Chapter 2
RAINBOW HOUSE
Johnny
The purple nail polish was still a little wet as they traipsed through the car park with their spare uniforms, empty holsters and law books they hadn’t looked at in years.
Falkington officers were collecting their tactical gear and taking it directly to Dingly Heath, which just felt like rubbing salt in the wound.
It was like a walk of shame—people were staring, a few of them smirking and laughing. It was pretty mortifying, actually, and Johnny had to hold Taylor back as he snapped at every single person who passed them.
“Stop it,” he growled, kicking Taylor’s ankle as they wove between the Battenberg patrol cars. The sun was high and bright, making the tyres stink of rubber and the paint shimmer. Taylor elbowed one, knocking the wing mirror up and disturbing a week’s worth of cobwebs.
“They’re laughing at us,” he said, not-so-subtly thumping one of the car doors.
Johnny clenched his teeth. “Fucking let them.”
They rounded the corner into the staff car park where Taylor’s black Ford Focus was waiting.
It had an obnoxious orange stripe down the bonnet and along the sills, though it was barely visible beneath the mud and dust. Johnny had installed the stripe as a joke on Taylor’s eighteenth birthday, and Taylor had never peeled it off.
Sighing, Johnny drew in a long, long breath. His nerves were beginning to settle the further they got from the police station, and the more distance they put between it and Taylor doing something stupid.
Johnny had nearly lost his grip on him in front of the inspector, Taylor’s anger unravelling so suddenly that even Johnny had had a job getting his own thoughts in order.
The pack bond was funny like that. Their emotions, their thoughts, all wound so tightly together that sometimes it was difficult to know if his feelings were his own.
It was intrusive as shit, and Taylor’s emotions were so fucking chaotic it was a wonder neither of them had hit the bottle. Or drugs. Or both.
Over the years Johnny had gotten used to tamping down his own feelings, learned to control his scent and push back his wolf when it demanded more. Taylor did enough reacting for the both of them, after all, and his anger had been simmering just beneath the surface over the last few months.
Johnny had always been able to keep a lid on it—first with restraint, then words, and eventually just a look.
The nail painting and bracelet making had come later; a distraction technique suggested by Taylor’s therapist, because getting the other alpha to hyperfocus on something other than anger was better than him losing his head completely.
But fuck if his own heart wasn’t still going like the clappers.
Taylor was still prattling away as he flung the boot open and threw all their kit into the back of the car. “Do you think Maman’s making candied nuts again?” he said, taking the cardboard box from Johnny’s hands and dropping it onto the grubby carpet.
And just like that, Taylor was back, with talk turning to food as his eyes relaxed into their usual pools of amber.
Johnny let out a breathy laugh, one that encompassed the days, weeks, months of unrelenting stress. “Dunno. But she’ll candy your nuts if she finds out what happened today.”
Taylor scowled. “I don’t need a fucking lecture, John-Paul.”
“Oof, well, Taylor Charles Terrence Campbell, you’ll have to see when we get there.” Johnny licked the sweat from his top lip and shut the boot. “She’s invited us for dinner. She’ll probably make pepper soup if you ask.”
“Yeah?” Taylor’s eyebrows rose as he went to open the driver’s side door. When it remained locked he shot Johnny a look across the roof of the car. “Come on, dude.”
Johnny pressed his lips together, pulling the keys from his pocket and looping them around his index finger. “I’ll drive, princess. You just put your feet up.”
Taylor scoffed and flicked the aerial, making the small Tasmanian devil taped to the top spring back and forth. “I’m fine now. It was just the boss. He—”
“It wasn’t just the boss,” Johnny said, giving him a hard look as they got into the car. “And you know it.”
As they drove out of the car park, Taylor slowly reclined his chair, flipping the middle finger to the big blue West Newton Constabulary sign. Then he promptly fell asleep, making the drive back to Maman’s house blissfully serene.
The sound of Taylor’s rhythmic breaths filled the car as they drove through the sunny countryside, and Johnny decided to take the long way back to the pack house, between the bright yellow rapeseed fields and past the lonely windmill. He hummed quietly, patting the steering wheel to his own tune.
It hadn’t all been bad at West Newton. In fact, there had been some fucking brilliant moments, especially in the beginning.
Fresh out of training school with nothing but a uniform, baton, PAVA, handcuffs and a warrant card.
Fuck, they hadn’t known it then, but for that brief slice of time their lives had been so easy.
