Chapter Eight

Darien

I was a good probation officer. I cared, which was more than I could say for a few others I’d met over the years, who’d either grown so cynical they were just in it for the salary, or they’d always been like that. Although, we weren’t paid handsomely enough for the former to be that likely. I certainly wasn’t own-your-own-restaurant-rich like my brother Hayden, Quinn’s Brasserie, only going from strength to strength. So much so that he’d started scoping out a second site with aspirations of making it a chain.

But I did care. Which was why, days after the biggest fuck-up of my career, I was still struggling to get my head around quite how far I’d fallen in such a short time. Felix being hot wasn’t an adequate excuse for having so little self-control. And it hadn’t just been a kiss. It had been full-on, come all over Felix’s perfect abs, sex. Did a good probation officer have sex with their clients? If you’d asked me that a week ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated to say no. There were several words I might have used. Words like unprofessional and weak.

I lay back on the sofa and tried to think. Only thinking invariably led me down the same path. A path where I relived every moment in lurid detail. How Felix had felt. How Felix had tasted. The way he kissed. The way he’d shuddered when he’d come. The possessive way he’d palmed my cheeks as he’d told me it would happen again with so much confidence in his voice that I’d believed him.

My fingers slid into the waistband of my sweatpants and I cursed, swinging my legs off the sofa and striding into the kitchen. I yanked the fridge door open and stared at its contents. Funnily enough, it was empty of magic pills that stopped you jerking off over the memory of something that should never have happened. There was wine, though, which was the next best thing.

I set to work on it with the corkscrew, pouring myself a large glass once I’d won the battle. My phone beeped and I closed my eyes. It probably wasn’t him. It could be any number of people. One of my parents. Hayden. Levi. Katherine sending me baby pictures, which she’d taken to doing. Another colleague. It might even be Emily, my one-time date seeming to think the evening we’d spent together had gone well and attempting to organize a follow-up. Apparently, she thought talking about your ex-husband all night was perfectly acceptable date etiquette.

I knew, though, as I returned to the living room with glass in hand, that it wouldn’t be any of them. Because Felix always sent a message around this time. I contemplated ignoring it for all of sixty seconds before curiosity overcame common sense and I snatched my phone up .

Felix: How was your day at work? Have I told you I give good massages? You should put yourself in my hands one day. Just me, you, and a bottle of oil. Condom safe, of course.

Friendly, with the mention of sex thrown in. That described all of Felix’s past messages. And there were a few. I scrolled back through some of them, shaking my head.

Felix: I was thinking about you in the shower today. I imagined you were there. Just in case you wondered why your ears were burning earlier. Is anything else burning now? Or maybe not burning. Swelling?

Felix: How many clients do you have, other than me? Not that I’m jealous or anything. I’m guessing they haven’t seen as much of you as I have. I hope they haven’t.

Felix: Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I think I’m back in prison. I need someone in bed with me to remind me. Do you know anyone who might be up to the job?

No calls. Just texts. And even though I hadn’t replied to a single one of them, they kept coming. They weren’t frequent enough that I could class them as harassment. But they were enough to provide a constant reminder that he existed, that I’d fallen off the straight and narrow in spectacular style.

I threw my phone on the sofa and turned to study my computer in the corner of the living room, an urge scratching away at the inside of my skull that refused to go away. At least this one wasn’t sexual and couldn’t get me dismissed. It was scant comfort, though, when I knew the desire to look up Felix’s past was based on trying to make myself feel better about what I’d done.

Did it really matter whether he was guilty or innocent of the crime he’d been convicted of? It wasn’t like it solved the dilemma of him being my client. Yet, I couldn’t shake the nagging thought that it did matter, that if he was as innocent as he kept insisting, that it explained why I’d given in so easily. Which was a pile of steaming crap.

