Reversing Over Liberace (24 page)

“Ah, not your fault really. Stupid place to keep a laptop, but I like to have it on me.”

We surveyed the dented black casing for a moment. “Expensive to fix, you said?”

Luke's head came up. “Fairly. More ready cash than I was looking to lay out right now, why?”

He'd bitten. I was almost ashamed of myself. “Well, you remember Cal? The guy who owns the farm up on the moors? He fixed my laptop. He's absolutely brilliant. I'll pay, of course. It's my fault it's broken. But he doesn't charge too much.”

Luke thought for a moment. “If you're sure. And he's good, you say?”

“Fantastic.” But I wasn't necessarily thinking of his winning ways with a computer.

“Here you are then. Could you get it back as soon as possible? Only I need it, for business.”

Yeah, sure you do
.

Chapter Twenty-three

The following evening I went round to Cal's flat and caught him leaving for the farm. “I need a favour.”

“Oh?” He stuck his head out through the window of the Metro. “You'd better jump in then and tell me about it on the way. It's good timing, actually. I need to shift that bloody goat again.”

“Why don't you employ someone to do it?”

“Because I've got you, and you need a favour.” I climbed into the Metro and sat on a pile of magazines. Cal looked at me sideways. “So. How are you?”

I had the lie lined up on my lips ready. The “oh, I'm fine” that was working so well for Katie, but once his cool gaze landed on me, the lie failed. “Pretty shitty, actually.”

“Uh-huh? Feel like talking about it?”

“I'm
angry
, Cal.” Until now I hadn't even been sure
how
I felt, but now I knew. “I'm angry that I've been duped and that I fell for it. I should have
known.
”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why ‘should' you have known? Did he approach you wearing an I'm-a-fraud badge and covered in lipstick marks?”

I laughed. “Of course not.”

“Well then. Stop beating yourself up about it. He's clever, he's good looking and he thinks on his feet. There's no way you could have sussed him.”

“Maybe, but I still should have known. Good-looking men don't exactly fall for me, you know.”

“Perhaps they do, but you're so worried about throwing up on them that you step over and make a beeline for the boring ones. Now, what's this favour you need?”

“It's this.” I held up Luke's laptop. “I want you to hack it for me.”

“Ssshhhhh. Willow!”

“Who's going to overhear—a traffic warden hell-bent on industrial espionage?”

“Even so. Whose is it? His?”

I smiled. “Hack it and you'll find out.”

Cal rubbed a hand over his unshaven cheeks and then grinned. “Go on then, I could do with the practice. Been a long time since I had a personal. What are we looking for?”

“I don't know.”

“Even better, a full-file job. It'll be just like old times.”

“I don't want to know what you used to get up to.”

Again the sideways look. “Ah, you do really. You want to know everything about me. And even if you don't, I'm going to tell you anyway.”

“Shut up and drive.”

The white house had a kind of dejected air about it when we arrived, like a puppy tied to railings. The fields looked unkempt and there was a corner of guttering coming away from one edge of the roof. Cal sighed as we went into the kitchen, and opened the windows to let out the overcooked air. “It's going to kill me to sell, but… Since Great-Aunt Mary died, there's so much stuff I can't do around the place.”

“You could pay someone to do things like the guttering though.” I looked out of the window to the paddock. “And look after Winnie.”

“I can't have anyone stomping around. Not with the tech I've got going on out in the barn. Too risky. Besides it's a lonely old house, especially in the winter. I don't want to be camped out here. Shit, I've just thought, you're not going to want it now, are you? Now that…I mean, sorry, I'll shut up now.”

My fingers gripped around the edge of the kitchen table and I felt the solidity, the permanence of it, the safe security of the four walls. “I want to live here.” I dug my nails into the wood. “I've still got my dreams, Cal. They weren't all dependent on marrying Luke. With the money from the council I'll have enough to live on for a while until I get some sort of business up and running, even after I've bought the place. So, I'll be poor, but I'll have my own roof and my own land and I can always grow food and if the electricity gets cut off, I'll go to bed early.”

