Hot Blooded (2 page)

Stan was still stammering, unable to look the men in the eyes.

"We, uh, we, uh..."

"We don't have champagne here." I spoke up for Stan, not altering my posture at all, not getting up. Four sets of too-bright eyes immediately settled on me, sizing me up.

"No champagne?" The obvious leader asked, turning a disdainful eye towards me."Why the devil not?"

"You know why not," I replied casually. "You look like smart boys. Surely you didn't come this far south expecting oysters and a wine list."

He immediately caught the condescension in my tone.

"What was that?"

I sighed at the inevitability of what was about to happen and got to my feet. These soft City boys were no match for me - even if their cocaine-gilded minds told them otherwise.

"I said you know damn well there's no champagne here. Now leave the boy the fuck alone or you're out."

The man I'd been addressing - the tallest of the group, with the typical flabby, flushed cheeks of his tribe - took a step towards me. He was about to speak when Gazza suddenly appeared. He inserted himself between us and held up his hands.

"Alright, alright. Everyone calm the fuck down. Stan - get these gentlemen four pints of Stella. Callum - sit down. You'll get the chance to settle this in the ring later."

I perked up. Was I fighting one of these guys? Jesus, it was going to be difficult to make it last longer than five seconds.

"This chav prick? This is who I'm fighting?"

It was the tall, ruddy-cheeked one talking again. And the more he said, the more I looked forward to smashing his face in.

"Yeah, that's me, mate," I answered, smiling coldly.

He eyed me up and down and snorted.

"I guess being on the dole gives you a lot of time to work on those pretty muscles."

Yes, I was very much going to revel in knocking this asshole down a peg or five.

"Stop talking mate, you're embarrassing yourself. And I've never been on the dole."

Fuck. I shouldn't have defended myself, but not much gets under my skin more than useless pricks who make bullshit assumptions just because someone's accent doesn't quite match their own.

"You're mother probably was, though, right? Daddy not around? My father's taxes paid for the roof over your head, son. A little respect might be nice."

I lunged for him and at the same time Gazza lunged for me. He shoved me away and got right up in my face.

"Calm down, Callum. CALM DOWN. Fight's in half an hour, mate. Save it for the ring. We get paid, this fuckhead goes home with a broken nose. Alright?"

"Yeah," I said. I took a deep breath and forced myself to turn away from the chuckling asshole. "No worries, Gaz."

I made my way over to an empty table near the door and let the cool night air from outside wash over me. I willed myself to calm down. When I looked up, the brunette with the Posh Fillies was watching me, and she didn't turn away when I caught her eye. She didn't smile, either, she just evenly met my gaze. I noticed that she was beautiful. Not as highly groomed as her blonde friends - who made me think of those pedigreed, pampered, blow-dried dogs you see at Crufts every year - but beautiful nonetheless. Her lips were full, her nose Roman. She had big, dark eyes that I couldn't read. She looked at me the way you look at someone you think you recognize but can't quite place. She kept looking, too, and the seconds stretched out as the rest of the club receded around me. The thought of her underneath me sprang instantly to mind, and I was about to throw her a grin when she turned away from me and focused back on her friends. What the fuck was that?

Once the Metropolitan Police approved my first undercover investigation, it took weeks to insinuate myself into the tight-knit group of four PR girls - Pandora Wolfe, Hannah Stone, Jemima Beckford and Imogene Banks. Eventually - after many boozy lunches and after-work bonding sessions over cocktails - I was accepted, mostly, as one of them. And after I was accepted as one of them, they led me to my goal: the Streatham Working Men's Club.

Looking back on that first night, I don’t feel like I did my job badly. I identified who was in charge, caught a few first names, and failed to note anything seriously illegal going on. There was the fights themselves, but even the local police knew about that. As long as they kept it off the streets, no one really cared enough to do anything to put a stop to it. And no one expected Linda Trout's murder to be solved on the basis of a single evening. Of course, none of that stopped me from putting far too much pressure on myself to do everything exactly right, to miss nothing.

What do I remember about that night? Everything. My observational talents and memory for detail were a huge part of the reason I was made a DCI for the Metropolitan Police before I turned thirty, and those skills served me well. My feelings of guilt and regret over what happened to Linda Trout, a woman I repeatedly promised was not in any danger, did the rest.

It had been instantly obvious that Gazza Wilson was the man in charge. The staff and customers alike both displayed a particular kind of masculine deference to him. And, as is the way of men like that, he took it as his due when they laughed at one of his unfunny quips or stepped aside when they found themselves in his path. I remember acne-stricken Stan Colley and his nervous, machine-gun laugh. I remember the feeling of having stepped into some kind of wormhole, with 2015 on one side and sometime around 1963 on the other. I didn't even know Working Men's Clubs still existed in London, let alone that there were still non-hipster men who wore flat caps. There was actual sawdust on the floor, for Christ's sake!

