Cash

“I’m not getting it.” I pointed the kitchen knife in Lucky’s general direction, ignoring Dom’s overprotective glare. “The only idiots who ever knock at the side door are twat-hound reporters looking for you.”

It was true. As the man Dom had given up a premiership football career to be with, the press loved Lucky, a fact he indulged to keep them away from Dom. And me, when he wasn’t being a dick.

“Put it this way,” I said when he didn’t move. “You ain’t getting dinner otherwise.”

I knew it would work. That boy was a slave to his stomach, and I enjoyed feeding him, even if the two minutes flat it took him to clear his plate reminded me that it wasn’t so long ago he’d had nothing and no one.

Lucky slid off his kitchen stool and sloped off to answer the door. I promptly forgot all about it and went back to chopping veg for dinner, so he surprised me when he reappeared a moment later, smirking.

“It’s for you.”

“What?”

“You heard.” He hopped back into his seat. “Some moody hottie who whole-named you.”

I froze, knife in hand. My name was no secret, but there was no one round these parts who’d use it on my doorstep. Everyone called me Cash, even the damn postman.

Trepidation rippled through me. Lucky didn’t seem to notice, but I felt Dom’s gaze on me as I left the kitchen. That fucker saw everything.

I slipped down the hallway to the side door. It was ajar, concealing whoever was on the other side, and my heart jumped again, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. Chances were it was some market research bullshit and they’d got my name from the electoral roll. That he was, in Lucky’s words, a hottie, was a bonus, right?

Life was never that simple. I eased the door open. At first, I saw no one, then a slim figure stepped out of the shadows, his expression grim until recognition seemed to hit him in the same moment it did me. Dark hair, moody eyes, beard, and perfect skin, dear-fucking-God, it was Rae.

Heat rushed me in the same moment suspicion shut me down. I stepped outside and shut the door behind me. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

Rae shrugged, though my aggression didn’t seem to surprise him. “I’m looking for someone.”

“At my house?” If he’d have been a paparazzo I would’ve decked him right then. It wouldn’t have been the first time someone had approached me to get to Dom. Be the first time it’s worked, though, eh? I silenced the devil on my shoulder and moved up on Rae again. “Who are you looking for?”

“You tell me.”

“Nah, mate. That’s not how it works. You don’t get to rock up on my doorstep after—”

“After what, Cash?” Rae’s dark eyes flashed. “After a one-night hook up three months ago? Cos, I’m assuming if you’d wanted a repeat performance you’d have hit up the email address I left on your pillow.”

There were a million reasons I hadn’t responded to the note he’d left when he’d slipped away that night, and bullshit like this was just one of them. I shoved Rae hard enough to let him know I meant it. “You’ve got thirty seconds to tell me why you’re giving my name on my doorstep, or I’m kicking you down the fucking road.”

Rae stumbled, but righted himself with a grace I could only dream of. “Cash, mate. Me being here is a coincidence, but I’m starting to hope I came here looking for you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yeah? Well maybe this will change your mind.”

He handed me a scrunched-up scrap of paper. I flattened it out, reading a name from the past and then my own, the only connection between the two of us something I’d fought so hard to leave behind. Something I’d never in a million years matched with Rae.

I closed my eyes as too many emotions hit me at once. Fear, sadness, pride. How had this ever been my life? And how was it my life now? A one-night stand showing up on my doorstep with my past in the palm of his hand?

A heavy sigh escaped me and I opened my eyes to face Rae. “You’d better come in.”

***

I bypassed the kitchen and took him out back to the garden. If the source of his information came from where I thought it did, he probably wanted to be seen even less than Dom, but I wasn’t ready to have him in my house again. In my safe place…the sanctuary I’d rebuilt with my own damn hands.

It was cold out. I thought about lighting the fire pit, but I’d left scraps out for my nightly visitors. Fire scared them. Besides, I was hoping Rae wouldn’t linger. That whatever he had to say wouldn’t mean anything to me.

I sat on an upturned beer crate, trying not to ogle as Rae did the same. “Give it to me, then,” I said. “Who sent you?”

“No one you know.”

“That’s helpful.”

“I know, but it’s true. My association is short on numbers, so we were given your name. I don’t know where it came from.”

