Big brown eyes, the colour of melted chocolate, peered up at Matt. “I can’t afford Mitch.”
Matt’s lips thinned. “He’ll probably do it for free, but if there are costs, Flynn will pay.” His tone assured her there would be no argument on Flynn’s part. Flynn wisely kept his mouth closed.
Jena handed Abby the phone.
“It’s too late to call,” Abby said.
“Now isn’t the time to be polite, honey.” Jena dialled then placed the phone in Abby’s hand.
Slowly Abby raised the phone to her ear. As she spoke, her eyes focused on Flynn.
“Hi, Mitch, I’m sorry to bother you so late,” she said. “I have a problem. A big problem, and I need your help.”
Aye, Flynn didn’t need a neon sign over his head to know he was the problem. With a sigh, he flopped down into the armchair behind him. His leg hurt. His head ached and he knew the night was just going to get worse.
“Got any beer?” he asked Matt.
His answer was a set of three identical glares.
3
"I'd been ill and hadn't trained for a week, and I'd been out of the team for three weeks before that, so I wasn't sharp. I got cramp before halftime as well. But I'm not one to make excuses."
Clinton Morrison, Exeter City player
“You didn’t have to sit on the naughty step. I don’t think that’s fair.”
Flynn opened the door of his RV to find Katy on his front step. After Mitch had turned up at Abby’s house the night before and told everyone the best he could do was make sure the camera crew didn’t film the kid, it had become clear Flynn was persona non grata in his hometown. Apparently nothing could be done to stop Abby being filmed. Nothing except keep her away from Flynn. Which suited him fine.
“Are you listening to me?” the tiny terrorist demanded. “I said it isn’t fair you don’t have to sit on the naughty step.”
Flynn let out a heavy sigh as he walked out into his field. Why wouldn’t people just leave him alone? He looked down at her. People and their spawn, he amended.
“Go away. I’m busy here.” The last thing he needed was for Abby to come storming over to retrieve the kid. “Shoo!” He waved her away with his hands.
She frowned. “When I’m naughty, I have to sit on the step.”
Flynn let out a longsuffering sigh. “Don’t you have something to do, kid? Play with dolls? Nap? Snack? Watch Mickey Mouse? Shouldn’t you be with your mother? Doesn’t she have a leash for you?”
She rolled her eyes with mega drama. “I’m too old for naps.”
“Look, kid, your mum is going to be seriously cheesed off when she finds out you’re over here. Do you want to upset her?”
“She’s in a meeting. She won’t know I’m gone.”
Flynn tuned her out, because there was little else he could do. With the camera crew hovering at the edge of his property waiting for something to happen, he didn’t want to attract attention. The weasel would love to lure his sexy neighbour from her house.
“This place is a pigsty.” The kid folded her arms and shook her head.
She wasn’t wrong. The Babes had gone shopping in Glasgow and his ex-teammates had headed back to London, leaving a field of debris in their wake. There was no way he could get down to the ground to pick up all the crap. It felt like a knife spiked through his knee every time he bent his leg. Crouching would probably knock him out entirely. There was nothing he could do but wait until the Babes got back to clean the place up. Unless…
He eyed the kid. “Want a job?”
“Cleaning?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“Kids are no bloody use,” Flynn grumbled.
“That’s a strange balloon.” The kid pointed at something on the grass. “I have rainbow-coloured balloons at my parties. They’re better than your ones.”
Flynn frowned as he looked where she pointed. Hell, someone had dumped a condom on his grass.
“That’s not a balloon, it’s a…” He looked down at her wide-eyed attention and decided there were some things she didn’t need to know. “Why are you still here? Go back to your cage.”
“I came to get you to take you to the naughty step. Yesterday you were badly behaved. You made my Muma cry. It’s not fair you don’t have to sit on the naughty step.”
A stab of pain shot through his chest at the thought of Abby crying. Worse still, the thought of him being responsible for her crying. He didn’t know what to do with the strange emotion, so he buried it deep. “Life isn’t fair, kid. Get over it.”
