Playing Grace (37 page)

‘Oh, that is so …’ she exhaled and knew that if he kept on kissing her like that, if the traffic continued to move so slowly, she might do something from her old days. She imagined taking off her belt and taking off his and telling him to lie back on the seat and …

She caught the taxi driver’s eye as Tate was pushing up her sleeve and kissing down the inside of her arm to her wrist, before slowly taking her middle finger into his mouth, and the look he gave her definitely said,
Don’t even think about it on my seats
.

He dropped them outside a terrace of white houses with columned porches and Grace thought,
Dad’s right, this is a bloody good address. How can he afford to live here? There’s no such thing as a free place to sleep. What’s he doing to earn it?

‘You live here?’ she asked, and Tate said, in between
kissing her neck, ‘Long story, Gracie, and there’s a few other things I need to tell you as well. We could talk about them now, or I could take you upstairs and see what you’ve got on under this serious old coat.’ He was opening it as he spoke, trying to get her shirt free of her trousers.

We should talk about it now, sensibly and calmly
, her brain said, while her mouth murmured, ‘Upstairs,’ and he hustled her up the steps and through the front door. The hallway was silent and smelt of expensive candles and polish, and they raced up the stairs, him pulling her by her hand as he bounded ahead. His keys were out of his trouser pocket; he was fumbling with them and he took long enough trying to get the right one in the lock that Grace had time to think,
This is going too fast. All I know is that he turns me on and I need him and he’s going to tear my heart out – and he might be a crook
.

Then the key was in the lock and she couldn’t remember any of the questions she’d been asking herself.

‘Normally have trouble getting it in, do you?’ she whispered in his ear as he waltzed her in through the door and kicked it shut behind him.

‘Nope, never. Usually slips in nicely,’ he whispered back in a way that intensified the heat she was feeling, the tightness in her stomach and her desperate, desperate urge to feel all of his skin against all of hers.

He went to punch in some numbers on the burglar alarm and stopped.

‘That’s weird …’ but he didn’t finish talking because she had taken off her coat and when he heard it hit the floor, he turned to look. She started to unbutton her shirt.

‘Jeez,’ he said and she was being pulled along the hallway. ‘Kitchen, sitting room, library,’ he reeled off and Grace saw marble worktops, huge sofas and even larger chandeliers flash by.

Here was a bed that you probably needed a sat nav to find your way across, a wall of wardrobes, wallpaper good enough to frame.

‘Let’s get that head of yours somewhere soft.’ He helped her very gently on to the bed. He was taking off his boots, kicking them across the floor, then taking off his socks as she started to undo more of her shirt buttons.

‘No, no, no,’ he said, nodding at what she was doing, ‘I get to do that. Hate that freakin’ shirt – gonna tear it off and ball it up and chuck it out the window.’

He was pulling his own shirt up and over his head and Grace saw his belly and chest appear bit by bit. He tanned easily, she could tell, and imagined his body moving through water, coming up out of it, drips beading and pooling in his belly button so she could lick them out.

He came back to the bed, got on it and straddled her hips. He was grinning down at her.

‘Comfy?’

‘Yes, but if you chuck my shirt away, these have to go too.’ She tugged at his pinstripe trousers.

‘These? Why these, Miss Surtees, have been in ma family for generations. We routed the British in these trousers and now I’m gonna do the same to you.’

They didn’t move straight away after that, both getting used to this new way of being with each other. Not talking, just looking.

Then he was undoing the last of the buttons on her shirt and kissing each bit of her that was exposed, but he didn’t throw her shirt out of the window when he peeled it off because suddenly, brazenly, she had removed her bra. It seemed to take his mind right off the shirt, which fell from his hands and then slid from the bed to the floor.

‘Work of art, Gracie,’ he said, not moving. And then, after gabbling that he was never letting her wear clothes again, he was undoing her trousers and pulling them down over her hips. She felt his mouth move over her thighs, his tongue making runs that finished with a kiss. Slowly he moved from one to the other, gave each its due attention, particularly along the place where her knickers met flesh. And then he was easing them down as well. She closed her eyes and if her
neck hadn’t been so delicate, she would have arched her back as she felt his hands on her bare hips.

He made a noise of appreciation and when she looked he seemed dreamy, mesmerised.