“And the loneliness?”

“I'll get a cat.”

Cal nodded slowly. “That should deal with the mouse shit in the larder problem. Good call.”

“And besides, you'd still be around, wouldn't you? With the barn and all.”

Cal turned away from me, fiddling with the Aga plates. “I don't know. I might have to shift somewhere else. Security.”

The bruise that was my heart gave a little twitch. “Oh,” I said, damply. “Oh.”

“Okay then.” I knew Cal was getting into work mode when he fixed his hair back away from his face like this. “Pass me the laptop. Let me see what I'm doing.”

I handed the case over without speaking. As he took it, our fingers brushed and I felt it, as though he were wearing acid gloves. “I'll go and see to Winnie then, shall I?”

“Mmm.” I'd lost him. Everything about Cal changed when he had a computer on his mind. Even his face became different, his eyes unblinking, his mouth a tight line of concentration. I watched him for a moment, the way his flexible fingers removed the black casing from the laptop as matter-of-factly as if he were peeling a banana, the shifting of the machine so that his less-strong arm didn't take all the weight. There it was again, flittering across the back of my mind, the flash of acknowledgement that he really was a very sexy man—and then he looked up and caught me looking. “Go on. Bugger off and see to that goat.”

He'd seen me watching. Seen the desire and longing spread across my face and dismissed it. I took a deep breath and left the room, holding the feeling until I cleared the yard, when I had to spit it into a gorse bush while Winnie watched and sneered.

But at least her close attention made her easy to catch. I moved her into the field by the house and let her loose. By the time this manoeuvre was completed, and I'd finished the swearing and cussing and my face had returned to a colour not associated with emergency situations, Cal was in the barn with the laptop connected to the big computer.

“Any ideas?” he asked as I poked my head cautiously through the door. “About passwords? Anything he might use? I've tried your name and got nothing. Sorry,” he added.

“What about Dee-Dee?” My teeth were so clenched when I said her name that I could hear my jaw cracking.

Cal tapped away at his keyboard. “Hey, yeah. That's got one file. Hmmm, nothing much there, few letters. What kind of guy
types
his love letters, hey? Oh. Sorry. Again. Keep forgetting.”

“I don't care if he's been writing erotic letters to an entire women's prison.”

“But there's nothing in there we could use, it's all”—his attention passed from me for a second—“pretty hot, actually. Quite heavy. Is he really into all that bondage and repression stuff? Sorry, sorry, any other password potentials?”

I couldn't think of any.

“I'll have to bring up the big guns then. He's working behind a firewall, so I can't piggyback a virus in to rewrite the passwords. Besides, he'd know then that someone had got at his files. So…” He tapped away. “I'll run a decryption program. That should break it. He's not exactly security conscious, our man.”

“I don't suppose he's ever thought anyone would want to break in.”

“Everyone should have security systems. You never know. There. We'll leave that to run a while. Do you fancy a glass of wine?” One of the boxes in the barn turned out to be a chiller unit, stacked with everything one might want, from Coke to champagne. Cal pulled a bottle of white wine out without even looking.

“Very smooth.” I accepted a glass.

“It's regular party time in here sometimes. The team and I, when we finish a job, we often have a drink together.”

“Together?”

“Figuratively speaking. Like the dress, by the way. Did it not come in your size?”

Had I dressed up to go and see Cal? What do you think? The dress in question was turquoise, halter backed and short skirted. It showed off my brown legs and arms and made my shoulders look slim and elegant. “What's wrong with it?”

A long glance. “Nothing. What there is of it, is fine. And, just for the record, what there is of you is fine, too.” He raised his glass to me and smiled, but I could no more tell what he was thinking than I could read Greek. His eyes said he wanted me. But hadn't he told me, in no uncertain terms, that he
didn't
? Was I reading things wrong here? And a little voice inside my brain said, “Don't forget. Ash read him wrong, too.”

“Do you ever get lonely, Cal? You seem quite happy on your own, but sometimes you look as if…”
Where the hell had that come from?
I looked at the glass of wine in surprise, almost as if
it
had spoken. “Blimey, this is strong.”

