Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George Read Free Book Online Page B

been waiting anxiously to see how things were going to develop, and there was no way he could have assessed this from his mother’s laptop. Absolutely no way.
    Toy4You had finally made the proposition that Tim had been angling for. He read it over and thought for a while. It was little enough to ask for what Tim expected to get in return, so he typed the message he’d been waiting to type these many weeks of playing Toy4You along.
    Yeah, but if I do it, I need something in return.
    He hit send and couldn’t help smiling. He knew exactly what he wanted in exchange for the favour that was being asked of him.
    LAKE WINDERMERE
CUMBRIA
    Ian Cresswell had cooled off long before he reached the lake, as reaching the lake necessitated a twenty-minute drive. But the cooling off only applied to Ian’s need to explode. The feelings beneath that need had not changed, and betrayal was first among them.
    Our situations are different
didn’t appease Ian any longer. It had been fine at first. He’d been so besotted with Kav that the fact that the younger man might not himself do what he’d successfully demanded of Ian had barely registered in Ian’s mind. It had been enough to walk out of the house in the company of Kaveh Mehran. It had been enough to leave behind his wife and his children in order—he declared to himself, to Kaveh, and to
them
, for God’s sake—to finally and openly be who he was. No more slithering off to Lancaster, no more nameless groping and nameless fucking and feeling the momentary relief of taking part in an act that was, for once, not such a miserable
chore
. He’d done that for years in the belief that protecting others from what he’d admitted to himself when it was too late to do anything about it was more important than owning himself as he knew now he was meant to be owned. Kaveh had taught him that. Kaveh had said, “It’s them or it’s me,” and had knocked on the door and walked into the house and said, “Do you tell them or do I tell them, Ian?” and instead of saying
Who the hell are you and what’re
you doing here?
Ian had heard himself make the declaration and out he’d walked, leaving Niamh to explain to the kids if she cared to explain, and he wondered now what the hell he’d been thinking, what sort of madness had overcomehim, whether he had actually been suffering from a mental disease of one kind or another.
    He wondered this not because he didn’t love Kaveh Mehran and still wanted him in a manner that felt like a form of insane obsession. He wondered it because he hadn’t stopped to consider what that moment had done to them all. And he wondered it because he hadn’t stopped to consider what it might mean if Kaveh didn’t do the same for Ian as Ian had done for him.
    To Ian, Kaveh’s making the declaration seemed simple enough and far less damaging than what Ian had done. Oh, he understood that Kav’s parents were foreigners, but they were foreigners in culture and religion only. They’d lived in Manchester for more than a decade so they were hardly adrift in an ethnic sea of which they had no understanding. It had been more than a year now that they’d lived together—he and Kaveh—and it was time for Kaveh to speak the truth about what he and Ian Cresswell were to each other. The fact that Kaveh could not embrace that simple fact and share it with his parents…The unfairness of it all made Ian rail.
    That need to rail was what he wanted to get out of his system. For he well knew that railing would accomplish exactly nothing.
    The gates stood open at Ireleth Hall when he arrived, which generally meant that someone was visiting. Ian didn’t want to see that someone or anyone else, however, so instead of heading towards the medieval house that loomed above the lake, he took a side route that led directly down to the water and to the stone boathouse built on its shore.
    Here he kept his scull. It was sleek, low in the water, tricky to climb into from the stone dock