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Strike paused in his deliberations, his pen hovering over the file spread in front of him, and sighed. Robin looked up from her desk.
“What?”
Strike glared at the paper under his hand, tapping his pen. “Do you think—?” He shook his head. “Never mind.”
Intrigued, Robin sat back, pushing the laptop away a little, stretching her back. She must learn not to hunch over the keyboard, she admonished herself. “No, go on.”
“Well…” Strike leaned back too, automatically reaching for his Benson & Hedges. “What if there’s more to Mr Money’s assistant than meets the eye? She could be in on all of it.”
“Bronwyn? She’s so mousy, she wouldn’t say boo to a goose!” Robin retorted, laughing.
“Exactly. Perfect cover,” Strike replied, extracting a cigarette from the packet. “Who would suspect timid Bronwyn, who jumps at her own shadow and trembles every time we ask her a question?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” Robin mused.
Strike heaved himself out of his chair, cigarette in one hand and lighter in the other. “Christ, it’s gone dark,” he remarked, reaching for the windowsill and pulling himself across to peer out.
“I’ll put the kettle on,” Robin replied, standing too. “The light is weird. Looks like it might snow.”
“It already is. Absolutely chucking it down.” Strike lit the cigarette and pushed the window open, grateful to Robin for absenting herself and pulling the door to behind her. Since they’d started sharing the office, he’d always gone down to the street or up to his flat to smoke, but he’d slipped on ice yesterday and wrenched his knee badly. It was so swollen, he could barely fit it into the cuff of his prosthesis. Robin had, with her usual tact, not mentioned his sudden pronounced limp, but had somehow made every round of tea before he’d even noticed he was thirsty, and produced sandwiches from her bag at lunch time just as he was wondering if he could face an agonising hobble to the Tesco down the road.
He drew on his cigarette and gazed out at the thickly falling snow, marvelling at the cushioned hush it lent to the air. London never rested, but these last few days before Christmas were particularly chaotic; now, with the snow falling, the street three storeys below seemed eerily distant and quiet.
He’d enjoyed these last couple of days, more than he ought to admit. Pat had asked to take all of Christmas week off to visit her niece in Scotland, and the partners had elected to close the agency for the whole week. Strike had decided to use the time to go over their current files and strip them back, re-examine all the evidence, see if any new ideas came to light. He’d assumed Robin would head to Masham, but here she still was, turning up every day with sandwiches and different flavours of hot chocolate, working away quietly next to him. He wondered when she would be heading north. She was cutting it very fine, now, to be there in time for Christmas. Why hadn’t he just asked her?
Because he didn’t want to know the answer. He wanted to stay here, working together in cosy companionship, few words passing between them, comfortable. Once she was gone, he would have to make a decision about Christmas Day, answer Ilsa’s increasingly insistent texts demanding to know whether he was joining them for dinner. He didn’t particularly relish the idea of another Christmas alone, but he didn’t really want to flog to Wandsworth either. He was a little afraid this Christmas might carry an air of the maudlin chez Herbert, now that it seemed a family of their own was definitely out of the question. He really must drag Nick out for a beer in the new year and ask him about it, offer a friendly ear. So much time had passed.
“Don’t worry, it’s not salted caramel,” Robin said cheerfully, backing into the room (Strike removed his gaze hurriedly from the snug fit of her jeans and turned back to look again at the snow) bearing two mugs of steaming hot chocolate. “Mint choc chip, I’ve gone a bit left field today.”
“That’s an ice cream flavour,” Strike told her, grinning and flicking his cigarette end out into the snow where it vanished into the swirling flakes. “Not a hot chocolate flavour.”
“Leave it out on the windowsill long enough and it will be,” she answered, quick as a whip, and he chuckled as he pulled the window closed again. He leaned across to grab the edge of his desk to swing himself back to his chair while Robin set his drink down next to his file and paused, waiting till he was settled.
“What’s up?” he asked her, reaching to cup his cold hands around the warm mug.
Robin took a breath. “It’s going to snow all night,” she said. “So says the Met Office.”
Strike frowned. “You should go, before it gets any worse. You don’t want to risk not being able to get to Masham.”
“I’m not going,” Robin replied, turning away.
