Rafferty (Default Distraction Book 2)

by A. S. Roberts

  ‘They’re ill. Would you believe it?’ In my mind’s eye, I could picture her spare arm waving around as she signalled her distress. She didn’t wait for me to answer her question. ‘Two of my hand-picked chefs have caught a sickness bug. The same chefs I vetted especially for the opening day and night for my biggest contract yet, are bloody ill. What the hell am I going to do now?’

  ‘Oh no! I’m so sorry, Winter.’ I pinched the bridge of my nose again and exhaled before I asked the next question. ‘Is there anyone else you know who could help you do the job at the last minute.’

  ‘What do you think?’ she replied in a slightly sarcastic tone. I didn’t bite, I knew she was worried out of her mind. For a few seconds, the line between us was empty of sound, but the thoughts that surrounded the two of us were so loud they were almost audible. ‘I mean I can pitch in to help, but after that there’s only you,’ she whispered. ‘But I can’t ask. As your friend I won’t ask you to help me… It’s asking too much.’

  My fingertips had started to turn white as I gripped hold of the receiver so tightly my blood couldn’t pump to the ends.

  ‘I…’ I tried to answer her, but my throat had begun to feel dry and tight, my heart rate had increased and I could feel a sheen of sweat already covering my body. A wave of anxiety was flooding through my system. My stomach turned over as the ball of worry unfurled itself inside me and a surge of nausea hit. I knew what I needed to do. To calm myself, I looked down at one of the orders in front of me and when I could focus, I started adding the figures again and again.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  These were tricks I’d taught myself over the years. I just needed to focus on something else and my body would start to return to my control.

  ‘Lauren? Are you still there? You know under any other circumstances I wouldn’t ask you. But, I don’t know what else I’m going to do,’ Winter carried on.

  I knew she needed me, but I still couldn’t answer her. My heart rate was slowing down slightly and I knew I was coming through the other side, but I couldn’t trust my voice to reply. She would hear I was in a mess and her guilt would make the whole situation worse.

  I could still hear Winter talking, but I was no longer focussing on her words as I continued to focus on the maths and the slow calming breaths I was willing my lungs to take. I was thirty-two years old and I needed to let this go, I needed to move on.

  I grabbed at the glass of water to the side of me and sipped a little.

  ‘I need more in the kitchen, I need at least one more capable chef, because…’

  ‘Winter?’ She stopped speaking as a voice interrupted her.

  In the background, I had heard a strong male voice call out Winter’s name. I let the deep voice wash over me and felt tears prick my eyes. It was a voice that I could sometimes make out on the radio, before I moved quickly to turn it off. It was the voice that on my lowest days I deliberately played on a DVD, just so I could cry. It was the voice of a boy I once knew, who had long since turned into a man.

  No more, I’m not doing this anymore.

  ‘Winter.’ I interrupted their conversation, as he had ours.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied immediately.

  ‘I’ll do it.’ The words came out of my mouth without any struggle at all.

  For the past couple of years, I had been doing my best to completely ignore anything that was going on at The Manor. But now it appeared that my ignoring it, keeping myself busy and locked away when necessary, was to no avail.

  I was going to face my heartache head on. I would get through it and then I would walk away with my head held high.

  ‘No, I’m telling you, Lawson, on behalf of us all. We’re not doing any more gigs until the planned tour next year.’ My empty hand was clenched into a fist, apart from my index finger. That was pointing at my reflection in the glass, as I tried to drive my point home.

  I listened to his reasons, shaking my head as once more he tried to convince me otherwise.

  ‘Speak to any of them, if they’ll take your fucking call. They, unlike me, have no emotional tie to you. If they even pick up, the answer will be the same one you’re refusing to listen to now… NO.’

  The man was fucking relentless, but then the heartless bastard was more machine parts than flesh and bone.

