by Fiona Walker
Kizzy smiled in amazement, her green eyes brimming with gratitude. She lingered for a moment in the arched door. ‘I haven’t had a chance to apologise for what happened with my mother. She was quite mortified afterwards. She’s going to write to you.’
‘Tell her she really doesn’t have to,’ Legs said hastily, not wanting to receive another of Liz Delamere’s creative letters. ‘All is forgiven. Speak soon. And don’t let Conrad bully you into doing anything you don’t feel comfortable with.’
She waved Kizzy away, watching her pick her way back down the path and cross the stable-yard before stepping into a very shiny little red hire car and driving away. Only then did Legs feel safe to retreat back into the wizard’s lair.
She wandered upstairs again, looking around at the screens. They were all lined with writing, each showing a different page of a Word document. She picked out the words Ptolemy and Purple before she heard a door slam below her and turned to watch Byrne bounding up the creaking wooden treads, battered despatch case under one arm. ‘You just saved my life. Thank you.’
‘Hardly on the scale of climbing up a cliff or pulling me up on a horse.’
‘I’m researching damsels in distress.’ He strode into the room. ‘You know what they say about authors; nothing is ever wasted. You haven’t been snooping, have you?’
‘Of course not.’ She blushed, realising that she’d been about to indulge in exactly what she’d told off Kizzy for doing.
She watched him nervously, this caddish squire with his wild black hair and determined manner, striding between his computer screens. Here was Gordon Lapis in his tower, a master of description and deception; Jago Byrne at home, a horseman and a gambler, Ptolemy Finch in his attic observatory, reading the stars before flying off to save the world. He was a mass of contradictions, yet seeing him here in context made them all add up at last.
He sat down in his chair and started unzipping his long leather riding boots. ‘No matter how many times I tell you to steer clear of me, you keep turning up.’ He glanced up through furrowed brows, fierce eyes sparkling. There was a smile playing on his lips.
She found she couldn’t answer, anger, love and compassion fusing her vocal chords closed. He seemed so sure of himself suddenly, whereas mortification and disappointment filled her with self-doubt.
The screens flickered around them still. Unable to stop her eyes being drawn to them, Legs read a few more lines on one, recognising a scene from the closing chapters of Raven’s Curse, not long before she’d been forced to stop reading.
Swinging a hinged table across in front of him, Byrne pressed a couple of buttons on the keyboard there and the white screens were all simultaneously wiped to be replaced by a 3D screensaver of tropical fish around a coral reef picked out in extraordinary lifelike detail, so that suddenly it felt as though they were in a submarine.
‘Tell me you’ll stay a while?’ he asked, casting his boots aside.
‘You offered me a cup of tea, remember,’ she muttered edgily, watching a clownfish dart from one screen to another. She couldn’t look at him now, the new tattoo burning shamefully on her neck. She was damned if she was going to embarrass herself any more than she already had by throwing herself at his newly liberated feet in their bright red socks.
On cue, Fink the basset waddled breathlessly upstairs carrying a pair of slippers which he placed at his master’s toes before turning back to welcome her, tail swaying, pressing his muzzle between her ankles.
Byrne looked abashed as he stepped into the soft leather mules. ‘Fink’s an old-fashioned hound. I’ll put the kettle on to boil.’ To her surprise, he then simply pressed a couple more computer keys and one of the screens flashed up with a message announcing the kettle on before returning to the reef once more. He really was the Wizard of Oz, Legs realised, straightening up from patting Fink.
‘Don’t you have a fireside one of these?’ She pointed at the fishy landscape. ‘We could toast crumpets.’
With a few more keystrokes they were surrounded by flaming logs.
‘I was only joking.’ She swallowed, circling the room, looking at each fireplace in turn.
He swung around in the chair, marking her progress. She felt like a performing pony in a big top watched by the circus ringmaster.
‘You have to be in control, don’t you?’ she asked, getting more wound up again with every circuit, the virtual flames surrounding her finally igniting her incandescent anger.
