Tyack & Frayne Mysteries 01 - Once Upon A Haunted Moor (4 page)

Look closer to home
, a voice that sounded a lot like Tyack’s whispered in his head.
I know you don’t want to. But look closer.

Gideon woke at three in the morning with a cold vibration dying in his bones. He got out of the narrow bed he’d shared with James. The bed was barely a double.  Moving into Pastor Frayne’s ministerial bedchamber had seemed too much of an enormity. He stood barefooted on the lino, hitching up his pyjama pants. It was
the early hours of Halloween. What had he heard? He shrugged into his dressing gown and padded swiftly downstairs, unease prickling between his shoulders.

Lee was sleeping where he’d left him, the room now filled with blood-bronze light from the dying fire. The dog was still there too, though she’d woken up and her posture was watchful, more focussed and attentive than Gideon had ever seen her. Her eyes were fixed on the door.

Whatever dive Lee had been preparing to take, he was in deep waters now. He had turned onto his front and was clutching the edge of the sofa for dear life. He was breathing shallowly, his face buried in a cushion. Quickly Gideon crouched beside him and eased it away. “You’ll suffocate, you daft bugger.”

Lee drew a
deep, relieved breath. He opened his eyes. His skin was marked with the weave of the cushion, and a dreadful lostness in his gaze evaporated as he focussed on Gideon. “God. I was dreaming.”

“Did you call out?”

“Don’t think so.” He pushed stiffly onto one arm. “Had my face stuffed into your cushions anyway, didn’t I?”

“And a death-grip on my sofa.” Gideon didn’t know quite how to touch him. Why was he so awkward? He was
usually good at comforting strangers, the lost hillwalkers and occasional road-accident victim. He settled for helping Lee prise his clutch off the sofa frame. “I don’t fancy your dreams, if they make you hang on like that. You’re all right now. What was it about?”

“Boats, of all things.” Lee sat up. “They were cutting through the water.”

“Well, you work at the harbour, don’t you? No wonder you dream about that.”

Lee swung his feet to the floor. “No, there was something bad about them. The fact that there was more than one of them, I mean.”

“More than one...” Gideon eased onto the sofa beside him. It felt very natural to do so: he only just stopped himself from slinging an arm around Lee’s shoulders while he thought. “Is this like the wheel that was spelled wrong? If these boats are cutting through the water, you’re thinking about the prow. If there’s more than one – prows, right?”

“Does that mean something to you?”

“Well, we’ve got a family of ne’er-do-wells in the village called Prowse.”

Lee gave him an amused sidelong glance. “We’d make a good team. That’s the second time you’ve put my pictures into words.”

“For all the good it’s done either of us. I might nip round and see Bill again tomorrow, all the same.”

“I’m not getting any kind of a hit or feel off that name. It’s more like...”
Lee faded out. He stared at the carpet with its random constellations of burn marks from the stove. Then, with a suddenness that made Gideon jump, he snapped into a protective curl, clutching the back of his head. “The monster!” he rasped. “In the garden. The monster sees the window – sees the roses, blue and green.” He curled up tighter. “Oh, fuck – it hurts. Gideon, help me – help me see its face.”

Now Gideon did put
an arm around him. He held him hard, deliberately setting aside his own growing fear. He knew what sound had woken him up. “This garden? Don’t be scared. Have a look.”

“No, not this. It’s dark. The monster’s smiling. Christ, the child is too...”

Gideon laid his hand on Lee’s bowed head. He knew without looking that James’s model of the Beast would be glowing again. A leaden oppression filled the room. Isolde squeezed herself as far beneath the sofa as her bulk would allow. This time the vibration seemed to pass through Gideon from the timbers of the house itself, and when the howl began – low, resonant, pitching quickly to a shriek – he held still beneath it. The source must be close. The garden? The lane that ran up to the fringes of the moor? He didn’t know – knew only, with a clarity he hadn’t experienced since childhood, that he had to shield Lee from it.

Lee had other ideas. He sprang to his feet and ran for the front door. He placed both hands on it at chest height, and he was there – lean, upright, defiant – when the scraping at the outside woodwork began. The sound of one great claw... “No,” Lee said softly. “This isn’t who you want. Leave him be.”

