The Salisbury Key by Harper Fox

Author:Harper Fox
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: M/M Contemporary Romance
ISBN: 9781609283698
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2011-02-22T06:00:00+00:00

The Audi’s interior was boiling. Scents of hot leather and vinyl assailed me, and I helped Rayne wind down the windows and push up the rusted sunroof. I reached to turn the heater dial to blue as he started the engine, and he said to me, “We’ll have to be going somewhere for that to do us any good.”

I nodded. Anywhere other than the Rose & Crown would mean something pretty significant. I took out my mobile phone and flipped its lid up, holding it thoughtfully between my hands. Jason’s speed-dial option appeared on the screen, hard to read in the sunlight. I shivered. So that was why I’d deliberately been leaving the damn thing at home.

The dean’s number was there too. After almost a minute, I dialled it. It took him a while to answer, and when he did, the background was discreetly noisy, just the kind of sound you’d expect a bunch of senior academics to be making in a pub on a solemn occasion.

I told the dean that I was ill and had gone home. That I was terribly, terribly sorry. I asked him if he could look after everyone at the Rose in my place, and not to mind if they went over Jason’s budget, just to send me the bill. The dean said that of course he could. His tone was almost perfect—concerned and reassuring. If he was irritated at me for flaking out on him, he was keeping it to himself. And yet I felt at the same time almost as if he were perfectly capable of peering down our satellite connection and seeing me in the passenger seat of a strange car, with a handsome soldier sitting beside me.

“You’re a pretty crap liar,” Rayne observed as I hung up. “You do still look rough, though. Want me to take you home and make the rest of it true?”

I thought about the house, which was mine now and may as well have been a tomb. I thought about its silences. It was Jason who always had wound up the ormolu clock in the living room. He did it lovingly, big hands delicate on its key. I could see him so clearly in the red and gold behind my eyelids now. When it had stopped last Sunday, I had left it alone. “No,” I said. “I don’t know where.”

“All right.” Rayne put the car into gear. We slid out into the flow of traffic, and I tipped my head back, letting it happen. Down the western road, and then left, out towards the water meadows. He said, slowing up for the next roundabout, “That was nice of you. About the bill at the pub.”

I shook my head. “Not really. Not my money.” He glanced at me enquiringly, and I went on, bitterly, “Jason left me everything. House, car, whacking great bank balance about three digits longer than I’ve ever had in my life.”

He absorbed this in silence. I wondered for a wild moment if he was going to take me back to his barracks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.