by TA Moore
For years Clayton hadn’t really been able to imagine the flamboyant, dryly amused Baker in a criminal court. Now he could.
“I’m going to talk to Nadine this evening,” Clayton said. He made a mental note to relieve Heather of that job. She’d already gone above and beyond, but he wasn’t going to put her in danger. “If you have any questions….”
Baker looked thoughtful as he adjusted his cuffs and checked his reflection in the mirror. A tug at his collar settled it to his satisfaction. “Actually I’d rather speak to her myself,” he said. “I know what to ask. Later. Some favors are better called in in person.”
After Baker left, Clayton glanced at himself in the mirror. His suit was just as—almost as—expensive as Baker’s, but instead of bright colors and patterned linings he’d gone for charcoal gray and a black shirt.
That was the thing, though. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in love, he just didn’t believe that it lasted.
After all, he went to its funeral every time he went to court.
Chapter Ten
ONE OF the few things Clayton missed about his home was the dark. In Utah, night fell like a stage backdrop to the desert. In LA, it never really got dark. The lights just got brighter. It did get late, not too late to hit a club, to find a pretty ass in black leather, but definitely too late to weave through the ribbons of traffic on the highway and definitely too late to growl a bike down the neat little street to Kelly’s ridiculous yellow house.
But here he was anyhow.
In his head, a figment of Baker smirked and raised his eyebrows in a knowing expression. Clayton snorted as he pulled in and knocked the kickstand down with his heel. Baker didn’t know as much as he thought he did, and Clayton didn’t have anything to admit, to himself or anyone else. He’d just spent too many nights as a kid worried that the purple knot on his mom’s temple would kill her, or the bottle she’d taken to his latest dad would turn her into a murderer. Old habits wouldn’t let him rest until he made sure that Kelly hadn’t passed out and choked on his own tongue.
Clayton pulled his helmet off and hung it off the handlebar of the bike. He scrubbed his hand through his sweat-matted hair and frowned at the familiar, dusty-windowed pickup parked up on the curb. If Kelly had gone back and driven his truck home, Clayton was going to use that as evidence that he was an idiot and not just a romantic.
He climbed off the bike and headed up to the front door. It stood ajar, and the sound of raised voices and a baby’s distressed wail filtered out into the warm night air. Clayton stiffened as the hackles on the back of his neck rose. Maybe it wasn’t Kelly who drove his pickup back home. Any ID in it, and the men who’d ground Kelly’s face into the pavement earlier could have found their way here. If Kelly was right about the police being involved, they wouldn’t even need the ID.
It meant there wouldn’t be any point in a 9-1-1 call either.
Clayton grimaced, pushed the door open, and cautiously stepped into the hall. The three men in the main room turned to stare at him.
“Who the fuck are you?” the taller, blonder version of Kelly demanded harshly.
“What are you doing here?” the oldest of the three said as he put his hand on blond Kelly’s shoulder. He didn’t look much like Kelly, but he looked a lot like the blond.
“He’s actually welcome,” Kelly said sardonically from behind them. He still had the eye patch on, and it lent an oddly rakish touch. “Unlike you two.”
Brothers. Of course. Kelly had his own family—a big, tight-knit, Irish family. He didn’t need Clayton to make sure he was okay. That was one responsibility Clayton could hand off without a qualm.
“You asked us over,” the blond pointed out to Kelly.
The older man stepped forward and held his hand out. He looked more like Kelly when he smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes under ginger brows.
“You must be Clayton,” he said as Clayton took his hand. “I’m Cole. That’s Wilde.”
A backward tilt of his head indicated the other brother. Wilde chuckled and turned to look at Kelly. “So this is him?” he said. “Thanksgiving Clayton?”
“Shut up,” Kelly muttered. Color spread across his cheekbones.
Wilde laughed, and Cole ignored him as he narrowed his eyes at Clayton.
“You met my wife the other day. Agatha.”
“I did.”
The grip on Clayton’s hand tightened. “And doing a favor for you is the reason my brother got beaten up.”
“Yes.”
