by TA Moore
Probably.
He closed the fridge and, because he was a well-trained Kelly boy, stuck the kettle on and quickly rinsed the betraying cup of coffee under the tap.
“See?” Kathleen said as she pulled Claire with her into the kitchen. “I told you, if you have time, it would be no trouble to make you a cup of tea. Sit. Sit.”
With a helpless laugh, Claire gave in and sat down at the table. She checked her watch.
“I have about half an hour,” she admitted. “So, how’s Bry doing? I haven’t seen him since he went back to work. I know he and Marie were….”
“Separated,” Kathleen said. She bounced Maxie in her arms as she talked. “Nearly a year now. I always knew it wouldn’t end well. Poor Marie could never deal with him being undercover, not coming home every night. Still, I didn’t think it would end like this. It was such a tragic accident, but she shouldn’t have been out driving that late.”
Or that drunk, but that wasn’t part of Kathleen’s narrative. Just like their childhoods, she had her own way of seeing things.
“Mom, I have to go,” Kelly said. “You sure you’re okay taking care of Maxie today?”
“Of course,” Kathleen said. She looked down and beamed at Maxie as though he were the cutest thing in the world. “Me and Maxie can have a lovely visit with Claire, can’t we?”
“Okay. I’ll come and grab him this evening,” Kelly said. “Nice to meet you, Claire.”
“You too, ummm—” She stalled on his name. Kathleen took advantage of her distraction to shove an armful of baby at her. Claire blanched and held her arms stiffly as Maxie did his aggressive squirm-and-arch reaction to a new person. “Oh no, Kathleen. I don’t—”
“Just for a second, dear. I just need a quick word.”
Kelly headed out into the garden. Gone-to-wood herbs grew in two long planters along the path that were decorated with the stubs of his dad’s old cigars.
The sun had crawled high enough in the sky to burn off the last drizzle of morning mist, and the sky was a flat, unrelenting blue. “Claire’s a lovely girl, isn’t she?” Kathleen said as she pulled the back door shut behind her. “I’ve heard that robbery-homicide already have their eye on her after she worked with them on a few cases.”
“Mom….”
“She’s a friend. Byron can have friends, can’t he?” she challenged.
“Since when has Byron ever been friends with a woman?”
Kathleen couldn’t disagree with that. Since he hit puberty, it had been Byron’s motto that men and women couldn’t be friends, so she just tched and batted the topic of conversation out of the air with one hand.
“Your dad really appreciates you stepping up like this to help Byron,” she said. “You know he’d never tell you that himself, but he does.”
Kelly nodded. He kind of hated that secondhand, halfhearted praise from his dad still made him feel like a little kid who just got a slap on the back. “How is he?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” Kathleen said. “Sick of desk duty. I might finally convince him to retire. Really, sweetheart, he’s doing much better. He’s even stuck to his diet this time.”
“Good,” Kelly said.
“We’re going to have a barbecue in a few weeks. We’d love all you boys to come,” she said. “It’s just going to be family, a few friends, some of your dad’s old friends from work.”
She stopped and waited hopefully.
Dad’s friends from work. That was another family code, a newer one. It meant, “You’re going to come on your own, right?” and “We don’t care if you’re gay, but… not everyone understands,” and “We love you, so won’t you lie for us?”
Kelly swallowed the bitter taste on his tongue, because what was the point.
“’Course,” he said. “It’s been a while since we all got together.”
Kathleen laughed, relieved that he wasn’t going to make a scene, and squeezed his arm. “Christmas,” she said. “Can you believe it? All my boys in one city at least, and we still hardly ever see each other.”
Yeah, well, there were a lot of reasons for that.
“I know, Mom,” he said as he kissed her cheek. “Hard to believe. I’ll see you later.”
IF KELLY had planned to take Clayton’s money, he’d have felt bad about it after he finished the background check. There was easy money, and then there was James “Jimmy” Graham. The guy wore who he was on his skin.
