by Fiona Walker
So she began lapping this room as well, the big, tousled bed seeming to mark her as she circled it. ‘How many women have you seduced in here?’
He watched her maddened circuits with troubled eyes. ‘None.’
‘Let me rephrase that. How many women seduced you in here?’
‘None.’
She stopped lapping and turned to face him across a huge and very sexy claw-footed bath. ‘You’re no bloody virgin.’
He raised a dark eyebrow. ‘This room is. I don’t sleep here often, and when I do I’m too exhausted for company.’
She started circling the room again. ‘Great. Glad we cleared that up.’
‘Are you feeling OK?’ He watched her fanning out her vest top, cheeks growing pink.
‘Fine! Just have a touch of what nineteenth-century heroines called the vapours.’ She realised she must be coming across about as comely and beguiling as an amorous hamster on a wheel, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She’d overindulged in romantic anticipation, and was now experiencing an endorphin high, a sort of sexual sugar rush that made her as manic and silly as a toddler after gorging on sweets. Growing dizzy, she did an about turn and started racing in the opposite direction.
She was suddenly reminded of the riding lessons she’d begged her parents for as a child. She’d wheedled and cajoled, written petitioning letters, drawn winning pictures, slaved lovingly over domestic chores and gone down on bended knees to secure her hour on Bo in a dusty indoor arena on the outskirts of Twickenham. Tacked up, docile eyed and obliging, he’d been presented to her beside the mounting block with his stirrups pulled down and his sweet-smelling muzzle outstretched to investigate her pockets. At which point she’d burst into tears and run back to the car to sob uncontrollably on the back seat, unable to explain to her confused parents that the pleasure was simply too great to sustain, the fear of disappointment too huge to contemplate. She’d folded under the pressure of her own expectations.
Byrne stepped back towards the stairs: ‘This is making you uncomfortable. Let’s go down.’
‘No, the virtual fireplaces are worse!’
‘The ground floor—’
‘Not the glittery pond! That’s far too …’
‘Too?’
‘Seductive. Don’t you have a kitchen? Weren’t you going to make tea?’
‘Ah, yes. It’s beyond the seductive glittery pond. You can close your eyes and I’ll lead you to it if you don’t want to look at that.’ She couldn’t quite tell if he was joking or not.
‘I’ll be fine!’ She belted away from the bed and the 360-degree heavenly view and hurtled downstairs, past Fink the basset puffing steadily up towards her, past the fires and on to the illuminated carp amid their stunning artwork, pushing gratefully through the first door she found.
‘That’s the loo,’ Byrne said helpfully from a discreet distance. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. I’m through the next door on your left.’
Legs admired the slate-tiled wet room, heart careering around madly in her chest. For a moment, she wondered how long she could hide in here, then realised that would look weird and took a few deep breaths before locating the kitchen.
This, she realised, was safe – the other half of the tower’s ground floor moon had curved, shiny black units with a red gas range at their heart, a Smeg and a pinball machine acting as outriders, a long, thin glass refectory table with benches taking up the majority of the polished stone floor, and a black leather sofa flanking far left along with a pair of double doors far right. It was bachelor pad-tastic, uber-cool and totally without warmth.
‘I hate this room,’ Byrne threw open the double doors. ‘My Nan chose it, God bless her. She says it’s very “Versace”, according to her magazines.’ He headed outside.
He was gone so long, Legs edged towards the doors and peeked through.
There was a huge decking balcony overlooking a steep wooded valley. The tops of the trees were level with its railings. Byrne lent on these, his hands knotted together around the back of his neck, staring into the crown of a tall pine, deep in thought.
She rolled her lips between her teeth and stepped out onto the deck, sunlight soothing her face and shoulders.
He didn’t look round.
‘This was ruined like the other tower up until a couple of years ago,’ he told her. ‘Local legend has it the land belonged to a brother and sister who fought over its legacy. Every bitter tear they wept turned to stone and eventually incarcerated them in the two towers here. They’re known as the Sibling Stones. They were ruined because they kept hurling bounders at one another.’
