Lovers and Liars: An addictive sexy beach read

by Nigel May

  Sheridan Rivers splashed a small puddle of Acqua Di Parma eau de cologne onto the palm of his hand and then rubbed it across the lower half of his face. It was his scent of choice. He always picked up a bottle at Harrods when he was back in London. There was something about the intensity of its fragrance and the deep, rich tones that made him feel even more invincible than he already did. Somehow its strength and robust body of ingredients seemed to signify everything that he had always strived to be in the world of business. It was deluxe, it was expensive, it was exclusive, and it came at a price tag not everyone could afford. It was for winners, for those who aspired to be just a little bit better than the best of the best. And if you happened to splash it on even the tiniest of shaving cuts then it stung like hell.

  Sheridan didn’t mind that. It was similar to how he ran the Velvet empire. Any weakness he saw in others – a metaphorical shaving cut, if you will – was doused, obliterated and put out of its misery with the stinging, ruthless, cut-throat nature of his own determination. It was how he had come to be one of the biggest names in the hotel world. One splash of Sheridan and the weakest of competitors would fall by the wayside.

  Giving his appearance a final once over in the mirror, Sheridan smoothed his hand across his hair, flattening down a few stray strands and accentuating his side parting. He looked good for a man of fifty, even if he said so himself. He still possessed a rich, full-bodied head of cola-brown hair and a face that was relatively free of wrinkles, which was miraculous considering he had never even entertained any of the brutal routes that Sutton had taken to try and turn back time. And his body was in pretty good shape for a man whose visits to the gym in the last year could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And as for what he had below the waist, well, that had always been a crowd-pleaser as far as he was concerned. He’d never had any complaints in that department nor had any of the women he’d used it on. And thanks to a cheeky little blue pill every now and again, Sheridan could still take one look at a woman’s ample chest or catch the merest glimpse of what lay between her legs and his sex would be harder than Mount Rushmore.

  The tycoon took a second to savour exactly where he was in life, reflecting on the path he had taken to that very moment: boarding school back in England; his early days learning the hotel business in London; opening the doors on his first establishment; seeing the Velvet logo being moved into position for the first time. Those were pivotal stitches in the fabric of his life. Some stitches had unravelled, some had remained strong, but Sheridan Rivers had risen to the top of his game. He’d been shrewd, he’d been calculating, he’d been sure. And he’d never doubted himself in business. He was a five-star tycoon and tonight would be the night to take him to six.

  All thoughts of his own grandeur were derailed by a knock at the door.

  ‘Jesus, who the hell is that now?’ said Sheridan to his own reflection before moving to the door. The face that greeted him took him completely by surprise.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be downstairs? Not chickened out, have you?’

  ‘I needed to come here first. I need to tell you a few things, before the fight. The time has come.’

  The voice came from under a red silk hood.

  Sheridan Rivers opened the door wide and let the reigning welterweight champion of the world, The Main Man, Hatton Eden, walk into his suite.

  67

  Sheridan shut the door behind the boxer. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘Why are you such a bad man?’ It was a simple question, but one that took him by surprise.

  ‘I’m sorry? This so-called bad man just happens to be the man who is putting you in a boxing ring in front of millions of people tonight, sunshine. So I suggest you shift your faggoty little ass back down there now.’

  Hatton slipped off his robe and placed it on the sofa. It struck Sheridan as an odd thing to do, seeing as beneath it the boxer was only wearing the outfit that he would be sporting in the ring – shorts and boxing boots. On his hands he wore a pair of black gym gloves.

  ‘You don’t scare me. All of your nasty talk about Fidge and me being gay, threatening to show the world what you know about our love… It’s none of your business but you don’t frighten me at all. Every man I’ve fought in the ring has been a bigger man than you in every way.’

