Page 11

Felix

Darien switching from someone who kept claiming he didn’t want to be here, to someone who took the lead in a shake of a lamb’s tail, had been quite the revelation.

And what a lead it had been, Darien far more commanding than I would ever have given him credit for.

When he rolled off me, I envisioned the next couple of minutes. He’d get rid of the condom. In fact, having spotted the bin right next to the bed, he was already doing that. He’d use the excuse of sitting up to take it one step further and stand. He’d dress almost as quickly as I’d gotten him out of his clothes. He’d mumble something about needing to be somewhere, or it getting late and him needing to work the next day. And then he’d leave, and I’d be alone again, just like I’d been all day. Just like I’d been yesterday and the day before.

Darien heaved out a sigh, and I steeled myself for him proving my theory correct and getting up and finding his clothes. He didn’t. Instead, he twisted in my direction, his gaze starting at my now limp dick and traveling over the rivulets of cum on my stomach, before finally reaching my face. “You came a lot.”

“I did.” There was no point in denying it when the evidence was right there for us both to see. “I guess your cock hit all the right spots.”

Darien laughed, the dimples making a brief appearance. “I can honestly say no one’s said that to me before.”

“No? They should have done.”

“People tend to be more…” His brow furrowed, like he wasn’t sure what he’d been going to say.

“More what?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head, his gaze dropping to my stomach again. “Do you want a washcloth?”

“That would be nice.” My words were careful, like he was an easily spooked woodland creature that might bolt if I talked too loud or said the wrong thing. “The bathroom’s opposite.”

He nodded as he stood and headed in that direction without putting on any clothes. Safe in the knowledge he couldn’t do a runner unless he was going to do it naked, I relaxed back against the pillows and listened to the familiar sounds: bathroom door being opened; tap running; tap being switched off. And then footsteps as he reappeared. Expecting him to throw the washcloth at me, it surprised me when he took a seat on the bed and cleaned me himself.

“How many sit-ups do you do a day?” he asked.

“Huh!”

“Sit-ups.” He gestured at the area he was wiping. “Calling that a six-pack isn’t doing it justice. It’s more like an eight pack.”

“Thank you.” He rolled his eyes, and I laughed. It seemed Darien wasn’t as predictable as I’d thought. Instead of being halfway back to wherever it was he lived, he was here, treating me with a care I couldn’t recall anyone exhibiting before. Not even Julian in the first flushes of our relationship when he’d been on his best behavior. And how sad was it that I used him as a yardstick? The same man who’d ruined my life just because he could.

“Is it a state secret?”

I lifted my gaze to Darien’s, finding him regarding me quizzically. “Is what a state secret?”

“The sit-ups.”

Right. He’d asked how many I did. “I don’t know. A lot. In prison, exercise kept me sane. It gave me something to think about. Something I had control over that no one could take from me.”

Darien lay back down, his eyes on the ceiling. “That makes sense.”

I hardly dared move, never mind speak, in case he realized he was supposed to be hightailing it out of here. What did it mean that he wasn’t? That he’d come to terms with his attraction to me, that he’d fully given into it? Probably not. It was more likely he was tired. He had, after all, been the one doing most of the work, my slightly sore arse a testament to that.

“I read up on your case. More than just your official report, that is.”

The words hung there while I turned them over in my head, a hundred questions all clamoring to be asked, without me being able to decide which should come first. Why? When? What did you read exactly? What were your thoughts on what you read? Why are you telling me? “I suppose that’s something you do for most of your clients?”

“No.”

A flat denial, which told me nothing while also telling me a great deal.

I turned onto my side, propping myself up on one elbow so I could see his face. “So, why do it for me?”

“You kept saying you were innocent.”

“You haven’t had anyone claim that before?”

Darien pulled a face. “Yeah, sure I have, but they were mostly petty crimes. John Doe, who didn’t really rob his grandma to pay for his drug habit. Jane Doe, who didn’t know that her boyfriend put something in her luggage, even though it had happened before.” He flicked a glance my way. “You get the picture. Not…”

“Murder,” I supplied when he didn’t finish his sentence. “You can say it.”

