Take the Edge Off Read online

  There was a zip file full of death threats on Edward’s computer to send to the police “in the event of,” and those were only the ones that wanted Joe harmed. That didn’t include the people, the ones he’d grown up with, worked with, and dated, who didn’t like him that much. Why should the opinion of one pretty contract worker with a tight ass matter more than all of those?

  The answer was probably in the question, Joe thought with a flutter of wry humor.

  He reached forward and clinked the base of his glass against the bottle.

  “Deal,” he said. “I’ll say please… in public.”

  Cal snorted at him, but a hint of interested color flushed his cheeks and the sharp bones of his temples. He sat back and lifted the bottle. This time Joe glanced away before he got distracted by Cal’s mouth, and his eyes caught on a blotchy, irregular stain on Cal’s torn sleeve instead.

  “Is that blood?” he asked.

  Cal looked blank and then glanced down at his arm as though he’d just remembered. “Oh. Yeah.” He put the soda down and rolled the sleeve back up his arm. The raw, red line scraped through a set of crooked initials inked onto Cal’s arm and then curved down and around to nick the top bar of the crucifix on the pale underside of his forearm. It was scabbed roughly at the corners and raw-looking along the rest on the length of it. Cal clenched his fingers and rolled his fist to move the muscles under the sliced skin. “Turns out your friend in the graveyard had a knife.”

  A minute ago Joe would have said he’d spent too many chemicals on fear today to muster any more. He’d been wrong. It caught in his chest like cold, wet rags as he remembered the attacker’s desperate energy and the venom in his voice as he threatened to finish the job next time. He’d come equipped to do it too.

  “I didn’t know you were hurt,” Joe said. “I’m sorry. If you want to go to the police, I won’t stop you.”

  Cal shrugged and rolled his sleeve back down. “It’s a scratch,” he said. “I’ve had worse.”

  There was a pause as he took a drink. Then he grimaced and leaned his elbows on the table as he leveled a serious look across the table at Joe.

  “Look, it’s not my business. You made that clear,” he said carefully. “But are you sure you don’t want to tell Edward? This is his job, and, to be honest, it’s not mine. I’m only a driver.”

  “And get laid,” Joe said, in a halfhearted try at humor. The echo of the other night’s claim made Cal’s mouth twitch.

  “That’s more of a hobby,” Cal said.

  Joe finished the whiskey, but it didn’t do anything to squelch the guilt. He set the empty glass down on the table with a click and steepled his fingers against the rim.

  “This was my call. I’ll take the consequences,” he said. “I don’t expect you to put yourself in harm’s way, not any more than you already have. What I do expect is for you to respect my wishes, and I do not want Edward to know.”

  Joe knew the drill. The minute Edward found out the stalker had escalated from empty paper threats to physical action, he’d want to institute new security measures that would curtail Joe’s ability to move around freely. Under normal circumstances the ability to run to McDonald’s without an escort would be a small sacrifice to make in return for not being thrown into a grave.

  Right now, it would ruin everything.

  “Are you close with your parents?” he asked. “Your mother?”

  Cal looked askance for a bit, but after a second, he visibly decided to play along. “Not really. My dad’s a junkie. He’s really good at it but useless at anything else, like being a parent. Mum’s married to some lawyer, lives up in Newcastle. She likes to pretend me and El don’t exist.” The flat honesty caught Joe off guard. That must have shown on his face, because Cal twisted his mouth into that sharp-edged, unamused smile and shrugged. “It’s their shit, not mine.”

  That sounded like a good philosophy. Joe wished he could follow it, but his family’s “shit” was hard to scrape off.

  “My mother died,” he said. It was habit to try and sound sad about that—half because people always seemed to think he should be, and half to see if he could wring the emotion out if he said it often enough, plaintively enough. A sort of emotional muscle memory. “It was tragic and sudden. She had a heart attack one day, and that was it. She died. People do.”

