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    Third Solstice
    Third Solstice
    Third Solstice
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    Third Solstice

    By Harper Fox

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    About this ebook

    (Book 6 in the Tyack & Frayne Mystery Series)
    Gideon’s managed to swing a few festive days off, and he and Lee are looking forward to celebrating their little girl’s first birthday. But duty calls, and Gideon is too good an officer to ignore the summons. He finds himself on the streets of Penzance, helping police the midwinter Montol celebrations.
    It’s his third winter solstice with Lee, and disturbance, danger and magic are in the air. His daughter is beginning to show some remarkable gifts, and not all the family can cope with them. As the Montol festivities reach their fiery heights, will Lee and Gideon find a way to keep those they love best on the right side of the solstice gate?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarper Fox
    Release dateDec 18, 2015
    ISBN9781910224953
    Third Solstice
    Author

    Harper Fox

    Harper Fox is the author of many critically acclaimed M/M Romance novels, including Stonewall Book Award-nominated Scrap Metal and Brothers Of The Wild North Sea, Publishers Weekly Best Book 2013. Her novels and novellas are powerfully sensual, with a dynamic of strongly developed characters finding love and a forever future – after an appropriate degree of turmoil. She loves to show the romance implicit in everyday life, and she writes a sharp action scene too.

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      Book preview

      Third Solstice - Harper Fox

      Third Solstice

      Harper Fox

      Copyright Harper Fox 2015

      Published by FoxTales at Smashwords

      Third Solstice

      Copyright © December 2015 by Harper Fox

      Cover art by Harper Fox

      Cover photo licensed through Shutterstock

      All rights reserved

      No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from FoxTales.

      FoxTales

      www.harperfox.net

      harperfox777@yahoo.co.uk

      This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

      Third Solstice

      Harper Fox

      Table of Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter One

      Going home for Christmas. A mantra for this time of year, a question, a promise. Are you going home for Christmas? Weary office workers, hanging up the phone for the last time. Kids fresh from university, holding down a first London job, lonely in bedsits and remembering once-despised villages and towns: I’m out of here. Going home for Christmas.

      Heartbreak to the homeless. Salt in the wounds of broken families. Bewildering, drug-like excitement to overstimulated kids, a vortex of tinsel and glitter. If you could feel it all—if you, one ordinary man, could walk the city streets and know about all of it—you’d drown. You’d have to make for higher ground. You’d have to build a wall.

      An ordinary man, going home for Christmas. The city streets are quiet to him now. Even the babbling, clattering Tube carriage, quiet as a church. The underground garage where he’s left his car resounds with engines and slammed doors only, not the dreams and schemes and thousand daily niggles of drivers and passengers, amplified and bouncing off the concrete. Then the westbound roads.

      Silence on the windswept brow of Lance Hill, but it’s always quiet here. Not many people know the moortop route to Dark. He stops the car in a layby and gets out.

      It’s all just a season of lights, isn’t it? Lights are marking Bodmin Moor like crystalline snail-trails tonight, villages clustering round their green centre or winding with the path of their river or main road. There’s a promise of frost in the air. The ordinary man—a family man now—celebrates Christmas with good heart, but he prefers his solstice, the day made doubly sacred by his daughter’s birthday.

      He can just see the shimmer of Dark on the horizon. Still half an hour away, but maybe he’ll get there in time to help put her to bed. For Lee, journey’s end isn’t any of the festivals of light. It’s Gideon and Tamsyn, now and forever.

      Going home for Christmas, Lee?

      No. Just going home.

      ***

      Gid and the baby agreed about most things, but electronic toys in bathwater wasn’t one of them. Gently he removed the talking bear from the starfishing little hands and laid it on the floor behind him. There. You can have him back when we’re finished.

      Tamsyn, too placid to raise a fuss, smacked him in the eye with a fistful of suds instead. Her aim was good. She could sit up unaided now, so he let go of her long enough to grab a flannel. Ow, you little blighter. What’s Lee gonna say when he gets home and finds out I let you go down the plughole?