Darien gave a slight shrug. “Most people don’t even talk about it once they’ve served their sentence. It’s over and done with. They look to the future, not the past.”

“Lucky them!” My words dripped with bitterness.

Perhaps realizing this was a strange conversation to have while still naked, Darien got off the bed. His movements were unhurried as he dressed, providing me with one last opportunity to look my fill before he deprived me of the sight. I had high hopes of getting to see a naked Darien again, but there was no guarantee, so it paid to make the most of it. I waited for him to say more, the seconds turning into a minute. Eventually, I lost patience. “And?”

“And what?”

“You brought it up for a reason. If you have questions, just ask them.”

Darien shook his head. “I don’t know what I expected to find.”

Something cold settled in my chest as I sat up. “Don’t you? I can tell you. You were hoping to find evidence that the courts had fucked up. Something that would make you feel better about this.” I waved a hand between the two of us to illustrate what I meant by this. “And you found nothing. Yet, here you are, anyway. I wonder what that says about you. ”

Darien paused from fastening his jeans, his gaze when it met mine slightly narrowed. “Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?” I got off the bed and grabbed a robe, my nakedness bothering me now that Darien was almost dressed.

“Go on the attack because I’ve made you feel vulnerable.”

His words stunned me. Not because they were ridiculous, but because they were true and he’d worked that out about me in such a short amount of time. Taking my frustration out on the fabric, I belted the robe so tightly that it dug into me. “You should probably go now. You got what you came for.”

Darien snorted. “And what’s that? A whole bucketful of guilt?”

“A fuck,” I said bluntly. “And an orgasm. Let’s not pretend you came here for my sparkling conversation.” Darien crossed his arms over his chest and regarded me silently. I stared right back, refusing to be the first to look away or to blink. The stand-off dragged on way beyond what was comfortable, both of us equally matched when it came to stubbornness. And still I didn’t give in.

Darien raised his chin slightly. “Fine. I’ll ask my questions. Where were you on the night Lily Reynolds was killed? Everything I read said you were home. You have to see how hard it is to believe you weren’t involved when you were there.”

I was equal parts hot and cold at the same time. “I’m not having this conversation with you. I might have let you fuck me up the arse, but it doesn’t come with permission to fuck

me in the head. No one gets to do that, anymore.”

“Okay. You don’t want to answer that. What about the night Julian disposed of the body using your car? Where were you that night? Because again, you were supposedly at home. How could you be at home both nights and know nothing about what was going on right under your nose? There were two days between Julian killing Lily and him disposing of her body. How could you not notice you were sharing your house with a corpse? And what about Julian? He must have been acting weird, surely? He’s not a serial killer. That was his first murder, or so we’re led to believe, so there had to be some tells. Come on, give me something, Felix. Some crumb that will make me believe you’re telling the truth.”

It was like the court case all over again, panic rising in my chest just as it had when I’d stood in the witness box and tried to make a jury believe me. They hadn’t, so why would Darien be any different? Grabbing him by the shoulder, I steered him toward the door, taking care despite the maelstrom of emotion I was experiencing not to dig my fingers in so hard they’d leave bruises.

Darien didn’t put up much of a fight, letting me lead him toward the top of the stairs. At which point, he turned and went down them of his own accord. I stood in the hallway and waited while he took a detour to the kitchen to collect his jacket and then accompanied him to the front door.

He turned before I could open it, his expression earnest. “I want to believe you.”

“No, you don’t.” My voice was flat and lacking emotion. Which was strange when it felt like one spark and I might go up in flames. “No one ever does. Not the jury. Not the judge. Not even my own goddamn mother, if you really want to know.” Fuck! I hadn’t meant that bit to come out. That was too honest. Although Darien had witnessed how frosty she’d been with me firsthand so I doubted it came as too much of a surprise.

Darien let out a frustrated sigh. “Talk to me, Felix. Don’t lump me in with everybody else. I want to understand what went on. That’s the only reason I looked up your case. If you’re telling the truth, then it was a huge miscarriage of justice. ”

If . The word buried itself in my skull, like a persistent woodpecker who refused to halt its attempts to drill a hole until it reached my brain. “I can’t.” I reached around him to open the door, my body reacting when my arm brushed his despite the conversation we were having.