Gideon broke paralysis. Slowly he crossed the room. With a sense of deep purpose – ritual, almost, as if he and Lee Tyack had done this before, met the beast and turned it back – he came to stand close behind his companion. He placed his hands over Lee’s on the door, feeling the bones of his knuckles press against his palms.

A hush fell.
This time it was only the fresh peace of a moorland dawn, and a thread of birdsong shimmered through it. Lee slid his hands out from under Gideon’s and turned around. They were so close that Gideon could feel the sweet vital heat radiating off him. He didn’t step back.

Lee smiled shakily. “Wow. You’re even better looking close up.”

Gideon, who had expected anything other than such an observation in the circumstances, and hadn’t realised his guest found him good looking at all, could only stare. “Brown eyes,” Lee went on. “Hair like short-cropped black fur. Broad shoulders – everything sturdy and strong, and...” He paused, his own very different sea-jade eyes lighting up with appreciative mischief. “And a policeman, too. Do you have any idea how incredibly comforting and sexy that is?”

Gideon hadn’t. No idea at all. He’d seldom heard himself described from the outside: that hadn’t been James’s style. For himself, he only glanced in a mirror these days to check that his uniform was tidy. “No,” he whispered. “Er... are you all right?”

“Fine. That scared the shit out of me.”

He was white as a tuft of Bodmin cottongrass. Tears were standing in his eyes. Gideon pulled him awa
y from the door into his arms, new belief in his own powers to protect surging through him. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”
Comforting and sexy
, Lee had said, and the second part shouldn’t have mattered, but suddenly vibrantly did: Lee’s arms went round him with a force that was seeking more than safety. His mouth brushed Gideon’s neck. He rested his brow on Gideon’s shoulder for a moment, breathing raggedly. Then he lifted his head. “Can I kiss you?”

Gideon didn’t know what permission he’d given – the startled parting of his lips, his involuntary movement forward – but Lee’s mouth met his like hot silk. Gideon closed his fist in the fabric of Lee’s shirt and squeezed, hardly able to bear the intimacy of this, so suddenly after so long. His tongue pushed hungrily forward and he tried to recoil, ashamed, but Lee held him fast, grunting assent
, returning the gesture. Gideon opened up for him. The slide and pressure in his mouth triggered a depth-charge of need at the core of him – under his gut, inside the curve of his tailbone, and his cock lifted so hard in his pyjama pants that Lee felt it, gasped and laughed inside their kiss and pulled away. “Oh, God,” he whispered, eyes brilliant, a flush of arousal turning his cottongrass to roses. “PC Frayne. Who knew?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What on earth for?”

“No first kiss should be that...”

He couldn’t even find the word. “Filthy?” Lee supplied, his smile making his answer a caress. “You can peck me on the cheek some other time. Probably no first fuck should be a clumsy stand-up job against a door either, but – ”

“Oh, Christ. No. Come back to the sofa with me.”

“No. We have to seal the gate.”

And now Lee was dead serious again. “Seal the gate?” Gideon echoed.

“Yes. You know what the witches say –
let naught but love enter in
.”

“If I hadn’t checked you out, I’d swear you were an escaped nutter, you know.”

“I know.” He leaned into Gideon, his answering erection pushing hot and tight against Gideon’s thigh. “But do it anyway. For God’s sake do it to me.”

So Gideon laid him back against the door. He’d forgotten his own strength. He’d got into a habit of holding it in abeyance. Most of the people he dealt with required gentleness, not a big burly cop throwing his weight about. But
this man needed all of him. Tenderly Gideon brushed a trace of sweat off Lee’s brow. He took the moment to undo Lee’s jeans and push them a little way down, and he stood trembling while Lee tugged open his pyjama cord. Then Gideon seized him by the hips and hoisted him up.

Lee loosed a deep, laughing groan. He wrapped his legs around Gideon and tipped back his head. “Yes. Feels like you could hold me here all night if you wanted to.”

“Do you need all night?”