‘You made that up,’ she spluttered.
‘It’s my job.’
There was a long pause. He continued staring at the pine, where a woodpecker was drumming furiously. Now he was the one behaving oddly.
‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m not sure I like this place with you in it,’ he admitted.
Legs felt as though her heart had suddenly been ejected from her between her ribs at high velocity.
‘This place is all about Gordon Lapis,’ he explained, narrowing his eyes as he turned to look back up at the tower. ‘The money I earned as him has paid for it. Ptolemy lives and dies here, and Gordon never steps beyond these walls. It’s not a part of the real world. You are very real indeed, Legs. You don’t belong here.’
‘I’ll go.’
‘No! I want you to stay.’
Her heart, finding itself on bungee elastic at maximum stretch, was pulled back into her chest again at even higher speed. There was another long pause.
The woodpecker was excelling itself now, drumming so fast, Legs half expected the top of the pine tree to drop off. Then she watched a spotted, feathery figure streak past overhead, red under-tail twitching. Yet the hammering continued, and she realised it was her own fingers rattling involuntarily against the wall beside her. Pulling her hand away and folding her arms, she caught Byrne’s eye.
He laughed, holding out his own hands. ‘Look.’ They were shaking too, the fingers dancing like a dreaming pianist’s.
‘Look.’ Uncrossing her arms, she held out hers which accompanied his, twitching and jerking like a slumbering harpist’s. Now laughing too, she blurted: ‘Sexual tension!’
‘Is that what this is?’ He looked delighted.
‘It’s either that or lithium poisoning.’ She was in danger of getting all-consuming giggles in a minute. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m far too tense for sex.’
Nodding, he trapped his shaking hands beneath his arms. ‘How do we take the edge off it?’
‘Going for a run helps.’
‘Good idea.’ He sprang up and burst back through the doors, sweeping her up in his slipstream. They made it as far as the long glass table, where he braked hard to avoid a loose chair and she slammed into him.
Both winded, they staggered aside, eyes watering.
Breathless, Byrne turned to her and held out his arms. She hurled herself into them.
The kiss he landed on her mouth was elixir. Far from dispelling any sexual tension, it pulled her every heartstring to breaking point and tightened every nerve ending in her erogenous zones.
Unable to stop herself, she took hold of the hem of his dusty T-shirt and pulled it up over his head, feasting her eyes on his broad shoulders and muscle-quilted belly, kissing the line of intricate black text along his breastbone. It was a quote she couldn’t hope to pronounce, but she hoped it would be on her lips every day for a very long time to come.
Later, Byrne looked up through his glass dining table and exclaimed. ‘I love this kitchen. I so love this kitchen!’
Legs curled tighter into his warmth and hoped his change in interior design taste was a temporary spell brought about by carnal mania. She loved this kitchen too. She never wanted to leave it for all its very Versace tackiness.
He reached out a hand to her face and turned it to his to kiss it. Soon she was rolling on top of him feeling like a magnet that had attached
itself so totally to its counterpart they might never pull apart.
‘I love you.’ He looked up at her in wonder. ‘I love you here. Never leave.’
Later still, she watched the sun setting over the crests of the pines through the double doors. ‘I should get my bag from the car.’
‘It can wait.’
There was an echo of déjà vu. This time, she had no desire to break free and reclaim her toothbrush and knickers. She felt as though she had come home. Suddenly she understood her mother and the summer of love. She had no care for the permanence of her situation here or the thoughts of others, just so long as each minute passed this exquisitely.
They drank coffee on the decking, wrapped in one shared towel, they ate toast between kisses at the glass table, they soaped one another with slithery abandon in the wet room and ventured up to the top of the tower to look at the stars and make love on a bed at last, revelling in its bouncing comfort and support as they twisted and turned, arched and weaved together.
As they curled up ready for sleep, Byrne traced the tattoo on the back of her neck in wonder, ‘This is so beautiful. You are so beautiful.’