The blond laughed again. “C’mon, Cole, be fair. He’s gotten worse from us. Remember when Byron pushed him off the roof to see if he could fly? We thought he’d killed him.”
Cole grimaced. “Shut up, Wilde. What if they punched him on the other side of the face? He could have lost his eye.”
“Again,” Wilde cracked. He jabbed his elbow into Kelly’s side. “One is a misfortune, two looks like carelessness, eh?”
He laughed at his own joke. Both Cole and Kelly rolled their eyes. In the background Maxie, on his back in a padded playpen, hiccuped and wailed some more.
It felt like family, at least the ones Clayton had experienced, where he was the outsider who gave in-jokes their point.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said coolly as he took his hand back. “I just wanted to make sure he didn’t need anything.”
Cole stared at him. “That’s what family is for.”
“Well, I wanted some dick,” Kelly drawled. “People frown on family who provide that.”
Clayton nearly laughed. A flush hit Cole’s face and was easily visible through his pale skin. “Do you have to talk like that in front of the baby?” he asked. “You want Mom to be waiting for Nana, and Maxie’s first word is dick?”
“We’ll just tell her he meant his dad,” Kelly said flatly.
There was a pause. That was family too—the fault lines that took a lifetime to navigate. Wilde broke the tension with a laugh and slung his arm around Kelly’s neck.
“Or you could just be grateful that it distracted her from lecturing you on why you have to wear your special glasses.”
“We’re keeping Clayton,” Cole said shortly.
“I’m keeping Clayton,” Kelly corrected. He shrugged Wilde off and gave him a shove toward the door. “You’re going home. Worry about your own love lives.”
Wilde snorted. “My wife is still in Idaho. Apparently we’re all toxic, and she’s got to stay on a commune to detox. Like her family’s a prize.” He paused on the way past Clayton and tilted his head to the side. “I mean, obviously, you get there’s six of us, and we’re cops, and we can make your life awkward if anything else happens to our baby brother? We got that across with the ’tude? Because I can puff my chest out and make some empty threats if you need a bit more.”
“Enough, Wilde!” Cole bit out.
Wilde winked at Clayton and left. He tossed a “Nice to meet you anyhow, after everything the kids had to say about you,” over his shoulder on his way out, and Cole scowled after him.
“He might think everything is funny,” he said to Kelly. “I don’t. You’re supposed to be taking care of Max. You said you could do it. You told us we could depend on you. I told Dad that you could do it, that we could trust you to step up and help Byron. If you can’t, if you’d rather screw around and get into fights, maybe… maybe Max should be with me and Aggie. I think Byron would be happier with that.”
He left.
Clayton wished he could as well. The day had been bad enough without being conscripted into someone else’s drama. He didn’t do scenes. He didn’t do families. Casual hookups and one-night stands kept his life simple. That was how he liked it.
“Sorry,” Kelly said. He rubbed his hand over his face and dragged a smile up out of somewhere. “This is why I can’t date casually. You’re one unannounced drop-in away from meeting my parents, and once that happens, we have to go steady. It’s the law.”
He crouched down to fuss
over Maxie and deposit a much-loved, spit-wet dragon into the baby’s sticky embrace. It was enough distraction to stop Maxie’s wails, but he kept up staccato, hiccuped sobs of irritation.
“I thought your problem was that you believed in love at first sight,” Clayton said.
“That doesn’t help,” Kelly admitted with a rasp of laughter. He sat down on the ground and leaned back against the couch. The cut on his face had scabbed with a bruise smeared blue and tender around the edges, and his nose was tender-looking around the bridge. “Did Baker find anything out?”
Clayton wanted to tell him. Maybe that was why he was there instead of reading case files at home or picking up a one-night stand at Revolver—so he could talk about Nadine’s odd pride in her abusive husband’s criminal ideals and how Baker had picked her story to bits so elegantly that she hadn’t even realized he’d done it.
It would be a bad idea, and he only allowed himself one of those.
“You should listen to your brothers,” he said. “I told you this afternoon that you have enough on your plate. If the police are involved in this somehow, your family won’t exactly appreciate you going against the grain.”
