Chapter 12
Calum reminds me of his promise the next morning. His lips brush my shoulder, beard rasping as softly as his voice.
“Morning, winner.” It feels too early to open my eyes, but if a do-over of last night is his version of working harder for me, sign me the fuck up. I’m less in favour of his body heat withdrawing until he promises, “I’ll be right back.”
I doze then to the sound of someone else in my space. Calum is quiet. The door to my tiny bathroom sliding closed behind him hardly registers. I wake for a second time to an even softer instruction. “Time to turn over, beautiful.”
I follow that instruction only to find him crouched next to the incubator to tell a duckling-to-be that it has the prettiest shell in central London.
My own voice is muffled by my pillow. “You just set off a camera.”
“Where?”
I point. “It’s focussed on the egg. What if I leak the footage of you talking to it? Think that will get you out of your contract?”
“Probably not.”
I’m not done yet with trying to solve that puzzle for him. “What if you stole a boat belonging to the River Police? I could video you racing it up and down the Thames until they catch you.”
He grins at the egg. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
He glances my way, and now isn’t the time to tell him his eyes are the same blue as the hidden part of icebergs.
Calum doesn’t hide his eye roll. “Because if I end up in prison, I won’t get home for Christmas, will I?
” He speaks to the egg about what is blocked out in his calendar for the last week of December.
“Not missing that for anything or anybody.”
“You could stage a protest.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Corruption in hockey?”
“Hockey isn’t corrupt. It’s a business. And it’s the best game—”
“In the world?”
Calum smiles, but here’s the thing about watching him so closely—I see it slip. That makes me work even harder to replace it with another. “Might get you off the hook if you did it naked.”
He laughs, and that’s so much better. “Where am I staging this naked protest?”
“I don’t know. On Tower Bridge?” I reach out to run a finger across a bare bicep. “You’d stop plenty of traffic.”
“Give it up, Valentin. I have.” He draws in a long, slow breath.
The cloud of his exhale is faint. So is his answer.
“Just gonna focus on having this time, yeah? Cram as much as I can into this Christmas. I’m lucky to have it.
” He meets my eyes and repeats an order.
“Focus on your win.” He moves on by giving a pep talk to a duck egg.
“And you focus on growing.” That egg might not have anything viable inside it.
That doesn’t stop him from acting as if it’s full of potential.
“You do that, and you’ll crack that shell, no problem.
There’s no rush, little duckie. You hatch when you’re good and ready.
But when you do smash your way out, you’re gonna see something so amazing. ”
I think he means this city all dressed up for Christmas.
His gaze slides in my direction. “Send me the video when it hatches?”
“If it hatches.”
He holds the egg between his thumb and finger the same as the day I met him. This morning, he studies the shell as if trying to see what is inside it. “You think it won’t?”
I sit up to face facts, my blankets slipping.
“Maybe the mother could tell there was no point hanging around. That it wasn’t worth her time.
That’s why she paddled away rather than sticking around to take care of it.
” I tug open a porthole curtain. The glass is frosted.
“I might not have kept it warm enough. I was busy the week before the show started.”
“You were already here?”
I nod. “Setting up. Someone has to stay on site overnight, but I was busy during the day ferrying boats between the yard and here.”
“Is it far away?”
“The yard? About an hour by water. That’s quicker than for some shows when we need to use a boat transporter. Still took me away for chunks of time. I set timers, but I don’t know if I did enough.”
“You did.”
He’s certain. I can see it. Calum being nakedly impervious to the cold should probably snag all my attention. I’m snagged instead by his conviction.
In me.
“No surprise there,” he tells me. “Because apples don’t fall far from the trees they grow on, do they?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you had a role model who made sure you got taken care of after your—” Perhaps his brain only now catches up with his mouth. He stutters. “I-I don’t mean that your mum abandoned you like your egg.”
I can’t speak while he pieces together my past to reveal a different picture.
“Can’t have been easy.”
I croak. “For my grandparents, because they ended up having to raise another baby?”
