Chapter Two
“If he doesn’t have something to hide, then why doesn’t he come out and say we’re wrong about him being a criminal?”
“FISH SUPPER,chicken nuggets, and a curry!” Gennie the barmaid yelled out as she shoved the plates onto the bar.
A man looked up from one of the coin-sized round tables that filled the space between the booths and the bar. He had two whining, wilting children with him, and the harried look of a man who hadn’t thought through what a weekend away with the kids would be like. He lifted his hand hopefully. Gennie gave the plates a shove toward the edge of the bar.
The guy sighed and got up, jabbed a finger at the kids, and squeezed his way to the bar. No one moved their chair for him. He reached the bar and fumbled at the plates as he tried to balance all three. Flynn propped himself up on his elbow and watched the man struggle.
The curry was the guy’s second mistake. The first was not going to the Fox and Swan. The Hairy Dog was the local pub. The food was cheaper, the atmosphere less friendly.
Gennie finished pulling Flynn’s beer. Froth dribbled down over her heavily-ringed fingers as she shoved it toward him.
“Three thirty,” she said. “Want me to start a tab?”
Flynn passed her a five instead. His father had drunk there all his life. When he died, his tab was thirty pounds, and the pub had wiped it in honor of him.
The beleaguered dad finally made it back to his table. Most of the food was still on the plates. The chicken dippers that had hit the floor were already being cleaned up by the pub dog, who’d been a sheepdog in Flynn’s dad’s day and was a lanky spaniel now.
“Mum said—” the pouting little girl started.
“Well, this is Dad’s weekend.” He tucked the napkin into her collar. “And on Dad’s weekend, we have chips.”
Poor bugger.
Flynn picked up the beer, the glass slippery under his fingers, and sucked the foam off the surface. His shoulder protested the movement. Some idiots had decided to go skinny-dipping off the bay, not realizing how quickly the weather went from balmy to Baltic once it started to get dark. The rescue ended with Flynn dunked in the freezing water as one of the idiots panicked when he was yanking them out.
The chill had sunk into his bones, and once the adrenaline wore off, his shoulder hurt. It was the sort of ache that smugly promised it was going to grow up to be a throb.
He was getting too old to be crawling up cliffs and diving into the Irish Sea. Twenty years earlier he’d have hauled himself back out of the water laughing. Fuck, twenty years earlier he’d have been the idiot pruning up his balls by skinny-dipping.
Yeah, he thought sourly as he drained the beer, but what else was he going to do? There weren’t a lot of options for a guy with his background. If there had been, he wouldn’t be propping up the same bar as his dad, would he?
“Well, I tell you what, Katie, I wouldn’t want him rescuing me. He’d have your wallet out of the water before you.”
It was the familiarity that caught his ear.
Flynn twisted around and leaned back against the counter with both his elbows braced behind him. He glanced around until he saw the two women at the end of the bar. Both were perched on stools, their heads tilted together over tall, lipstick-stained glasses of coke and something boozy. Chewed lemon slices lay on the side of the coasters. He vaguely recognized both. It was a small island.
“That’s a best-case scenario, Fi. My sister’s lad Ben and him used to be mates. What Ben says about what he got up to over on the mainland? Doesn’t bear repeating.”
She stopped and took a slurped drink of her coke and whatever-it-was for punctuation.
It was nothing new. The beer tasted sour on Flynn’s tongue all of a sudden. He left the pint sitting, pushed himself upright, and headed for the door.
Fi saw him coming, nudged her friend, and arched her eyebrows meaningfully. Before the woman could turn around, Flynn leaned in over her shoulder.
“Aw, go on, Katie. Repeat it,” he drawled. The low rasp of his voice in her ear, all growl and yeast, made Katie pull herself up straight and offended. “You know you want to.”
He winked at Fi and left them to sit and stew as he ducked out through the old black-wood main door. It was still summer—the season held on until the start of October—but Flynn could feel the chill creeping in.
His Land Rover was parked on the pavement outside the bar. Mud was splattered up the sides from the tire well to the back windows. Flynn hadn’t bothered to lock it. It wasn’t that there was no crime on the island—there were a lot of drugs, fights, bruises doled out behind closed doors—but if you stole a car, there was nothing to do with it but drive it to the other side of the island. If you stole Flynn’s car, you could drive the thing into the sea, and it would just have to be towed out and dried out. It was twenty years old, and there wasn’t much to it other than a heavy metal chassis and a red diesel-stained engine.
Flynn scrambled up into the driver’s seat and started the car. The heavy growl of the engine kicking to life rattled up through his bones. He jolted down off the pavement, one hand on the wheel as he headed out of town.
He passed the turnoff up to the Granshire halfway back to his house. They’d strung up old coach lanterns to illuminate the sight—brass and glass and class. Those got stolen pretty regularly.
Two turns and a sheep blocking the road for five minutes later, he saw the pale pillar of the old lighthouse appear on the headland. It stuck up like a defiant white finger at the Granshire, who’d tried to buy it after it was decommissioned.
