The Sugared Game (The Will Darling Adventures, #2)

by K.J. Charles

“You needn’t worry about my feelings.” “I don’t. I just didn’t mean to hurt them that particular way.”

Kim sighed. “Fate, then. Our wills and fates do so contrary run, and you are the most contrary of Wills.”

“I know you’ve thought about this,” Will said. “But there are men in the world who aren’t queer or arseholes. Have you considered marrying one of them instead?”

The blood-red uncivilised streak of his nature that had blossomed in the war didn’t want them. That streak wanted someone who would ask him to infiltrate night-clubs and kick people’s heads in. That streak wanted Kim, who offered none of the things that appealed to Will’s respectable ambitions and everything that fed the wolf.

He was on the back foot with Kim most of the time, what with his wealth and class and brains and limitless capacity to lie, but in these moments when he was bare and raw, exposing the desires Will knew shamed him for all the bravado, the balance tipped.

Will had no idea how to respond to that. He’d known a fellow in the trenches who’d taken to pinching himself viciously, so his wrists were a constant mess of half-moon nail marks. He didn’t want to think of a young Kim hurting his body to escape his mind, or of these scars as proof he had lived through whatever it was. The idea gave him a vast, aching sorrow too big for him to contain.

God the pain

Kim was taking up an alarming amount of space in his mind. If he was thinking this much about a woman, he’d have no trouble finding a name for it.

Will had never thought of himself as a person they had a word for. Then again, a word meant a thing was usual enough to need a word.