Diego: (Brighton Bad Boys 3)

by Tilly Delane

  “Good,” he says. “Because tomorrow morning, George is going to take you for breakfast, but tomorrow evening, Diego is gonna come to your door and he’s gonna want to take you to dinner.”

  “Is he?” I ask, smiling.

  “Yes,” he says almost sadly.

  I shuffle around a little, so I can trail my fingers over his abs and down the happy trail to the semi he is sporting. I take him in my hand and then slide down until my mouth is level with his tip. I dart my tongue out and give him one leisurely lick all around, feeling his cock grow back to full size in my hand immediately.

  “Does Diego like blowjobs?”

  “Fucking loves them,” he groans.

  “Good,” I say as I let go of him and shuffle back up until I’m propped up on my elbow, looking down at him. “Then he had better take me nowhere too nice.”

  George slides a hand into my hair and kisses me, softly. Then he pushes me off, rolls onto his side and pulls me back in, with my back to his chest. He slides a hand under my knee and lifts my leg up then slides into me from behind.

  “You’re killing me, Kalina,” he mumbles, in between peppering my neck with kisses. “I’m too tired to fuck you again right now, but I’m going to sleep right inside you, if you don’t mind.”

  I crawl back, pushing him in as far as possible, and hooking my leg back over his, to tell him that’s fine. He wraps his arms tightly around me, and the last thing I feel as I drift off to sleep is his cock twitching inside me.

  Diego

  It’s the second day in a row that I wake up to a woman sucking my dick, but this time it’s the right one ─ and she is fucking fantastic at the job.

  And it’s not even down to technique, though that is good, too.

  It’s the fact her mouth and my dick clearly have their very own thing for each other. They fucking play with each other and all I can do is come along for the ride.

  She sucks me all the way, swallowing my spunk, and when she’s finished, she crawls up to sit on my face.

  “My turn,” she demands, and I try to oblige and give as good as I just got.

  I never had a woman literally ride my face before and there is something almost intimidating about it, but oh so good. I love how Kalina will just take her pleasure and not give a fuck about propriety.

  She lets me explore her with my tongue, my fingers, my mouth, my nose, not once shy of telling me what she wants or of grabbing my head or my hands and directing me.

  By the time I succeed in making her scream both my names again, I’m good to go for a second round. So I give her some time to recalibrate and then I claim her again, the old-fashioned way. Because I need it. My fucking ego needs it. I flip her over on her back and bury myself in her over and over again, making her taste herself on me when I kiss her and mingling her taste and mine in our mouths when our tongues play their own game again. It’s slow and it’s kind of vanilla and yet utterly, utterly filthy. We play, until she comes for me again but this time much more quietly ─ softer and deeper somehow. I stop kissing her then to look into her eyes as she climaxes, and it sends me over the edge. I spill my second load inside her while the ripples of her orgasm still go through her, all the time holding her gaze, resisting the urge to shut my eyes as I come. And something weird shifts in my chest.

  Afterwards, we clean up, separately this time, and get dressed, her in her regular tomboy clothes and me in a shirt that I borrow from Silas’ wardrobe, which also yields a fresh pair of briefs and socks for me. When I ring to ask him if that’s okay, he laughs his head off at the other end before he tells Grace that Kalina and I shacked up, while I’m still on the line. I hang up to the sound of a whooping American in the background.

  As per Silas’ instructions, I take Kalina for breakfast. I love the fact she chooses a proper old-fashioned greasy spoon and orders a full fry up. I have no idea where she puts it all, but I sure like hanging out with a woman who loves food as much as I do and doesn’t moan about the calories. She’s got no time to count the fat molecules anyhow. She’s too busy dissecting the shitty puns in the shitty right-wing paper that the caf provides for its customers, in that specific way only foreigners ever seem to be able to, and telling me stories about the old biddies who work in the charity shop where she volunteered until recently.