What I mostly remember about that night, though, is Callum Cross. If I close my eyes I can still picture him sitting at the bar in his grey t-shirt, the one that emphasized his broad, muscled shoulders so well it almost made my eyes water.

Three years had passed since I had definitively decided to focus on my career and not on my romantic life - or on any other part of my life, really. I still had throwaway evenings here and there of course, because a woman has needs. But after my ex-fiancé Thomas and I ended things, the niggling feeling that a life of domesticity wasn't going to fulfill me in any meaningful way became too blatant to ignore. It hadn't been difficult, either. In fact, it had been something of a relief. No more coddling the tender egos of men, no more biting my lip after a man had a bad day at work and came home to unload on me. No more pretending to be interested when some man went on a twenty minute rant about a subject he would have realized I knew more about than he did, had he bothered to ask. It was great.

And then Callum Cross happened. He'd been checking me out all night, thinking he was being subtle. When he walked into the ring for his fight - the last of the evening - I perked up a little. OK, a lot.

"Oh my God, Callum."

It was Pandora, and her eyes were bugging out of her head.

"He's gorgeous, isn't he? What do you think, Lily?"

What did I think? I agreed with everything she said. If anything, I didn't think she was going far enough. Callum was hot. Not just regular-hot, either. He was the kind of hot that makes you want to physically bounce up and down, the kind of hot that makes you giddy and breathless even if you're well past your teenaged years. He was shirtless and he was perfection. Tall with close-cropped, almost military-style hair and a jaw so square I couldn't help but imagine what it would be like to run my tongue slowly down its entire length. Built, too. The kind of build you get from real work and real combat - not from doing curls in front of a mirror at the gym. Callum Cross was the best kind of big. He was three-dimensionally sizeable. He had height, breadth and - crucially - he had depth. He was the embodiment of a very specific kind of masculine physicality and he carried himself with total, easeful confidence. He made my knees weak, and I was smitten.

"Mm, yeah, he's nice." I replied.

"Nice? You should see his dick."

I turned to Pandora, smiling. "Really?"

She nodded smugly. "Oh yeah."

"Me too!" Imogene piped up. Then each and every one of my companions all confirmed that they, too, had been lucky enough to get a little naked time with the smirking, dimpled boxer. Pandora noticed the genuine surprise on my face and elbowed me.

"You didn't think we came here for the sophisticated atmosphere, did you, Lily? You colonials are so innocent."

I didn't know how to respond to that. She just kept going.

"Where are we going to meet men like this? I mean, other than here? They don't make 'em like this in Chelsea, you know."

She was right. They didn't make them like that in Chelsea. The moneyed, well-mannered men that Pandora and her kind were used to weren't unattractive, but they were very different from the ones at the Streatham Club. The men they knew had personal trainers to keep them in shape, because their jobs mainly involved sitting in front of mahogany desks and making decisions about large sums of other people's money. They drank £6 kale drinks and got stressed out over what kind of hardwood to use in their kitchen conversions. They wore bespoke suits and made an art of insincere self-deprecation. Something told me Callum Cross didn't practice self-deprecation of any kind.

"Yeah, I was just-"

I was cut off by the sound of fist on flesh. My head turned automatically towards the ring, where the fight had just begun. Callum was fighting the man I'd seen him arguing with earlier - some asshole from the City who was in all likelihood there for the same reason Pandora and the rest of the girls were - to get a taste of gritty reality on their spoiled palates. It was that guy who had thrown the first punch. I watched Callum take a few steps back, obviously unhurt, and absorb a second blow.

"What's he doing?" Imogene asked. Poor, easily-confused Imogene.

"He's giving the people what they came for, silly. If the fight ends in three seconds, people don't come back," Pandora explained, not taking her eyes off the fighters.

"What? You mean he's just pretending?"

I watched Pandora, the clear alpha-female of our group, as she rolled her eyes.

"Genie, be quiet!"

The man fighting Callum realized in short order that he was being toyed with, and I watched with fascination as he got angrier and his punches got sloppier. Callum didn't even make an attempt to hit him for the entire first round. When the bell rang for the second, he strolled towards his opponent like a man who was anywhere but in the middle of a fight.

This time, though, when his opponent reared back to take another drunken swing, Callum swiftly blocked him and, so quickly I didn't even see it, punched him hard enough to send him reeling back against the ropes. He stayed there for a few seconds, panting and swearing.

"You chav cunt. You fucking scumbag. You-"

Callum punched him again, a right hook to the jaw that made a sickening cracking sound when it connected. For the first time in the fight I saw anger on Callum's face. The 'chav' comment had done exactly what it was intended to do.

