by TA Moore
“That’s enough,” he said, his voice dry and sticky in his throat.
Edward studied him with narrowed, ice blue eyes for a second as he seemed to weigh the impact his words had. After a moment he gave a brisk dip of his chin.
“Maybe it is,” he said. “Finally. If anything happens, call me. Anything at all. Trust me, after an hour I’ll want a graceful excuse to leave. Something like this goes from ‘catching up with old friends’ to ‘bunch of old codgers complaining about how it used to be done back in the day’ very quickly.”
Joe nodded his agreement, and Edward turned to leave. He got a few steps and then turned around to look at Joe.
“I know I’m not your dad, Joey” he said. “I never tried to be. But you’re still the closest thing I have to family, and everything I do is with your best interests at heart. Even if you don’t see it at the time. I hope you know that.”
Joe knew that Edward believed that, and he was tired of arguments, so he nodded. “I know you mean well, Edward.”
There was enough room left between the words of that statement for everything else, from the fact that Edward had been the one to sit with Joe when they thought Harry was going to die to the fact that he thought only he knew best. Both of them knew that. After a second, Edward nodded and left, his hands shoved into the pockets of his coat.
Which left Joe with a decision to make. The plan had been to come down, cut through to King’s Cross, grab a coffee from Starbucks, and then go back to run an eye over the redundancy paperwork for their local employees. It needed done, and it really wasn’t his business what Cal did. Or who he ate with.
He still headed for the hotel restaurant. By the time he got there, he was sure he’d have come up with an excuse for why he picked tonight to eat at the hotel.
Or not. If Cal didn’t owe him anything, he didn’t owe Cal an explanation.
The restaurant was all dark wood and crystal lights. It was full of murmured conversation and the busy click of cutlery on good china. The host, her hair up in a bouncy blonde ponytail, a tailored gray vest buttoned snug over her stomach, smiled politely at him.
“Do you need to be seated, sir?” she asked.
Joe glanced over her head. He tracked across the tables until he found Cal’s profile, half-lit by the candle on the table. The man opposite was short but solid across the shoulders. His blond hair was styled back from his face, and his mouth was open as he held forth about something.
It could be hard to tell what Cal was thinking, except for the times he cracked that goofy grin, but Joe thought he had the knack of it. The smile that tugged one corner of his mouth up didn’t have the sly turn that his humor usually took. He didn’t look at the other man—the doctor—the way he looked at Joe. If he had, Joe supposed that Dr. Lawrence would have already rented a room for them.
He smiled at the host and pointed across the room.
“In that booth over there,” he said. “By the window.”
“Ahh….” The hostess turned and ran her pen down the reservations book. “That should be fine. Follow me.”
She led the way to the booth, handed him a menu, and assured him that the waiter would be with him soon. As she left, Dr. Lawrence chuckled at something as he sliced into his fish, and Cal watched him and drank his soda.
Joe waited until he’d put his order in. Salad and a glass of sparkling water. After the day he’d had, whiskey made sense, but this was already a bad idea. No point in more fuel for it. While he waited for the waiter, he typed out a brusque message to Cal.
The deal was 24/7 after all.
He hit Send and waited. Across the room Cal shifted in his chair and said something to Lawrence as he reached into his pocket. He studied the screen for a second and then slowly looked around to scowl at Joe.
“Fuck off,” he mouthed.
Joe texted him back No and smirked.
Chapter Eleven
ASSHOLE.
Cal shut his phone off and turned back around in his chair to grimace apologetically over the table. Doc frowned at him, blue eyes somewhere between irritated and disappointed behind smudge-free lenses.
“Work again?” he asked. “Who’d have thought being a driver was so demanding. I save lives for a living, but they still give me time to eat.”
Cal had to give him the jab about drivers. At this point even Cal, who’d always kind of viewed dating as a contact sport, had to admit he was being a dick. Not to mention the fact that an hour into their second date, he still didn’t know Doc’s real name. Cal had never noticed before how rarely you said your own name in conversation.
