Lovers and Liars: An addictive sexy beach read

by Nigel May

  The magazine reporter could obviously read Hatton’s mind.

  ‘Welcome to Santa’s grotto! Touch unseasonal given the time of year but at least we won’t suffer fans interrupting us every two seconds, not that they’d squeeze in here anyway.’ He let out a laugh before adding, ‘Pleased to meet you, my name’s Shaun O’Keefe.’

  Hatton nodded and smiled, taking in the man in front of him. Strong nose, eyes the colour of pistachio, neatly trimmed beard, a slight Tintin quiff rising messily yet styled above his forehead, and a smile that shouted top dentist magazine ad. He was deeply attractive, if a little on the boyish side for Hatton’s tastes.

  The boxer relaxed into the chair as much as design would allow and smiled. He hated interviews at the best of times but at least with a bit of eye candy the whole thing might be much more bearable and pleasant.

  ‘Nice to meet you too. I am very excited about being on your front cover,’ remarked Hatton.

  ‘I hear the shoot went incredibly well. I can’t wait to see the photos. You’re looking incredible, by the way.’

  Flirtation? Hatton wasn’t sure. He hadn’t quite worked out which corner of the boxing ring the reporter was fighting in as yet. Either way he could flirt all he liked, it was always nice to be appreciated by either sex, even if Hatton’s own sexuality would be a secret kept and guarded as if by the most feared of military units.

  ‘Thank you, my training is going well.’

  For the next half an hour Hatton answered all of the questions that O’Keefe directed at him. It was the normal batch of questions that any boxer expected and Hatton, though keen to try and keep his answers as fresh as possible, was still able to coast a little with his replies. He outlined his training plan for the upcoming title defence, his hopes and dreams in the boxing world, his dietary requirements, his excitement at fighting in Barbados, his love/hate relationship with fame, the standard pegs on which any interview could be hung. O’Keefe asked him about women, as every journalist did. Was there a special someone in his life right now? Who was his perfect woman? Was his apparent lack of girlfriend down to the pressures of being a world champion? Again Hatton was able to answer the questions with ease – no, there wasn’t, sadly, Sports Illustrated star Kate Upton is incredibly beautiful and yes, training does mean that personal life has to take a back seat. Hatton knew all of the answers and could reel them off with relish even if his insides did twist in knots every time he had to say them in case a shrewd journalist could see right through them. Especially as sometimes his use of English wasn’t always as perfect as he wanted it to be. But O’Keefe seemed more than satisfied with the answers and smiled throughout.

  Just as Hatton assumed that the interview was coming to its natural end, a fact he was always pleased about, O’Keefe started on a new line of questioning.

  ‘It would be nice for our readers to gain a real feel for the young Hatton Eden as well. The boy, the son, the loner…’ There was a ripple of questioning in O’Keefe’s tone, as if he knew that he was heading into waters that may encroach on the subject matters he had been warned not to talk about.

  Hatton shifted awkwardly, realising the interview was not reaching its dénouement at all. He wasn’t keen on where the questions might lead, but took a deep breath and attempted a smile.

  ‘I don’t talk about my childhood and my family. Those are private matters. But I was a happy child.’

  O’Keefe, who was suddenly becoming less attractive to Hatton with every question, was keen to continue. ‘Happy maybe, but you were a loner. People at your school who were there with you describe you as…’ He flicked through the notebook he had with him to find the exact quote. ‘“A strange boy who would never mix and seemed a bit of an oddball.” Do you agree with that? Do you understand that?’ There was now definitely a degree of smug patronisation in his tone.

  ‘As I said, I was a happy boy. Well loved. And I understand perfectly what you are saying, thank you.’ Hatton could feel the colour rising to his cheeks with an onslaught of anger. The journalist would have known the list of things that he would not talk about. Both Fidge and the various press people that flitted around the boxer on his travels were aware of what was off limits.

  But ‘off limits’ was a phrase that O’Keefe did not understand. Behind that pretty-boy face beat the heart of a man who would not settle for anything less than the best when it came to securing the perfect scoop for his stories. His technique was always the same: reel the celebrity in with niceties, flatter them to the max and then hit them with something they didn’t want to speak about, be it a botched boob job, a medical scandal, a secret from their past or a dodgy family link. If there was an elephant that could be invited into the room then O’Keefe wouldn’t just let it in, he would literally throw open the door as wide as it could possibly go and invite in the entire herd. Which was why some of the biggest magazines around employed him to gain the exclusive that many others failed to bring to fruition.

  ‘I spoke to people at your school. They found you kind of weird.’

  ‘They don’t know me.’

  ‘You idolised your parents.’

  ‘Doesn’t every boy?’ Hatton’s answers were clipped and he was becoming more volcanic with each one.

  ‘Your parents died, didn’t they?’

  ‘That is common knowledge but I do not talk about family matters. I think the interview is over, don’t you?’

  But O’Keefe wasn’t in any mood to stop. ‘Did you see them die? That must have been hard.’

  Hatton could imagine Fidge in his mind willing him not to answer. If only he’d have been in the room with them he would have stopped the questioning by now. Despite wanting to tell the journalist that of course seeing his parents gunned down was the most awful thing that any human could ever witness and that he was asking a fucking stupid question he simply replied with ‘No comment’.

