helenkord 's review for:

5.0

TWs/CWs: violence, death, familial abuse, depression, grief, horrible people in positions of power, injuries

Kit Webb, once the greatest highwayman in the country and now an owner of a respectable coffee house, has a problem. The problem being that he is so, so bored with his new respectable, boring life. But he promised himself that nothing can tempt him back into the life of crime.

That nothing is Percy, Lord Holland. Percy also has a problem, one that needs solving fast, since it’s threatening to throw his entire life out the window. Turns out that his father, the duke, is a bigamist, and Percy’s aristocratic life has been illegitimate this whole time, and now he and his childhood friend Marianne, who is currently married to the duke, are being blackmailed. So, Percy makes a plan:

Do a crime at his father, steal valuable blackmail intel
Get help to do said crime from supposedly cool, but actually very boring Mr. Webb
Somehow keep your dukedom or blackmail a lot of money out of shitty father to save himself, Marianne and his baby sister
Hang around Webb’s coffee shop until he helps you, maybe flirt a bit, wait he’s not boring at all. Oh no
Of course, his plan gets messed up, because before he knows it, he’s doing silly things like interrogating the abusive nature of aristocracy, asking himself if that is really what he wants of his own future, and trying to talk himself out of falling in love with one Mr. Kit Webb, because emotions bad. As you can tell, he’s really going through it, the poor bastard.

Meanwhile Kit is also interrogating what it means for him to even still be alive, when his entire life is marred with grief and pain and the whims of the aristocracy, and whether he’s willing to trust himself with one of their ilk. His life is safe now, but he realizes that maybe, just maybe, he could allow himself to live a bit more.

The juxtaposition of the world weary, stalwart and kind Kit, with his coffeeshop and lending library and pet spider and community he loves, against Percy, the smug little emotionally repressed bastard with only two friends, one of them being his employee, who’s life is falling apart before his eyes, and who must make decisions about his life for the first time in his life. It is beautiful and lovely and so touching.

I adore Cat’s fussy gremlin assholes, and Percy is a prime example. I adore him. He’s so awful and I love him so much.

And finally, I adore Marianne. She’s so depressed and weird and homicidal and I cannot wait for her and [REDACTED]’s story. They deserve a little murder. As a treat.