She folded her arms. “I’m not leaving until you come with me and take your punishment.”
Flynn stared at the sky for a minute. He was being punished, all right. He stared down at his tormentor. She was dressed in a purple dinosaur onesie, silver princess shoes and a tiara. Her cheeks were coloured with bright pink blush, her eyebrows were blue and her lips had red lipstick, applied with a heavy and shaky hand. She looked like a transvestite Barney.
“Has anybody ever told you that eye shadow doesn’t go on your eyebrows?”
“Has anybody ever told you, you smell like baby poo?”
He lifted an arm and sniffed his pit. Okay, he could use a shower. He hadn’t felt much like doing anything since he’d come back to town. Even showering seemed like an onerous chore. “If you don’t like the smell, go back home.”
“Not unless you come and sit on the step.”
Talk about a dog with a bone. This kid had one thought in her head, and he was damned if he knew how to get another one in there to replace it. He let out a sigh. “Fine. What will it take to make you go away?”
She scrunched up her nose. She actually seemed to be thinking about it. She opened her mouth and he held up his hand. “And before you say it again. I’m not sitting on any damn step.”
Her mouth snapped shut, but a calculating gleam appeared in her brown eyes. “You have to come to my tea party.”
“Not happening. Try again. Do you want money? I have money. I’ll give you fifty pounds to leave me alone.”
She stuck her little nose in the air. “You have to come to my tea party. And you have to be nice. And you have to stay there for a long time. Like, seventeen or fourteen minutes.”
“A hundred pounds. Last offer. A hundred pounds will buy a lot of Barbies.”
She licked her lips. “How many Barbies?”
“A gazillion.”
He watched her think it over. At last she nodded. She held out her hand palm up.
“I don’t have my wallet on me.”
“Then you’ll need to come to my tea party.”
It was worse than negotiating his contract with Arsenal. He pointed to the motorhome. “It’s in there. On the bedside table. Go get it.”
She ran off as fast as her sparkly-heel-clad feet would let her. Flynn flopped onto the lounger behind him. It was going to be a long, long day. He needed a beer. With the Ball Babes out for the day, there was no one to fetch him things when he needed them. He opened an eye and stared at the motorhome speculatively. No. He couldn’t ask the kid to fetch him beer. Could he?
Before he could ponder his way through the latest moral dilemma to intrude on his happy place, the kid came running out of the camper wearing last season’s Arsenal shirt over her dinosaur onesie. It came to her ankles and fell off her shoulders. She held it up in one hand, like a full-grown woman would hold up a ball gown. In her other hand she held his wallet.
“Can I have this T-shirt?” She handed him the wallet.
“No.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not using it.” She pointed to his bare chest. “You never wear shirts.”
Flynn was past caring. He wanted her gone. His head was starting to ache from the mental gymnastics of dealing with her. “Fine. You win. Take it. Take whatever you want. Just leave me alone.” She beamed at him. He opened his wallet and pulled out two fifty-pound notes. “Here. Go buy Barbies. And don’t come back.”
She grabbed the money, spun away from him and ran towards her house without another word, taking his favourite shirt with her.
Flynn plopped back in the lounger. He wanted a beer, but he sure as hell didn’t want to drag his backside in to get one. He was having a bad leg day. Every time he moved pain sliced through him, making his stomach lurch.
“We should never have agreed to exclude the girl from the show.” The weasel’s voice sliced right into Flynn’s already aching brain.
“Don’t even think about it. She isn’t part of the programme.”
The weasel pointed at Abby’s house. “The kid’s visit is the most interesting thing to happen here all day. If you don’t do something soon, this will be the most boring documentary ever made.”
Flynn shrugged. “Fine with me.” He shut his eyes and listened to the slimy guy stomp away.