He chews on a soft lip. “I was thinking it can’t have been easy for your dad to hand you over to them.” Calum’s focus is on the egg, big hands cradling it with so much care that something deep in my chest clenches. “Of course, that makes sense. Your dad . . . He was older than your mum?”
I nod.
“He didn’t have family left to step in and help him?”
“Not after the first year.” I scrub a hand through my hair, my fingers snagging on sleep-warm tangles. “I don’t remember.”
“Sounds like he did the best thing for you at the time. Gave you a safe base. Continuity. Family support from blood relations and a way to share something with them of your mother. I bet your grandparents needed that. Getting to relive some happy days by giving you the same upbringing?” He confirms how hard he must have listened.
“You think your mum ever used to steer back from the market like you did? I like to think she did.”
So do I.
Calum’s gaze drifts back to the egg that brought us together. “Did you say your dad always had this business to run?”
“Not really.” I clear my throat. “My grandfather wound it down when it looked like Dad had a future on the powerboat racing circuit. He came really close to breaking a world record. That’s how he met Maman.”
“Because she was making a speedboat documentary?”
I can’t help smiling like my grand-mère always used to while retelling this story.
“No, because she almost steered right into Dad’s path during a practice.
He circled back to give her a piece of his mind in English, she yelled back even louder in French, and that was it.
They each had met their match. Found each other.
Kept finding each other for the next year while she wrote a piece on money laundering—a lot of dirty money gets washed clean via racing.
He stopped competing after she . . .” I clear my throat again.
“That’s when he quit and restarted his old family business. ”
“To support you.” Calum nods before frowning. “He didn’t relocate it to France?”
“He wasn’t ever fluent.” I have to admit this. “I know he tried.”
“So he left you someplace safe and then came back to Britain? Had to be rough to sail away. From you and from breaking records. Another loss,” he says quietly. “Because he couldn’t take any more risks and leave you with no one. That’s what I mean by role model, see?”
He speaks to the egg, which is lucky. I struggle to swallow, let alone speak. Thankfully, I don’t need to do either when Calum resumes his pep talk.
“Your stand-in daddy learned from someone who did a hard but right thing.” Calum flicks a quick look my way. “He really could have been a record breaker, but he walked away from his chance?”
That’s what I’ve pieced together. What I overheard too over a year ago when Dad lent Reece his pride and joy, a high-powered model based on his almost-record breaker, so I nod, and Calum gets back to his affirmations.
“You’re gonna get to spread your wings one day all because Valentin knows what families do in tough times. That’s how I know you’re gonna do just fine once you bust out of that shell.” He’s quieter. “Really hope I get to see it.”
Silence fills the cabin for so long that I find my voice. “You will. Even if it happens when you’re down in Cornwall for Christmas. If it hatches while you’re away, I’ll get the footage to you.”
“No ifs. It will hatch. The only question is when.”
I reach for the egg. “That’s what your dad taught you? Relentless positivity?”
“Partly. Being positive is really Pat’s speciality.” He rubs his eyes, his cheek lined with pillow creases, and yeah, thank fuck for motion activation. I’ll watch this footage over and over and never share these moments with another person.
They’re all mine.
All ours if I count the egg that he only lets me hold for a moment before tucking it snugly away the same way he does with me. Calum gets busy with the disaster of my blankets while telling me a story about brothers.
“Reece got all the brains. I got a body built for hockey. But Pat? He got all the heart.”
After the care he’s taken this morning, I could argue about that.
Calum tucking his cock away into his boxers diverts me.
I tune into the rest of his story once he’s done dressing.
“So that’s when my folks moved him to a different school.
Pat’s new headmaster saw his true potential.
Now that’s all he tells other people—he believes in their potential.
But you’ll get to see that for yourself soon. ”
“I will?” I sit up straighter, neatly arranged blankets slipping. “I thought your family was off-limits.”
“They were. That was before.” He touches the line of my jaw. Catches hold of a wave. Gives my hair a light tug. “I’ll speak to Pat after . . .”
His gaze drifts as if he can see through the hull of my boat to where his mornings are also off-limits. That doesn’t stop me from hurrying to get up as well so I can walk him across Tower Bridge on his way to those hospital buildings. He stops me by planting a hand over my heart.