Ignoring the lurch of his heart as being irrelevant to the proceedings at hand, Strike nevertheless took a moment to steady his voice. “Why not? You’re not afraid of a little snow?”
Robin laughed lightly, too lightly. “In my tank? Of course not. That Land Rover would get me home across Siberia if it had to.” She paused again. “No,” she went on carefully. “I already told them I wasn’t coming.”
“How come?”
She shrugged. “Stephen and his family are staying again. Annabel is toddling now, and still not sleeping through apparently, and Jenny is pregnant again, and Mum’s already told me that Matthew and Sarah had a little boy, and have I met anyone nice yet, and—” She stopped again and sighed, frustrated. “She hasn’t said it in so many words, but I know what she means. ‘You’re thirty now, Robin, time to stop messing about with this career nonsense and start producing babies.’”
Strike laughed. “Has she met you?”
Robin cast him a sideways grin. “See? You know how ridiculous that is. But Mum doesn’t. For her generation, having babies was a woman’s greatest calling.”
“But anyway,” she went on. “That’s not why I mentioned the snow.”
“Oh?”
Robin hesitated, looking at him, and her gaze flickered down to his leg, extended out next to his desk because it hurt to bend it.
“It’s snowing. A lot. On top of yesterday’s ice.”
“They’ll have gritted.”
“Yes, but it’s still treacherous.”
Strike laughed, trying to deflect the conversation that he feared was heading where it was obviously heading. Her friendship, he valued. Her pity, not so much. “Nobody gets snowed in in London, Robin. It’s too warm and slushy.”
“They do if they’re injured and shouldn’t risk falling in it,” Robin retorted, and closed her eyes briefly. There. It was out.
“I don’t need to go out.” His tone was cool, and she knew he’d sensed the line she’d crossed and didn’t like it.
“But you will eventually. The thing is—” Robin hurried on, wishing she’d led with this part. She’d got the conversation backwards, and now he didn’t look at all amenable to her idea. “—I was going to invite you over for Christmas dinner,” she finished in a rush.
Strike blinked at her. This, he hadn’t expected. Hadn’t expected any of this conversation, in fact. “Um, okay.”
“Yes, you see, Max is away. Not that that makes it more— I mean, I wasn’t saying I wanted us to be alone— Well, we would be alone, but what I mean is, I didn’t want to be alone-alone, and I thought if you were alone and I was alone, then you could come for Christmas dinner and we could be alone…together.”
Never has a more bungled, garbled invitation been issued in the history of invitations, Robin thought, knowing her cheeks were scarlet and wishing Strike had left the window open. He was staring at her with a mixture of caution and amusement, and hot, embarrassed sweat began to dampen her armpits.
“Alone…together,” he repeated slowly.
“As friends,” she clarified hurriedly, wondering if there was any way she could make this moment any more awkward. “Only, with the snow, and it’s supposed to keep going, you see, I wondered if it would be easier if I brought Christmas dinner here.”
Strike was grinning at her now, making her flush deeper. “I think I could probably manage to limp down the stairs and into a taxi.”
“Of course.” Robin nodded vigorously. “Yes, of course. But what about now?”
“You want me to come now?” Strike’s eyebrows were in danger of disappearing into the curls tumbling down onto his forehead.
“No,” Robin replied, her fluster increasing. “I mean, what are you going to do about dinner now? With the weather like that?” She waved a vague arm at the window and hoped there wasn’t a sweat patch on her top.
“I’ll have something upstairs,” he replied dismissively.
“Or I could…fetch us a curry,” Robin suggested. “And anything else you need while I’m there,” she added casually, hoping he wouldn’t suspect that the curry idea had been concocted so that she could offer to shop for him.
Strike hesitated. “Well,” he said slowly, scanning the sentence ahead of him and hoping he wasn’t taking advantage of her good nature, “I’ll admit I wasn’t looking forward to going out for cigarettes and some more beers.”
“There you go, then,” Robin said with palpable relief. “I’ll go and get us a curry and any shopping you need, and tomorrow night you’ll have leftover curry, and then on Christmas Day you can come to me and I’ll cook.”
