Jory felt like an idiot the minute he’d blurted out the invitation. Mal just stood there, staring down at him. Quite clearly, he’d just been trying to get rid of him. “But you’ve probably got other plans. Things to do. I’ll—” Jory stood up.
“Nah, okay.” Mal blinked, giving Jory the absurd impression that he was as surprised as Jory at his response. “Where d’you wanna go? Caff in town?”
Jory hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Yes, why not?” After all, the town was full of eating places, and he’d be able to tell at a glance if there was any danger of bumping into Bran or Bea inside whichever one they chose.
“Right. Come on, then.” Mal grabbed his wallet and phone, shoved them into his jeans pockets, looked out of the window, and then turned to Jory expectantly. “Ready?”
“Uh . . . Yes.” Christ. It was ridiculous how attracted he was to the man. Mal seemed all sharp angles, all spiky class-war defensiveness, but there was a warmth underneath that took Jory’s breath away. He was all mercurial changes too—one minute showing tenderness and genuine curiosity, the next slipping back into his cocky, am-I-bothered persona.
And no amount of dithering on Jory’s part was likely to make Mal say, Sod breakfast, and jump back on the bed with him, and even if he did, Jory was self-aware enough to realise he’d probably run all the way back to Roscarrock House rather than stay and take advantage. But maybe going out for breakfast could be a first step. So Jory forced himself not to smile too widely like a complete idiot. “Yes. Let’s go.”
Mal nodded. “But keep it down, yeah? On your tippy-toes, and no talking on the stairs.”
Sneaking down the back stairs of the pub like a teenager. Bran would be appalled, Jory thought. His students in Edinburgh would be amazed.
When they emerged into bright sunlight, both of them were grinning. Mal put a finger to his lips and grabbed Jory’s arm, leading him not down the lane but over the fields and through a gap in the hedge to the road. Spiky branches clutched at Jory’s clothes, hair, and beard.
Once through, Mal turned to Jory and burst out laughing. “Seriously, mate, you look like a fucking mountain man. How come you’re all ripped, anyway? What did you used to teach up in Edinburgh—body-building and ’roid rage?”
Mal was exaggerating. Jory tried not to redden at the compliment, even as warmth flooded through him. “I got into climbing while I was at school. Upper body strength tends to be a bit of an advantage.” Especially for those whose genetics had blessed them with a larger-than-average frame that took more hauling about than most when it came to vertical rock faces. Although, to be fair, the reach was a distinct help too.
Building up a bit of muscle had come in handy in other ways too, but he wasn’t about to tell Mal any sob stories about being bullied as a young boy.
“Let me guess—your school was the sort that had its own climbing wall?”
Jory gave him a look. “And a fully equipped gym. Am I supposed to apologise for that?” he asked boldly, as they set off down the road.
Mal didn’t seem to take offence. “No, but you could try pretending to be a tiny bit sad that mine didn’t, yeah?”
“Would you have used it if they did?”
“Fuck, no. I’m a total wuss about heights.”
“Heights have never bothered me. It’s the depths that get you down.” Guilt twinged in Jory’s chest. If Bea or Bran heard him speaking of this sort of thing so lightly. . . But they hadn’t and wouldn’t.
Mal gave him a gentle dig in the ribs with his elbow, apparently far more at ease with casual physical contact than Jory. “Ever go caving? There’s a lot round here, aren’t there? Old smugglers’ haunts?”
Jory hesitated. “A little. But mostly I prefer being out in the open air. Less risk of drowning.”
“You got no romance in your soul.”
Jory gave Mal a slow, sidelong look. “If drowning is your idea of romance, I may have to seriously reconsider taking you out for a meal.” And then he held his breath because, damn it, he still didn’t have any idea if Mal saw him that way at all.
If Mal saw men that way, full stop.
Mal gave an airy shrug. “Hey, it worked for Leo DiCaprio and whatserface in Titanic, didn’t it? Nah, I meant, there’s legends and stuff about those caves, aren’t there? Might even find King Arthur down one of ’em, cuddling up to the Holy Grail while he waits for the second coming.”
“Or you could get eaten by a questing beast.” Great. Marvellous. Young men with a nonclassical education were always impressed by literary obscurity, weren’t they? He braced himself for a You what, mate?
Mal just grinned. “Nah, I’m safe. I ain’t slept with me sister, and cheers for making me think of that, by the way.”