  ‘And when the world finds out just how big you two boys like your men, I’m sure they will be thrilled.’ There was a mocking tone in Sheridan’s words, but it couldn’t mask the worry that he was suddenly feeling. He was alone in his suite with one of the most powerful and physically strong men in the world, a man who could deliver a punch like no other. And it was clear from the dark glint in his eyes that Hatton had come to the suite to deliver a rather deadly dose of lip service.

  ‘You’re never going to tell anybody about that, I’ll make sure of it. That would be a bad thing to do. You play with people’s lives, don’t you? Without thinking about the consequences. Without thinking about how it makes them feel. You’re an evil man. I have met men like you before. I have fought many men in my life, both inside and outside of the boxing ring, and I have remained victorious. None have beaten me – you won’t either.’

  ‘And you’re worried your squalid little secret will knock you off your throne, are you? That you won’t be The Main Man anymore?’

  ‘I don’t worry about anything, I never have. I just deal with the issue and take the necessary action. Bang, it is dealt with!’ Hatton clapped his hands together as if to symbolise the simplicity of what he was saying.

  ‘That how your parents raised you back in Bulgaria, is it? Taught you to bully your way out of every situation?’

  ‘That’s rich, coming from you! I have seen how uncaring and fake you are. Not just with Fidge and me. I have seen you with your wife, how nasty and dismissive you are. How you cheat on her with other women. Push her to one side and make her feel worthless. That is why she tried to be with me. Not that I would ever be interested, but she was not to know that. I believe in monogamy, being with one person – that is what life should be. It is what my bald eagle represents. I am proud of it.’ Hatton pointed to the tattoo on the left side of his chest. ‘It is why Fidge has his seahorses – to show our togetherness in our own special way. Why do you not care for people?’

  ‘Now, listen here, you idiot, you know nothing about me and my family so I suggest you and your bald eagle fly back to work and start fighting!’ Sheridan was fast losing his patience. As he saw it, the last thing he needed was a lesson in how to treat and care for his own wife from some shirt-lifter.

  ‘I saw you on TV at the funeral of your daughter’s husband. It disgusted me. I never saw you once comfort her. Her mother was there for her. Her sister too, but all I could see was your absence. I thought then how bad you must be.’

  ‘That funeral is none of your business!’ shouted Sheridan. ‘You don’t know how I was with Heather. Just because you didn’t see me with my arms wrapped around her doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’

  ‘But I bet it didn’t,’ stated Hatton.

  Sheridan knew it was the truth, but was not prepared to say so. ‘Like I said, it’s none of your business. You just saw something on the television.’

  ‘And neither is my sex life any of your business but because you have seen that on one of your dirty hidden cameras you think it is, so we’re even on that score, aren’t we? Your daughter should consider herself lucky to still have a father, but I bet she doesn’t. I have not seen you with her. I don’t blame her – who needs a father like you in their life?’

  ‘Just because you don’t have any family left, don’t go sticking your Bulgarian nose into the affairs of mine!’ barked Sheridan. Given what had happened with Heather, the boxer’s comments were closer to the truth than perhaps Hatton even realised.

  Mention of Hatton’s family fuelled the already evident anger within him.

  ‘My father was a better man than you could ever be. He loved me, as did my mother. They were pro
ud of me. They were good people and I had to watch them die in front of me. Do you know how that affects a young boy? To see your own flesh and blood shot down in front of your very eyes? To see the two men who butchered them run off as your own throat burns from trying to hold your breath so they don’t find you and kill you too? That changes you forever. Well, they could run, but they couldn’t hide. I can still see their blood now, as deep and red as my poor mother and father’s.’

  ‘Their blood?’ Sheridan didn’t understand and didn’t get the chance to utter another word as an obviously crazed Hatton continued to speak.