His warm grin made her blush all over again. “I’d like that.” Then he chuckled. “I’ve never heard of this ‘leftover curry’ of which you speak, though.”
Robin laughed, glad the moment was easing. “I’ll buy extra.”
Strike frowned a little. “You shouldn’t be fetching my shopping though. You’re not my PA.”
“No indeed,” she retorted. “But I’m not offering as your PA, I’m offering as your friend.” She turned away briskly. “Let me start wrapping up while you make a list. I might as well get going before the weather gets any worse.”
Smiling, realising he’d been somehow manoeuvred but that the matter was settled, Strike reached for a piece of scrap paper.
~~~~~
“Bloody hell,” Robin muttered, stamping snow off her shoes while Strike divested her of various bags and hid his smile at her Yorkshire vowels. “It’s way worse than I thought out there. I know you said nobody gets snowed in in London…”
“We’ll get you a taxi later,” Strike replied. “The Tube will be rammed, and the buses will struggle.”
“Yeah.” Robin shrugged off her coat and pulled off her beanie hat, shaking her head to loosen her hair and scattering flakes that melted into the warm office air and dripped to the carpet. She turned to hang up her coat, missing the way Strike’s eyes slid, unbidden, across her pink cheeks and sparkling lashes. She’d never looked so beautiful, and he forced himself to turn away and give his attention to the bags he’d piled on Pat’s desk. Doom Bar, cigarettes, milk, bread, bacon, cheese, just as he’d asked for. And a bag of delicious-smelling foil cartons of curry.
He’d half wondered about inviting her up to his flat. Was reciprocation required, if he was going to her house for dinner again? But there was more space down here, and, well. Perhaps it was too forward. So he’d limped, slowly and painfully, up the stairs to fetch his whisky bottle. For reasons he didn’t want to examine too closely, but he suspected had to do with Robin’s fluster over the Christmas dinner invitation, he’d also changed his shirt.
The familiar routine of setting out a curry together dissipated any awkwardness that might have lingered into the evening, and as always the talk slid back to their cases. It could have been any other curry night, with Strike sat on the sofa and Robin in Pat’s chair, eating a delicious dinner and sipping whisky from tumblers.
It wasn’t any other night, though. The snow fell thickly past the windows, and the radio that Strike had switched to BBC London to catch the updated forecast repeatedly interrupted its programming to warn of increasing numbers of road blockages and reduced bus services. Finally Robin began scrolling through her phone, and, watching her face, Strike knew what she was about to tell him.
“I can’t get a taxi,” she eventually admitted, after a lot of anxious thumbing of the screen. Strike nodded. He’d figured as much.
“Still, it’s only a few miles—”
“You’re not walking,” he told her gruffly.
Robin opened her mouth as though to protest, and then nodded. It was madness to even attempt it in this weather.
“Have you got a spare blanket? I can sleep on the sofa.”
Strike nodded, privately wondering how to manoeuvre things so that she could take his bed, and wondering where the camp bed was these days. In the cupboard on the landing, or under his bed upstairs? No matter. He would find it when he needed to. Right now he was enjoying his evening, sipping whisky, his stomach full of good curry and his best mate sat right here, the delightful offer of a Christmas Day together hovering before them.
The latest forecast over, the radio switched back to Christmas tunes, but the songs had grown less jaunty and more mellow as the hour grew later. Snow still fell, the office was dimly lit by the corner lamp and the one on Pat’s desk, the whisky was warming him through to his core, and suddenly Strike was thinking about another whisky-fuelled evening, sat just as they were now, with possibilities in front of them—
And this time Barclay’s in Glasgow, he thought, and a grin crossed his face before he could suppress it.
Robin tilted her head on one side. “What?”
Strike shook his head. “Nothing.”
“No, go on, what?”
Go on. The flickering devil was back on his shoulder again. Best mates, he thought. But…
He thought about that night so many months ago when he’d accidentally almost broken Robin’s nose, and their new-found close friendship and decision to be more open with each other. He’d often wondered since if her thoughts had begun to turn the way his had before Barclay had interrupted them. He thought about the Ritz, about her curves in that dress and her lips against his cheek. He thought about his birthday, and another curry and whisky night just like this one, when again he’d considered, for a mad moment, taking their friendship a step further, a step into more-than-friends, and again had backed away. How many times was he going to back away?