“If the LAPD wanted me to keep their dirty secrets, they should have let me sign up,” Kelly said. “And I’ve got six brothers. I can fall out with two of them for a while.”
“Three,” Clayton pointed out. “It sounds like Maxie’s dad isn’t going to be happy either.”
Kelly smiled, but it didn’t have the usual joy. “Oh, trust me, that I can live with.”
The bitter edge to his voice wasn’t something that Clayton associated with Kelly, but that was what family did. It brought out the worst in people sooner or later.
“You had anything to eat?” Clayton asked.
The abrupt shift in topic made Kelly blink, and that old bitter resentment was replaced by confusion. “No, not yet. Why?”
It wasn’t a date. Clayton pulled up the Grubhub app on his phone and scrolled through the nearby restaurants for something that looked good. It was just food. That didn’t have to mean anything.
BEER AND pizza, eaten on the floor. Last time Clayton had eaten like that he was a student with a box of cold slices from his part-time job and no money for heat. The pizza was better now, and LA came with its thermostat stuck on high.
“…Nadine denies everything, in good faith, I think,” Clayton said. “But once Baker started to question her, he picked up on a pattern of behavior he thinks suggests something.”
Kelly folded his pizza in half and took a bite. He wiped cheese-greasy lips on the back of his hand.
“Police harassment, but no charges,” he said once he swallowed. “Traffic tickets go away. Domestic calls never stick.”
“Only thing that doesn’t fit is that his parole got revoked a few months ago,” Clayton said. “He had to serve out five weeks. Maybe a judge didn’t get the hands-off memo.”
Kelly shrugged and tossed a burned rind of pizza crust into the grease-stained box on the coffee table. The eye patch made his face look leaner—almost stern—until he flashed one of those stupidly happy smiles of his. Clayton didn’t object to the new angles.
“Byron—he’s the one who’s undercover—used to have to serve out his sentence whenever he needed a breather or to recalibrate to the real world,” Kelly said. “Hell, around the same time that Jimmy was shipped off to jail, Byron’s cover had to go to traffic court in West Virginia so Byron could bury his wife. The judge on Jimmy’s case might have been told to deny him bail because the cops wanted to stick him a jail cell with someone to get them talking or put pressure on Jimmy if he’d been balking at doing dirty work for them.”
Clayton found it hard to imagine one of the Kelly brothers as an undercover cop. The three he’d met seemed like the sort of men who lost frequently, and with good grace, at poker. Whether it was dislike or sympathy, their feelings were as easy to read as a page in a court filing. He couldn’t imagine any of them on the tightrope of lie and truth that an undercover cop had to walk.
Maybe that was why none of Byron’s brothers seemed that sure they trusted him.
“What I don’t get is why they care whether or not Nadine leaves him,” Clayton said as he dragged his imagination away from the potential black-sheep Kelly brother. He picked a slice of mushroom off the box and popped it in his mouth. “Her only criminal involvement is through her husband. Her father was a construction worker—he’s dead—and her mother works in a factory. It shouldn’t have any impact on the police investigation if she leaves Jimmy.”
“If he’s a long-term informant,” Kelly said with a rueful expression, “it might just be a favor to Jimmy, something to keep him happy. Like you said, Nadine’s got no connections. There’s no benefit to Jimmy’s handlers if she owes them a favor.”
That left a bad taste in Clayton’s mouth. It tasted sour enough that he was done with his pizza. He flicked the box shut on the remaining slices of kale and mushroom and tried to wash the taste away with a mouthful of beer and a change of subject.
“Are all your brothers named after poets?” he asked. “Byron. Wilde. Cole… ridge?”
Kelly looked at him and eventually said, “I’m not telling you my name.” He got to his feet. “You don’t need to know my name. No one does. Want another beer?”
Clayton considered the bottle he had drank. Another would give him an excuse to stay, plausible deniability if he broke his “only one bad idea a year” rule.
“No,” he said. “Thanks.”
Kelly shrugged and took the empty pizza box with him into the kitchen. Metal rattled, plastic rustled, and the fridge lit up as Kelly opened it.
