The Burning Glass (13 page)

His velvet voice was brushed against the nap.
“There’s a packet of coffee in the basket. Shall I put on the
pot?”

“No thanks. Caffeine after dinner keeps me
awake.”

He waited, his mouth widening in a slow,
supple smile.

This time her face didn’t just flush. She
felt herself go red as a beet. A traffic light. A fire engine.
Positively scarlet. No scarlet letters here, though. No scarlet
women. She dared a quick tickle of his ribs, like a row of iron
bars through his sweater, and he laughed. The sound was a bit
rusty, but it was a laugh.

Jean leaned toward him, leading with her
lips—and from the corner of eye saw her backpack lying on the desk,
her car keys beside it. The cold water of obligation dashed her
face and she halted. “Dang it, I never locked my car. Keep up the
momentum. I’ll be right back.”

Alasdair was behind her as she stood up.
“I’ll do it.”

“No, no problem.” Seizing the keys, she
stepped out of the front door and stopped, grasping the railing
beside the steps. Why did alcohol always go to her knees? Placing
each foot carefully on the vociferous gravel, right, left, right,
left, she walked across the courtyard, punched the button on her
remote, and heard the car doors clunk in reply. There, already!

The cold light and the colder wind pressed in
around her warm glow like besiegers around a castle. Like the night
around the courtyard, growing darker by the minute as the clouds
crept forward, devouring stars and moon. Was that a movement among
the trees? Jean froze like a dog at point. No, it was just the wind
in the underbrush. Was that a light winking in and out of the
leaves or a will-o’-the-wisp hovering above the ancient well? No.
She saw nothing in the shadow-rippled darkness, not even the
ghostly shapes of the chapel walls.

Turning toward the keep, she detected a gleam
in an upper window, Isabel’s window, a warm gleam not at all like
the thin, off-color luminescence of the yard light. Nothing was
there, either, just a sheen on the uneven window glass. Jean’s gaze
rose to the serrated roof line and beyond, to the overcast sky that
faintly reflected the glow of the great cities to the north and
west.

Maybe her paranormal allergy was playing
tricks, or her nerves were overreacting to Wallace’s dubious death,
or her imagination was responding to the setting, the air stirring
with time-drowned memory and desire burned to ash, nothing left
behind but ravaged stone. What she’d seen at the chapel, assuming
she’d seen anything at all, was the glint of headlights from the
main road across the river. She hadn’t seen that much at Isabel’s
window.
Never mind
. With something between a sigh and shrug
she started back toward the sanctuary of the flat.

Alasdair stepped into the doorway, his body
silhouetted against the light. His solid, concentrated body,
contents under pressure. She stepped inside and he locked the door
behind her. “Let’s be getting ourselves to bed, lass. No splinters.
You get on, I’ll clear away.”

She brushed his lips with her own, needing to
make no other reply, and headed down the hall. By the time she
stepped out of the shower her nerve endings were doing the wave
around the stadium of her psyche. She’d only known the man for
three months. They were mature people, they knew what they were
getting into. But she hadn’t shared a bed in years. Heck, she
hadn’t had sex in years. Alasdair had admitted that he’d last had
sex a couple of years ago but hadn’t made love in a very long time.
Sex was a basic biological urge. There was a lot more to it than
biology, however.

She fussed around with dental floss,
tweezers, and emery board—this was no time for a hangnail—then
considered her flushed face in the mirror. He’d never seen her
without makeup, meager though that was. Maybe she should reinstall
her eyeshadow, mascara, and lip gloss, just for the occasion. But
then, he wouldn’t want to leave the lights on, would he? Maybe she
could get the candles from the dining table and . . . No. Falling
asleep with candles burning was stacking the odds against a long
relationship. Especially here at Ferniebank, with Isabel’s
cautionary tale.

Jean settled her new nightgown over her
curves, sucking in her stomach and throwing out her chest. The gown
was simple cotton, if with some darting and shirring to keep it
from hanging like a potato sack. Appearing before Alasdair in a
black lace spider’s web with a push-up bra would have been, well,
fake. If they couldn’t be real now, when could they be?

You know
, she told herself,
you’re
going to spend a lot more time worrying about it than actually
doing it
. She stepped out into the hall.
Alasdair?