  He paused and shifted uncomfortably. The conversation usually ended at “tragic and sudden,” a one-two of bad luck that no one ever wanted to question. Even when it was Joe who said the words, he could hear Harry’s flat, uninviting delivery in the words.

  “We never talked about her,” he said. “I asked, but… Edward always said it was too painful for Dad to talk about.”

  Cal reached over the table and stole the glass from under Joe’s fingers. “I’m guessing this is a two-drink conversation,” he said as he stood up.

  He wasn’t wrong. Joe licked his lip and tasted the diluted salt of blood. The hangover from his panic attack in the graveyard sat like a stone in the back of his skull, his stomach and arms ached dully from the beating he’d taken, and the whiskey he’d downed hadn’t even touched the edges of it.

  “Get me a beer,” he said. Then, since he’d promised, “Please.”

  Cal pointed his approval with one finger as he headed back to the bar. He leaned on the counter and waited for the bartender to drag himself away from the TV. Three stools down the two rowdy businessmen switched their attention briefly away from the redhead to Cal.

  “Charge by the hour, mate?” one of them cackled as he nudged his companion in the ribs. “What’s the going rate?”

  Joe tensed.

  Cal turned and looked the man up and down. Whatever the expression on his face was, it made the businessman flush and look worried.

  Shit.

  “Sweetheart, if you could afford me—” Cal said. His voice was pitched lighter than usual, the roughness that made Joe’s balls clench stripped from under the words. “—you’d know it without having to ask the price.”

  The businessman’s friend laughed and punched him in the arm while he crowed, “That’s true. He’s got you there, Ned.”

  The flush on Ned’s cheeks darkened angrily. He tossed back the dregs of his wine and curled his lip.

  “Who do you think you are, you fuckin—”

  “Think it through before you finish that,” Cal interrupted him, “because I will knock your fucking teeth down your throat if I don’t like what comes out of your gob.”

  Whatever Ned had been going to say crawled back off his tongue and down his throat. He blanched, muttered something under his breath, and turned his back. His friend laughed harder and refilled both their glasses.

  The confrontation, at least, inspired the bartender to leave the TV for a minute as he came down the bar. He popped the top off the beer and another soda and handed them over the bar along with a soft-voiced comment.

  Whatever he said made Cal shrug at him before he took the drinks and came back to the table.

  “Does that happen often?” Joe asked as Cal sat down.

  Cal glanced back over his shoulder and shrugged. He slid the beer across the table.

  “It used to happen more,” he said. A wry smile curved his mouth as he waved a hand at his face. “When I was a kid, I was pretty as fuck.”

  He said it like it would be news to Joe, as though he weren’t… well, the sort of man someone would call to their room to seduce five minutes after meeting him. The pretty had faded, that was true, but it had been replaced with heavy bones and brooding sensuality. Cal apparently had no idea.

  “You aren’t exactly hard on the eyes now,” Joe said.

  Cal shrugged. “I do okay,” he said dismissively. “So what? You think your Dad….”

  He trailed off expectantly. Joe faltered as he was faced with filling in the blank. It had been his idea to start the conversation, but this would be the first time he’d actually said it out loud to anyone. There was a possibility that the minute he did
, the whole construct of suspicion and circumstantial evidence would collapse into wishful thinking.

  Joe had seen it happen often enough. Some executive would get up to present his foolproof plan to save his company, every supplier sourced and line of income double-checked, but all it took was one previously unconsidered question to scoop out the foundations. It was usually Joe’s job to pinpoint and ask that question, so it would be ironic if someone did it to him.

  Better now, he supposed, than in front of Harry.

  “My dad doesn’t like publicity,” he said. “No fancy parties, no sex scandals, no celebrity friends. He always said only idiots court publicity, that if people see you on the news with a gold-plated Bugatti, the first thing they’ll think is you don’t deserve it and they do.”

  Cal laughed and crossed his arms, his elbows braced on the edge of the table. “It’s like he’s met me.”

  “As a little kid, I thought he’d found some life hack that none of those other rich people understood,” Joe said. “It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I worked out that part of it was that Dad had skeletons in the closet and some very dangerous associates he didn’t want anyone to know about. By then, though, I had my own secrets.”

