“Let me tell you something,” he said, quietly, leaning over the table. “He didn’t forget about you. If he had, he wouldn’t have been over here ‘saying hello.’ When you forget someone, you don’t even make eye contact. You make sure they know it’s finished. That just now? That wasn’t anywhere close to finished. He isn’t finished with you.”
Michelle stared at him with open shock. “No.”
“Believe it, sweetheart. He wants back in. Shit knows I would, if I’d been away.” He did now, suddenly feeling like they’d ended up on opposite sides of a fight that had never happened.
She glanced away from him, mulling over her thoughts, gaze pensive.
Raven shrugged and said, “I tried to help you out, man.”
~*~
Michelle
Albie appeared at the bottom of the stairs and announced church, and all the club boys marched up to the second floor, staircase trembling beneath their boots. If she was honest, it was a bit of a relief for Candy to slide out of the booth before she could make this strange misunderstanding any worse.
A prospect took over for Callie at the bar and the regular evening pub patrons began to filter through the door in twos and threes.
Raven checked her watch – silver, Gucci – and made a face. “I’m sorry, love, but I can’t stay. I have a shoot in the morning–”
“It’s fine.”
“It doesn’t look fine, though.” Raven gave her a smile. “Are you sure you’ll be alright?”
“Aren’t I always?”
“Hmm. Don’t do anything stupid.” Raven slid out of the booth, and straightened her coat.
“You’re talking to the wrong relative about that.”
“Don’t do anything rash, either.” She leaned in and kissed Michelle’s forehead. “Ring me if you need to.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will.”
And the first step toward being fine was to abandon the booth and claim an end stool at the bar.
She was no longer the only woman in the place – customers were bringing in girlfriends, some of the groupies had taken a table in the middle of the floor – but she was the only woman sitting at the bar, and the prospect barman came to her right away. He was a new one; she’d never seen him before. Younger than he looked, an obnoxious amount of ink, nose ring.
“You family?” he asked, tone friendly, but alert.
“You could say so.” When he smiled, she said, “But I’m guessing you’ve seen my picture on Dad’s desk.”
“Wanted to see what you’d say. Welcome home, darling.”
She approved – in a superficial, immediate way. Which was more than she could say for most of the guys around here.
“Drink?”
“Whiskey rocks.”
He nodded and moved away.
Michelle did a slow half-turn on her stool as the prospect pulled drinks. The déjà vu that closed over her had physical dimensions; it tightened around her throat like a fist, sat heavy on her shoulders. Wasn’t this just like every night of her life? Drinking in her father’s pub, physically exhausted, nothing to look forward to save a cold flat and lukewarm Thai noodles.
And she’d wanted to come home, hadn’t she?
The soft thump of her glass hitting the bar startled her. She swiveled back around and managed to shoot the prospect a bare smile. “Ta.”
~*~
Candy
The London crew was big, twenty guys deep, and that didn’t include prospects or hangarounds. Candy had no hope of keeping all their names straight. He kept his focus on Phillip and Albie, the unquestioned brains of the operation, as they conducted church down both sides of the long table in what had once been an old dining room. The dusty brass chandeliers swayed slightly in the invisible draft coming in up high along the failures in the window glazing.
The plan was complex, lots of moving parts in play, and required an extensive rundown. By the time Phillip dismissed them with, “Okay, I’m hungry,” Candy’s brain felt like mashed potatoes.
Mashed…Bangers and mash. That was a thing, wasn’t it? He wasn’t making that up?
“You’re knackered,” a voice said in front of him, and he realized his eyes had closed. He opened them to find Albie studying him, trademark Green see-right-through-you stare tempered with warmth and amusement.
“Long flight,” Candy said, and his voice was rough with fatigue.
“Come on. Let’s get a proper supper.”
“Somehow, Candy thought there’d be more than food involved.
~*~
Michelle
The hand that landed between her shoulder blades was large, warm, and familiar, but she knew without looking it didn’t belong to Candy.
Paul slid onto the stool beside her, and the déjà vu took hold of her lungs again, tightened around her ribs. His eyes seemed colorless in the dim light. There were more lines streaking from their corners than there had been before; he had a new scar along his jaw, and she didn’t want to imagine how he’d acquired it on the inside.
It would have been so easy to allow herself a backward fall into memory. Dark rooms, and muttered curses, and the sense of urgency; the high of hiding. But she clamped down hard and refused to go back to that place in her mind.
“Get your hand off me,” she said.
He obliged, but did so slowly, letting his fingers run down her spine and skip over her bra clasp before pulling away. “I didn’t think you’d be angry with me, love,” he said, quietly.
“I was never angry about you going to prison.”
“Ah. Well…you know how it was. We had to–”
“How it was? You were never doing anything but playing with me. And you were scared shitless you might ruin your whole friendship with Albie. That’s how it was.”
He braced an elbow on the bar and leaned into her; too close, closer than was casual. “I wanted to say something. You have no idea how much I wanted to. But it was wrong, Chelle. Surely you’re old enough to know that now.”