The dishes were stacked in the drainer beside
the kitchen sink. Alasdair sat on the living room couch, feet
propped on the coffee table. His left hand stroked Dougie and the
right held open the large, flat book of the Ancient Monuments
report. His sturdy forefinger tapped one of the pages as though
considering testimony in a case. But at her step he looked up, then
sat up, pulling off his reading glasses.

She hadn’t seen those for a while. He was
just a bit vain, wasn’t he? “The bathroom’s all yours,” she said.
“I’ll turn out the lights.”

Again that quick touch of lip to lip, a lick
and a promise. The bathroom door shut. Jean eyed the inscribed
stone lying in state on its doily and turned off the ceiling light.
The front windows were pale rectangles, the pale glow of the yard
light cheered by yellowed lace of the curtains.

Dougie gazed at her over the back of the
couch, his eyes twin dots of phosphorescence. “Sleep tight,” she
told him, and retreated to the bedroom. There she found a small
nightlight beside the wardrobe. Ah good. It emitted a rosy shine,
making the shadows soft and suggestible and yet providing enough
light to keep the proceedings from turning into a farcical
scramble.

Jean glanced out the window toward the river,
no more than a skein of shimmer, and toward the chapel, invisible
in the darkness. No lights flickered through the trees. The wind
rattled something loose in the outbuilding.

She pulled the curtains and turned back the
duvet. The sheets beneath were lightly scented with smoke—they’d
been dried outdoors, downwind of Roddy’s peat fire. Inhaling, she
sat down on the edge of the bed. No, that made her look as though
she was waiting for a bus. She lay down, flat, like an effigy on a
tomb. No. She tried rolling onto her side, but wasn’t sure where to
put her limbs so that they appeared seductive and not awkward. She
sat up again.

Alasdair walked in, wearing striped pajama
bottoms and a fresh white T-shirt. Without taking an extra step, he
came straight to the bed, sat down, and drew her back against the
breadth of his chest. His exhalation across her ear sent a frisson
of delight down her spine. “You’re sure about this, are you?”

Every single one of her nerve endings turned
toward his true north and hung there, quivering. “Yes. Are
you?”

His answer was a caress, his large, capable
hands making the serendipitous discovery that, cupped, they were
just the size of her breasts.
Wow
, she thought again, and as
his fingertips put the discovery to investigation,
oh
yes
.

Time stretched, slowed, stopped. Space
contracted. The nightgown and the T-shirt and pajamas
discorporated. Curious and shy at once, he touched her as though
she was made of crystal, and she touched him as though he was made
of the finest bone china, until the inspirational tour of the
erogenous zones intensified each caress. His skin beneath her lips
was salt-sweet, blending with the scent of smoke in her throat to
make him taste like a fine Islay whiskey—they’d sat beside Loch
Ness sipping Islay whiskey the night she’d realized it was all
going to come to this.

Making love was like riding a bicycle. The
body memory was still there. The mechanics were ordinary, murmured
that ineradicable lump of intellect, like a stone in her shoe, that
held down one corner of her senses. It was the partner who was
not.

She hoped she was skilled enough to please
him. If Alasdair could hold himself and everyone he dealt with to
high standards in other areas, then he might do so when it came to
sex, too . . . She was pleasing him. The smooth banks and braes of
his body sang to her hands, her lips, her tongue, verse and
response, and singed them as well.

She glimpsed his face in the shadows,
intense, set, eyes slitted. His body was heavy, but not too
heavy—it was comforting, solid . . . She suppressed a quick ow, and
when he stopped, whispered, “Go on, go—oh.”

Yes, that was what she wanted, what she
needed—bodies interlocked, limbs entwined, forehead pressed to
forehead—yes. The bedposts beat muted time against the stone wall,
stopped, started again as they shifted around, playing variations
on a theme. His breath came in syncopated gasps, in counterpoint to
hers, and that cool observer in her senses murmured that still he
was holding something back, assessing and evaluating even as he
enjoyed.
Contents under pressure
, not just for him, for her
as well—let go, let go, it’s all right.
Not yet
.

