Chapter 28
28
Max
Max still felt cold from the beer fridge even though she’d been sitting in the driver’s seat of Bessy’s climate-controlled belly for the past hour. She figured it was probably also her icy insides due to the man beside her, who was watching a week’s worth of CCTV from Liquor Paradise with blue headphones.
It was the most normal thing she’d ever seen him do. Not the watching CCTV footage part, but if you didn’t look at the screen, it looked almost like Greyson Hawke, in his jeans and casual T-shirt, was on a road trip, watching a YouTube video on how to deep-water fish or whatever. What would he be like in an actual casual situation like that? Would he loosen up? Tell a joke? Take off his shirt while he flipped sausages on a barbecue? Did he even have a Netflix subscription? The image of a shirtless Greyson in floral swim shorts on an inflatable flamingo in one of Bindi Bindi’s lagoons, flipping through a paperback book, did not compute in her mind.
Had Grey ever had a holiday? What did he do for his birthday? (Assuming he had one and wasn’t just rebooted once a year for his annual update.)
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
The question burned her face as she clenched the wheel tighter. Yep. Just fantasising about assaulting you on a beach. ‘Fine.’ Eyes straight ahead. Oddly, apart from the humiliation that came in waves and the squirming nausea that had lived in her since she’d arrived at the bachelor auction, driving a car actually didn’t make her freak out as much as being in the passenger seat.
He tapped his phone, pausing the video. ‘I’ll take over whenever you want. I don’t have to watch these now. We can stop if you need air.’
Her throat stung. How was he able to be like this? Disproportionately nice to compensate for what he’d said? She wished he’d ignore her, or gag in disgust at her profile. She didn’t want his pity.
‘It’s fine. You’re more likely to recognise someone connected to the La Marcas than me. And anyway, this is actually better than I remember.’ She tapped the steering wheel. ‘I think it’s about being in control.’
He stared out the windscreen at the flat grey road ahead of them. ‘I think we both like being in control.’
She inhaled. He wasn’t wrong; ever since her parents died, she’d wanted to control everything. But she hadn’t been in control last night. Not with him. She’d never been like that before, not with Damien, not with anyone.
Last night had been—
No. There was no point thinking—
But maybe it wasn’t him she craved, maybe it was just that feeling. That untethered, uncaged, electric feeling. He wasn’t the only guy in the world she could get that with – she just wanted him because she couldn’t have him. She’d find it again. But she was not going to compromise solving this murder and getting her career back on track just because of some over-achieving abdominals.
‘What happened at that party?’ she asked instead. ‘The one the Ravens were talking about?’
The one good thing about almost sleeping with him was that now she knew there was nothing between them, she felt a strange sense of freedom about what she could ask.
Grey glanced at her. ‘Luca punched Forrest – the waiter from the restaurant. You know this.’
‘You tensed up in the Ravens’ house when they mentioned the party.’
‘Did I?’ His voice gave nothing away. He was so fucking good at pretending.
‘There’s more going on here, and I think Libby knows more than she’s saying—’
‘Oh really? The great all-knowing Libby Johnston?’
She clenched her jaw. ‘How many people know what you told me – about the balcony?’
‘It’s okay, Maxella, you can say the words. I’m not going to turn into a pile of goo.’
‘Good, because I think these seats are real leather.’
‘It’s not exactly something I put on my Instagram bio.’ He put his headphones back in and the video resumed.
As if he had Instagram. What would his profile picture be? A row of knives? His bio would be something like: I hate long walks, beaches and sunsets, DM me for dismembering tips. He’d have one picture on his grid, so he didn’t get reported for being a bot, and it would probably be a stock image from Canva of someone else’s dog.
She knew what she had to do. This was her job. She knew how to break people apart, to poke at their vulnerabilities, looking for the part that hurts – then stab down. He wasn’t telling her everything, and she had to get to the bottom of what happened at that party, why he’d tensed up at the Ravens’.
But she couldn’t.
And that pissed her off. He didn’t get to just sit there like that after showing her a small piece of him that no one else had seen, after ... everything. He didn’t get to just sit there, with every breath, every swallow, every unwitting bicep flex attached to an invisible wire connected to her heart. Every microscopic reminder of his existence tugging it out like a fish on a hook.
‘So you trusted me enough to tell me about the boy on the bal—Were you just pretending?’ she snapped. ‘Last night – was that just, like, letting off steam?’
He tugged at the headphones and they came off in the one movement, like everything he did – perfect, controlled. ‘Pull over.’
‘Don’t tell me what to do.’
‘Pull the fuck over!’
Bessy protested as her wheels skittered over the gravel, demonstrating just how indignant she was at Max’s spontaneous detour by tilting them perilously into a grassy ditch.
‘We need to get back,’ Max said as she wrenched the handbrake and Bessy groaned. Sorry, Bessy, I’m not mad at YOU.
Grey frowned, brown eyes gliding over her face with such intensity she swore she could feel the phantom brush of his fingers. ‘You thought I was pretending?’
She knew he wasn’t talking about the flashback.
