Take the Edge Off Read online

  He wanted his name in Cal’s mouth, the syllables rough as it was squeezed out through gritted teeth, but all he got was a grunt and the sticky pulse of come as it spilled over his tongue. It smeared stickily over his lips as he let Cal’s cock slide from between his lips. It dropped against Cal’s thigh, spit and spunk washed away as the stream of water poured down his body. He was slouched back against the wet walls, one arm cocked over his head with his hand cupped around his skull and his lower lip chewed raw between his teeth.

  Joe stood up, clothes drenched and plastered to his body, and cupped Cal’s jaw in his hand. He was already so hard he hurt, and the zipper was rough against his eager cock, but when Cal opened his eyes, the heavy, dull ache in his balls sharpened to hungry pain. He looked satiated, almost dazed, and there was an unguarded vulnerability to his face that made Joe want to fuck him again. No smirk, no cleverness—not that Joe didn’t like that. Cal’s sly bluntness was oddly charming, but this was… this was his.

  He leaned in and kissed Cal hard with come-sticky lips as the water hammered down on them.

  “Swallow,” he said in answer to yesterday’s question as he broke the kiss.

  Cal blinked at him for a moment, and then his expression sharpened with that familiar, guarded humor. He laughed and reached back to slap the shower off. Without the steam that filled the shower, Joe’s clothes quickly chilled, and were soon clammy against his back and balls. He shivered, and then Cal pulled him back into a kiss.

  “Your turn,” he mumbled against Joe’s mouth as he pushed the shower door open behind Joe. They both stumbled—over each other, over towels on the floor—toward the bedroom. Cal pushed Joe, wet clothes and all, onto the bed. He unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them down Joe’s thighs, wet denim reluctant to peel away from damp skin. His mouth was hot around Joe’s cold cock.

  Chapter Seven

  THEY WEREN’T a birthmark. Cal lay tangled in cotton sheets and rich boy and brushed his fingertips carefully over the red marks that dripped from Joe’s forehead down to his eyebrow. The skin was raised slightly and rough to the touch.

  “What happened?” Cal asked.

  Joe turned his head and gently—then not so gently—bit the heel of Cal’s hand. He stretched out on the narrow bed—Cal’s room only had a single—and tucked one arm behind his head.

  “You want to get to know me now?” he asked.

  Cal shrugged and dropped his head back against the pillows. He closed his eyes. That wasn’t the sort of thing you fucking admitted, even to yourself, even if it was true.

  “My nanny splashed boiling water on me when I was a kid,” Joe said after a moment. “I had a lot of surgery apparently, to minimize the scars, and that’s all that’s left. He never fired her. She was with us until I was, like, eight and Dad sent me to boarding school.”

  Cal winced. “Sorry.”

  “I don’t remember it.” Joe shrugged. He nudged Cal’s thigh with his knee. “What about you? What happened to your ribs?”

  “Nothing.”

  Joe walked his fingers—finally warmed up—from Cal’s hip to his ribs. He poked his fingers right into a ticklish spot, and Cal swore as his nerves twitched an overreaction.

  “Don’t,” he grumbled as he opened his eyes. “I know where it is.”

  “So do I,” Joe said. “I showed you mine.”

  Cal glanced sidelong at Joe, at the red flush of old scar tissue, and tried to decide if story for story was a fair trade. He begrudged that he had to admit it was. It wasn’t a secret, but he didn’t want to talk about it.

  “I got stabbed.”

  Joe waited. So did Cal, as he watched ready sympathy bloom on Joe’s face and then quickly fade into wary suspicion.

  “Edward said you had a record,” Joe said bluntly. That was for the best. Cal appreciated that he didn’t beat around the bush. “Is that why you got hurt?”

  “Figured he would tell you,” Cal said. He scratched his ribs. There was an inch of skin on either side of the scar that he couldn’t feel. “And no. I stole cars. People didn’t even know they’d been robbed until the valet couldn’t find their Bugatti. Never even got a black eye on the job, never mind stabbed.”

  “So what happened?” Joe asked as he moved his hand away.

