The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes (London Highwaymen, #2)

by Cat Sebastian

P.S. I refuse to believe that you are a woman. There is something inexpressibly masculine about expecting to be believed.

what a waste it was that in all the thousands of love poems written across the ages, nobody had ever thought to catalogue their beloved’s proficiency in crime.

What a trick it was to be able to say I beg your pardon in a way that meant fuck off and die, and to look serene and saintly while saying it.

It had been a long year, during which one of the few lessons she had learned was never to let anyone know that you needed anything. Need was only weakness by another name. And if someone could give you what you needed, they could just as easily take it away.

So far, he had avoided touching her unnecessarily, primarily because not everyone found touch comforting, but also he was afraid that all it would take would be a squeeze of her fingers and he’d tumble from admiring her to adoring her, or from adoring her to whatever was even worse. But by now he knew that if she didn’t want him to touch her, she’d move her hand away, and if he didn’t want to fall in love with her, he was already fucked.

“In the winter, you can imagine that the land could become anything. In the summer, all that’s left is for winter to come.”

He had done her more kindnesses in the past week than she had performed over the course of her life. He was reckless in his kindness, extravagant to the point of decadence. Sometimes she thought he didn’t realize what he was doing, that it was simply his nature to hand over everything that a person might hold dear without any regard for what havoc such prodigality might wreak on the sensibilities of a reasonable person.

“Gentlemen typically don’t extort money from their tenants,” Marian retorted. “That is precisely what gentlemen do,” he pointed out, exasperated. “It is practically the entire point of gentlemen.”

His friendship was like a creeping ivy—all one had to do was let it be, and it covered the whole barn.