“Well…” John shoved cautiously up onto his elbows. His expression was apprehensive, but a faint smile was lighting it—achingly familiar to Michael, full of mischief and affection. “Some of it was…unexpected. And you are—oh, so much kinkier than I’d have given you credit for in a million years, but…it wasn’t all bad. As you must have been able to tell.”
Involuntarily Michael flashed back to the feel of John hitting climax in his arms. Christ, he’d hardly noticed at the time, his own cock like a spear in pursuit of its demands. How could he have been so lost—blind and deaf to the best part of it? “I made you come,” he said softly, almost in a tone of confession.
“Twice. In the space of about two minutes, which is some kind of land speed record. Mikey. Look… I know it got out of control, and somebody said
never again
, but we can deal with it. If you want to. Let me see your wrists.”
Michael had no choice. He could hardly stick them behind his back like an unwilling child. He bore John’s inspection as best he could, feeling a painful blush invading his neck and his face. “You don’t understand,” he said hoarsely. “Sometimes it’s the only way for me.”
“Sometimes? Or always?”
Not with a woman
. Michael couldn’t say it. He hadn’t hidden his occasional flings from John, but the thought of throwing them into his tired, pale face now was repellent to him. Being with a woman, even the redoubtable Diane, meant nothing. The scratching of an itch. And last night, fuckup though it had been, had meant the world. John was caressing his wrists, frowning over the wounds as if they had been legitimate, acquired in the line of duty. “I don’t know. Maybe. That’s too screwed up, John.”
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat. If pain’s what it takes, I mean.” He leaned on one elbow and gave Michael a look of kindly penetration. “Doesn’t have to end in knives and bloodshed. And”—his thumb gently skimmed the old marks—“it sure as hell shouldn’t leave scars.”
“Oh, I didn’t get those doing that. I got them—” He crashed to a halt, the last word dying in his throat. He knew, didn’t he? The memory had been there. Now there was only a cold weight, as if someone had put a stone in its place.
Fear swept through him. He felt sick. John was watching him, brow creased in concern, and Michael could read him like a book, ready to offer him any damn thing he wanted. To wash the darkness off all his desires. But John didn’t know the half of it. Michael didn’t know himself. God alone knew what he’d done in his memory’s gaps. What he recalled was bad enough.
“Mike? Where’d you get them?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He tried for a smile and began to get up, but John’s hand closed on his shoulder. His palm was starfish cool, soothing to fretted skin. “Don’t. We’d better go.”
“Was it while you were with MI5?”
He froze. John never asked him. Michael had made it clear during the first days of their partnership that MI5 was a no-go zone for small talk or even the large kind they’d soon started to enjoy over a pint in the evening, and John had left well alone. It wouldn’t have mattered now, except that everything bad in Michael’s life—the memory gaps, the need to be hurt, the sense of his own soiled worthlessness—dated from his time in MI5.
No. From his time in Zemelya. And, since setting eyes on the ashkeloi the day before, Zemelya had rushed back into the world all around him, the world he’d struggled so hard to make safe. The buildings beyond his bedroom window would turn into impenetrable ranks of pine if he didn’t concentrate. He would smell resin and frost… “John,” he said urgently, easing out from under the restraining hand. “We’re due on shift. If you’re okay…”
“Yeah, I’m okay.” John scrambled off the bed. Shadows of pain were beginning to cloud the bright compassion in his eyes. He tugged his T-shirt down and stood in front of Michael. “Feel like I got fucked by some big ex-secret service bloke, but I must just be imagining that.”
Michael swallowed. When he found a voice, it didn’t sound like his own. “You wanted us to have sex. That’s what sex with me is gonna be like.” Anger flickered in John’s eyes. It was better than hurt, but still Michael couldn’t hold his gaze. He turned away and pulled a fresh shirt from his wardrobe. “You might want to think better of it. Christ, we haven’t even got time for a shower. You bring your gun back from the hospital last night?”
“What do you think?”
“Then grab it and let’s go.”
* * *
An hour later they were on the steps outside HQ, looking at one another in the light of a brilliant May morning. Folding his arms, leaning on the railing, John asked cautiously, “D’you think we screwed up?”
