“He lied about pretty much everything, to all of us. To me, to my brothers, and to my mum. I haven’t seen him since I was twelve years old.”
Dylan sighed, and Kara looked up with a small smile. “So there you have it. I’m single because I’m the idiot who was stood up at the altar.”
“You were definitely not the idiot in that story,” Dylan said, drawing her against him and kissing her hair.
“It doesn’t bother me any more. It did, but now it doesn’t. It seems that you’ve cured me.”
Dylan’s mouth moved over her face, kissing her damp lashes.
“Promise me you’ll never lie to me?” she said when he finally reached her lips.
“Kara…” he murmured, and then he kissed her until she had forgotten she’d even asked a question, let alone noticed that he hadn’t answered.
The boat rocked in gentle motion to the slow beat of the music as Dylan’s tongue slid between Kara’s lips, exploring the sweetness of her mouth, trying to forget the things she’d said. Her father was a liar. Her ex was a liar. He was a liar.
Her fingers picked open the buttons of his shirt and smoothed it from his shoulders.
“You know, it’s a crime to have that thing in here and not dance,” she whispered, standing up, still holding his hand. He flicked his eyes to where she was looking, at the outlandish glitter ball slowly rotating above the lounge, and then shrugged with a half smile and stood up.
They smooched slowly, two late night lovers moving to lovers’ music on a dance floor made just for them, arms wrapped around each other, their mouths grazing each other’s shoulders. Dylan unpicked the laces of Kara’s corset, making his fingers work patiently but so badly wanting her skin against his, her heat to warm him, her body to hold him.
Her dress slid off in his hands, leaving her beautiful in lacy lingerie and stockings. She was tired in his arms, pliant, yet still her nipples beaded against the lace and her hips undulated into his when he held her close. Her skin was silk against his, warm and vital, and the need to stay there in her arms blindsided him.
“The most perfect girl in the world,” he said, his mouth against her ear, only half aware that the words had come out loud.
She pulled him closer until they pressed against each other from shoulder to hip, and a sigh of pleasure left her lips when he stroked her back. Dylan buried his face in her hair, loving her some, despising himself more. He understood her so much better after what she’d told him tonight, and he hated the knowledge that he was the next liar in her life.
Over at the villa, Lucien finally got to unfasten the laces on the back of a similar dress and make love to the woman he adored. He needed Sophie as he needed oxygen. She was the reason he could sleep at night and the reason he got up in the morning. He buried his cock deep inside her in the centre of their big bed, and he knew with complete certainty that he wanted to screw only this woman for the rest of his life. Married. He felt the passion in the idea growing, captivating him.
My Sophie. Soon to be my wife.
Dylan woke to the sounds of Kara moving around overhead. His watch told him that he’d slept in late: he could hear the whistle of the kettle and the sound of Kara singing along to the radio. Stumbling as he pulled on his jeans, he made his way up the ladder.
“Morning sleepyhead,” she smiled, a vision in his shirt as she poured water into the coffee cups. “I made breakfast.”
She held up a brown paper bag and he caught a waft of cinnamon. An image of her going to the bakery dressed in his shirt filled his head, pleasingly.
“You really should think about bringing a few things down here. Clothes… that kind of stuff…” he trailed off, aware of the significance of the suggestion.
She laughed, making the most of the moment.
“You asking me to move in with you, Sailor?”
He rolled his eyes, carrying their coffee up onto the roof terrace as Kara followed him with the pastries. They sat at the small rickety table, the sun already hot on their exposed skin. Kara dropped her sunglasses down over her eyes, messy-haired and looking deliciously like a woman who’d spent the night not sleeping a whole lot in a lover’s bed. Which she had, of course. His bed. An unexpected wave of possessiveness swept over him from nowhere. He wanted to be the only man who got to spend the night with her.
She opened the bag and handed him a pastry.
“You’re a fabulous cook,” he said, biting into it.
