Relief Valve: The Plumber's Mate, Book 2 (38 page)

There were a lot of long words,
aforementioneds
and other legalese. But the upshot of it was, as far as I could gather, that she’d left me a bequest of £500 and my mother’s letters. Her part of the house had been left to her stepson, Raz Nair. She’d even put in all the details of his former name, just to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.

I huffed out a breath. “That’s going to put the cat among the pigeons, innit? Him owning half of his dad’s house. Think she meant it as a final
screw you
to the old bloke?”

“Well, you knew her best.”

I thought about it, staring out through the windscreen. Down the road, a mum was pushing triplets in one of those modern stacker-system buggies, and an old lady walking two Yorkshire Terriers stopped to coo over the cuteness. To be honest, it was a relief to think about something other than what was in those letters. “Nah,” I said in the end. “She wasn’t like that. She’d have just wanted him to have what he was due. Raz, I mean. His dad might have cut him off, but she wasn’t going to stand for it. You never know, she might even have thought it’d get them speaking again.” Was that what she’d wanted to happen by telling me about my real dad? Me and him getting to know each other? I wondered what he was like, this Mike bloke. Was he even still alive after all this time?

“Right. Because arguments over property are well-known for leading to reconciliations.” Phil was obviously still thinking about Raz.

“Yeah, well, hope over experience and all that bollocks. You know, I can’t believe I never realised he was trans. I just thought he was gay.”

“He still might be. Doesn’t matter, does it?” Phil grabbed my thigh, hard. “You’re taken, and don’t you forget it, all right?”

“So now would probably be a bad time to mention I had Greg in my bed the other night? Not in the biblical sense, obviously,” I added quickly as the storm clouds gathered on Phil’s brow. Obviously, me sleeping with other blokes wasn’t something he had much of a sense of humour about.

“Right.” The weather forecast still wasn’t looking all that sunny. Oops.

“We just shared a bed ’cos Cherry insisted on him staying.
I
didn’t want him in there. And it’s not like I even slept.” Too late, I realised that last bit wasn’t exactly helping my case. “He snores. Like a bloody foghorn.”

“Does he.” There was a long silence. “It’s okay,” Phil said at last, “I trust you. Sometimes wonder why I put up with you, mind.” But there was a fond twist to his mouth, and his hand was stroking up and down my thigh in a way that promised… Well, I wasn’t sure exactly what it was promising, but I was looking forward to finding out when I got him home.

“Love you too,” I said, and this time, I meant it.

About the Author

JL Merrow is that rare beast, an English person who refuses to drink tea. She read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, where she learned many things, chief amongst which was that she never wanted to see the inside of a lab ever again. Her one regret is that she never mastered the ability of punting one-handed whilst holding a glass of champagne.

She writes across genres, with a preference for contemporary gay romance and the paranormal, and is frequently accused of humour. Her novella
Muscling Through
was a 2013 EPIC ebook Award finalist.

JL Merrow is a member of the
UK GLBTQ Fiction Meet
organising team.

Find JL Merrow online at:
www.jlmerrow.com
, on Twitter as
@jlmerrow
, and on Facebook at
www.facebook.com/jl.merrow

Look for these titles by JL Merrow

Now Available:

Pricks and Pragmatism

Camwolf

Muscling Through

Wight Mischief

Midnight in Berlin

Hard Tail

Slam!

Fall Hard

The Plumber’s Mate

Pressure Head

Coming Soon:

Tom and Phil will return in
Heat Trap

Some secrets are better left hidden…

Pressure Head

© 2012 JL Merrow

To most of the world, Tom Paretski is just a plumber with a cheeky attitude and a dodgy hip, souvenir of a schoolboy accident. The local police keep his number on file for a different reason—his sixth sense for finding hidden things.

When he’s called in to help locate the body of a missing woman up on Nomansland Common, he unexpectedly encounters someone who resurrects a host of complicated emotions. Phil Morrison, Tom’s old school crush, now a private investigator working the same case. And the former bully partly responsible for Tom’s injury.

The shocks keep coming. Phil is now openly gay, and shows unmistakable signs of interest. Tom’s attraction to the big, blond investigator hasn’t changed—in fact, he’s even more desirable all grown up. But is Phil’s interest genuine, or does he only want to use Tom’s talent?

As the pile of complicated evidence surrounding the woman’s murder grows higher, so does the heat between Tom and Phil. But opening himself to this degree exposes Tom’s heart in a way he’s not sure he’s ready for…while the murderer’s trigger finger is getting increasingly twitchy.

Warning: Contains a flirtatious plumber with hidden talents, a cashmere-clad private investigator with hidden depths, and an English village chock full of colourful characters with plenty to hide.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Pressure Head:

Whatever it was I was following, it was dead ahead. Calling to me, tugging at my mind. I fought my way through prickly hawthorn and incongruously festive holly, a minor annoyance as it clutched at my padded jacket. When I reached a clearing I broke into a run. Melanie’s face was seared in my mind, and I thought, please, God, let it not be her. Let it be some drunk’s alcohol stash…

I already knew it wasn’t. There was the stench of guilt about this one, turning my stomach even as it dragged me nearer. Guilt and violence—and death.

I reached a thicket, dropped to my hands and knees and crawled in. Twigs scratched my face, caught in my hair. Damp soaked through the knees of my jeans, the chill reaching to my bones, numbing my core. There was barely any light to see by, but I didn’t need any, my questing fingers meeting cold, waxy flesh. I fumbled to be certain and found I was holding her hand.

For a moment, I was six years old again, with the little girl in the park.

But when you’re twenty-nine and you find a body, you don’t get to go blubbing for your mother.