‘Blonder than me,’ he said and lowered his head and kissed her. That was the moment the real Grace came roaring back.

She reached down and put her hand in his hair, tugging just enough to get his attention, and soon she was helping him get his trousers off, helping him get his pants down, and he wouldn’t leave her mouth alone as she wrapped herself around him, holding him as he said, ‘Gracie, Gracie, you’re all naked in my bed, everything stripped away.’ And she was there, there in that actual moment, not removed from herself like the poor barmaid at the Folies Bergère. She was kissing him back – she couldn’t leave his mouth alone either, or his neck or his chest or his shoulders … God, his shoulders.

Quicker and quicker now, she was letting herself lose control and opening up for him. She helped him roll on a condom and took him in, sensations bombarding her as she caressed him with her tongue and her hands and felt him move over and inside her doing the same. She heard him say, ‘That’s … wow … Gracie. Jeez.’ Then he wasn’t
talking any more and she was being noisy and they’d both forgotten they were meant to be careful with her neck and her head, and she forgot she was meant to be careful with everything. Instead they just absolutely, frantically, went for it.

*

Lying on top of her afterwards, with both of their hearts hammering, Tate said, ‘That was one hell of a tour, Miss Surtees. Now I’m gonna need a neck brace too.’ Rolling off her, he lay by Grace’s side and she turned to face him. He was looking at her as if he’d known all along that they should be lying here like this. But it was not a smug look, just a supremely happy one. She felt his hand on her breast; saw the silver of the ring on his thumb against the pink of her nipple.

‘You young men,’ she said, playing an imaginary chord on his arm with her fingers, ‘think you know it all.’

He nodded and she loved the way it made his hair move.

‘Certainly didn’t know there was so much fire under that ice, that’s for sure.’ He moved his hand from her breast and pushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘Wouldn’t want to see it disappear again. Your eyes are even more beautiful when they haven’t got all those extra layers of darkness in them.’ His tone was sad, and he reached for her and pulled her closer, kissed her on the mouth. ‘Not gonna
keep asking you what happened, but if you ever wanna tell me …’ He frowned and turned his head because there was a definite clunk from one of the wardrobes; she’d heard it too. Now there was a kind of scrabbling and Tate was off the bed, his head tilted slightly while he walked along the wall of wardrobes as if trying to work out where the noise was coming from. He stopped, backtracked, caught hold of a door handle and pulled sharply.

There was her father, bent over as if he had just toppled sideways. One hand was over his eyes. ‘I told you to keep him busy,’ he said, ‘not bring him here. And where the hell’s Nadim? He’s meant to be shadowing you.’ But Grace wasn’t listening; she was too preoccupied looking at the icon held in her father’s other hand.

CHAPTER
30

Grace had known falling for Tate would make her life go to hell in a handcart. She just hadn’t realised it would happen so quickly or so drastically.

It had been half past five in the afternoon when she agreed to go for a drink with him. Now it was one the following morning; from the taxi window she could see only the odd staggering or homeless soul.

So, in seven and a half hours she’d given up fighting her attraction for Tate; had heart-wrenchingly lovely sex with him while her father hid in his wardrobe; seen him arrested; been questioned by the police in the presence of a solicitor; had her fingerprints taken; and, finally, been released on police bail pending further enquiries. She guessed Tate was still in the police station somewhere. At least she was only fighting guilt by association; he had the bigger problem of explaining how there was a stolen icon in his wardrobe. Or, rather, two stolen icons – the other
one was in there too; her father had just dropped it when he’d fallen over sideways, hence the clunk.

So, nine years of living a quiet, well-ordered life and she’d ended up sitting in an interview room having her entrails picked over by the police.

They would probably turn up with a search warrant for her flat later, find the paintings under her bed and put her down as a major art thief.

Served her right – she knew all this chaos would happen.

To go with all those new experiences, Grace also had a severely trampled heart. She’d spent so long stopping herself falling for Tate that, when it had happened, she’d plummeted like lead – straight down; no hesitation or deviation. Which was why, even faced with the solid proof of what he’d done, it was hard to pull up from the nosedive. She should concentrate on the choking, tear-gas-filled chaos he’d helped create at the galleries. On all the subterfuge and lies. Where was the outrage that he’d stolen the things she loved?