‘You’ve always been able to read me like a book.’ She reached drowsily for his hand to draw his arm beneath her chin like a warm stole. ‘I thought you deserved a signed copy.’
Chapter 49
Dawn arrived, then bright sunlight, then dusk, all back-lighting their love-making, naps, chatter and teasing. Byrne made love with that same extraordinary intense focus and energy with which he wrote and spoke. They talked endlessly now, opening new avenues of honesty and laughter with each pause between breath-snatching kisses and tongue-tying sex.
Another sleepless night ensued, as Legs learned more about his childhood and his amazing rapprochement with Poppy. ‘I had no idea what a clever woman she could be. Such bitterness is the richest of chocolate with her, smooth to taste if you take time to acquire a palate. She is desperate to be loved, but too rare to be appreciated by many. I adore her.’
‘What about your father?’
‘He would be the first to admit that he loved drink more than her by the end. Sure, he’s never really forgiven her for abandoning us, but that she didn’t take me was her saving grace, the ultimate sacrifice. He needed me more than she did.’
‘And you forgive her that?’
‘Now I do. I really do. I can think of no worse fate than being raised at Farcombe like Francis.’
She flinched away, guilt spearing her.
‘Look at your misplaced penitence, Heavenly Pony. I swear you’re more a Catholic than any member of this household. My father will love you as a daughter. He’ll buy you a new rosary for every birthday.’
She stayed very still.
‘I am an old fashioned geek,’ he pointed out. ‘I will propose one day, be warned. Just not yet. You will have plenty of opportunity to run away beforehand. I have to get dressed and go out to buy a ring for a start. Although.’ He picked up her hand and admired the P signet still firmly stuck on her fourth finger, ‘you may have beaten me to that with that amazing foresight of yours, Psychic Purple.’ He kissed her finger.
‘I’m not great at engagements,’ she pointed out in terror, not wanting to break the spell.
‘I don’t think it’ll be a very long one. I love you, you love me. It’s absolutely right.’
She chewed her lip, still not trusting herself to believe something so lovely could be happening to her. ‘It wasn’t so long ago you lectured me about the fact any fool can say “I love you”.’
‘I meant everything I said that night.’
She started back in horror, but he reached out to stop her retreating further across the mattress, dark eyes glowing with honesty. ‘When I said I’d fallen in love with you at half past seven the previous evening, I was telling the truth, although I hated myself for it at the time.’
Legs gazed back at him in amazement, blown away by the intensity of his eyes. ‘Seven thirty-six,’ she corrected breathlessly. ‘You said you fell in love with me at seven thirty-six.’
‘And you?’
‘I always forget to wear a watch.’ She wriggled closer again, ‘but I’d hazard a guess at seven thirty-sixish. I felt the same,’ she laughed, snuggling up to him once more. ‘I’ve never reacted so strongly to anyone in my life. I absolutely, totally loved you from that point.’
‘As long as you keep saying that to me, I think I can finally start to believe it.’ He reached out to touch his fingers lightly on the words at the top of her spine in wonder.
‘I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you!’ She repeated over and over again until he was forced to kiss her again to shut her up.
Making love amid the flickering computer screens in Byrne’s writing room was one of the most thrilling sexual highs of Legs’ life. She loved the imaginative potency of the space and its dark, gothic intimacy; it was part monastic medieval study, part sci-fi fantasy. The big leather chair was particularly stimulating as she climbed on board to straddle him and it whirled around giddily, the illuminated screens blurring in front of her eyes until she lost count of the minutes they span round, just as she’d already lost count of the number of times they’d had sex. Byrne’s beautiful, athletic body was her Seventh Heaven and his clever mind her Cloud Nine, fuelling her sexual imagination as they found more and more delicious ways of slotting together, from Legs Eleven to Sixty-Nine.
Afterwards, exhausted, they took a long soak in the claw-footed bath and collapsed into bed to sleep. When Legs woke up it was the early hours and Byrne was missing beside her in the bed.
