Chapter 7
REID
The next day, the builders I hired are dealing with the shower and bathroom on the top floor, so I can have a decent wash, and Callie, after accepting breakfast with me and packing away an impressive number of pastries given her tiny stature, announces the last thing I expect.
She’s going to spend her day off baking.
So I join her in the pokey little kitchen—making a mental note that this needs to be upgraded very soon—and sit with my phone checking in with my men as she bakes.
“I’m going to make this one.” She opens a cookbook and shows me an enormous photo of a cake with multiple layers, and patterns of icing and brightly coloured marbling inside. The actual cake itself is different colours. Purple, red, and blue, as well as the usual creamy yellow.
“That looks wonderful. If you’re a unicorn.”
“You don’t like it?” She pouts at me. “Is colour that offensive to you, mister fancy suit mafia boss?”
I stare at her. Has anyone ever called me that? Has anyone ever dared say anything so disrespectful?
Would I have anticipated that I’d like it?
“It’s more that after twelve-hour shifts, you’re doing yet more work.”
She shrugs happily. “I need to bake a cake. I do one every week on my day off, for my ward at the hospital. I started doing it years ago. My mother really loved cake, though she couldn’t eat it. She said the smell was enough. She was the best at baking.”
I stare at her. “Not only do you take it upon yourself to cure everyone physically, you tend to your housemate’s ailments—”
“Normally they’re very healthy. It’s just you,” she interrupts brightly.
“And bake cakes for your colleagues. And I did offer to pay you.”
“I like baking!” That sunny smile re-emerges, and I’m yet again aware of what a sweet, good person she is, and what a grumpy monster I am, and how these two things cannot go together. “And I don’t mind looking after your wound.”
I shake my head at her. “You should. You’re a remarkably accepting captive.”
“Or you’re a very bad kidnapper,” she teases. “I managed to stay in my own house, didn’t I?”
I don’t take the bait. I’m secure in my kidnapping prowess. “Excellent negotiation skills, yes, but you’re too kind for your own good.”
“Puhhssh.” She waves my observation away as she pulls ingredients out of her cupboard, and places them onto the table before me.
Sugar, flour, butter from the fridge. A dozen food colourings, and some flavourings, just placing them randomly, the small bottles scattered around the butter and the different types of sugar not even next to each other.
She pores over the recipe.
I shift the little colouring bottles first, putting them in a neat line. Then the flour packet, I fold the top more neatly. One handed.
The frustration of being incapacitated is unbearable. What else wouldn’t I be able to do properly?
Pleasure Callie.
I push the thought away.
“What…” Her hand pauses mid-air, reaching for something then does a double take.
All of her ingredients are tidied. They’re in neat little rows on the table.
She’s giggling even before she meets my gaze.
“You said I should help.” I nod at the perfectly logically laid out ingredients. Admittedly, I’d prefer sealed tubs with labels, but we can’t have everything. Compromises have to be made.
“I meant more with mixing things, or washing up!”
“Sure. What do you need washing?” I have this odd sensation that I’d do anything for Callie. Move the world. Stop time. Bring her the moon.
She looks at me thoughtfully. “Mm. But if you splash dirty, sugary water on your wound…”
“I can’t be static for the rest of my life.”
“You’d make an excellent statue,” she teases, smiling that sunny smile at me. “Good job change. I’d look at you.”
“A Greek one with no clothes?” I say deadpan, but it’s a bomb into the conversation.
The air grows hot between us, and she becomes a statue herself, totally stationary apart from the fast pulse at her elegant throat. I’m insane, but I’d like to bite her there. She looks delicious. Cake is nice, but I bet Callie tastes fantastic. Especially between her legs.
“Or a brass statue that’s touched for good luck and has a polished, bright section because of it.” That would be hell for me, of course. But the blush that’s creeping up Callie’s neck is worth it. “Do you think people would like to touch my—”
“What were you doing to get shot?” She bites her lip as soon as she’s asked, as though she’s attempting to gnaw the words back.
There’s another taut silence.
I preferred the sexually charged one about me being a naked object.
“Are you sure you want to know that?” I ask eventually. “You might decide you’d rather not, given the danger being involved could put you in.”
“You’ve moved in with me. Concern about your life affecting mine has already been made an irrelevant point, since we’re living together.”
I like that phrasing. Married would be even better, and for a second I let myself imagine it.
She’s in my arms when I wake up, then I shuffle down under the covers to wake her with my tongue.
She’s there when I’ve had a hard day, and eats dinner opposite me.
Maybe we’d have a kid or seven. We’d have so much time together, and I’d learn to laugh and smile like she does.
