It was all out of balance, too hot. Mike had lurched from
I can’t risk it
to
I can’t stop
in less than a minute—and so had he. John transferred his grasp to the sides of Michael’s face. Slowly, carefully he forced him back. “No. Stop a second.”
“Christ, John. I…didn’t even mean to start.”
“I know. Me neither.” Unsteadily John smoothed the rumpled black hair, planted a kiss more fraternal than sexual onto the top of his skull. “So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re gonna make dinner for us; then we’ll sit around and have the…nice, boring, no-brainer night we usually do have when I come down here. I’ll moan at you about Quin, and you can tell me one of your interesting stories about what type of sheep your granddad kept.” He waited until Michael registered the insult, reddened lips parting in silent protest. “Then if anything happens—and I’m not saying it won’t—maybe it can happen a bit slower and less like we’re trying to kill one another. Okay?”
“Okay. I…thought you liked my sheep stories.”
“I do, but God knows they’re passion killers. Which might be no bad thing.”
“Maybe not.” Still breathing quickly, Michael sat back on his heels. He smiled and looked like himself again. Handsome but ordinary. John’s partner and friend. John couldn’t bear to lose that—not even for the best shag in the world. “Still, I wouldn’t rely on it. I’d have thought picking ticks off you would’ve killed the romance.”
* * *
Michael poached the salmon, steamed new potatoes to a state of heartbreaking tenderness. He sent John off into the garden to pick chives. He let John watch while he brought an alchemist’s concentration to the hollandaise, which would separate out if left unstirred for so much as a second. John, whose notions of cooking began and ended with the microwave instructions on a ready meal, allowed himself to be chivied round the kitchen with a good heart. He liked these rituals. In London, dinner was often a sandwich washed down with a flask coffee in the back of a surveillance van. He liked to set the massive kitchen table with linen and silverware which, though spotless, looked as if they belonged to the house from its earliest foundations.
John grabbed a bottle of crisp cold Pinot from the fridge, uncorked it, and was in time to draw the chef’s chair back for Michael in a half-mocking, half-serious gesture that made Michael grin and shake his head. “Pack it in, you clown.”
“Least I can do. This looks bloody gorgeous.”
“Sit down and eat it, then.”
John complied willingly. He wanted to ask why all his best-loved foods were on the table—and a summer pudding gently chilling in the fridge—but suspected he knew. It was on his lips to tell Michael there was no need, that their collision of three nights before had been entirely mutual, a shared if unexpected violence. No call for him to do anything to make it up. That would put the whole thing on the table, though, huge and inappropriate among the old crystal glasses and the handful of eglantine roses John had awkwardly borne in from the garden. Better not to look it in the mouth. Instead he said, reaching for more hollandaise, “One day you’re gonna tell me who taught you to cook like this.”
“Yes, all right. My mum did.”
John almost dropped the jug. Michael had turned that question aside with a joke for the best part of three years. He never volunteered a word about his family. John had gathered, in scraps and with painful slowness, that his father had died in the far-flung Russian province where he’d gone out on business and met his mother. That his mother had fled Russia for reasons unknown with her five-year-old son, and on motives equally mysterious taken refuge with her father-in-law, the dour old sheep farmer who’d lived here until the house fell into dereliction around him. Learning that much had been a major victory. “Your mum?” he echoed, trying not to sound too astonished. Michael was continuing calmly with his meal. “This is top-notch English cuisine for a Russian refugee, isn’t it?”
“Well, these were the raw materials she had to hand.” Michael topped off John’s glass with the straw-pale Pinot. “She adapted. I kept her recipe book after she died. I could do you
kvashennaya kapusta
and borscht with
pelmeni
if you wanted.”
“That would be interesting sometime.” John let a minute or so elapse, watching his partner as subtly as he could. He knew every flicker of tension in him, as well as all his measures for trying to hide them. Just now he seemed absolutely relaxed. A good time or a bad one to push it? He decided to take the risk. “What happened to her, Mike?”
Michael looked up, wineglass gently cupped in one palm. His eyes were dark but untroubled. “You’ve been very good about not asking.”
“Oh fuck.” John shivered in dismay. Had he managed to bugger things up already? “I’ve got a big mouth. Forget it.”