At that point in my life, I had never seen an actual fight before. A few dust-ups in the schoolyard, maybe, but not an actual fist-fight between two grown men. As I sat at my table watching, following Callum with my eyes, I became aware of a certain feeling of exhilaration I hadn't expected. It was strange, an excitement tinged with instinctive repulsion for the violence on display. At least, that's what I told myself, even as I unconsciously leaned in towards it.

By the third round, both fighters had taken a few punches. Callum wasn't wobbling on his feet like his opponent, but I could see on his face that he was getting more of a fight than he'd expected. He took a hard punch, blood flowing out of his just-split lip and down his chin, and I saw something change in his eyes. Something in the air changed, too, and it wasn't just me who noticed it. The audience collectively leaned forward, sensing the approaching climax.

When it came it was brutal and swift, a clean knockout. Callum smashed his fist as hard as he could into the other man's face and he went down hard, his body flopping limply onto the canvas. Then something else happened.

Before he raised his arms - before he did anything else - Callum looked right at me and smiled. The image of that smile is burned into my memory - his white teeth stained with his own blood, his shoulders rising and falling and his ice-blue eyes locked on mine, as if we were sharing an intimate, personal moment. Pandora and all the girls noticed it. When Callum finally looked away to acknowledge the cheers from the crowd, she turned to me.

"Lily, what was
that
?"

I didn't know what it was, exactly, but I knew I liked it. I liked it so much that a number of internal alarm bells started ringing.
Careful, Lily
.

"Do you know him?" Hannah asked.

I shrugged and tried to play it cool despite the fact that I was, for the first time in a long time, completely thrown. The warmth in my belly bloomed into something deeper and more insistent as I sat there, unable to get Callum's bloody, focused smile out of my head.

"No, I don't. How would I know him?"

All four girls eyed me curiously, and not without some envy.

"Well that was just bizarre," Jemima commented."Maybe he's got you on his list?"

"What list?" I asked, distracted and surprised by the amount of effort it was taking to get my thoughts straight.

"Oh, you know, Lily. The list. The one that every fighter in this place has. The 'List Of Posh Fillies I Haven't Shagged Yet.'"

Everyone giggled. I was confused.

"The Posh Fillies? Who are they?"

"It's
us
, Lily," Pandora stage-whispered."They think we don't know they call us that, but we do. They're men, aren't they? If they give us a patronizing nickname, we're slightly less dangerous, aren't we?"

She lifted her pint glass to her glossy lips, took a delicate sip, and looked at me like I was the densest person who had ever lived.

"Really, Lily. I know you're a foreigner, but take a look around. Does this look like one of our usual haunts? This is England. The working classes do their thing and the upper classes do theirs, and never the twain shall meet. They have to treat us like silly little girls. If they didn't, they might start resenting us for our differences. And resentment gets in the way of, you know, things."

Pandora was excellent at saying things like that. They all were. The flippant, easy comment that sounded like common sense if you didn't pay too much attention, and sounded worryingly close to class prejudice if you did. Instead of arguing, which is what I wanted to do, I just nodded quietly, playing the meek, vaguely clueless foreigner as I always did in those situations.

"Genie," Pandora said after looking around the table and noting that glasses were running low, "I think this next round's on you?"

Imogene pressed her lips together into an expression I recognized well. She made it whenever money - her money - needed to be spent. As far as I could tell, she had more than enough, but she was the type who always brought a packed lunch and sat with us in Pret-A-Manger at lunchtime making disapproving comments over how expensive everything was. But Pandora was the boss, so Genie reluctantly got to her feet and asked us all what we wanted. I should have said water, or Coke, or nothing. What I actually said was: "Cider, please."

When I turned back to the table, all three women were staring at some spot directly to my left. I followed their gazes. It was Callum Cross - sweaty, unshowered, and still breathing a little heavily from the fight.

"Ladies! How are things?" He asked, grinning widely.

I watched as all three of my companions seemed to almost physically melt in front of me. Callum pulled up a chair - without asking - and looked directly at me.

"And how about you, new kid? Did you enjoy the fight? Were you not entertained?"

The temptation to react the same way Pandora, Hannah and Jemima had was so strong I had to consciously concentrate on keeping my fingers out of my hair and my lower lip unbitten. Callum Cross was going to have to work harder than that to have me falling all over myself.

"It was - uh, it was, um, good."

Jesus. It really wasn't like me to get so flustered, at least not in front of others. '
It was, um, good
.' Bloody hell. Heat threatened to rise into my cheeks, and I willed it away.

"Good, huh? You enjoy watching men beat the shit out of each other, then?"

He hadn't taken his eyes off mine for one second. I was about to answer when Genie returned with our drinks and jumped in: "I like watching men beat the shit out of each other!"

Callum showed no sign of having even heard her, which made me slightly embarrassed on Genie's behalf, given my recent knowledge of their intimate activities.