“Glenn, this is good!” Archie burst out before he even paused to say, “How’re you doing, Izzy?”
“Damn good,” Dougie agreed with such emphasis that Glenn understood he’d only just managed to get his language under control for the sake of the kid.
“What is it?” Izzy asked.
“Glenn’s thing for the game,” Dougie replied, as if she’d know what that meant.
“What thing? What game?”
And so Dougie told her, and she looked at Glenn as if she were seriously impressed.
“Can I hear it?” she asked.
And he couldn’t say no, although his stomach was churning like a kid’s at an exam. There was so much of him in these pieces, he couldn’t bear if she hated it.
Well, even if she did, it could be a style-preference thing. He’d written it for a computer game. Not a symphony concert. He set her up with earphones and walked away to change the height of the drum stool for Jack and show him again how to hold the sticks for maximum effect and safety. Rather than watch Izzy, at first, he just hung around Jack at a safe distance, nodding approval and giving the odd word of advice.
Dougie came over and said quietly, “Don’t change a thing. Not a fucking thing, Glenn.” And as he and Archie clumped back upstairs, Glenn finally found the courage to glance over at Izzy.
Her eyes were huge, her lips slightly parted. She wasn’t looking at him but gazing into space. Her expression seemed to change with the music, a quick frown arriving and smoothing, a quirk of the lips, a slow nod. He breathed an inward sigh of relief. He wasn’t sure if she liked it, but she was certainly absorbed in it. And that was good enough.
Jim appeared at the top of the steps. “Macaroni! Dinner is served, ladies and gentlemen!” he boomed, about as far from a butler’s civilized tones as you could get.
Jack bounded down from the drums, and as he flew past Izzy, she caught on and removed the earphones. The music seeped out and Glenn moved quickly to turn it off.
“Wow,” she said. Her face was flushed again, but this time, he thought, with neither embarrassment nor lust, just sheer emotion. “Glenn, that’s fabulous. I never realized you were so good. Is that really for a computer game?”
“Should be,” he mumbled. “Good money.”
“Awards and laurels,” she said, smiling, and threaded her fingers through his and they climbed the stairs.
Glenn Brody, feared Glasgow hard-man and convicted murderer before his twenty-second birthday, who’d managed to survive ten years in Barlinnie Prison with his brutal reputation intact, almost burst with happiness.
Chapter Twelve
Fiona Marr wasn’t entirely happy about living in London. She’d begun her television career at the BBC in Glasgow and gone south to further her ambitions. Her current contract with Genuine TV had been purely mercenary—plus she got to work with some people she already valued and had some say in the programmes she was doing for them.
But having just returned from filming in Scotland, she was struck with a rare dose of homesickness. Sometimes, London was just too big and busy and impersonal. But it did have one important advantage—she could go to the opera whenever she chose. More or less.
Opera was Fiona’s weakness. She didn’t really understand why, because on one level the plots were utterly over the top and unbelievable, but for some reason, opera caught at her imagination and her heart-strings, and she loved nothing more than an evening at Covent Garden.
Besides, you met all sorts of interesting people there. As always, she was happy to be hailed in the bar during the interval. She’d just sat down with Nathan, her fiancé, when another man’s voice attracted her attention.
“Hello, Fiona!”
She turned, smiling, to meet an old acquaintance. Just for an instant, she couldn’t place him, couldn’t remember his name or how she knew him. Then he slotted in. “Ray!” she greeted him, as another face fell in beside him. It was like a cartoon lightbulb moment. “So that’s where I knew her from!”
Understandably, Ray looked baffled in a slightly amused kind of way.
Fiona laughed. “Sorry! I came across Anna the other week.”
But she hadn’t called herself Anna, and she’d denied knowing Fiona. Perhaps that was what set off the warning bells; or it might have been the sudden flash of something very like venom in Ray’s amiable eyes before his lids swept down, cleansing them. Whatever, Fiona, who, wasn’t a journalist for nothing, recalled a few unsavoury rumours about Raymond Kemp’s side interests, and backpedalled.
