After a bit, he stopped even attempting to weep quietly. He gave in to it and stopped trying to control the tears. It must have been fully two or three minutes before the sobs became less violent, but he still held onto her. Like a child, she thought. Then he said it again.
‘I’m so sorry. Really.’
‘Don’t be, please don’t be,’ she said. ‘I’m honoured.’
She took a paper tissue from the pocket of her jeans and gently wiped his face with it with one hand. With the other, she stroked his forehead. Suddenly she felt very tender towards him.
And then it happened. Something changed in his body, and to her surprise, and perhaps also to her dismay, she felt it change in her own body too. Maybe it was the display of tenderness that brought about the change, maybe it was something else, something beyond both their comprehension. She wasn’t sure. But, suddenly, John Kelly was no longer a child seeking nothing more than comfort.
His arms tightened around her and he began to kiss her face, her forehead, her eyes, and then, finally, her mouth. His lips sought hers with a kind of desperation. She didn’t mean to respond, but somehow could not stop herself. He pressed his lips against hers and his arms began to move over her body, stroking and caressing her. Then she found that she was doing that to him too. He eased her lips apart with his tongue. She did not resist, instead she opened her mouth for him. For several seconds they stood like that, wrapped around each other, straining to make the kiss deeper and deeper, more and more demanding.
Then, all of a sudden, a moment of sanity hit her. What they were doing was madness. Total and utter madness. And she had had enough of such madness in her life. Kelly had buried his partner only the day before. His emotions could not be trusted, and neither, she suspected, could her own. Also, this was, at the very least, totally crass behaviour. Worse than that, it was quite horrible behaviour. And she could not live with it, even if he could. In addition, this was John Kelly. Her old friend and sparring partner. He had never been, and never could be, her lover. Not under any circumstances, she told herself, and certainly not under these circumstances. She was disgusted with herself.
Immediately, she jerked her head back, pulling away from his kiss, and at the same time struggled to push him away. It wasn’t much of a struggle. She felt his grip slacken and sensed him beginning to back off, even before she put both her hands on his shoulders and pushed. They both stepped back and stood, breathing heavily, looking at each other.
Kelly bowed his head slightly. She suspected he felt much the same way as she did.
‘Now I really, really, am sorry,’ he said eventually. ‘I just don’t know what came over me. That was a disgraceful thing to do. I’m just—’
‘No,’ she interrupted him. ‘No. It takes two. I played my part, all right. And I don’t know what came over me, either. At least you have an excuse. You’re on an emotional roller coaster at the moment. You’ve just lost the most important person in your life, you’re in a muddle, you said that. You hardly know what you’re doing...’
‘Don’t I?’ he responded quietly. ‘No. No. You won’t make me feel better. I have no excuse at all, just a lot of reasons why I should not have done that. Look, I really had better go.’
She felt almost as emotionally drained as she was sure he was. Certainly, she had no energy left to try to further rationalise either his behaviour or her own. She just wanted to be left alone, to at least try to come to grips with what had happened. Or rather, she supposed, what had nearly happened.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I think you better had go.’
She made no effort to see him out. He knew the way well enough. And he went at once, without saying another word. Perhaps, like her, he did not know what more to say.
She remained standing at the window and watched as his little MG pulled out of the car park and began to move slowly along the seafront road.
Sophie was at her feet, brushing against her, trying to wind herself around her legs. It was funny how, on the one hand, she was a typically selfish cat and, on the other, so sensitive to Karen’s moods that she almost invariably seemed to know when her mistress needed comfort.
Karen bent down and picked up the cat, scratching the back of her neck as she lifted her against one shoulder. Sophie’s more or less constant purring grew louder and louder in her ear.
‘You know what, Sophe,’ Karen murmured. ‘Your Uncle Kelly and I very nearly did something extremely stupid.’
Karen realised she was almost in a state of shock. Fond as she was of him, she had never considered Kelly in any sort of romantic or sexual way before. It had just never occurred to her.
And she was grateful that they had both come to their senses before that extraordinary moment had developed into something more. She was extremely glad they had stopped. But only because she had felt it was wrong. After all, the timing had been just terrible.
But the man, when his arms had been around her and his body pressed against hers, had not felt wrong at all. He had been both tender and exciting at the same time. As for the kiss, well, the kiss had been fabulous. Quite fabulous. She didn’t want to admit that, but it was true.
She could still taste it, still feel it. It had been a very special kiss indeed, and she was quite astonished. She had never thought there could be anything like that between her and Kelly.
None the less, it must go no further. She did not need any more man trouble, and Kelly was always, always, trouble. Also, she valued their friendship a great deal, and romance — or perhaps she really meant sex — was, in Karen’s experience, all too often inclined to render friendship dead in the water.
‘There’s only one thing for it, Sophe,’ she muttered to the still-purring cat. ‘Your Uncle Kelly and I just have to forget all about that little incident and go back to exactly the way we were before.’
Fifteen
Kelly’s whole body was trembling as he drove home. Like Karen, he had found their kiss very special. It had woken up his senses again. He had always found Karen attractive, but in an abstract kind of way, and it had simply never occurred to him before that their relationship could ever become anything other than it was. And now, like Karen, he believed that what had happened between them had been very wrong, particularly at this time. The fact that he had so actively enjoyed kissing Karen, just one day after he had buried his partner, made him feel quite sick. In effect, what he had done was little more than to make a clumsy pass at Karen Meadows, quite possibly destroying a friendship he cherished. And then there was their professional association. Had he destroyed that too?
Normally, even at a difficult time like this when he was coping with grief, he would be feeling elated to be on the threshold of an investigation like the Hangridge one. And, indeed, he had been truly excited by the information which Karen had handed him on a plate. It was, after all, potential dynamite. This was the kind of story the old hack in him lived for. And now he had spoilt it all. Not only had he killed the thrill of it for himself, but also, for all he knew, Karen Meadows might not even be prepared to continue with the information-sharing scheme she had presented to him. At the very least she must consider him dangerously unstable, he reflected.
He muttered a few expletives as he parked the MG. Why was he such a fool? But then, perhaps he had always been dangerously unstable.
The house looked particularly dark and empty that night. He hurried to unlock the door, get inside and switch on the lights. It was almost as cold in the house as it had been outside.