The Queer Principles of Kit Webb

by Cat Sebastian

As close to starting fresh as a man could get when three times a day some bastard walked past the coffeehouse singing that bloody fucking ballad about that one time he had escaped from prison—yes, the escape had been dashing but it wasn’t even in the top 10 percent of his most impressive feats, and it was a sin and a shame that jail rhymed with so many words.

He was the very model of what the preacher in Hyde Park was pleased to call A Virtuous Life and the boredom of it would probably kill him.

Percy had hoped that consorting with the criminal classes would at least be interesting, and was quite depressed by the reality.

How very quickly one could go from being a law-abiding citizen, the scion of a noble family, to consorting with highwaymen and then contemplating stealing one’s own portrait. There was a lesson in there, he supposed, but he preferred not to think about it.

Marian remained silent rather longer than Percy thought it ought to take to agree that murder and arson were undesirable courses of action, however dreadful their present crisis.

“But what kind of father is he, Mr. Percy?” Webb asked, his voice low and scratchy. His voice was, Percy reflected inanely, the verbal equivalent of the stubble on his jaw—rough, careless, inconveniently attractive.

His prick didn’t understand anything. Bringing himself off to an aristocrat in a goddamn wig would be a humiliating end to a foul day.

There were rich men who didn’t use their money and power as cudgels, but they still always knew that they had a cudgel ready at hand. They got so used to it, they probably thought they were doing a grand thing by not wielding it.

People might say that what he really hated was the system that put too much power in too few hands. But Kit knew he also hated the men.

“You all right, dearie?” the old woman asked, and Kit had to be in a truly bad state when the purveyor of an illegal gin shop was worried about him.

“All right, you lot. Somebody’s been scribbling Tory nonsense on the privy walls.” Every eye in the room was on Webb, as if he were a magnet. He wasn’t even raising his voice above his usual scratchy growl. “You want to write Tory slogans, you do at it the coffeehouse across the way with the rest of the Tory scum.” As Webb spoke, he looked at his audience, and his gaze caught on Percy, and Percy knew he had been recognized. “Here, we serve Whigs and radicals.”

As the books were arranged with no regard to title, author, size, color, or any other quality Percy could determine, this took quite a while, and if he shifted his hips and stretched his arms over his head and in general posed like a bawd in the window of a cathouse, that was hardly his fault, now, was it.

Betty sidled over to him with a dark look and murmured something about Kit’s weakness for a pretty face.

“You think I’m going to pass up a chance to kick a lord? Been dreaming of this since I was a little girl,” she said. “You have the chance to make a young woman’s dreams come true,” Kit said. Percy glared at him.

“There’re not a lot of things I do right, it turns out. I mean, not a lot of things I do that are good. But that’s one of them. And you shouldn’t try to take it from me.”

Talbots were made for war and enmity. They let those with weaker blood have their easy peacetime delights.

And Kit didn’t care about him—it was just that tucking him into bed and keeping him safe had tricked his mind into thinking he gave a damn. That was all.

Kit opened his mouth to protest and then realized that Scarlett had given him exactly what he had asked for: a reason not to like Percy. The fact that he wanted to argue with her was not a good sign.

And he was glaring down at Percy, if glaring could be accomplished without any malice. Was there such a thing as an affectionate glare? Percy found that he very much hoped so, because Percy was an idiot.

“I used to think that revenge was about defending one’s honor, but it turns out that honor is just spite dressed up for Sunday.”

Percy had been undoing the dozen buttons that fastened the jerkin but stopped and stared at Marian. Poisoning the servants seemed rather uncalled for.

Good God,” he said to Marian, glancing up, “one knows things are bad when one’s blackmailer sympathizes.

He wore his hair unpowdered, and Kit caught himself staring more than he cared to admit. Worse still was Percy’s sixth sense for knowing when he was being watched. He kept catching Kit out, and then Kit would have to either hastily look away or endure Percy’s smug little smile. None of it stopped him from looking again a few minutes later.

That was the sum total of their relationship: insults, fistfights, and sometimes, rarely, when they were both too tired to move, a tentative conversation.

