by Clare London
Percy scowled. “Better watch y’r p’s and q’s, Goodson. We respect management around here.”
To give Alex his due, he realized his mistake quickly. “Of course. I’m totally sure I’ll soon pick it all up, Mr. Grove.”
Percy paused, probably just long enough for Alex to start wondering what he’d done wrong now, then he nodded. “Percy.”
“Uh… sorry?”
“Call me Percy, for God’s sake. Mr. Grove sounds like y’re talking to my old dad.”
To Tate’s surprise—again—Alex grinned. “I know the feeling.” He stuck out his hand and firmly shook Percy’s. “Thanks, Percy. I look forward to working with you.”
Percy growled in the back of his throat. “For me, boy.”
“Yes, that’s what I meant. For you.” Alex nodded, but nothing in his tone suggested he was apologetic.
Tate couldn’t help it—he laughed softly.
Alex spun around. From the startled look on his face, he’d only just realized someone else was behind him. “Sorry, who are you?”
Tate gave his most cheesy smile and took Alex’s hand in a formal shake. “I’m Tate Somerton, Percy’s manager. Percy’s just been keeping my seat warm.”
Alex gaped. “Mr. Somerton? But you’re….”
Too young? Tate mentally filled in the gap as Alex’s sentence trailed off. It wasn’t the first time he’d been mistaken for nothing more than the tea boy. He knew he could look younger than his age, and—yes, Lou was right—he could have had a smarter haircut and worn more professional clothes. But he spent his days driving forklifts and climbing over and under pallets, and as long as he did a good job with the warehouse staff, no one minded him dressing in the same smart casual wear.
“Um. What I said earlier?” Alex looked a little disturbed, obviously not sure how much Tate might have overheard. “I suppose I may have been a tad out of line.”
Tate shrugged. It was an apology of sorts. “What matters to me is that everyone does their best in the job. If you shirk, or cause trouble, well… that’s a different matter.”
Alex was still staring at him. He also hadn’t let go of Tate’s hand. For one long, pregnant moment, their gazes locked.
Tate knew he shouldn’t be devouring Alex’s attention like he was—it was rude, he didn’t behave like this, at least he hadn’t before, he didn’t even know if the guy was gay, and he’d never thought about dating a fellow employee before, that would be unprofessional, right? And oh God, even his mind was rambling—but he couldn’t seem to look away.
Alex’s hand shifted very slightly, but enough for his thumb to brush the palm of Tate’s hand as he let go, almost reluctantly. A small smile teased the edge of his handsome mouth. “Mr. Somerton, may I say—?”
“No, y’ bloody may not!” Percy snapped into his ear, having borne down on him without either Tate or Alex noticing.
Alex gave a small, embarrassing yelp.
Tate bit his lip to stop from laughing. “Welcome to the firm, Alex,” he said briskly, and turned away.
ALEX stood rooted to the spot for a few minutes as Tate and Percy paused in the doorway ahead of him, discussing in a low voice something about a delayed shipment.
What a bloody idiot he’d been! Challenging the supervisor; calling the manager a pain in the arse. He’d hijacked a temporary space on the general intern scheme with his fake name and his friend Liam’s help, but he needed to remember his menial place. Laughable, really, if his mission weren’t so serious.
Maybe Tina had been wrong, and he hadn’t grown up enough yet. One of the first, and hardest, lessons his parents had tried to teach him had been to know when to hold his tongue. Truth was all very well but, in his experience, people tended to want their truth, not his spontaneous, unvarnished version.
Dammit. He’d have to keep his head down if this plan was to work. He’d only persisted about meeting Mr. Somerton because he wanted to make contact with the warehouse manager as soon as possible, so he could investigate the troubles there’d been. Data and observation were needed for any good investigator to get started. But he wouldn’t get anywhere if he annoyed everyone on the first day and got fired.
Fired. Jesus. That’d be a new experience for him, wouldn’t it?