She could hear computer keys tapping in the room below and crept halfway down the stairs to watch him working in his big chair, no longer a plaything as he focused on one of the many screens, typing furiously. He was wearing just an old shirt and the inevitable Calvin Klein boxers, his hair on end, gorgeously dishevelled and much-shagged. So besotted that her libido was on permanent tick-over like a waiting getaway car to sexual oblivion, Legs felt the engine revving on her sex drive again. She tried to let out the choke, not wanting to disturb him.
Around the room, other screens were open on reference websites and emails. She could see one from Conrad written entirely in capital letters.
Legs had checked her own phone earlier that day while Byrne was asleep and had found tens of messages from her ex boss and ex-lover queued up on it demanding to know what was going on and whether she was really now Gordon’s PA. Conrad was back in London now, as was Kizzy, desperately preparing for damage limitation in the event of Gordon’s big reveal being cancelled. It seemed Brooke had finally sent Kizzy packing by telling her that his son had just flown to New Zealand, which was panicking Conrad totally. Peering at the screen now to look at his email to Byrne, she could make out at least ten capitalised obscenities.
Aware that he wasn’t alone, Byrne stopped typing and looked up at her perched on the curving staircase.
‘I wasn’t snooping,’ she promised, then blushed. ‘Well maybe a bit. I like watching you work.’
‘You’ll have to get used to it.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘I’m something of a workaholic.’
‘Oh I’m sure I can help you deal with that.’ She started down the stairs. ‘The secret of getting rid of a vice is to acquire another one.’ She dropped the bed sheet she was wrapped in as she weaved her way towards him.
‘And what did you have in mind?’
She climbed back on board the chair. ‘I was thinking of sex addiction.’
‘Too late.’ He started kissing her as she eased the boxers off and herself on. ‘I’m already totally hooked.’
Curled up on his lap later, she watched as he flipped through more emails while he printed out his night’s work.
‘What is it?’ She watched the sheaves of A4 churning out of the laser.
‘Something I was working on that day at the quarry. It’s finished now. I’ll show you soon. Shit!’ He sat up, spillin
g her off his lap as he read a message, anger mounting in his face.
‘What is it?’ She turned to see, but he minimised the screen, making her suddenly jumpy, even though romantic fires were glowing and cracking all around them once more.
‘Is it Conrad going on about the Reveal again?’
He shook his head.
‘Have you decided what you’re going to do?’
Still his head shook, those big intense eyes lifting to hers, rivalling the fires all around them. ‘Can you live with Gordon Lapis as a public figure?’
‘Of course I can. If you wrote bestselling sex confessionals as Tess Tosterone I’d be proud to be outed as your lover. I love you.’
He smiled distractedly, looking at the fires on screen, but his head shook on like a dancing bear kept chained up too long in a Russian city square.
‘The message is from Poppy in total histrionics,’ he admitted, although Legs sensed he was trying to change the subject away from Gordon’s forthcoming public appearance rather than wanting to talk about his mother’s overwrought state. ‘I sent her a line saying that I now know about Kizzy being my half-sister.’
‘She’s angry that you know?’
‘Upset,’ still his head shook on. ‘She thinks I’ll never forgive her for keeping us apart. I suppose I was pretty cold. I thought she’d told me absolutely everything, after all, and now I find out she’s still withholding secrets.’
‘But you do forgive her, surely?’ she asked, remembering that he’d said he adored her that very day.
‘For that much, yes. I’m sure she had her reasons.’
Legs was about to point out that he similarly had reasons for keeping Gordon a secret, but something about his tension stopped her. ‘So what is it you can’t forgive her?’
‘I told her that I’m in love with you.’
She went very still. ‘What does she say?’
‘That I’m a bloody fool. That you and Francis have a love that can never be extinguished. She’s told Hector and he’s raging to the rooftops.’
‘They’re wrong!’ Legs took his face in her hands, forcing his head to stop shaking. ‘They’re wrong!’
