Nine Lights Over Edinburgh

by Harper Fox

  Nine Lights Over Edinburgh

  By Harper Fox

  Detective Inspector James McBride is riding high on the belief that he’s about to bust a human-trafficking ring. But just five days before Christmas, his unorthodox methods catch up with him and his world comes crashing down.

  McBride tries to concentrate on his new day job as security for the visiting Israeli ambassador. He even starts to feel a renewed sense of self-worth when the leader of the Israeli team, the aristocratic Tobias Leitner, takes a bullet for him in the line of duty. But he can’t forget the trafficking case, especially when his investigations result in the kidnapping of his own daughter! McBride has no one to turn to for help—no one, except Toby.

  Can these two very different men work together to bring about a holiday miracle—and heal one another’s heart in the process?

  Dear Reader,

  There’s something magical about the holiday season, whether you celebrate Christmas or Kwanzaa, Hanukkah or Diwali. The energy and excitement surrounding these holidays charges the air and our emotions, providing a perfect platform for romance and love. So I knew we couldn’t let Carina Press’s first holiday season pass without celebrating it with a collection of special novella releases.

  This holiday season, celebrate with our first collection of invitation-only novellas. We’ve pulled together eleven talented authors and author duos, all of whom have made their mark in their respective niches, and invited them to transport our readers with holiday delights. In Naughty and Nice, join Jaci Burton, Lauren Dane, Megan Hart and Shannon Stacey as they show you both the sensual and sweet sides of the holidays. Visit post-apocalyptic worlds and paranormal beings in an enchanted journey with authors Vivi Andrews, Moira Rogers and Vivian Arend in Winter Wishes. And celebrate the beauty of the season in His for the Holidays with m/m authors Josh Lanyon, Z.A. Maxfield, Harper Fox and LB Gregg.

  Through the talent of their writing and their captivating storytelling, I believe you’ll find something in each of these special novellas to put you in the magic of the holiday moment.

  Wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons.

  ~Angela

  Executive Editor, Carina Press

  www.carinapress.com

  www.twitter.com/carinapress

  www.facebook.com/carinapress

  Dedication

  To Jane, whose love of the city inspired me—and to Midge

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Being this drunk made everything easy. James McBride watched his handsome young partner disappear down the corridor and considered his offer. He took his time over it. No sense of urgency.

  “Come on, Jim. If we leave now, I can give you a lift home.”

  Jim was a new one on McBride. Normally Andrew stuck to James, or better still Inspector. McBride, while he’d tried to be a good boss and mentor, hadn’t encouraged that much familiarity.

  Still, it was well past midnight, and rules got bent at office parties. This was the department’s informal mid-December bash; nearer to the date there would be an elegant, excruciating police dinner at one of Edinburgh’s more glittering venues. McBride wasn’t sure which was worse. Keeping a smile on his face for social occasions this year was proving bloody painful. At least the downing of large quantities of alcohol was considered acceptable.

  Compulsory, nearly, he thought, setting down the plastic cup of screw-top Lambrusco he’d been using to toast season’s greetings to the office girls and admin staff. Andrew’s strong, muscular back was still visible. He’d stopped to chat up one of the secretaries en route. And that was more Andrew’s style, McBride reflected, pushing unsteadily off the edge of the desk where he’d been perched. There’d been a couple of times over the past month or so when he’d caught a look or a smile that made him wonder, but Andrew was straight. Clean living, almost teetotal. Probably sober enough, even at the end of a night like this, to legally drive them both home.

  He’d finished with the girl and was heading for the stairwell that led to the locker rooms. McBride followed him, negotiating the concrete steps with caution. Probably the offer of a lift was all it was…

  A lean arm snaked out from behind the first row of lockers. A hand fastened round his arm. Andrew said, “Early Christmas present for you, boss,” and dragged him into the shadows.