  ‘Where did you go after they died?’

  ‘I lived with my grandmother.’ Hatton, feeling his rage mounting, stood up to leave. ‘We are through.’

  ‘She’s dead too, isn’t she? I tried to track her down.’

  It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. No one tried to track his family down. And besides, his grandmother had died many years before. No one talked about his parents. Hatton was fiercely loyal to his family even if they were no longer a physical part of his life. They would always be there with him in his heart.

  He grabbed the collar of the shirt O’Keefe was wearing and twisted it in his fist. Then he brought his face to about three inches from the reporter’s and spat the words at him: ‘You do not write about my family in your magazine, you write about the boxing, that is all!’

  ‘But it’s obviously an interesting story for our readers,’ said O’Keefe, now more than a little scared that one of the world’s most famous boxers was holding him in a potentially violent way.

  ‘Well, you and your readers can go to hell!’

  And that’s my cover line, thought O’Keefe as he stared up into Hatton’s eyes.

  Hatton pushed the reporter back into his seat and let go. As he turned to vacate the small room he knocked into the table. Then as he pulled open the door and stormed back into the bar the glass vase on the table fell over, spilling water across the surface. The calla lily sent a small spray of pollen into the air as it hit the surface.

  Fidge could see from the look on the boxer’s face that the interview had obviously not gone smoothly.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Hatton’s response told him that he wasn’t. ‘Let’s just say another two minutes with that prick and you would have been mopping up plenty of red from all of the white surfaces in there.’

  Hatton kept walking. Fidge didn’t know whether to go and see the journalist to make sure that things were okay or whether to follow Hatton out of the bar.

  He decided to follow Hatton.

  32

  Heather Rivers knew that she wasn’t going to like what Kassidy Orpin was ab
out to tell her. How could she? It was obviously a no-win situation. She was about to hear that the man she married and loved died due to a man she had always looked up to from the day she was born.

  She inhaled a deep breath and looked at Kassidy. ‘Why are you saying that?’ There was a slight edge of accusation in her tone. She already didn’t want to believe what was potentially coming next.

  Kassidy looked directly at Heather. For the briefest of seconds a flash of insecurity shot across her brain. Should she tell her what she knew? As she stared into the sad depths of Heather’s eyes, she knew that she had to.

  ‘That night that the four of us were dining together in Crete – you, me, Max and Sheridan – the night it happened…’ She placed an emphasis on the word it, not really knowing how to describe such a horror. ‘Before Max and your dad went off into the hills together to try and find that village. Well, your dad had been drinking.’

  ‘I know,’ said Heather matter-of-factly. ‘I was there. He had a couple of glasses of wine but not enough to make him a danger, surely? Dad is always sensible.’ She could hear her own words but already doubted them.

  Kassidy continued. ‘That’s what we saw him drink. He had a whole lot more.’

  ‘What? When he was with Max? Max would not have climbed into a car with my father if he thought that he was over the limit.’

  ‘I had to go back to the restaurant after Max’s death, it was while you and your mum and dad went to see his body at the hospital. There had been some discrepancy about the payment. Some things had been left off the bill and hadn’t been paid for. They phoned me because I had left my number with them when I made the booking there for the four of us in the first place. When I went back there was a list of drinks that hadn’t been paid for. Three vodkas, top-quality ones as well, judging from the price.’

  ‘But we didn’t drink them?’

  ‘Sheridan did. Do you remember when he went to take that phone call and disappeared off to the bar? It was the call about him selling Velvet Hong Kong. When he came back to the table he was all jubilant and happy that he’d bagged the asking price on the hotel. Well, he’d been celebrating while he was on the phone to Julian obviously. He told the bartender to just keep pouring him neat vodkas while he was there. He must have necked three while he was talking. It didn’t go on the same bill as all of the stuff we had at the table because it was a different barman and he didn’t realise that Sheridan was part of a table booking. Which is why it wasn’t paid for.’

  ‘Are you telling me my dad was drunk?’

  ‘Maybe not obviously but he shouldn’t have been driving. He and Max had an ouzo together as well so Sheridan must have had quite a mix. There’s no way he should have been behind the wheel of a car.’

  To Heather none of this made any sense. ‘But surely the police would have breathalysed him at the scene, especially with it being such a serious accident?’

  Kassidy had known the question would come. It was the reply she had been dreading.

  ‘Yeah, that’s why I knew I had to come. I’ve been working for your father for a long time and he’s been incredibly good to me. I know he’s a law unto himself and he runs his business in his own unique way but occasionally he does something that I don’t understand. I always let it go because he’s the head of a multi-million pound empire and I’m… Well, I’m his trusty minion, I suppose. But your dad told me something in Crete that I will never understand. I don’t want to understand.’

  Heather cut her short, unable to wait. ‘Which is…?’

  ‘Sheridan paid off the policeman at the scene. He needed me to know in case there was any follow-up and that way I would be able to corroborate his story.’