‘Of course you were.’ Except it came out as ‘ Of c— ’ because the rest of the sentence was swallowed by his mouth.
She should have seen it coming. They were too far apart, with Bessy’s handbrake in between them, for him to catch her off guard. But he’d been moving closer ever since she’d pulled over, she hadn’t even considered what he was thinking—
She should have been prepared to stop it. Not because she didn’t want it. God, no. She wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything. But her heart could not withstand any more of his tiny betrayals. And every time his mouth left hers, it was treason of the highest count.
He pulled back. ‘I wasn’t pretending , Maxella. I meant everything. But every word I said after was true too.’
You’re not my type.
She pulled away, the scent of Christmas paper tingling every dormant part of her awake. ‘I know.’
‘I can’t talk about these things,’ he said. ‘I never— I can’t talk about that night, because it betrays Luca, the Barbaranis. It’s not that I don’t trust you.’
‘But your loyalty is to them.’
‘Yes. Always.’
‘Loyalty should go both ways.’
He breathed out; she wanted to capture that breath with her lips, have him breathe it into her instead. She needed to cut her head open, take out her brain and wipe out these thoughts like crumbs in between computer keys. She needed to bleach away the memory of last night. The feel of him.
‘You don’t know what they’ve done for me.’ Grey swallowed like there was glass stuck in his throat.
‘What have they done?’
‘They gave me a home. Employment. Even after I left, even after I was discharged.’
‘Dishonourably?’
‘Who told you?’ His gaze was harsh but his voice had lost its bite.
‘Vittoria let it slip. Why were you discharged?’ She was being a cop, she knew it. But she couldn’t help it.
‘Oh, Max, for Christ’s sa—’
‘I told you I perjured myself in court.’
‘And I told you , it’s not that I don’t trust you.’
‘Yes, I know, you’re a frightened little boy who can’t articulate his feelings. Draw it in the window condensation then, Greyson.’
His jaw tightened so hard she waited for his teeth to crack. ‘Drugs.’ He looked out onto the field. ‘There were drugs in my bed.’
‘Not yours, obviously.’
‘Why would you assume that? Am I not cool enough to do drugs?’
‘I saw your fridge. And I felt ...’ your washboard chest . ‘That’s not the ... fridge of someone who’s an addict. Plus’—she dug her nail into the red etchings of the steering wheel—‘the being in control thing.’
It was a guess but his silence confirmed it. She turned to look out her own window. The wind was picking up outside, tugging the ancient trees in its pre-storm dance, and the sky was mottled grey, the threat of rain pressing down on the gold grass – the cows in the field next to Bessy carried on grazing. What a fucking simple, perfect life. Well, except for the fact that they were probably going to be shunted onto a truck to Fremantle and slaughtered. Max thought back to the news articles she’d read about Frankie’s animal warrior antics and felt a rush of affection for the youngest Barbarani.
She understood why Grey loved them, why he wanted to protect them. She understood the feeling of knowing you would jump in front of someone who you weren’t sure would jump in front of you.
Grey drew a heavy breath like he was about to scream. She whipped back to face him, but he was still staring out his own window.
‘Someone was assaulted on base during our training at Wagga Wagga. Alexandra’s friend. That’s how I know her. They wanted it swept under, but I refused.’
‘You told?’
‘Yeah.’ He breathed out, still not looking at her. ‘They questioned her, and the guy who did it. Both denied it happened. Next day they did a random room check and there was a bag of pills in my pillow I’d never seen before.’
‘So you got punished for doing the right thing.’
‘I got punished for my lack of loyalty. You were punished for doing the right thing.’
Her heart stopped. ‘You can’t know if I did the right thing or not.’ Even I don’t know.
‘Can’t I?’ He raised his eyebrows. The daring tone in his voice piped hot blood to the tips of her fingers and other parts of her she chose to ignore.
No one had ever said she’d done the right thing , not even her lawyer. It was the type of thing a parent might say, or a best friend. Emotion burned in her eyes, up her throat. It wasn’t fair that this man who barely tolerated her presence, who didn’t feel ‘that way’ about her was maybe the only human being in the whole world who might be able to understand.
‘They discharged me,’ Grey continued. ‘I had no other qualifications, nowhere to go, so I ... went home. Giovanni gave me my job back as though I hadn’t left. He didn’t care about the dishonourable discharge. No one gets a second chance from Giovanni Barbarani’—he sighed—‘but he gave me one.’
Max’s instincts urged her to press more on that. Charity didn’t really fit with what she knew about Giovanni. Was Grey so blinded by unrequited love and loyalty to this family that he didn’t even consider the tycoon’s motivations behind his reinstatement as Fixer in Chief?
Vittoria’s face swam before Max, the scent of her perfume on the note.
There are things even Greyson doesn’t know.
Grey turned to face her now, his brown eyes blazing. ‘I wish I could ...’
‘You wish what?’
The longest silence of her life followed.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He shifted in his seat, and her heart froze over like a winter lake. ‘I’ll drive the rest of the way.’