  ‘I saw their faces when they murdered my parents. I was sent to live with my grandmother, but she died of old age and doubtless a broken heart shortly after so I was put in a home in the Bulgarian countryside, not far from where I had lived with my parents. It was an orphanage, I suppose, with other boys and girls my age. The teachers there were strict, almost cruel, and very religious. They taught me more about God – they were people like this…’ Hatton pointed to the tattoo of a nun and cross on his sleeve of inkings. ‘But they taught me about right and wrong and about how evil must be punished. It was there that I started to fight, that I started to find a way to deal with the anger inside me. It was there that I started to become the power that I am now.’

  For one second it struck Sheridan that maybe he and Hatton actually had something in common: a belief that they were invincible, that they both deserved to be champions in their chosen fields. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I found the men who slaughtered my parents… and I killed them. It was a few years later but they were easy to find. They were people from the local area. They didn’t know I had seen them that night at my parents’ house. I befriended them, lured them to the rocky clifftops near the Kaliakra lighthouse and threw them both to their deaths. Down onto the rocks, their blood staining the surface of the stones, and then I watched as the tides of the raging sea came in and took their bodies away. Justice was mine. I felt a nobility in their deaths, that evil had been rightfully punished. That is what I believe, that evil must always be punished. That is what this means…’

  Hatton held his arm aloft and ran a gloved finger down the Sanskrit tattoo that Russell John had inked for him in Culver City. It was the tattoo that he had always craved: Evil Must Be Punished. His mantra ever since witnessing the deaths of his parents back home in Bulgaria, it had been the thought that filled his head as he tossed the two Bulgarian killers onto the rocks of the rugged coastline of his homeland. The thought that had slashed across his mind as he secretly watched poor Fidge, the man he loved, crying in misery about the prospect of Sheridan sharing their secret love with the world, a love so pure and good that should be shouted with pride and honour, not forced onto the front page of some tawdry gossip rag or filthy journalist’s blog without their consent. How dare those gossipmongers try to belittle and sully what he and Fidge had together? Hatton would never let a journalist damage their integrity.

  The people who tried to write bad things about Hatton and his family, the two men who had gunned down his parents, who had treated his own family like shit, the man standing in front of him now… They were all evil. They all had to be punished. And Hatton was the one to do it. It was God’s will, in his mind. A mind that had been warped by the horrors he had experienced. A mind that had made him fight so that he would never again be the vulnerable little boy shivering in the wardrobe, hiding from his parents’ killers. That was the boy, Zlaten. Hatton was a man, a strong man – a superhero champion who would serve justice on those who deserved it.

  ‘Evil must be punished.’ Hatton repeated the words again as he walked over to the bar and picked up the award that was sitting there. A look of horror washed over Sheridan as he realised the full extent of the boxer’s insanity.

  Fear gripped him, a realisation that this could be the end flashed through his mind. Sutton’s face, followed by those of Nikki and Heather, appeared in his thoughts and a bead of sweat ran down the back of his neck as he realised that he needed to escape.

  He was just about to try and move, to run and take flight, when the award crashed onto the back of his head, the force of a world champion behind it. The bead of sweat was lost in a river of blood, which spread across Sheridan’s neck and onto the white of his shirt.

  Sheridan Rivers’s last thought as he felt the award smash into his skull was that maybe he wasn’t so invincible after all.

  Epilogue

  Three months later…

  Sutton Rivers was dangling her legs in the clear blue waters of the swimming pool at Heather Stoneham’s St Lucia home. She looked over at Nikki, Blair and Pasinetta chatting on the far side of the water. Pasinetta wore a wide-brimmed hat to protect herself from the sun that beat down from the cloudless sky overhead. She was laughing at something Blair said to her, her merriment filling the stillness and serenity of the air.

  It felt good to hear laughter again. There was a magic about it that managed to erase, maybe just for a second, the memory of the horror of that night back at Velvet Barbados a few weeks earlier.

  The moment when she had discovered Sheridan’s dead body.

  The world had been shocked by Hatton Eden’s defeat. Everyone had assumed he would successfully defend his title. They had been equally shocked by the seat next to Sutton that sat empty throughout the entire five rounds of the one-sided fight. Where was Sheridan Rivers, the man who had masterminded the fight in Barbados in the first place? Why would he miss such a moment?

