Chapter 4
Eli didn’t back up, and ended up draped over Rob’s front.
“Mm, no.” He kissed Rob’s stubbled jaw before stepping away and shrugging on a T-shirt. “Okay, okay. Come on, then, out the door.”
Rob cut a huge and rough-edged figure in Eli’s family home. The house was all white carpets, white walls, and expensive decorations of no use but a lot of worth scattered on various shelves. They had doilies, for goodness’ sake—a man wearing yesterday’s clothes, hair on end, and smelling like the floor of a dive bar didn’t fit in.
Especially not under the glower of the man standing at the bottom of the stairs, in full, gleaming uniform.
“Dad,” Eli said warningly. Then, as an afterthought: “Rob.”
Both ignored him.
“What?” Rob demanded aggressively.
Chief Inspector Samuel Bell’s lips tightened.
“Your…car…is blocking the end of my driveway,” he said coldly.
“Musta been when I drunk-parked it,” Rob returned flippantly.
Eli huffed and gave Rob a shove in the back towards the front door.
“Lay off, Dad,” he ordered, shoving Rob outside. “And don’t antagonise him.”
“Bloke’s a fucking twat,” Rob grumbled, but rolled his eyes and softened under Eli’s scowl. “Alright, alright. Jesus.”
“Get yourself gone,” Eli scolded, walking Rob to his battered old 4x4. It was a Suzuki Jimny from the late nineties, and about as respectable on their tidy suburban street as Rob himself. Eli loved that car.
“Alright,” Rob said, swinging himself into the driver’s seat. It took two goes to slam the door, then he wound the window down and caught Eli’s chin in one huge hand to kiss him soundly. “You still up for coming to Scotland for Christmas with me and Danny?”
“Yep,” Eli said, smiling against the press of Rob’s finger and thumb. He darted back in for another kiss.
“Tart. You’ve scratched holes in my shoulders.”
“You love it.”
“I fucking do an’ all,” Rob agreed, and that belligerent face eased into a wide, crooked grin. “Call you later, babe.”
Eli smacked his hand. “Babe? Fuck off, savage.”
Rob laughed and started the engine. The Suzuki jerked and rolled backwards a little before realising it had an accelerator, and then it and Rob were gone in a clattering cacophony of metal and smoke. Eli stood at the end of the drive, one hand absently rubbing at the deep bite-mark Rob had left in his neck, and smiling like a fool.
“Eli! I need to go to work.”
Eli sighed, and moved aside to let his father’s BMW out of the drive. Not that his father had even gotten into the thing yet—he was still standing, brass and all, in the open doorway.
“I don’t like that man,” Dad said firmly as Eli approached.
Eli didn’t much care. He’d heard it all before, and right now, his priority was going back to bed for a few hours before getting up and going to work for the afternoon. So his response was as flippant as Rob’s, though not—quite—as rude.
“Tough,” he said. “Because I do.” 2
Eli firmly believed that whole ‘how you were raised’ stuff was a load of crap. And the reason for that was Jenny. Sitting on the wall by the shopping centre entrance and watching his sister carelessly swinging her gleaming Audi into a too-narrow space, Eli idly wondered—as he had often—how they’d turned out so different.
They looked like peas in a pod. Similar height, same slender build, same waviness to their hair—although Jenny’s was nearly black like Dad’s, and Eli’s a sandy blond like Mum’s. They even had the same ears and jaw. But while Eli was all baggy T-shirts and heavy jeans, hunched shoulders and hiding behind sunglasses whenever the weather was warm enough to allow it, Jenny was…
“Eli!”
Well. Jenny.
“Hey, Jen.”
She flung her arms around his neck in a stranglehold, and her handbag hit him in the back. Because this was where Eli and Jenny had nothing in common—Jenny was all about looking good, and Eli…wasn’t.
It had been that way growing up, and it hadn’t changed now they were adults. Jenny had always preened. She was only a year younger than Eli, but Eli could remember her caterwauling even at five when Mum hadn’t done her hair exactly the way Jenny wanted it. She’d been getting in rows with Dad about make-up and heels when she was just twelve. And she’d nearly given him a coronary when she was fifteen, marched into the kitchen, slammed a pregnancy test kit down, and announced that Mum and Dad were going to be grandparents. God, that had been a bad Christmas. Eli had been tempted, for the next eight months, to ask his grandmother if he could live with her. He’d have taken the smell of cat piss and church incense over the toxic atmosphere in the house any day.