“You did say cook?” she said, raising her eyebrows suggestively as she smoothed the bag out over her knees to serve as a plate. The double whammy of sugar and strong coffee seeped into their bloodstreams and worked its magic, revving them up for the new long day and night that lay ahead.
“I’ll bring some clothes by later,” she said, and, as simple as that, they agreed to spend the next couple of months together on the Love Tug.
“And about what I said last night…” she said conversationally, ripping the warm pastry apart with her fingers. “ I meant every word of it, Dylan Day. Lie to me and I’ll cut your cock off and pickle it.”
Chapter Twenty
The club went from strength to strength over the following few weeks, as did Dylan and Kara’s love-in on the Love Tug. Every day she fell a little deeper for the laidback American’s charm, and he fell a little harder for her English sense of humour and disarming honesty. They worked hard, and they played hard, from sunny afternoons around the pool with Lucien, Sophie and Tilly to long steamy interludes that made the Love Tug rock despite the serene seas.
They found things they shared in common: a love of Thai food and horror movies.
They found things they were never going to agree on: the merits of reality TV and punk music.
But most of all they found solace in each other’s arms, and peace in each other’s body. Each new act of sex bonded them closer. Sometimes slow, intimate and intense, other times red hot sexy rip-your-shirt-off-and-fuck-me-right-now, but always consuming.
Dylan’s skin turned a deeper shade of gold lying out on the deck with Kara, and he lowered his guard enough to feel insulated from the worries of his old life.
Settled. Happy, even.
It turned out to be the biggest mistake of his life.
Chapter Twenty One
A stranger on a hired moped followed Kara’s red Mustang along the coast road, his face obscured by a helmet.
He watched as she and Dylan parked the car and disappeared into the closed up club just after lunchtime.
He watched Kara leave again half an hour later and contemplated following her, catching up with her first instead. That would make for a very illuminating conversation. Tempting as it was, given the way her luscious ass had looked in those cut off denim shorts, he decided against it. He had more to gain from going inside.
He walked around the perimeter of the club, noting the dusty Estrella beer truck unloading, with professional interest. He slipped soundlessly into the unlocked cellar with the ease of a practised thief, waiting for a few minutes after the sound of the delivery truck’s engine faded away before he unfurled himself from behind the crates. Helping himself to a bottle of beer, he knocked the lid off and drank deeply. A second beer followed the first, for Dutch courage. Now he was ready.
Upstairs in the office, Dylan worked on the staff rosters for the coming month, deep in concentration.
Downstairs behind the bar, Lucien flicked through the morning’s mail, an espresso on the bar beside him. He’d left Sophie at home with Tilly for an afternoon of wedding planning with Kara, or more likely a wide-ranging chat over a glass of wine, if Kara had anything to do with it.
A sound behind him had him instantly on high alert, and he looked up a second before the man appeared through the door at the end of the bar.
“Who the fuck are you?” the stranger blurted, clearly not expecting his company.
“That’s a fairly fucking audacious question, given the circumstances,” Lucien said coolly, placing his cup down as he watched
the smaller man with shrewd eyes. The guy’s attire suggested that he was a holidaymaker, and a vain one at that. Cheap shorts, vest cut to show off his physique, a flashy identity bracelet and a thick chain around his wrist. Aggression emanated from him in waves, and only some vague familiarity in his face stopped Lucien from removing him by force from the premises without bothering to ask any more questions.
“Get your boss down here, man,” the guy said. “And I’ll have a Southern Comfort while I wait. In fact, make it a double.”
Lucien made no move, considering the intruder’s American accent. The stranger mistook his silence for trepidation, and reached arrogantly for a glass.
“No? I guess I’ll just get my own then.”
He had misread the situation. Big-time. His hand froze half way back down from the shelf as Lucien took a step towards him and said, his voice laden with menace,
“No you won’t. Put my glass down and get the fuck out of my club.” The stranger blanched and took several steps back and around the bar.
