Page 1 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

CHAPTER ONE

IN WHICH JOE TRIES TO CONTROL HIMSELF

Percy Ashdown pressed a glittering red ruby just beneath his shapely lower lip. He gently tapped it three times with the tip of his long left ring finger, keeping his face statue-still in the mirror as he reached for the next. All the while, he was well aware of the curious, slightly unsettled gaze that watched his every move.

He pretended he didn’t notice.

“They look very real,” came the voice from behind.

“Well-cut glass,” he replied.

“Because I know it’s none of my business,” the voice continued, while Percy stifled a sigh, “but I would hate for you to lose them. If theywerereal.”

“Then it’s a good thing they’re not.” And he pressed the fourth tear-shaped ruby to his chin.

Joe Bruno, sitting on the elegant bed of the plush hotel room, wondered why he still cared. Since the day he took up with Percy, they had burned through more money than Joe would ordinarily see in a decade. Not his money, to be sure. A Catholic priest’s wage didn’t compare to whatever bottomless goldmine Percy seemed to have torn out of, and he had resolved not to trouble Percy with such quibbling concerns as the strength offacial glue versus however many carats those red jewels on his chin may or may not have been. Still, it pained him to think of a real ruby falling and sinking into the stones of some aristocrat’s gravel drive, to be trod deeper and deeper into obscurity, when a single one could probably cover a month’s rent for a normal person. If they were real.

But then Percy put down his eyeliner, turned, and Joe wanted nothing more than to lick those jewels from Percy’s chin and swallow them down. Every last one.

Percy was dressed in full costume for a Halloween ball. He wore black from his perfectly polished shoes, over his expertly tailored trousers, to his black shirt that wrapped what Joe knew to be hard, delicious, irresistible manhood personified.

Joe’s breath already came that little bit deeper, his trousers suddenly feeling a touch too tight, but it only got more trying from there.

Percy had affixed a laced corset vest over his thickly starched shirt. It featured a base of black, with red and gold trim, that sat quietly against a pattern of embroidered black roses. Joe had suggested it looked more eighteenth than nineteenth century. Percy had argued that it was an anachronism to suggest that no one from the nineteenth century had carried over taste from the eighteenth, particularly if the person in question was almost six centuries old, and particularly given that any man of taste would prefer fashion of the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, anyway. Joe, in all honesty, hadn’t been invested enough to argue any further, and now he was thankful for that. The corset was tighter than any regular vest could ever have been, and on Percy’s ample frame, it swept over his abs and pectorals in sharp lines, leaving little to the imagination.

When he could finally raise his eyes to Percy’s face, his lips dropped open. It was not the done thing at all, but Percy had left his dark hair wild, as he always did. That brought the tips to acurling frame of his blue, blue, insanely blue eyes, but now those eyes were shaded with dark eyeshadow, black and grey with a hint of malicious-looking gold, framed by deathly black eyeliner, adorned with a little blood-like splatter of tiny rubies across his right cheekbone.

His handsome fingers finished the tie of his cape, long and black and lined with red silk, the trim repeating the pattern of black roses in correspondence with his vest, and when he smiled, which he did, watching Joe’s reaction, his divine lips pulled back to reveal the sharp, white tips of two very realistic-looking fake fangs. “Well?”

“You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen,” Joe breathed, and following hot on the same statement was,I will do literally anything you ask, but Joe bottled it up with a nip of his own lip. He knew Percy well enough to know that if he said that, all their plans would be out the window, and they two would fall on the bed in a drunken orgy of pleasure, the rest of the world be damned.

But that night, they had work to do, so Joe only offered a sulky, “I don’t see why I have to be Van Helsing.”

“You’re asexyVan Helsing,” Percy corrected.

“Van Helsing wasn’t sexy.” He raised himself from the bed to look down at his leather trousers, leather vest, leather holster, replete with a whip, knives and wooden crosses. Percy had insisted on him wearing a white shirt beneath the vest because it looked ‘less evil’, and he’d taken great care selecting an excessively large crucifix which he’d arranged to perfection against Joe’s handsome chest. Joe’s chestnut curls were getting longer, given how little time he had these days to visit a hairdresser, and they were now by his cheekbones, left free at Percy’s insistence, to set off his golden-brown eyes behind his enticingly long lashes.

“He’s sexy now,” Percy said. “Or, you know, you could be Solomon Kane?”

Joe sent a half-hearted glare. “Are you fetishising my priestliness again?”

“I’m not.” He was. “Just throwing ideas out there. You didn’t want to be the Red Death?—”

“Too hot.”

“Or the Phantom of the Opera?—”

“Too obvious.”

“But there’s something nice about this.” Percy came to his side in front of the mirror. “We go together. We’re a pair. It’s romantic.” He took Joe’s hand to his lips and placed a gentle kiss there.

Joe watched on doubtfully. “But my sole purpose in life is to stake you.”

Percy shrugged. “So it’s a lot like reality then.” He took a sly enjoyment of Joe’s blush out of the corner of his eyes, then turned to him. “You look beautiful. Just like you always do.” And Percy kissed him. Then he kissed him again. Then he kissed him again, and here found himself pushed back with some inexplicable yet arousing energy.

“The plan,” Joe blurted out, turning away to still his fast-beating heart and settle his rising cock. “We need to go over the plan again.”

“But we’ve been over it a thousand times,” Percy moaned.

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