by Harper Fox
“Like I’d leave her alone for a second while that child-snatching monster’s in the house.” Lee said it lightly, but his eyes filled suddenly with shadows, and he leaned his brow on Gideon’s shoulder. Tamsyn, mildly crushed between them, emitted a raspberry noise and a sound like a hen settling down on its eggs. “I couldn’t go through that again, premonitions or no premonitions. I’d fucking kill anyone who laid another hand on her now.”
“I know.” Gideon rocked them both. “Let’s wait another twenty years or so for some unsuitable lover to come and snatch her away. You’re gonna make a lovely laid-back father-in-law, I can tell.”
“I might buy a shotgun.”
They were still laughing when Jago leaned into the kitchen and tapped lightly on the door. “Elowen’s here, gentlemen.”
“Yes. Thanks, Jago—I’m on my way.”
“She’s my niece,” Jago added, “and I love her very much.”
Gideon wasn’t about to argue family bonds. “I know that. Of course.”
“But don’t you let her take away that little girl again. All right?”
“All right. Lee’s gonna take her upstairs for a while. You don’t have to worry about anything now.”
“I should bloody hope not. In that case, I’ll make everyone a cup of tea.”
Gideon entered the living room cautiously. Elowen and her companion were already there, looking awkward among the family photos. The lawyer wasn’t from Baragwathen’s office. The Bodmin fracking scandal was exploding in fantastic slow motion over the town council, local authority, AONB management and planning department. Poor old lawyer Keast’s would be the least of the heads to roll. So far he faced only disbarment, and Gideon wasn’t keen to press charges against a man already made so desolate by his grab for wealth. This gentleman looked a lot more sleek and successful. He stood up to shake Gideon’s hand. “Saul Welkin of Prynne, Welkin and Co, Falmouth. Miss Tyack thought she wouldn’t put you and your husband to the inconvenience of coming into town, not when you’ve both been through so much.”
“Thanks,” Gideon said uncertainly. “I’m Gideon Tyack-Frayne. Lee’s busy with the baby, Elowen—can we manage without him?”
“I’m not going to get to see her, am I?”
Welkin gave her a repressing glance. “Yes, that’s no problem. Miss Tyack has signed all the paperwork you requested. We’ve brought it along for you to look over, if we could all perhaps sit down...?”
The lawyer spread the papers out on the coffee table. Before Gideon could turn the first sheet, Elowen reached out to touch his wrist. “I don’t suppose for a moment you want to hear me explain.”
Gideon didn’t. But he couldn’t help noting that she’d lost weight, and had shadows under her eyes to rival Lee’s. “Whatever you want to say, I’ll listen.”
“Good old Gideon. Always so bloody fair. I wonder if my brother realises what a sodding treasure he’s got in you.”
He sighed. “Would you rather I kicked your arse, Elowen?”
“Almost.” She knotted her hands together in a gesture just like Lee’s, knucklebones stretching the skin. “Michel and I were arguing before we got out of Cornwall. We argued all the way across the Channel to Carnac. He wouldn’t come right out and say it, but I think he was more inclined to take your side and Lee’s than mine. So that was great, and then the house he said he’d rented in Auray turned out to be a one-room flat. And Tamsie might have been a baby angel for you two, but for me she turned into a howling demon, and she screamed the place down in that one bloody room for forty eight hours straight.”
“She was probably just unsettled, Elowen.”
“Oh, right. That’s why she started crooning and making that clucking sound of hers the minute—the minute—I gave up and started packing her things to bring her home.” She held up a hand, although Gideon hadn’t been about to interrupt. “I know—women have brought up babies in much worse circumstances than mine. I don’t have any excuses, though it didn’t help that Michel suddenly found the excavation site a whole lot more interesting than me and his kid and a pile of dirty nappies, and announced he wasn’t coming home for a week.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been hard.”
“Not if I’d loved her.” She read Gideon’s shift of expression, paled a bit and quickly amended, “You know what I mean. The way a mother—a parent—should love a child, where the nappies and the crying and the absentee husband might drive you crazy, but underneath it all there’s this... thing, this bond, that makes it all worthwhile. I didn’t have that. I didn’t even have a proper home for her, and all I can say to excuse myself for taking her away from you was that I had—God, I dunno, some kind of hormone surge at the prospect of leaving her behind. Can you understand?”
