Blue Steel Chain (Trowchester Blues Book 3)

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 6652

  Hillsborough, NJ 08844

  www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

  Blue Steel Chain

  Copyright © 2015 by Alex Beecroft

  Cover art: Lou Harper, louharper.com/design.html

  Editors: Sarah Lyons, Chris Muldoon

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at marketing@riptidepublishing.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-206-6

  First edition

  July, 2015

  Also available in paperback:

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-207-3

  ABOUT THE EBOOK YOU HAVE PURCHASED:

  We thank you kindly for purchasing this title. Your nonrefundable purchase legally allows you to replicate this file for your own personal reading only, on your own personal computer or device. Unlike paperback books, sharing ebooks is the same as stealing them. Please do not violate the author’s copyright and harm their livelihood by sharing or distributing this book, in part or whole, for a fee or free, without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner. We love that you love to share the things you love, but sharing ebooks—whether with joyous or malicious intent—steals royalties from authors’ pockets and makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to be able to afford to keep writing the stories you love. Piracy has sent more than one beloved series the way of the dodo. We appreciate your honesty and support.

  At sixteen, Aidan Swift was swept off his feet by a rich older man who promised to take care of him for the rest of his life. But eight years later, his sugar daddy has turned from a prince into a beast. Trapped and terrified, Aidan snatches an hour’s respite at the Trowchester Museum.

  Local archaeologist James Huntley is in a failing long-distance relationship with a rock star, and Aidan—nervous, bruised, and clearly in need of a champion—brings out all his white knight tendencies. When everything falls apart for Aidan, James saves him from certain death . . . and discovers a skeleton of another boy who wasn’t so lucky.

  As Aidan recovers, James falls desperately in love. But though Aidan acts like an adoring boyfriend, he doesn’t seem to feel any sexual attraction at all. Meanwhile there are two angry exes on the horizon, one coming after them with the press and the other with a butcher’s knife. To be together, Aidan and James must conquer death, sex, and everyone’s preconceptions about the right way to love—even their own.

  To all the asexual activists out there without whom I would still be thinking of myself as merely weird, wrong, and slightly inhuman. In the hope that the more people talk about it, the fewer people there will be in the world who reach my age without knowing what they are.

  About Blue Steel Chain

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Alex Beecroft

  About the Author

  More like this

  Aidan got a little lost on the top floor. He’d been drifting slowly from cabinet to cabinet, reading the handwritten labels that were giving him increasing glimpses into the world of the Bronze Age Beaker people, when he came to an empty display and then a second. He raised his head cautiously to discover he was halfway down a gallery that petered out into unused cases.

  Grim February light drifted dank through all the tall windows of the museum’s third floor and lit a scene that was obviously not meant for the public’s eyes. Here, among empty display cases, plastic trays full of dirty-looking broken pots and rusted blobs of green metal lay scattered on the floor.

  Someone was moving among them, hunched like a bear over berries, muttering to himself as he gazed down.

  Aidan froze, ducking his head between his shoulders. Oh God, he wasn’t supposed to be here, was he? Muffling his breath, he eased back behind the last full case and concentrated on breathing silent and slow. The man hadn’t noticed him come in. If he was careful and quiet he might not be noticed leaving.

  “Oh, where did I put them . . .?”

  The stranger half rose from his crouch, peering at the ground all around him. Aidan stood very still and his ear tightened, anticipating a smack. He rubbed it as he told himself not to be so stupid. He was in a public museum; he had done nothing wrong. The man would stand up and see him, and if he was angry he would still only dare shout, which would not be so bad.

  Except Aidan didn’t want to be shouted at. He had come here to get away from all that, to be left in peace, to be left alone . . .

  The man was now kneeling in front of a crate full of paper towels, unwrapping something small. If Aidan leaned forward just an inch, he could look down on the man’s bent head. Caramel-coloured hair that stood up by itself in spikes—Aidan might have thought the man dressed it that way had he not been wearing those clothes. No one who went to the trouble of spiking their hair with product would then come out of the house wearing pale-tan corduroy trousers and a Christmas jumper underneath a blue corduroy jacket.

  He was a smallish man, Aidan saw with some relief. Not short, but slender—the figure of someone who didn’t eat much but who also did very little exercise. Wire-framed glasses were hooked into his collar. There was a smudge of ink on the knuckle of his right index finger and a matching one on his ear. Even as Aidan watched he lifted both hands and pushed his fingers into his hair, dragging that knuckle over his cheekbone and the top of his ear, explaining the smudge.

  Aidan smiled and felt himself uncurl a little inside. He didn’t come out of hiding, but his breath came easier and his shoulders unclenched. The psychosomatic stinging of his ear gave way to one last rub and disappeared.