I lasted ten minutes before booting the computer up. And then I stared at Google without typing anything into the search bar while I drank my wine and battled with my subconscious. I’d been going to do this when I first met him, Felix still insisting he was innocent after the completion of his sentence, unusual enough that it had piqued my curiosity. Yeah, but you didn’t, did you? You talked yourself out of it when you realized you’ve never done it for anyone else, and you asked yourself what made Felix so special? My fingers hovered over the keyboard, various phrases I might search going through my head.

What do you think you’re going to find? Do you think you’re better than a judge and jury? Do you think you’ll be able to find evidence a lawyer couldn’t? My fingers flashed over the keys and I pressed return before I could change my mind. The article that loaded had Julian Blackwell, Felix’s ex-boyfriend, front and center, which was understandable when he’d murdered the poor girl.

I leaned forward to study the photo. He was a good-looking guy: tanned, with thick dark hair, excellent bone structure, and piercing blue eyes. It wasn’t hard to see what Felix had seen in him. They must have made quite the striking couple back in the day.

Remembering Felix’s claim that Julian had abused him, I peered closer at the photograph before letting out a laugh and sitting back. What the fuck was I doing? You couldn’t tell an abuser from a photo. If you could, the world would be a much simpler place to live in. I pulled up more photos of Julian, the press having rooted them all out when the case had come to light. Julian was smiling in most of the photos, his teeth pearly white.

There were photos of the two of them as well, presumably taken from one or both of their Facebook accounts. Julian with his arm round Felix. The two of them at a festival. Go-karting. Eating dinner. On their own. With friends. Laughing. Smiling. Looking very much in love.

I wasn’t na?ve enough to think that posed photos told a complete story, but they were pretty damning evidence. I wondered if anyone had presented them as evidence in court. If so, I could imagine a jury poring over them and coming to the same conclusion that ninety-nine percent of the population would: that Julian and Felix had been happy together. Loved-up and relaxed in each other’s company. There were no mystery bruises. There were no photos where Felix looked lost. Just your average everyday couple.

Once there was nothing more to be gleaned from the photos, I moved onto reading, clicking through article after article about the pair of them. Before the case. During the case. After the case. The ones after the case tailed off quickly, people losing interest once justice was seen to be done and both men were behind bars.

Lily Reynolds had been your typical sixteen-year-old girl. Academic enough to be doing well at school—she’d been going to stay on at school and do A-levels—and popular enough to have plenty of friends. Good parents. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a doctor. Her life had been on an upward trajectory until she’d started chatting online to Julian Blackwell when she was just fifteen. Despite having a boyfriend, he’d groomed her. Or Julian and Felix both had. There were mixed theories about the events that had led up to the murder detailed in several articles .

At some point after her sixteenth birthday, she’d agreed to meet Julian and the two of them had started a sexual relationship, Lily in thrall to the older man. Again, there were people who believed that Felix had been in on it, that the trio had indulged in wild threesomes.

A few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, Lily had disappeared without a trace. The press attention given to the case had been nothing short of frenzied. Her parents’ entreaties for someone to offer information had been eloquent and heartfelt, the public support understandable.

People had put forward various theories to explain her disappearance, especially once they knew she’d been chatting with an older man online—Julian obviously smart enough not to use his real name and IP address. She’d run away with him. She’d been spotted in Spain by a member of the public. No, not Spain—France. Then it was Brazil.

The body had been discovered two weeks later in Epping Forest in a shallow grave, the post-mortem showing she’d died from strangulation on the night she’d disappeared, but that the murder itself had occurred elsewhere and her body dumped there. Her parents had been inconsolable. The public had seen it as an awful waste for a girl who’d seemed to have the world at her feet. The hunt for the killer had gone on for months. Until a neighbor had returned from a three-month visit from their daughter in Australia and turned Crimewatch on.

The case, featured that night on the TV program, had been enough to jog her memory about the strange behavior of a certain Julian Blackwell on the night Lily had disappeared. She’d observed him loading something unwieldy into the boot of his boyfriend’s car. No, she hadn’t seen Felix, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. She couldn’t see the driver’s seat from her vantage point. He could have been sitting in it. Or he could have come out once she’d stopped watching and moved away from the window. It was Felix’s car, Julian’s parked right next to it. Why would he use his boyfriend’s car when his was right there?

