Hidden Kiss (Love Is The Law 2) (15 page)

All she wanted to do was to go home, drag her tired, heavy
body into bed and read a book about something light and fluffy. But walking out
of the door would be the end of it all, so she nodded. "Okay. Sure."

Turner left her alone as he went through to the kitchen, and
she remained on the chair, fiddling with a ring on her finger. He was a good
man, and she'd be proud to call him a friend. Eventually.

He popped back in while the kettle boiled, and was just
about to show her the website he wanted an opinion on, when the front door
opened and Riggers entered. Emily jumped, almost guiltily, but he smiled at her
and waved dismissively.

"Hey, mate," he said to Turner, whose face was set
hard at the sight of Riggers. "Thanks for filling in with the babysitting
tonight. Elaine let me know that she'd asked you when I got delayed from work.
She still out as well?"

"She is."

"I'm sure she won't be long. The boys all right?"

"Yup, should be asleep by now."

"Great."

Emily looked at Riggers as he talked with Turner. It was as
if she wasn't there. He was dressed in his warehouse work clothes, all clean
and tidy, but he still stood with the arrogance of the low life street criminal
that he had once been. Eventually she couldn't hold her tongue any longer.

"You were really rude to the workers at the soup
kitchen."

Turner's eyebrows shot up and she realised that she never
had told him about the evening confrontation. It was going to be one more thing
that he would feel excluded about. Still, she ploughed on. "Especially
Joel. He's actually worked hard to get himself off the streets and into a flat
and a job, because of the charity's help, not in spite of it."

She waited, expecting an angry response.

Riggers sighed, looked sideways at her, and then just
smiled. An infuriating, patronising, meaningless smile. "I'm sure,"
he said mildly, and turned away, presenting his shoulder to her as he continued
to talk to Turner about some work he was planning to do in the kitchen.

Turner looked insulted on Emily's behalf. "Hang on,
there. Don't you owe her an apology?"

"Nope. Do you think you can help me with putting a new
worktop in at the weekend?"

"You can't just ignore me!" Emily said, rising to
her feet.

"I can, woman. Sit down and shut up."

"Christ, are you some Victorian throwback or
what?" She couldn't believe what she was hearing, and nor, it seemed,
could Turner.

"Come on, now, show some respect," Turner said,
spreading his hands wide.

"She's in my house uninvited, and interrupting me. Don't
talk to me about respect." Riggers' voice had risen, and there was a noise
from upstairs. All three turned their heads upwards.

"You've woken the twins now," Turner said.

"Me?"

"Come on," Turner growled suddenly. "Riggers.
Come outside. Not for a rumble. I just want to talk to you. Lay a few things
straight. And get your side of things. Some stuff is bothering me and it occurs
to me… I ought to just talk to you. But let's go outside, and let the kids get
back to sleep."

Emily watched them retreat out of the back door into the
little yard beyond, and pull the door almost closed behind them. She stood in
the middle of the living room, feeling helpless and annoyed.

Riggers was a sexist twat as well as a racist one, but she
knew she'd get over it. It looked like Turner had another axe to grind, though.

So it wasn't just her that was keeping things to herself.
She wondered what Turner's issue was. Then another noise from upstairs caught
her attention and she went to the bottom of the stairs, straining her ears.

For a moment, all was silent, before a slight sniffle
emerged from the darkness on the landing.

She'd looked after Kyle and Liam herself, over the months
that Turner and Riggers had been in prison, often helping out when Elaine took
Pearl to hospital. It didn't feel right to be creeping about in someone else's
house but when another sob sounded, she knew she had to go up to investigate.

She crept up the stairs as quietly as she could and found
herself on a small landing area, with three doors off it. Two were partly open.
She peeked into one room and saw a bath and toilet. The other room had a faint
orange glow emerging from it. It was the bedroom at the front of the house and
she pushed the door open a little further.

"It's Emily," she whispered. "Kyle?
Liam?"

"Emily!"

She let her eyes adjust to the dim light of the orange night
light, and saw a set of bunk beds. Both boys were on the top bunk, huddled
under a blanket.