It started with a phone call, as these things usually do. I haven’t exactly got an office, more like a stack of files in a cardboard box that I hand over to my accountant once a quarter, and the answer phone’s on the blink, so if anyone wants to get in touch with me, they have to call my mobile.

I was out in one of the villages when he rang. There are a lot of villages around St Albans, most of them filled up with people who commute into London to work and keep the house prices sky-high. In between, you get the green belt made up of pony farms and golf courses, plus the odd actual working farm tucked in, with small herds of placid cows looking like refugees from the nineteenth century as they chomp on the grass and idly wonder what happened to the neighbourhood.

I was fitting some new kitchen taps for Mrs. B., who made great coffee and liked to chat. I always had to be careful I didn’t go over time there. It wasn’t easy when I knew the next call was to Mrs. L., a sour-faced old biddy who always watched me like a hawk in case I made off with the teaspoons or did something unspeakable to her pet poodle.

I put down my spanner and dug my mobile out of my pocket. “Paretski Plumbing,” I answered in my jaunty “trade” voice, flashing Mrs. B. an apologetic smile. She dimpled.

“Tom? Dave Southgate. Got a little job for you.”

“Oh, yeah? Blocked toilet down at the station? Must be all those doughnuts you lot eat.” I wasn’t talking about the place you catch a train from. Dave Southgate is one of our boys in blue—or he would be, if he still wore a uniform. And when he rang, the job was never all that little, though I lived in hope.

“I wish. No—young lady by the name of Melanie Porter. Last seen going off to meet person or persons unknown three days ago—
if
you believe her useless yob of a hoodie boyfriend, who I personally wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw his drugs stash. We’ve received information suggesting we have a look for the young lady in the woods up by Brock’s Hollow.”

“I do have a proper job to do, you know.” Even I could hear the resignation in my voice.

“Cheers, Tom, I owe you. We’re up on Nomansland Common. Up past Devil’s Dyke—you know the area? Combing through the woodland, the usual drill. How soon can you get up here?”

I looked at my watch. “About ten minutes—I’m only down the road, as it happens. Just need to finish up.” And I’d have to ring Mrs. L. and apologise for the no-show, but that’d be more a pleasure than a duty.

I shoved my phone back in my pocket and finished tightening up the taps. Opened the supply pipes and turned the taps on and off to prove they worked. “There you go,” I said, wiping my hands on an old rag. “All sorted.”

“That’s lovely. Sure you wouldn’t like to stay for another coffee?” She gave me a winning smile, and the dimples deepened. “I’ve got some Belgian chocolate biccies.”

“Sorry, Mrs. B.,” I said regretfully. “Duty calls.”

I first met Dave Southgate around three years ago. A kiddie went missing in Verulamium Park, and they put out an appeal on local radio for help finding the little lad. He was only three. I tracked him down under a bush right next to the main road, crying his little heart out and clutching a half-eaten loaf of bread he’d taken to feed the ducks.

Obviously, me being a single gay man who’d managed to find a missing toddler, it wasn’t just as simple as handing the kid over and receiving the effusive thanks of a grateful police force. There were a lot of searching questions about just how I’d known where to look. Eventually, I managed to convince Sergeant Southgate, as he then was, I just had this knack of finding stuff. Or people, as it might be. Since then, he’s called me in a few times to look for things—burglars’ loot, hidden drugs—and bodies.

It’s a bit hard to explain, but I can’t just find any old thing. I’m not some bloody database on the location of everything in the world. It’s only certain types of things. And usually, there has to be some strong emotion involved. So lost things are almost always impossible, because if you’d been feeling that strongly about the thing at the time, chances are you wouldn’t have lost it, would you? Hidden things, on the other hand, call out to me. All the guilt and shame and sneakiness involved in the hiding acts as a kind of beacon. And I can often tell from the feeling just what sort of thing it is that’s hidden.

I mean, say you buried a suitcase in your garden. I’d have a pretty good idea before I dug it up whether it’d contain your collection of hard-core porn, letters from a lover, or the body of your dead baby.

Bodies, actually, are the classic one. I have to be close enough physically—although there’s tricks I can do to help, I’ll get on to those later—but once I’m there, it’s like they’re howling at me.

The first one I found, I thought she really was howling.

’Tis the season of goodwill to all men…even the one who dumped you.

Merry Gentlemen

© 2013 Josephine Myles

Riley MacDermott’s ambitions are simple. Managing the annual Bath Christmas Market—which involves long hours in the cold and a whole lot of hassle—will secure the promotion he needs to afford to move out of his noisy, top-floor flat. Where not even his balcony is safe from an aggressive herring gull.

The last stallholder he expects to see is his ex. Riley never recovered from their breakup, and five years on, the old chemistry still sparkles. So does their habitual head butting.

Stan never wanted to leave the love of his life, but the pull of the woods was too strong—and Riley was firmly planted in the city. Reconnecting is painful, but Stan still jumps at the chance to stay with his old flame during the Market. And damn the consequences.

As the weeks pass, the two grow closer than ever. But despite scorching sex and cozy intimacy, they both know they face a cold and lonely future. Unless one of them can compromise.

Warning: Contains sex in a shed, a seagull with a grudge, glamping, awful Secret Santa underwear, misuse of an Abba song, and as many wood-related puns as the author thought she could get away with.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Merry Gentlemen:

You could lose yourself in Stan’s eyes. Well, I could. They reminded me of sun-bleached denim, with a deeper indigo ring around the outside. They were the kind of eyes that spoke of hard work in the great outdoors, and if it hadn’t been for the fact they’d been just the same back when he’d slaved away as a housing officer, I’d believe they really had been lightened by the sun. His hair certainly had. I’d always thought of him as a dirty blond rather than a honey one.