Rainbow Snippets: Ships, ports & mooring…

_{^{Rainbow Snippets is a Facebook group for LGBTQ+ authors, readers, and bloggers to gather once a week and share six sentences from a work of fiction–a WIP or a finished work or even a 6-sentence book recommendation.}}

To Poison a Prince releases at the end of the month. I’ve put the prequel novella to In Pain and Blood on the back burner until I’ve sorted out everything for the release. I’ll be posting bits of Hamish and Darshan’s story for at least until then…

For those of you who are new or catching up… Darshan and Hamish are a pair of thirty-something princes from two vastly different lands. Their tale starts with them travelling through the ginormous Udynea Empire that Darshan is from on their way to the capital. This snippet follows on from the one at the end of May, where Hamish was waxing lyrical about his husband, but also suggesting: “You look a little uneasy.”…

Darshan opened his mouth, a clear protest on his tongue, before biting his lip. “Well.” He offered up a sheepish smile. “It just occurred to me that, given my half-sister’s penchant of surrounding herself with those of the lower nobility, there is likely to be a number of men here who have… seen me in some form of undress, if you catch my meaning.”
“And?” Hamish might’ve spent thirteen years prior to meeting his husband in a sort of self-enforced celibacy, but he couldn’t have been labelled as ignorant when it came to intimacy between men. “It’s nae as if you havenae told me your ship has docked at a lot of ports.” His husband’s hedonistic attitude to court life had been the sole reason the Mhanek sent his heir to Tirglas on an ambassadorial mission, even after the appointed countess was assassinated.
His husband’s lips twisted sourly. “Nevertheless, I hardly think you expected to be faced with a mob of them during your debut at court. And I think a number of them will be most put out that I have found a… permanent place to moor, so to speak.”

And there you have it. I’ll be back next weekend to share more of these two adorkable twits. In the meantime, check out these other snippets.