“Yes,” Gideon said shortly, and turned the pages until he found the crucial clauses, managing not to add, Just in case you have another one. “Thank you for signing these. Has Mr Welkin been through them with you properly?”
“Yes. In painful detail. They’re belt-and-braces adoption papers, awarding full custody of Tamsyn to my brother and to you.”
“Yes. If they seem a bit... watertight, I’m sure you’ll understand.”
“Oh, Gideon. I know I’ve been a dick. You don’t have to rub my nose in it.”
Now she really did sound like Lee. Gideon drew a deep breath and let it go. “I didn’t mean to do that,” he said kindly, reaching across the table to take her chilly hand. “We both know you’re not signing these for your own benefit, or for mine, or even for your brother’s. It’s for Tamsyn, isn’t it? She needs to know where home is. Who her parents are.”
Elowen gave a sob. “Will you let me see her at all?”
“What kind of question is that? Did you make things up with Michel?”
“Kind of. We’re working on it.”
“Did he come through on the fancy hot-shot job?”
She found a watery smile. “I should bloody think so.”
“Well, then—in the intervals of your high-flying archaeology career, once Tamsyn notices she hasn’t inherited my ugly mug or Lee’s, I hope you’ll be around to help explain.” He waited a beat, listening to the silent message from upstairs, the pulse of forgiveness behind the pain. “We both do.”
Chapter Eleven
“Do you think it does her any harm, to hear us rolling around in here?”
Gideon considered. “Well, for a start, she’s sound asleep. But... I dunno. I grew up in a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil household—bedroom doors firmly closed—and all it did for me was to make me even more clueless about relationships than I would have been anyway. No, I don’t think it hurts her to hear us loving each other.” He shifted onto his back in delicious surrender. “Not like this, anyway. Some nights we’re gonna have to give her earplugs and lock her in the coal shed, of course.”
Lee gave a moan of anticipation and continued his slow, well-lubed push into Gideon’s body. “Oh, God. Those nights.”
“Can you hang on for the next one?”
“Long as you like. Just not sure I can give you more than three minutes now.”
“Oh, that ought to do fine.” Gideon stretched out. He held on to the bars of the headboard where Lee had once tied him up, then couldn’t resist the muscular ripple of his lover’s back and curled up to hold him, cradling him between his thighs. White curtains blew softly into the room, the rhythm of the sweet sea wind all of one piece with his gathering pleasure. “Mm, yes. Deeper, darlin’. Deeper.”
“All the way. Oh, I love you, Gid.”
Gideon caught his breath. He didn’t want his response to come out as a yell. Mrs Ivey and Jago were still enjoying their summer afternoon, and Lee’s room overlooked the garden. “Oh, God. I... I love...”
His mobile rang. He’d made the mistake of assigning DI Lawrence her own ringtone, so he’d know which calls he could ignore, and which—this afternoon anyway—he absolutely had to take. “Lee...”
“You’re kidding.”
/> “Nope.”
“Oh, great. This is married life, is it—picking up phone calls in the middle of a fu-...”
“Bet you a tenner you can’t keep it in there and keep it hard while I talk to her.”
“Can I move?”
“Not a muscle.”
Gideon conducted his half of the conversation in monosyllables. They were less likely to fracture or squeak, and were all that was required of him. He listened, taking deep, silent breaths through his nose while poor Lee remained frozen between his thighs, turning various shades of rose pink and eventually burying his face in the duvet. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you. That’s great news.” Another agonising pause, DI Lawrence’s tinned voice broadcasting innocently across their scene. “Thank you, ma’am. You too. Goodbye.” He cut the line and met Lee’s bright gaze as he surfaced. “Well done.”
“I’ve studied Tantric.”
“Really? You never mentioned that before we were married.”
“I was keeping it as a surprise. What did she want?”
“You seriously want to wait while I tell you?”
“Why not? Tantric, I’m telling you. Tantric.” Lee pushed upright on his arms. “Oh, God.”
