MALCOLM TOOK A BLOW that sent the two of them careening sideways; he used his own body as a shield to shove back, creating a brief clearing through which they raced, slaloming through the crowd until they reached a long dim hallway lined in paneling and cracked linoleum through to the door sporting the emergency exit sign and out into an alley.
The sudden plunge into dark and quiet was as startling as a dive into the sea.
The door thunked to a close behind them.
She didn’t even look back for Argosy.
They ran, hand in hand, into the exhilarating black dark and cold, down the long and fetid alley. She didn’t question where they were going; he could probably lead her right off a bridge if he so chose and her last moments would still be happy ones.
They rounded a corner into a sort of a dark walled area; she realized it was the opposite side of the car park. The long shadows of weeds swayed against the white wall.
Malcolm stopped abruptly.
He spun her around until her back was against the wall. He covered her with the heat of his body.
For a moment it only swift breathing.
Then his smile flashed. “Spoils of war,” he whispered.
The slide of his warm hands beneath her coat, under her shirt, across her bare skin, dissolved her into something like smoke even before his lips touched hers.
She groaned, softly, a shameless animal sound of relief. Wanton surrender had never been in her wheelhouse. But within seconds she would do anything he wanted, as long as she never had to leave this world comprised of the hot, skillful satin of his lips, his tongue, the scrape of his beard against the pulse in her throat, his hands on her skin, the jolt after jolt of pleasure as they clung, and ground together. His cock hard in his jeans. He got hold of the top button on his jeans and when he tugged the rest obediently opened.
And then his hands were beneath her skirt and slipping down into the waistband of her underwear. When he lifted her up against him her head fell back with a gasp as pleasure cleaved her.
“Isabel...” he breathed her name. “I want you now.”
“God, yes. Please.” Her voice was shredded.
And that’s when his phone rang.
Unsurprisingly it was a full-throated, old-fashioned ringtone.
They both went still.
“FUCK,” he said quietly, but with great, great feeling.
Echoing precisely Isabel’s thoughts.
He closed his eyes.
She knew he had to take this call.
“I’m so sorry,” he rasped.
He reached into his coat for the phone.
She slid down his body, clung to his shirt. She couldn’t stand on her own just yet. She waited, dazed, kiss-drunk, savoring his ribcage rising and falling, rising and falling, against hers, like a storm tide.
“On my way, Finn.”
His voice all gravel.
“Isabel, I...”
She touched his cheek. “Let’s go,” she said.
* * * * *
When Malcolm burst through the front door of the clinic the waiting room was nearly teeming and Finn was getting ready to usher the next slightly wounded soul into the exam rooms.
“What the hell happened at that show, Coburn? We’ve got a few cut lips, a torn earlobe, and somebody who limped in with an arm slung over his mate’s shoulder, and someone else with what might be a dislocated shoulder—glad you could get your arse back here.”
He didn’t sound angry. Finn was usually pretty unflappable. He was simply marveling at human folly.
“The short answer is that it started with heckling and snowballed from there.” He didn’t feel like implicating Declan in the the whole mess. The man had been sorely provoked.
“By the way, I heard you were last seen absconding with a short blonde out the back door of The Riot.” Finn said slyly, shoving a chart into his hand.
“Who the hell told you that?”
“The blonde geezer you passed standing at the reception desk chatting up Cindy had an earring torn out in the fight. Ripped his earlobe. Sewed up his ear. Told me he saw you.”
Malcolm paused. “It was a rescue. She was, er, frightened.”
He’d taken Isabel home on the back of his motorcycle, reluctantly leaving her with a chaste kiss, in case all of her neighbors were watching. Notably, Argosy’s car was gone from the carpark when they left The Riot.
“Ah, I see. A rescue, was it now?” Finn was laughing. “Did you go back in for all the frightened blondes, then?”
“I only had time for the one before you rang,” Malcolm said snidely. Feeling, however, a trifle guilty.
Finn snorted. “Just....be careful, Mal. I have a feeling this bird is the migratory sort. Here for the change in climate, then off without a thought.”