Brian the weasel was short and skinny. A guy who was made up of lots of sharp angles, kind of like a Picasso painting Flynn had seen once at some hoity-toity party. Brian had perpetually narrowed eyes and a disdainful smirk on his face. He was the guy other men felt nervous turning their backs on. Nothing about Brian engendered loyalty or respect. If the weasel was having problems with the shoot then that was fine with Flynn. He didn’t want to do the show anyway. His agent had sold it to him as a serious piece, an interview on his career with some life shots for filler. It was the exact opposite. He felt like Matthew McConaughey in that movie—EDtv. He glanced down at himself and wondered if his abs were better than Matthew’s.
The answer wasn’t forthcoming.
Brian Flannigan watched Flynn laze on the lounger in the middle of the perfectly nice field he’d turned into a dump. He sneered. Must be good to have so much money you could bum around all day, every day. It pissed him off. Guys like Flynn got all the luck. All they did was kick a ball around and look pretty, while men like Brian, men with brains and talent, had to work damn hard to make it through the month. It made him sick.
“What did you dig up on the neighbour?” he asked his whiny, terrified assistant. She was the walking, talking equivalent of beige wallpaper.
She cleared her throat and addressed her answer to her shoes. Her dull brown shoes.
“There isn’t much. She comes from a wealthy, connected family. Her mother is still alive; her father passed away a few years ago and his title went to her older brother. She doesn’t have any contact with her family. The rumour is they disowned her when she married her late husband. He was an agriculture graduate who moved here to open a mushroom farm in the old mine. As far as I can tell, he was hardworking and well liked. People were really upset when he died. It was a brain tumour. Abby tried running the business herself, but it was going under even before the explosion a few months ago made the mine collapse.”
Brian stilled. “Wait a minute. Go back a bit. You said ‘his title’? Her father was a peer?”
The beige wonder nodded, still unable to meet his eyes. “A lord. Her brother is now Lord Montgomery-Clark. The family estate is in Kent.”
“A lord?” He felt his heart race. He could see the documentary title now: Class Warfare in the Highlands. It was the edge he needed to take his documentary from mundane to spectacular. Instead of ninety minutes featuring a self-obsessed pretty boy, the programme would be a social commentary on the struggles of a failing British class system and the lower class’ obsession with football. His mouth salivated at the thought of all the accolades that were bound to come his way.
“They’re distant cousins of the Queen,” the mouse said, breaking into his vivid daydream.
Holy hell. Brian bit back a laugh. This couldn’t get any better even if he wrote it himself. After this, people would be queuing up to get him in on their projects. His name would be gold.
“Does the family know their daughter is slumming with the bad boy of UK soccer?”
The beige wonder’s eyes snapped up to his, briefly. It made him wonder if she had a backbone after all. “She isn’t doing anything with Flynn. They’re just neighbours.”
He couldn’t contain the grin that split his face. “The family doesn’t know what Flynn is to Abby. If her family disowned her for marrying an educated and respectable working-class man, they’ll go ballistic when they find out she’s setting up home with that waste of space.” He smiled over at Flynn. It was cold. He knew it. He didn’t care.
“I, I don’t think—” the mouse started.
“You’re right. You don’t think.” He spun towards her, deliberately crowding her space. “I want you to make sure the unedited footage of Abby’s meltdown gets to the family. I want this to happen anonymously. And I want you to include a note saying you’re worried about the child growing up around all this debauchery. You can hint about Abby’s parenting skills being substandard. Let’s see what the Montgomery-Clarks do with that.”
The mouse paled. Her pasty skin turned ashen. “I can’t. You can’t—”
“Get it done.” He stared at her, letting his feelings for her leach into his gaze. She was nothing. Less than nothing. He held her career in his hands. “If you can’t get it done, I can find someone who can.”
She swallowed hard. Her eyes were back on her shoes, where they belonged. “I’ll do it.” Her words were barely a whisper.
“Now, mouse, do it now.” He spun on his heels and headed for his car. This was turning out to be the best job of his career. He would make his name on this job. He’d be set for life. Fame. Fortune. It was all his for the taking—as it should be.
