It's weekend, and time for more Rainbow Snippets! The Rainbow Snippets group on Facebook asks its members to share six sentence snippets from their work each weekend. Check out the group's Facebook page to read all the snippets and add lots of great books to your TBR. You'll find all sorts of books with the common thread that the main character identifies as LGBTQ.
I decided to share a few snippets from The Merchant's Love this month because it has an anniversary coming up in a couple of weeks. I always call this book a warm hug in book form because that's how it's always felt to me (and what I needed when I was writing it). It's the story of Faelen, a demisexual bookish royal, falling in love over books and baked goods with Maxen, a bisexual merchant who is utterly besotted with him from the start. There's also some family drama and a bit of magic gone wrong. This snippet is the beginning of the book, when Faelen, his twin Alexander, and their mother and brother arrive back in Tournai after a long absence.
In the last decade since his father was appointed ambassador to the kingdom of Teilo, Faelen had been on the grounds of Tournai’s royal palace three times, if he included today. The relief, happiness, and utter sense of home flooding through him as soon as he stepped off the boat had been shocking in its intensity, but not surprising otherwise. Sometime in the middle of the journey, he’d been hit with the bone-deep certainty that he needed to be back in Tournai. He’d mentioned it to Alexander, who admitted feeling the same—which Faelen was happy to hear from his twin, even if it did make the whole thing stranger.
He tried not to dwell on it, which was made a bit easier because of his discomfort that they were arriving unannounced and uninvited.
Well, not entirely uninvited. Faelen’s cousin Etan was getting married in a couple of weeks, and the entire family had been invited to the wedding, but Faelen couldn’t imagine Philip, the crown prince, and Amory, his husband, expected them to descend on the palace for it.
He and Alexander would be staying in Jumelle longer than that if they had their way.