by TA Moore
He hitched his jeans up over his lean hips and headed out of the room. Clayton watched him go and then looked down at the baby.
“If a feral dog breaks in here, you’re on your own,” he said dryly.
The baby stared up at him with huge unfocused blue eyes and screwed its face up, ready to scream again, all red folds and pink gums. Clayton gingerly reached out and rocked the padded chair slightly.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll give you a head start.”
Either the motion or the promise satisfied Maxie. He went back to relatively quiet fussing as he bounced.
It only took Kelly five minutes to come back downstairs, his damp hair finger-combed back from his face and jeans swapped out for a different pair. The laces on his battered old combat boots trailed behind him as he came in. He took a quick look at Maxie and gave Clayton a thumbs-up.
“I guess he likes you,” he said. “Okay. Where were we? Pro bono client, background check, want me to work for free. Did I miss anything?”
“I said I’d pay your fee.”
“Sure. I’m going to gouge you for a couple of hours’ work for some woman with a sad enough story to pull your heartstrings?” The emphasis on your wasn’t entirely flattering. Kelly shrugged a pale blue shirt on over his shoulders and buttoned it as he talked. If Clayton expected that to be less distracting, he’d have been wrong. The crisp cotton exaggerated the inverted triangle of Kelly’s torso, from the heavy breadth of his shoulders to the tight tuck of his waist. “Cover any outsize expenses, and we’ll call it square.”
That was generous. Clayton knew what Kelly usually got paid. He approved the invoices when they came over his desk. It still rubbed him the wrong way. Couldn’t Kelly just play along and have one repulsive flaw?
“Aren’t you saving up to take your boyfriend to Acapulco or something?” he asked. That wasn’t something he should care enough to remember, but everyone needed a hobby. Clayton kept track of Kelly’s boyfriends in the hope that one day he’d realize it was easier to give up. “He’ll be thrilled you turned down money.”
“It was Bali, for the surfing,” Kelly corrected easily. “And he went back to Donegal.”
“Was it health-and-safety mandated?” Clayton asked, mostly as a joke and a bit of a jibe. More than a bit, maybe. “The two of you in the same zip code just too much Irish.”
Kelly narrowed his eyes for a second and then shook his head. “No, his whole family died in a freak accident,” he said. For a second Clayton’s stomach dropped, because even he had a limit to his pettiness, apparently. He opened his mouth to apologize, but before he could get the words out, Kelly blithely finished the story. “Got sucked down in a potato bog. The whole clan. Tragic.”
The sorry caught behind Clayton’s teeth. He gave Kelly a thin, severe smile. “Ah, the vaunted Kelly humor.”
Kelly snorted. The genial smile faded down to a grim ghost of itself, and something colder showed through Kelly’s pale eyes. “Least I crack a smile, Claymore.” The use of the sobriquet made Clayton’s jaw clench in annoyance. It was better than a lot of nicknames he’d had, but what “Baker’s Claymore” lacked in alliteration, it made up for in ridiculousness. He wasn’t even Scottish. The Reynolds were, if drunk old men with big stories could be believed, as Irish as Kelly. But he’d earned it, so he held his tongue as Kelly continued sharply. “Liam’s none of your business. My personal life is none of your business. So if you can’t mind your manners, you can find another investigator willing to do you a favor.”
Annoyance clenched Clayton’s jaw, and he had to swallow the hot bubble of harsh words that stirred in the back of his throat. It wasn’t that people didn’t talk to Clayton that way. Lots of people did. Even if he did still resent it, he frequently deserved it or had at least earned it somehow. What pricked him on the raw was that, like the shirt, the fact Mr. Nice had a temper, just made him more attractive—like a dash of salt to season all that caramel-tanned skin.
He could still say sorry. He probably should. But the closest he could manage was a stilted “Fair enough” as he fished an envelope out of his pocket and held it out. “This is all we have for now. I just want to know what he’s worth, if he has a police record, and what sort of asshole he is.”
