“She’s friendly,” Kira explained.
“Quite,” I returned in a strangled voice. Kira giggled again. There was something about her laugh. Or maybe it was the way it lit up her small face, making her eyes twinkle and her cheeks glow. It was infectious and, despite an ugly dog’s nose being buried in my manhood and the fact that I was thrown by this entire situation, I could not help smiling. Now I was with her again, now that I was watching her laugh, I felt . . . lighter. Like some weight had settled over me when we were apart that had now lifted. Kira’s laughter died slowly and she looked from the dog’s head to my face, a crease of confusion forming between her brows.
“Why are you here?” she asked, that tiny crease deepening into a real frown.
I cleared my throat, made an attempt to shift the dog off my groin, which only succeeded in causing more drool to soak into my suit. The bastard’s head weighed a ton. “You didn’t see Henry this week.”
I didn’t see you this week. I blinked as that thought flashed through my mind. That was the real reason why I was here. Yes, of course I was worried about Henry, but since that kiss, my obsession with Kira, which, if I were honest with myself, had started from the moment I first spoke to her at the hospital, had gone into overdrive.
Straight after our kiss the other night, I’d resolved that that would be the end of it. I justified my decision with the knowledge that I couldn’t think of a less suitable partner for a Tory politician. Maybe Martin was pleased by the results of our little experiment in the press (they seemed to love Kira Murphy and her antics), butIknew that she was too much of an unknown quantity – too prone to saying and doing what she felt like at any given moment, with not nearly the amount of repression and reserve required to smile along at press conferences. But that wasn’t the only reason I’d avoided Kira. The truth was, she scared me to death. I needed to be in control, but with Kira, just like that rollercoaster I’d clung onto so tightly, I was anything but.
She was just so . . . magnetic, so full of charisma, so unpredictable. The elfin way she moved, the way she spoke, the pink streaks in her beautiful hair, her haphazardly applied make up. But more, so much more than all of that, was her humour – her crazy logic and the conversational tangents she took people on, it was all so . . . addictive. I needed to be around her, and it was that need, that strength of feeling that terrified me most of all.
And since I’d felt her small, soft body against mine, heard the quiet sounds she made when she was turned on, and felt how goddamn soft her pink lips were … I had becomeobsessed. I thought about her all the time. My days were spent struggling to concentrate, while my mind drifted off to images of the freckles across her nose and her beautiful hazel-green eyes.
I very nearly embarrassed myself in Parliament the other day.Parliament.The most unsexy place in the United Kingdom had turned me on, all because of this woman. And the nights . . . the nights were worse – dreams of soft, lavender-scented, pink-streaked hair, imagining that hair spread over my pillows, her gorgeous body under mine in my bed. I hadn’t had those types of dreams since I was fifteen years old.
I had no idea what to do about it. With the other women I’d been with over the years – attractive women, sexy women, women I’d got on with, women who weregreatin bed – everything had been so much calmer. I hadn’t had all these ragingemotionsand I’d been able to put the women out of my mind when I wasn’t with them. I hadn’t even slept with Kira and I felt like thoughts of her were consuming me.
Now, she looked guilty at my inference that she had neglected Henry. Her eyes slid to the side and she bit her lip. “I was . . . busy. But it’s on for this week. Pav and Millie are gonna host so–”
“No,” I cut her off and she frowned again. “No I think it should be at my house. He . . . I think he’ll be better if it’s on his own turf.”
Kira cocked her head to the side. “He’s better leaving the house, Barclay.”
“I know but–”
“Has he contacted any of his old friends again yet?”
I sighed and lifted a hand to absently stroke arse-smelling dog’s head. “He’s not ready for that. I don’t think–”
“He’s never going to feel ready for it, Barclay, but it’s time he reconnected with his old life. I know his mates still contact him. I’ve seen him ignoring the messages, I’ve caught him deleting the emails. And that’s after he’s ignored them for what, now? Nearly a year? That says something about their friendship. They really care about him.”
I tore my eyes away from her earnest expression and looked down at the fur in my lap.
“He was always a social bugger,” I muttered. “But if his friends . . . if he contacted them and they weren’t . . . I just want to protect him.”
Kira sighed and her face softened.
“He’s bad again,” I said in a low voice.
“Has he stopped–?”
“No, he’s still taking the meds, but he’s disconnecting. I can see it happening. I can feel that . . .” I swallowed and cleared my throat. It was that darkness I could feel creeping over my brother again. That sense of hopelessness. “He doesn’t have to work. Our family has money, and he made enough on his own for three lifetimes in the City, but without a focus . . .”
I’d tried to engage Henry in something, anything. Stocks and shares, financial investments. Henry had always loved making money. I was the one who wanted to save the world, Henry the one who wanted to buy it. But now he would just shrug, say he had enough money and retreat back to the basement of the house, which I was now sorely regretting converting into a self-contained flat. Over the last week, Henry had stopped even coming up to the kitchen. Mrs Scull, our housekeeper, left him meals and cleaned for him. The times I went down to check on him, he was either sleeping or sitting staring out of the window. It was scaring me.
I must have let some of my desperation leak into my tone because Kira’s expression had softened further.
“Okay,” she told me. “I’ll come over.”
I let the relief wash over me and tried to tell myself that it was just for my brother. Tried to tell myself that the thought of no Kira contact for an indefinite amount of time didn’t make me feel physically ill.
“Thank you,” I said and smiled at her. A real smile, the kind that had become very few and far between in recent years. Her eyes went wide and unfocused for a moment.
Then, she cleared her throat and it was her turn to swallow. “No problem.” Her voice came out slightly higher than normal.
“Right, great. Now if we could just extract this dog from my genitals, I’ll be on my way.”
