Hot Blooded (25 page)

There was a sudden loud bang, loud enough to make my ears feel like they were stuffed with cotton wool, and at once the weight of Gazza was gone. I spun around and saw him sprawled out on the road with blood pouring out of his neck. He was making a strange gargling sound.

"Morgan! Morgan!"

Akin ran to me, still holstering his gun. He'd shot Gazza. It took a few seconds to register. At first, I didn't understand his panic. Gazza was down. Not only was he down, he didn't look long for the world. It took a good twenty to thirty seconds for the pain in my finger and the warm, wet feeling trickling down my neck to wake me up. Akin and another person were lying me down on the road. I felt someone tying something very tight around my wrist as Akin knelt down beside me to put pressure on my neck. Absurdly, my main instinct was to reassure him.

"I'm OK. I'm OK," I babbled, "I'm conscious. If he'd hit anything important, I wouldn't be."

"Shut up, Morgan," Akin replied, his eyes darting from my neck down to my hand, which was being held in the air by the female officer. "Stop moving. The ambulance is on its way. Stop moving! Morgan!"

Akin was right next to me, but he was starting to sound faraway. I felt my eyes closing. Shit. I was going to pass out.

"Akin!"

I remember reaching up for him, panic setting in again as I realized what was happening, but that's the last thing I remember.

I was sitting in the hotel room in Wembley when Lily's boss called me. As soon as I heard his voice, I knew something was up. I assumed he was going to ask me for something - he'd made it more than clear that although I was being let go, I wasn't anywhere near 'free' yet.

"I need you to come back into the station," he told me.

I sighed."Alright mate. But if you want me to come back in you're going to have to tell me what's going on with Lily - Lily Morgan. She hasn't contacted me in-"

"This is about Lily Morgan," Akin said, "she's been injured and she's in the hospital. I'm calling you as a courtesy to her, she's asked for you. So come into the station and I'll take you to see her. She's under guard so you won't be able to get in without me."

I felt all the blood draining out of me."Lily's in the hospital? Is she hurt? What happened? Where is-"

"Mr. Cross, just come into the station."

He hung up before I could ask anything further. I threw my clothes on in a daze and headed for the tube. The whole journey had a dreamlike quality, like one of those dreams where you're trying to run but your legs are in slow-motion. I arrived at the station breathless, my skin prickling with dread.

"Akin! Where the fuck is Superintendent Akin!" I shouted, swiveling my head around wildly and causing the receptionist to reach for her phone.

"It's alright," came a voice from behind me "I've got him."

I turned around to face Lily's boss. "Is she OK? Just - please tell me she's OK. Please."

"She's OK. I'm leaving now, so if you want to see her you better get a move on."

I didn't need to be told twice. Fucker could have told me on the phone that she was OK, though. I tried to get more information out of him on the drive to the hospital but he remained tight-lipped, just telling me I was going to have to ask Lily myself. When we got there, he stepped back at the entrance to her room and nodded for me to go first.

"She wants to see you. I'll be outside."

Maybe he wasn't a total fucker. I mean, he was, but he obviously cared about Lily and that made us allies, of sorts. I walked into the room and saw Lily lying in a hospital bed. My eyes roamed over her, taking note of bandages on her neck and her hand.

"Lily, what the fuck happened?"

She didn’t say anything, she just reached her arms out for me. Something about seeing her like that - so uncharacteristically vulnerable - made me shut up immediately. I ran to her, bending down so she could wrap her arms around me and press her face into my neck. It took a few minutes before she stopped breathing so quickly, but eventually I felt her calming down in my arms.

"Callum. I'm so..." She trailed off.

"Lily, are you OK? Just tell me you're OK."

She smiled weakly. She was very pale.

"I'm OK, Callum. I'm alright. I lost some blood but they stitched me back up. I'm good."

"What happened? Who did this?"

I sat down beside her on the bed and she ran her hands up my arms, shoulders and face, as if checking to see that I was actually there.

"Gazza's dead, Callum."

Nothing about Lily's statement changed what I felt, which was concern for her and nothing else. Gazza was dead? I didn't feel anything about that.

"Is he?"