  McBride watched himself in the mirror. He could hardly help it: Andrew had thudded him against the wall opposite the washbasins. What did he see? A pale, dishevelled man of forty, mouth open in shock. McBride searched the image for anything that might have induced lovely Andrew Barclay, rising star of the Harle Street force, to drop to his knees on the locker-room tiles and begin unfastening his senior officer’s belt. Handsome enough once, that reflected man, before the streets and the drink had gone to work on him. Still looking strong, stocky, with sandy hair that would have come in the same red as his five-o’clock shadow if he had one more drop of Aberdeen hill farmer’s blood in his veins. But now—just exhausted and lost. Eyes widening in comic shock as competent hands jerked his pants down and a hot mouth closed on his cock.

  McBride looked away. Never mind the reflection. All he had was his skin and the moment. He looked at his hands, buried in Andrew’s rich brown hair. A right office-party cliché they were making of themselves, weren’t they? Might as well have taken a tumble under the superintendent’s desk. Through veils of booze and lust, McBride wondered what effect being found sucking off his DI would have on Andrew’s career. Why the hell was he risking this? “Andy,” he grunted, making a halfhearted effort to push him back. “What the devil are you…”

  Andrew’s hands clenched his backside. McBride let go a gut-punched cry. Straight or not, Andrew had been practising somewhere. His tongue whipped round the underside of McBride’s erection and his lips closed tight, a hard, demanding circle squeezing him from root to tip and back. “Jesus,” he whispered, closing his eyes. In the red-tinged darkness, scraps of perception and memory flickered like bats round the Waverley monument at twilight. Dull scents of rubber and sweat, locker-room smells at the end of a long, hard day. The last time he’d been touched like this: Libby, who had put as much good-hearted, hopeless work into their marriage as he had. Nearly a year ago, it must be. McBride had been celibate since their divorce.

  Shuddering, he braced his feet and fought not to thrust into Andrew’s willing mouth. Libby had done her best, and so had he. Ten years of playing it straight, for the sake of their daughter, for the sake of society, McBride’s police job and his thundering Presbyterian minister father. To be queer was a damned aberration. Choking back cries, McBride shoved his aberrant cock down Andy Barclay’s throat and tried not to die of the hot, drunken pleasure of it. He’d tried—straight, like his father and every good Bible-thumping Scottish ancestor before him. “God, Andy. Let go! I’m gonna come!”

  Andrew sat back. Prompt, McBride thought dazedly. Well, fair enough. Five years of getting mentored, protected and trained didn’t add up to wanting to swallow; hygienic, Andy, neat and direct in all he did. His hand closed hard where his mouth had been. Tissues appeared from somewhere. The surge to climax seized McBride oddly—snatched him out and away, flung him to a cold distance. Through the glass and into the eyes of the washed-out mirror man, who could watch
himself being jerked proficiently to orgasm but not feel it, not properly. The peak hit and died, dropping him back into his flesh.

  Andrew was grinning up at him. McBride, who for many years had stayed alive and employed by knowing how to read a human face, looked back. There was something not quite right about that smile.

  McBride let it go. His knees were trying to dissolve, noisy gasps for air racking him. He must have imagined the tiny glint of calculation in Andrew’s eyes. What could Andy want of him? Everything McBride had, he’d given him already. “Well,” he said shakily. He’d have reached down to help, but Andrew was pushing lithely to his feet, folding the tissues as if they were evidence waiting to be bagged. “That was unexpected. Do you… Should I…”

  He shut up. Can I do you any favours in return? sounded like a bad line from a Carry On film. McBride wasn’t used to casual locker-room sex; he didn’t know the lingo. Hastily he zipped his trousers. Andrew was dumping the tissues down the bog. Please don’t wash your hands, McBride thought with indistinct fervour. Don’t make me something that needs to be scrubbed off you.

  Andrew turned as if he’d read the thought. His smile was still in place. He looked for all the world like an uncertain actor struggling to recall his lines. “Er, no,” he said, and McBride clearly heard him swallow a habitual sir. “I mean, not here. We can go back to mine if you like.”

