“Giles!” I said, flicking on the lights. “What the bloody hell are you doing here?”
Giles Blitherington regarded me sleepily from the bed. “Not much,” he yawned. He patted the bed beside him. “I could be doing a lot more, though, if you’d care to join me.” He winked lasciviously at me.
Need I say that he was beneath the covers of the bed, with his naked torso exposed? His dragon tattoo and hairy chest very much in evidence, Giles presented a tempting picture. His hair was a bit tousled from his nap in my bed, and his eyes made promises he seemed only too willing to keep.
I thought about yanking the covers off him and throwing him out of the cottage. Instead, I sat down on the bed near him and regarded him with my sternest gaze. He matched me glare for glare, unrepentantly. “What am I going to do with you?” I said softly.
Giles grinned. “I should have thought that was pretty obvious for a clever man like you, Simon.” He reclined against the pillow and regarded me seductively.
“Giles, this is no time to be funny,” I said severely.
“I agree with you completely, Simon,” he responded.
He reached out with his right hand and clasped mine in his. He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed it, slowly and lingeringly.
“Oh, hell!” I said. I thrust his hand down against the bed, out of the way, then leaned over and kissed him.
After an enjoyable few minutes of that, I sat back and watched Giles. He almost purred with contentment. ‘Very nice, Simon,” he said, his breath a bit short. “In fact, much more than very nice.”
“Well, you’ll have to be content with that,” I told him, getting up from the bed. “I want you out of my bed, dressed, and downstairs in my study in five minutes.” I smiled at him to take some of the sting out of my words, but I meant what I said. He recognized that, thankfully. His mouth twisted in a pout, but his eyes evinced resignation. I turned my back and headed out the door before he could throw off the bedcovers.
In my office, restless, I wandered about, shifting stacks of papers here and there. What was I going to say to him? I went over to the window, pulled back the curtains, and pressed my forehead to the glass. The moon shed a tranquil glow over the lane. There was no sign of a car, so Giles must have walked here. As I watched, I caught a glimpse of movement in Jane Hardwick’s yard. A dark figure slipped out from the side of Jane’s house and made off down the lane. I couldn’t see enough to tell who it was, but from the size and the way the person moved, it looked an awful lot like Jane.
Frowning, I turned away from the window. What was Jane doing? Some investigating of her own before I joined her later, I supposed. I looked up from my reverie, and there was Giles, dressed but still seductively tousled looking. I forgot all about Jane for the moment.
If Giles only knew what self-control I’d had to exert to resist him, he’d be very flattered. I sighed inwardly. What had I got myself into by agreeing to hire him? Should I fire him now and be done with the whole situation? I wavered. I didn’t want to dismiss him entirely, I told myself, at least not while Abigail Winterton’s murder remained unsolved. He was a suspect, and I should take this opportunity to interrogate him.
I sat down behind my desk and motioned for Giles to take the chair across from me. He did so, frowning slightly.
Giles started to speak, but I stopped him. “No apologies necessary, Giles,” I said. “I am very flattered, believe me. But I’d prefer to keep our relationship on a professional basis. If you can’t abide by that, then I’ll have no choice but to dismiss you.”
Giles breathed deeply. “I shall abide by your rules, Simon,” he said. “But I’ll warn you, sooner or later, I always get what I want.” His eyes sparkled wickedly, and his mouth curved in yet another seductive grin.
I found myself smiling in return. “That’s as may be. If it happens to coincide with what I want, then there’s no problem. But we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”
“I’m willing to wait,” Giles assured me. “Some things are worth waiting for, after all.”
“Yes, they are,” I agreed softly, watching him. He was so very appealing, but I wanted to know him better before I made any kind of personal commitment. Working together should provide enough opportunity for getting to know each other. We’d either quickly tire of the situation and each other or it would become even more difficult to maintain a professional distance. Either way, it was worth the gamble.
As long as he wasn’t a murderer.
Spurred by that thought, I plunged in. “As long as you’re here, Giles, I’ve something I’d like to talk to you about.”
Giles sighed tragically. “Since I seemingly have nothing better to do, go right ahead, Simon.”
“Tell me about you and Trevor Chase,” I said, not mincing words.
“Trevor and me?” Giles sat up straight in his chair. “What do you mean, Simon? There is nothing going on!”
I didn’t believe him, not only because of what Trevor Chase had told me earlier in the day but because Giles had a rather shifty look at that moment.
“Perhaps there’s nothing going on at the moment,” I said, stressing those last three words, “but surely something went on in the past. Level with me, Giles. I promise I’m not going to hold past indiscretions against you.”
Giles rolled his eyes. “It’s just so embarrassing, Simon. God, if you only knew.”
“Just tell me.”
Giles stared down at his hands for a moment. “I first met Trevor when I went to university eight years ago. He was my tutor, and I found him madly attractive. I’ve always liked older men.” He grinned at me. Then he turned somber again. “And Trevor was attracted to me, that much was obvious. Things got rather out of hand after that and I was as much to blame as he was at the beginning. But I quickly realized that he was obsessively jealous. He followed me around, keeping an eye on me, because he feared I was having an affair with someone else. The whole situation was too Grand Guignol for words.”