“Or at least she reminded me of Anna. Quite a resemblance, but a different woman altogether. So, what do you think of the production, Ray?”
“A little minimalist for my taste,” he said smoothly. “But very well done. So who is it you’re working for these days?”
“Genuine TV, but it’s not an exclusive contract. They sell a lot of stuff to the States, so it’s a good for exposure. How’s life treating you?”
It was small talk, meaningless socializing, the purpose only to imprint one’s name closer to the forefront of someone’s brain for the day a job or a favour came up. Ray invested in certain arts and media projects from time to time, so he was a useful contact to cultivate. To Fiona, this kind of thing was second nature, and yet for some reason, she began to feel…icky talking to Ray.
Worse, she had the uneasy suspicion that she’d already said the only thing that mattered.
On Monday morning, after her first dining room clear-up and the cleaning of the hall floor—which actually got a lot less muddy than it used to, so perhaps the men really did notice the difference when the house was cleaner—Izzy stuck her head around Chrissy’s office door.
Chrissy was at her desk, poring over accounts with a huge scowl on her face.
“Hard going?” Izzy asked sympathetically.
“I’ll get there, but it doesn’t come naturally. Looking forward to the New Year when I can pass all this stuff to a real accountant.”
“We’re hiring an accountant?” Harry flickered through her mind, but only briefly. She was sure he’d turn down any job from here. They’d only communicated by text since Friday night, to reassure each other that both were home safely. She didn’t expect another invitation to tea, let alone to another dinner dance.
“Well, sort of,” Chrissy said. “Among the new guys coming to join us in January, we’ll have an accountant and a computer whiz. They were inside for fraud, so no one’s going to be beating down their doors with employment offers. Were you going to ask me something?”
“Yes. You know you said the attic is dangerous? How dangerous, exactly?”
“Well, there’s a beam fallen in—although the roof itself is apparently sound enough, so it won’t collapse. But the wood of the floor is rotten in places. Plus, it’s so dusty that if you were subject to asthma, I reckon you’d die on the spot. Why?”
“I’ve got the odd bit of time on my hands some days. The guys have started to clear up after themselves, so I thought I might have a go at the attic. Is there electricity up there?”
“Yes, but you’ll still need to watch your step, or you’ll end up crashing through someone’s ceiling. By sod’s law, you won’t land on a comfy bed.”
“I’ll be careful,” Izzy promised.
Before dragging up any vacuum cleaners, mops or buckets, she decided to do a reccy first. Walking along the top corridor to the smallish door in the end wall, she was aware of a curious excitement, like an explorer discovering new territory. And it had nothing to do with passing Glenn’s bedroom door. Nothing at all.
She’d wondered how it would feel seeing him now in a work environment. Determined to keep doing her job, she couldn’t let herself be distracted by chat, or listening to more of Glenn’s music—or deliberately coming across him in bed when she was cleaning his room…
Don’t go there!
At the top was an open door and another light switch. Two narrow passages were divided by a thin wall, presumably once for male and female servants. Most of the doors were missing and some of the room partitions had collapsed or been broken down. For some reason, she felt it necessary to creep along the passages, as if to maintain the silence up here.
Everything was just as dirty and messy and dangerous as Chrissy had warned her. Cobwebs hung everywhere. She found the fallen beam and several rotten patches of wood. This house needed a joiner. Lewis Dunn in the village was a joiner. He travelled most of the week to get the work.
Walking back, Izzy pushed her way into the first of the rooms. Both here and in the one opposite, the partitions to the next room looked as if they’d been deliberately taken down, so the space could be used for more efficient storage. There was furniture, boxes, trunks and other luggage, rolled up carpets, bits of plumbing and rolls of electrical cable just abandoned. Everything was covered in thick layers of filth, overlaid with cobwebs.