“You have precisely ten seconds before I post you home to your mama in a series of blood-stained envelopes,” Lucien added, conversationally.
The guy slid the glass he’d snagged back onto the bar and swallowed hard. Then, both turned sharply at the sound of footsteps jogging down the stairs. A couple of seconds later, Dylan emerged through the staff doorway.
“Lucien, do you know whether…” Dylan’s words died in his mouth as he caught sight of the visitor.
Lucien watched Dylan’s expression go from easy to stricken, and the pieces tumbled into place. The man was a stranger to Lucien, but not to Dylan. Now he knew why he’d had the sense of recognising something in his face.
“Hey big bro,” the guy said, oily now that he felt he had the upper hand again. “Long time no see.”
“Justin.” Dylan could not have loaded the word with more despondency if he’d tried. He threw the paperwork in his hand down on a nearby table. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
His heart thumped uncomfortably behind his ribs. How long had Justin been here? What had he said to Lucien?
“That’s no way to welcome your little brother, is it?” Justin said, the same sly grin on his face that always irritated the hell out of him.
“How did you find me?” Dylan said flatly. He hated the fact that Lucien had to hear this.
Justin practically sneered. “Because you couldn’t help sucking up to mom, even from thousands of miles away." It figured that their mother would have trusted Justin around her computer. She always wanted to think the best of him. "Hey mom, I remembered Billy’s birthday,” Justin said, affecting a mocking, whiney voice.
“Hey Matthew, you’ve always been a good boy, Justin’s always been the bad boy. Stay in Ibiza and enjoy yourself while he rots,” Justin went on, an awful impersonation of their mother that hit the mark anyway. “Just like you let Billy rot.” Those weren’t their mother’s words, they were pure Justin.
Dylan’s heart constricted with pain at the low jibe. He looked at his brother for several long, silent seconds, searching for something worth loving and coming up with nothing. As kids they'd shared little in common, as men even less. There was an underhand slyness to his kid brother that had made Dylan's skin crawl his whole life.
“Go home, Justin. You have no place here.”
“And yet it seems you do, Matty.” Justin gestured around the club, the bracelets on his wrist clashing against each other in the quiet room. Dylan flinched at the sound of Billy’s nickname for him, his eyes sheering away from Lucien’s unreadable ones across the room.
“Maybe I see what you’ve got going here and I want in. I saw that hot piece of ass you were with earlier.” Justin cut an hourglass shape in the air with his hands. “Maybe I want in on that, too.”
It was debatable who reached him first. Within a second he was surrounded, Dylan on one side, Lucien on the other, fury white hot on both faces. Like prey caught between two prowling lions, Justin’s eyes darted for an escape route, knowing there wasn’t one.
“Okay, okay,” he said nervously, holding his hands up. His bravado had dissolved once again. “At ease, boys.”
Neither Lucien nor Dylan moved a muscle.
“For mom’s sake, I’m going to let you walk out of this place alive,” Dylan said, his voice low and steady.
“And for Matthew’s sake, I’m going to give you until night fall to leave the island before I send out for those envelopes,” Lucien said in his ear, his fist itching to smack into their intruder’s jaw. Hearing his emphasis on the name, Dylan couldn’t meet Lucien’s eye.
“And I came all this way just to deliver your mail,” Justin said, rallying slightly, drawing a beige, official-looking envelope out of his back pocket. Dylan took it from him, not even glancing at it.
“Get out,” he said heavily, feeling the fragile new life he'd built for himself unravelling thread by slow thread.
He watched his brother leave with Lucien close on his heels. He sank down onto the nearest chair, shoving the envelope addressed to Matthew McKenzie into his back pocket and dropping his head into his hands.
Outside, Lucien pinned Justin up against the wall with a hard shove. Edgy and rigid with fury, he towered over the other man in both stature and power. In that moment, he wasn't Lucien Knight, lover and father. He was Lucien Knight, loyal friend, the man you'd want in your corner when the chips were down. The man you really didn't want to be on the wrong side of.