Yet somehow the guy couldn’t let five minutes pass without the reminder he was a doctor.
“Long hours, short contracts,” Cal said shortly. “End of the month, I could be sitting on my thumbs.”
The doc laughed. “Or mine,” he said. “If tonight goes well.”
Cal paused and gave him a dubious look. That was weird. Doc realized it too as he laughed nervously and jabbed his fork into a piece of fish. It disintegrated into the sauce.
“That, umm, came out wrong,” Doc said.
“I noticed,” Cal said. He glanced back over his shoulder to see what Joe was doing. Still spying on Cal’s date was the answer. Cal glared at him in frustration and then tried to smooth his face back out as he looked at Doc. “Look, do you mind if I step out for five minutes?”
Frustration pinched Doc’s mouth together in a puckered line. “Actually, I’d rather you not,” he said. “Most of my dates don’t feel the need for a breather.”
Cal looked at him for a second, shrugged, and got up anyhow. He crumpled his napkin up and dropped it next to the half-eaten burger he’d ordered. First Kristen at breakfast and now this. Apparently there was a conspiracy that didn’t want him to finish a meal.
“Up to you,” he said. “Tell the waiter to bill the meal to my room.”
Color spread across Doc’s cheekbones, under the wire rims of his glasses. He put his knife and fork down on the plate.
“I don’t appreciate this,” he said stiffly. “And I don’t deserve it.”
“I know,” Cal said. “That’s why I’m covering the bill. See you around, Doc.”
“You won’t.”
Cal thought about that for a second. “Seems fair,” he said and headed across the restaurant to Joe’s booth. He leaned his shoulder against the hard wooden edge of it and scowled down at Joe, who looked lean and elegant in a gray suit and lavender tie. His hair had wilted out of its quiff and fallen into loose dark curls around his face. Cal didn’t think about what it would feel like to bury his fingers in them, because he’d decided that wasn’t what he wanted.
Liar, a sly little voice accused from the back of his brain where he kept all the things he had to work at not caring about—his mum, being an ex-con, the fact he was built to be a dirty little secret—you want all of it.
It was, for once, wrong. Cal didn’t. He wanted Joe, but he didn’t want closed bedroom doors and plausible deniability in public. But Kristen was right—that was all that was ever going to be on offer. Not because of her either. Take her out of the equation and Cal was still the itch that got scratched on a dirty weekend, not the guy you brought home to Mum.
Hell, even his own mum didn’t want that.
“I’m on a date,” he said as he crossed his arms. “This couldn’t wait?”
Joe leaned back in the booth and laced his hands together on the table. “Hmm, now you mention it, I suppose it could,” he said. “However, since I guess the date’s over now? Do you have anything better to do?”
“Do you? Because I had him to do,” Cal said as he jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the table. “So my night was all booked up.”
Joe leaned out of the booth to check the table. “He’s still there,” he said. “I can wait if you want.”
Shit.
The immediate, dismayed reaction made Cal wince. Okay, so the date hadn’t gone great. He probably shouldn’t be
disappointed that the date hadn’t already ended badly.
Cal turned to look and the table was empty. The plates with their half-eaten meal were abandoned, and Doc’s wineglass had been drained to the dregs. Guilt tried to pinch at Cal’s stomach, but it struggled to make an impact through the quick rush of relief. Maybe later.
“You’re an asshole,” he told Joe.
“Maybe,” Joe admitted. “But you looked like someone had told you that you could have seconds of a shit sandwich, so don’t pretend you’re that annoyed I interrupted. What was wrong with him?”
“Nothing,” Cal said sourly. So he hadn’t enjoyed the doc’s company that much, but Joe had still been a dick to interrupt them. Cal could ruin his own dates without any help. “You’re paying for his dinner, by the way.”
Joe didn’t look bothered, or sorry. “I see,” he said, as though Cal had given something away. “So he just wasn’t me?”
The calm confidence in Joe’s voice made Cal squirm as lust prickled under his skin and between his legs. It didn’t really make sense. The doc’s boasts about his medical degree had bored him, but Joe’s arrogance turned Cal on. Maybe because, with Joe, it wasn’t a boast, it was… conviction.
