Rae

“I don’t need your bed, Meg. I’m fine now.”

Megan clicked her teeth and slipped another pillow behind me. “Nonsense. Drey says you need to take it easy, and you can’t do that in a freezing cold tent.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her the rickety trailer she and Fletch lived in wasn’t much warmer—or dryer—so I let her carry on mothering me and went back to my work keeping the blog updated, something I’d let slip while we’d been busy preparing for last weekend’s big hunt. I’d uploaded my report on that already, but I had something else to say too. Something that went beyond our simple message of don’t kill foxes.

…On Saturday morning, a couple of us joined the fringes of the hunting party. It was a public event—no one could stop us. When the master of the hunt saw us, he exchanged glances with the police dotted around the crowds and quickly changed the tack of his rousing speech.

“This is a trail hunt,” he proclaimed. “Clive has been up since dawn laying it.”

He dragged forward one of his terrier men—a portly fella who couldn’t walk to the pub, let alone hike twenty miles across the countryside to set a trail vast enough to entertain this hunt.

The policemen bought it, but we didn’t, and we made our feelings clear. Peaceful monitoring has always been at the heart of sabbing. If a hunt abides by the law, we’re happy to observe and report, but to date, it’s been three years since a hunt in this county completed a genuine trail hunt.

Illegal hunting is alive and well in Bedfordshire, and the police—

“Rae?”

I jumped. “What?”

Fletch grinned. “Stay here, mate. We’ve got company.”

He disappeared before I could ascertain if it was the good or the bad kind of company. Dick. Moving hurt like a bitch and I had no desire to go tramping in the dark unless it involved fuckhot sex or a decent dinner.

Neither seemed likely, but something in the air drove me off Meg and Fletch’s bed and down the steps of their trailer. I limped across the yard towards the small cluster at the gate. Meg, Fletch, Sprig, even grumpy Drey was out of his tent. They were gathered around something—someone. I hadn’t seen Flynn in a few weeks. Perhaps he’d returned with the tools he’d promised to filch from the construction sites he laboured on. Or maybe it was Dana. I missed sharing my tent with her.

As I got closer, a voice I couldn’t quite place reached me, muted by the night. A complex mix of cockney and brogue—a heady combination I’d only heard on two occasions, both in recent memory.

My heart skipped a beat, but I still couldn’t see. Frustration boiled over and I limped harder, tender cartilage rubbing sore bones. A pained gasp escaped me, and the bodies in front of me parted. Smokey eyes met mine and an odd peace settled over me.

The new face in the crowd was Cash.

***

I couldn’t hear what they were saying. After the introductions, Meg and Fletch had hustled Cash to the fire to talk about shit the rest of us weren’t privy to, but I hadn’t been able to make myself go back to the trailer.

Instead, I’d sunk onto a discarded oilcan and I was still there, watching and waiting, searching for any sign that Cash gave two fucks about me, all the while trying not to vomit as the pain of being upright ran riot through my body. Idiot. He’s here for the cause, not you. But was he? Maybe he’d come to complain about me banging on his door, invading his life. Worse, perhaps he really did think our first encounter had been by design.

More nausea licked my guts. The coincidence that had led us to this point was fucking wild, but it was real. The thought of Cash believing otherwise left me feeling like I’d snorted a bag of the worst whizz—a habit I’d left behind when I’d taken up sabbing.

Across the yard, Fletch glanced at me. His keen gaze seemed to mean something, but I wasn’t sure what. Cash had his back to me, his shoulders slumped as he leaned over the fire, poking it idly with a stick. God, I wanted to see his face. Needed it. Craved it. Anything to pour water on the uncertainty burning through me.

Finally, Meg got up and came over. Sprig wasn’t far away, and she beckoned him closer. “He isn’t joining us,” she said before either of us could ask. “But he’s offered support—money, contacts. Maybe some equipment if he can get his hands on it covertly. He’s also got a van we can use. Rae, do you think you can drive?”

“What?”

“Drive,” Meg repeated. “It’s late, but if you go down to London with Ciaran tonight, you can bring the van back by morning.”

Ciaran. It took me far too long place the name, and even longer to comprehend that she wanted me to get in a car with Cash and drive all the way back to London where the two encounters we’d shared were like a dream and a fucking nightmare.

I glanced over to where he still sat. “Is that okay with him?”

“Of course,” Meg said. “It was his idea.”

At this point in my life, very little shocked or surprised me, but that just about did it. I shook my head slightly and stood with a wince. “I hope this van’s a fucking automatic.”

Meg chuckled. “Can I take that as a yes?”