“No, it’s okay. I only haven’t told you because—there aren’t any answers, not really. I came back from school one day and found her in bed. There wasn’t a mark on her. The coroner recorded death by natural causes, though neither he nor any of the doctors who carried out the inquest could tell what those were.”
“Oh—Jesus, Mike.”
“Look, I was seven. It all went straight over my head. I don’t even really remember any of it, not properly. So take a deep breath and finish your dinner.” Michael picked up the vegetable dish and served him more potatoes, then helped himself by way of example. “Now, tell me what happened with Quin.”
Are you kidding me
? Reflexively swallowing half a glassful of wine, John stared at him.
You tell me you found your mother dead when you were seven years old, and now we just…politely turn the conversation
? “Quin? Bugger him. Mike, why—”
“Hush. I’ve no idea why I told you that. My brain feels full of all sorts of weird flotsam at the moment. Can we leave it?”
“God, yes, of course.” John shook himself. “Right. Quin… This time the police retrieved him from the Forest of Dean. He’d built and equipped a fully operational survival shelter using an SAS handbook he’d nicked from Waterstones.” He waited until Michael had recovered from a half-choked burst of laughter. “When they asked him why he’d stolen the book—he’s got plenty of pocket money—he said it was part of the game. He’s not of this bloody earth, Mike.”
“Did he tell
you
why he’d done it?”
“Fat chance. He hates me. We had to stay in a hotel when I took him up for the interviews at Prince William, and he wouldn’t even sit at the same table with me for breakfast.”
“Ouch,” Michael said, pulling a face of wry sympathy. “What pissed him off so much this time?”
“Oh, I dunno. The fact that I exist, maybe. Every time I tell him to do something, he just reminds me I’m not his dad.” Leaning back from the table, John shrugged. “And he’s right; I’m not. Why should he listen?”
“Have you tried asking?”
“What?”
“Asking him, not telling. He’s sixteen and apparently ready to join the paras. He’s not thick.”
“What?
Quin, would you mind staying at your expensive new school for more than a couple of weeks this time
?”
“Start lower. Ask him down here for the weekend.”
John felt his mouth fall open. “Mate, you’ve got a radically different idea of a peaceful few days than I have.”
“Well—maybe not
this
weekend.” Michael paused long enough to let John see the teasing glimmer in his eyes: a brief, veiled promise, reasons why this particular weekend might be best left to the two of them alone. “But sometime. He’d be very welcome, and you know he loves it here.”
Making sure the acceleration in his pulse didn’t reach surface, John shook his head. “He loves
you
. He’d probably move in, follow you back to London, and ask Webb for a job.”
Michael chuckled. “He’d be less bloody trouble than you. Did the academy accept him, then?”
“Yes, on production of fees up front. Look, I take your point. I’ll try requests instead of orders.”
“For that noble intention, you get dessert.”
Michael stretched out a hand for John’s main course plate. John noticed that his palm was grazed, the pad of his thumb scraped and blistered. He’d been too busy looking at his wrists to notice before. He was moving stiffly too. “You all right? You should’ve waited till I got here to finish off that barn wall.”
“Yeah, I probably should. Felt like a week where punishing hard work was the best thing for me, though.”
“Mm.” John held his gaze for a few seconds. His pulse notched up again, feeding hotly to nerves all down his spine. He felt for the first time as if Michael had stopped running from him. The dark eyes were unfathomable as ever but keeping no deliberate secrets. “Tell you what,” he said. “I like my summer pudding well chilled. I’ll wash this lot up, and you can go and have a hot bath.”
He thought he would meet with resistance. But after a moment, Michael gave him an odd little half smile—acceptance? surrender?—and took the dishes through to the kitchen. He set them down and disappeared without another word into the shadows of the corridor that led to the old farm’s bathroom.
John watched him go. He pressed his wineglass gently to his lower lip and considered following him. But he’d meant it about the washing up. Events, if any, needed longer to unfold of their own accord. Like paper flowers in water, he thought irresistibly, though when he closed his eyes, the flowers blazed up and transformed in fire.
Chapter Eight
Michael closed the bathroom door behind him. He sat on the edge of the bath and listened for a moment, wondering if John would follow him.