      She let loose a shriek of laughter at the prospect and slapped the surface of the water with her palms, soaking Gideon again. Pug’ole, she said, with eerie distinctness, then added solemnly, Eee.

      Yes. Lee. He’ll be back any minute, and I promised to have you in bed by seven.

      Blighter.

      Oh, shi-... Crikey. Don’t you pick up any more bad language from me. His sweet-faced infant had transformed overnight into a word-absorbing sponge, startling Ma Frayne and Ezekiel with a crisply-enunciated bugger over the lunch table. Gideon rolled his shirt sleeves higher and went back into the fray. Right. Let me have a go at that potato crop growing behind your ears.

      Bear.

      Not yet, sweetheart. As soon as you’re...

      He sat back on his heels, staring. The toy was in her hands again. Had somebody bought her a second one? The various members of her fan club—Ma, Zeke, Sarah and Lorna Kemp, her great-uncle Jago and Mrs Ivey—often doubled up on gifts in their anxiety to get her the latest thing. She’d have been spoiled rotten but for her own imperturbable good nature and the gentle discipline of her home. Bear.

      Gideon took it from her again. No. No bear in the bath, Tamsie. Dangerous.

      It was just as well the various thugs and villains he came across in the course of his daily duties couldn’t exert her charm. Even gentle discipline was hard to apply. Something throbbed at the back of his skull, first warning of a headache or a change in the weather. In the corner of the bathroom, Isolde sat up restlessly and began to growl. Give me a break, dog, Gideon said, perching the bear firmly on the edge of the sink. I’m not hurting her. I’m trying to stop her electrocuting herself.

      The growl became a whine. To Gideon’s alarm, his placid old collie—fat and contented, spending her days now sprawled out and farting beside Tamsyn’s cot—lifted her hackles and began to back away. And the toy bear wobbled once on the sink, then sailed straight back into the child’s outstretched hand.

      Gideon clamped his mouth shut. He didn’t want Tamsyn to learn any of the words that would have come out of it at that point. He took a deep breath, shook his head. What did... What did you just do?

      "Bear."

      Yes, I know. An appeal to her generosity would often succeed where an order failed. Sweetheart, can I have the bear for a minute?

      She shoved it at him. Dada.

      Thank you. She was more or less clean, so he scooped her out of the bath and wrapped her in a towel. Right. Let’s put Bear over here on the shelf, and you and I will go and sit on the stool beside Isolde, because... Because I’m about to raise my hackles and start whining myself. Isolde! Hush, stupid. Everything’s all right.

      He sat with the baby on his lap and one soothing hand on the dog’s head. Tamsyn gazed around until she located the toy on the shelf. She reached out, then suddenly looked up at him for permission with a clarity that pierced his heart. Bear now?

      She was smart as a fresh coat of paint. Every day she said or did something that revealed to Gideon how the universe was unfolding for her and within her. Yes, he said unsteadily. That’s a clever girl. There’s no water now, so... you can have your bear.

      She stretched out her hand. Again Gideon felt the throbbing tug deep in his brain. Isolde tucked her tail between her legs, nosed the bathroom door open and fled, and the bear lifted slowly off the shelf.

      Whatever Tamsyn was doing, she wasn’t quite strong enough yet to pull it off. Gravity and reality took over when the toy was halfway across the room. She gave a little wail of disappointment and began to wriggle in Gideon’s arms. All right, he said, as calmly as he could with his heart pounding and ice cubes slithering down his spine. Let’s do it the old-fashioned way. Come on.

      He scooped the toy off the floor, gave it to Tamsyn and helped her pull the string that would make it talk. This was the bear whose porridge was just right—he had two less contented siblings in the little girl’s bedroom—and his high-pitched porridge song was enough to drive a strong man

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