William Holt has been hired to guide an English heir west through colonial New South Wales. Six weeks through the mountains, the plains, the red country past Bathurst — and William knows, from the first night at the inn, exactly who George Ashford is.
George doesn't know him at all.
What begins as employment becomes something neither man has a name for and neither can afford. The further west they ride, the further they get from the world that tells them what they are to each other — and to themselves. By the time they reach the station, the distance between employer and guide has collapsed entirely.
But William has been carrying something since that first night. And arriving means it can't be carried much longer.
This book contains themes some readers may wish to know about before beginning.
Explicit sexual content
Sample
He took tea from the innkeeper's wife and sat at the far end of the common room where the wall met the corner and his back could rest against something solid. The room was filling slowly — two men by the fire, another at the long table near the door, the sound of boots on the stairs. Morning at an inn on a busy road, nothing remarkable about it.
The door opened and the cold came in with two men.
The first was nobody. Colonial clothes, the uncertain posture of a city hand hired for work he didn't fully understand yet. He stepped aside immediately to let the second man pass.
William saw the face and his hands stopped moving.
Not shock. Something he did not choose. In his chest first. Then his gut. Then his legs. He did not move. He could not have said if he was breathing. The cup was still in his hands. He checked that. It was.
The face was older. Twelve years older. The boy's smoothness gone but the structure underneath still there — the dark eyes and the dark hair and the way he held his mouth. The way he stood. That was what made it certain. Not the features alone but the way the body carried them — the shoulders back, the head level, the ease of a man who had never once had to ask.
William knew him.
He swallowed once. His hands were still steady on the cup. His face had not moved.