Or I’d just bathe in her sunshine every day.
Except, I’m a murderous mafia boss whose territory on the edge of Essex is at constant risk. And she’s more than twenty years younger than me.
I nod grimly. “It was a dispute with Loughton, the Essex territory that borders this one. I thought we were meeting for peace talks. We were, in fact.” I might not like the terms that were being proposed—my marriage to Loughton’s daughter. But they were peace talks. “And then someone fired.”
“So you are in the mafia.”
“You already knew that, sweetheart.” The endearment slips out too easily. “I’m the kingpin of Woodford.”
She gulps, and stares at the flour as she puts it through a sieve. “Were they trying to actually kill you, or was it some sort of warning?”
Smart. “The same question has been going through my head. I’m not sure. I think they didn’t mean to kill me, exactly. Perhaps more indifferent to whether I lived or died. But it backfired. The kingpin of Loughton was killed. His sons have taken over, so now we have more uncertainty.”
“Is that what happens with mafias? The sons take over?”
“When a kingpin dies?” I nod. “Usually.”
“Is Jack your son?” she asks tentatively, as though asking about a taboo.
I bark with laughter. “No, but he probably would take over Woodford if Loughton had their way and killed me. He’s a good second-in-command. I have no sons. And I don’t have daughters, or a wife, or any sort of person like that.”
“And your parents?”
I suppose she’s asking if my father is dead, and yes, but I’d rather not tarnish her opinion of me by explaining how and why they died.
“I’m alone.” The statement echoes uncomfortably. It’s true, but I wish I hadn’t said it.
“I am too.” She shrugs, embarrassed. “Kinda. My mum’s dead and my dad and I don’t talk anymore.”
From the way her gaze has slid away from me, that’s not an invitation to ask about her family, so I leave it and ask something else. “Why did you become a nurse?”
She mixes the cake batter with a silicone implement, and I think for a second that she won’t reply. Her eyes have gone even sadder.
“It was my mum. She spent a lot of time in the hospital when I was teenager, especially. And I went with her. I liked the nurses. They were always the ones who had a couple of extra minutes to explain things, or a little tip, or insight. They had knowledge, but they weren’t stuck up like a doctor.”
“Your dad didn’t go with her?” I catch hold of the first relevant point she said.
“No.” That’s a whole sentence. She’s good at that, I notice. There’s a finality and a length to that small word when she says it that leaves no question about what she means.
“Why did she go to hospital?”
“She had Crohn’s disease. When she had flare-ups, I’d visit her, and even when she was better, she needed regular treatments.” Callie smiles sadly. “I cared for her at home, too, so I had experience to show when I applied to be a nurse.”
I note the past tense, and the heaviness that has descended onto her.
“What happened?” I’d like to say my voice was gentle, but I didn’t achieve that. The suspicion is too sharp.
“Sometimes the visits were for her Crohn’s disease, and other times she was very clumsy.” She says it with a neutral inflection, as though controlling herself.
“Clumsy,” I repeat thoughtfully. “I don’t believe that.”
She bites her lip. “I don’t let myself think about it much, because she’s gone now, and there’s nothing I can do about it. She died when I was seventeen. I moved out of home, and got onto a nursing course as soon as I turned eighteen.”
“Away from your father.” It’s not a question.
She nods as she pours the cake mix into the last of the tins, and smooths the top. “Yes.”
She looks me straight in the eyes.
Such a brave little thing.
“He hit her,” I state baldly. The anger is building up inside me. It was a spark at first, but the more I see, the more the flames are fanned.
“I didn’t see it. And she never told me.” Callie turns and slides the neat trays into the oven, the fan humming.
“Which isn’t the same thing as it not happening.”
Closing the oven, she sets a timer, clicking the old-fashioned device and setting it onto the table.
“No,” she says softly. “It’s not.”
I’m going to kill that piece of shit, just as I did my own father. It shouldn’t take too long to find him. Flowers is a reasonably unusual surname, and I shouldn’t even need any help from the resident arsehole tech expert of the London Mafia Syndicate. Her father still being alive isn’t acceptable.
Perhaps she would prefer not to know about my intentions, though.
“My father was awful too.” Understatement. And he had all of Woodford to control and terrorise until I stopped him. “We get through it.”
The bright smile returns, and it rings false. “We do.”
“Possibly with a lot of cake.”
And this time there’s a spark in her eye. “I love cake.”
“I do, too.” This is a new interest. I can’t remember when I last ate cake. It’s a matter of lack of enthusiasm, up until now. But if it’s Callie’s favourite thing, then I like it. A lot.