Page 205 of The Wild Charge

“Oh.” Reese’s smile widened, flash of teeth and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’ ‘Stormed at with shot and shell/Boldly they rode and well/Into the jaws of Death/Into the mouth of hell.’”

“Yes.” Tenny’s lungs and heart worked in rapid concert; each exhale lifted the fine hair that framed Reese’s face. “That one.”

“The end goes, ‘When can their glory fade?/O the wild charge they made/All the world wondered.’ That’s the part about the charge.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“But I named you after the poet, not the poem.”

“Right. Lord Snob something.”

Reese breathed a quiet laugh that squeezed mercilessly at Tenny’s heart. “Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”

“Good for him, then. But I don’t need the title. Just you.”

“Tenny.” Reese’s fingers curled into his sodden shirt, tugging at him. “What’s wrong?”

“With me? Oh, loads.” He rested their foreheads together, thankful for the simple miracle of warm skin and shared breath and both of them alive, on the other side of things. “But mostly.” His voice caught, and he pressed on, the way he should have from the first. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t there. At the gallery. At the raid. Here – when we got…home.”

Reese hummed a low, wounded noise, and petted across his chest, over his collarbones. Hooked his fingers in the neck of his shirt and worried the ribbing there with his thumbs. “Sothat’swhy you’ve–” When Tenny started to pull back, Reese tugged his collar until he stayed. “It’s not your fault. Nothing that happened was your fault.”

“But I should have–”

“You did your job. We both did – and then you saved me.”

Bitterness burned hot and sour in his throat. “But I didn’t – I didn’t even – Fox and Devin–” He bit his lip, because how awful would it be to sayI wish I got to kill your family myself?

Reese cupped his throat, held him steady, and eased back, gaze nothing but understanding.

Tenny said, “I should have beenwith you.”

Reese frowned, and that was no good. “Hanging up next to me? They had to split us up, and send us on different missions. You’ve said it yourself: there’s only two of us. We’re not like everyone else. We were trained for this.”

“But does that mean we have todiefor this?”

Still frowning, Reese reached to wipe at Tenny’s face; his fingertips came away wet, with tears or rainwater, Tenny didn’t know.

“Since when do you worry about the risks so much?”

“Since I got you.”

Reese’s eyes widened. “Oh.”

“What the hell do you thinkI love youmeans?”

Reese gripped his hair in back, surged up onto his knees, and kissed him.

That first, firm press of lips hit Tenny’s system like a stray spark to a tinderbox. It had been weeks: weeks of worrying over bruises, and broken ribs, and torturing himself with guilt and regret and thinking about all the ways this might have been taken from him permanently. But here was Reese now, alive and solid, kissing him with a ferocious desperation that echoed his own.

God, he’d been an idiot.

He pulled back – cock twitching at the sound of Reese’s low murmur of protest – long enough to peel off his soaked shirt and jeans, and then dove back in. Gathered Reese’s hair in one hand and tipped his head to the side so he could latch his mouth to his throat, and set about leaving him a necklace of little bites and bruises. Reese made a low, purring noise and leaned into it, head falling back in the cradle of Tenny’s palm like an offering.

Tenny wanted to devour him.

Had wanted to from the first, back when he’d put girls between them as a shield for how very much he felt; when he’d tried to deny that his want was such a bright and swollen thing he expected to see light bleeding around the edges of his fingernails.

He wantedso much, and the only one who’d ever stood in his way…was himself.

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