He shrugged, saying nothing, tilting his head as he watched her.
‘You’re basically just a big geek, aren’t you Byrne?’
‘If you say so.’
‘Incredibly clever, granted, but a control freak geek nonetheless. You have no idea how to handle women at all.’
‘Is that a fact?’
‘I think you’re scared of us.’ She started to walk faster.
‘I’m more frightened for my monitors right now. I think you should change direction. You’ll get dizzy,’
‘I feel so sorry for Zina.’
‘Why?’ he laughed softly. ‘She’s happy. I don’t ask her to clean in here, if that’s what bothers you.’
She couldn’t believe his arrogance. ‘You entertain girls you meet on the internet up here all the time. That’s so disgusting!’
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘Your own father told me.’
‘Dad thinks the internet is the Devil’s brothel. He won’t even have a computer in the house, which drives Zina mad because she’s desperate to get on Mumsnet.’
Again, his arrogance took her breath away, and she panted to a halt. ‘She doesn’t even know you’re Gordon Lapis, does she?’
‘No woman knows but you, Allegra.’
‘Why me?’ She swung around to face him. ‘Why confide in me?’
He was looking less self-assured now, dark brows furrowed low. ‘I didn’t confide. You guessed.’
‘Come on, all the clues were there!’
‘Only to you.’ His voice was as soft as hers was shrill and accusing. ‘Nobody here is interested. Dad’s the only one who knows and he doesn’t even read the books. He only cares about things with four legs, which technically includes his wife right now.’
‘Zina reads the books.’
‘She tries, but she only understands about one word in three; she learned all her English from watching CSI, so she thinks soothsayers and sorcerers are forensic detectives.’
‘God you’re heartless!’
He stood up smoothly and walked towards her, those furnace eyes as bright as the screensavers around them, reflecting the dancing flames. ‘You are right about me, Allegra. Totally right. I am supremely selfish and I am a geek. I am Ptolemy, an immortal boy who cannot grow old, playing with my wizardry and plagued by my childish hang-ups. I am quite hopeless with women. My father brought me up to be highly suspicious of love.’
‘And now your grime poo is spreading far and wide to make up for it?’
He turned away, hands in his hair, laughing bitterly. ‘Perhaps you’re right to call it that. It’s like shitting on somebody from a great height.’
‘How can you say that if you’ve never tried trusting a woman?’ Legs exclaimed. ‘Even your wife doesn’t know who you really are.’
‘I’m not married.’
‘And you treat her—’ she stopped herself mid-sentence, cocking her head, eyes darting left then right. ‘What about Zina?’
‘She’s my stepmother.’
She gaped at him disbelievingly as he turned to look at her over his shoulder, a slow smile curling the corners of his mouth. ‘You thought she was my wife?’
Legs felt her face flaming again, appalled at her misjudgement. ‘But she’s our age.’
He grimaced. ‘Dad has a lot of hang-ups about that, so best not mention it. He wouldn’t believe she loved him for a long time. She came through the agency as a live-in carer a couple of years back – one of the benefits of my income is that I could get him a dec
ent housekeeper. My Nan and her husband have lived in a bungalow beyond the orchard for years; they prefer their independence. Dad and Zina have the house to themselves now. She’s restored his faith in love.’
She felt her face redden yet more. Then, like a porthole bursting open, the relief came flooding in, whooshing around her, bubbling and swirling and lifting her towards the beamed ceiling as grateful laughter caught in her her throat and tears touched her eyes. He wasn’t married. He was a single man; one who she had just called a geek, disgusting and a control freak and accused of being frightened of women, she realised uneasily. The tide of relief quickly turned into a cold sweat of contrition.
‘And you?’ she managed to splutter.
He deliberately misread the question. ‘I eat with them often, but mostly I’m working in here or away travelling. I keep meaning to buy a place of my own, but then I get writing and get too busy. I just write, Legs. That’s what I do. I’m a geek – you said it. I write day and night sometimes. It’s the world I most want to live in.’
