“Because I’m going to buy you earrings. If you’re going to take me seriously, the least I can do is treat you fluffily in return. You deserve a bit of fluffiness.”

“You are an entire armful of fluffiness,” Pat said, placing her own arms as demonstration. “And I don’t know about deserving you but I’d certainly like a chance to try. I didn’t ever imagine I’d meet anybody special; I didn’t think I was the kind of person who had that kind of thing. Maybe you’re special enough for two.”

“You know my views on this,” Fen said. “We’ll go to King’s Norton.” She rested her head lightly on Pat’s shoulder, hair and breath sending a light tickle of pleasure over her chest. “We both need to relax, after all this. You can give some thought to what you want to do with your life, and I can think about what I want to do, and we can do all sorts of wonderful nothing together, and perhaps we might even come to some decisions eventually, between us. Mightn’t we, darling?”

Pat looked out over the view, the fresh new world opening up in front of her, as bright with promise and possibility and as bursting with life as the glorious woman in her arms. “Yes. I dare say we might.”

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

With huge thanks to Paul for gun-reading, and Alicia for putting up with it.

Deep gratitude to my invaluable early readers Moog Florin, May Peterson, and Talia Hibbert, without whom...

Thank you to Veronica Vega for editing, and Lennan Adams at Lexiconic Design for the glorious cover, as inspired by the Think of England cover by Erin Dameron-Hill.

A big shout out to the KJ Charles Chat group for their support, particularly to the tag team of Zee and Bren who came up with the title!

For more Edwardian country-house plottery, and to see how Pat and Fen got on...

Think of England

England, 1904. Two years ago, Captain Archie Curtis lost his friends, fingers, and future to a terrible military accident. Alone, purposeless and angry, Curtis is determined to discover if he and his comrades were the victims of fate, or of sabotage.

Curtis’s search takes him to an isolated, ultra-modern country house, where he meets and instantly clashes with fellow guest Daniel da Silva. Effete, decadent, foreign, and all-too-obviously queer, the sophisticated poet is everything the straightforward British officer fears and distrusts.

As events unfold, Curtis realizes that Daniel has his own secret intentions. And there’s something else they share—a mounting sexual tension that leaves Curtis reeling.

As the house party’s elegant facade cracks to reveal treachery, blackmail and murder, Curtis finds himself needing clever, dark-eyed Daniel as he has never needed a man before...