No, he decided. John was giving him large and conscientious amounts of space, even if that was so much against his natural inclination that the poor sod had arrived here fresh from a stopgap session on the riverbank. Michael appreciated it, though if the bathroom door had clicked and opened now, he would have taken what the hour had to give. He felt different. Maybe he’d worked out his demons on the drystone wall. Maybe the appearance of Piotr in the church had been a good thing, shaking up the deep layers of his memory. He’d never have been able to tell John about his mother until now. Maybe the silt would clear from his mission to Zemelya too.
He heard the clatter of silverware and crockery in the kitchen and turned, smiling, to switch on the hot tap. A good lad, his John. He thought himself wicked, with his voracious trawling of the clubs, his flash cars and unwillingness to sacrifice his carefree youth to play dad to his little brother. But Michael knew that in every way that counted, he was as innocent as day. Incorruptible. Michael, allowed to walk in the aura of that innocence for the last three years, had been happier than he could have imagined.
The ancient hot water tank groaned and rattled but began to produce its usual thunderous stream. Michael put the plug in and ran the cold tap too. He’d parboil himself otherwise. This was the next part of the house that could really use a refit, but he and John had kept putting it off. They wouldn’t soon find a replacement for the deep ceramic tub, which had been built for washing dirty shepherds and was delicious to stretch out in.
Not that Michael could remember the last time he’d done it. He frowned, thoughtfully swirling the water with one hand. He’d got into hurried city habits, he supposed, and even here, with time on his hands, had stuck with the efficient but soulless electric shower unit. Stupid, really. The last few nights, grazed and aching, he could really have used a deep hot bath.
He’d make up for it now. The water was halfway up the sides of the tub and steaming temptingly. Did he have any bath salts? Getting up, he glanced in the cabinet, but he hadn’t used the Radox in so long that it had solidified to a brick inside its box. There was, however, a gleaming bottle of John’s ridiculously expensive bath foam, in the same range as his aftershave. Michael was pretty sure he wouldn’t mind. Uncapping the bottle and pouring a little in, he smiled at the exactitude with which the scent conjured the man. Michael teased the crap out of him for his addiction to such things—a ruthless little Merseyside scrapper, standing for ages in the perfume hall at Liberty’s trying to decide between the cologne and the aftershave—but he had to admit that it was very nice, and quite unmistakably
him.
To bathe in his scent would be pleasant. Michael switched off the taps and pulled his jumper over his head. Immediately the godawful, nightmarish bruising and cuts round his wrists leaped out at him, but he pushed them aside. He didn’t know what that had been, but surely it was gone now. If John was still willing to let him anywhere near him, Michael would show him how it could really be, in his arms, in his bed—as hot and sweet as sinking into water. He peeled off the rest of his clothes and cautiously lowered himself into the fragrant bath. He could salvage things still. It would be fine.
He stretched out. The water eased gravity’s grip off him, undoing the knots in his muscles. He was more tired than he’d thought. He’d better be careful not to fall asleep in here. Drifting thoughts tugged at his mind. He wished he could have been the sun or the wind-stirred trees down at the riverbank, to look down on John, laid out and pleasuring himself there. What the hell had he been thinking, telling him he couldn’t let another man fuck him? Right now Michael couldn’t think of anything better than surrender, a slow luxurious opening to John’s fingers and his big urgent cock.
He drew a shivery breath. All these things were much more likely to happen, weren’t they, if he was clean and didn’t smell of mortar dust and sweat. His hair was sticky. Sliding down in the bath, he submerged.
Water flooded his sinuses. For a second it was only a nuisance. He should’ve held his nose.
He should close his eyes. But he couldn’t. They had snapped wide open. Through burning pain he stared straight up and into neon glare. He couldn’t move.
Drowning.
A huge spasm seized him. He heaved upright, a howl ripping out of his lungs. He could hear water all around him, splashing, churning, but all he could feel was the cold choking cupful—all it took—that had entered his mouth and his nose. He lurched against his bonds and found they weren’t there. Terror blazed through him. In the church, in the candlelit underground church, Lukas Oriel had made him believe he was tied when he wasn’t. Now his tormentors didn’t even have to strap him down.