The Love Letter (82 page)

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 for 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.

So she began lapping this room as well, the big, tousled bed seeming to mark her as she circled it. ‘How many women have you seduced in here?’

He watched her maddened circuits with troubled eyes. ‘None.’

‘Let me rephrase that. How many women seduced you in here?’

‘None.’

She stopped lapping and turned to face him across a huge and very sexy claw-footed bath. ‘You’re no bloody virgin.’

He raised a dark eyebrow. ‘This room is. I don’t sleep here often, and when I do I’m too exhausted for company.’

She started circling the room again. ‘Great. Glad we cleared that up.’

‘Are you feeling OK?’ He watched her fanning out her vest top, cheeks growing pink.

‘Fine! Just have a touch of what nineteenth-century heroines called the vapours.’ She realised she must be coming across about as comely and beguiling as an amorous hamster on a wheel, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She’d overindulged in romantic anticipation, and was now experiencing an endorphin high, a sort of sexual sugar rush that made her as manic and silly as a toddler after gorging on sweets. Growing dizzy, she did an about turn and started racing in the opposite direction.

She was suddenly reminded of the riding lessons she’d begged her parents for as a child. She’d wheedled and cajoled, written petitioning letters, drawn winning pictures, slaved lovingly over domestic chores and gone down on bended knees to secure her hour on Bo in a dusty indoor arena on the outskirts of Twickenham. Tacked up, docile eyed and obliging, he’d been presented to her beside the mounting block with his stirrups pulled down and his sweet-smelling muzzle outstretched to investigate her pockets. At which point she’d burst into tears and run back to the car to sob uncontrollably on the back seat, unable to explain to her confused parents that the pleasure was simply too great to sustain, the fear of disappointment too huge to contemplate. She’d folded under the pressure of her own expectations.

Byrne stepped back towards the stairs: ‘This is making you uncomfortable. Let’s go down.’

‘No, the virtual fireplaces are worse!’

‘The ground floor—’

‘Not the glittery pond! That’s far too …’

‘Too?’

‘Seductive. Don’t you have a kitchen? Weren’t you going to make tea?’

‘Ah, yes. It’s beyond the seductive glittery pond. You can close your eyes and I’ll lead you to it if you don’t want to look at that.’ She couldn’t quite tell if he was joking or not.

‘I’ll be fine!’ She belted away from the bed and the 360-degree heavenly view and hurtled downstairs, past Fink the basset puffing steadily up towards her, past the fires and on to the illuminated carp amid their stunning artwork, pushing gratefully through the first door she found.

‘That’s the loo,’ Byrne said helpfully from a discreet distance. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. I’m through the next door on your left.’

Legs admired the slate-tiled wet room, heart careering around madly in her chest. For a moment, she wondered how long she could hide in here, then realised that would look weird and took a few deep breaths before locating the kitchen.

This, she realised, was safe – the other half of the tower’s ground floor moon had curved, shiny black units with a red gas range at their heart, a Smeg and a pinball machine acting as outriders, a long, thin glass refectory table with benches taking up the majority of the polished stone floor, and a black leather sofa flanking far left along with a pair of double doors far right. It was bachelor pad-tastic, uber-cool and totally without warmth.

‘I hate this room,’ Byrne threw open the double doors. ‘My Nan chose it, God bless her. She says it’s very “Versace”, according to her magazines.’ He headed outside.

He was gone so long, Legs edged towards the doors and peeked through.

There was a huge decking balcony overlooking a steep wooded valley. The tops of the trees were level with its railings. Byrne lent on these, his hands knotted together around the back of his neck, staring into the crown of a tall pine, deep in thought.

She rolled her lips between her teeth and stepped out onto the deck, sunlight soothing her face and shoulders.

He didn’t look round.

‘This was ruined like the other tower up until a couple of years ago,’ he told her. ‘Local legend has it the land belonged to a brother and sister who fought over its legacy. Every bitter tear they wept turned to stone and eventually incarcerated them in the two towers
here. They’re known as the Sibling Stones. They were ruined because they kept hurling bounders at one another.’