"Hey, guys, what's wrong?"

They were both awake and neither seemed to be crying much,
but they were holding on to one another in the dark.

"Nothing," Kyle said.

"Then why are you awake?"

"Dunno. We are. Tell us a story."

"Oh, come on."

"Please."

"Get into your own beds first." She was
exasperated but couldn't deny the frisson of pleasure that the neediness of the
two lads gave her. She let Liam wriggle from the top bunk and dive under his
own covers on the lower bed. "Okay, then, are you ready?"

She came into the room and stood by the head of the bed,
pulling the door more closed behind her, in case Riggers and Turner came back
in and started making noise again. She started to tell them a complicated
mish-mash of a story involving as many fairy tale characters as she could.

She was just getting to the bit where Sleeping Beauty had
hit a troll over the head with a magic carpet, when the sound of breaking glass
from downstairs made both boys scream.

"What the…" Emily instinctively slammed the
bedroom door hard closed, and Kyle jumped off the top bed, to join Liam in the
shelter of the lower bunk. She gathered both boys in her arms, holding their
panicking bodies tight to hers. "It's okay, lads. I bet your dad has just
dropped a glass or something." It had sounded like a window breaking, but
she wasn't going to tell them that. "We'll just wait a moment, and then
I'll go and see what's going on."

"Don't go!" Kyle and Liam clung to her, their eyes
shining large in the gloom. She held on to them for a few more minutes,
listening hard for anything happening downstairs. There was a dull background
noise which she couldn't identify, and she was curious. She couldn't hear
voices.

Suddenly, there was another crash and the window of the
bedroom exploded in a shower of glass and light. The curtains billowed and
flared and the boys screamed in fright as something rolled off the top bunk and
onto the carpet, blazing and stinking and sparking.

Fire. Emily leapt to her feet, kicking the burning object
randomly, so that it spun under the bunk bed. Kyle and Liam screamed again and
jumped off the bed, grabbing her legs. Already the bedclothes on the top bunk
were burning, the cheap material bursting into flames and eating along the top
of the mattress. The curtains were just red and black rags now, fanned by the
air streaming in through the broken window.

"We've got to get out." She grabbed for the door
handle and then paused. She'd seen fire safety videos, and adrenaline made her
mind click through a thousand possibilities. Was the sound of breaking glass
from downstairs an earlier fire bomb? She ran her hands along the thin wood of
the door, seeking warmth, but it was reassuringly cold.

So she took a risk, placed the boys behind her, and stood
away from the opening as she cracked the door open slightly. The flames dancing
in the bedclothes waved towards the gap but nothing rushed in from the landing.
She peered around and saw no fire.

"Come on." But as she opened the door fully, she
realised that the landing area was full of choking, black smoke that was
creeping up the stairs. "Kyle, Liam," she said, coughing. "Get
to the floor."

They were rigid with fear. Emily dropped to her knees, her
eyes already streaming with the acrid cloud in the air. She pulled at the boys,
dragging them down to where she thought the air might be a little clearer, and
they crawled towards the stairs.

Fear gripped her, making her tears flow even more. She could
see, straight away, that the stairwell would offer no exit. Already, flames
were licking along the wooden bannister at the foot of the stairs. She held out
an arm, stopping Kyle and Liam from rushing blindly down.

"It's okay, it's okay," she repeated desperately,
almost hypnotically, her throat rasping and sore. "We'll get out somewhere
else…"

"Where? Mum! Mum!" The boys were screaming and hysterical,
and she felt her own reason burn away at the edges like the curtains and the
bedclothes as the black smoke filled her lungs. She pulled the boys to her,
lying on the carpet, feeling the heat coming up even through the floor.
The
downstairs area must be well ablaze by now,
she thought,
and isn't it a
comfort that the smoke will kill us before the flames do? Burning, I wouldn't
want to die by burning.
Tears streamed down her face and ran into the hair
of the twins who were clamped tight to her chest. Her mind was foggy and her
lungs burning. "It's okay, it's okay, it's okay…" The smoke stole her
fight and her energy and all she could do was try not to breathe.