She was still waiting for his answer. Strike took a fortifying swig of whisky, and the grin tugged at his mouth again. “I was just thinking that Barclay’s a long way away this time,” he said slowly, watching her.
Robin stared at him, going very still, and for a moment Strike’s stomach lurched at the thought that he had got this so very wrong…and then she smiled.
“He is indeed,” she replied, and stood, picking up her whisky tumbler and moving towards him. Strike shifted his bulk along the cushions, giving her as much room as he could, and half turned as she sat next to him, facing him sideways on the sofa, her foot resting on the cushion between them and her arm wrapped around her leg. Close, but with a barrier.
This far, but no further, he thought, and was surprised by the strength of the disappointment that pierced him. He had so long assumed that their attraction was mutual - and not without good reason - that it somehow had stopped occurring to him that a gentle attempt to cross the boundaries of their friendship might not be welcomed.
“Do you know what I remember most about that night?” Robin asked him, serious suddenly, her blue-grey eyes on his, and Strike felt a powerful wave of fondness for his partner wash over him. She was right in her body language. They were friends, a relationship he valued so highly, and anything more would jeopardise—
“Strike?” She prompted him for an answer, and her use of his last name send a frisson of something through him that he’d always tried not to analyse. He liked it. More than he should.
“The black eyes? The nosebleed? That I was an utter tit?”
She grinned. “All of the above, but I was thinking of something else.”
He wasn’t going to get this wrong again. “Go on.”
“That we agreed we would try talking. Using words.”
Strike frowned. “I have been. At least I thought so. I told you I was worried about Ted going into his first winter without Joan, and—”
“I didn’t mean that,” Robin interrupted him. “Well, I did at the time, that’s exactly what I meant. Proper friends who discuss stuff instead of bottling things up. I appreciated you cheering me up when Mum rang to tell me Sarah had had the baby. But right now, I mean about that night.”
Strike’s brows knitted. “Explain.”
Robin took a deep breath, her eyes boring into his. “What would have happened if Sam hadn’t walked in that night?”
Strike didn’t pretend not to understand her. He hesitated, searching for the truth. Would he have taken the leap?
“Probably nothing,” he said, slowly, honestly.
She was still gazing steadily at him, but not in a predatory way. Strike had a fleeting memory of Charlotte watching him during such conversations, trying to catch him out, looking for the choice of word to take offence at, the turn of phrase to twist. This was the opposite of that. Robin was seeking to understand.
“But you thought about it.”
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Robin—”
“I’m not fishing, honestly. Was it just because we were having a bonding moment? Because of the whisky? Because I was…there, and female?”
“No!” This last, he rejected hotly. “It wasn’t about availability.” He paused, and Robin waited.
Honesty, then. Okay. “It was a bit about the bonding,” he said slowly. “Maybe, I guess, a bit the whisky. But only because—”
Was he really going to say it? Apparently he was.
“—because I do fancy you, even though a lot of the time I wish I didn’t, and the whisky makes it harder to pretend I don’t.”
There was a pause which was just long enough for Strike to realise how terrible that sounded and to experience the lurch of a fear he’d thought long past him in this particular relationship, fear that he’d upset her and that now she would be hurt and angry, and he would have to apologise and placate—
But this was Robin, and she laughed. “Well, now I feel like Elizabeth Bennet,” she said, chuckling. “You wait ages for the distant, reserved guy to admit to a feeling, and when he finally does, he tells you he fervently wishes he didn’t feel it!”
Strike laughed too. “I hope my reasons are a little more noble than Mr Darcy’s.”
“And they are…?”
Strike shrugged again. “I like you,” he said simply. “You’re my best mate, like I said. I get along with you, we work well together, we have shared goals for the agency. I don’t want to lose any of that. So, yeah, life would be a lot easier if I wasn’t also attracted to you.”
Robin took a sip of her whisky, a smile hovering around her mouth. “Most inconvenient,” she murmured.
Well, if she was going to push the boundaries, lay everything out in the open, make him expose his hidden feelings…
“Waiting for the reserved guy to admit to a feeling?”