There was a draught too. The windows didn’t fit properly anymore. Or perhaps some were broken. Whatever, the chill added to the atmosphere this place already had in spades. Silent, eerie, old.
As she made her way carefully to the opaque window, she felt again that sense of presence that had seemed to call her when she’d first opened the door on Friday. Glancing over her shoulder, just to be sure, she remembered what she’d felt and seen in the library when the TV people were here.
Old houses were just spooky. It was part of their charm. She took out the cloth she’d jammed in her jeans pocket earlier. Since it was still damp, she rubbed a patch on the filthy window. It was a tall window—this must surely have been the room of an upper servant—but in this condition, it admitted practically no light.
Through the smudged clear patch, she made out some bushes that further helped block daylight. But squinting through, she could just make out Glenn’s roof garden. Smiling, she turned back to face the room.
They were going to need more space for the new guys coming in January. Maybe the attics were a possibility, although they needed a hell of a lot of work. She walked around, then began to cross toward the room directly opposite in the other passage, when something creaked behind her. She spun around.
It came again, not just a floorboard creak like you got all the time in old houses. This was almost like a screech, like an unoiled hinge. Izzy stared at the filthy window, her heart drumming.
Somebody, something was out there on the roof garden. She could see a patch of colour against the cleanish hole she’d made in the dirt. Although surely a ghost would just walk through. A ghost wouldn’t open the window…
Ray. Fuck, it’s Ray. He’s finally found me, sent somebody to get us…
And she’d left the half-forgotten pepper spray in her bag downstairs. She looked wildly around for a weapon, and grabbed up a length of pipe.
The school! She had to contact the school, make sure Jack was still there, that the staff remembered to release him to no one but her…
As the window opened with deathly slowness, she grabbed her phone from her pocket with her free hand and scrolled down. She backed toward the door.
A leg appeared through the window, and her hand tightened on the pipe. Running away would do no good. Not now. He’d just hurt other people. The ex-cons who lived here, she suspected, were not exactly shrinking violets when it came to a fight, but she’d seen what Ray’s people could do. And she didn’t want anyone to risk prison for her—not Glenn, not Glenn.
Her courage nailed to his name, to her mind’s vision of him, she advanced purposefully. She should never have run away. She should have found a way to stop him. But if she struck now…
Damn, those legs were familiar…but not in a scary way. A man’s torso followed the legs, and then his head.
She dropped the pipe with a resounding clatter. “Glenn, you—you…”
As she ran at him, fists clenched, his gaze lifted from the pipe. “Who were you expecting? The ghost of Mary Ross? I suppose tickling her up with some copper might have achieved some materialization—”
“You’re laughing at me, you bastard.”
He caught her fist as it landed furiously on his chest, and then the other one too. “Trying to make you laugh,” he amended and took her in his arms. “Because no one’ll touch you here. Your biggest danger is falling through the rotten floorboards.”
“Is that what you came through the window to tell me?” she demanded indignantly.
“No.” His eyes had grown oddly hot, catching at her breath and making further struggle impossible. She relaxed into him, let her clenched fists grasp on to his sweater. “I saw you from the roof garden—once you’d made the spy hole—and had the sudden urge to take you among all the dirt and clutter of the attic floor.”
Blood rushed through her body and into her face, setting all her nerves on fire as it went. “That would be grubby and uncomfortable,” she said unsteadily.
“Yes, and sexy as hell.”
Her fingers tightened on his sweater. “Glenn—”
The rest of her objection got lost in his mouth as he swooped and seized it, and she had to cling to him, throwing her arms up around his neck. The butterflies in her stomach dived south as her lips fell open for him, kissing him back.
No one had ever kissed her like Glenn. Such an impossible mixture of utter, desperate hunger and tender passion. Alternately hard and yielding, his lips caressed and demanded, his tongue seduced and explored and insisted. His consuming kiss, together with the pressure of his impressive erection, was enough to bring her raging arousal galloping to a head.
