Chapter Nineteen
Chapter
Nineteen
My feet mobilize, carrying me down the rest of the stairs and along the cold-floored hall toward the entrance.
“Ghostbuster!” someone shouts. “Open the damn door.”
Fletch.
Oh God! Relief floods through my veins, a gut reaction to the realization that I’m not about to be murdered, or worse.
“Bittersweet, can you hear me in there?” Fletch shouts, banging again, and I feel the vibrations as I lay my hand flat against the solid, smooth door.
“Stop banging, you’ll wake the dead,” I say loudly, and silence suddenly reigns. I imagine him waiting on the other side of the door while I consider whether or not to open it. I think we both know that I’m probably going to, but I really am trying to be a sensible person.
“What do you want?” I dillydally, half shouting because the door is so thick.
“Not to sleep on the stone steps like your bloody dog?” He’s quieter when he bangs again, softer and muffled. I’m pretty sure he’s bumping his forehead on the door out of frustration. “I’m cold, Ghostbuster.”
There’s something in the tone of his voice that has me reaching for the unwieldy key and fitting it into the lock. He must be able to hear me grappling with it, because he waits silently until I manage to get the damn thing to turn, throw the bolts, and slowly swing the door wide.
“They put me back on the job,” he says, and then his eyes rove over me, taking in Britannia’s nightgown. “Fuck. You look like a Victorian waif.”
It’s quite a charming description, until his eyes settle on my boosted cleavage and he adds, “A waif with a really great ra—”
“Could you not keep more conventional working hours?” I say, pointedly cutting him off.
“I’m not a conventional sort of guy.” He leans against the doorframe and sighs. “Let me in? Please?”
I reason with myself that I really didn’t care for being alone here all that much, and on that basis, I step aside and let him pass.
I’m not saying this princess needs her knight, but this ghost buster will sleep a tiny bit easier for knowing she’s not the only living soul in this hulking great castle tonight.
I tussle with the bolts and keys for a minute or two, and when I follow him through into the reception hall I find him slumped into one of the fireside chairs with his head resting against the flared side wing. His eyes are closed, and for a second he looks vulnerable and as worn out as I am.
“Drink?” I say, motioning toward the decanters when he opens his eyes.
He seems to wrestle with the decision for a few silent moments, and then eventually he nods, resigned.
I could be snarky and tell him to get himself one then, but I don’t.
I pour him a decent measure and hand him the cut-glass tumbler.
He accepts it with the briefest smile that doesn’t get anywhere close to reaching his eyes; he looks off-kilter somehow.
“You okay?”
He cups his glass between his hands and leans forward with his elbows on his knees. He doesn’t answer me straightaway; his eyes are nailed on the deep bronze brandy swirling in his glass.
“I lied to you.”
I’m not sure what he means, so I perch in front of him on the heavy square coffee table, smoothing the crisp cotton nightgown over my kneecaps.
I say coffee table; it’s big enough to hold about ten thousand cups of coffee, but everything is scaled up when you live in a castle.
Only the humans stay true to size. We’re like dolls in one of those fancy dollhouses where you can open the front and peep inside.
“I lied to you awhile back too,” I say, casting around for something to lighten the mood. “I said I had a dog and then I had to go and get one before you found out I was lying.”
“My mother isn’t dead.” He knocks back a good half of his brandy and then shudders as it goes down. “Not yet, anyway.”
I’m so out of my depth here that I’m drowning. “Is she ill?”
His laugh is harsh and glass brittle.
“Nothing that another bottle won’t cure. I grew up watching her have whiskey for breakfast, vodka for lunch, and tequila for dinner. She’s in the hospital again and still the only thing she wanted from me was to switch the mineral water in her bottle for gin.”
I realize now why he was called away so suddenly. “Is that where you’ve been today?”
“Her neighbors found her face down on the front lawn in her underwear. They called an ambulance when they couldn’t rouse her.”
Jesus. “Does she live on her own?”
His bleak eyes meet mine. “She does lately. Yet another reason for her to hate me. She has quite the list.”
That explains why he’s rented that grotty flat on Chapelwick High Street then.
For all my oddness, I’ve lived a pretty regular, Pollyanna lifestyle thanks to the two strong, positive women who’ve raised me.