  McBride assessed him. “You know what, laddie? Lovely though this has been, I think I’m for my bed.”

  “Oh. Oh right. Yeah, it’s late. I…I’ll still drive you.”

  Halfway down the stairs that led to the underground car park, walking at McBride’s side in a good imitation of their usual rapport, Andrew casually asked, “Are you still going out on that Grassmarket op, then?”

  McBride gave it thought. Perfectly reasonable question from his partner, wasn’t it? In retrospect McBride couldn’t think why he hadn’t told him about it before. He’d been working solo, but he’d need Andy’s help if he got anywhere with the case. “Aye. Sim Carlyle, if I can get my hands on the scaly wee bastard. It’s an extortion racket at best. Maybe human trafficking.” McBride heard himself with interest. He wasn’t sure if the sex or its clinical aftermath had sobered him up so completely. He sounded just as he did on a normal day, coming off shift, chatting to his colleague.

  But at no point had he told Andy or anyone else Sim was working out of the Grassmarket.

  He pushed the doors to the car park wide. A scent of ice and petrol drifted in off the street. McBride didn’t want a lift home from Andy: he wanted suddenly to be in a taxi and on his own. But it was a bollock-shrinking bitch of a night, and by the time he’d fought with fifty other drunken partygoers for a cab, he’d be frozen to the Harle Street cobbles.

  Andy was waiting for him. He looked ordinary to McBride again—his usual handsome, laid-back self. Wondering if he’d hallucinated the last half hour of his life, McBride got into the car.

  Chapter One

  A cold, unforgiving she-wolf of a city.

  Not the parts the tourists saw, though in some places the two worlds coexisted, like the vaults, where population pressure had caused the Old Town builders to dig as far below the earth as they had raised their rickety structures above it. Guides took visitors down there—to gawp at grinding poverty safely set two hundred years in the past, though McBride knew men and women who lived there still.

  McBride knew his city. He made his way in the grip of a bitter elation down the cobbled wynds that led between the Grassmarket and Cowgate. The back streets were icy, but he did not slip or fall. He knew the glitter side: Holyrood and the Tattoo, the peerless art galleries and science museums of the Enlightenment. He knew the squatting dwellers of the vaults, the tramps and gangs of disaffected kids who scratched out a troglodyte existence there. Even with a skinful of scotch, he knew how to place his feet on the cobbles to be steady and quiet and sure.

  The city was his: he had conquered it. McBride knew the underworld network of clubs that threaded the Grassmarket. Some were for the tourists, a bit of spice and vice to titillate the lads on their stag weekends. And some were much worse. McBride, undercover as Archie Bayne, alcoholic and gambling addict, was a paid-up member of the worst of them. Oh, he knew Auld Reekie, who stank high enough to live up to her name behind these elegant, crumbling Georgian facades. McBride knew—almost—from which of the underworld dens Sim Carlyle was trading in the lives of Romanian women and kids.

  Fifteen years on Edinburgh’s streets, from constable to DI. Many of them happy, while he was pulling off his act as a heterosexual family man well enough. Team years, those had been, shouldering the harness beside Libby, ticking over like clockwork in his Harle Street squad. Then came his promotion. Better pay, plain clothes and the beginning of working alone. Of thinking too much and drinking too much to drown the thoughts; learning too well how to vanish undercover into night. Of Libby growing tired of playing mistress to a man now married to his job.

  McBride emerged from the wynds and onto Castle Street. He snatched a surfacing breath. Leave all that mess down in the murk with Sim Carlyle. There was his city: a river of lights pouring down over the Royal Mile ridge, and above it all, brooding, visible only by its darkness, the root of the ancient volcano. Six days before Christmas, the cold had come down from the hollow sky at dusk, ringing, reverberant, making McBride’s blood sing. His pockets were fat with cash from his poker winnings, his mind alight with all the things he knew. He was better off without his team—without a partner.

