Chapter Twelve
UNDER NORMALcircumstances it wouldn’t be a great start to the day. The coffee was bad, the breakfast had been lukewarm, and Lem Jeter, whose investment in a dilapidated hospital in Cornwall looked more a losing proposition than ever, hated Joe’s guts. Today, though, none of that was sufficient to put a dent in Joe’s good mood. He’d woken up with Cal in his bed, a full-sizehot-water bottle with an arm slung loosely over Joe’s hip and his face buried in Joe’s pillow.
That was a first.
Joe wasn’t sure if he wanted to let Cal know that, but he was sure he wanted to wake up like that again.
“You know what?” Lem said as he shoved his meticulous proposal impatiently into his briefcase. He lurched to his feet and nearly spilled all the paper back out again. A quickscramble got the briefcase clutched awkwardly in his arms as he glared at Joe over it. “Gofuckyourself, Mr. Bailey. All I needed was another year to finish the refurb, and I’d have brought money in. Now I’m going to lose the property. Do youunderstandthat? None of us are going to get anything back on this.”
Joe pushed his coffee cup away from the edge of the table. “My company won’t loseany more money either,” he said bluntly. The Cornwall project had never been his idea of a good investment anyhow, but Harry had an occasional weakness for a whimsical project well done. The problem with Jeter was that he’d let well done consume him year after year as he finished one quarter of the project to perfection. “I appreciate your passion, Mr. Jeter—”
Jeter spat on the table and stormedout of the cafe. The door slammed behind him, hard enough to make another customer look up from his laptop.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Edward asked as he produced a folded paper napkin and wiped up the clot of sputum. He folded the napkin with a distasteful curl of his lip and dropped it into the dregs of his tea.
For the first time in a while, Joe thought he might give an honest answer to thatquestion. He studied Edward for a second over the coffee and wondered what his reaction would be once there was no more plausible deniability. Joe thought it would be okay, in the end. Or maybe that was more hope.
“That after this tour, you’ll have to work double time to stay on top of the death threats,” Joe said dryly. “You might need an assistant.”
Whatever reaction Edward would have to Joedating a man could wait. He had enough balls to keep in the air—the search for his mother, his responsibilities to the business, his stalker—that he couldn’t afford to add Edward.
Although, it occurred to Joe, the latter wouldn’t have the flesh and bone of Cal to offer up as evidence. Joe would be back in LA, and Cal would be back on the market for some doctor to pick up. The thought sank throughJoe’s lingering good mood like a cold stone, despite his attempt to brush it away.
It wasn’t a tragedy—you had to know someone at least a year for their absence to be a tragedy—but that didn’t mean Joe had to like it. He grimaced to himself as he lifted the bitter coffee to his mouth. There were too many feelings around lately. Joe was used to a more limited range.
“Speaking of that,” Edwardsaid. “When did the stalker first make contact again, the original emails that you didn’t think were serious enough to escalate to internal security?”
“Earlier this year,” Joe said. “March.”
“There was a… vlog?” Edward asked. He wasn’t computer illiterate. Cybersecurity came under his oversight at the company too, but you could still hear the air quotes he put around the word. “You said it wasafter that.”
Joe took a drink of coffee. “It was one of Eric’s starlets,” he said, the mention of his least reliable friend enough to make Edward scowl. It wasn’t exactly the story that Joe had told Cal either, so he supposed he wasn’t so proud of the company he sometimes kept. “Antoni. She got stoned, Eric got pushy, so I got her out of there. Some man with a handheld camera jumped us outside,shouted the usual gibberish to try and piss us off. I ignored him, poured Antoni in the car, and drove her home.”
Edward pulled his phone out of his pocket and pulled something off. When he turned it around so Joe could see the screen, it was the grubby street outside the bar with him and Antoni caught in an image-editing-program-enhanced spotlight. She had her face buried in his shoulder toavoid the camera, and Joe remembered he’d nearly choked on the floating, brown curls. But the blog had splashed an “actress caught in romantic clinch with property magnate heir” red ticker over the photo.
“Could Kristen have thought there was any truth to the headline?” Edward asked.
“Antoni wasn’t who she had to worry about,” Joe said dryly. It might not be the right time to shove Joe’s orientationunder Edward’s nose, but he wasn’t going to indulge Edward anymore either.
“Did she know that?” Edward asked. He turned around and raised his hand to catch a waiter’s eye. He mouthed “tea” and held up one finger.
Joe frowned. “You think Kristen sent me those letters?” he asked dubiously.
“She had reason,” Edward pointed out. “You didn’t treat her well, and… she’s had problems in the past. Afterher parents split up, she keyed the mistress’s car and sent her hate mail.”
“She was thirteen,” Joe pointed out. Although he remembered when Kristen had told him about it, the real venom in her voice when she mentioned her stepmother’s name. Age hadn’t changed how she felt. The flicker of doubt made him feel guilty, and he struggled to think of something else to disprove the accusation. “Andit wasn’t anonymous.”
“So she learned her lesson and kept her name out of it this time,” Edward said. He paused as the waiter brought his refreshed tea and took away the empty cup. “It makes sense, especially how it escalated after you broke up with her. Not to mention that she arrived the same day the bear was sent in the post. I should have considered her originally, but I hadn’t realized youwere having problems.”
That would be ironic. He’d thought the stalker knew some sort of dark family secret, but it was Kristen getting pissed off after a couple of glasses of wine. Of course Edward didn’t know about the man who’d jumped Joe at the graveyard. Kristen had still been in California then, although Joe supposed that even two-bit English thugs had PayPal.
“The bear, though,” he saidslowly. Even the thought of the charred blue fur made the back of Joe’s throat taste like bile. He washed it away with the bitter coffee. “It… disturbed me.”
Edward snorted as he tasted his tea, made a face, and added more sugar. “It was creepy, right enough.” He chuckled, scratched between his knuckles, and picked off a rough bit of old scar. “But maybe that got it out of her system? I’ll keepan eye on it, but I think maybe the closure will help cut it off.”
Part of Joe wanted to argue that it was more than that. The bear had made him feel the same way a lift did, trapped and skin-stinging hot. It was hard to get the words out. He never talked about his claustrophobia, about the sour sweat under his arms every time he had to ride in a packed elevator. Harry, Joe knew, assumed he’dgrown out of it like a kid who was afraid of the dark.
So he changed the subject instead. “I have a meeting with Bea, the lawyer, in ten minutes,” he said. “We’re going to discuss continuing the company’s support of some charities in the UK on an ongoing basis. Good publicity, in case we ever decide to expand back into the local market. Do you want to go and—”
