by Max Walker
Lie With Me
Stonewall Investigations Miami- Book Two
Max Walker
Edited By: ONE LOVE EDITING
Proofread By: Tanja Ongkiehong
Cover Design: Max Walker
Copyright © 2019 by Max Walker
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Synopsis
OLIVER:
Ok, so imagine this.
I’m halfway across the world in a bar in London celebrating my last year of vet school when I spot the sexiest silver fox I’ve ever seen. We flirt, we kiss, and I have one of the best nights of my life. I’m sure I’ll never see him again, which is why I don’t give him my real name, even though I’m down to give him my address, phone number, and throw in my social security number just to be sure.
Weeks later, I walk into Stonewall Investigations in Miami looking for help and who do I find?
A certain silver-haired fox with a cocksure grin and an accent that makes my knees melt.
So… about that help...
BECKHAM:
I went back to London so I could bury my father and put our rocky past to rest. I wasn’t expecting to get handed a letter by a woman I’d never seen before, addressed to me in my father’s handwriting.
Opening it on the spot would be the emotionally mature thing to do. Drinking the evening away at a pub would be the emotionally therapeutic thing to do.
I chose the latter. That’s where I met one of the most interesting and attractive guys I’d ever chatted with, one I wanted to get to know from his head to his toes. One I was sure I would never see again.
Cut to three weeks later, when the object of my intense desire walks into my office looking for help with a murder that had been haunting him for years.
This was going to be an interesting case.
Contents
1. Beckham Noble
2. Oliver Brightly
3. Beckham Noble
4. Oliver Brightly
5. Beckham Noble
6. Oliver Brightly
7. Beckham Noble
8. Oliver Brightly
9. Beckham Noble
10. Oliver Brightly
11. Beckham Noble
12. Oliver Brightly
13. Beckham Noble
14. Oliver Brightly
15. Beckham Noble
16. Oliver Brightly
17. Beckham Noble
18. Oliver Brightly
19. Beckham Noble
20. Oliver Brightly
21. Beckham Noble
22. Beckham Noble
23. Oliver Brightly
24. Beckham Noble
25. Oliver Brightly
26. Beckham Noble
27. Oliver Brightly
28. Beckham Noble
29. Oliver Brightly
30. Beckham Noble
31. Oliver Brightly
32. Beckham Noble
33. Beckham Noble
34. Beckham Noble
Epilogue
Thank You
Endless Stretch of Blue by Riley Hart
Also by Max Walker
1 Beckham Noble
The city was charcoal gray. Rain clattered down the window as I looked out at the passing buildings. The regal Croydon Clocktower whizzed by in a raindrop-streaked blur. The Ashcroft Theatre looked different than the last time I’d seen it, with an entirely new modern facade, all white edges and square boxes.
It all felt like home, and yet nothing could seem stranger to me.
Of course, things had changed. I hadn’t been back in London since I’d moved to the States. After my father and I threw fists at each other. After he kicked me out of the house and I never looked back.
I moved to America… damn, seventeen years ago. I had been twenty-three, a young man just figuring himself out, when I felt like my past in London was too much for me to bear. I packed up my shit and made a life for myself across the world.
Now I had just turned forty and no longer needed to figure myself out or explain myself to anyone. Least of all my father. And even if I wanted to talk to him, that wasn’t a possibility.
The reason I had come back to London was to put our past to rest with him. Once and for all.
It was my mother who’d talked me into it. When I was kicked out, she did everything she could to get me back into the house. She was ready to divorce my father and sleep on the streets with me until we found a place to stay. I didn’t want that, and I knew my relationship with my father was irreparable. So I cut all ties with both of my parents. I made it solely on my own, surviving day by day until I started working at a pub. That was where I met a private eye who would talk to me every day about his job, his cases. They weren’t all riveting cases, but he talked about each one with a contagious excitement.
Years later, I spoke to my mum again. We had a tear-filled reunion, my heart feeling like it had been mended from an age-old wound, scabbed over with time. She told me that she’d divorced my father. Losing everything she loved in life, she had thrown herself into her sewing and dressmaking. Her passion bled into her pieces, and she soon found huge success, changing her life around.
Sometime in the last couple of years, my parents had a rekindling of sorts. They spoke over tea and found some common ground. Over those years, things slowly got better, until my mum was telling me that my father was a changed man. She said there was something different about him. A happiness that changed even the way he smiled. She wanted me to speak to him, to try and build a bridge of the whitewater of trauma we had rushing underneath us, but I felt like there would be no way. I couldn’t speak to him. I couldn’t face him.
And then I got a call about his death. It was my mother, and she had sounded pretty shaken up. She asked me to promise that I’d be at the funeral, at least to provide some strength to her.
