of the chimney against my back. “Oh, God…I should have had you against my office door yesterday night!”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You wanted to go home.”
“I thought you wanted to get rid of me.”
His hands clench underneath my ass. He closes his eyes and groans.
“Giles.”
“Mmhm.”
“Where’s the file?”
“Termagant! Will you stop nagging me about the file? I have it safe.”
“Here? Or at the department?”
“Safe.”
“No, you have to listen to me!”
I climb onto his lap and look into his eyes. His face dissolves in front of me.
“Sweetheart, what’s this?” He leans forward and kisses the tears off my cheeks.
“We have to hand it in, Giles. I feel awful, hiding it. Like an accomplice.”
“You’re not hiding it. I am.”
“But why do you want to shield Hornberger from justice? I-don’t-un-der-stand!” With my palms pressing down on his shoulders, I stress each syllable.
“I rather thought I was shielding you from gossip,” Giles observes, not visibly impressed by my vehemence.
I sink back onto his thighs and rest my forehead against his chest. For a whole minute I stay like that, struggling to muster the courage to say what I want to say.
“If it just concerned me, I’d hand it in.” My voice is muffled by the skin of his belly.
“You haven’t thought that through.”
“Look, Giles!” I sit up so he can see how serious I am. “You can think and think, but wrong will remain wrong and it’s wrong to protect Hornberger!”
“It’s more important to me to protect you than to turn him in.”
“And to protect yourself.” Because there is a subtext to this topic that we have so far carefully avoided.
“That does not weigh with me.”
“Doesn’t it?” Maybe the time has come to have this out. I climb off his lap and huddle up on the other side of the sofa. “My ‘reputation’ can hardly be more important to you than it is to me.”
“Can’t it?” he echoes me flippantly, and I can tell he is going to be difficult about this. “But I’m a gentleman.”
“There is nothing gentlemanly about not allowing me to make my own decisions!”
“You haven’t got all the facts.” Suddenly he is not flippant at all.
“Then give me the facts!” I explode. “Heavens, Giles! Talk to me!”
He looks away from me, into the fire, and for a few moments I really think he isn’t going to answer.
“When Nick turned up in the observatory…that time,” he finally says, still not looking at me, “he had his phone with him.”
I wait for him to say more, and then it clicks. My hand, when I raise it to my forehead, is ice-cold. That, or I have a temperature again.
“There’s a picture? He took a picture of us?”
Now Giles looks at me, and I understand how much of his ironic grin is about feeling helpless.
Chapter 37
I AM NO LONGER ANGRY WITH GILES for withholding this little piece of information from me. However closely the sword of Damocles is hanging over the precious few days we have together, at least it was not accompanied by a pornographic photograph.
“And he isn’t bluffing? Have you seen this picture?” I rally in a last-ditch defense later that evening when we’re snuggled up in front of the fire.
“Good thinking, Sherlock, but I’ve seen it.”
I’m tempted to ask for details, but Giles shakes his head.
“Why didn’t he tell us there and then?”
“He said you’re such a hothead, you’d have told him where to stick it. He thought I’d be more reasonable on my own.”
“So the deal is, you hold onto the file and he’ll hold onto the photo?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“God, I hate that.”
The scene has clouded over, and on the morning of my fourth day I decide that I must go home today, if only to get a change of clothes.
“You’ve had fresh undies each morning,” Giles points out with the face of an Angel in the House, and it’s true. Because we are going through so many bed sheets, he has been doing a load of laundry every day.
“Squidgy, slimy, oozy, gooey, sticky—oww!” he protests as I fling myself on him in the bed and wrestle him down. “I meant me! Did you think I was talking about you? Never!”
What with one thing and another, it is past four o’clock and getting dark again by the time we set off. I am grateful that Giles has offered to drive me and my bike back to the farm, because it’s no longer white and clear but wet and windy-cold. But I am also grateful that he doesn’t ask to come in or when he will