She felt like she’d been slapped. It hurt – shit, those words hurt – but they hurt for all the right reasons. Reasons that loosened the bands around her chest and made it easier to breathe.
“You’re right, it was wrong. Because it was never love. I know what that feels like now, Paul, and it sure as hell doesn’t have anything to do with hiding and keeping quiet.”
“Michelle–”
“I’m not a single woman these days, I might remind you.” She snatched her drink up and slid off her stool, turning away from him–
And there were Albie and Candy, sitting in a booth, watching her.
Candy looked disgruntled…but only that, not furious, or about to go on a killing spree. Just irritated.
Albie, though, was so carefully blank that she knew he was piecing things together in his mind, and she hated that.
Candy patted the spot on the booth next to him and she slid in, because there was no way to avoid any of this. “Well,” she said. “Don’t either of you look at me like that.” When they didn’t say anything, she said, “Paul–”
“Is a goddamn dead man,” Albie finished. His face was still blank, but she saw the throb of his pulse in his throat.
“No, no he isn’t.” Visions of a chair-tossing, bottle-breaking pub fight whirled through her head. Even though, with Albie, it wouldn’t be anything as uncivilized and unprecise as that. No, Albie would stalk up silently behind the man, tangle a hand in his hair, yank his head back and slit his throat. She had to swallow. “Ancient history, Albie. Please don’t. Please. No one knows, and he never meant for you to find out.”
“Because he knew I’d–”
“Just don’t even say it!” she pleaded. “Once you say something, it’s halfway to done. So just keep it to yourself.”
She turned to look at Candy. “Say something!”
He shrugged. “I don’t care what happens to the guy.”
She glared at him.
He sipped
his whiskey.
She threw back her own and said, “Ugh.”
~*~
Dinner was tasteless soup and too-hard bread. After, they went up to find their room for the night on the third floor. It was close-walled, but had high ceilings, and a window that overlooked the city, its indistinct nighttime shape stamped against the black of the night, smeared with yellow light from windows and streetlamps.
Candy let her have the first shower, and while she waited for him, she sat on the side of the bed, finger-combing her hair, studying London through the glass.
She heard the door open and close, but Candy was very quiet when he came back into the room. She twisted around and saw that he was in nothing but a towel, skin still flushed from the shower.
It hit her hard, the sight of him, a sudden wild press of heat behind her breastbone, and something deeper, aching, clawing at her insides.
He’d been reaching for the clothes he’d left sitting on top of the hope chest, but paused, hand poised above his sweatpants, fingers open. “What?”
“You didn’t ever want to hide from it. Keep it secret.”
She expected him to ask what she meant, but something in her face must have filled in the blanks.
“No,” he said, straightening slowly. “It was never like that for me. I never wanted it to be.”
“I was never in love with him,” she said, because she needed him to know that. She couldn’t just let him hope or wonder, but needed him to hear it straight from her lips. “I was really young, and stupid, but it was never real.”
His mouth twitched, and she thought he was holding back a smile. “Well, you’re still really young…”
She lifted her brows.
“…end of sentence.”
“Yeah.” She snorted. “That’s what I thought.”
But the feeling was still spreading through her veins, warm and fizzy, like stolen champagne.
A complicated expression flickered across his face as he came to sit beside her. He was big, and solid, and radiating heat that might have been from the shower, but might have just been him. He looked at her, very serious, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat when he swallowed. “You know,” he said, “when we were packing to come, I made a promise to myself. I decided that if we got back here, and you were happy, and you were glowing, and you wanted to be back here – back home – I’d leave you in London when this was done.”
An awful sensation, her stomach dropping out from under her, like at the top of a roller coaster. “What?”
“Not sneak off. Not leave you like that,” he clarified, eyes deep and sad. “But I would have let you stay here, if that’s what you really wanted.”
She swallowed. The heat was still there inside her, unbearable at this point, and that terrible sense of falling, too. “Derek–”
“But I think that was a really stupid thing to promise myself, because I know I can’t do that now.”
There were a dozen things she wanted to say to him; she wanted to agree that he was incredibly stupid for thinking such a thing. But she said, “Oh,” and reached for him the same moment he leaned into her.
He urged her down onto the bed and she went, hands passing up the heavy muscles of his arms, his shoulders, finding the tender places at the back of his neck. He smelled like soap, his clean skin soft and warm. She melted when his kissed her; shut her eyes and opened her mouth to him, arching up into the shelter of his body.
He propped up on one arm and pushed her shirt up with his free hand, broke the kiss just long enough to pull it over her head, hair rustling as it settled around her shoulders and ears again. She dug her nails into the knob at the top of his spine, caught her lip between her teeth when he skimmed his palm down the flat of her stomach and then between her legs.
She spread for him, locked her thighs around his waist and tugged at the knot in his towel, until she had all of him naked above her. “Please.” She didn’t want the long teasing foreplay; she just wanted him inside her.