Since it would get back to Larry if he turned up at the law firm with a report in hand, he told Clayton to meet him at the food van down the street—kind of like a date, a sly little voice in his head insinuated. He ignored it and grabbed his burger from the bright-eyed, wide-smiled kid behind the hot plate. The food was hot through the cardboard against his fingers.
“Hope you don’t enjoy your Angry Burger, sir,” the girl rhymed off gleefully. She saluted him crisply. “Choke on it!”
Kelly stuck money in the tip jar anyhow. It was the schtick. Miss Ann Thropy’s Burgers—service with a scowl. It was hard to get used to for a Californian, but the burgers were worth it. He left the confused customer in line behind him to weather the prickly menu and retreated to one of the folding tables set up along the wide curve of the sidewalk dining court. The tall mirrored buildings glittered with the bright blue reflection of the sky, and a homeless guy slouched under a tree provided a droned music soundtrack.
Kelly unpacked the burger. It was already cut in half, juice and hot sauce slippery under his fingers as he picked it up. The bun was black—charcoal or octopus ink; there were options, but Kelly hadn’t really cared—and the two patties had been marinated in coffee before they were slapped on the grill. Kelly took a bite. He wasn’t sure it tasted good, exactly, but he wanted another bite.
“That looks disgusting,” Clayton said at his shoulder.
Kelly jerked with surprise and nearly choked on a mouthful of half-chewed coffee meat. Hot sauce burned more than usual when it went down the wrong way. He coughed and grabbed his bottle of water as he twisted around to bring Clayton into view.
“It’s delicious,” he said from behind his hand. Once he swallowed, he gave Clayton a wry grin. “Better when you don’t choke on it.”
“I hope you pay more attention to your surroundings when we pay you to do surveillance.” Clayton sat down opposite him. He tilted his head back to the sun for a second, eyes closed and hair tipped with gold. Then he scooched his chair sideways into a bar of cast shade. “That didn’t take long.”
Kelly put the envelope on the table between them. “I’ve never been burned on surveillance,” he said. It was a lie. Everyone got burned. Murphy’s Law saw to that. There’d be construction, some angry woman would mistake your car for her cheating ex’s, or something would just put the target’s nerves on end. Kelly placated his conscience, which always sounded like his dad, with a silent “Well, lately.” “And your client married a dirtbag. Hell, the dirt was easier to find than the bag.”
While Clayton flicked through the report and a frown pleated between his straight, sandy eyebrows, Kelly watched him. One day he was going to work out exactly what it was about Clayton Reynolds that he couldn’t just ignore.
Obviously Clayton was handsome. He had the sort of stern, sharp-boned face that belonged in a European castle or a silver-screen Western—all harsh angles and intensity. His shoulders were broad, his hips lean, and his legs looked a mile long in his tailored dark blue suit. All of that explained why he made Kelly’s mouth dry and his mind dirty, but not the way he stuck in Kelly’s head.
He worked with plenty of attractive men, people he gave a solid second look to, but they didn’t crawl into his fantasies or take up space in his brain while he went about his day. It wasn’t as though there was even anything to it other than an itch to be scratched. Clayton was probably a catch for someone, but not for Kelly.
He didn’t do intense, reserved men who wore their feelings on the insides of their bones where no one could see them. His lovers were go
od-natured and easygoing, the sort of men who didn’t need anything from you but still wanted to be with you.
Until they didn’t. Even then, there were no hard feelings.
So one day he’d work out why long, lanky, and knife-sharp—not what he wanted, not what he needed—had worked his way under Kelly’s skin. Probably not today, though. Kelly took a bite of his burger. He’d just started to chew when Clayton looked up from the timeline of Jimmy’s douchebaggery.
“What do you think of him?”
Kelly swallowed hard and wiped hot sauce off his mouth with a napkin. The heat lingered on his tongue, and he took another swig of water while he dragged his thoughts out of the gutter.
“On paper it looks like she’s in a good position,” Kelly said. “Even without her broken arm, she has plenty of reasons to leave him. I can’t see custody being an issue if he gets to court.”
“If?” Clayton said. “You think she’s in danger?”
