Slow Decay - By Andy Lane Page 0,33

now. ‘What about the Brie wedges in breadcrumbs?’

‘Which we left in the deep fat fryer for so long that the Brie just melted away and all we had left were these breadcrumb shells that tasted faintly of cheese!’

‘What was the silliest thing we ever cooked?’ Rhys asked. He reached out a hand and placed it over the back of Gwen’s hand in a gesture of familiarity that took her breath away momentarily, it was so unexpected.

Gwen smiled at him, catching his eye for longer than they usually managed these days. ‘The pork, paprika and pears, when the pears just cooked down to this porridge-y mush?’

His gaze locked with hers. ‘No. No, I think it was the Cuban lamb. The one where the recipe said we had to marinade it in Coca Cola before barbecuing it.’

‘Oh! Oh!’ A sudden memory made her eyes widen. ‘Surely it was the peanut butter and apple soup?’

Rhys nodded. ‘Yes! Oh God, didn’t we do that for a dinner party?’

‘Rebecca and Andy came over. You found the recipe in a vegetarian cookbook. You were so proud of it.’

‘And it was so thick and stodgy that none of us actually wanted our main course.’ His fingers curled around her hand, touching the soft palm, stroking down to her wrist. ‘Oh, Gwen, when did we stop having so much fun?’ he asked softly.

She sighed. ‘When I got a promotion, and you got a promotion, and we both ended up working silly hours just so we could get together enough money to pay the bills and take an exotic foreign holiday, once a year, just to keep ourselves sane.’

‘Looking back, we may have made the wrong choice, somewhere along the line. No promotion, and a week in Criccieth every August. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds like hell. Have you ever been to Criccieth?’

Rhys looked down at the remains of his chicken. ‘Lovely though that is, I’m not sure I could finish another mouthful.’

‘You usually clear your plate. What’s wrong?’

He shrugged, avoiding her eyes. ‘I thought I could do with losing a few pounds.’

Gwen reached out and placed her hand over his.

‘I wouldn’t complain,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I don’t find you shaggable just the way you are.’

Gwen could feel a slight tugging in her hand, as if Rhys subconsciously wanted to pull her towards him. Or was it subconscious? There was a slight curve to his lip, a certain glint in his eye, that sent a tingle through her, from her head to her toes but lingering somewhere around her middle. She could feel her nipples getting hard, rubbing against her dress. ‘Er, you know I did dessert?’

‘Get thee behind me, temptress.’

‘I was rather hoping to have you behind me,’ she said, enjoying the way his eyes widened.

‘We could always bring the dessert with us,’ he said, teasingly. ‘I could lick it off your… stomach. And your breasts.’

‘It’s crème brûlée,’ she breathed. ‘I need to caramelise the sugar.’

Rhys stood up at the same time Gwen did.

‘The way I’m feeling right now,’ he said, pulling her towards him, ‘heat isn’t going to be a problem.’

As Gwen felt his fingers spread themselves through her hair, pressing her lips hard against his, she in turn pressed herself hard against him. They stumbled together towards the bedroom, not even noticing the amber light that pulsed in time with their heartbeats, from the dining table.

Tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six looked exactly like the twenty-five chambers that had come before it and the fifteen that Toshiko had overshot by: a red-brick arch in a red-brick tunnel, water trickling down and etching the mortar away, small patches of fungus spread across the walls. Toshiko hoped that they were good, old-fashioned Earth funguses, and not spores of something alien that were patiently eating their way into the walls. She hoped that the rats that she heard scurrying in the darkness sometimes really were rats, and not tiny things with many legs and many eyes that had snuck in along with some of the alien technology they had found. She had nightmares occasionally that something was growing, deep in the bowels of Torchwood. Something alien. Something bad.

Toshiko shivered. They were just dreams, provoked by some of the strange things they did and saw in Torchwood. They weren’t real. They weren’t backed up by observation, or evidence. By science.

She looked around, trying to work out where they were exactly, in relation to Cardiff geography. The Hub was directly beneath the centre of the Basin, but now they were