Guardians Of The Haunted Moor (23 page)

“
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 halt 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.”

“
Yes,” said Gideon, lacing their fingers together. “I
know.”

About
the Author

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.