The Queer Principles of Kit Webb - Cat Sebastian Page 0,7

his voice, as if he knew precisely what Kit was thinking and that it wasn’t about stealing papers.

It took a moment for Kit’s brain to catch up with Percy’s meaning. “No,” he said, any thoughts of well-turned ankles and slender calves evaporating into the air. “I don’t do that.”

It would have been easy for Percy to point out that Kit didn’t do that anymore. But Kit had already learned that this man never said the obvious thing. Instead, the gentleman nodded. “Quite. I’m hoping you’ll make an exception for the right price.” He uncrossed and recrossed his legs, as if he knew what that did to Kit’s ability to think straight—and he probably did, damn it. “And for the right person,” he added, as if to drive home the point.

“I said I don’t—”

“Is it because of your leg? Are you not able to ride?”

Kit searched the man’s face for a sign of insult or insolence, but found only the same amused curiosity. “I can ride,” he said, which wasn’t quite a lie. He could ride, and he could walk, and he could climb stairs, as long as he didn’t mind pain and if one employed a fairly generous definition of ride, walk, and climb.

“Interesting. I thought there had to be a reason for a man with your storied past to live the way you do now.”

“Well, you’re wrong.”

Percy rose to his feet but didn’t turn toward the door. “Pity,” he said. “Could have been fun. You can’t tell me that a man with your skills and your history is content to stand in one place all day, warm and safe and terribly, terribly bored.” He adjusted the lace at his cuffs. “Could have been quite fun.”

Kit picked up the knife, allowing its blade to catch the candlelight, so Percy could be under no misapprehension as to what Kit meant. “No,” he repeated, putting his free hand flat on the desk, as if preparing to stand. “Get out.”

Percy left, and as Kit heard his near-silent progress down the stairs, he wondered how the stranger had known things he had hardly admitted to himself.

Chapter 4

Percy certainly hadn’t anticipated using his questionable powers of seduction to persuade the man, but if he could get that book from his father and also get into that highwayman’s breeches, he’d consider it time well spent. Not only did Webb have that jawline and those shoulders, but he spoke with a pleasantly rough growl of a voice. He would probably be as boring in bed as he was out of it, but when a man looked like that, one could lower one’s standards.

Buoyed along by this pleasant train of thought, he decided to perform a task he had been delaying.

“The book your father won’t let out of his sight,” Marian had murmured that morning while she and Percy once again sat for their portrait, “is bound in dark green morocco and has faded gold lettering embossed on the cover.”

Percy’s heart had given a thump, and he’d forced himself to remain very still and very calm so as to conceal any trace of his excitement. “So, it is my mother’s book,” he responded, equally low. Until this point, all Percy had known was that his father was taking great pains to guard and conceal a book he kept about his person at all times. That alone told Percy of the book’s value to the duke. If Percy could steal it, then he could force his father to pay for its return; that was reason enough to want the blasted thing. If the book had been his mother’s, however, that opened up a rather intriguing vista of possibilities.

Percy remembered his mother removing her little green book from the folds of her gown, sometimes running her finger down a page as if to remind herself of something, other times writing something inside. He had never seen its contents but was certain that she had used the book as a means to amass power, and that his father was now doing the same: gathering and hoarding power was the one thing Percy’s parents had in common.

Percy had known from his earliest days that his parents were engaged in a protracted domestic war that seemed to have originated some time before their marriage, and over a cause no more complicated than their long-standing hatred for one another. Percy often only learned of the individual skirmishes long after the fact, and from overheard whispers among servants; this was how he learned the duke

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