No rent because they were still living at the pack house, no arsehole landlords and no dead friends.
Johnny shook his head, casting his eyes over the bales of hay dotted across the fields. He and Taylor used to play on them as overgrown pups, leaping and crashing onto one another, pretending they were castles and the other was a dragon.
Nothing better than rolling around in the open air, catching rabbits and biting each other’s scruffs until they were raw.
Even picking straw out of their fur at the end of the day made him smile, although Maman made a habit of hovering menacingly with a rolling pin on the doorstep every time they did.
He missed Cameroon, obviously. It was a different way of life over there. The packs were massive, and the food… Well, he was lucky Maman was a chef, otherwise the bland British food might have driven him back to Yaoundé already.
Taylor grunted in his sleep and threw an arm across his face, his black tactical shirt riding up a little to reveal the smattering of blond hairs covering his belly. The sun caught them, making the downy fur light up under the late afternoon rays.
Johnny swallowed, licking his top lip.
Fuck, he loved that part of Taylor, soft but firm, the strawberry blonde hairs growing thicker the closer they got to his groin.
He swallowed again, and was about to turn his eyes back to the road when he had a fleeting thought that maybe Jesus could take the wheel just this once, and let Johnny stare at those hairs some more.
But then the car jolted, something went under the tyre, and of course Jesus couldn’t take the fucking wheel because Jesus didn’t have a fucking driving licence. His attention snapped back to the road and he realised it had just been a hunk of bark from an overhanging tree.
Near miss aside, he thought about taking a wrong turn just to prolong the journey, to savour the moment of peace before getting sucked into the chaos of the pack house.
Taylor quietly cleared his throat, his voice soft and heavy with sleep. “I’m sorry.”
Johnny flicked his gaze back to Taylor. “Don’t be,” he replied, patting the top of his thigh.
There was a pause, then: “I’ve fucked it up for you. Like I always do.”
Johnny let his hand linger over the bend of Taylor’s knee, thumb brushing across the rough combat material. “No, you haven’t,” he said, lowering it back to the gear stick. “We’re both to blame.”
“But I—”
“We’ve been stuck in a rut for ages, Tay. It was only a matter of time before the higher-ups noticed.”
The chair groaned as Taylor pulled the lever, rising smoothly back into sitting. He pushed his hair back, revealing the messy scar over his right eyebrow where a piercing used to be.
“Yeah, but, Dingly Heath? Falkington City would have been fine, but Dingly’s a town of coffin dodgers, JP. Did you know that the average age is sixty-seven? I looked it up earlier.”
Johnny had too, and according to Google it had also won England’s ‘Most Motivated Town of 1992.’ Allegedly. Although what it was motivated for was anyone’s guess.
“Sixty-fucking-seven,” Taylor continued. “It’s practically a retirement village.”
Johnny huffed out a laugh. “Should we just take up knitting now, or wait until our blood pressure tablets kick in?”
They both laughed, the tension of the day beginning to melt away. Johnny tapped the little hula girl that was stuck to the dashboard, making her grass skirt flick about. “The elderly can be randy bastards, you know? Might put an end to your dry spell.”
Taylor grimaced. “Fuck no. Remember that guy in the care home that got his cock stuck in a Pringles tube? Filled it with denture cream and humped it until everything congealed and made a vacuum around his knob?”
Johnny grinned. “Shit, yeah. And the other old guy that got a tangerine stuck up his arse? Tried to get it out with an electric drill and had to be airlifted to hospital? Fuck, that was traumatising. The boss banned fruit in the office for a year.”
Taylor pressed two fingers to his forehead. “Thanks. I’d almost wiped that day from my memory.”
Taylor ran a hand down his face and crossed his arms. “What’re we gonna do, JP? We’re not made for wrangling old people. We’re trained firearms officers, for fuck’s sake.”
Johnny nodded. “I know, but just go with it. Ride the storm, see the punishment post through, then maybe we can reapply to get our guns back. Transfer to the city or something.”
“You think they’ll let us?”
“Why not? Get your head on straight, nose to the grindstone—both of us—support the local community, all that bollocks. Then, yeah. Why wouldn’t they?”
Contemplative silence hung between them as the car drifted around the final bend and the pack house came into view. It sat at the top of a hill at the end of an incredibly muddy driveway that was so long it could almost be mistaken for a country lane of its own.