“Maybe he’s not an asshole?” Kelly leaned forward to take the envelope. His fingers were long and elegantly shaped, but old scars and calluses roughed up the skin over his knuckles. Clayton had grown up around men who had hands like that. He’d put a lot of distance and hand cream between him and them. Kelly tore off the end of the envelope. “Maybe the relationship just ran its course.”
“He broke her arm.”
Distaste twitched the corners of Kelly’s mouth. “So, this asshole? What’s his name?”
“James Graham.” Clayton felt a nip of guilt and added, “Nadine seemed to think he was dangerous to more than just women and children. This isn’t part of your job. If you don’t want to take it on….”
“I said I would.”
Apparently that was enough as far as Kelly was concerned. It left Clayton wrong-footed, with nothing to do with the well-reasoned arguments he’d come prepared with.
“My contact details are in there too.” He motioned to the envelope. “If you find anything out or need something from me, you can call me at any time.”
Kelly looked amused. “Thanks for the permission.” He showed Clayton back to the sky-blue door and, as he opened it, admitted, “Let’s be honest. You’re doing me a favor too. When I arranged this break, I had a boyfriend and the delusion that I was a lot more interesting than I actually am. Now I’m single, and I did all the things I had planned in the first two days.”
He leaned against the doorframe and folded his arms, and his shirt pulled tightly across his heavy shoulders. Clayton resisted the urge to make a list of all the things he could do with Kelly. It would fill more than a day. The tug of lust in his gut made him ache, and he wondered dourly if he should have taken last night’s number after all.
“Glad to be of service,” he said. “Once Maxie’s mother picks him up, you can get to work on this.”
Kelly gave him an odd look.
“What?” Clayton asked.
“My sister-in-law died,” Kelly said. “Three months ago. I already had time off booked anyhow, for the holiday with Liam, so I could pitch in with Maxie since my brother isn’t… coping.”
He said coping in a careful, measured way that made it obvious it was a make-do word and what he wanted to say was that his brother wasn’t sober, around, or able to understand the situation. He settled for coping, or he would have if Clayton believed a word of it.
“Very funny.”
Kelly folded his arm behind his head and scratched the nape of his neck as he pulled a dubious face. “I suppose, if you have a really dark sense of humor.”
Clayton waited for the mask to slip and Kelly to let him in on the joke with a smirk. It didn’t. Then he remembered that he never had asked why Kelly had taken time off.
“I didn’t realize,” he said. The words sounded stiffer than he meant them to be, with a sharp edge to them that sounded unkind, for some reason. “I’m so sorry.”
The corner of Kelly’s twisted up in something like a smile. “No reason you should know,” he said. “Besides, I kind of asked for it with the whole Liam gag. Don’t worry about it.”
“Still,” Clayton said. He shifted on the doorstep and sweltered under his suit in the muggy evening heat. Sometimes he forgot how hot LA could be. He spent his life in courtrooms and offices, air-conditioned for the comfort of men in suits, or nightclubs where the sweat was part of the charm. He resisted the urge to tug at his collar. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked. I can find someone else.”
Kelly looked away down the street. His eyes flicked over the row of cars parked along the curb, from the rusty Mustang propped on blocks to the glossy yellow Hummer parked half up in someone’s yard.
“I didn’t really know her that well,” Kell
y admitted. It sounded like a confession, something to be ashamed of. “My brother’s been… away.”
“Jail?” Clayton asked.
That snapped Kelly’s attention back on him. A startled frown pulled his eyebrows down toward his nose. “What? No. His work just takes him away a lot.”
The question had startled Clayton nearly as much as it had Kelly. Too many ghosts today. They made him fall back into old habits. Back when jail or jailbait were the most common reasons for someone’s family member “going… away”.
“If you’re sure.”
Back in the other room, Maxie sneezed, hiccuped, and started to cry again. Kelly closed his eyes for a second and thumped his head gently against the doorframe.
“Trust me,” he said. “A reason to squeeze their share of this out of my brothers is just what I need.”
A good man would probably have argued or rolled up his sleeves and sacrificed a very expensive suit to baby spit. But Clayton was under no illusions about who he was, so he could just leave.
