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    Ebook93 pages1 hour

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    By Harper Fox

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    It’s Christmas at Edinburgh’s magnificent Barlinney Hotel, and chief housekeeper Cosmo Grant is in charge of the festivities. He’s already got his hands full when handsome Ren Vaudrey checks in. Ren is an accountant, or so he says, and he’s asking questions about his missing colleague, Sam.

    It soon turns out that Ren is an undercover cop. Cosmo wants to help him – Ren is kind as well as handsome as hell – but unless he can do it within the Barlinney’s walls, Cosmo is stuck. A victim of crippling agoraphobia, he’s been a prisoner in this gilded cage for over a year.

    There’s another problem too. Ren clearly adores his partner Sam. In the face of his rising attraction for this man, Cosmo has to bear in mind that Ren may be already taken. Cosmo gathers all his courage to do the right thing by Ren and Sam – and as a glittering Christmas Eve descends on the city, finds himself confronting his very darkest fears.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarper Fox
    Release dateDec 7, 2014
    ISBN9781910224168
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    Author

    Harper Fox

    Harper Fox is the author of many critically acclaimed M/M Romance novels, including Stonewall Book Award-nominated Scrap Metal and Brothers Of The Wild North Sea, Publishers Weekly Best Book 2013. Her novels and novellas are powerfully sensual, with a dynamic of strongly developed characters finding love and a forever future – after an appropriate degree of turmoil. She loves to show the romance implicit in everyday life, and she writes a sharp action scene too.

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    • 4/5
      A lovely story, and not only in the season. Only one thing that bothered me, and that's the way the author shut the proverbial bedroom door just as the single love scene began to heat up. I absolutely loved Life After Joe, and that one didn't pull any punches. So in this story, it came off as artificially coy.

      Otherwise, this was a very good read with a satisfying HEA. Wonderful characters!
    • 3/5
      Sorry, couldn't get past the fact that Cosmo lets his boss prostitute him and has no recourse because they don't have a union. Really. Because without a union, bosses everywhere are free to pimp out their employees and nobody would bat an eyelash? I didn't even get far enough to see if he actually told the cop who showed up at the hotel to become his love interest, or whether he kept it to himself the entire book to avoid embarrassment. Authors need need NEED to do logic tests on their plots. What would any person of normal intelligence do if... (yeah, I get that he is afraid to leave the hotel. That doesn't mean he doesn't have problem solving ability or the ability to communicate with the outside world.)

    Book preview

    Out - Harper Fox

    It’s Christmas at Edinburgh’s magnificent Barlinney Hotel, and chief housekeeper Cosmo Grant is in charge of the festivities. He’s already got his hands full when handsome Ren Vaudrey checks in. Ren is an accountant, or so he says, and he’s asking questions about his missing colleague, Sam.

    It soon turns out that Ren is an undercover cop. Cosmo wants to help him—Ren is kind as well as handsome as hell—but unless he can do it within the Barlinney’s walls, Cosmo is stuck. A victim of crippling agoraphobia, he’s been a prisoner in this gilded cage for over a year.

    There’s another problem too. Ren clearly adores his partner Sam. In the face of his rising attraction for this man, Cosmo has to bear in mind that Ren may be already taken. Cosmo gathers all his courage to do the right thing by Ren and Sam—and as a glittering Christmas Eve descends on the city, finds himself confronting his very darkest fears.

    Out

    December 2014

    Copyright (c) 2014 by Harper Fox

    Cover Art by Johanna Ollila

    Edited by Keren Reed

    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 written permission from Fox Tales.

    Printed in the United States of America

    This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

    Table of Contents

    Chapter One

    Chapter Two

    Chapter Three

    Chapter Four

    Chapter Five

    Chapter Six

    Chapter Seven

    Chapter Eight

    Chapter Nine

    Out

    Harper Fox

    Chapter One

    My name is Cosmo Grant, and I have no pride left.

    I’d been doing all right until yesterday. The run-up to Christmas always turns the big Edinburgh hotels into pressure cookers, backstage at least; front of house, we try to present a genial, welcoming face to our public, and here at the Royal Barlinney we succeed.

    Recently that’s been due to my efforts, I can say without lack of modesty. I started as junior housekeeper five years ago, and I scrubbed as many toilets and made as many beds as any of the domestic staff under my shaky command. I learned by doing everyone’s job as well as my own. I cleaned miles and miles of carpets and Italian marble floors. Changed light bulbs, fixed leaky taps, once brought ambassadorial aid to a foreign princess fleeing a murderous regime. As well as my bilingual English and Gaelic—the latter just a frosting, ceud mìle fáilte to charm the Americans—I picked up enough French, German, Arabic and Italian to help out most of our visitors with most of their basic needs. I learned from the kitchens upwards all the workings of our vast flagship hotel, which sails above the city’s railway lines like an ocean liner

    lit up from within by a thousand crystal chandeliers.

    And two years ago George Brace, the Barlinney’s manager, rewarded all that initiative by promoting me to housekeeper-in-chief. I think it nearly killed him. He hates me as cordially as I detest him. It isn’t the fact that I’m gay, great big UKIP-voting lump as he is: half the staff are that, and/or foreign, which makes even less sense of his politics. No, Brace is a bully. He’s twice my age and size, and I guess it burns him up that his staff would rather walk backwards three times round the Walter Scott Monument than go to him for orders. That a skinny twenty-five-year-old has more power than he does inside

    his own hotel.

    Ah, if I sound arrogant, give me a bit of rope. I’m the monster he created after all. He had no choice but to give me the job, but he’s found ways of making me pay. The Barlinney is a world in its own right—complete, from its underground swimming pool and spa to its fabulous rooftop garden, and just as well. I can’t leave it. Not one step, not one breath of city air. For the last year and three days, I haven’t set foot outside.

    Chapter Two

    We don’t wear kilts as part of our Barlinney uniform—that would be cheap, a parody of our nationalism—but if we did, I might as well have taken mine off and handed it to Brace in the foyer. He could have hung it on our thirty-foot Barlinney Christmas tree, the envy and wonder of every hotel in the city. Then he could have stuck me on the top.

    Last night he’d cornered me just as I’d been about to go off shift. Cosmo, we have a special customer. I knew what that meant. He’d edged me towards it a couple of times before, and I’d held out, choosing not to understand, finding urgent business for myself elsewhere.

    This time he’d meant it. He’d been different with me, far from his usual sleek self-satisfied self. On edge, damp-browed and glancing around him as if on the lookout. His normally velvety voice had been harsh.

    Of course I’d said no.

    Cosmo, it’s a big wide world, isn’t it? A grand big city, Edinburgh. You’re overqualified here, we both know that. You can walk out any day you choose and find another job.

    We don’t have a union rep here in the Barlinney. The private hotels, the ones that have stayed out of reach of buy-up chains like Rocco Forte, really are little kingdoms unto themselves. But the sorry truth is that I wouldn’t have gone knocking on the rep’s door in any case. Brace had known what he was doing, had accurately judged my state of mind and laid a particular emphasis on the word out. And I’d gone down at that light a push.

    No kilts, just a touch of red-thread tartan in our waistcoats. I particularly liked the waistcoat, with its satin back and little adjustable buckle-tie in the rear. I hadn’t known exactly what was about to happen, so I’d stepped into the Grand Suite’s bathroom and undressed to that extent. Stepped back out in my white shirt and grey trousers, my palms cold with sweat. Sprawled in the armchair before me had been the biggest of big businessmen, a huge complacent bulk topped by

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