Darien might have stepped outside once the door was open, but his body language said he wasn’t happy about it. Well, tough. I’d invited him here for a fuck, not to psychoanalyze me. If he wanted to be a therapist so badly, he should have done that instead of being a probation officer. He slid his hands into his pockets. “I guess I’m leaving then.”

“I guess you are.”

He backed off a couple of steps. “Well, you know where I am if you change your mind and want to talk.”

“I won’t.”

“If you won’t talk to me, you should talk to someone.” He gestured to my hands, and I dropped my gaze to find them balled into fists. Instead of answering him, I closed the door to leave him on the other side of it. I didn’t wait around to see if he lingered, staggering into the living room and collapsing on the sofa.

I’d never considered that seducing someone brought them closer and gave them access to things you’d rather they stayed away from. But then there was no way I could have known that Darien would take it upon himself to read up on all things Felix Church. There was nothing online that showed me in a good light. And I knew that because I’d read most of the same things he had, masochist that I was.

“I know you.”

I whipped around to find Mrs. Featherstone peering at me over the garden fence. She’d looked old before I’d gone to prison. Now, she looked ancient, her hair completely white and her wrinkles seeming to have wrinkles of their own. She’d lived next door for as long as I could remember, which made her statement ridiculous. I carried on pegging my washing on the line, the day warm and windy enough that they should only take an hour to dry. My mother, on one of her rare visits home, had rejected my offer to do her washing as well. It seemed there was nothing I could do to please her.

Tamping down on the urge to tell Mrs. Featherstone to fuck off—because my mother would love that—I forced a smile. “Of course you know me. I grew up here. You used to tell me that if I kicked a football in your garden, you’d take a knife to it.” I didn’t add that it had happened once and she’d kept her word, my dad insisting once he’d bought a new one that football sessions stayed in the park from now on.

Mrs. Featherstone didn’t smile. No surprise there. I’m not sure I’d ever seen her smile. There used to be a Mr. Featherstone, apparently, but he’d run off with a flamenco dancer of all things when I was just a toddler and I had no memories of him. It was the reason, my father used to say, that Mrs. Featherstone walked around with a face like a slapped arse. His words, not mine. I really missed him sometimes.

She lifted her chin. “I didn’t mean that. I meant I know what you did. Everyone around here does.”

Her words had me scanning the surrounding yards, half expecting to see heads pop up one by one in response to her words. They didn’t, and if anyone was watching from the windows overlooking my mother’s yard, they were doing it in such a way I couldn’t see them. “I did my sentence. ”

Mrs. Featherstone’s snort said she didn’t give a rat’s ass about the courts deciding to let me out, that if she’d been in charge, I would never have seen the light of day again. I carried on with my task, hoping she’d get the message that I wasn’t about to scuttle back inside with my tail between my legs. I had every right to be in my mother’s backyard and she couldn’t say a damn thing about it.

“Who was that man who visited you?”

Be polite. Don’t let her rile you. “Which man?”

“Two days ago. Blond hair. Young. Handsome. I hope he wasn’t an unsavory element. This is a nice place to live. It always has been.”

I lifted my chin and looked her square in the eye. “He’s my probation officer, if you must know, so he’s about the furthest thing from an”—it was so damn tempting to lift my hands and make quotation marks, but I resisted the urge—“unsavory element as you can get. He’s here to make sure I keep out of trouble.” She didn’t need to know that he’d spent his time inside the house fucking me into the mattress, which I suppose you could argue had kept me out of trouble. I certainly hadn’t been thinking of anything beyond his cock in my arse.

Mrs. Featherstone let out a huff. “I suppose you’re just staying with your mother until you get back on your feet?”

She didn’t say it, but the question was there of how long that would be.

My pegging became more aggressive. “I don’t know.”

Mrs. Featherstone didn’t like that answer much, her brows drawing together. Thankfully, I’d reached the last piece of clothing which needed adding to the washing line. “Nice seeing you again, Mrs. Featherstone,” I lied as I took my leave and went back inside. Next time I’d just use the tumble drier.