But then he had met Mr. Somerton—and what a delight that had been. He glanced quickly and surreptitiously at Tate. What an attractive man he was! Alex was used to appraising men as potential dates, but the spark he’d felt when he shook hands with Tate Somerton—that was something at an instinctive level. Wiry, and less well-groomed than Alex’s usual type, but with glorious, messy auburn hair, tanned skin, and such an angry, passionate fire in his eyes. As Alex had turned in his chair to see Tate for the first time, he’d caught the tail end of Tate’s smile. It had been heart-stoppingly delicious. Pity it was so quickly covered with the managerial scowl. Tate wasn’t model-type handsome but had something very special Alex couldn’t immediately put his finger on.
Heavens.
And that was what he wanted to do, wasn’t it? Put not just his finger on Tate, but his hands and his lips, and all places in between. Alex’s cock stirred gently beneath his jeans. He was bemused by such a visceral reaction toward a man he’d only just met. Tate may not even be gay, though Alex suspected from that long, warm, startled handshake that Tate had been interested in him in return. But even Alex’s easygoing attitude toward dating didn’t usually encourage him to pursue someone he wasn’t even sure liked him.
“Alex? Are you ready to get started?”
“Yes. Right now.” Damn. He focused on the two men—his bosses—who were calling him. How long had he been ignoring them, off in his reverie?
Tate had a last word for Percy. “You’ll look into the paperwork? We must get that Merlot delivery back on schedule.”
“Leave it to me,” Percy grunted back. “Looks like they had the wrong signature, though fuck knows how that happened. We submitted it with y’rs on, as usual.”
Tate sucked in an almost imperceptible breath. “Get them to send through a copy of that document.”
Percy frowned. “What, the wrong one?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Can’t see why, though. No good to man nor beast, in my opinion, but if y’ say so….”
“Which I do,” Tate said.
Alex’s ears pricked up. There was assertiveness in that low, sharp tone. Alex felt it all the way through to his toes.
Tate’s alert gaze met Alex’s again. “This way, please. I’ll show you where you’ll be working today.”
Alex was torn between following that cute arse, and the innate difficulty of being obedient to anyone. But he could be, couldn’t he, if he concentrated?
If this was how employment went, he’d better get used to it damned quickly.
Chapter Four
ALEX had never, ever imagined what a working day in a wine warehouse could be like. Well—any structured working day, really. When he was in the Bonfils office to see Papa or Tina, he spent his considerable spare time surfing supercar sites or chatting to the staff about any celebrities he’d met recently. His whole life had been run largely to his own timetable. No one had ever presumed to tell him what to do, and when to have it done by.
Until today.
What the hell had he done with all his hours before now? Every damned minute of this day had been crammed full of activity: both muscle-straining physical work and mind-whirling instructions. Alex felt like he was running just to stay in the same place. Yet none of the guys around him seemed to pause or question it all. They groused, they laughed, they pitched appallingly rude insults at each other, and then they knuckled down to the work as if their lives depended on it. Was this really how people spent every working day?
Trucks pulled up at the warehouse continuously during the morning, and the forklifts trundled past again and again. It only took a couple of nudges at Alex’s arse from the front prongs to cue him into recognizing the approaching noise in time to get out of
the way. He might have been mistaken those first few times, when the smirking driver appeared to be driving straight at him—very amusing, not—but Alex soon cottoned on.
But his learning curve was steep. It didn’t take him long after starting his training to discover how very little he knew. It was sobering. No, actually, it was bloody embarrassing. He understood and appreciated wine, how to grow and nurture it. He’d been all but brought up at vineyards and tastings. But the subsequent storage, transport, and selling of that wine? In that, he was—what did they call it?—a newbie. Plenty of times he had to bite back a protest at the lack of time to absorb barked, half-alien instructions, the uncomfortably sparse conditions he had to operate in, and, worst of all, the disrespectful way they treated him.
But of course, he had to. He was meant to be one of them, wasn’t he? And in a weird way, it was hardly personal, just endemic to the whole atmosphere. Almost flattering, really.