  No sooner had Orlando Vince’s fist been raised in the air in victory than Sutton left her seat, fending off the vacuous Hollywood harpies who flocked around her to pass comment on Sheridan’s absence. His suite had been her first port of call.

  Seeing him lying there, his head caved in, would be an image that she would never be able to erase from her mind. This was the man with whom she had spent around three decades of her life. She had loved him for so many of those years and in a way she always would, but seeing him as the victim of a brutal killing in a pool of his own thick, red blood was something that both had and hadn’t shocked her. Sheridan had racked up enemies, for sure. Maybe something like this had always been a possibility in the back of her mind.

  It was Sutton who was first in the frame for his murder. It was her fingerprints that were found on the award, the only others apart from Sheridan’s himself. She had the motive. It was common knowledge that she and her tycoon husband didn’t always see eye to eye.

  Everyone was questioned, as with any murder investigation. There had been a time when each of the main suspects had been alone before the fight, had been lost for a few minutes during which they could have gone to Sheridan’s suite and delivered the fatal blow. They all had things that they had said they needed to do in those few minutes before the fight. Sutton had heard them all and listened on in horror as the police discounted people from their enquiries.

  Kassidy Orpin had been phoning her mother back in Ireland. Her phone records showed that. She wanted to speak to the woman who inspired her, to tell her that she loved her and that, even though they were time zones apart, she was thinking of her. She also wanted to confess that Sheridan was indeed a bullish thug at times and yet she let him do what he needed to do, sometimes against her will. It was her way of telling her mother that she understood what she put up with from her father.

  Blair Lonergan had gone to see Nikki Rivers in her seat, leaving his DJ stage for no more than five or so minutes. He had wanted the fight to be the occasion that they went public with their love. But she hadn’t reached her seat yet and when he enquired about sitting next to her during the match he was told that the spaces had already been allocated and paid for. He would be sitting next to rapper Daddy O. His vision of holding Nikki’s hand and nuzzling against her soft flesh as they watched Hatton Eden in action would have to wait.

  Nikki had pondered the same idea, going to see Blair at his DJ stage at exactly the same time as he was venturing across th
e huge arena to see her. Blair’s security verified that she had come by at precisely the same time as the DJ had tried to find her. She too had wanted to go public with their love, especially with the threat of being arrested for the incident in Harlem hanging over her head. Nikki was indeed approached by police after the fight and arrested for the hit-and-run, but with the gruesome discovery of Sheridan’s body that story had been concealed and, for the moment, forgotten.

  Heather Stoneham had been seen on the beach placing two baby turtles back in the sea. As so often happened when turtles hatched, they were in danger of not making it to the water before their energy supply ran dry and they were left stranded for birds to feast on or for the sun to bake the next day. When the fireworks had illuminated the two forgotten creatures at her feet she knew that she must rescue them: it was life or death. Max would have done the same had he been there. She had placed them in the shallow waters of the ocean, her dress trailing in the lapping waves, and watched by the light of her iPhone as they swam away. By the time she had taken her seat at the fight a white watermark had circled the dress. Not that Heather cared – freedom over fashion every time.

  Fidge Carter had been checking on the flowers that he had ordered for Hatton, as he always did, making sure that they were ready to be delivered to his dressing room after the fight: a dozen red roses. The flowers of love, yes, but they were also the national flower of Bulgaria. It was another fact that a proud Hatton was keen to share about his country.

  Sutton knew all of their alibis by heart and when she couldn’t provide one herself, coupled with the fact that she was seen entering the suite that evening by a housemaid, she was left wondering how she could prove her innocence. Months later, feeling the warmth of the St Lucia sun on her back, she couldn’t help herself and let out a slight shudder of chilliness as she remembered the grilling she’d received from the police that evening. Until evidence suggested otherwise, she was their main suspect.