a somewhat public (and drunken) kiss before being lambasted by Hamish’s mother.

Thirteen years.

He still couldn’t quite get his head around that scenario. To have to pretend, to constrain his emotions, to keep any friendship with another man at a distance least the worst was thought of such closeness… Darshan had some experience with the latter, but the rest was foreign. Not once had he ever been made to feel that he needed to hide any part of his being from the world.

Punishment he understood—being in Tirglas was his punishment—but it was what he’d done and with whom, not that the act had been with a man.

He gnawed on the inside of his lip as a frustration-laced sigh whistled out his nose. Why—Gods, why?—couldn’t the man he found utterly irresistible have been someone who had not spent almost two-thirds of his adult life forced into celibacy by their wretched mother? Their damn queen, no less. With a head full of ancient scriptures and her intentions only on ensuring her brood filled the world with more of her clan. Disgusting.

I could walk away. That had been an option since he had first kissed the man. Not that he’d been able to shake Hamish from his dreams no matter how hard he tried. Were a few nights of pleasure worth dragging Hamish into a worse situation than the man was already in?

He wished he had an objective enough stance on the matter to answer that truthfully.

I’ll be back with more from In Love and Death next weekend. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.

If you’re looking for more news of my books, be sure to “Like” my Facebook page and/or join me in my Facebook group!