I pondered one reason while I refilled my wineglass. Why contaminate your own car with forensic evidence if there was an alternative? When discussed in court, the prosecution had stated that Felix was home. Ergo, he must have known. I had to admit that it stretched credibility to believe he’d not only been oblivious to there being a dead body in the house, but he’d remained unaware while Julian had loaded it into his car, and driven off for a jaunt to Epping Forest. It was easy to see why the jury had found Felix guilty. Especially given Julian’s evidence that Felix had been in on it.

Why would he have claimed that if it weren’t true? But then, if the relationship had been abusive, it was just another type of abuse, wasn’t it? You could argue that incarcerating your boyfriend for seven years was the ultimate form of control. There was no moving on from your boyfriend when you didn’t even have your freedom. Could Julian really be that controlling and vindictive?

My phone beeped again, and I swiveled round to stare at it. The hour was late, my research having taken me way past the point where I would normally have gone to bed. I’d drunk more wine than usual, the alcohol going down far too easily while I’d scoured the internet. Both those things would make for a ‘fun’ day at work the next day. Nothing made you crankier than combining a hangover with being tired.

With that in mind, I powered my computer down, retrieving my phone on the way to bed.

Felix: You realize I can see that you read these messages, right ?

I undressed and climbed into bed, propping myself up against the pillows and staring at the last message. The sensible thing would be to keep ignoring them. None of them were about anything that I had to deal with professionally. Which, actually, was the perfect excuse.

Darien: You’re my client. I have to make sure there isn’t an emergency, so of course I read them. It’s my job.

Felix: There he is! And BULLSHIT!!!!!

Darien: What do you want from me?

Felix: I thought that was obvious.

Darien: Spell it out for me.

My fingers turned sweaty around my phone while I waited for the reply, the cursor seeming to flash several times and then stop, like Felix kept changing his mind about what he wanted to say.

Felix: You. Me. Naked.

I let out an unsteady breath. Nobody could accuse Felix of not being direct. He hadn’t finished, though, another message coming through within seconds.

Felix: My mother’s away tomorrow night at a charity auction in Scotland. That means I’ve got the house to myself. I’ll get the condoms and lube. You just bring yourself and that delectable body of yours.

Swallowing had become difficult, all the saliva in my mouth ceasing to be. What he was suggesting was ludicrous. Worse than ludicrous. Yet, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel tempted. I’d already broken the rules, right? What difference did it make if I broke them more than once? No one and I mean no one turned round and said, well… never mind, it was only the once. No jury. No judge. No disciplinary board. Therefore, it was I-may-as-well-be-hung-for-a-sheep-as-a-lamb territory.

Darien: You know I can’t do that.

There. Super professional. I wasn’t a complete loss.

A long pause. No flashing cursor. Nothing.

Was that it? Disappointment gnawed at my gut. He hadn’t been that interested then. Felix had just proved that I was nothing more than a passing fancy. He’d probably already been out and picked someone up. Several someone’s. With a face and body like his, he’d be beating them off with a stick. Not if they recognize him. Yeah, there was that. But how many people realistically would take one look at him and link him to a murder that had happened eight years ago? And he might not be prepared to change his name permanently, but maybe—and it was a big maybe—he might be sensible enough not to give his full name to someone he’d only just met.

I was about to put my phone down and get some sleep when the cursor started flashing again.

Felix: Yeah, you can. It’s easy. You just get in your car, leave your hang-ups at home, and come to Hampstead.

Hang-ups! Was he for real? Did he really not see it as that big a deal?

Felix: What are you into sex-wise? Topping? Bottoming? I’m happy to do either. I’d love to fuck you or get fucked by you. Or we can take it in turns.

Jesus! He needed to back off. Except if I really thought that my cock wouldn’t be hard. And it was, the need to jerk off before I went to sleep suddenly becoming a pressing need.

Felix: Let’s say eight tomorrow, shall we?

Darien: I won’t be there.

Felix: We’ll see.