I didn’t want her going through that day alone. I imagined her dressed in black, holding herself and surrounded by no one she could reach out for. I couldn’t have that. I booked my flight and made it to London in time for the burial.
The funeral went by in a blur. I didn’t speak, but my mother did. She gave a beautiful eulogy for the man she had known before the alcohol took over. She talked about how, in those last few years, he had seemed to have turned his life around. Positivity had bred in a place where negativity held dominance for his entire life. Too little, too late for me, but as my mother wiped away tears, I could see it was just enough for her. She looked frail in her older age, but her shoulders never slumped, no matter how much pain she was enduring. Even at the burial, she stayed strong, holding my hand in hers, her bones poking at my palm, her body giving small shudders.
It was at the end of the burial, when I thought all was done, when a sense of permanence had fallen on the five of us standing there, it was then that a woman walked over to me and caught me by the elbow. She looked to be my mother’s age, with soft brown eyes moist at the corners from fresh tears.
“You’re his son, right?” she asked.
“’Scuse me?”
“Robert’s son. You’re Beckham?”
I nodded. She opened her black jacket and pulled something out from an inside pocket. “This is for you. He wanted you to have it.”
I narrowed my eyes. The envelope had my name written across the front. It was big and bent at the edges, and I could already tell I wanted nothing to do with it. I had come to this funeral
because my mother asked me to. This wasn’t about closure for myself. I’d already got my closure when I was homeless on the grimy London streets. That was when my father died to me, back when I was a sixteen-year-old kid, lost in this world and just looking for a little guidance.
Surprise, surprise.
Closure was a damn fuckin’ lie. Because that envelope held a letter from my father, and as I took it into my hand, I could feel the weight of it like a fifty-pound dumbbell.
“Who are you?” I asked the woman, not recognizing her.
“I’m… well, I should let you read the letter. It’ll explain it all.” She took my hands in hers and shook them. “I’m so sorry.” In her eyes was a deep sorrow, the same kind of sadness reflected in the few people that had attended the funeral. Somehow, though, hers seemed to run deeper.
She left, getting into a dark town car and driving off down the shaded road of the cemetery, leaving me behind with a hundred different questions.
I got into the back of the cab. I held the envelope in my hand, wondering what would happen if I just slid the window down and tossed the damn thing out onto the grungy street.
That’s what I wanted to do. I should have never come. I let my mother convince me this was a good idea. I should have stuck to my gut. This was a mistake, and the burning envelope in my hand proved that.
I told the driver the address to the flat I was staying in. He tapped it into the navigation system, and we were off. I had asked my mum if she wanted to spend some time together, but she said she felt like sleep was the only thing she wanted. I wondered if she knew who that woman was. I didn’t even get a name, but the way she was looking into my eyes, the way the sadness washed over her, I felt like she had to have some kind of strong connection with my father.
The driver turned onto a faintly familiar street. A lot of this part of South London was coming back to me. I had left Kingston when I was nineteen, so there were plenty of memories built up in the narrow streets and brown-bricked buildings, their windowsills painted white, their walls practically touching their neighbors. Not all memories were good, but most were. Most were really good.
“Turn here, please.”
“Sure thing, mate.”
We drove down a less residential street, homes being replaced by newsstands and boutique shops. There were more people out on the streets around here, shopping and going out to eat, walking hand in hand with their dates. A movie theatre blurred past, the marquee lit up like a spotlight, a long line stretching out past the ticket booth.
“You can stop here,” I said, realizing we were getting close. “I can walk the rest of the way.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, it’s a nice night out.”
“It is, innit?” The driver pulled to the side of the road. I thanked him again and hopped out, making sure I had the letter in my hand, although I briefly considered leaving it in the back seat and being done with it for good.
Down the street I went, the letter weighing me down like an anchor. I had a remedy for that kind of trouble, though, and it involved downing a few shots.
I almost walked past it at first. Time doesn’t stop for anyone or anything, that was certain. A lot had changed since I left, my favorite pub being one of those things. I remembered coming to this place when it was a hole-in-the-wall, serving questionable food but excellent liquor. The crowd was always the same and always entertaining, and the bartenders had turned into good friends of mine. I met my first drag queens in Hopkins Mug and taken my first body shots there, too. It had felt a little like family after a while.
Unfortunately, time wasn’t kind on friendships either, and I had lost touch with them years ago.
Part of me hoped they would still be in there. Like a time capsule just waiting to be split apart. The second I walked in, I half expected to be greeted by cheers and familiar faces, all having been preserved in amber and waiting for my return.
Of course, that would never happen. Shit changed, and that was apparent by just looking at the building.
It was a different time seventeen years ago.
Bloody hell. Seventeen years ago?