“I’ll keep it brief. The forensics team found a scythe buried in the garden at Carnysen. It’s covered with John Bowe’s blood—and Dev’s prints.”
“Oh, good. You didn’t arrest the wrong guy.”
“No, although I still don’t understand how that poor skinny lad managed to slice up his brother like so much sausage meat... I doubt he’ll stand trial. He’s in Fletcher Ward, under restraint.”
“Do you really not understand that, Gid? After all you’ve seen?”
“No, I... I do. Partway at least. The Beast came, or he believed it did, and...”
Lee shuddered deeply, withdrawing a little way, pulsing back in. “Godsakes. Sausages, restraints, beasts coming... What else?”
This was becoming a game of control. Gideon grinned up at him. “You’re quite something, aren’t you? No-one’s gonna frack on Bodmin Moor.”
“Lawrence knows that for sure?”
“She’s rounded up all the councillors Keast named like the Clanton gang. Every one of them admitted to bribery and corruption. The sale itself was illegal, and with John and Bligh gone and Dev incapable of making decisions...”
“The land goes to the Crown?”
“Possibly, unless Dev’s lawyers can get ’em to hold it in trust for him until he’s well. Either way, Mitchell Shale won’t get it. The AONB might make a bid to enclose it inside the park.”
“You did it. You saved the moor.” Pinning him gently down, Lee trailed kisses along his throat and collar bone. Gideon didn’t know that he could take so much credit, but if this was how his moment of glory was going to happen, he couldn’t argue. “My guardian,” Lee continued, adding the lightest sharp-toothed nip to the words. “My good shepherd. What else? Tell me quick, handsome, so I can take us both where we’re going.”
“She says...” Gideon gasped and swallowed a raw shout. “She says she’s pleased about Tamsyn, and I can take some leave to get sorted about the house, and... she hopes we have a good weekend.”
“Nice of her.”
“I thought so. Where are you gonna take us?”
“Where would you like to go?”
“Where you took me before. The cliffs.”
If Gideon sat up, he would see them—the real ones, tumbling in all their sunny glory along the coast of Drift. Lee destroyed the boundaries between the outer and the inner worlds. One day, if Gideon let him, he would disprove the old lie that life and death were separate things. “You saw that so clearly when I showed you,” Lee whispered. “You see all kinds of things you’re not meant to be able to now, don’t you?”
Gideon couldn’t tell him. He hadn’t even formulated for himself how he was changing. “Even if I do—can you understand that I don’t want to? The world I have right here’s enough for me. Even... Even if we hadn’t got Tamsyn back. It would have been enough for me.”
Lee gathered him up. He cupped the back of his skull and pounded into him. He jolted Gideon up with him into the clear blue sky, laid him out and fucked him in harsh-breathing silence until the sun grew red to his wide-open gaze. They hit the barrier together, hard and fast. Gideon saw—one of the things he wasn’t meant to—how the world would have been enough for Lee too, even without their daughter: somehow, eventually. Yes.
***
Lee raised his head. He looked as disreputable as he could ever manage, mouth swollen from rough kisses, a piratical touch of five o’clock shadow darkening his jaw. He yawned enormously. “We seem doomed to be interrupted by doorbells.”
“Doorbells or demon knocks. At least they waited until we were done this time.” Gideon glanced at his watch. “Oops. Overslept. That isn’t too soon for our dinner guests.”
“Don’t worry. Jago’s been primed to take them in and make them welcome.”
“Shit. We’d better get down there fast.” Gideon slithered out from under Lee’s attempt to nose-dive back onto his shoulder. An unearthly cackle from the nursery told him that Tamsyn was back in the game as well, and as usual finding something about the state of her fingers or toes hilarious. “Come and help me dress our daughter. She’s meant to be on parade.”