“Join me,” Joe said as he pointed over the table. “I already paid for the meal. You might as well eat it.”
The thing was that Cal wanted to say yes. He wanted to have dinner with Joe, go upstairs, and get fucked until he forgot all the stuff he wanted and couldn’t have. But he had a feeling that, for once, that wasn’t going to work.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Cal—”
Cal didn’t let Joe finish. “The doc was pompous and a bit of a prig. But at least he wasn’t so ashamed to be seen with me that he needed to pretend that dinner was a business meeting, not a date.”
For the first time Joe looked as though he’d been caught off guard. “I just…. Look, what did you want me to do, come over and punch him?”
Cal pushed himself off the booth and tucked his hands into his pockets. There was a tight knot of words caught in his throat—the sarcastic admission that “it would have been hot” tangled with the raw “you could have asked me first”—but in the end, he didn’t say any of them. What was the point?
“Why would you?” he asked. “Like you told Kristen, your love life is nothing to do with me. So return the favor.”
The flustered expression on Joe’s face had faded. It gave way to a cool, irritated expression. The muscles in the sides of his jaw clenched as he glanced around at the nearby tables.
“This is hardly the place to discuss this,” he said.
“Yeah,” Cal said. “Exactly. Look, I’m not complaining. We both got exactly what we wanted, Joe, and it was fun. If you want to fuck? Sure, you know where my room is. But don’t try and pretend we’re dating, as long as no one else knows about it. I don’t deserve that sort of shit.”
Joe looked frustrated. He still kept his voice down to a tight, discreet mutter. “So, to be clear, sex is okay but not dinner?”
“More or less,” Cal said. He stepped back from the table and gave Joe an empty smile. “Forward me the itinerary you wanted to go over, Mr. Bailey, and I’ll go over it tonight. Enjoy your salad.”
He turned to leave and caught the eye of an elegant, gray-haired woman who’d obviously shamelessly eavesdropped on them over her soup. Caught in the act, she smiled at Cal with white, even teeth and winked.
“Smart boy,” she hissed her approval at him on his way past her table. “Never take sex off the table. Or jewelry.”
He laughed despite the fact he felt like shit, and didn’t look back on his way out of the restaurant. The flash of humor got him all the way back up to the suite and then drained away as he closed the door to his room. He dropped his head back against the door with a thump and wondered what the hell had possessed him.
It had seemed like the right thing to do in the moment, but where had he gotten him? Now his cock thought he was an idiot, his heart ached, and his stomach didn’t know why it had to suffer in all this. Cal rubbed his forehead and wondered why the hell he hadn’t shut his mouth. He could have had dinner, had sex, and if his heart hurt later… well, it did now. So he didn’t see what he’d bloody accomplished.
CAL WOKE up to the sound of the first train of the day leaving, muffled through the thick walls and triple-glazed windows. He growled under his breath and buried his face in the pillow, his arm hooked over his head.
His head felt muzzy with a mixture of embarrassment and exhaustion. Last night he’d stayed up, checked his phone every ten minutes, and realized two things—first, that he made himself look like a soft idiot when he spewed his feelings all over the restaurant last night, and second, that Joe might know where Cal’s bed was, but he wasn’t about to knock on the door. Or text.
Oh, and third, that he probably owed Doc some sort of apology.
“Shit,” Cal muttered into the pillow. He waited a while longer, until he could taste the damp from his breath against the cotton, and then rolled over onto his back. Maybe he should have been more sympathetic to El about the divorce. He’d known Joe for two weeks, and he felt like crap. If it had been years, he’d probably drink himself into a grave next to his grandparents.
The thought made Cal grimace sourly at this own dramatics. He scrambled out of bed, showered, dressed, and was ready to go by seven o’clock. Since no one had come to get him, or fire him, he assumed he wasn’t needed yet.