  She is as funny and smart as always, and exactly the same around me as she was before, which is also refreshing. Most of the women I fuck go weird the next day and suddenly I can’t have a conversation with them any longer. I say that to Kalina, and she raises an eyebrow.

  “But do you ever have conversations with them before?” she asks levelly, and I laugh.

  That right there makes Kalina Jasinski one in a million. If you talk to any other woman about other women you’ve fucked after you fucked them, they go all jealous and shit, even if you didn’t let them spend the night and shoved their arse in a taxi.

  Kalina doesn’t get jealous, she goes straight for the intellectual kill shot.

  I find it extremely hard to say goodbye to her after breakfast, but from the moment I switched my phone back on to call Silas until the last bite of fried bread disappears in Kalina’s mouth, my phone goes off non-stop. I have a gazillion missed messages from last night and they’re still coming in hard and fast. Weekends are big business in my world and the last time I took a weekend night off was never.

  I offer to walk her back home, but instead she walks me to the train station, which is just around the corner from the caf she chose. When I automatically head for the taxi rank, she stops me with a hand on my abs.

  “Where are you going? Woodland Drive or The Brick?”

  She surprises me with that, twice over. I had forgotten that she’d been to the Benson Mansion, on the night the big fight between Silas and Rowan went down. But what jolts me even more is her using the nickname for my nan’s building that only family and the very inner circle really use. But she must have overheard me call it that to Silas at some point. And let’s face it, if she wasn’t inner circle before last night, she sure as fuck is now. Inner inner circle.

  “The Brick,” I answer.

  “Then take the train,” she says. “Much faster. You’ll be in Brighton in ten minutes. If you take a cab, it’s forty.”

  I do a double take between her, the rank and the tracks and I realise she’s spot on. And suddenly it dawns on me what is so fucking special about this girl, other than pretty much everything about her. She doesn’t just know how to do the good life, she’s never forgotten how to do the basics.

  She’s fucking perfect.

  Kalina

  I breathe a sigh of relief when I watch his train leave the station.

  That was intense.

  I need time to, what’s the word he uses all the time?

  Recalibrate.

  I’m adopting that. It describes the need I feel right now perfectly.

  I need to recalibrate, and then I need to get my head down and do some fucking work. The charity shop was a dead end. The Jubilee library was a dead end. And I’m slowly starting to think even the language school might just have been a coincidence, though it seems improbable. But I’ve dug and dug and there is nothing else Piotr Schmidt-Danczyk and Zoltan Salak had in common.

  Piotr was Polish-German and came from a small town called Jülich, on the German-Dutch border. He was well travelled, even at fourteen. His father is an orthopaedic surgeon who married a prosthetics developer. It’s all about knees and hips in their house. I’ve been there. They are very nice, middle-class people who work hard for their wealth, pay their taxes and play tennis, while making jokes about how they will need to branch out into elbow replacements one day.

  Though when I met them, the jokes had gone stale and their eyes had that hollow, haunted look all of my clients have.

  Zoltan was Hungarian. The only son of a single mum, seventeen when he arrived in Brighton two years ago. First in his family to show academic talent. He’d never left Hungary before he came to England. The
authorities here assume he stayed as an illegal, so they were never as interested in him as they were in Piotr. Piotr disappeared only three months after Zoltan ─ which makes all my alarm bells ring, but clearly not the ones in the heads of Sussex police ─ but he got a proper coastal search, appeals on the internet, the whole package. Zoltan got a missing poster and a stamp on his files, saying ‘wanted for immigration offences’.