An odd deputation was waiting for them in the hallway. This informal dinner was to celebrate Pendower’s release from hospital. Once Ma Frayne had heard about the part he’d played in keeping her son from rushing into the flat at Dark, she hadn’t let anyone rest until she’d extracted a promise from Jago to host the event, Gideon and Lee to have their infant present and correct, and Zeke and Eleanor to pick the injured sergeant up from Trelowarren and transport him over to Drift. Tamsyn was overjoyed at the sight of so much company. She yowled in Gideon’s arms as he bore her ceremoniously down the stairs, pointed at her grandmother and said something close enough to gan to make the old lady dissolve into tears. “There she is!” Ma Frayne cried, poking Pendower in the ribs. “Oh, she’s wearing the new dress I bought her. Doesn’t she look like an angel?”
Gideon thought she looked like an explosion in a meringue factory, but handed her over smiling. “Yeah. She loves it. How are you, Rufus? It’s good to see you on your feet.”
“Thank you.” Pendower shook his outstretched hand, reached to shake Lee’s too and beamed with pleasure when Lee returned him a brief hug. “I’m fine now. So, this is your girl?”
“The creature herself. Tamsyn Elizabeth Tyack-Frayne, named after her grandmother, of course.”
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Pendower gave her a wistful chuck under the chin. “Can I have a little hold of her, Mrs Frayne? I used to think I might have something like this of my own one day.”
Tamsyn was used to being handed around like a parcel at social gatherings, and went to him willingly, intrigued by the dressing still taped to his skull. Gideon frowned in concern. “Why not? You’re going to be all right, aren’t you? It was just a head wound.”
“I meant... I thought I knew who I was going to marry. I had it all planned out.” He jounced Tamsyn on his hip. “But she died.”
His words fell like stones into the convivial atmosphere. Tears had come to his eyes. Gideon and Lee exchanged a glance. “I tell you what,” Lee said. “Tamsie needs a breath of air. Why don’t you take her down to the gate to see the cliffs? Gid and I will come too, and Jago, could you get drinks for everyone?”
Jago nodded happily. He was living it up in his role as host, and would probably uncork his homebrewed moonshine if left unattended for long. As for Zeke, he had the look of a man who would probably drink it today, exhausted under his contentment at the hard-won reunion of his family. He and Eleanor followed his mother into the living room, and Lee steered Pendower and Gideon outside.
Isolde trotted after them, weaving circles around them thrice. A perfect summer’s day was drawing to its close above the cliffs. Pendower came to a ha
lt by the garden gate, turning Tamsyn so that she could watch the setting sun. “The thing is,” he said, as much to the child as to anyone else, “that I kept seeing her. Amber, I mean—my girlfriend. After the car crash, I’d look up, and she’d just be standing there smiling at me. It made me very happy, to be honest with you, but of course I’m a police officer, and I can’t afford to be having hallucinations. So I went to the doctor, and he put me on some anti-psychotic meds, and—well, they made her disappear. That was for the best, but I missed her a lot.” He brushed back a strand of Tamsyn’s hair from her eyes. “I think that was why I had a slightly... unbalanced reaction to you, Lee. I’d seen you talk to dead people at your stage shows, just as if they were right there in front of you. So either they were real, or you were a fake, and I wanted to find out which.”
Lee had taken up position on the path behind him, as if watching his back. Gideon came to stand beside him, and Lee took a tight, hot-skinned grip on his hand. “Did you come to any conclusions?”
“I know you’re not a fake. Other than that, all I’ve really come to believe is that the world was a smaller, stupider place for me, once I couldn’t see Amber anymore.”
“Rufus—if you want me to advise you to stop taking your meds, I can’t. Has it ever occurred to you that it doesn’t really matter whether what you saw was real or not? She was there for you.”
“Yes, it occurred. I had plenty of time in hospital, and somehow after working with you and Gideon—awful though most of that was—I found I could think about it without wanting to throw things or cry. I stopped taking my pills about a month ago.”
He was watching a patch of sunny turf on the cliff top. After a few seconds he seemed to recollect himself. “Well,” he said, “that breeze is turning cold. Shall we go back indoors, Miss Tyack-Frayne?”
Lee and Gideon followed him slowly back up the path. When he was out of earshot, Lee glanced back once over his shoulder to the cliff. His grip on Gideon’s intensified. “She’s a pretty girl, Amber. She likes the dress he bought her, the one with the tulips on the skirt. She wears it all the time.”