This was irritatingly close to Malcolm’s own suspicions, but he hadn’t decided whether this was a bad thing or not. So he just scowled at Finn. “As if you’re an expert on birds. As if you’re John James Audubon.”
As this was a ridiculous thing to say, Finn’s eyebrows naturally shot up.
“I’d say, ‘look out for the crumbly ground on the cliff’s edge,’ too, if you were approaching crumbly ground at a cliff’s edge. Because that’s the kind of friend I am. Good luck with the shoulder in Room Three. He’s big, drunk, and angry.”
And then Finn zipped off down the hall toward Exam Room two.
Malcolm’s body was still vibrating with the desperate indignation of being interrupted in the middle of doing something magnificent, and possibly foolish, which was taking Isabel Redmond against the back wall of a car park. He was, in fact, as irrationally, formlessly furious as Declan Duggan sailing through the air to land on a heckler.
When he walked into the examination room his expression shut the angry, noisy guy right up. He was docile as a lamb while Malcolm saw to his wonky shoulder.
Finn and Malcolm sent Cynthia home an hour before they closed up for the night, which was two-thirty in the morning. They’d gotten everyone patched up and safely off into the night with loved ones or in taxis.
Malcolm stood in the middle of the now silent clinic, between the stairs that led up to his apartments and the door that led out into the night, thinking about crumbly cliff edges and migratory birds, and what he wanted to do and why he felt the way he felt, and how the echoes of the past were like a distant rock concert: he could feel the thunder of the bass and drums but he couldn’t quite make out the words, and not yet the whole melody. There seemed an element of peril in what he wanted to do now, but he couldn’t put a finger on why he felt that way. Word of him whisking Isabel out of the Riot was bound to spread like wildfire throughout the town. But he was pretty sure this rescue, or his little encounter with Argosy, would affect the Falconbridge Trust’s decision making. For them, it really was about the money.
He thought about that poor bastard Lyon Redmond carving an“O” out of silent, secret misery.
Malcolm’s choice was easier. Maybe he owed it to Lyon to make it.
* * * * *
Click.
Isabel opened her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping—why on earth would she sleep, when she could relive again and again that rush of kissing Malcolm?—so the little sound resounded in her quiet flat. What was it? An insect meeting an grisly end against the windowpane? The sound of the old house settling, maybe? Timbers shifting with the change in temperature?
A fuse blowing?
She wondered if her time with Malcolm would always be about interruptions, angst, and watching him leave. This last got a little more difficult each time. It held all he pleasure of ripping a bandaid from skin. In other words, none at all. It was an entirely new, but not entirely welcome, feeling.
Click click. Click.
She frowned and propped herself up on her elbows. Something was definitely hitting the window.
Isabel was certain it wasn’t rain. It hadn’t been in the forecast.
Click. Click. Click.
And then suddenly she knew.
Click.
Click.
Click click click. Click click.
She slid from bed and slid across the room in her socks to part the curtain.
His face was little more than a pale blur against a dense, velvety dark outside. But she had a hunch that she’d know him even if she were blindfolded. The air against her skin simply felt different when he was near. That, and her heart had all but shot-put from her chest.
He must have gotten his hands on some gravel and was flinging it at the window. She gave a muffled laugh.
And he must have walked his motorcycle most of the way, in order not to make a racket in front of her building. It all felt deliciously illicit, somehow.
She remained motionless for a moment, suspended in wild, breathless joy. Whatever happened, she wanted to imprint this moment on her memory.
She darted out her door and tiptoed past Poppy’s apartment. She liked to imagined Poppy asleep with a satin mask over her face, new age music tinkling next to her head.
She crept down the stairs, careful to avoid the squeaky one.
She opened the door.
Malcolm took in the scrunchy ponytail and the pajama bottoms with kitty faces on them in the feeble hall light.
He grinned.
She wouldn’t be surprised if he could hear her heart pounding insider her chest like those strained amps at The Riot.
“I wondered if I could trouble you for a cup of tea,” he said, in a voice just above a whisper.
She stifled a laugh.
She left him in suspense for three silent seconds.
Then:
“The fourth step creaks,” she whispered. And held out her hand.