Up on the shelf, the baby monitor blinked placidly. Maxie had been quiet since Kelly took him upstairs. The pizza-delivery girl, all freckles and funky moped helmet, had said “aw” as she watched through the door. Clayton hadn’t corrected her. On the other side of the monitor, the framed picture of Kelly’s Irish ex grinned sunnily at the camera.
He looked like he was in love, but where was he now?
“Not here,” Clayton muttered to himself. He stood up and walked over to lean against the kitchen door. On the way past, he put Liam’s picture facedown on the shelf. The kitchen was a mess—not dirty, but half-finished. A polished silver fridge stood alone against the wall, and the skeletons of unfinished cupboards leaned against the back wall under the long grubby window. The floor was freshly surfaced with sea-blue tiles, and the smell of fresh cement still lingered in the room. Kelly popped the cap off the soda he’d grabbed instead of a beer as Clayton tried again. “Wordsworth?”
“I wish,” Kelly muttered, low enough that Clayton probably wasn’t meant to hear. “And nope.”
“It’s the Romantics, though,” Clayton said. “They were a limited run. I’ll work it out eventually.”
Kelly turned and gave him a wry look over the bottle as he took a swig. “You’re assuming that I’ll tell you if you’re right.”
“Fair’s fair.”
“I don’t tell anyone my name.”
“So Liam didn’t know?” Clayton asked as he walked over the sea-blue tiles. One had cracked already and been sealed back down with sticky tape in a haphazard fix that would probably be there for a while. “He lived with you and never saw your name on anything?”
There was a raw edge to the question that Clayton didn’t like, a scrape of jealousy or possessiveness. He wasn’t sure which, and he didn’t have the right to either.
“He met my mom,” Kelly said. “Unfortunately, she hadn’t forgotten my name yet. My birthday sometimes, but not the name.”
Clayton took the soda from him and balanced it on top of the bare-bones framework of the counter-to-be.
“I’m not suddenly going to become a good fit,” he said as he hooked his fingers in the waistband of Kelly’s jeans. If Baker really did have eyes everywhere, he’d think the abrupt shift in topic was bizarre. But the two of them knew what Clayton meant. “It’ll be fun�
��a lot of fun—and then it’ll end. I want you, but I’m not your next Prince Charming.”
He tugged Kelly forward and bent down to kiss him, roughly and quickly and deeply. Kelly’s mouth tasted of sugar and salt, soda and pizza. It felt intimate in how commonplace it was. Unpracticed, like it was a real thing. Clayton curled his hand around the nape of Kelly’s neck and tucked his thumb under the sharp hinge of Kelly’s jaw. He could feel the eager beat of Kelly’s pulse through stubbled skin and felt the hot tide of lust under his own.
It took a minute, but Kelly leaned back. He licked Clayton’s spit off his lips and shook his head.
“I didn’t ask you to be,” he said.
The pang of hurt caught Clayton by surprise. It was the right answer, but that wasn’t the point. Just because you knew you couldn’t be someone’s future didn’t mean you wanted them to agree with you, particularly when it came from a man who fell in love at the drop of a hat.
To cover the moment of hypocritical injury, Clayton pushed his hand back into Kelly’s short, wavy hair and dragged him back into the kiss. “Good,” he muttered around Kelly’s tongue. “Blake?”
The snort of laughter tangled between their mouths in a trickle of sound and the curve of Kelly’s smile mapped out against Clayton’s lips. Kelly stripped his jacket off on the way out of the kitchen and folded it almost neatly over the back of the chair on the way past.
“I’m not telling you,” Kelly said between kisses as he tugged at Clayton’s tie. “But you think I’d kick up this much fuss over Blake?”
Clayton murmured his acknowledgment of that point against Kelly’s lips. He didn’t know why Kelly’s name mattered to him. If he really wanted to find out, he could ask Baker or check out his PI license with the state. Hell, he could just wait and check Kelly’s driver’s license when he was asleep.
But he wanted Kelly to tell him—a lawyer’s habit, Clayton supposed. He ignored the Baker-like snort that hmphed in the back chambers of his brain. It wasn’t going to tell him anything he wanted to listen to, and Kelly’s eager mouth and wandering hands were much more fun to focus on.