I looked at the updated facade. The pub looked nothing like it did all those years ago. For one, it had a new name: The Sword and the Sword. There were two swords crossing on the shield above the door, a rainbow behind the shield.
Clever.
The old brick wall that marked the entrance had been replaced by a sleek white wood, freshly painted and well taken care of. After the bouncer let me in, I was glad to see that the inside was at least similar to what I remembered. The tables were different and the pub looked bigger, but overall, this was the same pub I had come to as a kid and found a home in. I remembered the bussers, Alfredo and Kia, two people who had taken me under their big gay wings and taught me how to dance on our downtime. Then there had been Chris and Pradeep, the bartenders who had spent hours teaching me how to make every drink under the sun, along with how to make the most tips under the sun, too. Those two had been tip monsters, their pockets always full to bursting by the end of the night.
I went over to the bar, pulling out a stool and taking a seat by the far end corner, where the light had some trouble reaching. The place was pretty empty, which didn’t surprise me considering it was just now turning five o’clock in the evening.
“Cheers, mate, drinking anything today?” The bartender was a bubbly brunette with a stunning red rose tattoo on her forearm.
“I’ll take a vodka tonic, thanks.”
She must have judged by my all-black attire that the day wasn’t exactly going well, because the drink she handed me was 90 percent vodka and 10 percent tonic.
I drank half of it in one gulp.
On my lap was the thick envelope. I grabbed it, half expecting the thing to light on fire, and placed it on the bar, making sure there weren’t any wet spots. As much as I didn’t want to read the damn thing, I knew I wanted to keep it safe.
It wasn’t long before the pub started to fill up. At first, the music was playing a good mix of oldies and recent hits, low enough that I could hear myself think. I’d been doing a lot of that, and after three vodka tonics, my thoughts were all over the place.
“You’re gonna need a refill,” said a voice from my left. I turned my head, meeting eyes with a young guy, blond hair cut short and light blue eyes reflecting the light off the multicolored disco ball that swung overhead. “What ya drinking?”
He was a good-looking guy. I could entertain this for a moment.
“I’ve got it.” I turned to the bartender and ordered two shots: redheaded sluts.
She brought back the shot glasses swirling with Jägermeister and cranberry juice. The blue-eyed cutie looked at me, a devilish smirk playing on his face. I placed the letter back on my lap, keeping it away from the increasingly dirty bar top.
“Okay, you like control. I like that.”
I smiled at him and grabbed my shot glass. He followed suit, lifting his and clinking the glass with mine before we both tilted our heads back and dropped it down the hatch, the liquor burning its way down my throat.
He shook his shoulders and rolled his head. “That was intense. What was in that shite? Bull bollocks and cinnamon?”
Ah, Londoners. How I missed these bold, brash, beautiful fuckin’ people. I hadn’t been back in a long, long time. Almost enough time for me to have forgotten the difference between a stonker and a todger.
Not that they’re much different at all.
“Whatever, daddy, you can order a shot of pure rubbish and I’ll still go home with you.”
I winced a little at the casual toss of “daddy” my way. It was fine, I got it, and I embraced it. For the most part. My hair had been going gray since I got into my early twenties, and the smile lines that crinkled at the corners of my eyes and on my forehead didn’t exactly scream that I was sipping from the fountain of youth either. I was built broad, with strong shoulders and a sturdy frame, and carried myself with confi
dence. I could see how I fit the description of a daddy, and I didn’t mind it.
What I didn’t enjoy was what came after. The inevitable realization that we had nothing in common besides sex. That was getting very old, very fast. I was tired. Exhausted of relationships that were set to expire from the second they began. No more, I told myself. Stop being such a blundering oaf, focus on yourself and your job, and just be happy, be content.
That’s what I’ve been telling myself.
Now, though, now my hardening cock, spurred by the Jäger and the attractive pair of blue eyes staring me down, was telling me an entirely different story.
“Come, let’s dance.” The music was pumping loud, a song I didn’t recognize. People were shouting about a twerking contest or some other crazy dance move I didn’t know how to do.
“Oh, no. No, that’s okay. I don’t dance.”
“What! Come on, you can dance. Just get behind me and rub up on me. I want to feel that big thing of yours rubbing up against me.” He leaned in, a hand on my thigh.
Why couldn’t he just sit at the pub and chat before I took him back to my flat for the fuck of his life? All these kids wanted to dance and move and swing their arms around, all while they simulated standing sex on a tuna-packed dance floor.
It didn’t sound like fun. Currently, the dance floor was only being used by a group of three guys who looked like they snuck in with fake IDs, which really only made things worse. At least in a tuna-can situation, you were relatively hidden from the masses. In this case, this guy, who I still had no idea what his name was, wanted me to go and move my uncoordinated body as people stood around with drinks in their hands, judging the bloody hell out of us.