“Are we doing any work today?” Betty asked, walking past him with a stack of empty cups. “Or are we lounging around and staring at customers? Just let me know.”

Percy blinked up at him. “Why?” His eyelashes were darker than his hair, lighter at the tips. Kit could have identified Percy by his eyelashes alone, which was a lowering thought.

But he didn’t want to keep it separate: the man he wanted to take to bed was the man who fought like it was a dance only he knew the steps to, who was brazen enough to hire notorious criminals for insane jobs, and who, apparently, swooned at the sight of blood.

Percy had gone directly to Collins. Really, he would not have guessed that a life of crime and dishonor would afford his valet such a wide scope for demonstrating his talent.

Good God, but the man was easy to look at. He clearly made no effort whatsoever with his appearance and probably never had, which made Percy both faintly jealous and peculiarly aroused.

Percy knew he was leering. In fact, he knew he spent a shocking portion of his time around Kit ogling the man. He might have stopped if Kit didn’t do it right back.

“What we want to do,” Kit said, after the horses were secured, “is find a place where we can see the road but stay hidden. Do you see that bend? That’s bloody perfect. It’s fucking gorgeous.” He grinned at Percy and found the other man looking at him with a slightly dazed expression. “Gorgeous,” Percy echoed. “Look at the road, not at me.

“In any event,” Percy went on, “what I had thought were principles were merely manners, and they’re utterly insufficient for my present circumstances.

Kit gasped, like an idiot, like someone who needed to have the mechanics of kissing and possibly the anatomy of mouths explained to him, maybe with charts.

But he also knew that the moral of Scarlett’s story wasn’t that rich men abandon their conquests; it was that when you’re treated badly, you start to believe you don’t deserve any better.

Kit clenched his teeth in jealousy. He did not like watching Percy insult anyone who wasn’t him, which was probably a mad thought, but if insults and flirtation weren’t synonymous for Percy, then Kit was very much at sea.

Percy preferred to keep his lovers at a safe and cordial distance, and that was precisely how he had planned for things to be with Kit, but all this sweetness was ruining his plans. He was sure that’s what was happening as he bit Kit’s earlobe and felt the man shudder gently against him. This was Percy’s plans being ruined.

“Like this?” Percy asked. “If you don’t stop asking questions and fuck me, I’m never speaking to you again,” Kit said, pressing back against Percy.

“How’s your leg?” “How’s my leg? You’ve just had your cock up my arse and you’re asking about my leg?”

“Are you coming back from the dead to complain that I’m fucking men who aren’t you?” asked Kit in disbelief. “Are you serious, now?” “Well, yes. It does need to be addressed.”

Percy realized he had had it all wrong when he told Kit that honor is just spite dressed up; spite was honor when it was the only weapon you had against someone more powerful.

The world he now saw was Kit’s, a world where one could refuse to accept the existing order of things, a world where old truths could be jettisoned and new ones put into place.

“Sorry,” Percy said after a few moments, unsure what he was apologizing for but aware that he was taking up Kit’s time. “Shut up,” Kit said, and kissed him.

“I do adore you,” Kit said, gazing up at him with an expression that caused Percy to become intensely interested in the buttons of his coat. “You really shouldn’t,” Percy said. “You can’t stop me, you know,” Kit said. “I’ll care about you as much as I please.”

Kit unsheathed the dagger at his hip. “Strip or I’m cutting those breeches off you.” Percy raised his eyebrows. “In another context that would have been a very fun game indeed.”

Percy gave him as incredulous a look as a man could deliver with bubbles all over his head.

Whatever they had between them, for all its confusion, was good, and it was theirs, and they should take it. Fuck anything that said otherwise.

He couldn’t even convince himself that he was deluded or foolish—he knew how Percy felt with a bone-deep certainty, with a surety that was something like faith.

Kit stared at him. “You’ve gone daft.” “I love you.” “Like I said.”

Percy kissed him, because there was no use arguing with a man so stubborn.

in the world as Kit saw it, getting supper and committing felonies and attempting to dismantle ancestral power were all equally probable events.