“I think I need...” He shuddered in Gideon’s grasp. “Half a minute ought to do me fine. Come on, you beauty. Come on.”

Gideon shoved up and forward. His aching shaft drove into the tangle of Lee’s jeans and briefs, the contact at once hot as hell and wildly frustrating, then Lee twisted and writhed and somehow they were pressed cock to cock. Gideon inhaled a great gasp of the skin of Lee’s collarbone, burrowing under the collar of his shirt to find the damp velvety flesh. His mouth brushed the silver chain. Lee dragged the dressing gown back off his shoulders. He stroked the taut muscles there with urgent tenderness. “It’s all right! Let go of it for me.”

Gideon had no choice left. There was something terrible to him in having a man he’d just met like this, with this explicit rawness, but Lee was dynamic and real in his arms – not just riding his cock but demanding it, meeting his first big thrust then the next and the next with a savage passion of his own, and when his words rang in Gideon
’s mind –
seal the gate, seal the gate
– a kind of wild sanctity spread its wings over their act. Oh, and half a minute would be more than enough – Lee cried out, jerking up towards climax, freeing Gideon to ram his hips against him harder and faster till the honeyed fires of orgasm began to burn. Their heat roared up in his spine, his thighs, and then it was a huge whole-body blaze that centred and focussed and began to spend, from his balls to the place where his shaft was trapped tight against Lee’s. They came within a heart-jolting second of one another. Lee threw his head back, Gideon’s hand at the back of his skull shielding him. He convulsed, bucking to completion, Gideon thrusting them as far and as hard through it as they could go.

They caught one another on the way down. The
y leaned against the door in a sweaty, exhausted tangle. “Don’t fall down here,” Gideon whispered. “Come on. Let me take you upstairs.”

***

The first-floor landing was cold, a cavernous space Gideon had always shot across as a child, seeking the refuge of his room. Some kids might have seen their parents’ bedroom as a place of safety, but the Fraynes hadn’t been that kind of family.

That hadn’t been why he’d never moved with James out of the damp back bedroom he occupied now. In that and in so many other ways, he’d just been a terrible coward. He held Lee Tyack tight in the circle of his arm. Lee was hanging on to him too, his warm clasp of Gideon’s waist convincing him that he had to do better this time. The stairs had been steep and long after their exertions. They were both unsteady, clutching one another like shagged-out babes in the wood. Yes, Gideon had to do better, in what he tried to think of as his own home. “This way,” he said, and led Lee to the far end of the hall.

Lee looked round the dim-lit room. The first morning light was gleaming coldly on polished surfaces and the starched linen of the old bed. “Is this where you normally sleep?”

It was scrupulously clean. His parents’ housekeeper had officially retired, but still came once a week to take away the sheets and clean this room for the minister she’d adored, even though neither he nor Mrs Frayne would ever be coming home. “No, but... Is there something wrong with it?”

Lee turned to face him. He smiled as if he understood not only the gesture Gideon had made in bringing him here, but all the lonely years that resounded in Gideon’s memory whenever he tried to live in this house as his home. “Nothing wrong. It’s just... a bit of a mausoleum, isn’t it? Wherever you usually sleep is fine with me. Wherever you slept with James.”

There was still the faintest trace of warmth in the sheets in Gideon’s bed. Feeling it, he tumbled Lee over his body and into the warm place, then curled up tight around his back. “Sorry it’s so cold.”

“I’m not cold. You are.” Lee twisted over and put an arm beneath his head. “Come here. What happened with James, then?”

“You... You seemed to already know.”
Gideon could hardly speak. Lee was right: he was the ice-block, now being warmed to melting point by this embrace. “Back at Sarah Kemp’s. You were so sure. I thought you must know him.”

“No. I get flashes about people sometimes, that’s all. It’s better if they tell me of their own accord.”

Gideon nodded. It would be so much better if he could get this stony weight off his heart. He wasn’t a religious man, but still he thought sometimes in the words his father had taught him.
Lord, I have a burden on my soul...
“I hid James,” he said roughly. “He was a lovely man. He taught at the kindergarten. He had so much more to lose than I did, and...”