Hamilton's Battalion: A Trio of Romances by Courtney Milan & Alyssa Cole & Rose Lerner

Author:Courtney Milan & Alyssa Cole & Rose Lerner [Milan, Courtney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781937248598
Publisher: Courtney Milan
Published: 2017-10-16T18:00:00+00:00

It was a lovely afternoon for walking, the second they had encountered in a row. The trees were mostly bare by now, which meant that despite the cold air, bright sun touched John’s face, unfiltered by anything except a few branches reaching to the sky.

He’d left the sling behind several days ago. As he walked, he moved his arm, subtly, in its socket, testing the range—just enough to twinge, a good kind of pain, before backing off.

Henry was talking.

That, John realized, would be surprising to nobody in the universe who knew the man at all.

Henry was amusing, thoughtful, a complete chatterbox, and—incidentally—also an inveterate liar. Percentage-wise he probably didn’t lie much more than the average man. But given the sheer volume of words that proceeded from his mouth, he uttered approximately a hundred times more lies than John. And he had a tendency to deliver them all at once.

“So at any rate,” Henry was saying, “when I was taking articles—”

“One moment.” John held up a hand. “When you were taking articles? Isn’t that what one does when one wants to be a barrister?”

Henry wrinkled his nose. “Ah. Yes. Well, so it is.”

“Didn’t you tell me once you were a potter’s son?” Or maybe it had been a tailor. There had been as many professions as there had been days.

“Ah, ha ha. Well. Yes, I did, and there are potters’ sons who…still, possibly that might have been a bit of a…um, how do I say this? A bit of an exaggeration.” Henry gave him a brilliant smile. “My father…did own a pottery works? It wasn’t entirely a lie.”

More than two weeks of walking. Two weeks of Henry talking; several days of thinking of him as Henry rather than Latham, a transition that had occurred all too swiftly. That much time, John had spent listening to the other man’s exaggerations. He was used to it by now.

“So your father owned a pottery works. You were planning to be a barrister. How did you wind up in the infantry?”

“Did you know that people want barristers who are capable of talking about the same thing for more than two minutes at a time?” Henry shot back brightly. “I did know that, but my father had to be convinced that it was the case.”

“Your father the potter?”

“Uh. Yes. Him.” Henry simply waved a hand. “It does all make sense, and I’ll explain as soon as I…um, take care of some business over by that copse of trees. If you know what I mean.”

John did know what he meant, and he wasn’t referring to Henry’s need to piss. Henry avoided all questions about his father, except to roundly decry him as terrible. The only thing John was sure of was that he wasn’t a potter. He was likely not even a pottery works owner. Henry was hiding something.

It would be offensive, except he was so inept at hiding it hardly counted. It was like draping a blanket over a statue and pinning a sign to it

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.