“He already broke her arm. And he’s got more than just pride on the line.” Kelly wiped his hands on his jeans and leaned over to flick back pages. “Look. The house is in her name. No bank accounts or credit cards, so he’s probably fed all his finances back through her accounts, even if she doesn’t know about it. If she leaves him, he stands to lose a lot. That’s just his own finances. His associates are… unpleasant people, and if any of their business interests are entwined with his, then it could involve them.”
Clayton looked sour but not surprised. He knew what the facts meant better than Kelly did.
“Damn it.” He pushed the file back into the envelope and sat back. His jaw was set so tightly it looked as though the sharp hinges were going to slice through the skin. “I had hoped she was just afraid of him.”
Kelly didn’t need to state the obvious, that other people were afraid of Jimmy Graham. It was laid out in the stark black and white of his record, the red hidden under the dry terms of the charges—assault and battery, false imprisonment, possession with intent, criminal threat. He wasn’t a nice man. If a broken arm was all she got from him, she was luckier than most of the people in his orbit.
He shoved the carton with the uneaten half of his burger across the table like a greasy protein consolation prize.
“If you want lunch.”
Clayton gave it an unimpressed look and pushed it back to Kelly. “I’m a vegetarian.”
Kelly flipped the carton shut and pulled it back to his side of the table. Yeah, it was just like a date. Awkward. A middle-aged man in a pair of tie-dyed shorts that he really didn’t have the body for skated past them. The wheels rattled over the concrete.
“Do you want me to chase up more details on Mr. Graham?” he asked.
“Did you miss something?” Clayton asked as he picked up the envelope. He pulled an apologetic face a second later. “Sorry. Not yet. There’s no point putting more man hours into this until Nadine decides whether to go forward or not.”
“If you’re sure.”
“Thank you for this, though,” Clayton said. He held up the envelope. “I appreciate it.”
“Well, let me know if you need anything else,” Kelly said. He grinned. “Same deal.”
Clayton gave him a tight shadow of a smile. “I probably won’t,” he admitted as he stood up. “Not this time. Probably not the next. Maybe never.”
There was a raw scrape in his voice that cut through his usual service. Something too honest to hide? It wasn’t any of Kelly’s business, but he asked anyhow.
“This case, this client, has really gotten under your skin. Why?”
Clayton stood in the sunshine, the scrappy black-and-silver food truck behind him, and adjusted the cuffs of his expensive suit. It looked like a photo shoot for some glossy magazine profile. Turn the page and there’d be a picture of him with his sleeves rolled up to drink a mug of artisanal coffee.
The rawness lingered in his voice, something real under the polish.
“Children should be scared of the dark and monsters under the bed, if they’re scared of anything. Not their parents.” He paused and twisted his thin mouth into a smirk as he slapped the envelope against his leg. “That and I don’t like to lose, Kelly.”
He gave one last salute with the envelope and left. Kelly watched him go and wondered what else Clayton kept tightly folded down under his pressed shirts and excellent suits.
Chapter Four
IT DIDN’T matter how much bleach was slopped around the floor at the end of the day, the gym always smelled like old socks, sweat, and ass. Kelly figured that most of the fighters had broken their noses often enough that they didn’t care.
Kelly danced backward over the canvas, his gloves tucked up to his chin as Cole bounced back off the ropes. There was blood on Cole’s mouth. He wiped it off on his arm, grinned with bloody teeth, and came after Kelly.
The gym rats on the sidelines jeered good-naturedly—“stand and fight” and “let’s see that pretty face”—as Kelly cautiously retreated. Sweat stung in his eye as it dripped down behind his goggles, and he blinked it away.
He blocked a hard left with his forearm, and the rattle of it jarred up into his shoulder. He jabbed a punch into Cole’s stomach, and that earned him a grunt of pain, a short-lived feeling of smugness, and a haymaker that came out of nowhere and knocked him on his ass.
“Sonov—”
Cole tapped him in the ribs with his toe. “Mind your manners.”
