The Firebird

Rob was always a gentleman.

Five paces off, he stopped dead in the corridor, still with his back to me.

Then, as it had on that first night in Eyemouth, when I’d seen him coming to shore on the lifeboat, his dark head turned slightly, as though he’d just heard something. I heard the heavy exhale of his breath.

And in one sudden motion he turned and came back, and the force of his forward momentum swept me up along with it, bringing me up hard against the closed door of the room at my back. With his hands on my shoulders, his face filling all of my vision, his eyes locked with mine, Rob said softly, ‘Not always.’

And lowered his mouth to my own.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

He was right. He didn’t kiss me like a gentleman.

He kissed me like a man who had been taken to his limit and beyond it, with a wordless, urgent passion that made anything but breathing seem impossible; and even breathing wasn’t all that easy.

I had no remembrance whatsoever of how we got through that door, or how it locked behind us, but I had a vague awareness of us being in the room now, in the semi-darkness, with my back pressed up against a wall and not the door.

I did remember Rob’s shirt coming off, because the sleeves had stubbornly got stuck around his biceps and I’d heard the tearing sound as he had yanked the fabric free, before his hands had roughly pushed the jacket from my shoulders, found the buttons of my own shirt; dealt with that, as well.

It tore a little, too, but at that point I didn’t care. And then he leant in once again and settled onto me more carefully, his skin against my own, his forearms braced against the wall beside my shoulders, both hands buried in my hair as though he sought to hold me there and never let me go.

This kiss was gentle, deep, and left no walls to hide behind. His thoughts lay fully open to me, but they had no form – they were pure feeling, crashing into mine and over them and through them till I couldn’t tell which one of us was thinking what, or feeling what, or whose sensations made it seem as though I were no longer held by gravity, but spinning in a void.

Rob’s voice, that calm and sane and quiet voice, became a thing of heat and want and desperate need, and I did what it asked of me.

We didn’t even make it to the bed.

Our thoughts were the last things that we untangled, in the aftermath, and even then we did it with reluctance. Rob’s head slowly tilted forwards till his forehead rested heavy on my shoulder, and I slid my own hand upwards from his neck to grasp his dampened hair and hold him close.

I guessed that he was having the same difficulty I was having sorting out my thoughts from his, because he used his spoken voice to tell me, thickly, ‘Sorry.’

My voice wasn’t working all that well yet, either. ‘Don’t be.’

‘Not exactly how I planned it.’

If I turned my head a fraction, I discovered, I could brush my lips against his shoulder. Doing this, I answered him, ‘I thought I was the planner. You’re meant to be the spontaneous one.’

‘No.’ His head changed its angle, his voice rumbling low down the sensitive skin of my neck. ‘No, for this I had plans.’

‘Did you?’

‘Aye.’ I could feel that faint smile, and my fingers curled into his hair as his one hand slid slowly the length of my side. ‘Very definite plans.’

Then he dragged his mouth back to my own and his smile disappeared in another deep kiss as he wrapped both arms strongly around me and lifted me up, and we crossed the few feet to the bed, where he set me down gently and followed me into the blankets. And showed me.

‘I’ll be putting on weight,’ Rob accused me, ‘with you and your ice cream for breakfast.’

‘You’re not the type to put on weight. You’re far too fit.’

He slid his arm along the back rail of the painted white bench, slanting a look down at me. ‘You’re blushing now.’

‘I’m not.’

He only grinned and looked away again, his level blue gaze settling on the gold glint of the church spire showing in between the curve of trees, above the fortress walls along the river’s edge.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it’s more like brunch. It’s gone eleven.’

‘And what time is your reception?’

‘Not till three o’clock. We’ve loads of time.’ Contentedly, I leant against Rob’s side and let my head rest back against his arm as he adjusted it to cradle round my shoulders.

Looking down, he said, ‘I have to say, you’re being very calm about it.’

‘About what? Telling Wendy Van Hoek that her painting’s a forgery?’

‘Aye, that,’ he acknowledged, ‘and telling her, too, how ye ken it.’

‘Well, she doesn’t have to know that, does she? I mean,’ I explained, ‘it is a forgery. The evidence of that is already physically there, in the painting. I only have to say I have my doubts about it, and let Yuri’s experts do the rest and run the tests to prove it. No one ever has to know that … what?’ I asked, as I felt Rob go motionless beside me.

He lifted his arm from my shoulders, and then from the back of the bench altogether as, shifting, he straightened away from me.

‘Rob?’

I was hit by a hard wave of something like hurt, then he closed off his thoughts. To the static, I said again, Rob?

It was no use. He’d shut me out. Raking a hand through his hair, he said carefully, ‘I thought, when you said you’d tell her … I thought …’