Free A Wager of Love: M/M Historical Romance by Katherine Marlowe Page A

it?”
    “Which are you?”
    Sighing as he considered it, Laurie leaned back in his seat. “I always rather thought that I was made as every man was made, that it was simply a man’s nature to take a wife, but now I have learned that there are other natures in the world. It is true that I have never longed for any woman.”
    “Have you ever longed for any man?”
    Laurie frowned with thought, gazing up at the ceiling of the carriage. The image of Gilbert’s impish smile came unbidden into his mind. “No,” he answered. “Or if I did—I don’t know, can a thing deserve the name of love or even longing if one does not recognise it as such?”
    “I feel like even you would notice such a thing.”
    Laurie snorted. “Then no.”
    “What do you suppose,” Gilbert said, shutting the book and setting it back on the pile with the others. The pile had fallen over and was making its way across the floor of the carriage, but while both of them had their feet up and the floor wasn’t muddy, neither of them much cared about the disarray of the books.
    “Hm?” Laurie prompted, since Gilbert had trailed off.
    His friend glanced over, sprawling comfortably sideways across the well-padded seat. “What, to you specifically, is the most beautiful sight in all the world?”
    “To me? I don’t know. I suppose… a sunrise.”
    “A sunrise? That’s a bland answer. Does a sunrise truly fill your heart with more awe and joy than any other sight on the black earth?”
    “Depends on the sunrise.”
    “So, then, tell me about the one that does.”
    “Huh.” Laurie drew his teeth across his lower lip in thought. “I don’t know if you’ve ever spent much time in the country. But there is such a feeling, when you are walking back home along a stretch of road in Somersetshire after a wedding celebration that ran late into the night and your parents already left earlier with the carriage, as you gaze across the mist that hangs in the fields in the pre-dawn light, while all the world is still asleep and you yourself may still be half-drunk from the celebration, and as the sun begins to rise, turning the sky from midnight blue to dawn yellow, to pigeon-blue and then at last to purple and rose and orange across all the world and upon the lingering mist, and it seems that there can be no doubt that God created the world in love, and that whatever sorrows and cruelties, whatever suffering or greed leads us astray, there is still, in the dawn light, such beauty in the world that it must surely have been intended as a gift, from a god that wishes us to be happy.”
    Gilbert smiled, his eyes alight with fondness and pleasure in a way that Laurie had never quite seen from him before. “Laurie, I think that is the most eloquently convincing argument you have yet made in the course of our wager. Although my favourite is still when you told me I was so handsome I must have been fashioned specially by the devil in order to tempt the hearts of the world.”
    Laurie flushed at the reminder of that. “Have I half-convinced you, then, with my argument?”
    “Not of God, I assure you, for I simply will not believe in a god who is omnipotent and yet allows the destitution and suffering of innocents. No matter the religious reasoning or theory, nothing can be excuse enough for that allowance, and if there is indeed a God and Lucifer, I should prefer obedience to the latter, who encourages freedom and the guidance of one’s heart, to the former whose rules are strict and harsh as to how one must perform devotion and love. It seems to me that God, however loving, is the sort of father who beats his children roughly, and I will none of him.”
    Mouth falling open at the vehemence and heresy of his friend, Laurie shut his mouth again and looked off out the carriage. He thought indeed that he should always believe, and Gilbert should always doubt, and found that he did not mind so very much, since the disagreement had in no way impacted their