Watching Flynn Boyle crash and burn on national TV was just the icing on the cake.
4
“The ball is like a woman—she loves to be caressed.”
Eric Cantona, former national soccer player for France
Abby was meeting with the women of Knit or Die when Katy burst into the room.
“Muma, you need to take me to the shop!”
“Don’t interrupt, Katy.” Abby was firm, but she smiled at the same time. She wanted her daughter to learn manners, not to have her personality subdued. “It isn’t polite to interrupt. Wait until I finish talking with the ladies.”
Abby turned her back on her impatient and grumpy daughter. She was in the middle of presenting her knitwear designs to the local knitting group. She hoped they would work with her by making the designs a reality. This new business had seemed like such a great idea during the planning stage. It would combine the skills she’d learned in college with hours to fit around raising Katy. Now as she looked at the uncharacteristically quiet demeanours of the women in front of her, she worried she’d overreached. It’d been years since she’d studied textile design at art college. She was rusty. Out of date. She wasn’t talented enough. Or smart enough. What had she been thinking? This was stupid idea.
The presentation fizzled out as Abby’s cheeks heated. She’d made a fool of herself. She knew it. She forced her head high. She’d be polite, let the women off the hook and forget she’d ever come up with this foolish plan. Mind made up, she opened her mouth to speak. Kirsty’s mum, Margaret Campbell, beat her to it.
“I am stunned,” she said.
Abby’s stomach lurched. She could hear the rest of the woman’s comment before it came out of her mouth. I am stunned you think such a childish plan will work. Your designs are pathetic. You’ve wasted our time. She took a deep breath. It was okay. She’d be okay. She’d get a job at the supermarket. It wasn’t like she hadn’t heard this stuff before. Her father had been very vocal about her lack of ability and talent.
“Abby?” Margaret said. “Are you listening to me?”
Abby lifted her eyes to look at the woman. “I’m sorry, Margaret, my mind wandered. I didn’t mean to waste your time. I’ll just clear this mess up.” She motioned to her designs. “Then I’ll make everyone a nice cup of tea.”
She rose from her seat, but a hand on her arm stopped her. Matt’s mother, Heather, gave her a look of confusion. “Sit back down, Abby. You’ve completely missed what
Margaret said.” She turned to Margaret. “Say it again.”
“I said”—Margaret looked at Abby—“these are the most amazing designs I’ve seen in a long time and I’d love to be a part of your new business.”
Abby stilled, unsure she’d heard correctly this time. Heather patted her arm in reassurance.
“I’m sorry?” Abby said. “You want to work with me?”
“We all do,” Shona said with a laugh. “You’re going to make us rich with your patterns. They’re gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.”
“I like the idea of local wool supplies and ancient dyeing methods,” Jean added. “I like that it’s going to be completely Scottish.”
“I love the bags,” Margaret said. “Who would have thought of designer bags in knit? They look so classy.”
“The mix of textures is wonderful. Is that felting?” Heather pointed to one of the sketches.
Abby nodded, still too stunned to speak. They wanted to work with her? They didn’t think she was reaching too high? They thought she had talent? It was a little too much to process.
“What are we calling this company?” Jean asked. “If we’re going to be partners, I want us to have a good name.”
Abby blinked a couple of times, still in shock. “I haven’t thought of a name yet. I was more focused on the designs.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jean said. “We’re great at coming up with names.”
“I came up with the name for our knitting group—Knit or Die,” Shona said proudly. “Best name in Scotland.”
The women gave her a round of thumbs ups.
Abby eyed each of them in turn. The youngest woman in the group was in her fifties. These women had lived through a lot of life—losing husbands, losing children, losing jobs. They understood what it meant to start again.
“You really mean it? You want to do it? You want to start a business with me?”
“Of course we do, silly girl,” Heather said with an understanding smile. “Now go make some tea and we’ll hash out the details.”
Bad Boy (Invertary Book 5) Page 3