  While I know a shit ton about Piotr, I know very little about Zoltan, because communicating with his mum is difficult. She only speaks Hungarian and that happens to be one of the many languages I don’t speak. When I contacted her initially, I emailed her in English and heard nothing back for two weeks. I thought maybe she didn’t get the email and was about to send her an old-fashioned actual letter, when I got an email back, written from her address but by a friend of hers who spoke English. Bad English. After some to and fro over a number of days, we realised that if I wrote to her in French that would be easier, because she had another friend who spoke fluent French. She had them compose a long letter about Zoltan and how wonderful he was, but it didn’t really tell me anything about the person, other than what a proud mother sees through her rose-tinted glasses. It would probably be useful to go and see her, but technically Zoltan isn’t my job. He’s just a lead and I’m not sure the Schmidt-Danczyks have the finance to spring for a flight to Hungary and a hotel, on top of what they are paying me to be here. And I don’t think I’d learn enough from being there to warrant the expense. And Zoltan’s mother doesn’t have a penny to her name.

  It’s probably the toughest aspect of my job, staying clear on who is bankrolling me, and who is not. Konstantin, my boss and mentor, is very strict on that: we don’t do pro bono. There are too many missing children in the world to get sidetracked off the paying gigs. We’d never make a penny. Konstantin always says it’s like rescuing a puppy from a shelter. You can’t bring them all home, so concentrate on the ones you can. It still bugs me, though, that the Schmidt-Danczyks of this world may get closure one day whereas Zoltan’s mother will forever wonder what happened to her baby.

  So I secretly hope I find both their bodies.

  I never delude myself into thinking the kids I am looking for are still alive. I’ve recovered eight since I started working for Konstantin five years ago. Three of them in my second year of training, as Konstantin’s help. The other five on my own since I ‘graduated’. None of them were still breathing when we found them. Actually, none of them still had flesh on their bones.

  In the business, they call us the body hunters.

  Diego

  I stop myself from answering calls on the train, it’s too public anyway, and I don’t bother getting a cab from Brighton Station to the seafront either. Instead, I nip down into the North Laines, like any other punter. I wade through the thousands of people out today, moving beautifully incognito through the masses of hippies, punks and tosspots, before I get to North Street and head up towards the Clock Tower, then down West Street, hangar right at the seafront, until I get to The Brick. The security on the door to the side entrance that leads up to the flats does a double take when he sees me but then he nods.

  “Good afternoon, boss,” he says.

  “Good afternoon, Ben,” I reply.

  I hired him not so long ago to replace Silas’ arse on the rota for as long as Silas isn’t coming back to work. He will, but when he does, he won’t be doing door duty any longer, that’s for fucking certain. I’ll give him a choice, depending on whether I get the contract for running the two new youth offender institutions that are being built on the edge of town at the moment, or not. I’ve put in my tender and now it’s a game of wait and see.

  If I get it, Silas will be my head of security there. If I don’t, I need to talk to Julian, who is currently running Santos-Benson Security for me, about how we can maybe branch out and give Silas his own patch.

  If he wants to, that is.

  I keep asking him, but he’s not giving me any answers. I think secretly he likes us being back together as friends as much as I do, but he thinks that as soon as he stops having the longest holiday known to man, we’ll be back in that bullshit master-and-servant dynamic, and he doesn’t want that.

  Neither do I.

  It’s a fucking headache.

  I push the thought aside as I enter the foyer. We’re not in America, so there is no ‘doorman’, no reception and once I leave Ben behind on the other side of the door, it’s eerily quiet.

  The Brick is always pretty silent at four o’clock in the afternoon. The whores are asleep, and my security guys are all out on jobs or still at home waiting for the nightshifts to begin. It’s at this time of day that I feel torn about keeping the building or not. For about an hour a day, this is home. Not quite as much as any house that smells of lemongrass and is owned by Sheena O’Brien is, but home nonetheless.

  I take the lift up to my nan’s penthouse, select a suit, shirt and dress shoes from the closet and change, keeping on the underwear I nicked from Silas.

  Then I take the lift down to the office.

  As soon as I step through the door, Lila, our secretary and Julian’s wife, looks up from her laptop and breathes a sigh of relief.

  “Boss, good to see you, we were getting worried.”

  I smile at her.