Of course she could. There wasn’t much I’d refused her since we’d made contact all those years ago, and not even the clusterfuck between me and Cash was going to change that.

I sloped off to get myself together, and crawled out of my tent a few minutes later to find Cash waiting for me, his expression unreadable.

“You came,” I said stupidly.

“I did.”

“How did you find us?”

“I followed the trail of fucking lunacy,” Cash replied dryly. “You lot really are in trouble.”

“You thought I was lying?”

Cash snorted and turned on his heel. “Hurry up. I gotta work tomorrow.”

Brilliant. As if our last meeting hadn’t been enough to show me, apparently sober Cash was nothing like the amiable drunk I’d gone home with the first time. And now I was stuck with him for the next few hours.

Limping, I followed him to the gate. He nodded goodbye to Meg and Fletch and left it open for me. “My car’s in the village. You okay with the walk?”

I’d walked four miles home from the hunt at the weekend, holding myself together while blood had dripped from my split lip, but I didn’t feel like rehashing that, so I nodded and pushed past Cash. “I’m fine. Let’s get this shit done.”

We walked to where he’d stashed his car at the local pub—smart move, given what had happened to Meg’s car. I had a crazy notion to hustle him inside the pub, buy him a beer and pretend the complications surrounding us didn’t exist. But they did exist—we both had to drive tonight…and I wasn’t welcome in the toff-owned boozer anyway.

Cash’s car turned out to be an old Golf that wouldn’t have looked out of place on camp.

“I’m restoring it,” he said. “I don’t normally drive in the city.”

“Uh-huh.” Like I cared. If Cash was going to treat me like we hadn’t fucked twelve bells of hell out of each other, then I wasn’t going to feign interest in his life. Feign. Right. As though I wasn’t gobbling up every teeny snippet of information he was willing to give.

Emotional whiplash had always made my head spin. Even when hunts went well—when the animals won—I often felt as traumatised as when they didn’t. I’d learned not to replay the scenes I’d witnessed, but though this mess with Cash was nothing like that, somehow he still brought out the masochist in me. “You know, Fletch could get the train down in the morning and fetch the van. Why do I have to come with you right now?”

Cash got in the car without answering. Rolling my eyes, I followed suit, but fixed him with a questioning glare he couldn’t quite ignore.

He shrugged. “The van is at my work. If I shift it out tonight, I won’t have to answer a bunch of questions about where it’s going.”

“We’re stealing it?” I’d done worse, but I wasn’t willing to bring that trouble onto Fletch’s land. The police raided us enough as it was.

Cash snorted and started the engine. “It’s mine. But I haven’t touched it in years, and my boss knows it. Rocking up with some crusty who’s got no dosh to buy it will make him ask questions.”

“How do you know I’ve got no money?”

“Dude, you live in a tent.”

He had me there, and even though his explanation was patchy, I was suddenly tired as fuck. I’d been laid up since the weekend, but I hadn’t slept well. Depriving Meg and Fletch of their bed had weighed heavily on me, and more than that, Cash had been on my mind. That his presence now was enough to put me to sleep was pretty damn ironic.

We hit the road. Cash seemed familiar with the area and navigated to the motorway without a sat nav. Silence cloaked us, and when we hit the M1, I called time on worrying about it and tipped my head back, closing my eyes to him and the nagging pain in my chest that seemed to be getting worse. We were on the North Circular when he nudged me awake.

“I have a confession.”

I blinked a few times, rubbing my chest and coughing. “I know a joke about that, but it’s not politically correct.”

“If it ain’t killing animals, I don’t care, but I’m serious.”

I sat up, waving for him to go on.

“You’re right about the van,” he said. “I mean, everything I told you was true, but it’s not that big a deal. Someone could’ve picked it up tomorrow.”

“Okaaay. Why the hurry then?”

Cash turned his gaze back to the road. “I see something in you I saw in myself, and figured you could do with the break. Get a few hours kip in a real bed before you head back in the morning.”

The last real bed I’d slept in had been his, and I wondered if he was offering that now, but his face gave nothing away. “That’s sweet, but I had a break a little while ago. Came into the city and knocked on your door, as it happens, and it didn’t turn out too well.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Why? You’re not the one who ran off like a—fuck, I don’t know.” I coughed again, harder this time, and tasted blood in the back of my throat. Man, I was a mess.

“Maybe you don’t need to know.” Cash was still staring doggedly ahead. “But if it helps, it was thinking about you that brought me to your camp. Don’t reckon no one else could’ve dragged me back in.”

“Not back in, though, are you? Meg told us you’re not joining us.”

“Rae, I can’t.”

He did look at me then, and the regret and pain I saw in his eyes cut me to the bone.