Her unfocused eyes saw something beyond his
shoulder, a glow moving against the window curtains—more
headlights, certainly, headlights across the river, fluttering
through the trees. . . . If she was seeing fireworks, they were
inside her own mind. Her eyes shut as her body arched back against
the pillows,
ah, yesssss
.

When she opened her eyes again, Alasdair was
looking down at her, sweat glistening on his forehead and pooling
between their bodies. And suddenly she felt the chill of the room
that a moment ago she could have sworn was hot as a conservatory
growing tropical plants.

His lips were rosy, almost bruised. They
parted. She pressed her fingertips against them before he could
speak—
don’t say anything, above all don’t ask if it was all
right for me—it’s good, it’s good
. But still a faint arctic
gleam lurked deep in his eyes, and she thought of Yellowstone Park
in the winter, the hot springs steaming up through drifts of snow,
rimmed with ice bright as gemstones.
Not yet. Soon
.

One more time the bedposts thumped the wall,
as though knocking at the blocked door in the Laigh Hall, and he
was beside her, pulling the cool duvet over them both. She lay back
into his arms and cast a wary glance at the window, but if any
light shone through the curtains at all it was simply the ambient
light of a starless, moonless night.

And then footsteps walked across the ceiling.
Jean turned her head so quickly to look upwards that she missed
Alasdair’s nose by a millimeter. Her body seemed to sink into the
mattress, that cold spectral sensation heavier than Alasdair’s full
weight could ever be. She didn’t need to ask if he heard the steps.
His body grew so hard and brittle, she felt as though she was lying
in the embrace of a fully-armored knight.

The light steps moved slowly from one side of
the room to the other, paused, then came back again. After what
seemed like two hours, but which was probably only a few minutes,
they faded away into the profound silence. But no sooner had Jean
taken a deep breath and swum up from the depth of her sixth sense,
and Alasdair had shaken off his petrifaction and with a similar
deep breath relaxed against her, then the harp music filled the
night.

The strains rose and fell, slow, then fast,
then slow again, lovemaking in melody. The strings vibrated in the
same frequency as Jean’s nerves. Alasdair’s fingertips stroked her
flank in the same rhythm, as though she were the musical
instrument. The music came from another dimension, the prickle on
the nape of her neck told her that. And yet it wasn’t at all
fearsome, just melancholy.

Alasdair’s hand stopped moving, his body went
inert, and his breath slowed. He was asleep. Jean drew his arm
further around her and clasped his hand between her own. She lay
there, her thoughts drifting like thistledown, listening to the
otherworldly music, until at last, it, too, faded into silence and
time, and she slept at last.

Jean woke suddenly, a ray of sun shining in
her eyes and birds singing arias outside. Whatever she had been
dreaming sifted through the fingers of her memory and disappeared,
leaving only a vague, unsettled, melancholy.

Alasdair was no dream. He was lying beside
her, the duvet not quite pulled up to his naked shoulders. His hair
was a bit longer than the severe style he’d worn when they first
met, and was actually tousled. Once he’d been blond, she supposed,
but now those amber waves of grain were touched by frost. She’d
never known him without the gray in his hair and the creases beside
his mouth and eyes, now partly erased in sleep. His unshaven cheeks
and jaw made him look not hard-bitten but tender, taken
unawares.

She had only known him for three months. For
one of those they’d ignored each other, giving their mutual
attraction every chance to wither and die. And yet here they were,
coupled, flesh of each other’s flesh—more or less. For all the
dithering and all the doubts, sex was the easy part.

The sunbeam faded. Jean wallowed, drowsily
replaying the sensations of the night before, and the footsteps,
and the music of the clarsach. . . . The clock beside the bed read
nine a.m. Where was Dougie? Usually he wanted his breakfast by now.
The little cat must be sulking somewhere, his role as the man of
Jean’s house usurped by another male.

She climbed out of bed into the cold air, her
feet landing on the nightclothes puddled on the floor. The long
muscles of her thighs twinged. Wincing, she huddled on her robe and
headed to the bathroom, only to discover that muscles weren’t the
only part of her anatomy signaling how long it had been since she’d
practiced the amatory arts. She and Alasdair would have to work
hard to alleviate her condition.