Her cheeks bloomed with colour. “I thought about it, too, that night,” she replied. “But I definitely wouldn’t have said anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” She trailed off, thinking, her eyes going unfocused for a moment. “For the same reasons as you. The agency, the friendship, the way it all just…works.” She pulled her gaze back to his, and Strike saw a flash of fear in her eyes as she took a keep breath. “And because it’s more than just attraction, for me.”
Strike stared at her, his mouth dry. “More than—?”
“I mean,” Robin began slowly. “If we’re mates, but you quite fancy me, and you were thinking that maybe we could, er—” she took another breath, her cheeks redder “—sleep together and that would be that, and we’d go back to being just friends after, well…” Her voice grew soft. “I can’t do that.”
Strike swallowed. “I don’t think I can, either,” he said quietly.
“So…” Robin gazed at him, her eyes bright with, he feared, the beginnings of tears.
“So.” Strike hesitated, wondering what the right move was. Wondering if the move he wanted to make and the wise move were one and the same, or in fact polar opposites.
Fuck it. Hadn’t they, by the very having of this conversation, already changed their relationship irreparably? Could they still be simply best mates, when he’d told her he fancied her and she’d said she felt even more, and he’d agreed he did too?
‘So,” he murmured again, and gently took her whisky glass from her, leaning to set it and his own on the floor. As he turned back, Robin was already angling her body more, her foot sliding off the sofa between them, her knee dropping to rest on his lap.
The moment hung, incandescent, as they gazed at one another, and he could feel her thigh tremble against his; too long, and delicious anticipation would tip into an awkward pause. He leaned forward and kissed her.
Kissing Strike was— Robin hadn’t often allowed herself to imagine it. She’d dreamed it, once or twice, and been unable to look him in the eye the next morning. But her dreams had not done him justice. She’d somehow expected him to be more forceful, his very size and masculinity making her subconscious assume he’d take control of the situation.
Instead he was gentle, tender, unhurried. His lips softer against hers than she had expected. His hand sliding into her hair to gently explore and stroke the soft tresses rather than to pull her closer. His tongue, when it finally touched hers, a gentle invitation rather than an insistent intrusion.
Heat bloomed in her belly, spiralling outwards, sending tingles through every part of her. Somehow her hand was on his cheek, caressing stubble that was softer than she’d imagined, her fingers sliding to the nape of his neck to toy with the curls there, making him growl and press closer, and then they were kissing passionately.
Heavy, thundering silence reigned in the dim office for a few minutes until Strike, distantly aware that he didn’t want to push Robin further than she wanted to go, pulled back gently and rested his forehead on hers. They were both breathing hard. Slowly Robin’s eyes drifted open, her gaze stormy and fierce, and he knew in that moment as desire lurched through him that not dragging her upstairs to his bed was going to take every ounce of his self control.
“This is normally where I would take a large step back and give the lady some space to think about the next move,” he murmured, his voice a little hoarse. “But seeing as neither of us can go anywhere…”
Robin’s hand slid from his hair down to his neck, the warmth of her fingers tantalising, sending shudders of lust through his large frame. He reached up and captured her hand in his big one, tangling their fingers together and bringing their hands down to rest on his leg. Her eyes, huge and brimming with emotion, searched his.
“We could…go upstairs and discuss what we were both thinking about on the night you nearly knocked me out,” she said softly.
Strike ignored his libido screaming at him to agree and smiled gently. “I was going to ask you to my bed,” he said with a rueful grin. “And then I was going to dig out the camp bed.”
Robin dipped her head. “You don’t need to be so chivalrous,” she said, grinning. “After all, as my mother keeps pointing out, I am thirty now.”
Strike gazed at her. “Are you sure?”
Robin nodded. “Are you unsure?”
Behind them, the radio pipped the hour. Strike glanced at it and grinned. “I am not in the least bit unsure,” he replied. “And Happy Christmas Eve, Robin Ellacott.”
“Happy Christmas Eve to you too, Cormoran Strike,” she replied, grinning too. “Am I going to have to convince you?”
The wicked look he gave her made her stomach lurch powerfully. “Maybe.”
“Okay,” Robin murmured, and kissed him.