Jory actually stopped dead in his tracks for a moment, and had to force himself to start walking again because, that must look incredibly patronising of him. “You know about the symbolism of the questing beast?” he couldn’t help asking. He tried to keep the surprise out of his voice but wasn’t sure he’d succeeded.
“Ain’t just a pretty face, am I? Course I know. I watched Merlin on the telly.”
“Oh. I hadn’t realised—”
“Nah, I’m yanking your chain. The TV show was on Saturday teatime, wasn’t it? So they totally glossed over the whole incest bit so’s not to put the kiddies off their fish fingers. I mean, it was all right, but they changed a shitload of stuff from what was in the Morte d’Arthur.”
Jory’s stomach somehow managed to clench and flip at one and the same time, as if his insides were auditioning for some kind of acrobatic act on Britain’s Got Talent. “You’ve read Thomas Malory?”
Mal shoved his hands in his jeans pockets—or at least, as far as they’d go, which was about halfway—and gazed off down the road. Was his face redder than before? Jory couldn’t be sure in the sunlight. “Yeah, well, Mum used to read me The Once and Future King when I was little—you know, the book Disney based Sword in the Stone on? Wait, what am I saying, course you know—and I wanted to know where it all came from, yeah? And then there’s the name thing.”
He was definitely red in the face now, and it was unbearably charming. “The name thing?” Jory almost forgot to ask.
“See, Mum was always into all that stuff. Arthurian legends and that. Then she got married to a bloke whose last name was Thomas and, well, Mal ain’t actually short for Malcolm.”
“Not . . .”
“Yep. Malory Thomas, esquire, at your service, sirrah.” Mal sketched a ridiculously overblown bow in the air. “Bet you can guess how that went down at school.”
Jory, who’d been laughing, stopped abruptly. “You were bullied?”
“Fuck yeah.” Mal put on a snide, mocking voice. “‘It’s a girl’s name, Mallorie, innit?’ And that was before they found out I got a sister called Morgan. Then it was all, ‘Go on, show us which one of you’s really the girl.’”
Ouch. Some parents . . . “They didn’t tease you about the literary associations, at least, then?”
Mal gave him a look of exaggerated disbelief. “You’re giving them gits way too much credit. Most of ’em thought a book was just a posh way of packaging bog roll.”
“Did—” Jory stopped, realising he didn’t actually want to change the subject right now, no matter how important the question was to him.
“What?”
Apparently there was no help for it. “Did you know Devan then?”
“Dev? Nah, we didn’t meet till we were eleven. High school. Had a couple of teachers who used to sit everyone in alphabetical order, yeah? So him being a Thompson, and me being a Thomas . . .” Mal shrugged.
“Thompson . . . that was the family who adopted him?”
“Yeah, but they ain’t been around since I’ve known him. Died.”
God, how awful for Devan. Dev. To be orphaned, effectively, twice, before he’d even reached his teens. Jory glanced over at Mal and desperately hoped he wasn’t about to hear another tale of everyday woe. “Have you got family, apart from your sister? You mentioned your mum, but . . .” Jory had never been able to think of a tactful way to ask if someone was still alive. Maybe there wasn’t one.
Mal seemed to take his meaning anyway. “Mum? Nah, she ain’t popped her clogs yet. Hit the big five-oh last year. Her and my dad are still married and everything. Morgan’s older than me. Married. Got a kid on the way. Like, any minute now.”
It was a rush of information all at once. Jory had to take a moment to sort it out in his head.
They’d reached the edge of town, and the first shops were beginning to appear.
Mal turned to him. “Got a place in mind, have you?”
“Ah, not really, no.”
“The Turkish place near the mosque does a wicked coffee—I went there with Dev last year.”
Jory blinked. “You were here last year too?”
“Yeah, came down for a week to join Dev. Drove down with Tasha. Missed all the drama though. And we were here again over Christmas, but that was just for a few days.”
That was . . . appallingly unfair. Jory could have known him for a year already, if he’d only been in the right place at the right time.
Then again, given what had happened with other members of his family, maybe not. “Um. The trouble with the Seven Stars is that there’s an outside chance we might bump into Bea or Bran there.” Jory couldn’t help glancing nervously around in case he’d somehow conjured them up.
“Gotcha. Tell you what, we’ll go down the front. They ever go to the Square Peg?”
“Is it touristy?”
