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

friendship.
    “But,” Gilbert continued, “you may indeed have half-convinced me that there is such a thing as love in the world, if only for the love you feel toward the world and its beauty.”
    “Have I then?” Laurie asked, grinning and sitting up straight. “Do you concede?”
    “I most certainly do not.” Gilbert snorted indignantly, but he was grinning. “Half-convinced. And verily, just the other day I had you half-convinced that love is a falsity, yet you did not concede.”
    “Because you begged that I should not,” Laurie reminded him, “on account of how eagerly you wish for me to win.”
    “Unfair,” Gilbert said, grumbling and colouring.
    “And to you?” Laurie asked. “Since you began this questioning. What, to you, is the most beautiful sight in all the world?”
    “It would be indecorous of me to answer that.”
    “You took me to a brothel to watch a pair of women at tribades—” Laurie retorted.
    Gilbert blinked in surprise. “I didn’t think you knew that term.”
    “What, then, could you find indecorous to say in my presence?”
    “Οἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον οἰ δὲ πέσδων,” Gilbert said.
    Laurie’s mouth fell open again in surprise, and his brain struggled to make sense of it. Greek, though it flowed more smoothly from Gilbert’s tongue than it ever had from those of Laurie’s professors at Oxford.
    “Oἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ᾽ ἐπὶ γᾶν μέλαιναν ἔμμεναι κάλλιστον ἔγω δὲ κῆν᾽ ὄττω τὶσ ἔπαται.”
    “What?” Laurie asked, quite effectively sidetracked.
    “Some say an army of horse,” Gilbert translated. There was a wicked, playful smile on his lips, pleased as ever to be showing off. Laurie couldn’t say he much minded Gilbert’s tendency to show off. He would listen to poetic recitations all day in Gilbert’s honeyed voice and with Gilbert’s impishly glinting eyes. “And others say an army of foot soldiers, while others say that a fleet is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is what you love.”
    “That’s not—that’s not Homeric Greek.”
    “Aeolic.”
    “What?”
    Gilbert rolled his eyes. “It’s Sappho, Laurie. Did you never read Sappho?”
    “I confess I did not.”
    “I shall have to correct that error,” Gilbert said. “I regret I’ve brought none.”
    “Recite it again for me,” Laurie asked, and Gilbert complied. Some of the words were familiar, while others were strangely formed.
    Letting the words roll through his mind as he appreciated the sound and the form of them, Laurie found that Gilbert had never truly answered the question proposed inherently within the quote. “What, then, to you, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth?”
    “That which I love,” Gilbert said, dodging the question through rhetoric and grinning as he did so.
    “And do you, truly, love something?”
    “I might,” Gilbert confessed, his smile turning wry and full of secrets.
    “Lo, then you must concede the wager.”
    “Not yet,” Gilbert said. “Not until I am certain.”
    “Of your love?”
    “Yes.”
    “What, then? Or whom?”
    “The most beautiful thing on all the black earth,” Gilbert answered.
    Laurie threw a book at him.

    T hey stopped for the night at an inn.
    “Do you want your own room?” Gilbert asked, offering his hand to help Laurie down. “Or will you share with me and endure my late-night poetry?”
    Smiling fondly at him, Laurie kept hold of his hand once he was down, pausing at the sight of Gilbert’s sparkling gray eyes. “I’ll risk the poetry.”
    “As you please,” Gilbert said, and tugged him inside.
    They spoke little over dinner, on account of their having spent the entire day in the carriage chatting on matters of love which might not be acceptable for discussion in a public space. Afterward, they retired up to the room together.
    Laurie sat in the single chair as he removed his boots, gaze