Instead she kept thinking of what had taken place on that bed and what had happened after her father had stumbled out of the wardrobe.

Almost at once, the police had started hammering on the door to the flat, summoned by her father from within the wardrobe – God, they must have been making so much
noise not to have heard him. At the sound of knocking, Grace had scrambled, clumsily, under the duvet and her father had gone to open the door. Tate had stood there, naked, looking first at the wardrobe and then at her.

‘
Keep him busy
?’ he’d said, repeating her father’s words as if they were only now making sense to him. ‘
I told you to keep him busy
,’ he’d repeated. He seemed empty and kicked. ‘Is that what this was, Gracie? Keeping me busy?’

She’d said ‘no’ quickly, but he fired back, ‘So, you had no idea your dad thought I stole the icons? Didn’t know he was following me?’

She had floundered at that as ‘no’ was a lie and ‘yes’ was worse, and saw him press his lips together and slump down on the bed with his back to her. She knew he’d now remember how she had talked to her father on her mobile just before she had agreed out of the blue to go to the pub with him.

She’d wanted to put her arms around him, press her lips to his shoulder, but now there were police in the room and her father was whispering to her to say nothing, that she didn’t want to implicate herself any further. Although how it was possible to implicate yourself more when you were already sitting up naked in a suspect’s bed, having obviously just had sex with him, she didn’t know.

When they took him away, Tate didn’t even look at her.

He had his head down and, once again, it seemed as if his boots were too heavy for him.

The stark desertion of the streets mirrored how she felt, but she didn’t know if it was because she’d fallen for Tate and he was a thief or because of that look of anguish he’d given her when he thought she’d just been using him.

Still, in the end he
was
like Bill – except Bill had only stolen her heart … Tate looked as if he’d gone for that and the icons. All she’d got in return was a cut head and a sore neck.

She tried hard to find any silver lining in the huge dark, thundering cloud that seemed to be centred over the taxi and heard her mother say to her father, ‘So brave of you, anything could have happened.’ Ah, there it was, that patch of silver: her parents were speaking to each other again.

More than speaking. Her father was sitting in the flip-down seat, her mother opposite him, and Grace saw how they were both leaning towards each other. Felicity had turned up at the police station with the solicitor and now she kept touching her husband’s arm, doing that overly expressive face of hers as she listened to the whole history of how Tate had been captured. She had her hand on his thigh by the time he explained how he’d got access to the flat. Turned out he’d discovered the woman who cleaned it had once tried to pull a fast one on the insurance
company he’d worked for. She’d been so eager to keep that bit of her past quiet from her new husband that she’d agreed to hand over the key and the code for the alarm.

‘Never expected to find the actual paintings though, Fliss,’ her father was saying. ‘Was just looking for clues, you know. Nipped in the wardrobe when I heard Tate unlock the front door, hoped he wouldn’t notice the alarm had been switched off.’ Fliss was gazing at him as if he were James Bond, and Grace could almost see her thinking,
Jay? Jay, who
?

Grace might as well have been invisible, but that was a relief. She wasn’t sure that she and her father were ever going to be able to look each other fully in the face again after what he’d heard her doing on that bed. And as long as her mother was occupied fawning over her father, she would not start rubbing Grace’s back again and saying, ‘I knew you were in trouble with Tate, didn’t I? Such a bad, bad boy,’ as if what Grace had done was bridge-burningly wild and romantic. If Grace heard Felicity say that once more, she was afraid she would do something that would get her plonked right back in the police station.

The taxi stopped at the lights and Grace saw her mother squeeze her father’s thigh provocatively, and the prospect of going back to her flat with them seemed an ordeal too far today. She bore it for the rest of the journey and even
while they were bustling around in her kitchen, making tea and toast, but when they started talking in whispers and her mother had reached giddy giggling stage, she got her biscuit tin out of the cupboard and left the room. She could go and hide under a hot shower but the prospect of washing the smell of Tate from her body made her drift to the sitting room and out again, along to her bedroom, and then brought her to a halt in the hallway. She stared at her messy walls and carpet, before going to ring for another taxi. She left her parents a note explaining where she’d gone, but had a feeling they wouldn’t miss her for some time – there was an unnerving silence from the kitchen.