  ‘Yeah, you know damn well the new album will be recorded before then, this isn’t our first rodeo, man.’ I shook my head. My tone had taken on an air of sarcasm. I reined it back in and internalised what would have been an extremely loud, pissed off exhale. I placed my once pointed, but now bent index finger into my mouth and bit onto the knuckle, effectively stopping myself from swearing at his dogged refusal to listen to what I had been saying.

  We couldn’t have asked for a better fucking manager. Over the years, he had proved his worth many times. His business brain was phenomenal, as like a fucking tracker dog he sniffed out the next fifteen per cent he could make from us. We had made him into a millionaire. He, in return, had guided the four teenagers he had found playing their alternative rock music to anyone who’d listen in a seedy dive on the outskirts of Vegas, into fame and more money than we’d ever dreamt of. But as a person he was an A+ rated arsehole, whose family were just accessories he paraded out now and again. The fact he was my ex father-in-law and my son Flint’s grandfather didn’t help matters. Lawson looked after our PR, contracts and staff, but he didn’t give a flying fuck what sort of lives we had or if we had any at all. As long as we turned out an album a year and were on stage at the required place and time, the fact we’d turned into addicts and lost people along the way didn’t even deserve a second thought from him. His only concern was earning more and more money.

  With the four of us now singing from the same hymn sheet, he had for the past few years, struggled to deal with the fact that although he was still our manager, we were now in charge of our lives. While we had been happy to hand them over to him for the previous fifteen years while we lived in a catatonic stupor, since Luke’s wife Cerise had died, we’d taken a step back to see what we’d become. What we had found had shocked us to the core. We had two children between the four of us and there was no fucking way the drug and alcohol dependant fuck ups we had morphed into as we got high on fame, were going to be able to give them the life they deserved.

  Hell, we were in our mid-thirties and we had no fucking life either. Apart from when we were on the stage in front of thousands of our fans playing our music, we were the empty, numb vessels we had created. We had money, sure, but inside and for all different reasons we were effectively fucking dead.

  Three years ago, after Cerise died from a heroin overdose, we’d finally come to our senses, thank Christ. It was then that I knew right where we all needed to be. So slowly, as we helped Luke grieve for his beautiful wife and care for his eighteen-month-old daughter, we’d come up with a plan.

  Now we were all here, back in the place I’d been born, and here I was staring out of my newly renovated, stone-columned bedroom window, looking out onto the snow-covered grounds of The Manor House I had as a kid regularly wandered into. This place had been my sanctuary as a young boy, as I scrumped from the fruit trees and kept away from my demanding father.

  My refuge later, as a teenager, had been her and our young love. Her touch, trusting smile and amber eyes had fed my soul, and kept the pressure in my life contained. We had shared our hopes, dreams and passion. Lauren and I knew each other inside out and the further I pulled away from the demands of my family, the closer we’d become, until eventually I pushed her away too.

  I blinked away my memories, but almost on instinct I placed an open palm onto the pane of glass in front of me, as I tried to touch the beauty of the countryside around our hotel. I knew what I was doing, through the glass I was trying to absorb what Lauren and I once were. I shook my head and heard myself exhale loudly as I tried hard to dislodge the thoughts in my head. My open palm curled up instantly into a tight fist as I mentally tried to shut down. A
nger fuelled my system, but I wasn’t exactly sure what the driving force was. Coming back to live here was one hundred per cent my idea, it wasn’t as if I’d been out voted and made to come. But feelings that I’d long ago successfully pushed to one side were consuming me. I knew inside that this new venture was fucking paramount to our survival, not as a band but as actual functional human beings. But I’d made so many poor fucking decisions before, perhaps I was walking into another one?

  How is she?

  Does she still think of me?

  What the fuck am I going to do if she doesn’t even want to look at me?

  Those questions and others had been going around my head on fucking repeat since we’d all arrived four days ago. The confusion inside my head was submerging me, taking me under and making my heart pound out of my chest with all the what ifs. I lifted my hand and pushed the longer strands of my black hair off my face and back to where they were supposed to go.