 Kyle and Liam were still sobbing, but quietly, gasping and
whispering for their mother. There was another crash and Emily squeezed her
eyes tightly shut. In the back of her mind, she wondered if she ought to go to
a window and jump out. But the bedroom was full of fire and that crash had just
come from the back of the house and it was slowly, slowly, stealing her away
towards oblivion.

A voice was shouting and hands were grabbing. She forced
herself awake, coughing, spluttering. There was a figure there, a body, a tall
and broad shouldered man, pulling at her.

She had enough reason left to push the boys towards the
figure. She couldn't speak and she could barely see but she hauled Kyle and
Liam in front of her face and then let go. The pressure of them against her
chest disappeared and she knew the figure had lifted them, taken them, and she
prayed it was not too late as the shadows merged into the clouds of smoke
again.

The floor was very warm now. Some instinct propelled her to follow
the direction the figure had gone, towards the back of the house, through the
open door that she muzzily remembered led to the bathroom.

Great draughts of cold air were coming in through a broken
window and she crawled into glass that scattered across the soft lino floor.
The hole dragged the smoke and the fire up into the bathroom as the flames
sought more oxygen and more fuel for its destructive path.

The sting of the broken window bit her fingers and her
elbows but she dragged herself onwards, and suddenly the figure appeared again,
hauling himself in through the shattered frame. Hands took hold of her,
dragging her up, and her legs hung uselessly as her head spun with lack of air.
She was carried to the window and pushed through. A towel had been laid along
the broken shards of the bottom of the frame and it tangled with her legs as
she plunged forwards, sobbing and gasping as the new fresh air hit her seared
lungs and she let go of her grip on the frame and fell - fell - jarring with a
thump as she landed, not on a concrete patio nor a muddy lawn, but onto the
roof of the kitchen and she crumpled, winded, bruised and alive and crying.

The man jumped down and landed with a thump next to her. He
dragged her to her feet again and held her, stroking her hair, as she coughed
and spluttered onto his shoulder.

There were lights, strobing and lighting up the garden, and
shouts, and sirens, and then another figure in a yellow fire-fighter's suit
appeared, disconcertingly high in the air. It took her a moment to realise he
was on a ladder, and the man holding her steered her towards the waiting
fire-fighter.

She moved in a dream, stumbling like a puppet whose strings
had been half-cut, and let herself be carried down to the ground where she was
whisked into an ambulance and surrounded by all the efficiency and briskness of
the medical staff.

Emily lay back on the hospital bed and tried to ignore the
noise all around her. The admissions ward was a busy one and the nurses were
trying to get everyone settled down for the night. How anyone was expected to
sleep with the groaning, snoring, beeping and whispering was a mystery to Emily
and she tried to make herself comfortable, expecting a wakeful night.

"Hey."

She opened her eyes and was started to see Turner looming by
her bedside. He half-pulled the privacy curtain a little closer so that he was
out of the sight of the nurses' station, and perched himself on a plastic chair
close to Emily's bed.

"Hey, hello. How did you get in? It's way past visiting
time."

"Charm, bare faced cheek, and subterfuge. How are
you?"

"I'm okay. I shouldn't be here but they want to keep me
overnight for the doctor to check me in the morning. It's just cuts from the
glass. Stupid, really. Someone else could have this bed who really needs
it."

"You need it."

He leaned forward, his bulk just a dark shape in the subdued
gloom of the quietening ward. Emily kept her hands on her lap, fighting the
urge to reach out and touch him. God, but she wanted a hug.

"Thank you," she said, keeping her voice low.
"For coming. For being there. For… everything. What about Kyle and Liam?
Where are they?"

"Children's ward, being kept overnight like you. Elaine
and Riggers are with them. Kyle is fine, but Liam has a fractured wrist where I
was a bit too heavy handed dropping him out of the window."

"It could have been so much worse. Turner, what exactly
happened?"

He ran his hands over his face, rubbing his eyes, and
cleared his throat as quietly as he could. Emily suddenly realised that the
rasp in his words wasn't just because he was trying to speak low; it was smoke
inhalation damage.