I know I joke about my gran and her love of champagne, but it’s a world away from the life Fletch must have endured.
She’s a lightweight, someone who drinks a couple of glasses of champagne a day because it makes her feel like a sophisticated French movie star and because it adds to her fanciful image.
Beneath it all there’s a woman in her eighties who eats only the good stuff, can out-yoga most thirty-year-olds, and has a sharp wit and a huge, warm heart that has held her family together through the decades.
I slide down onto my knees and cover Fletch’s hands with mine around his glass.
“Do you have any brothers or sisters to share the load?”
He shakes his head, his eyes still hidden from me as he studies his brandy.
“And your dad?”
“She’s always been proud of the father-unknown status on my birth certificate.” He makes a derisory sound low in his chest.
“So it was just you and your mum growing up, huh?” I murmur.
I can almost see the weight of misplaced guilt pressing down on his shoulders, years of not measuring up, and my hands reach out instinctively to soothe him. I hold his warm jaw, stroke my fingers over his hair, smooth and dark in the low-lit room.
He empties what’s left of his brandy into his mouth like medicine and then places his glass on the table beside me.
“Would you do something for me, Melody?” he whispers, low and forlorn. At this moment, there isn’t much I’d refuse him.
“Let me just hold you for a while?”
It’s such a heart-achingly simple request, but wildly complicated too, because this isn’t the Fletcher Gunn I know and understand.
This man is different. This man needs comfort to help salve the hurt of his hellish day.
He’s asking for a tiny sticking plaster on a lifetime of careless paper cuts inflicted by the hands of his alcoholic mother.
I can’t imagine his childhood. I don’t even want to, so I crawl into his lap and curl myself into the warmth of his body, tucking my knees up and wrapping my arms around his shoulders.
He gathers me in, cradles me, presses his face into my neck and breathes me in deep, as if he’s inhaling me into his veins.
God knows what this is. It isn’t a sex thing, exactly, although it’s profoundly, deeply sexy to feel this needed.
He’s holding on to me tightly, fiercely, the way you might hug someone if they were leaving to live on the other side of the world tomorrow.
His defenses are on the floor and he’s just lifted me over them onto his side because he’s lonely and desolate and he needs someone, he needs me, to make him feel something other than shitty for a while.
I couldn’t swear to it, but when he mouths my neck slowly, I think his cheeks are damp.
I can’t bear it that he’s so fucked up. It rebalances the scales in a way that puts me at a disadvantage, because that chip on his shoulder is all part of the Teflon wall he’s built around himself so no one gets close enough to hurt him.
I drag a soft woolen throw from the back of the chair and settle it over us. Fletch helps me, tucking us in, his mouth moving against my hair as he shifts beneath me to get comfortable.
I can hear his heartbeat in my ear, steady and strong, soothing in the same way a train going over the tracks sounds if you close your eyes and let yourself nod.
He’s warm too, so very, very warm, kind of how it is when you step off the plane somewhere sunny and the heat envelops you and makes you feel like taking off all your clothes and ordering a cold beer and staying there for the foreseeable.
I’m perfectly still, aside from my fingers stroking the back of his neck and he is the same, aside from his thumb rubbing slowly over my cheek as he cups my face.
I suddenly realize I’m absolutely bone tired and peaceful, encapsulated in a place far from here, a place where there’s a population of two. Fletch and me.
“Best ten minutes of the entire damn day,” he says, sliding his thumb over my mouth. I kiss it without thought, then catch his hand in mine and press my lips against his palm. His fingertips rest warm against my face and then move into my hair as he tilts my chin back to touch his lips to mine.
It’s the single most sorrowful, sensual kiss of my life.
His lips are soft and he barely moves. It’s a slow, intense coming together, a sigh into my mouth, both of us giving, neither of us taking.
It’s powerful in a way I never knew a kiss could be.
I’m spellbound, and all of the things that normally keep us mentally miles apart melt like snowflakes in Las Vegas.
I don’t have a name for this, or a handy shorthand way to describe what happens sometimes between Fletch and me.
All I know is that here feels like the only place either of us should be tonight, and that this kiss is more than just his mouth and mine. It’s kiss nirvana.