Driftwood Read Online Free Page B

the Atlantic appeared, silver-glitter indigo, beyond the north coast’s pitching cliffs, then took an unmarked side track and bounced the Rover across half a mile of moorland, the track fading out to turf and scattered stones beneath her tyres. He opened a farm gate, drove through and shut it behind him, then let Belle out of the passenger side. Restrained and polite, she seldom indulged in undignified racing around, but she did love her run home, and Thomas liked the sight, her full-power streak across the last tract of moor to the solitary white-painted building near the edge of the cliff.
    He followed her in the Rover and pulled up outside the tower, ratcheting the handbrake up with a sigh of relief. By the time he had finished with poor Victor today, there’d been no time to come home for a change of clothes, and he’d had to start his surgery round as he was. Mrs. Vic had offered him a shirt, but none of her husband’s mighty garments would have been less conspicuous on Thomas than his own wet ones, which by that time had started to dry on his skin. In his office, he resorted to his seldom-used white coat to hide the damage and had got away with it. Now, though, the cotton and denim, stiff with salt, were scraping on his skin, and he thought with longing of a shower. The bathroom was the only part of the watchtower he had bothered to have professionally refurbished—worth it, for a man who still hallucinated desert dust in the crevices of his body, whose dreams left his muscles so rigid with resistance he could often barely walk until he’d immersed himself in a bath.
    The tower had its original black-oak door, the wood rock solid and satiny with time. Belle, still wild, was describing high-speed circles round the building, always clockwise, as if she shared the many local witches’ aversion to a widdershins manoeuvre. Smiling, Thomas took the vast key from under its stone and began to let himself in.
    He noticed the package at the same time the dog did, and both of them froze, Belle skidding to a halt on the turf. She trotted across to the door and sniffed the box over as if it had been an unexploded bomb, and Thomas reflected with a touch of shame that they were, after all, a pair of suspicious bastards. Then she sat down and looked up at him with an expression he could only interpret as a smile.
    He carried the box into the house, wondering at its weight. He hadn’t ordered anything. Placing it on the plain deal table in the kitchen, he noted from its labels that it had been sent up by parcel post from Marazion just that afternoon, and presumably at some expense—it was about eighteen inches all round and heavy as a rock. Thomas pulled out a kitchen chair, turned it round so he could straddle it and folded his arms along the back.
    He wasn’t in the mood for surprises. After seeing to poor Victor, he hadn’t been in much of a mood for anything, except perhaps drinking himself to oblivion. That thought sparked another in his mind, one connected with the gleam of a rarely touched supply of vodka in a crate under the stairs. Breaking his own rules of seldom-on-weekdays and never-before-eight, Thomas dismounted from the chair and went to pour himself a generous double.
    It was good, very smooth—his thinking had been that, if he spared no expense, he would go easy on it—but his throat was still raw with salt and unaccustomed shouting, and he choked faintly, pressing a hand to his mouth. What was in the damn box? He had an uneasy feeling in his gut about it. He was unsettled anyway. Having managed all day not to think about Flynn Summers, now that he was alone and unoccupied once more, he was finding he could think of little else. And people like Flynn did not belong in Thomas’s life. He was no longer fit to associate with the young and the reckless, with men who were—Thomas felt it, even on shortest acquaintance—absolutely, essentially sweet-natured. Not