  Sixteen years old and his cock hard in the barman’s mouth, caught between the realization that this was the missing piece and flat terror that this was another cock in the equation. His dad, who boasted about what a lady’s man his son was and joked—or “joked”—about dynasties, would never understand.

  “Then I got—” Joe hesitated on the engaged and took a drink of beer to cover his stumble. He looked over the table at Cal, who was straightforwardly into cars and guys, and wondered if he’d understand Kristen, if he’d get that Joe had really thought he could make it work if he liked her and pretended that he hadn’t fucked some guy in a club. Probably not. Joe wasn’t even sure he ever thought so himself, not really. “I had my picture taken at a few nightclubs, ended up in a couple of gossip magazines. A few weeks later, I started to get some weird emails.”

  “Threats?” Cal asked.

  “Not then,” Joe said. “Odd. Angry. They weren’t threats, though. They just accused me of lying.”

  Over and over again. There was no way to read personality into a computer font, but the uncompromising, all-caps repetition of LIAR, sporadically misspelled, still conjured rage and angry, jabbed keystrokes.

  “About what?”

  “I didn’t know,” Joe said. He’d thought it was a lot of things, from a threat to out him to an angry ex-employee, but he hadn’t known. “Not at first. Then they emailed me that we both knew the truth about my mother, and that if I kept lying, they’d make me stop. To be honest I thought it was this vlogger who was obsessed with an actress friend of mine. He’d ambushed me outside of a bar when I was with her and tried to antagonize me into something… newsworthy. One of the things he asked was if my mother would be proud, and I said she would. It was the only thing he did that got a reaction, so at first I figured he wanted to see how good of a goad he was.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  Joe shook his head. “No. It was like that broke some sort of dam, and they started to send emails and letters. Then they started to mail stuff to our offices in LA. That’s why Edward is involved. Once it escalates into real life, it’s a lot harder to keep it off people’s radar.”

  “They’re some nut, though,” Cal pointed out. He took a swig of his soda and then gestured with the bottle. “Maybe they think your mum’s, like, the Virgin Mary or something. People make weird connections sometimes. They think they’re real, but that doesn’t always mean they are. You don’t—”

  “I didn’t take it at face value,” Joe said impatiently. He wondered if the people with their company-saving plans, laid out in action points and diagrams, felt this irritated at being questioned. Probably. Maybe it was a wonder he didn’t have more death threats. “I made inquiries. I talked to people who’d known her before I was born. No one knew anything. Her and Dad had been living half the year in England. She was from here, and then one year, Dad came home with me and told everyone she died. Suddenly and tragically. No details, no records.”

  “So, what?” Cal asked. “Do you think something… bad happened?”

  “I don’t know. I think my father lied about what happened to my mother. I don’t know why he did it, or when he started, but he did,” Joe said. He took a drink of beer and decided not to add the last level to his blueprint, in case it collapsed under its own weight.

  I think she might not be dead at all.

  That sounded too stupid to risk saying out loud, like a child’s fantasy in a grown man’s mouth. The thing was, Joe still couldn’t shake the conviction it was true.

  His mother should have been buried in that graveyard today, with her parents. It was one of the few details his dad, drunk and maudlin, had ever given him. But the only names etched on the stone had been his grandparents.

  Chapter Five

  THE BLOODIED shirt lay in a tangled ball on the black-and-white tiled floor as Cal stepped out of the shower. He’d scrubbed the scrape on his arm open again, and blood dripped, pink and diluted, down his arm to his fingers and then onto the floor.

  Cal grimaced and grabbed a washcloth to sop up the blood. He held it against the cut while he unzipped the first-aid kit he’d grabbed from the car. A quick application of an alcohol swab made him hiss, and then he stuck a square of gauze against his forearm. The ends of the cut peeked out from under the bandage, but it would do. He fumbled one-handed with a roll of tape and tore papery lengths of it off to clumsily slap it down on his arm.

