Bumping Uglies

Chapter Nineteen

Later, with darkness falling around us like an embrace, Sophie and I lay in the hayloft talking.

Sharing a bed, mind you, but just talking.

It seemed that I was beginning to make a habit of that combination.

Ty had declined my offer to bunk-down in the recently cleaned bedroom of the farmhouse. He had insisted on returning to the small woodland camp he had apparently set up in the trees that ran alongside the stream at the edge of the property.

I was trying to explain to Sophie why Ty would prefer to sleep on a roll mat beneath a tarpaulin strung between two trees than in a bed. I had tried to convince her that that this scenario was emblematic of Tyrone Edge and the essence of his being. It was not, in and of itself, indicative of any particular psychopathy.

Ty exists much closer to the earth than the rest of us. He is a natural woodsman, something of a recluse, but a force of nature. In his past he spent a period of time training British Special Forces on wilderness survival and escape and evasion from capture. This was in spite of being a civilian.

Well, he claimed to be a civilian, but he was certainly well connected to the military and was pretty evasive whenever I asked him about where he had been or what he had been doing. I'd seen him handle a weapon to great effect and I suspected that he still served the Government in some capacity. But what that could be, or how official it was, I hadn't the first idea.

Ty's uncle Morgan had served King and Country as a spy of sorts in the Special Operations Executive during World War II, and I sometimes wondered to what extent Ty had made that the family business.

Ty Edge was also an extremely resourceful guy who I knew to be capable of great violence when defending his own particular sense of justice and right. His period of absence from the farm stemmed from one such misadventure that I tried hard to blank from my memory. The outcome brought him firmly to the attention of Her Majesty's Constabulary as a result of permanently ending the careers of a couple of very unsavoury characters.

He was the perfect person to have by your side in case of trouble, even if his eccentricities made for a somewhat quirky relationship.

His return suggested that the situation with his wanted status was now ameliorated to some degree, or that he deemed my call to the emergency number took precedence to any risk he might be facing with the law.

In any case, as I tried to explain all, or some, of this cogently to Sophie, I found myself increasingly-glad of his return. Just having him out there, somewhere, in the darkness, made me feel much safer.

I could tell that Sophie was not so sure. Which placed the pair of us in a position of great unsurety. For my part, I was trying to fathom what I felt for Sophie, and what she felt for me. We had shared a bed, but nothing more, for two nights. I really wanted a little separation to sort it all out in my mind, but she had trumped that with an appeal to my protective side by saying that she did not want to be alone.

Above it all, I was having a hard time shaking the feeling that something about her just was not right. Her relationship with Richard didn't ring true, and her apparent pursuit of closeness to me also felt off in some way that I just could not place.

All-in-all, it made for a pretty sleepless night, and not in the good way.

*

"You know Satch," Ty began, gently adjusting the focus dial on his binoculars, "this is not going to be as easy as you think it is."

This was an ominous pronouncement because I was assuming getting Elira out of the Tunnel of Love was going to be harder than retrieving a greased belt from a bucket of cobras. I grunted in response.