  And still Lawson went fucking on, chewing my ear off with his selfish reasoning. His voice in my ear and the turmoil inside me as my heart and head demanded to be heard, were stoking the embers of my foul temper. I couldn’t shout and scream at myself, God knows I’d tried it many fucking times before.

  I was going to vent my spleen and his endless talk was killing the buzz I had from being home.

  ‘THAT. IS. FUCKING. ENOUGH!’ I shouted into the phone.

  Stunned silence answered the words I’d shouted with force into his ear.

  ‘Do you, or do you not, Lawson, want to carry on managing us?’ I carried on speaking through my gritted teeth, while he was too shocked to voice his retort.

  ‘Yes.’ His answer came back on the very next beat.

  ‘Then do it, carry on sorting out what needs to be done. Then we can carry on here knowing you’ve got it all in hand. Brody is halfway through writing the album already, it’s a done deal. Now, answer the question I phoned to ask you in the first place. Did Flint make the plane an hour ago at McCarran?’

  ‘Yes, I put him on myself.’ I closed my eyes and pictured my stroppy, fourteen-year-old mirror image sitting in his first-class seat, pissed off with the world at leaving his friends and having to come to the UK to be with the father he hated.

  I smiled at the thought and my anger fell away.

  ‘Great, well nice to speak to you, Lawson. We’ll speak soon, yeah?’

  He said his goodbyes, but I’d already switched off. There were only two people in the world who could do that to me, our manager and his spoilt daughter, my ex, Ashley.

  As the room fell into silence, I chucked my phone onto the large bed that dominated my room. I watched the phone bounce on the charcoal coloured covers and I threaded my fingers together and flexed them forward, listening to the click each knuckle made. I continued to release pressure by rolling my shoulders back and clicking my neck, alleviating some of the compulsory pressure that talking to him had forced into my muscles.

  ‘Uncle Riff,’ came a high-pitched voice from behind me. I smiled to myself as her baby name for me hit my ears. It had become a standing joke that while she could now pronounce everyone else’s name correctly, she still clung on to the name she had labelled me with.

  I immediately stopped what I was doing and turned to grin at the red-haired ball of energy, as she burst through my open doorway. Bending down I positioned myself to receive her up into my arms as she did her trademark leap of faith. It seemed that having a dad and three very protective uncles made her feel like she would never fall or struggle in any way and that was how we wanted it to fucking stay. I held her close to me, inhaled the coconut conditioner that she insisted was used on her hair, to “always smell like Mummy,” and twirled her around a couple of times as I breathed in the joy of life she always carried with her.

  ‘Hi, Bri, sweetheart,’ I replied as I placed a kiss on her forehead. ‘Whatcha up to?’

  ‘Daddy asked Biscuit and me to come and find you.’

  I glanced at the open door, there was no sign of her much-loved puppy.

  ‘Okay, you’ve found me.’ I placed her back down to the floor. ‘Where’s Biscuit gone?’

  ‘He’s in Uncle Cade’s room across the hall, he’s found his toothpaste.’

  ‘Oh, shi…’ I reined it in before the expletive fell out of my mouth. God knows we were trying to improve our language in front of her, but years of cursing were making it hard. I wasn’t sure why we bothered, she already knew most swear words in existence, but she was intelligent enough not to use them.

  So, high five to our parenting skills with that one.

  ‘Uncle RIFF, you nearly said SHIT!’ I closed my eyes and sighed.

  Nice one, arsehole.

  ‘Come on, let’s go and rescue the toothpaste and then you can take me to Daddy, okay?’ I tried to change the subject quickly and smiled at her as she turned and with her long red hair trailing behind her, she tore out of my room.

  ‘Raff?’ I heard behind me.

  ‘I’m in Cade’s bathroom,’ I shouted out.

  The wriggling puppy squirmed around even more under my arm as he heard Luke’s voice and I struggled to hold him, as I continued to try to rinse out the pieces of chewed plastic and the constantly foaming, white bubbles from his mouth. All the while his jaws remained clamped shut on his prize.