Association. In my day, we’d called ourselves a gang and had done with it, but I could believe that Rae didn’t know where his tip-off had come from. The nature of sab life was secrets and silence. It was how we—how they—survived. “Where are you based?”

“Bedfordshire. We’ve got a campsite a couple of miles away from the main hunt in the area. Cleared out some badger culling last year too.”

“Hare coursing?”

He shook his head. “Not for a while.”

I didn’t even know why I was asking. The reason he was here was as obvious as my response. Hearing him out was a pointless exercise. But still. I’d forgotten how seductive his voice was. How it wrapped around every syllable and pretty much hypnotised me.

Are you fucking mad? He’s a sab. Who knows who sent him?

I didn’t want to know. But I had to. “Who gave you my name?”

“I told you. I got no clue.”

“I don’t mean where it originated from. Who in your gang passed it to you?”

Rae hesitated, the distrust in his liquid gaze mirroring my own. He pulled tobacco and Rizla from his back pocket and rolled a fag, lighting up slowly to buy more time. “There aren’t many of us.”

“I figured by your recruitment run. Did you find Ted?”

“No.”

“So you came to me.”

It wasn’t a question, but Rae nodded and tugged his hood up, shadow obscuring his face. “I didn’t know it was you, though. How would I when you never told me your real name?”

“You don’t think it’s a mad coincidence that you were in an Irish bar the same night as me, and then my name rocked up on your list?”

I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice. Failed.

Rae flinched. “It might be fucking mad, but it’s true. My folks live in Hampstead. I’d been to see them when I stopped for a pint on my way home. And you approached me. Do I look like a fucking honey trap?”

He was so gorgeous it was hard to think straight, but there was sense in what he was saying. I had approached him, if a wink across a bar could be called that, and no one had forced me to fuck him. Once, twice, more than that. The only reason he’d slipped out of my bed unnoticed was that I’d pretty much fallen into a sex coma.

Rae’s tobacco pouch called to me. I snagged it and skinned up, daring him to stop me.

He didn’t. Just stared inscrutably enough to raise my hackles again.

I settled for filling my lungs with tar-laced smoke, hoping it would bring clarity as I turned over the bizarre chain of events. We’d hooked up by chance, but he’d been sent to find me by design. To seek me out and drag me back to a life that had almost got me killed. Had killed me, in many ways. “Do they know?”

“Who?”

“Whoever sent you…do they know you already knew me?”

“No, Cash. I didn’t know until ten minutes ago. Your name meant nothing to me until I recognised your house, and even then I half thought I’d wound up here by mistake.”

“Mistake?”

“Yeah. That I’d let my dick guide me here, or some shit.”

If only. Rae had been on my mind more than I cared to admit since that night, and the idea of him rocking up for no more than a repeat performance left me dizzy-hot. But I couldn’t escape reality. We had more in common than I’d ever imagined, and that wasn’t a good thing. Rae’s sharp edges now made sense, but he was young. I didn’t want to him to feel like I did.

I finished my smoke and flicked the butt into the fire pit. “I need you to tell me why you’re here, and tell me all of it. Where you’re at, what you need, and why you need it.”

“You’ll hear me out?”

His obvious surprise stung. I glanced at the patio door and took in my reflection. Three years had passed, but I still saw the broken man I’d dragged down to London to take refuge with my father’s favourite brother. My hair was shorter than it had been back then, but still too long, and my face was the same, even without the months of scruff obscuring most of it. Had anything really changed?

I reached for Rae’s tobacco again and shrugged. “Try me.”

***

Rae

This wasn’t going how I’d planned, even after fate had chucked me its best curveball. Being close to Cash again had thrown me, but it was more than that. Picturing him naked and driving into me, his lips twisted in a beautiful snarl as his messy hair obscured his eyes? God, that was easy. Transplanting him from his hipster London home and into my world was harder. How was I supposed to sell him a life I couldn’t imagine him living?

“…Walsh is a legend.” Megan’s words echoed in my head, but I just couldn’t see it.

And Cash didn’t seem to want me to. The gentle smile I remembered from the night we’d met had been replaced by a challenging glare. He isn’t pleased to see me. And could I blame him? He’d probably never given me a second thought, let alone in this capacity.

“Try me.”

On the train I’d prepared a fucking monologue to coax these veterans home, but Cash’s gaze was demanding the truth, and dammit, it was all I had.