Of course, so did most people eventually, once the congratulatory glow of being a good person wore off. If you were lucky, they left.
“Let me know if you need anything,” Clayton said. “If I can’t get back to you, Heather will.”
He strode back down to the road, threw his leg over the bike, and braced one foot on the pavement as he pushed it upright. A husky laugh chased him, and he glanced back at Kelly with a coolly raised brow.
“Always figured you were more the convertible type.” Kelly pushed himself off the doorjamb. The light was starting to dim toward dusk, and it cast shadows over his face. “Like the bike, though. You look more….”
Before he could finish the thought, Maxie belted out a wail that made both men flinch. It was a big noise from a small body.
“Better go,” Kelly said as he motioned over his shoulder. “I’ll update you tomorrow.”
He ducked back into the house, the door closed behind him, and Clayton was left to wonder what the bike made him look more of.
Not that it mattered—Clayton yanked his helmet down over his ears and started the bike—but he still wanted to know.
Chapter Three
“OH LOOK at the wee mite,” Kathleen fussed as she took her grandson from her son. She mwah’d against his rash-pink cheek and picked at the grubby onesie that Kelly had wrestled the baby into before he left the house. It had been clean then. “What happened to the lovely outfits I brought over for him?”
Kathleen Kelly was five foot nothing of condensed first-generation Irish immigrant. Forty years on—first in New York and then city-hopping around Nevada and California—and she hadn’t lost the accent. Kelly always figured it was a silent protest of how aggressively his dad had embraced America and everything about it.
“He barfed on them, Mom,” Kelly said as he shrugged the baby bag off his shoulder and set it on the table. “Any coffee?”
She tched at him. “You know I won’t have artificial stimulants in my house,” she said as she chucked Maxie under his chin. The baby stared at her with suspicion. “They’re no good for you. I don’t care what the doctors said, Byron stopped acting out once we cut out all the caffeine from his diet.”
Kelly scratched the old scar in his eyebrow. “Or he stopped getting caught.”
“Now don’t start.” Kathleen lifted a finger—the warning finger, they called it as children—and wagged it at him over Maxie. “You’ve stepped up for your brother, helped to take care of Maxie. Don’t ruin it now by dragging up old fights you two had when you were boys. Byron could be a handful, with his… attention problems, but you were a little snitch. As bad as each other, in the end.”
Some moms said they loved all their kids equally. Kathleen was more “I managed to love you all the same, despite everything.” It drove Kelly mad as a kid, when he was sure of the injustice of it, but there was no point arguing now. Kathleen’s image of their childhoods had calcified into scab-knees and mischief.
“So no coffee?” Kelly asked again.
It was the secret code. All the family knew it. It used to get them a candy or a can of soda from Mom’s secret stash. Now it was a coffee or a beer. Not every time. Sometimes you struck out. Kathleen gave him a look, took in the bags under his eyes, and softened.
“There might be a jar under the sink,” she said. Then to cover her own backside, she added, “Mrs. Lowry brought it over. Couldn’t exactly throw it back at her, could I?”
She picked up the baby bag from the table and dangled it from the crook of her elbow as she headed for the stairs. Maxie squirmed and fussed in her arms, and Kelly had to resist the urge to say the baby didn’t like to be held like that, that he liked to wriggle.
It wasn’t as though he really knew anything about babies. Until Marie died, his only experience had been the fat, placid cocoons that his sisters-in-law shoved at him “for a hold.” They’d all been quiet and genial, weighed down by breast milk and baby fat—unlike Maxie, who was made of wire, wind, and spite.
Kathleen baby-talk narrated her way upstairs. “We’re going to find you a lovely wee outfit, aren’t we? You’re going to be the best-dressed bab in the country. And get you a blankie so you don’t get cold. We don’t want grandma’s precious bab to get cold.”
“It’s California, Mom,” Kelly yelled up.
“And how many children have you raised?”
