Chapter Nineteen No Procedure
No Procedure
Harrison got into his car, shut the door and gripped the steering wheel with both hands.
Then breathed.
Well.
That hadn’t gone particularly to plan.
He stared through the windscreen at the alley for several seconds before dropping his forehead onto the steering wheel. “Fuck.”
Twenty years.
Twenty years of one man’s hands. One mouth. One body. And tonight, for the first time in his adult life, another man had put his hands on him.
Of course it had felt different.
How the hell had he expected it not to?
He sat back and scrubbed both hands over his face.
The ridiculous thing was that he still wanted to turn around. Right now. Get out of the car, go back up those stairs and knock on Jake’s door. Tell him that freezing hadn’t meant I don’t want you. It’d meant I don’t know how to do this yet.
Because he did want him.
Christ, he wanted him enough that some part of him was still considering going back. Which was a problem for considerably more reasons than Harrison currently had the capacity to deal with.
Jake was tangled through an active investigation Harrison was leading. His sister’s disappearance was already dragging Harrison towards another. Professional distance wasn’t merely advisable. It was necessary. Yet Harrison had just been half-naked in the man’s bedsit.
Excellent work, Detective Inspector.
He bashed his head back against the seat again and closed his eyes.
He had absolutely no idea what he was doing.
No idea who he was with someone who wasn’t Chris.
And apparently far too little common sense where Jake Whitton was concerned to work it out alone.
There was only one person he trusted enough to tell the truth to. So he reached for his phone, scrolled to her name and hit call.
It rang once.
Twice.
“Harry!” Nigella’s voice showered down the line. Warm, familiar, and a bit too much all at once. “You’ve called at the exact right time. I’m between clients. How’s it going? Did you get moved in alright? What’s the house like? New team behaving? Any gossip?”
He could picture her perfectly. Kettle boiled. Feet tucked under her. Settling in. Normal. Safe.
So he blurted, “I just kissed a witness.”
Silence.
He stared at the sky, jaw tightening.
“In the middle of an active missing persons investigation.”
Still nothing.
He closed his eyes. “Not the first time, either.”
Another beat.
Then, because apparently, he’d decided self-destruction was the order of the day—“He put his bloody hands on me.”
The silence deepened.
“But the cottage is fine,” Harrison rushed out, already retreating.
“Bit of a leak in the roof, though that’s…
temporarily dealt with. Apparently, it needs a full overhaul.
I’ve no idea how to even begin arranging something like that, as those things were always Chris’s—” He stopped, recalibrated.
“The team seem decent enough. Usual mix. A few inflated egos, but nothing unexpected. DCI appears sound. And the case itself is—”
“Harry?”
He stopped. “Yeah.”
“What the hell did you just say?”
Harrison pinched the bridge of his nose. “I was rather hoping we might… circle back to literally anything else.”
“Absolutely not.”
He exhaled slowly. “It was… a lapse in judgement.”
“A lapse in judgement?”
“Yes.”
“With a witness?”
“Yes. Though to a cold case. But, fuck, if we’re being completely fucking honest, he’s a person of interest on the live one.”
Nigella made a noise somewhere between disbelief and laughter. “You kissed a suspect?”
“Person of interest. There is a distinction.”
“Oh. My. God.”
He scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “Look, let’s not catastrophise this. I’m simply calling for you to confirm that this is some entirely predictable stage of the grieving process. Preferably one with a clearly defined duration.”
Nigella laughed properly then. “Oh, Harry…”
“And if you happen to know what comes next, I would very much appreciate a briefing. I find I function better when I know what I’m dealing with.”
“Jesus, Harry.”
“I know. Bit out of character. So, if you could tell me you’re surprised it’s taken this long for me to completely lose my mind and how Chris wouldn’t think any less of me for wanting to sleep with another man, that would be very helpful right about now.”
She waited a beat, to wreak havoc, no doubt. Then, finally, “Chris doesn’t get to think anything about it, Harry. He gave that up.”
“Yeah.” Harrison dropped his head back against the seat with a dull thud.
“That’s sort of the problem, though, isn’t it?
” He wiped a hand over his mouth before staring unfocused through the rain streaking the windscreen.
“He left me to fucking do this. We said forever, didn’t we?
I was fine with my version of that. It made sense.
” He tightened his fingers around the steering wheel.