‘You made that up,’ she spluttered.

‘It’s my job.’

There was a long pause. He continued staring at the pine, where a woodpecker was drumming furiously. Now he was the one behaving oddly.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m not sure I like this place with you in it,’ he admitted.

Legs felt as though her heart had suddenly been ejected from her between her ribs at high velocity.

‘This place is all about Gordon Lapis,’ he explained, narrowing his eyes as he turned to look back up at the tower. ‘The money I earned as him has paid for it. Ptolemy lives and dies here, and Gordon never steps beyond these walls. It’s not a part of the real world. You are very real indeed, Legs. You don’t belong here.’

‘I’ll go.’

‘No! I want you to stay.’

Her heart, finding itself on bungee elastic at maximum stretch, was pulled back into her chest again at even higher speed. There was another long pause.

The woodpecker was excelling itself now, drumming so fast, Legs half expected the top of the pine tree to drop off. Then she watched a spotted, feathery figure streak past overhead, red under-tail twitching. Yet the hammering continued, and she realised it was her own fingers rattling involuntarily against the wall beside her. Pulling her hand away and folding her arms, she caught Byrne’s eye.

He laughed, holding out his own hands. ‘Look.’ They were shaking too, the fingers dancing like a dreaming pianist’s.

‘Look.’ Uncrossing her arms, she held out hers which accompanied his, twitching and jerking like a slumbering harpist’s. Now laughing too, she blurted: ‘Sexual tension!’

‘Is that what this is?’ He looked delighted.

‘It’s either that or lithium poisoning.’ She was in danger of getting all-consuming giggles in a minute. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m far too tense for sex.’

Nodding, he trapped his shaking hands beneath his arms. ‘How do we take the edge off it?’

‘Going for a run helps.’

‘Good idea.’ He sprang up and burst back through the doors, sweeping her up in his slipstream. They made it as far as the long glass table, where he braked hard to avoid a loose chair and she slammed into him.

Both winded, they staggered aside, eyes watering.

Breathless, Byrne turned to her and held out his arms. She hurled herself into them.

The kiss he landed on her mouth was elixir. Far from dispelling any sexual tension, it pulled her every heartstring to breaking point and tightened every nerve ending in her erogenous zones.

Unable to stop herself, she took hold of the hem of his dusty T-shirt and pulled it up over his head, feasting her eyes on his broad shoulders and muscle-quilted belly, kissing the line of intricate black text along his breastbone. It was a quote she couldn’t hope to pronounce, but she hoped it would be on her lips every day for a very long time to come.

Later, Byrne looked up through his glass dining table and exclaimed. ‘I love this kitchen. I so love this kitchen!’

Legs curled tighter into his warmth and hoped his change in interior design taste was a temporary spell brought about by carnal mania. She loved this kitchen too. She never wanted to leave it for all its very Versace tackiness.

He reached out a hand to her face and turned it to his to kiss it. Soon she was rolling on top of him feeling like a magnet that had attached itself so totally to its counterpart they might never pull apart.

‘I love you.’ He looked up at her in wonder. ‘I love you here. Never leave.’

Later still, she watched the sun setting over the crests of the pines through the double doors. ‘I should get my bag from the car.’

‘It can wait.’

There was an echo of déjà vu. This time, she had no desire to break free and reclaim her toothbrush and knickers. She felt as though she had come home. Suddenly she understood her mother and the summer of love. She had no care for the permanence of her situation here or the thoughts of others, just so long as each minute passed this exquisitely.

They drank coffee on the decking, wrapped in one shared towel, they ate toast between kisses at the glass table, they soaped one another with slithery abandon in the wet room and ventured up to the top of the tower to look at the stars and make love on a bed at last, revelling in its bouncing comfort and support as they twisted and turned, arched and weaved together.