She nodded. "He was shot. He was holding me at knifepoint - that's why I'm all cut up - but they got him. Akin got him, actually. He was dead before the ambulance got there."

"He - what? He held you at knifepoint? Where - Lily, where did you find him?"

She smiled again. "I'm so happy to see you, Callum. You're the only person in the whole world I wanted to see. I'll fill you in on the details later, if you don't mind. But yeah, we found him. We found him and now this is all done."

"Is it? Done?"

Well..." She chuckled, then started coughing a little. "It's not done-done, but it's done. We still need to get the DNA results back, but Ian flipped and told us everything anyway, so we don't even need them, really. You're still going to need to testify, but if you agree to that you're looking at a few months probation, if that."

I didn't even take in most of what Lily was saying about the case because I was too busy staring at her. I touched her very gently because she looked so broken. All that mattered was that she was OK. And she seemed to be.

"Callum?"

"What?"

"Don't you have anything to say?"

"About what? The case? Oh yeah, well, that's good. To be honest, Lily, I don't give a fuck about the case-"

"Well you should, Callum, you're still-"

I bent down and kissed her cracked lips. "Lily, shhh. I'm not one of your colleagues. I don't care about any of this. I care about you. I care that you're alright. That's it."

She ran her hand, which was so heavily bandaged it reminded me of a boxing glove, over my shoulder. "Don't kiss me. My lips are all dry."

"You're right, and it's disgusting. No more kisses until you get some moisturizer on there, you lazy slob."

She laughed at that. The sound of Lily laughing always made me want to laugh. It was idiotic, but I loved it.

"Will you take me home? Are you still staying in Wembley?" She asked. "Come stay with me, will you? I need someone to change my bandages and cook for me. You'll do."

"Mmm, I'll do, will I? You're damn right I'll do, woman."

As it turned out, she was free to leave the hospital. The protective guard was a precaution only. Everyone who was even remotely involved with the Linda Trout murder - Ian, Dave, Mick, Wayne Karswell and his son - was already under arrest. All Lily needed was someone to take her home and stay with her while she healed. And coincidentally, there was nothing else I wanted to do more than that. I left her in the hospital to go back to Wembley and check out of the hotel, and when I got back we took a black cab back to her flat.

"Don't worry," she said, grinning, "the Met's paying for the poncy cab." I winced at every bump in the road, worried it was going to hurt her.

When we got back to Lily's flat the first thing she did was announce that she was starving.

"Want to get a pizza?" I asked her.

"YES. And then I need to have a shower. I feel gross. I'm not supposed to get my bandages wet, so I might need some help with that."

"If it involves seeing you naked, I'm in," I told her, bending down and kissing the top of her head.

She turned around and tried to look up at me."Ow. I can't really look up properly."

"Does it hurt? Did they give you anything for the pain?"

She reached up and ran one hand gingerly over her bandaged neck. "It hurts a little. It aches. So does my finger. They just gave me paracetamol and said I could call if I needed something stronger."

"Right. Well, just say something if it gets worse. I can go and pick up any meds you need."

She snuggled into my chest. I wasn't as surprised as I once had been at the protectiveness that Lily brought out in me. It wasn't strange anymore. Still, it was enough to make me shake my head.

"What?" She asked, pressing her face into my chest and taking a deep breath.

"I don't know, Lily. I hate seeing you like this. I hate that I wasn't there to protect you. I'm worried about you."

She put her arms around me. "You know I couldn't tell you where I was going, Callum. You would have gone mad. You would have showed up in the middle of our operation in St. Ives and gotten yourself into even more trouble than you were already in."

She wasn't wrong. If I'd known where Gazza was, I would have been there. And if I'd seen him with a knife to her throat...well, at least David Akin had finished the job.

"St. Ives?" I asked. "How did you find him there?"

"I'll tell you, Callum, but I need to eat first. And I really, really need to shower. I'm filthy."

I ordered a pizza and then followed Lily into the bathroom to help her undress. I was hard before she was even naked, in spite of my efforts to control it. She noticed, too.

"Callum, you animal," she teased, reaching down to run her fingers over my cock. I caught her non-injured wrist.

"Lily, stop. If you don't stop, you're not going to get your shower and I'm, uh, I'm a little..."