  ‘Honestly, I’m not sure that Biscuit is a dog, he’s more like a fucking goat.’ I grinned at Luke as he took the bedraggled, struggling puppy from my arms.

  ‘Leave him to me and Bri, we’ll deal with it. You need to go and see Winter.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I questioned, feeling my eyebrows raise as I answered.

  ‘She’s on the phone trying to sort out a… quote “problem” with the catering. I couldn’t make out what the problem was, but it didn’t sound too good. I thought you’d wanna know before the meeting.’

  ‘Right?’ I shrugged at him and looked down at the watch on the inside of my wrist. We had an hour. Without bothering to change my soaking wet, toothpaste covered T-shirt, I jogged along the corridor that held all our rooms and down the stairs. Eventually, a few corridors later, I came to the hotel’s purpose-built kitchen.

  I pushed open the door, then stopped dead as the aluminium swing door shut silently behind me and watched Winter as she paced from one side of the room to the other. Her heels clicked on the slate tiles as she spoke into her mobile.

  ‘I need more in the kitchen, I need at least one more capable chef, because…’

  ‘Winter?’ I interrupted her and crossed my arms over my chest as I leant my arse onto the shiny worktop behind me. I didn’t need to say any more, I knew my body language was asking all the right questions.

  She spun around to face me and then I started to worry.

  My always immaculately turned out sister had mascara running down her face. The fact she was so upset knocked me for six. I’d only ever seen her like it once before and that was many years ago. She never let anything get to her. Maybe letting her have this job was going to prove to be a mistake after all.

  Three years ago, as we struggled to set our new life plan in motion, Falham Manor had been placed up for sale and even though I hadn’t been home in seventeen years, I knew it was exactly the place I wanted to be. I bought it without thinking twice and for the first time in years, I offered the others an idea that had absolutely nothing to do with the music world.

  In two days, our flagship, and the first of many luxury hotels, would be opened to the world and we’d happily given Winter the contract for the opening. Family meant everything to us and after everything we’d been through family would now always come first.

  Fuck.

  I looked at her again and she raised her palm at me asking me to be silent. I gauged my reaction inside and realised that it was true, I was very nearly human again. Years ago, I’d have been worried about what the press would say if something went wrong with a venture like this. Now, all I was concerned about was the fact this job might have been too much for her a
nd it was going to break her.

  ‘Yes,’ I heard her reply into the phone.

  Her face changed instantly as she listened to the voice on the other end.

  ‘Thank you. I’ll see you later at yours?’

  She disconnected the call and stood in front of me. She dabbed at her eyes and lifted her blonde hair away from her face as she calmed herself down and tried to regain the control she always wore.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m fine, everything is under control.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

  ‘No, I’m being paid to do a job here, not to whine at my big brother when the going gets tough.’

  I shifted my arse away from the worktop behind me and walked nearer to her, until I could gently take hold of the tops of her arms. I rubbed my hands up and down them offering her my comfort.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ she emphatically replied. ‘There was a problem, but it’s dealt with. I’ll tell you more in just under an hour. In the meeting, I’ll update all the shareholders, not just you.’

  I lifted my arms off her and held my open palms up to her in defence.

  ‘Right, well let me know if I can assist you at all as your brother, not just a shareholder, won’t you?’ I sarcastically added, offering her a smile and moved back towards the swing door.

  ‘You know I love you, don’t you, Rafferty?’ she called out from behind me and I could hear the hesitation in her voice as she thought about continuing. ‘But there’s a couple of us living here who have done alright without you being around to look after us.’

  I stopped dead in my tracks at her words. I knew she didn’t mean to hurt, but her words cut me to the fucking core. Without turning back to her I ran my hands through my hair, momentarily closed my eyes and expelled a huge sigh of resignation.

  ‘I know. But I’m here now and I’d like to try to sort out some of the damage I left behind, if I can.’

  ‘She’s moved on, you know?’