“No.”

“Oh, I think it is. Bloody hell, I've only had one, all right, one and three quarters of a glass and I'm already talking bollocks.”

“I meant, I'm lonely all the time, Willow. Goes with the territory, really. I can't talk to people properly in case it comes out what I do, which would mean gangs might try to get at me. I always have to be on my guard. I never know who I can trust. Are you ready for another story?”

He refilled my glass and led me out of the barn and through the yard to the house, where the air was cooler now. “Three years ago I met Hannah. Oddly enough, it wasn't the palindromic nature of her name which attracted me. She was bright, funny, pretty—not, in fact, unlike yourself in a lot of ways, with the same sparky kind of personality. Quick, you know the sort of thing I mean? Anyway, I'd got a job writing software, she worked with kids at a play scheme, after-school clubs and such and we were happy, I thought. She didn't seem to mind the war wound. At least she never said.”

There was a deliberately bland expression on his face, and he avoided meeting my eye. He carried on speaking as though talking to his glass.

“She moved in with me. I lived up on Petergate then. Nice flat, but too many stairs. I loved her. Loved her, but couldn't talk to her. She didn't…she wouldn't have understood the implications, thought that the computers were just… She loved me anyway, even if I was a bit secretive.”

Now he did look at me. It was a look that dared me to pity him.

“One day I got in and she'd gone. Left to go and live with someone she'd met at work. I thought the only people she met at work were under the age of fifteen but apparently not. I never found out. We'd lasted a year, she and I. After that I threw myself into running the team, setting up my own business, so I've been on my own. And strangely, women don't seem all that interested in a guy with a dud arm and leg, funny that.”

“Ash thought you were gay.” Blaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh. Perhaps if I held my mouth shut these things couldn't come out. I pinched my lips together but had to let go to drink.

“Yes, I felt really bad about that, thought I might have led him on. I was
so
lonely, Willow, you cannot imagine. I'd go to therapy and talk to my counsellor then go home, knowing that I'd probably not speak to another soul for the rest of the week, and when Ash and I got on so well, d'you know, I even considered going to bed with him? To feel someone hold me, arms around me. I didn't push him away, you know that? I let him kiss me, until… It took me a moment to realise that I couldn't do it, couldn't sleep with Ash. It wouldn't be fair to either of us.”

“I think you're gorgeous.”

A half-laugh. “Thanks for that.”

“Katie thinks you're gorgeous, too. And Ash. We can't all be wrong, can we?”

“Unfortunately. I'm a geeky guy with a weak arm and a leg that won't do as it's told. No social graces. I'm shy, I'm awkward and I stutter when I don't know people.”

“And you're funny and kind, and you have the most fabulous eyes I've ever seen.”

“I'm nothing like Luke, you know. The only six pack I possess is out there, in the cooler.”

“Luke is a first-class
bastard
.”

“But one you've fancied for ten years. You're only finding me attractive because I'm skinny and dark and introverted, and he's hurt you so badly that you don't want anyone who reminds you of him, even obliquely.”

“That's therapy talk. I'm not thinking of Luke at all.” I let Cal refill my glass again, feeling our knees bump against each other as he carelessly leaned across the table. It was true, Luke and all his treacherous deceits were far, far away. From horizon to horizon all I could see was Cal's huge, dark eyes and sculpted face, pencilled with stubble and lined with remembered pain.

“Do you know something?” He lowered his gaze to stare at the cracks in the flagstone floor. “Right now, right
now
I don't care why you want me.
I
want
you
,
so much
, and, Christ, I haven't been with anyone for two years and if you don't stop looking at me like that, then it's all going to be over in the next five seconds.”

“I thought you didn't.”

“Willow, I want you so much I can hardly move.”

“Cal.”

“But if you and Luke decide, despite everything, to get it together, if you decide you can live with what he's done, then where does that leave me? Wanting more of what I can't have, can't
ever
have. But you're damaged and hurting and I can make it stop for however long, and I would do
anything
to stop you hurting.” Eyes met mine and locked on.