“So Trevor was stalking you?” I said, intrigued by this different interpretation of the story.
Giles nodded. “More or less. I couldn’t handle his obsessiveness, and I told him I didn’t want to see him again. But he wouldn’t leave me alone. I threatened to report him to the appropriate university authorities and so on, and he must have believed me, because he went to them before I could. He made me out to be the villain, and I ended up being sent down as a consequence. My work had been suffering because he was making my life miserable. I couldn’t concentrate on my studies, I couldn’t do anything very well. He made my life an utter living hell for months.”
“How did he come to live in this village, then?” I asked.
“That’s where it gets even nuttier,” Giles muttered. “He had been down to Blitherington Hall once, and at some point after I was sent down, he came into some money. He bought the bookshop in the village and moved here about six years ago. I was walking down the street one day and looked up and there he was, smiling at me from the doorway of his shop.”
“So he followed you here?” I asked.
Giles nodded unhappily. “I thought at first that he was going to follow me around all the time and make my life hell again, but he hasn’t. He has more than once made it plain that he’d just as soon take up where we left off, before I realized he was starkers, that is! But I told him in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t interested.”
“Did Abigail Winterton know about any of this?”
Giles looked startled. “Her? How could she unless someone told her? I certainly wouldn’t and I doubt Trevor would have.”
“From what I hear,” I said, “she wasn’t above opening the mail and looking for interesting tidbits.”
“Blackmail, you mean?” Giles almost laughed. “I suppose I wouldn’t have put it past her, but she wouldn’t have had much luck with me. All I would have had to do was sic my mother on her and that would have been that.”
“But could she have known about it?” I persisted.
Giles considered that. “If she did go through and read one’s mail, then yes, she could. Trevor wrote me a couple of rather indiscreet letters. I burned them immediately after reading them. But old Winterton never said anything to me about them. After all, I was the innocent one. That is, mostly”—at least he had the grace to appear slightly abashed—“but the old cow probably tweaked Trevor about them plenty.”
Upon quick reflection, I was inclined to believe Giles’s version of the story. No doubt he was spoiled and could be temperamental when he didn’t get his way, but I didn’t think he was obsessive. Impulsive, yes. As well as self-centered. But not (I hoped) obsessional.
His explanation of Trevor’s turning up in Snupperton Mumsley seemed more convincing than Trevor’s version. It would have been a whopping great coincidence for Trevor to have bought a bookshop in the one village in England where Giles lived without Trevor’s having known about it in advance. Naturally, such coincidences do occur in real life, but this one seemed a bit much. That tipped the scales in Giles’s favor. For the moment at least.
“Then you think Trevor might have more to lose if the story were broadcast around the village?” I asked.
Giles shrugged. “I suppose. He might find it more than a bit humiliating. And my mother would make his life miserable if she knew.”
“Such being the case, how did you explain your being sent down? You must not have told her the truth.”
“No,” Giles said, “of course I didn’t tell her the truth! Her hold on reality couldn’t take it. Some version of it, mind you, but not the complete truth. My mother thinks I was simply too gifted for the jealously pedestrian minds of my tutors and that everything was their fault.” His wicked grin flashed again.
“It wouldn’t embarrass you if the truth came out?” I asked.
“Of course it would, Simon,” Giles said in exasperation, “but I could live with it. I’m more embarrassed over the opportunities I wasted than for anything else. I could have had a first-class degree, but I screwed that up.” His tone was bitter with self-reproach. “I know full well that I handled the whole situation poorly, and I’ve paid for it. But that little secret isn’t worth killing for, if that’s what you’re after. At least I wouldn’t have killed anyone to keep it quiet!” He glared at me with something approaching distaste.
“I believe you, Giles,” I said, and I meant it. Was it simply my own hormones taking over? Or did Giles seem truly sincere, more so than Trevor had been? Perhaps I wanted to believe him more than I wanted to believe Trevor. Giles had managed to get past my defenses much faster than I had been willing to admit.
Giles stood up. “Thank you, Simon. I appreciate that.” He looked across the desk at me, his eyes now warm again. “I’m more than a bit spoiled and selfish, I know, but I promise you I’ll abide by your rules. When you’re ready for something more than a professional relationship, I’ll be waiting.”
I stood up and walked around the desk. “I’m glad you understand, Giles.” I pushed him toward the door. “Now, go home. I expect you here in the morning, ready to work. No slacking, mind you!”
“I’ll be here”—Giles laughed—“and you’ll have trouble keeping up with me.”
“That I don’t doubt,” I answered wryly.
Giles left smiling, and I stood in the doorway of my study, staring at the closed front door of the cottage. I suddenly realized I had never asked Giles how he had gotten in. I had likely forgotten to lock one of the two doors to the cottage. But I wouldn’t put it past the very enterprising Giles to have picked a lock. He was a young man of many parts, as I was quickly discovering. Nothing at all like what my first impression had indicated—but perhaps his mother simply had that effect upon him. I could easily understand that.
I glanced at my watch; it was now a few minutes past midnight. I had better get back to my original plan. I trudged upstairs again to get myself dressed for tonight’s undercover activities and couldn’t help laughing at my unintentional pun.
What further adventures would the night bring?