  Heather could feel her mouth fall open, a dryness in her throat causing her to pick up her glass of water and sip from it as she listened to what Kassidy had to say.

  ‘The policeman who turned up first at the scene was some cop who had obviously been working the same patch for years. He was pretty rural, shall we say. I think the most dangerous thing he’d had to deal with in months was a tourist roadkilling a mountain goat. Sheridan said it was pretty clear that he was overawed about having to deal with a crash and a fatality. He knew he would have to breathalyse the driver of the car and Sheridan told the cop that Max had been driving. Apparently it was pretty obvious from his position in the car and the angle it had been hit that he wasn’t telling the truth, but Sheridan said that he panicked. He knew that his stupidity had killed Max. He was trying to overtake a tractor when it happened, driving recklessly. The tractor was long gone by the time the cop arrived so there were no witnesses, just Sheridan’s version of the story, which was that the car went out of control.’

  ‘So my father bought the cop off?’

  ‘He took the chance and said that he would give the man more money than he ever dreamt of if he lied and said that the breathalyser test was under the legal limit. It was a risk but Sheridan didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘And the policeman agreed?’

  ‘Sheridan offered him a considerable sum, probably more than a countrified Crete cop earns in a lifetime, and he fixed the test. He breathed into it himself so that there was no trace of alcohol in the sample. The whole crash was simply put down as an unfortunate accident on a treacherous road.’

  Heather tried to take in what Kassidy had told her. She felt physically sick and placed her hand on her stomach. It was something that Kassidy had noticed her doing a lot during their conversation. Did Heather have something to tell her family? Maybe now wasn’t the time to ask.

  ‘So how much?’ asked Heather.

  ‘How much what?’

  ‘So how much did my father have to pay this bent cop to get his sorry arse off the hook? What price did he sell me for?’

  ‘Sell you for?’ Kassidy didn’t understand the meaning.

  ‘To lose me as a daughter… That’s what he’s done. He killed Max and then he didn’t even have the balls to admit that he’d done it, my own father. So how much was the blood money? How much did he give to the cop to get himself off the hook and walk scot-free while my poor husband rots in his grave?’

  Kassidy didn’t want to say but she knew that she had to. ‘About fifty thousand euros.’

  Heather let out a snort of derision. ‘Fifty thousand euros! My dad has bought watches more expensive than that. And that’s the price he put on poor Max’s head! Well, that’s the price that has cost him his son-in-law and now it will cost him his daughter as well… And a whole lot more.’ Heather moved her hand to her stomach again.

  Kassidy knew that she needed to ask. ‘Heather, you keep rubbing your belly, are you pregnant?’

  Heather didn’t answer; she didn’t need to. ‘My father has lost it all.’

  He’d cut the cord between them for fifty thousand euros. As Heather requested Kassidy to leave her St Lucia home, eager to be on her own again, she knew that she would make her father pay for his treachery.

  ‘Will you be okay?’ asked Kassidy. ‘I had to come and tell you. I know I work for Sheridan but I don’t agree with what he’s done. I needed to tell you, woman to woman.’

  ‘Just go!’ The words were almost barked but she meant no malice. She needed to be alone with her thoughts.

  As Kassidy disappeared from view, Heather shouted after her: ‘Thank you for telling me! And yes, I’ll be fine.’

  As a storm cloud of black thoughts gathered in her brain, Heather Stoneham couldn’t say the same for her father: she needed to make sure that he would never be fine again.

  33

  Sex was like a drug to Julian Bailey. He loved every aspect of it and really didn’t care where it came from. But just like the drugs favoured by so many in the twenty-first century, it had left his senses numbed to sensation and feelings of the impassioned, rose-tinted kind. What did the song say, ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling’? Well, with Julian it wasn’t so much lost as completely hung, drawn and quartered – replaced with an all-consuming
carnality that sometimes turned his joy of sex into a need rather than a want. As long as he was drained dry and taken to completion then the vessel for his seed was insignificant. Which is why he had experienced so much more of the sexual spectrum in his time on earth than most could ever dream of. And at more ends of the sexual ballroom than a champion dancer could ever box step and ball change their way into. As long as the climax of the song was satisfying he didn’t mind who was singing the tune, male or female.

  So he had been more surprised than anyone at how much he had fallen for the scandalous delights of Nikki Rivers. There was something about her that had ignited senses within him that no ball-slamming tryst in a gay backroom bar or class A-fuelled sex masquerade had ever managed to do, and God knows he had enjoyed those to a cloud nine-like degree at the time. His moments with Nikki had given him more of a sexual awakening than any trip to a panty-facesitting website or a log on to Ashley Madison – pre-hacking scandal – had ever done. She had awakened him to the possibility of love.

  But, just as he had fallen hard and fast for Nikki, he was determined that it would be just as quick to fall out of love with her. He needed to, for his own sanity, as now that he had betrayed her to Sheridan there was no way that he would be able to tread that path again.

  His time with Nikki was over, he knew that. He could not let himself admit just how much he was actually hurting, or that he had shed tears as he’d left Nikki at The Cliff the night before. He had to move on. And that meant erecting barriers around his heart that were stacked so high even King Kong would have had a job to reach the top.