His first mistake had been to ask the way to the cellar. Jamie—a tall, skinny man in his early twenties, who apparently had failed in a sales career at Fenchurch’s, Bonfils’s major competitor, and was probably being given stewardship of Alex as some kind of karmic punishment—just stared at him. Another, burlier employee called Stuart, who was older and drove one of the forklifts with the arrogance and panache of a Formula 1 racer, had roared with laughter and slapped Alex so hard on the shoulder he nearly toppled over.
“Take a look around, kid. What d’you think is on all these damned shelves? We don’t use a cellar any longer, at least not for the regular retail deliveries. The only specialist storage is where we keep the expensive stuff, and that’s locked away, around by the manager’s office. Otherwise, everything’s out there on the pallets.”
Alex took another look around the warehouse. Huge, high shelves surrounded him, in a row of aisles stretching as far as he could see, stacked with pallets wrapped tightly in plastic. Stuart roared with laughter again, Jamie had a sly grin on his face, and now Percy was on his way over.
“What the fuck?” Percy said brusquely. He stood in front of them, hands on hips, feet planted securely. “We got deliveries stacked up, gentlemen, and y’re discussing y’r manicures or somethin’.”
“Prince Harry here thought we were still fermenting the stuff in the dark, one bottle at a time,” Stuart chortled.
“No, I didn’t,” Alex snapped but, he suspected, too late to save his credibility. “And my name’s Alex. Not Harry.”
“Nob’s accent like yours could slice through cheese.” Stuart snorted. “Looking for royal privileges with the bosses, I bet?” He gave an obscenely exaggerated wink, and Jamie sniggered.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Alex muttered. He’d noticed that Jamie and Stuart hung around together almost all the time, like a pair of mismatched, smirking bookends. “I’m not a nob, as you put it. And as for the wine, I just didn’t think it through.” He wasn’t used to watching himself so closely, to worrying about what he said or what people thought of him. So why the hell was he worrying now? This whole mission of his was having a weird psychological effect.
Percy turned a thoughtful gaze on Alex and sighed. “Boys, take him out the back to the grape barrels. Couple of hours stamping on ’em should see him right.”
Alex gaped. He wasn’t dressed for that! And, God, when had he last been to the gym? His abdominals and glutes had never been that resilient, and if he was expected to crush grapes for an hour at a time—
They were laughing again. At him.
“Ah. You’re joking.” Alex was ludicrously relieved, while the catcalls bounced back and forth around him. Then he was angry too. “To hell with you.”
Stuart and Jamie were laughing too much to take offense.
“Your face!”
“Prince Harry to a tee!”
Alex found Percy’s steady gaze on him. Percy was also grinning, but his eyes glinted with a more quizzical look. “Our idea of a joke, boy, nothin’ more. Y’ll cope, I’m sure. We don’t make wine here, even the English labels. A lot of the catalog is bottled and imported, mainly from France. Do y’ know anythin’ about this business?”
Alex flushed more deeply than he’d have liked. “A little,” he said through gritted teeth. Yeah, yeah. Let’s all make a fool of the new kid. But he had to admit, it wasn’t that different from his first year at Eton, and he’d managed to get through that, hadn’t he?
“Y’ can go and collect a couple of pallets of the premier cabernet. They’re needed for a tastin’ at the Waldorf on Friday.”
“Great!” Alex was much cheered up at the thought of taking his turn on the forklift—
“Stuart will drive,” Percy said sharply.
Chastened, Alex turned to follow the still chuckling Stuart. He couldn’t help but hear Percy’s words to Jamie, just before the younger man turned to scuttle after Stuart like a little shadow.
“Tate is gonna eat that boy for breakfast. He doesn’t have patience for anyone who can’t keep up.”
Alex gritted his teeth. “Y’ll cope,” Percy had said to him.
Looked like he’d have to!