“You speak to no one, or I will know. You go straight to the airport, or I will know. You board a plane, or I will know. Set foot on Ibiza again, and I will know.” He leaned his arm against Justin’s wind pipe, his face inches from the other man’s. “Have I made myself clear, or do you need me to fucking spell it out?”
The shifty fear in Justin’s eyes answered for him. He was on his way. He was a low life of no substance or worth, and he thought too much of his charmless face to risk its rearrangement by such a formidable foe.
Lucien watched the younger man walk away, certain that he would never lay eyes on him again.
Justin made his way back to the airport, his pride stinging and his throat sore, but satisfied that he’d thrown a grenade into his brother’s life in the form of a screwed up, beige envelope.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lucien walked back into the club, passed by Dylan’s table, and strode straight to the bar. Two glasses and a bottle of vodka in his hands, he returned and pulled up a chair at the table.
“Do you mind if I stick to Dylan?” His tone was neutral. “I’m kind of used to it.” He poured two good measures and pushed one across the table.
Dylan scrubbed his palms into his eye sockets. “I’m sorry, man.” He didn’t have any words to explain the weight his brother’s unexpected appearance had dropped back onto his shoulders. His hard won peace had dissolved around him like ice on a hot day, showing up his life on Ibiza for the cheap illusion of smoke and mirrors it was.
There was a long silence. They both drank a measure, not meeting eyes.
“So. You’re nothing like your brother,” Lucien said, eventually.
Dylan swallowed the remaining contents of his glass in one mouthful.
“That’s just about the best thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
Lucien refilled Dylan’s glass.
“There were three of us. Billy. Me. Justin.” Dylan didn’t raise his eyes from the bottom of his glass. “Billy was the best of all of us. Now there’s just me. And him.”
“What happened?” Lucien watched Dylan’s face as he searched for the right words, and he recognised the expressions that twisted his features. Grief, and guilt. He recognised them because he’d shouldered the same emotions for too many years himself over someone he’d loved too.
“Billy… he was my big brother, and… my best friend. Sunshine followed him into every room, you know?”
Lucien didn’t know. Not when it came to family, anyhow, but for the first ti
me he was learning it now about a friend. Dylan had brought a new aspect to his life that he hadn’t even known had been missing. Brotherhood.
“He got himself into trouble… gambling… debts he couldn’t make… I missed the signs. Too busy on my way up to notice, and he was too proud to come to me.” Dylan swirled the vodka in his glass, and Lucien sat still, in silent solidarity opposite him.
“They found him hung by his own belt out in the woods behind his house. Open and closed case.” Dylan shrugged, his face etched with disgust.
“Was it?”
“Hell, no. Billy was no coward, and no matter how much shit he was in he’d never have broken our mother’s heart that way, on purpose.”
Lucien’s affinity with the man opposite increased with his every word. Both of their lives had been overshadowed by loss and consumed by guilt. The difference between them was that Lucien had worked his way out the other side, thanks to Sophie. Dylan was still living in his own version of hell, and his brother’s appearance had just turned up the heat to unbearable levels. To Lucien’s eyes, he looked very much as he had the first time they’d met. Beat.
“Justin has been spoiled his whole life. He grew up with a sense of entitlement, for no good reason. He was always going to get himself in trouble, and I was always going to be the one who had to bail him out. I think he gambled too just to prove he could succeed where Billy failed, to be the big man. Except he wasn’t. He got in way over his head, debt on debt, and then he came to me with his hands out. ‘They’re going to kill me, they’re going to take mom’s house.’” Unconsciously, Dylan adopted his brother’s drawling tone, his expression miserably disgusted. He shook his head, his eyes still downcast. “So I bailed him.” He shrugged. “It took my club and my home, but I did it, because I couldn’t fail a brother again.”
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