  “I’d only gotten out of jail, and I went on a bender with my brother,” Cal said. “We were both drunk, and some kid came to the bar to find his girlfriend and her friend. Or his friend. I don’t remember. She wasn’t there—smart girl—and since he’d walked all that way, he didn’t want to go home without stabbing someone.”

  It sounded almost funny. At the time it hadn’t been. Cal didn’t even remember the kid until the moment he nearly staggered over him. He’d been skinny and strung out, visibly at the end of something. Cal had put his hand on the kid’s shoulder, easygoing with beer, and apologized for the near collision.

  That still pissed him off. He’d said “sorry” to the man who was about to stab him in the side.

  He hadn’t actually felt it at first, not really. The knuckles had thumped against his side, and then he’d felt what felt like a cold stitch between his ribs. It was only when he saw the blood soak through his shirt that he registered it really hurt and he couldn’t quite breathe.

  “What did you do?”

  Cal paused and glanced sidelong at Joe’s narrow, elegant face and dark, wary eyes.

  “He stabbed me,” he said. “I bled a lot and yelled for help.”

  It was the truth. It wasn’t 100 percent of the truth. It skipped the bit where Cal got twenty stitches and an orange juice, and the stabber spent two weeks in intensive care. Cal didn’t like violence, but he’d grown up too pretty not to be good at it, especially when he was drunk and full of anger about the year he’d pissed away.

  “Sounds sensible,” Joe said. It was hard to tell if he was skeptical or impressed.

  “It wasn’t serious,” Cal said. He untangled himself from Joe and the sheets as he sat up, the floor cold under his feet. “It hurt like hell, but I wasn’t going to die. It… made me realize some stuff, and I thought a reminder would be a good idea.”

  If he’d died, there’d have been one person who gave a crap at his funeral, and even El would have been better off. Cal hadn’t wanted to go back to jail before that, but that was the first time he really wanted to clean up his act.

  “Well, I like it,” Joe said. The mattress creaked as Joe propped himself up. He tucked his chin into Cal’s shoulder and wrapped an arm around his waist, fingers spread over the ink. “It suits you.”

  It felt real, for a second. Joe’s weight was sprawled lazily over Cal’s back, and his breath was warm and ticklish against his ear. But it wasn’t, and Cal didn’t feel ready to deal with that. He swallowed, his throat dry, and squirmed out from under Joe’s arm.

  “Didn’t you want me to drive you somewhere?”

  Joe pushed his still-damp hair back from his face, the loose curls defiant as they caught around his fingers. The white sheets tangled around his thighs in a poor attempt at modesty, and his cock was soft and stuck to his thigh. It made Cal want to crawl back into bed with him, even if his cock wasn’t up for another round yet.

  “Yes,” Joe said. “I have to approve the sale of some of our local assets. I’d reschedule, but I have plans for next week.”

  Cal shrugged and tossed Joe his clothes. “No need,” he said. “That’s why you keep me around.”

  THE ONLY lawyers Cal had ever had dealings with wore suits, comfortable shoes, and depression. Bea McGuire, Joe’s lawyer, wore a yellow dress with frilled, three-quarter sleeves and a flirtatious smile. The difference between a duty solicitor and business law, Cal supposed.

  He glanced into the rearview mirror as she slid into the back seat, the flash of her knees deliberate as she artfully arranged her legs.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  She didn’t look up. “There’s a lovely bistro,” she said as Joe folded his long, elegant body into the car. Her hand
fluttered out and rested on his knee. “The tapas is to die for. The Minsk in Hay’s Lane?”

  Joe moved her hand. He glanced at Cal and raised his eyebrows.

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “I’m sure he has GPS,” Bea interrupted. She sighed and rubbed her hand along the leather in the back seat. “Although it is a shame to hook something like that into an old dame like this.”

  Maybe she was all right. Cal threw the car into first. “I know where it is,” he said. “It won’t take long to get there.”

  He glanced at Joe in the mirror again, just because. Then he pulled out of the car park and eased into traffic. He let Joe and Bea out at the Minsk, where the street in front was cluttered with well-dressed people who smoked with one hand and swigged wine with the other.