I sucked in a deep breath and tipped my head back, giving up the safe haven of my hood. Cash didn’t react, but perhaps I’d been counting on that. “I don’t know you,” I said. “They didn’t give me anything except your name, and that you’re something of a legend.”

Cash snorted.

I tried for a grin. He stone-faced me.

“Anyway,” I went on. “They sent me because we’re in trouble. The hunt we monitor has grown over the past few years while our numbers have depleted. Trolls have shut us down online, basically getting Facebook to treat us like ISIS, and today, just before I came here, I’m pretty sure we figured out a serving police officer is riding out with the hunt.”

Something flickered in Cash’s gaze. “What makes you think that?”

“The landowner we square up to had a visitor this morning—an unmarked car—but it’s not just that. Since the season started again, the hunts have been policed like a fucking cup final. Cars, vans, helicopters. Fletch reckons one of their own is controlling the budget.”

“Fletch Barnes?”

Shit. Given Cash’s less than welcoming reception, I’d been trying to keep Meg and Fletch out of it. “Yeah. Know him?”

“Know of him.” Cash waved a hand for me to continue.

Powerless to refuse, I ploughed on. “Regardless of police involvement, we’re fucked. There are six of us against a hunt of up to thirty every other Saturday. And they’ve been cubbing too—Tuesdays mornings at dawn.” My fingers itched to trace the scar that split my eyebrow. “We can’t cope.”

“Of course you can’t,” Cash rumbled. “Six of you? If you had a dozen it wouldn’t be enough.”

“So we should just stop? Let them ride freely and kill every fox they find? Right…okay, maybe I should retire like you. Get myself a nice fancy house and chill the fuck out for the rest of my life? Fucking—” I snapped my teeth together, cutting off my tirade, but it was too late. Cash had flayed me open with three strikes of logic.

I was wasting my time, both here and at home.

***

Cash

Rae was gone as abruptly as he’d arrived, blurring out of sight. I waited for the side gate to bang, but it didn’t. I went to investigate and realised with a start that he’d gone over the garden wall like a fucking ninja.

Jesus. I scrubbed a shaky hand through my hair. He was every bit as intense as I remembered, and loaded with damn Semtex. And I still wasn’t sure what he’d actually wanted from me. Just that he was every bit as emerged in sab life as I had been when my world had fallen apart.

He’d left his tobacco behind. I rolled my third cigarette and lit up, not looking round when the back door opened and someone—Dom—stepped out.

He moved into my eyeline, gaze flickering from my face to the cancer stick wedged between my fingers. “Everything okay?”

“Uh huh.”

“Sure about that? You look kind of spooked.”

“What do you care?”

Dom shrugged. “Okay then. I don’t.”

He went back inside and I felt like a dick, but I knew he wouldn’t hold it against me. Being a grumpy motherfucker himself, he was good like that.

Sighing, I went back to smoking and glaring at the moon. My encounter with Rae three months ago had reset my soul—intimacy, laughter, the freedom of a stranger expecting nothing more than a good time. Learning that he was a sab, and perhaps no stranger at all, was surreal. I smoked harder, burning my lungs, but no clarity came. I knew everything I needed to know about him, and nothing at all. And it still wasn’t enough. My old life had destroyed me, but reignited by my dark-eyed stranger, the call to return was so strong I could taste it.

Damn it, Rae.

Soft rustling broke through my haze. I glanced to the bottom of the garden as a slight form eased out of the bushes. Shula. She was the reddest fox I’d ever seen, her fur shone under the urban moon like brushed lava as she crept towards the humble offering I’d left for her.

I sat like a statue as she moved around my garden, glad I’d left the lights off. I’d been feeding Shula and her mate from the day I’d moved into the house, but I still lived in fear that my neighbours would see them and call the exterminators. It kept me up some nights and I’d sit at my window, watching and waiting, as though there was anything I could do to protect them. As though the years I’d spent hurling myself in front of riders wielding whips, and dogs meant anything.

But what could it possibly mean if Rae and his gang were still losing the battle?

Shula’s mate joined her in the garden, choosing the smallest scraps for himself and leaving the biggest for her, like he always did, even though he was bigger, stronger, and needed it more. He reminded me of Dom, but humour didn’t reach me now. Rae had lit a spark in me I couldn’t ignore, and I knew I wouldn’t sleep tonight.