“Don’t worry about it,” Cal said. The taste of Joe was long gone from his lips, but he licked them anyway. “What else do I have to do?”
There was a pause, and then El said, “Do you have anyfriends who aren’t criminals?”
“You?”
“I’m your brother. I have no choice.”
“I miss the cars, not the assholes,” Cal said. The acrid edge to his voice tasted like bile. He swallowed it. Last time he’d seen his best mate, the shithead sold him out on the stand. It had been a year, and it could easily have been worse, but it had been Cal’s fucking year. Mick was lucky Cal had worked out thatrevenge wasn’t worth another year. “Don’t worry about me. He’s put me up at the Renaissance for the duration. Guy’s too rich for common sense.”
“Do not.”
“I don’t plan to,” Cal promised.
It wasn’t a lie. He’d already done it, and despite the temptation, he didn’t plan to revisit Joe’s bed. That sort of thing got complicated fast, and Cal was already on Edward’s bad side… assuming there wasanother side.
It might have worked on anyone else, but El had known Cal since he told his first lie, so he snorted.
“At least wait until the contract’s up,” El said. “And if you see Jane, tell her I need to talk—”
“No.”
Cal hung up and tucked the phone into his pocket. There was no sign of Joe on his way back to the car. Who did an American have buried in a London graveyard, Cal wondered ashe patted his pockets for a smoke. It was only when he came up with a strip of gum instead of a packet of Benson and Hedges that he remembered he’d given that habit up.
It had been a sort of sacrifice to his new, clean act. He’d quit the two vices most likely to kill him—smoking and stealing cars—so could anyone really hold it against him if he fell off the dangerous-men bandwagon every now andagain?
The collar of Cal’s borrowed shirt—retrieved from the garment bag in the boot earlier—rubbed at his neck. He scratched under it and wondered when El’s last visit to Grandad had been. The abrupt blare of a horn cut through his distraction, and he turned around to see the yellow-clad power walker slap his bare hands angrily against the bonnet of a low-slung sports car.
“Watch where you’regoing,” the man yelled as he threw his hands up in the air. He gave the bumper of the car a dent with his trainer. “Idiot!”
The driver gave him the finger out the window and veered around him. Cal started to turn back to the graves but stopped as a dull navy car, so nondescript it was memorable, caught his attention. It was stopped in the back corner of the car park, in front of two other cars.
It probably wasn’t the same one. There were lots of navy cars, after all.
The passenger-side door popped open, and a lanky figure in baggy jeans and a baggier hoodie, skull and Slipknot logo half-peeled off the well-washed cotton, scrambled out. Despite the sun that beat down on the manicured, vibrantly green grass and pruned trees, he had his hood tugged up over his head and down nearly to thebridge of his nose. The scruffy figure loped between the parked cars and cut across, instead of around the sunken dips of the graves. Meanwhile the navy car gunned the engine and pulled away from its spot.
Cal gave in to the sharp-nailed prod of suspicion and tried to get the license plate, but between the distance and the dirt, it was impossible. It turned out the gate and disappeared from view,and when Cal looked back at the graveyard, the hoodie had disappeared from view too.
A kid, Cal tried to convince himself, dropped off to pay his respects. That was all. Even if it wasn’t, Cal was a driver, not a bodyguard. No one had ever been exactly clear where he could toe up to that line, but this would be clearly over it.
“Shit,” he muttered aloud as he pushed himself off the car.
Calwalked briskly up the narrow path between the carved, occasionally florid gravestones until he reached the turn Joe had taken. He looked around as he walked briskly along the road, eyes peeled for either Joe or the scruffy kid in the torn hoodie.
“This is what comes of not listening to El,” he muttered to himself as he sidestepped some mourning old ladies. “I bet this doesn’t happen if you datea doctor.”
Gravel crunched under Cal’s feet as he walked along the path. He scanned the green slopes at either side of the road as he looked for an expensive suit and stupid hair or Slipknot hoodie as he nicked a bunch of flowers from a grave.
He rubbed his ear as he took a left at a swooning angel, the crack her nose had taken at some point probably why she’d had to sit down, and followed thenarrow, uneven lane trod between the graves.
At the top of the slope, shadowed by a thick spur of hedges, Cal finally saw Joe in front of a large, gray gravestone. His hand rested carefully, almost uncertainly on top of it, and his head was bowed. He didn’t look like he wanted to be interrupted.
Cal paused next to Mr. and Mrs. Eddie Tanner and wondered if he could get away without being seen.Before he could make up his mind, the hoodie belted through the gravestones and grabbed Joe.
Fuck.
Cal sprinted up the hill as the hoodie tried to muscle Joe away from the grave. It didn’t go as easily as the lanky man had expected, as Joe dug his heels in and jabbed an elbow back.