“I don’t want this. I don’t want to start over at forty-bloody-three years old.
I don’t know how to be with somebody else.
I don’t know who I am with somebody else. ”
“Oh, Harry…”
“I knew how to be with Chris. And now I’m sitting in my fucking car wanting to turn around and go back upstairs to a man I’ve known for barely a week.”
That one hurt to admit.
Harrison closed his eyes.
“And of all people, why Jake bloody Whitton? He’s younger.
More than ten years younger. He’s involved in my fucking investigation.
He’s impulsive and infuriating and apparently incapable of staying out of trouble for longer than five minutes.
” Harrison breathed out. “And he’s offensively attractive. ”
“Offensively?”
“Yes.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
Nigella laughed softly.
Harrison didn’t. He carried on. “And you know what the really fucking inconvenient part is?”
“Other than him being a suspect?”
“Person of interest.”
“Harry.”
“That I fucking want him.”
“Oh, Christ, Harry.” Her voice softened, the humour dropping away. “All right. Slow down a second.”
Harrison did. Or tried to. He drew in a breath, held it, let it out again, slower, causing the windscreen to mist.
“Good. Again.”
He obeyed, eyes fixed on the blur of rain ahead.
“Okay.” Her tone returned to that familiar cadence, the one she’d learned somewhere between interview rooms and counselling suites. “Right. Let’s start with this. What you’re feeling? Completely normal. Messy, inconvenient, badly timed, but normal.”
There she was. Professional, but never detached.
Nigella always had that balance. Even back when she’d been in the job.
Uniform first, then safeguarding, then years buried in domestic violence cases where the lines between victim, survivor, and system failure blurred more often than anyone liked to admit.
She’d seen things. Carried them. Same as him.
Same as Chris. Her brother.
Being a Boswel, she’d never really had a choice.
Chris’s family were police through and through.
Generations of it. Service. Duty. An expectation so ingrained it didn’t need saying aloud.
They were both meant to follow. And they had.
Chris had gone into firearms. Nigella had started on response, same as him.
They’d met on their first day of training at Hendon, became fast friends from the start, then she’d introduced him to her big brother, and Chris had smiled at him across a kitchen while clutching a beer, and not long after, Harrison became her family. Properly.
But safeguarding had worn her down in ways she hadn’t expected.
Not the violence itself; she could compartmentalise that.
It was the pattern. The repetition. Women cycling back through the same doors because there was nowhere else to go.
Systems set up to protect them missing the mark by inches, yet feeling like miles.
Then Chris died, and her trust in all of it went with him.
She’d left the force not long after. Retrained. Started again. Now she sat on the other side of it. Working with survivors, yes, but also with officers. The ones who’d seen too much, carried too much, didn’t know where to put it anymore.
People like him.
“You’re grieving,” she said, as if that wasn’t bloody obvious.
“Not just Chris, but everything that came with him. The life you thought you had. The version of yourself that only existed with him in it. And grief doesn’t behave, Harry.
It doesn’t sit quietly and wait until it’s convenient.
It spills. It confuses things. Makes you reach for connection in ways you wouldn’t have before. ”
He let out a shaky breath. “He’s a witness. A fucking person of interest.”
“That’s…unfortunate. Is he guilty?”
“No. Of that, I’m positive.”
“Then at least you’re not compromising the case in that sense.”
“I’m still the SIO.”
“Not ideal.”
“And I…” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I bloody broke down. On him. When he was—” He exhaled sharply. “Christ. When he had his hand on me.”
“Ah.”
“But… Christ, Nell, his hands weren’t like Chris’s. His mouth wasn’t like Chris’s. Nothing felt the same.” Harrison swallowed, staring through the windscreen. “But it still felt…”
He trailed off.
“Nice?”
Harrison laughed, because of course she’d pick that bloody word. “Yeah.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth, remembering Jake’s against it. “Really fucking nice, actually.”
“Well, there you go.”
“I’m not sure there you go adequately covers the psychological crisis I’m currently having.”
“No. But it’s a start. And, honestly, this is sort of a good thing.”
He huffed. “How do you figure that?”
“I’m not saying it’s ideal. In fact, professionally, it’s a bit of a nightmare. We’ll circle back to that. But right now? I’m more interested in the fact you’re sat in your car sounding as if the world’s tilted off its axis.”
“It has.”