  The final result wasn’t pretty, and he was going to lose some hair later, but it would do. Cal gave himself a quick rubdown with a towel, head to balls, and then glanced at his reflection in the mirror. The asshole at the cemetery had thrown an elbow that caught Cal in the jaw and rattled his teeth. He could feel the ache of it in the bone, but the bruise hadn’t come up yet.

  Cal rubbed his jaw, the scruff of stubble that had grown back in since he’d shaved that morning rough under his fingers, and wondered idly how Joe would feel about a beard. He caught that thought and grimaced at himself. Sex might always be on the table for him, but he was pretty sure that, as far as Joe was concerned, that itch was scratched.

  Besides, he probably had other things on his mind than Cal’s ass—things like complicated feelings about his mother, and nobody enjoyed that in bed. Like El and his soon to be ex.

  Cal hung the towel off the hook on the back of the door and padded naked into his bedroom. He grabbed a fresh uniform from the wardrobe—washed, pressed, and ready for wear before Ryan dropped them off—and got dressed mechanically while he wondered what he should do about Joe’s complicated feelings.

  He should probably still spill his guts to Edward. Standard operating procedure was to cooperate with their client’s security teams. Little Ms. Bouncy Popstar might appreciate that you sneaked her out to KFC at midnight, but when her security team blacklisted the firm, she wouldn’t fight them.

  Problem was—Cal shrugged the shirt on last and rolled the sleeves back, remembered the giveaway slash on his arm and rolled them back down again—that Edward was a prick, and Cal liked Joe. Even though he was a high-strung brat… with an out-there theory that he still needed to explain.

  Cal took a quick look at himself in the mirror. The close crop had grown out enough to stick up at odd, short angles. He scrubbed his hand over his head to flatten them down and headed out into the suite. The faint sound of bubbling water led him down the hall and into the large, country-house-styled study, with a heavy wooden desk in one corner of the room and two oversized leather-and-tweed armchairs in front of an empty hearth.

  There was a coffee maker on the desk, wreathed with steam as it spat milky coffee into a round glass cup. Joe stood in front of the bookcase with his attention halfheartedly focused on the rows of hard-backed books. He’d changed out of his scuffle-damaged suit and in
to black jeans and a fitted black jersey shirt, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His hair flopped over his forehead, more curled and less styled as his gel wore off.

  Cal bit his lower lip with sharp interest. It was something about the juxtaposition between the intimacy of casual wear and the fact that Joe’s casual wear was what most people would wear on a date. Hell, if Doc had looked like this on their date, he’d have told El to shove it when he called.

  “Anything good?” he asked.

  Joe glanced around at him. “Pretty sure they were bulk bought for their bindings. There’s a copy of Robin Hood here, though, that seems up your alley.”

  “Not really a reader,” Cal admitted with a shrug. “Look, this thing with your mother….”

  “You think I’m crazy?” Joe said.

  “No. Maybe,” Cal said. “I mean, it sounds a bit weird but people do stuff. My mum pretends I don’t exist, that the life where she had me and El never happened. People rewrite themselves all the time. They even believe it sometimes. I’m not saying it’s right, but it seems more important that someone is trying to kill you.”

  The last drops of coffee drained from the spout into the cup. Joe picked it up by the handle and cradled it gingerly in his bruised hand as he stared into it.

  “It’s not,” he said quietly. “Not to me.”

  Cal snorted. He spread his hands when Joe looked at him. “That’s the sort of thing I say,” he said. “Now that I’m on this side of it, I can see why it pisses my brother off.”

  Joe raised one dark, straight brow. “What happened to minding your manners?”

  “I don’t expect you to say please in private,” Cal said.

  Something dark and heated flickered through Joe’s eyes. “Good to know,” he said softly. Then he blinked, and the moment was gone. He took a drink of coffee, grimaced in distaste, and set the cup back down on the desk. “I’m not stupid, Cal, and I’m not putting myself at risk. Today was the first time this guy’s gone further than threats. In future I’ll be more careful.”