She had no complaint at all when he slid his hands under the waistband of her jeans. She even pulled down her own zip before turning her attentions to his. He released her to tear off his sweater and drop it on the floor, then simply lifted her up and laid her on it. He yanked at one leg of her jeans, pulling it off completely, although he ignored the other one, simply thrusting his own partway down his hips and pulling his cock free.
Izzy moaned. She remembered it inside her, all the wonderful things he’d done to her with it, and she wanted it again. She wanted it now. She reached for him, grasping his neck, his hair, tugging up his T-shirt to find some warm, smooth skin beneath. His weight pressed down on her, settling between her hips, thrusting, and suddenly, shockingly, he was inside her.
But she was already so wet for him, his speed didn’t hurt her. Instead, gasping, she thrust onto him in almost involuntary response, taking him deeper. He groaned and pushed again, stretching his whole body to get as far in as he could before he shoved up her old woollen top and bra and latched his mouth to her nipple, and sucked with oddly gentle sensuality considering his forceful entry, flicking his tongue across the tip.
Izzy gasped, arching into him, and he began to move. He took her head between his hands to stop her skidding across the floor, and fucked her hard and fast. And she loved it. She kissed his ear, bit his lobe, his shoulder, rocking and thrusting with him in a desperate race for completion.
He was right. The surroundings were filthy, cluttered, insalubrious in the extreme. Everything smelled damp and musty, and yet there was something incredibly sexy about giving in to their desires here in this place where so many stories had unfolded in the past. And in truth, she loved that he wanted her this much, with such urgency that he couldn’t wait. Without realizing it, she’d longed to be taken like this, just once, without flattery or seduction, just raw, animal lust. But only by Glenn, only by Glenn, because he was the only one who had ever inspired such a wild need.
She heard the soft
little growl of triumph that began deep in his throat as he approached climax, and moaned with anticipation, scrabbling at his back, and pulling him into her, for she was so close too that one more thrust, maybe two, and she’d be there.
And then Glenn’s eyes turned upward and his head dropped forward against her cheek, almost bumping on the floor.
For Glenn, the fantasy had begun when he sat alone in his roof garden on his solitary chair, drinking coffee and tormenting himself most pleasantly with detailed memories of making love to Izzy. Which turned, inevitably, into equally pleasant daydreams of things he wanted to do with Izzy. The vague clattering sounds from the attic inside had distracted him, and he was already pushing through the overgrown bush in front of the nearest window when a little patch of dirt had begun to move and vanish.
Breathless, excited laughter had caught in his throat, and he’d broken into his own attic window with all the skill of the sixteen-year-old burglar he’d once been. He hadn’t expected her to come at him with a copper pipe, but then, perhaps stupidly, he hadn’t expected to scare her. She really was jumpy about being discovered. But his guilt had vanished into desire. He’d kissed her first to reassure her, to distract her, but once begun, the lust had raged out of control, and the fantasy which had originally drawn him inside insisted on fulfilment.
Of course, Izzy’s thorough cooperation helped. To lay her among all that mess and have her so desperate for him, so wet that he slid into her like a hand into a familiar glove, it all drove him on, swift and hard and, just as he’d promised them both, sexy as hell.
Until, right at the crucial moment, when they were both almost there and the blood was thundering in his head and his cock and his heart hammering way out of control, the world slipped.
At first he didn’t recognize the place. For it was bright and clean and painted. Curtains hung at the windows, open to let the sunshine pour in on the room. But the sloping attic walls and the view from the nearest window gave everything away. The room itself was warm, with a big Turkish rug on the floor and scattered with old furniture. A sofa and an armchair were set around a fireplace. There was a television, some speakers, which implied a sound system off-camera, as it were. And right in front of him, a child’s spinning top.
In His Wildest Dreams Page 14