“Just a bit.” The way Mal said it clearly implied a place crammed to the rafters with families eating cream teas, half of them pronouncing scones incorrectly and the other half putting the jam and cream on in the wrong order.
Perfect. Neither Bran nor Bea would be seen dead in a place like that. “Then no.”
“Right, that’s where we’ll go, then. Tasha’s mate Ceri used to work there,” he added as they turned down a side street.
The Square Peg Café, when they reached it, turned out not to be quite as tacky as Jory had imagined, but it was every bit as touristy. He wondered how long it had been here, considering he hadn’t even known about it, but was afraid to ask.
“Do you mind if we take this table?” He gestured to one set back against the café window and shaded by the awning. It’d give them some cover in case anyone who knew them happened by. Jory was damned if he’d avoid Mal just because his brother and sister wouldn’t approve, but he didn’t fancy having a public argument about it. And the last thing he wanted was to get Mal in trouble with either Tasha or Jago Andrewartha.
“Yeah, with colouring like yours, the sun ain’t your friend, is it? I freckle and burn like a ginge anyhow if I don’t slap on the sunblock, so it’s no skin off my nose sitting in the shade.” Mal grinned. “Literally.”
They sat down. Jory took a couple of cheaply laminated menus from the stand in the centre of the table and passed one to Mal, who took it with a smile and a brush of fingers that Jory was almost certain was deliberate.
Almost. He looked down at his menu quickly.
“Now, what I want to know,” Mal said with an air of significance that had Jory tensing up automatically, “is, are you eating? Cos I don’t want to sit here stuffing my face while you try and make an espresso last half an hour.”
“I had half a slice of toast for breakfast several hours ago, so yes, I’m eating.” He’d woken up early and been unable to either get back to sleep or force much food down. Nerves.
Sometimes he envied Bea’s way of remaining untroubled by strong emotion.
“In that case, the full Cornish sounds good to me.” Mal shoved his menu back in the stand.
Jory did likewise, and managed to catch the waitress’s eye so he could give their order.
“You don’t know her?” he asked a few minutes later, as she bustled away from them. She was a pretty girl, with bleached-blonde hair up in a doughnut on top of her head. It made her look curiously doll-like, and her ivory-and-pink makeup seemed designed to accentuate the impression of unreal perfection. Her name tag had read Aurora.
“What, her? Never met her before. Why?”
“Oh—I thought maybe she was a friend of your . . . friend’s friend. The one you said used to work here.” Jory frowned. Put like that, the connection seemed embarrassingly tenuous.
“You mean Ceri? Nah, she ain’t got a lot of friends round here.” Mal, who’d been fiddling with his phone, turned back to Jory and grinned. “Why, you fancy her or something?”
“What? No. I, um, I don’t really . . .” The heat was rising in Jory’s cheeks, and he hated it. “I’m not looking for a girlfriend.”
“No? Nah, you’re probably right.” Mal’s voice was off-hand as he flicked through messages on his phone. “I’d be shit-scared she’d bite my balls off if I messed up her hair.”
Jory swallowed. Did Mal realise the sort of imagery he was conjuring up? Was he doing it on purpose? Jory wasn’t sure how to respond.
And then he didn’t have to.
“Well, fancy meeting you here,” a familiar voice said in ringing tones that had half the occupants of the café turning to stare.
Jory’s stomach lurched. Kirsty was beaming down at him. She was alone, which was the smallest of mercies. Her hair was up in a headscarf, wrapped African style, and she was wearing a pair of voluminous harem pants printed with brightly coloured elephants. Her shoulder bag looked like she’d crocheted it, possibly while drunk, and incorporated little mirrors that caught the light and flung it back at him, accusingly.
Oh God, why now? This was terrible timing. “Kirsty. Hi. Um. Yes. Fancy.” Jory cringed internally at himself.
Kirsty pulled out a chair with an obnoxious scrape on the ground, and sat down. “So who’s your mate?”
“Oh, this is, um, Mal.” Jory swallowed.
Kirsty leaned forward on the table and smiled up at him. “Mal? Now, would that be short for Malachi, Malcolm, Malik . . . or something I haven’t thought of?”
“More fun to keep you guessing, innit?” Mal, who didn’t seem the slightest bit bothered by her appearance, flashed her a wink that left Jory feeling even less at ease. “So how do you know Jory, then?”
“Me?” she said with an easy smile. “I’m his missus. Been married twelve years, we have.”