TEA breaks were another eye-opener. Alex had given up on waiting for drinks either to appear from a kitchen somewhere, or for someone to offer to run to the nearest quality coffee shop. After a few false starts, he’d learned to stand behind everyone else at the vending machine at the back of a small staff seating area. What he hadn’t learned was how to extract a cup of coffee from it without squeezing the plastic cup too hard and spilling it either over his crotch or back into the machine’s tray. Not that that was an ongoing problem. By the time the afternoon break came along, he’d suffered through several half-full cups during the day, and had determined he would rather drink his own urine than that bitter concoction. Maybe tomorrow he could smuggle in his own personal blend from his Soho supplier. Also, maybe, a decent china cup rather than those plastic death traps….
“Wotcha waiting for?” Jamie asked him, appearing at his side with a disarming silence, at least until he took a noisy slurp from his tea. “We only got fifteen minutes, and there’s anovver stack by the door to move.”
“Is there any food?” God forbid he should ask for cake, but surely there’d be something offered to keep their strength up toward the end of the working day? All he’d managed at lunch had been something from a trolley wrapped in plastic that purported to be an egg sandwich, but with filling the same color as the bread and barely a difference in taste between them. If he had his way, things would change around here on the culinary front. Like, right now, he was just about ready for some of those little cinnamon biscuits, or a couple of summer fruit and fresh cream pastries—
“No way,” Jamie interrupted Alex’s thoughts quite cheerily. “No food trolley in the afternoon. Cutbacks, y’know.”
Alex didn’t, but he understood the impact.
“You coulda brought some wiv you. But Tate doesn’t allow open food on the main floor, so you have to keep to the seats. And you better not leave litter. He goes mad about it.”
Tate this, Tate that. Damned man wasn’t even around, but his bloody rules hung over everything. Alex was beginning to revise his initial intention of getting to know Tate Somerton better. “So, how long have you been here, Jamie?”
Jamie stared at him for so long, Alex began to think the young man had lost his previous job at Fenchurch’s due to an inability to express English. Then Jamie took another slurp of tea and answered. “Six monfs.”
“So you know most of the chaps—I mean, the guys here, and what they’re like?”
“Sorta.”
“And I bet you know who takes liberties, eh?”
“Huh?”
This conversation was going to be like pulling teeth. “You know what I mean. Who cuts corners, who’s open to any offers on the side.” Alex was proud of his command of shady idiom, but Jamie still looked at him blankly. “On the take,” Alex said bluntly. “Putting the odd spanner in the works. Out for what they can get,
even if it harms the company.”
“Your Highness!” came a yell from the other side of the warehouse. “Mop-up duty, aisle twelve!”
Alex bit back the snap of irritation at being interrupted and both he and Jamie turned to go back to work. But Alex didn’t mistake the almost guilty glance Jamie darted toward the office as he scuttled away. And when Alex also looked that way he saw a man leaning against the door, arms crossed, chewing gum, and obviously waiting for Percy.
It was Stuart.
Alex changed direction abruptly and strode toward the office, but before he got there, Stuart peeled away and darted into one of the bays. Alex paused, unsure what to do next. What would James Bond do?
Then Percy appeared from inside the office with a clipboard in his hand and three pens perched behind one ear. He raised an interrogative eyebrow at Alex. Alex was beginning to hate that expression with a rare passion.
“You want somethin’, boy?”
“I was just wondering….” Dammit, he’d started now, Alex supposed he had to create some kind of cover story. “When my shift will be over?”
Percy continued to look steadily at him.
“Not yet, then?” Alex said weakly.
“Well. Y’ can go when y’ like,” Percy said slowly. He smiled, but there wasn’t much amusement in it. “I’ll send y’r pay on to the Palace.”
In other words, don’t come back. Alex bit back a sigh. “Guess we’re all here for the duration, right?”
“Delivery day,” Percy gave a curt nod. “We all pitch in until it’s done. Y’ll learn.”
“Yes,” Alex said spiritedly. “I suspect I will.”
Percy’s other eyebrow popped up, which was a surprising variation. All Alex could hope was that it showed some tolerance for him, rather than further ignominy.
“Mop-up in bay twelve, I heard,” Percy said, deceptively calmly.
“I know. I’m on my way,” Alex said quickly, turned, and walked away with more haste than usual.
The forklift whirred past him just as he reached the first bin.