That gave him time to make a couple of calls. The first two were easy—a blunt apology to Doc and a blunt reminder for Van that he wasn’t a patient man. It was the last call that made him hesitate, his hands sweaty and his stomach sour from more than hunger. He didn’t even know what the point of it was now. He was pretty sure he’d burned his bridges with Joe last night. This wasn’t going to fix that.
He dialed away. It went to voicemail. Of course it did.
“It’s Cal. Caleb,” he said. Although he supposed she would know who he was anyhow. “Can you call me? It won’t take long. I wanted to ask about someone you used to know. El said you knew him anyhow. It’s important.”
Ten years ago he’d have offered her money. That had always been a surefire way to get his mum to answer a call. She’d always needed money. These days her husband could give her whatever she wanted. He was a dentist or chiropodist, or something.
“If I don’t hear from you,” he said, and it didn’t feel good that that was the best lever he had to get her to do something, “I’ll call back.”
He hung up. They weren’t the sort of family who lingered over sentimental sign-offs.
It was done. Now he didn’t have any excuse to loiter in his room. Cal glanced at his reflection in the mirror and gave his collar a tug to hide the edges of his tattoo. For a second, the memory of Joe’s mouth on his throat—as he traced the ink with tongue and teeth—was so vivid he could feel the heat on his skin.
Cal scrubbed it away impatiently with the back of his hand. People who second-guessed themselves weren’t good drivers, or thieves, and Cal was both. He’d drawn a line. Joe had decided not to cross it. Time to move on.
Not only emotionally either. It might be time to do it literally. After he heard from Van and his mum, he’d ask El to swap him out with another driver. Until then Cal could act like an adult.
That was almost as good as being one.
IT WAS like the first time they’d fucked. You wouldn’t know anything at all had happened from Joe’s behavior. He sat in the back, immersed in paperwork, emails, and the occasional brisk phone call. They had driven from the hotel to the abandoned housing development that Bailey Holdings were selling. The red-haired lawyer from the other day—Bea, Cal thought—had been there with two separate folders and a grim-faced man who’d thrown his clipboard down and stalked off in a rage.
Not good news, then.
“What time is it?” Joe asked as he looked up from the file.
Cal gave Joe a look in
the rearview mirror. His phone had been in his hand five minutes ago. “Nearly two,” he said. “Where next, Mr. Bailey?”
“I need to be at Saville Row by half three,” Joe said as he closed the file and tucked it away in his briefcase. “I made an appointment for a fitting.”
Cal forgot himself for a second and snorted. “You need more clothes?”
The slip from coolly professional made Cal wince. He spun his map of the city in his head and plotted out the quickest route through the narrow streets. It would be tight, but with the sort of money Joe spent on his clothes, Cal supposed the tailor would be more accommodating than your average dentist. He flicked the indicator on and changed lanes, the sleek shape of the Bentley tucked between the bumper of a white van and a blue Mini driven by a woman with a nervous face and a death grip on the wheel.
“Nothing wrong with looking nice, Cal,” Joe said.
“I do all right,” Cal said. “And I don’t even own a suit.”
“No,” Joe said softly. Something hot and dark curled through his voice. It stroked down Cal’s back like a hand. “You look hot. There’s a difference.”
Cal risked a quick glance in the mirror, but Joe had already dropped his attention back to his phone. The itch of hunger that lodged under Cal’s skin, down his spine and along his inner thighs didn’t seem to be mutual. Cal dragged his attention back to the road and wished his grandad were still about to clip him around the back of the head—not that it had ever knocked sense into him as a kid.
The thought of it certainly did nothing to discourage the lustful notion that it would be kinda hot to see Joe get all fitted up for a fancy suit.
Forty minutes later Cal stood in front of a full-length mirror while a prim young woman with a pencil clenched between her teeth measured his inseam. At the end of the process, she spat it out and scribbled the numbers down in her pad.
Once she was finished, she sat back on her heels. “Okay. It’s short notice, but we can find something on the rack and then tailor it a little to fit.” Her eyes tracked up to Cal’s shoulders, bare except for ink, and she pursed her lips. “Maybe a lot. Do you have any preference for color.”