‘Along with the rest of us,’ she agreed tearfully. ‘Your world is magic to millions.’
‘Yeah.’ He ran a hand through his hair again, turning away to look at the flickering fires. ‘Trouble is I’m as scared of fame as I am of love. Scared of everything, me.’
‘You’re one of the bravest men I’ve ever met,’ Legs protested, remembering him running into the cellars the night they thought a murder had taken place at Farcombe, drawing the gunfire to himself when Hector was taking pot-shots at Spywood and finally climbing up the cliff-face at Eascombe Cove to rescue her.
He shook his head. ‘I like my world just as it is. I write, run and ride – my three Rs. I’m just a typical Oirish farm boy.’ He thickened his accent. ‘Sometimes I climb mountains. I have friends I trust, but they can be forgiven for not trusting me when I keep so many secrets. I love my family. Conrad’s like a portal to another world. He’s the real sorcerer, turning my words into more cash than I know what to do with. I hate him sometimes, but what he does for me pays for the repairs here, so he’s OK.’ He looked around at the fires burning on the screens and gave his soft laugh. ‘I just wish I had his literary knowledge.’ He walked to his despatch case and pulled out a pile of paperbacks along with his laptop. ‘Can you believe I’ve never read Joyce until now?’ He held them up. ‘That’s a crying shame for an Irishman to admit.’
‘His work’s best appreciated when one’s lived and loved a little, I think,’ Legs bit her lip, heart starting to roar with hope. ‘Now’s probably the perfect time in your life to start.’
He smiled, looking down at the covers. ‘When I got to Dublin airport, I realised I hadn’t got anything for Nan – she wouldn’t forgive me if I came back from a trip without a gift. So I found some god-awful gift shop, and there, on a tea towel, was the first line of the letter Francis wrote you.’
‘They weren’t his words,’ she breathed. ‘They didn’t come from his soul. He arranged them like a bouquet of florist’s flowers to win me over, but my heart was already lost to a whole new garden I’d found growing wild all around me. I love you.’
Moving slowly up to her face, his eyes found hers, and blinked in wonder. ‘Christ, I’m so fucking naive. You had to have it tattooed on your skin to spell it out to me.’ He looked away, raking his hands through his hair. ‘The farm boy geek who has no idea how to handle women. Can you sue the tattooist?’
She shook her head, laughter and tears catching together in her throat. ‘I think you’re the most incredible man I have ever met, the brightest, the bravest and definitely the sexiest.’
‘You do?’ He looked at her again, eyebrows curling up in genuine amazement.
‘I can’t believe you’re for real. You’re no typical Oirish farm boy. Or geek.’ She bit her lip, shame-faced.
He stepped towards her almost cautiously, thrusting out his hands. ‘Feel there.’
She reached out for them, amazed at their warmth.
‘Those calluses are from typing, these from riding. These cuts here are from climbing up a rock a couple of days ago helping some eejit girl who was hanging off a cliff in my favourite pants; I want those back, by the way.’
Laughing, she touched the bumps and grazes with her fingertips, and fought an urge to sink her lips to those honest, hardworking hands. She wanted to kiss every finger, and then his strong sinewy forearms, his wide shoulders and strong neck and most of all his mouth, eagerly rediscovering that kiss which she already knew had spoiled her from enjoying the kiss of other men for a lifetime.
But his lips were moving too much to kiss, words tumbling from them like tennis balls fired from a rally machine, holding her back from approaching the net.
‘I thought that when you read that letter, you’d go straight back to Francis,’ he said, his mouth tantalisingly close to hers, ‘I was so angry at myself for screwing it up for you two, banging on about revenge and love meaning nothing, dragging you down into my darkness. That was all that seemed to matter at first. Then suddenly you were all that seemed to matter, but I’d already made your life hell by then, costing you your job, putting you in danger, questioning your heart. Even Liz Delamere’s mad stunt was my fault for passing on her manuscript when I knew she was half crackpot, half genius. I’d misjudged everything, so it seemed only right to make amends after being proven wrong on all counts.’