  “We’ll be an hour or so. I’ll call when we’re done here,” Joe said as he paused next to the driver’s door and stooped to look through the window. He brushed Cal’s shoulder and paused long enough to be pointed. “You can take me home.”

  That was literally his job, Cal reminded himself as he watched Joe escort Bea through the crowd to the propped-open front door of the Minsk. No underlying meaning needed, but the nerves under his skin didn’t listen.

  He found somewhere to park and walked down to Queen’s Walk while he waited. There was a spray-painted van on the corner that sold fusion ice cream in squid-ink cones. He got himself a Starbucks inside and called El from a bench that overlooked the river. Not that he could make out much of the Thames through the eddied crowd and the vendors with their packs of tat and quick patter.

  “You got a few?” he asked when El picked up. No niceties; this was family. “I got you a coffee.”

  Half an hour later, El jogged up Queen’s Walk in shorts and sweat-soaked T-shirt. A woman with an Up style canopy of mylar balloons fumbled the transfer between her and a small pink child as she clocked him. The kid wailed as the balloons drifted away, and he had to be consoled with two.

  “Two birds with one stone,” El said as he bent over and braced his hands on his knees. His grin flashed white and smug from between his elbows. “Anyone look?”

  “A couple,” Cal admitted. “Probably worried you were going to stroke out right in front of them.”

  El snorted and sat down on the end of the bench. He wiped his hand over his dense, short-cropped curls and huffed out a breath as he slouched back. Heat seeped out of his body.

  “You reek,” Cal grumbled as he shifted away.

  “You’re getting fat,” El countered. He stretched his legs out in front of him and fanned his shirt. The flash of tight brown abs made a passerby in a nicely fitted suit stumble over his own feet. “Coffee?”

  Cal hitched his hips up and pulled a fiver out of his pocket. He handed it over. “I left it in Starbucks. It would have got cold.”

  El took the fiver, folded it, and stuck it into the waistband of his shorts. He pulled his hand down his sweaty face and tilted his head back toward the sun.

  “Why did I start running again?” he asked as he squinted his eyes shut.

  “To make your wife think you had someone you wanted to impress,” Cal said. “Not sure the show you made of yourself would impress anyone.”

  To be fair, not that Cal ever would be out loud, El didn’t need to run to impress. He had a few streaks of gray in his curls and some wrinkles around his eyes, but whoever their dads had been, they’d passed down some good genes. Unfortunately, how he looked wasn’t the problem with his marriage.

  “You wanted to talk,” El reminded him as he dragged his hand down his sweaty face. “What’s up?”

  “How’d Grandad get to know Harry Bailey?” Cal asked.

  It wasn’t the question El had expected. He opened his eyes and gave Cal a curious look. “Grandad? He didn’t, far as I know.”

  “You said it was a legacy client.”

  El rolled his eyes. “Is there any point in giving you the client files?”

  “No.”

  “It wouldn’t kill you to read them.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  El unhooked his arm from the back of the bench long enough to flick Cal on the ear. “I know you’re not stupid or lazy, so stop trying to convince me. If you had read the file, you’d know that Bailey wasn’t the legacy client. That’s Edward Dexter, their head of security.”

  That was a surprise. Cal paused and thought of Edward’s hard eyes, granite, deeply lined face, and the ice in his voice as he confronted Cal that night. Maybe not that much of a surprise.

  “He was a crook?”

  El scratched under his ear with his thumb. Grandad hadn’t exactly kept detailed records about his clients. He probably wouldn’t have even if they’d been legit clients. He’d been an “IOU on the back of a betting slip” sort of man. Of the two of them, El had been old enough to have a fifty folded into his hand and get sent to put a bet on or buy a bottle of Jack. He remembered more.

  “Dexter was a cop, Cal,” he said.

  “So yes on the crook thing?”

  There was a pause, and then El lifted his hand and wobbled it from side to side. He ended the gesture with a shrug. “Maybe. He went out with our mum, and you know what terrible fucking taste she had.”

  “The fuck?” Cal said as he sat up straight on the chair. “I don’t remember that.”