"A little what?"

"A little worried. You can't move properly. I don't want to hurt you."

"I'm fine, Callum." She turned away from me and stepped into the shower. She held her injured hand out through the gap in the curtain as I forced my eyes to look anywhere but at her perfectly curved little ass. "Can you hold my arm? It's painful for me to flex the muscles."

I held her arm tenderly, careful not to touch the bandages. She turned the water on and aimed the showerhead downwards so the water didn't get near the bandages on her neck.

"Fuck," she said, after a few minutes of trying to find a comfortable position."Callum, this isn't working. I think I'm going to have to take the bandages off my neck. They told me to just make sure it was dry, so if I do it fast it should be fine, right?"

I pulled back the curtain and leaned into the steamy shower. "Did they say it would be fine? You know, I could get a small towel and help you with this."

Lily caught my eye. "You could."

I pulled the shower curtain back and laid a couple of heavy bath towels down on the floor so the bathroom didn't become a lake. Then I wet a smaller towel, poured a little soap onto it and started to rub it gently over her belly as she lifted her arms. I kept going, moving up to her breasts as she turned around in front of me. Her mouth was slightly open and I could hear her breath catching every time I put my hand on her body.

"Callum..."

"I know," I replied, "I know, baby. Let's get you clean first."

It wasn’t that I didn't want to snatch Lily out of the shower, carry her into the bedroom and have my way with her. I did want that, and the uncomfortable tightness in my jeans was proof. But there was something else. I wanted her to know I could control it, too. I was turned on, yes, and she knew it, but I was also full of a kind of tenderness that I’d never experienced before. Her body felt warm and alive under my hands, but it also seemed incredibly fragile. She'd been hurt - badly - and I wanted her to feel how concerned I was about her, and know that my concern wasn't based on the fact that I wanted her so much I could hardly breathe.

Halfway through Lily's shower, the doorbell rang. Pizza. I went down to pay the driver and when I got back up to the bathroom Lily was standing there, wincing, the bandage on her neck halfway off.

I moved in closer. "Here, let me-"

She took her hands away and tilted her head, ever so slightly, towards me. She trusted me. She trusted me not to hurt her. For a brief moment I felt like my heart was going to burst. It almost made me laugh. I never thought I'd be the kind of man who was going to feel things like that. But Lily Morgan made me feel them, without even trying. And to my surprise, I loved every second of it. I carefully pulled the bandage off a little further and suddenly caught a glimpse of the wound. A wave of rage and hate washed over me as I thought of Gazza.

"Oh Jesus, Lily. Oh Jesus fucking Christ."

It was no superficial cut - I could see where the thick stitches were holding it together, surrounded by an angry redness. Gazza had done that to her.
My father
had done that to her.

"Fuck him. Fuck him! I can't believe - Lily, that son of a bitch, that fucking son of-"

"Callum." She reached up with her good hand and touched my wrist. "It's OK, it's done. It's done and I'll be fine. He didn't get near any arteries, it looks worse than it is."

I knew she was trying to calm me down -
she
was trying to comfort
me
- but the sight of her neck had my head spinning. I stumbled backwards and ended up sitting on the toilet, holding my head in my hands.

"Callum!"

"It's fine," I mumbled, "I just - just give me a second, Lily. I feel like my fucking head is going to explode. I'm actually sad he's dead, because that means I don't get to give him what he deserves for doing this to you. That piece of shit. I can't believe-"

"Callum, we can talk about this, OK? We can talk about this tonight, but I need you to help me finish up here, is that alright?"

Even when she was asking me for help, Lily was helping me. I got up, refusing to let my own anger stop me from being there for her, and we both worked slowly and carefully to remove the rest of her bandage. Then she lifted her hair up and I washed her neck, taking more care than I think I had ever taken with anything else in my life. From there, I worked down again, making sure there was no soap left on her skin. When I got to her lower belly I put the towel on the side of the tub and used my hand, sliding it between her legs, just using water to wash her there.

"Callum," she moaned as I felt the warmth of her core against my fingers, "get in here with me."

But I wasn't finished, and I told her as much. She looked at me, a curious smile on her face."Callum! Please," she laughed, "get your dick in here."