  Without a family. The courts had granted Libby custody of their ten-year-old daughter, Grace. That was natural and good. McBride had not contested it. He had his girl for weekends and holidays, and that was enough. What kind of life could he give her? If McBride still really cared for anyone, it was the brat. She was staying with him on Christmas night. The money rustling in his pockets was destined, of course, for the police treasury—most of it, anyway; McBride was not as particular as he once had been concerning such niceties. All he was thinking as he turned the corner into Usher Close, was whether an iPod or that absurd Swarovski crystal necklace would go down best as an extravagant, unnecessary stocking filler. Both, maybe, though that would piss off Libby something cruel.

  “Hoi, Archie!”

  McBride stopped. It took him a second to connect the name with himself: unforgivable, because as long as he was in this cover, he was Archie Bayne, responding on the instant. It was thoughts of Grace that had drawn him back into his own skin. He turned around. He knew one of the two men emerging from the alley’s shadows well enough, or Archie did, anyway. Fitz Maguire, one of his opponents earlier at the Red Bottle poker club. The other man—just a face across the table, whispering urgently to Maguire—was a stranger. He meant nothing to Archie.

  No. Before leaning over Maguire, the stranger had glanced at him. And Archie, too drunk and intrigued by his poker hand, had failed to notice.

  “Evening, Fitz,” McBride said genially. “Get lost on our way home, did we?”

  Maguire took a step into the middle of the wynd. He was a slight man, undermined by decades of bad living. His companion was huskier, but still McBride reckoned he could take the pair of them out. “Aye, maybe,” Maguire said. “Good thing my mammy taught me to always ask a copper.”

  Shit. Somewhere in the distances of his mind, the shattering of his cover resounded. Distinct as breaking a glass. He wasn’t afraid. Bitterly angry at his lack of vigilance, but sure he could still walk away. Glue it back together, even, maybe. Fitz might not be sure. McBride put his hands in his pockets, feeling the cash once more, which was probably the little weasel’s motivation. “Not sure I’ve the pleasure of knowing what you’re on about.”

  “Ah, come on, Detective Sergeant McBride. Drop your poker face. Wilkie here knows it too well.”

  Wilkie. McBride’s good copper’s brain, which until he had started shellacking it with Cutty Sark had effortlessly held the names and mug shots of every suspect he’d ever ar
rested, struggled to retrieve the information. It came at last, with a burst of wrath for his own stupidity. Malcolm bloody Wilkes, a small-time cardsharp and druggie McBride had put away not once over the years, but at least three times. Jesus, what was becoming of him?

  Game was up, then. “Malc,” he said, shifting onto the balls of his feet. Lothian street coppers didn’t get much unarmed combat training, and McBride had seldom had call to use his. His bulk, and an expression of granite severity he could pull down to order, usually did the trick. “I owe you an apology. It’s detective inspector now, by the way. What can I do for you, then, gentlemen?”

  “For me, ye can drop down deid where you stand, you snoutin’ polis bastard. The boss at the Bottle says he’ll glass yer ugly puss for ye, if ever you show it down market again.”

  McBride raised his eyebrows. That was big talk for little Fitzy Maguire, even with Wilkes at his side. Way too big. Head spinning, adrenaline boiling the booze out of his system, McBride glanced behind him. Yes—two more thugs coalesced out of the streetlights, the chilly fog just starting to crown them with halos. If he’d been inclined to run, his retreat had been cut off.

  Suddenly that was fine by McBride. He was not a violent man. But how much easier to shed like a tight-fitting skin all his self-disgust and send it lashing outwards! McBride had spikes inside him, poisoned splinters. One was Andy Barclay, who’d uneasily continued to court him since the Christmas party. Another was booze, which was changing from a tool into a need, and a third was his damned new-broom boss who had noticed. Then there was Libby and even McBride’s angel, Grace—the pair of them by their existence obliging him not to devolve any further, a constant silent weight on his conscience. “Right,” he snarled, taking his hands from his pockets and bunching them into fists. He wheeled slowly, facing each of his assailants in turn. “Which one of you bloody jessies wants it first?”