For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley, #5)(128)

“Helen, isn’t it?”

“You’re not being fair.”

“You’re in love with me, Helen.”

“Don’t. Please.”

“Every bit as much as I’m in love with you. You want me as much, you long for me as much. But I’m not like all the rest of the men you’ve involved yourself with. I don’t need you in a way that makes it safe for you to love me. I don’t depend upon you. I stand on my own. If you take up life with me, you jump into the void. You risk it all, without a single guarantee.”

He felt her tremble slightly. He saw her throat work. He felt his heart open.

“Helen.” He drew her into his arms. He took strength from knowing each gentle curve of her, from feeling the rise and fall of her chest, from the feathering touch of her hair against his face, from the slender hand that caught at his jacket. “Darling Helen,” he whispered and ran his hand along the length of her hair. When she looked up, he kissed her. Her arms slipped round him. Her lips softened and opened beneath his. She smelled of perfume and Troughton’s cigarette smoke. She tasted of brandy.

“Do you understand?” she whispered.

In reply, he drew her mouth back to his, giving himself over to nothing more than the separate sensations attendant to kissing her: the soft warmth of her lips and her tongue, the faint sound of her breathing, the heady pleasure of her breasts. Desire built in him, slowly obliterating everything but the knowledge that he had to have her. Now. Tonight. He wasn’t prepared to wait another hour. He would take her to bed and to hell with the consequences. He wanted to taste her, to touch her, to know her completely. He wanted to take every lovely part of her body and to make her body his. He wanted to lower himself between her upraised thighs and hear her gasp and cry out when he sank inside her and…

I wanted to feel young resilient flesh I wanted to kiss breasts that were full and firm I wanted unveined legs and feet without callosity and IwantedIwantedIwanted…

He released her. “Good Christ,” he whispered.

He felt her hand touch his cheek. Her skin was so cool. His own, he knew, was probably burning.

He stood. He felt shaken. He said, “I ought to get you back to Pen’s.”

“What is it?” she asked.

He shook his head blindly. It was, after all, so easy to construct lofty, intellectual, self-denigrating comparisons between himself and Victor Troughton, especially when he felt relatively sure that her response would be a loving and generous reassurance that he was not like other men. It was far more difficult to look at the matter when his own behaviour—his desires and his intentions—delineated the truth. He felt as if he’d spent the last few hours earnestly gathering the seeds of understanding, all of which he’d just flung mindlessly into the wind.

They started walking back across the lawn, towards the porter’s lodge and Trinity Lane beyond it. She was silent beside him, although her question still hung in the air, waiting for an answer. He knew she deserved one. Still, he didn’t reply until they’d reached his car and he’d unlocked the door and opened it for her. And then, he stopped her just before she got inside. He touched her shoulder. He fumbled for words.

“I was standing in judgement of Troughton,” he said. “I was naming the sin and deciding the punishment.”

“Isn’t that what police are meant to do?”

“Not when they’re guilty of the same crime, Helen.”

She frowned. “The same—”

“Wanting. Not giving, not even thinking. Just wanting. And blindly taking what they want. And not caring a damn about anything else.”

She touched her hand to his. For a moment, she looked to the rise of the footbridge and the Backs beyond it where the first ghost puffs of fog were beginning to curl like misty fingers round the trunks of the trees. Then her eyes moved back to his. “You weren’t alone in the wanting,” she said. “You never have been, Tommy. Not before this. And certainly not tonight.”

It was an absolution that filled his heart with a sense of completion that he’d never had with her before. “Stay in Cambridge,” he said. “Come home when you’re ready.”

“Thank you,” she whispered—to him, to the night.





20





The fog lay heavily on the city the next morning, a grey blanket of mist that rose like a gas from the surrounding fens and billowed into the air in amorphous clouds that shrouded trees, buildings, roadways, and open land, changing everything from common and recognisable substance into mere shape. Cars, lorries, buses, and taxis inched their way along the damp pavements of the city streets. Bicyclists slowly swayed through the gloom. Pedestrians huddled into heavy coats and dodged the constant spattering of the drops of condensation that fell from rooflines, window ledges, and trees. The two days of wind and sunshine might never have existed. Fog had returned like a pestilence in the night. This was Cambridge weather with a vengeance.

“Makes me feel like a case for the tubercular ward,” Havers said. Encased in her pea-soup coat with its hood pulled up and a pink knit cap on her head for additional protection, she beat her hands against her upper arms and stamped her feet as they walked to Lynley’s car. The heavy mist was creating a beadwork of damp on her clothing. Across her brow, her sandy fringe was beginning to curl as if exposed to steam. “No wonder Philby and Burgess went over to the Soviets while they were here,” she continued darkly. “They were probably looking for a better climate.”