Cole pinned his glove between his ribs and elbow to yank it off. Then he held out his hand to Kelly and wriggled his fingers. Kelly grunted and took the offered help to get up. His ears were ringing, and the abrupt transition from prone to upright made his stomach twist. For a second, he felt like he might do a Maxie and just barf on his own feet.
Cole slapped that out of him with a tap to the cheek to get his attention. He held up his middle finger in front of Kelly’s nose.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked.
Idiot. Kelly gave him a shove to get the sweaty bulk of him out of his space.
“You know, they have a Boxercize class at my gym,” he muttered as he rubbed his jaw. “I could just go there.”
Cole laughed and grabbed him by the shoulder to steer him out of the ring.
“Boxercise won’t teach you to avoid a punch to the face.” He casually slapped the back of Kelly’s head. “And your mug just begs to be punched.”
Kelly ducked away from him and crawled under the ropes. He dragged his gloves off and grabbed a bottle of chilled water from one of the loitering gym rats. It was unlabeled and tasted like tap. He drank half of it down in one go. That would replenish about a third of the hydration he’d sweated out letting Cole beat him up.
He doubled over and braced his hands against his knees as he caught his breath. His ribs hurt, his jaw ached, and it felt like he’d gone ten rounds with Conor McGregor instead of sparred for twenty minutes with a forty-year-old. Maybe—not that he’d admit it aloud—he’d gotten a bit out of shape.
“You’re one to talk.” He pushed himself upright and looked up to where Cole dangled his long, lean body over the ropes. “That pretty face of yours is held together by staples.”
Anyone else would get laid out for that—if not because they’d brought up the surgery, then because they’d called him pretty. Since his little brother had said it, Cole just grinned and wiped blood off his chin.
“The curse of the men in our family,” he said easily as he ducked under the ropes and jumped down. He hooked a long arm around Kelly’s throat and planted a noisy kiss on his temple. “Why d’ya think Da had to leave Ireland? His face needed the break. Come on. Take those stupid goggles off, and I’ll take you for a beer.”
“HOW YOU coping?” Cole asked as he slid a pint of Guinness across the table. Froth dribbled down the sides of the glass and soaked into the coaster. Cole spun a chair around and straddled it as he took an appreciative drink of his own beer. “With Maxie and, you know, Liam.”
Kelly ran hi
s thumb up the side of the glass to gather a rime of foam. He didn’t actually like Guinness—he preferred a beer that he didn’t have to chew—but to come out with that would cause more arguments than him being gay.
Okay. Maybe not. It was his and Cole’s thing, though. They sparred. They went for beer. Back when they started, when Cole had been twenty and Kelly ten, it was ginger ale. Kelly figured it was the same thing back then. He hadn’t been a smart kid. Now it was beer, and Cole asked about stuff that he’d probably rather not.
“Liam asked me to go back with him,” he said. “To Ireland. I thought about it.”
“Jaysus,” Cole said. The Irish in his voice thickened. He’d never been there, but he’d picked it up from Mom and Dad before years of America had rubbed the burr off. “Mom would have killed herself.”
Kelly flinched. “Not funny.” He took a draught of the thick, yeasty beer and set the pint glass back down carefully in the ring it had left on the coaster. “It should have made sense to go. I did like him.”
“You don’t move to another country because you like someone,” Cole said. “You move because you can’t live where you are without them.”
“Well, fuck,” Kelly said. He slouched back in his chair and nursed his Guinness. “That’s beautiful.”
Cole flashed a wide, white grin that crinkled the corners of his eyes. He looked like their dad. He had the same pale gray eyes and red-fair hair that faded to gilt instead of gray, but he smiled more than Dad ever did.
“It’s not bad,” he acknowledged. “What did you say?”
Kelly puffed his cheeks out with a sigh. “Waited until he noticed that I hadn’t booked my ticket and pointed out I didn’t want to go?”
Cole pulled a face that tried not to be horrified but didn’t quite make it. “That’s an approach.”
“Yeah. I could have handled it better.”
“You could have talked to me about it.” Cole folded his arms over the back of the chair. He cracked a sly grin. “I’ve got good lines, if nothing else.”