He made sure she was ready, fingers sure, breath unsteady against her throat. And then he entered her, working in slowly, almost sweetly, until he was buried to the hilt.
Michelle held the back of his head, held him close to her, his ragged breaths against her skin, the steady roll and surge of his hips tortuous and perfect.
This, she thought. Not London, not Texas, not a flat, or a clubhouse, or a room, or a street, or an address of any kind. This. Love wasn’t secret, wasn’t forbidden, wasn’t an obstacle or a weakness. It was home.
Thirty-Eight
Albie
The thing was, he’d never given a damn about what society thought was “acceptable.” He was an arm’s dealer, for Christ’s sake – in London, no less. The law was something to work around, and it had nothing to do with morality.
But within the brotherhood, there was an honor code, and Paul was in violation.
That was the basic fact of the matter. But in a not-at-all-basic sense, the betrayal went much, much deeper. Paul had gone away when Michelle was eighteen, which in Albie’s mind spelled “too young.” All those times Paul had been loitering at the shop, and Michelle had come in, fresh-faced and delicate as the first spring flowers. And Paul had…
He couldn’t allow himself to play it out in his head. He would be too murderous if he did.
As it was, though…
He waited until Candy and Michelle were gone, and then he waited just a little longer, nursing his whiskey. Paul was still at the bar, working on his third drink when Albie slid out of the booth and approached him. “Brother,” he greeted, as he took the stool next to Paul.
Paul nodded in response, head hung low over his glass, fingers too tight around it.
The prospect passed, brows lifted in inquiry. Albie shook his head; no, no more drinks for him. His head was clear and he wanted it to stay that way.
Paul lifted his tumbler and threw down the rest of whatever he’d been working on, finally turning to Albie with a half-hearted smile. “So. In the morning.”
“In the morning, yeah.”
Paul looked devastated. “Why do I have the feeling I’ll be right back where I came from by the time it’s over?”
“That’s always the risk.”
“Spoken like a man who’s never been kept in a cell,” Paul said, with no small amount of bitterness.
Albie sighed. “Guess that’s fair.”
He could see it – for a brief flash that made him hate himself – why Paul had put himself on that stool beside Michelle earlier. A drowning man who’d just been given a lifeboat…and then a storm kicks up the waves and he thinks he’s going back in the drink again. So even though there were groupies ready for the taking, all set for a quick fuck, Paul had wanted something familiar and comforting instead.
Even if, in this case, it was fucking disgusting.
“Come take a walk with me,” Albie said, and squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll show you what we’re taking with us tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
They walked down to Maude’s, and the scents of leather and hewn wood had an instant focusing effect on Albie; there was no room for sentiment here. He flicked on the lights and silently locked the door with a turn of the key, pocketed it afterward as Paul preceded him deeper into the shop, heading for the back.
Down in the vault, Paul braced his hands on the workbench, swaying a little. Too much whiskey. He whistled appreciatively. “Shit, look at your stash. Little bit of everything down here.”
“Yeah. You should see the Škorpions I just got. Gorgeous.” It was easy as anything to step up behind his friend. The knife slipped soundlessly from his sleeve, the hilt filling his palm. It was a wicked, smooth length of steel, and it caught the light when Albie moved.
One hand in Paul’s hair, the other on the knife, and he had the man bent back awkwardly at the waist, blade pressed against his carotid.
Paul gasped and flailed.
“Stop moving,” Albie said in his ear, a
nd dug in a little with the knife, so he could feel its bite.
Paul stilled.
“Now,” Albie said, “I’m going to ask you some questions, and it’s going to be very important that you answer honestly on the first try, because there isn’t going to be a second try. Understand?”
“I – I…” But he and Paul had been friends too long for him to misunderstand. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”
“Good. First question: How old was Michelle when you first touched her?”
Paul took a breath, hesitated.
Albie pressed until the first pearls of blood welled up against the knife’s edge.
“Sixteen,” Paul said on a deep exhale. “But you know she was never mentally sixteen–”
“Next question: Did you break her heart?”
“I broke things off with her.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I don’t think so, no. She never loved me.”
“What did you think would happen if I ever found out?”
Paul’s eyes closed, and when he swallowed, the knife jumped in Albie’s hand. “This. I knew this would happen.” Tears beaded beneath his lashes, shiny in the glare of the overhead light.
Albie pulled the knife away and gave a hard yank on Paul’s hair, throwing him down flat on his back on the concrete floor. He was shaking, he realized, as he reached for a cloth to wipe the knife. “Fuck you,” he whispered. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”
In a clumsy scramble, Paul sat up and put his back to the gun case behind him, reaching up to press a hand to the wound at his throat. It wasn’t deep, but the blood rolled down his neck in thin trails. “How is it any different now?” He sounded hurt. “Why aren’t you threatening to slit Candyman’s throat?”
“Because she’s Candy’s queen. And not some dirty betrayal behind his friend’s back.”
Tastes Like Candy (Lean Dogs Legacy Book 2) Page 37