Something Fabulous (Something Fabulous, #1)

by Alexis Hall

“I think you will find,” he told her, “that I have chosen to be exactly what I am supposed to be. You, on the other hand, appear to have fashioned yourself entirely from cliché.”

He opened his mouth with even more difficulty than his eye. Its interior felt both dry and sticky at the same time. He passed his tongue—which seemed to have died at some point during the night—across his lips and tried to remember how words worked.

“My reluctant flower. It’s a good job you’re such a feast for the eyes because otherwise you’d be completely unbearable. Instead of merely mostly unbearable.”

“Look at me.” Tarleton indicated himself with a flourish. “What could possibly be wrong with me.”

I believe we know when we do wrong. We feel it. In our hearts, our souls, our conscience. And nothing I have ever learned or known or felt has taught me to believe that love is wrong. So no, my flower, it’s not wrong.”

“That’s the thing, though: we could be anything, do anything. A prince, a husband, a lover, a thief. We could fall in love, fall out of love, have adventures, overcome any adversity. My God, the stories we told. The lives we lived.”

The publican shook his head. “I’m sorry, Your”—his attention flicked between them—“Graces, but I haven’t seen two ladies.”

“You complete . . . arse. Wait, I like arses. You . . . you complete something I don’t like. Mustard. You complete jar of mustard.”

“Perhaps we should not play charades,” remarked Miss Tarleton, flinging herself into a chair. Valentine had no idea why nobody in that family could just sit down.

“Yes,” yelled Valentine. “Impossibly sweet and impossibly kind and impossibly inclined”—he was still yelling—“to see good where I would not even think to try. You make me laugh when I am not given to laughter. You make me question things when I am not given to that either. You make me feel in ways I have never felt before. You are your own adventure and you are . . . beautiful.” Abruptly aware of his volume, Valentine lowered his voice. “So beautiful that my throat clenches and my stomach flips when I as much as glance at you, and I wonder how the world turns when such wanting exists within it.”

Love, sex, friendship, kindness, laughter: they were all stars to be strung in constellations of your own making.

“I don’t care”—Mr. Whelpington-Byng, Esquire, was still using his body to shelter Miss Tarleton—“how things were managed in your day. It is now the nineteenth century, and we respect women and treat them as equals in areas not pertaining to politics, property, warfare, finances, or the law.”

You are going to give me my happy ever after, Valentinian Gervase Lorimer Layton, or I’ll shoot you myself.

“You should never be jealous of another gentleman’s valet. You may on occasion, however, be envious.”