Rainbow Snippets: Queer Relations

For this week’s Rainbow Snippets, I’m choosing another few lines from my new release, Queer Relations published by JMS Books.

Authors who take part in Rainbow Snippets each weekend are encouraged to post a few lines from one of their stories on their blog and then link back to the group post on Facebook. I always enjoy joining in with Rainbow Snippets, especially to read and comment on everyone else’s choice of snippet.

Queer Relations follows on from my ensemble story Twelve Letters about the lives and loves of a small group of Regency gentlemen. The plot concentrates on spoiled brat Percy Havilland, whose privileged life is thrown upside down in a family scandal.

In this snippet, Percy has just been kindly rescued from social embarrassment by his former lover Jo Everett, my main character in Twelve Letters, who is reflecting on the recent past while walking home from Percy’s house with his true love Daniel Walters…

In the spring and while in Percy’s calculating clutches, Jo had mis-addressed two letters. One was a wildly indiscreet letter to Percy and the other, a note about trimmings to his tailor. What could have been a disaster had turned out to be the stroke of luck of a lifetime, Jo mused, as it had afforded him the chance to associate with and fall in love with Daniel, whose thoughts also seemed to be dwelling on those past events.

“Now I’ve met him, I can understand why he inspired that letter. Mr. Havilland is extremely beautiful,” Daniel said rather wistfully.

“Percy? Oh yes, very pretty,” Jo said in an offhand tone as if agreeing to a well-established fact like ‘old King George is mad,’ or ‘we are at war with France.’ “But to my eyes,” Jo added firmly, “you are far lovelier, and altogether a finer man than Percy could ever be. And,” he continued, bending slightly to whisper in his loved one’s ear, “you’re a hundred times better in bed.”