Kelly supposed he had to give her that. He crouched down to hunt for coffee in the cupboard under the sink, amid the bottles of bleach and antibacterial soap. Kathleen might feed the family on organic produce, but she never met a chemical cleaning product she didn’t like. The stronger the better. It probably wasn’t the best place to keep coffee, but there the dusty jar of instant was, right at the back, under an old wax-stained polishing rag.
He boiled the kettle and got a mug out of the cupboard. It was strange. He was nearly thirty years old, and his childhood seemed a long way away, but nothing had changed here. The kettle was still slotted into the same plug, the mugs still in the same cupboard, and the mugs were still the same LAPD-branded ones he drank out of as a kid.
Even the family photo on the fridge was still there when he went to get the milk, held up by the faded “Happy Mother’s Day” magnet that one of them got her when they were kids. All six of the Kelly boys crouched on the grass in their LAPD baseball jerseys, while Dad grinned over them in the background.
The seventh Kelly boy poured an overdose of flavored creamer into his coffee and shoved the fridge shut. Look at that. Even his old childhood resentments were just where he left them, not quite brushed under the rug.
He turned his back on the fridge and dragged a chair out from the kitchen table just as someone rapped on the front door.
“Sweetheart, will you get that?” Kathleen yelled from upstairs.
He grabbed a swig of coffee and grimaced at the taste—too much sweetener—and yelled up, “Sure.”
It wasn’t family. They always used the back door. Kelly gave his hair a quick rake through with his fingers on his way down the hall and checked the front of his shirt for stains before he opened the door. A vaguely familiar woman stood on the doorstep with an armful of casserole dish, the gunmetal navy of her uniform somehow starker than usual in the sun and on the porch.
“Oh,” she said, and her voice lilted with surprise. She tried to free one hand from the dish to push the aviator sunglasses up onto her forehead. Big green eyes blinked at him out of a freckled face. “Hi. I’m Officer Andrews. I work with your brother?”
“Which one?”
She dimpled at him. “Good point. You must be—”
“The one who’s not a cop?” Kelly finished for her. “Yeah, that’s me. Is that for Mom?”
Andrews glanced down at the casserole as though she’d forgotten it was there, and color pinked up her face. “Oh, um, yeah. She said she really liked it at the last barbecue, and I know… what with everything that happened….”
Kelly steppe
d back and waved her in through the front door. Once she was inside, he relieved her of the casserole and yelled upstairs.
“Mom, Officer Andrews—”
“Claire,” she muttered to him.
“Claire has dropped by.”
The speed at which Kathleen made it back down the stairs with Maxie squawking from a pale blue cocoon of angora in her arms betrayed that she had designs on poor Claire. She still had, at last count, two unmarried sons. That counted.
Kelly snorted at that bit of self-pity while Kathleen hugged Claire and fussed over how pretty her hair was now that she’d cut it. He was a grown man. He didn’t need to be his mom’s favorite. Besides, Mom might be okay with him being gay, but that didn’t mean he trusted her taste in men.
She’d probably pick out some nice Irish lad like Liam for him—all brogue and the ability to bake, someone the rest of the family could view as unthreatening. And she could correspond with his family back home. As opposed to what, Kelly asked himself wryly, a tall, flatly American divorce lawyer with razor-sharp cheekbones and even sharper fashion?
His libido, as always, chimed in with an enthusiastic yes. The tug of sticky interest in that idea spread like warm honey through his groin. His cock twitched, and he set his jaw. Now was hardly the time to start fantasizing about the unattainable Clayton Reynolds.
That had been last night, all tangled sheets, his own impatient hand and weird adolescent guilt about doing it with a baby in the house.
Enough. He pulled his brain back from the sweaty precipice of his… what? Not a crush. He didn’t want to peel back Clayton’s prickly exterior and find the nicer person inside. He just—every now and again—wanted the asshole to pin him down and be clever at him while they fucked. So maybe an issue, but not a crush. Whatever it was, he shoved it to the back of his head the same way he shoved the casserole into the fridge.
Talley, Baker, and Jenks were his firm’s best clients. A one-night stand with Clayton—no matter how hot he looked in that stupid suit on that bike—was not worth the risk of losing that account.