“I don’t think so. He seemed to be in a good mood. If I seem unsure, it’s just that it’s the first time I’ve seen it.”
“I’ve never known him to offer us leave before.”
“I can understand it for you. You should probably be on sick leave anyway.”
“Mikey, you look worse than I do.”
Michael blinked. The old rough trace of tenderness was back in his partner’s voice, and how he had deserved it he couldn’t imagine. Their silent drive in had been a torture. Webb had summoned them at once on their arrival, and they’d gone into his office shoulder to shoulder as always, and a million miles apart. “Ta,” he said. “Okay, maybe we both need some time off.”
“Yeah. We had the Vauxhall case before this one, and that was a ballbreaker. Still, I thought he’d be too pissed off about his witness to offer us anything but paperwork.”
“That guy couldn’t have given us much anyway. He was bit-part.”
“In whose play? I know you don’t want to talk about him, but…”
“No. It’s okay.” Michael had done some fast thinking in Webb’s office. The witness had died almost instantly, the old man had informed them brusquely. The explosives he was carrying were duds. The whole thing was a mystery, a waste of Last Line’s valuable resources. Michael had drawn a deep breath as Webb had closed up the file. With Piotr gone, what did it matter that Michael’s memories of him didn’t match up? If Webb wasn’t inclined to pursue it, the matter could drop into darkness, and Michael could give John a half-truth to settle his fears too. “I don’t mean to be a clam about MI5. I did a mission to northern Russia—to Zemelya Province, where my mother came from. You were right about the language. That guy in the church was an insurgent I was meant to be tracking. I thought he was dead, so seeing him again was a shock. That was all.”
John shrugged. When was the last time that Michael had tried to slide a fiction past him? Usually he didn’t bother. The look in those green eyes would tell him exactly how far he was getting. “Okay,” he said. “Look, I don’t care, mate—long as you’re all right.”
A silence fell. They stood facing one another on the steps. In a way it felt so ordinary—to be here within arm’s reach of one another, catching a breath of air between tasks—and in another way, Michael knew, it was fucking outrageous. He might be able to drop Piotr back into oblivion, but he couldn’t drop John there. He had to say something that would acknowledge the night they’d just spent. “I’m fine,” he began, then shoved a foot toward his partner in an echo of their old camaraderie. “But I am tired. I might head down to Glastonbury, if the old sod’s really giving us this week off. Do you fancy a few days on the farm?”
John snorted faintly. “You just want a brickie.”
“Well, where would I find a better one?” Michael smiled. John had put in so much work with him over the years on the derelict farmhouse Michael’s grandfather had left him, together with its six acres of rich green Somerset land, that the place should belong to him as much as to Michael. So much so that Michael had often thought about putting it into both their names, a task he had somehow never got around to. Given their sudden-death line of trade, the omission had been stupid. “Come on, Griff. Let’s just go and kick back for a bit. I feel like we…walked into some kind of bloody explosion last night. Maybe we can—”
John’s phone buzzed. For a long moment, he didn’t move to answer. His gaze was locked seriously to Michael’s. Then he glanced down at the screen. “Oh shit. I have to take this.”
“Who is it?”
“Quin’s bloody school again. I swear…”
He turned away and jogged down the rest of the steps to the pavement. Michael watched him go. How easy it was to push a whole world off its axis. Only yesterday, John would have stayed within earshot, would have put his hand across the phone’s pickup and mouthed obscenities at Michael while the conversation went on.
He went to lean on the roof of the Jag. Michael had driven it carefully back from the hospital for him, minding its tricky gears. After a minute or so, he straightened up, running a hand through his hair. All his movements, Michael saw, were slower than usual, tired and stiff. He tucked the phone back into his pocket.
“Everything all right?”
John tried for a grin and managed the ghost of one. “No. Little fucker’s in trouble again. I’ve got to go and sort it out.”
“I’ll come with you if you—”
“Nn-nn. Time I learned to kick his arse myself. I’ll come down to Glasto in a couple of days, if that’s okay. I…” The smile amped up, became genuine, if laced with regret and irony. “I don’t think a bit of time apart will do us any harm at the moment, will it? I’ll see you soon.”