  Sitting back on his heels, Christmas Jumper Man drew an index card out of his top pocket, patting himself all over before he came up with a leaky pen. A rootle around the trays brought up a clipboard, on which he positioned the card. He uncapped his pen and looked up into the distance outside the windows, perhaps towards Wednesday Keep, perhaps ten thousand years into the past.

  The new angle brought his face into Aidan’s view, and Aidan liked it. It was a gentle face with a puzzled, intellectual look and something boyish about the smoothness of its angles. Objectively handsome, the colour of his eyes and hair were harmonious with each other. Aidan would have liked to sculpt it, probably in wood to do justice to the impression that there was life going on under the surface of it.

  His fingers clenched and ached, and he cut that thought off. He had been given so much, it was only right that he give up a great deal in return. And after all, his art . . . well, it was a bit pretent
ious claiming it was art at all. Piers was right—his hobbies just got in the way.

  Christmas Jumper Man had wrestled inspiration out of the distant hills. He took a deep breath, pressed his pen to the paper, and looked down. His eyes and his forehead crinkled as he raised his free hand to the bridge of his nose as if to push up his glasses. “What did I . . .?” he asked himself, patting his pockets down again, following it by sighing and getting up to look in the crates that surrounded him.

  His back was turned. Aidan could have made a getaway. Could have at least got halfway down the gallery so when the man noticed him it would be too late for his distant anger to strike. But he was feeling brave, and he wanted to be useful, and he knew exactly how he could help.

  “They’re tucked in your collar.”

  Christmas Jumper Man startled and recoiled, almost losing his balance as he stepped back.

  Oh . . . hell. Aidan was always doing this. Always pushing himself where he wasn’t wanted, as if to compensate for all the occasions where he wasn’t to be found where he should be. Was that wrong? Had he just done something terribly wrong?

  Aidan braced himself. He had done something wrong. He had shocked the man, frightened him maybe, when he thought he was alone, and now he was looking up and seeing a looming tattooed figure, and he would strike out to try to get it away from him. Aidan hunched in anticipation, raising his hands to hover by his face.

  But the stranger had pressed a theatrical hand to his throat, felt his glasses there, and was chuckling. “Oh,” he said and smiled up at Aidan sideways in a combination of rueful and embarrassed. “I knew they were there. I knew it. I put them there so I wouldn’t lose them. I just forgot that was what I’d done, and . . .”

  There was a microgram or two of anger to the twist of his smile. Aidan didn’t feel it was directed at him. Still, he didn’t like it.

  “I know how that is,” he said, in an effort to get the stranger to forgive himself, to drop the reproach and be happy. “So many more important things to think about.”

  It wasn’t true—Piers didn’t like it when he mislaid things, so he had trained himself not to—but the reassurance seemed to work. The stranger huffed in agreement and relaxed. “Well, thank you,” he said, putting his glasses on and then immediately pushing them up to rest in his hair. He held out a hand, and Aidan shook it carefully. “I’m James. I’m the curator here. And you are . . .?”

  Not sure whether I should say. Suppose Piers came in here and James accidentally revealed he had said something to Aidan? What was the likelihood of that, given that Piers only liked modern things?

  “Um . . . I’m lost. I was looking at the arrowheads, and then I saw an open door and I came through. I thought this gallery was open. I’m sorry. I should go.”

  “No, no, that’s my fault.” James was absentmindedly still holding on to his hand. The touch was warm and impersonal in a good way—like he had just left it there because everything was fine. But it did something profoundly strange to the marrow of Aidan’s bones and the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been touched by anyone who wasn’t Piers. His hand felt like it wasn’t his own—like it was one of those fragile pieces of pottery James had been unpacking—and the infection had spread up his arm and into his chest before it occurred to him to wonder if he should be allowing this to go on.

  “I . . . uh . . .” James laughed. “I forgot where I’d put the ‘Gallery Closed’ sign. I was sure it was in the night watchman’s desk, but it wasn’t, so I . . .” He looked down at their loosely held hands and pulled away with an apologetic twist upwards of his smile. “And anyway, it’s not as though I’m doing anything top secret in here. Why shouldn’t people come in and watch?”

  “But maybe,” Aidan ventured, nervous and reckless and exhilarated at the sound of his own voice, “you wanted to be left to work in peace?”

  “Well, if I’d wanted that I could have locked the door.”

  James’s hand returned to hover at Aidan’s elbow. Not touching, but being so close that he could feel the presence of it like a force field. He should have stepped away, but he didn’t.

  “Perhaps I should show you back to the beaten track.” James inched the hand forward so it came into contact, and it was again a completely professional, gentle, businesslike touch, and again it did something deep and bizarre to Aidan’s heart. He stood quite still in the mingled grey and gold lights of the half-empty room and felt like James had dug him up from somewhere and put him on display. He wasn’t sure he liked it, but he also didn’t want it to stop.