  “You’d have been… what, five?” El said. “Four? Grandma was still alive, and she didn’t want us around any of Mum’s men. I saw them come around a couple of times, but Grandma would give me some cash and send us down to the shop to get some ice cream. Dexter got on with Grandad, though. He used to come around and they’d talk cars while they smoked cigars out in the garden. Sometimes Gran would let me sit and listen for a bit, but you know what she was like.”

  Cal nodded. Their gran hadn’t trusted men around little kids—not teachers or neighbors or strangers. Hell, now that he was grown and looked back at some of her careful questions about what he’d done that day, she hadn’t even trusted Grandad completely. Someone she’d trusted had burned Grandma at some point, and she’d been gun-shy for the rest of her life. As fucked-up as their mum had been, Cal had always kinda figured it had something to do with her.

  “So what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” El said. “He’d been in an accident in the Bentley—Grandad had loaned it to him to take Mum out for the day, and he brought it back all smashed up—but Grandad didn’t seem that pissed off. I think Dexter paid for it, anyhow. A couple of weeks after that, though, he didn’t come round again. I think he left town. Or, well, if he’s working for the Bailey Group, I guess he left the country. Whatever happened, though, Grandad kept his name in the legacy file when he handed it over.”

  “Give ’em a good price, do a good job,” Cal said, his accent thicker than usual as he mimicked his grandad’s Tottenham twang. “Don’t ask questions.”

  El nodded. “Why do you want to know, anyhow?” he asked. “Most of the time, you don’t want to know anything about them other than where they want to get to. Is this about your rich boss, the one you didn’t plan to sleep with?”

  “No,” Cal lied dismissively. If El found out what was going on, he’d definitely spill the beans to Edward. It was his business on the line. “He’s a dick.”

  El pushed himself off the back of the bench and leaned forward, his elbows braced on his knees and his eyes trained on the scuffed toes of his trainers. He flexed his hands, spread his fingers, and then clenched them into fists.

  “Is it about Van?” he asked as he glanced sideways at Cal.

  “What?” Cal spluttered. His head had been full of misgivings over whether he should keep Joe’s secrets or not. The sudden injection of his ex caught him off balance. “The fuck it is. Why would you ask that?”

  “Someone said you’d been down at the Dobbins’s the other night,” El said. “Look, I know it’s your life, Cal, but fuck sake. Is it worth another stint behind bars to drive fast in someone else’s
car?”

  Probably not, but Cal was pretty sure that most people would have said definitely. He shook his head.

  “Who?”

  “Malcolm’s auntie said that he’d seen you.” El shook his head and pushed himself up off the bench. He crossed his arms as he looked down on Cal—something he hadn’t been able to do normally since Cal hit sixteen. “It’s… it took me a while to get used to the idea that you, you know, liked men that way.”

  “Fucked them.”

  El glanced behind him and grimaced an apology to the scandalized woman who hustled her giggling son away.

  “Yeah, that,” he said. “Maybe if I’d talked to you about it more, encouraged you to go after—fuck, I don’t know—some nice kid from school.”

  “To be fair,” Cal interrupted, feeling awkward as the conversation suddenly felt real, “I never went to school.”

  “Shut up,” El told him. “You’re a piss-poor adult, Cal, but you’re trying. That matters. And, like I said, maybe I should have told you this more often back then—you deserve better. You need to find someone who treats you well, makes you feel good about yourself, not some version of our mum with a dick attached.”

  It was El’s turn to get a stare from a passerby, although the woman slowed down instead of sped up. Cal supposed he couldn’t blame her.

  “Jesus,” he said. His skull felt hot, and the skin across his shoulders tight, as if this were about to turn into a fight. He grimaced and crossed his arms as he tried to squash the sense that he was under attack. “I’m not—my life has nothing to do with our mum. She was never even around.”

  “Yeah,” El said. “And that has absolutely nothing to do with why you hook up with people who think you’re their dirty little secret or why I married the first girl I ever dated, even though neither of us were finished people at that point, so I didn’t bounce from relationship to relationship like our mother.”

  “Yeah, you’re screwed up,” Cal said. He’d always liked Jane. She was smart, pretty, and mean enough to keep it fun. But they’d been at each other’s throats since they were sixteen. “I was having fun. Nothing… psychological… about it. And I’m not chasing after Van either.”