Chapter Seven
The river Teal was sparkling seductively in the hot May sun. John pulled the XKR into the familiar lay-by and switched the engine off. For a moment he just sat, leaning his head back, grateful for the leaf-stirred silence. Dealing with Quin had been a three-day job this time, and a joyless one: meetings with staff and advisers at one school, a dreadful hostile overnight with the brat in a hotel near the next one, then a round of interviews during which he had persuaded more staff and advisers that Quin’s genius, and a full year’s fees paid in advance, more than made up for the fact that the genius was disturbed, destructive, and an incorrigible runaway.
John rubbed a hand over his eyes. He knew he wasn’t doing the right thing by his brother, but unless he could turn back the clock and stop the lorry that had broadsided his parents into oblivion during a run to the local supermarket, he didn’t know what else to do. He hadn’t even been in England at the time. The news had hauled him back from a stint with on a Merchant Navy ship in the Gulf of Aden. He had landed at Harwich an unskilled, unwilling guardian to a bereaved thirteen-year-old, and things had gone downhill from there.
The river looked tempting. John clambered out of the car, tugging at his sweat-dampened shirt. He could see Michael’s house high on the hillside—or the promise of a house that was beginning to rise from the masonry scattered around it. No car was parked outside, and the garden was empty. For a moment he wondered if Michael hadn’t come down after all, then remembered it was Thursday. He shook his head, smiling. On holiday or not, Mike never missed his drill with the local volunteer fire brigade when he was in Somerset. He would be out, tearing around the country lanes in a seven-ton truck, causing—John always told him—far more danger to life and limb than he and his colleagues could ever hope to avert. John had met him head-to-head on a curve once or twice, poised behind the wheel, face a pure mask of concentration, all the lovely musculature of his arms exposed in his uniform tee.
Damn. John had set himself carefully not to think about Michael in any sexual context at all. Easy enough until now, despite their recent clash. The last three days had been among the least arousing of John’s life. Here, though, in the lazy sunshine, lush green meadows rolling and dreaming all around…
He locked the car and shinned over the roadside fence. The water was calling to him strongly. No matter how bad he felt, a dip would usually help fix him up, even if it was only half an hour in the training pool at HQ. The Teal curved round Mike’s land in a sheltering half circle here, an embracing arm. The banks were deserted and tree lined. He wouldn’t frighten anyone. He made his way through waist-high goldenrod to the water’s edge. Late willow-fluff or early dandelion was floating on the surface. John knew that the leisurely motion concealed a strong, deep current, and having skinned out of his shirt, jeans, and boxers, he went in cautiously, gasping at the cold.
He let the current carry him downriver for almost half a mile, then turned, set his muscle against the great brown-gold liquid one surrounding him, and began to swim for all he was worth. He was more keenly aware of his strength in the water than anywhere else. It was one of the few areas in which he could outstrip Mike when it came to a physical contest between them. Patiently, arms and legs tingling then slowly numbing out, he worked back upstream to his starting point, turned, and repeated the exercise.
He found his depth and stood, waist high, water sheeting off his shoulders. He squeezed his hair back from his brow. He was trembling slightly with exhaustion, and that was good. He had wanted to take the edge off before seeing Michael again. If he closed his eyes, he was back in Michael’s kitchen—in his bedroom, caught up again in everything that had gone so shatteringly wrong and right on his table and then in his bed. In a red-hot fuck without a trace of tenderness—about the last thing John would ever have predicted from his partner, unless it was the bondage, pain, and blood.
Tiredly he sank down on the water-rippled sand. It was deliciously warm. His limbs still held the river’s chill, and he stretched out on his back, idly drying himself with the bunched fabric of his shirt. A faint moan of pleasure escaped him, audible only to the drifting willows and the birds. His bruises had healed with weird rapidity. He was almost all better, no aches or pains left to distract him from dangerous thoughts. Nothing but the cold in his marrow, and that was melting fast. He had to accept that he and Mike might have taken their swing at passion and failed.
So John needed to stop replaying the tape. Instead he turned his mind to his own warm skin. Letting go of his shirt, he idly ran a hand down his chest. His palm brushed a nipple, which promptly tightened, raising a corresponding twitch near his groin. “Oh fuck,” he whispered to the cloud-chased sky. He was horny as hell. He couldn’t stop remembering.