  “Yeah.” He licked his lips nervously and looked away. “I should really be getting home anyway. It’s . . .” A glance at his watch and the unsettled feeling gave way to a much more familiar anxiety. “Wow, it’s getting late. I really need to get home.”

  James gave him a concerned look and then a reassuring smile. “This way, then. I’ll take you to the main stairwell. Then it’s straight down and through the double doors.”

  He fell into step beside Aidan, their strides the same length. Actually, he was the same height. Aidan had just been thinking of him as small because there was something so endearingly helpless about him, so friendly and so unthreatening, as though he was apologetic about taking up any space at all. His hands were large and his wrists bony, pleasant looking. Aidan liked that too.

  He should have pulled ahead, run through the doors at the end of the gallery and down the steps. He should have jogged home. He didn’t.

  “This is very interesting.” James followed his averted gaze to a large curved fragment of pot on a cushion in one of the larger cases, its label written in what must be James’s handwriting. “Are you fond of the Bronze Age at all?”

  Aidan was fond of the feeling of the room expanding out all around him, of galleries opening in every direction into infinity, of being able to walk down them, free and curious and unafraid. “I’m interested in everything,” he said. “I didn’t get to go to school, so—”

  And his phone buzzed in his pocket. He had time for a breath and then he was falling through the floor, smack into darkness and terror.

  “Shit.” His fingers hurt as he fished the phone out of his pocket, forced his thumb to open the text he’d just been sent.

  Where are you?

  “Oh shit.” Piers was home. Piers was home and had found him absent. Oh shit, he was an idiot. He was such a bad boyfriend, such a . . . Oh God, what the hell had he been doing? He gave James one last look—the man’s grey eyes startled and his inoffensive face creased with concern—felt he owed him an explanation but didn’t have one to give.

  “I’m sorry,” he gasped, hunching over the phone as he texted back, On my way. “Bye!”

  Outside the final door, the stairwell went down three flights around a marble entrance hall that echoed his panicked footsteps like a drum. As he was leaping down, taking three steps at a time, James leaned over the upper bannister and shouted, “But come back when this exhibit’s finished. I’ll give you the tour.”

  Stupid, innocent man. It wasn’t his fault Aidan had lost track of the time. It wasn’t his fault Aidan had been out without permission in the first place. It was all on Aidan. Aidan was a fucking stupid wanker who ought to have learned better than this by now.

  He didn’t reply, just burst through the double doors, gaining speed as he let his gait open out to a flat run. Through the cathedral grounds, over the rubble of the city wall beyond it, and then up to where Piers’s house sat isolated among stony fields.

  Shit shit shit. He was such a bad person. How could he go through life like this, getting every single thing wrong? Now Piers would be upset. And after everything he did for Aidan, everything he had to put up with. Well, that was very bad.

  Over the fields. Over the back garden, skirting the circular hill that took up a good third of the area of it, the one that Piers didn’t like looking at. Through the landscaped arboretum and the rock garden and the filtration pools beyond. Not thi
nking about anything except where to place his feet, about the burn of exertion, the hot rawness of breath in his chest.

  Even though he was not thinking, he had the sense to swing around onto the encircling path and take the extra few minutes to run into the front garden, approach the house from the drive. He tried to be a good boyfriend, really he did, but he didn’t see why it should matter to Piers that Aidan knew there was a way into town through the back. For some reason, Aidan was supposed to avoid the hill at the bottom of the garden, and the path ran behind it. It would only make Piers more upset if he found out Aidan had flouted that instruction too. Why bother him with it?

  Up the drive then, up perfectly smooth white flagstones like a late snowfall. Crocuses were coming up under the box hedges and in the lawn. Little explosions of gold and purple that promised summer to come. He felt them like a defiance. Hope, hope that sprang up green every single time.

  The house had belonged to Piers’s parents. He’d grown up here. But you couldn’t see a trace of the old place under new concrete. As soon as he’d come into the inheritance, Piers had remodelled the house in the newest, most up-to-date architectural style. Now it was all hard angles and white blocks, with bulletproof glass walls all around the sunroom and tiny, prison-cell-like square windows everywhere else.

  Sometimes when he was away from it, Aidan hated it with a passion he didn’t recognise in himself. But now, as he slowed to a jog on the drive, bent over to catch his breath—just a moment, just one more moment outside—he felt nothing. Maybe a kind of dull reluctance at the most. He took a last look at the crocuses as he was fishing out his keys, rubbed his hands together to try to make them solid again—shake off whatever it was James had done to them—and then raised his hand to the lock.

  The door opened before he touched it. Piers had been standing in the hall, waiting for him. Everything inside him compressed down into the least possible space at his lover’s expression.

  “Where have you been?” Piers asked, very cold, very tightly restrained, and oh, he really was angry.