  “I told you I was taking the night off. Everything okay here?”

  She takes a breath but before she can answer, Julian barges through his office door into reception, Isla, his German shepherd bitch, at his heel.

  “Diego! About fucking time,” he starts then stops himself when he sees my face.

  Nobody talks to me that way in my own fucking office. I can feel all the mellow of the last twenty-four hours seep out of me in an instant. Cat away and all that. But before I can put Julian in his place, he runs a hand through his short black hair and apologises.

  “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean for it to come out that way, but we’ve got a situation and I’ve been trying to get hold of you since last night.”

  The ‘sir’ tickles me. Julian is ex-army and when he’s stressed it still slips out. I soften a bit.

  “Yeah, I know, I saw the missed calls, but you didn’t leave a message, so I didn’t think it was that urgent.”

  He nods gravely.

  “I would have. But you explicitly told me not to ever mention anything around this over the phone ever, or in any traceable way,” he says, and I’m immediately on full alert.

  Of course there isn’t only one thing Julian and I don’t talk about unless we’re eye to eye, but there is only one thing I told him we explicitly don’t talk about, unless we’re in a secure room.

  I jerk my head at my office.

  “I’m listening.”

  Kalina

  In Germany, where I’m registered to operate, anyone can become a private detective, no qualifications needed. But when I decided that’s what I wanted to do and found Konstantin, the only P.I. in a fifty mile radius of the small town where my boarding school was located who would even entertain talking to me, he sent me straight from receiving my Abiturzeugnis at school, into taking courses with the Zentralstelle für die Ausbildung im Detektivgewerbe, ZAD for short. Sleuth uni, as we call it.

  It’s exactly as lame as that sounds, but being a ZAD graduate gets you better indemnity insurance rates and less scrutiny from officials. Konstantin is a good mentor, though, so he topped up my training in other areas that the ZAD doesn’t cover. Like shooting, hand-to-hand combat and covering your tracks before you’ve even started making them.

  I have no idea what Konstantin did before he became a PI, but I’m pretty sure he must have been military or secret service ─ or organised crime enforcer turned good. I don’t really care. I know that the work we do is good work and that often you can’t get the job done without crossing the lines between legal and illegal.

  Something neither the ZAD not Konstantin taught me, though, is what it means to get the feeling.

  The feel
ing is not the same as a hunch. A hunch is like knowing that someone is about to knock a glass over on the table, based on all the other times you’ve seen people gesticulate in a particular way while a glass was a similar distance away from the table edge and at a similar angle from their elbow. It’s basically the more bad-arse word for an educated guess on a grander scale.

  The feeling is not the same as intuition either. Intuition is just empathy and reading people and interpreting that against the background of a given set of circumstances.

  The feeling is different. It happens when something shifts in the ether, when a case you are hooked into suddenly takes a turn or gathers momentum, and you can feel it on a metaphysical level. It might be down to the work you’ve put into your search, the butterfly effect that follows from your actions. But more often than not, it’s just that something is happening outside of your influence, but you are so connected to the subject matter that you can feel it in your gut, or maybe through the ripples you feel by way of the six degrees of separation. Although I think, considering we’ve gained another two or three billion people on the planet since that theory was derived, we must be at seven or eight degrees by now.

  Wherever it comes from, the trick is to have done enough groundwork to know where to look for the shift, once the feeling hits.

  The problem with Piotr and Zoltan is that I’ve immersed myself in their cases for months now, but at no point did I get the feeling, or any feeling for that matter. Half the time I don’t even feel a connection, no matter how intensely I stare at the two photographs of two very different looking boys.

  Piotr was small, slight in build, much younger looking than his sixteen years, round-faced and dark-haired, with big brown puppy eyes. He could have passed for one of my brothers. Maybe that’s why I feel an affinity with him I’ve never felt with any of my other cases before. Or maybe it’s the Polish thing. Maybe it’s both.