His lips were frustratingly close. Legs couldn’t take her eyes from them.
‘Then I saw the light on a tea towel.’ His voice was a seductive whisper.
She burst into laughter, blowing the kiss away. She wanted to catch hold of it and drag it back, but he was talking again, the tennis balls rapid-firing at faster, trickier angles now.
‘I might not be as well read as Francis, but I do understand what he’s feeling. A year ago, I thought my heart was broken, too. I’d have plaguarised any text going to have her back – the Bible, War and Peace or Bridget Jones’s Diary. Whatever it took.’
Legs was broadsided by jealousy as she recalled the girlfriend who’d told him she loved him before running off. And hadn’t Brooke talked earlier about champagne picnics and twisted ankles? It conjured instant images of an Anne Hathaway beauty tripping prettily through the meadows, breaking fragile bones, crockery and hearts.
‘She went off with your best friend,’ she remembered, the prospect of a kiss blowing further away by the second. ‘They’re expecting a baby in Cork.’
‘The cork’s popped,’ his brows curled thoughtfully. ‘I got a text yesterday.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Yesterday I was too wretchedly in love to care. Lost-forever love. I’d moved on to a whole new level of misery. That news barely salted the wound.’
‘And today?’
The kissable mouth laughed, showing lots of tasteable red tongue and lickable white teeth; the dark eyes blazed brighter than ever. ‘Still in love. Totally in love. Different love. Better love. Shout out loud in love. I just want to thank them for finding each other so that I could find this love. I want to tell Francis to hang on in there and wait for this sort of “bloody marvellous love”.’ He adopted an upper class drawl. Then he took her face in his hands and drew her lips to his. ‘I want to tell the world I’m in love. I AM IN LOVE! The Oirish farm boy geek is in love with Allegra North.’
Faint with happiness, Legs shut her eyes tightly in giddy anticipation and puckered up. The kiss was back on course.
As his lips closed over hers, the shock of energy between them rocked them onto their heels. They pulled apart.
Byrne’s eyes melted into hers. ‘Wow.’
‘Wow,’ she whispered back.
His fingers slid along hers and gripped her hand tight, steering her towards the stairs leading upwards.
As she tripped along behind Legs was aware that this might all be part of an elaborate seduction enacted many times on internet lovers. But to her shame, she didn’t much care. She’d follow him to the ends of the Earth fo
r another kiss right now. His trust was an aphrodisiac like no other. She was knock-kneed with lust.
On the level above the cave of computer screens was a top floor that seemed to have walls entirely made of glass, looking across miles of green hills. Almost blinded by light after the darkness below, Legs’ eyes watered as she tried to take it in.
‘I wake up to this every day,’ Byrne led her to the window. ‘It’s hard to beat.’
‘You live in heaven,’ she laughed, eyes adjusting as she realised she was looking back towards the quarry, its vast, yawning chasm just a stony scar from this distance.
‘The sea at Farcombe comes a close second, but I just love this.’ He turned to watch her expression as she looked out across the green miles. ‘What man needs any other castle?’
Legs thought about her dingy basement squeezed in amid the packed urban cubism of London and couldn’t argue, although looking around the glass walls she couldn’t help wondering where the loo was.
‘The raven likes his own nest,’ she whispered, then wished she hadn’t because saying it made her think of the tattoo on his beautiful, wide breastbone, just above that tightly muscled torso and just beneath the dusty T-shirt he was wearing right now, which was close enough for her to reach out and pull off over his head in a heartbeat.
There was a huge, low bed in the middle of the room, covered with rumpled Egyptian linen. Its presence made her acutely aware of Byrne watching her in his dusty rip-offable T-shirt, and of her knocking knees keeping time with her castanet heart. She was so charged up with nervous sexual energy that she could no longer stand still for fear of sounding like a percussion section.