Kitty French - Knight and Day

Downstairs behind the bar, Lucien flicked through the morning’s mail, an espresso on the bar beside him. He’d left Sophie at home with Tilly for an afternoon of wedding planning with Kara, or more likely a wide-ranging chat over a glass of wine, if Kara had anything to do with it.

A sound behind him had him instantly on high alert, and he looked up a second before the man appeared through the door at the end of the bar.

“Who the fuck are you?” the stranger blurted, clearly not expecting his company.

“That’s a fairly fucking audacious question, given the circumstances,” Lucien said coolly, placing his cup down as he watched the smaller man with shrewd eyes. The guy’s attire suggested that he was a holidaymaker, and a vain one at that. Cheap shorts, vest cut to show off his physique, a flashy identity bracelet and a thick chain around his wrist. Aggression emanated from him in waves, and only some vague familiarity in his face stopped Lucien from removing him by force from the premises without bothering to ask any more questions.

“Get your boss down here, man,” the guy said. “And I’ll have a Southern Comfort while I wait. In fact, make it a double.”

Lucien made no move, considering the intruder’s American accent. The stranger mistook his silence for trepidation, and reached arrogantly for a glass.

“No? I guess I’ll just get my own then.”

He had misread the situation. Big-time. His hand froze half way back down from the shelf as Lucien took a step towards him and said, his voice laden with menace,

“No you won’t. Put my glass down and get the fuck out of my club.” The stranger blanched and took several steps back and around the bar.

“You have precisely ten seconds before I post you home to your mama in a series of blood-stained envelopes,” Lucien added, conversationally.

The guy slid the glass he’d snagged back onto the bar and swallowed hard. Then, both turned sharply at the sound of footsteps jogging down the stairs. A couple of seconds later, Dylan emerged through the staff doorway.

“Lucien, do you know whether…” Dylan’s words died in his mouth as he caught sight of the visitor.

Lucien watched Dylan’s expression go from easy to stricken, and the pieces tumbled into place. The man was a stranger to Lucien, but not to Dylan. Now he knew why he’d had the sense of recognising something in his face.

“Hey big bro,” the guy said, oily now that he felt he had the upper hand again. “Long time no see.”

“Justin.” Dylan could not have loaded the word with more despondency if he’d tried. He threw the paperwork in his hand down on a nearby table. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

His heart thumped uncomfortably behind his ribs. How long had Justin been here? What had he said to Lucien?

“That’s no way to welcome your little brother, is it?” Justin said, the same sly grin on his face that always irritated the hell out of him.

“How did you find me?” Dylan said flatly. He hated the fact that Lucien had to hear this.

Justin practically sneered. “Because you couldn’t help sucking up to mom, even from thousands of miles away." It figured that their mother would have trusted Justin around her computer. She always wanted to think the best of him. "Hey mom, I remembered Billy’s birthday,” Justin said, affecting a mocking, whiney voice.

“Hey Matthew, you’ve always been a good boy, Justin’s always been the bad boy. Stay in Ibiza and enjoy yourself while he rots,” Justin went on, an awful impersonation of their mother that hit the mark anyway. “Just like you let Billy rot.” Those weren’t their mother’s words, they were pure Justin.

Dylan’s heart constricted with pain at the low jibe. He looked at his brother for several long, silent seconds, searching for something worth loving and coming up with nothing. As kids they'd shared little in common, as men even less. There was an underhand slyness to his kid brother that had made Dylan's skin crawl his whole life.

“Go home, Justin. You have no place here.”

“And yet it seems you do, Matty.” Justin gestured around the club, the bracelets on his wrist clashing against each other in the quiet room. Dylan flinched at the sound of Billy’s nickname for him, his eyes sheering away from Lucien’s unreadable ones across the room.

“Maybe I see what you’ve got going here and I want in. I saw that hot piece of ass you were with earlier.” Justin cut an hourglass shape in the air with his hands. “Maybe I want in on that, too.”

It was debatable who reached him first. Within a second he was surrounded, Dylan on one side, Lucien on the other, fury white hot on both faces. Like prey caught between two prowling lions, Justin’s eyes darted for an escape route, knowing there wasn’t one.

“Okay, okay,” he said nervously, holding his hands up. His bravado had dissolved once again. “At ease, boys.”

Neither Lucien nor Dylan moved a muscle.

“For mom’s sake, I’m going to let you walk out of this place alive,” Dylan said, his voice low and steady.

“And for Matthew’s sake, I’m going to give you until night fall to leave the island before I send out for those envelopes,” Lucien said in his ear, his fist itching to smack into their intruder’s jaw. Hearing his emphasis on the name, Dylan couldn’t meet Lucien’s eye.

“And I came all this way just to deliver your mail,” Justin said, rallying slightly, drawing a beige, official-looking envelope out of his back pocket. Dylan took it from him, not even glancing at it.

“Get out,” he said heavily, feeling the fragile new life he'd built for himself unravelling thread by slow thread.

He watched his brother leave with Lucien close on his heels. He sank down onto the nearest chair, shoving the envelope addressed to Matthew McKenzie into his back pocket and dropping his head into his hands.

Outside, Lucien pinned Justin up against the wall with a hard shove. Edgy and rigid with fury, he towered over the other man in both stature and power. In that moment, he wasn't Lucien Knight, lover and father. He was Lucien Knight, loyal friend, the man you'd want in your corner when the chips were down. The man you really didn't want to be on the wrong side of.

“You speak to no one, or I will know. You go straight to the airport, or I will know. You board a plane, or I will know. Set foot on Ibiza again, and I will know.” He leaned his arm against Justin’s wind pipe, his face inches from the other man’s. “Have I made myself clear, or do you need me to fucking spell it out?”

The shifty fear in Justin’s eyes answered for him. He was on his way. He was a low life of no substance or worth, and he thought too much of his charmless face to risk its rearrangement by such a formidable foe.

Lucien watched the younger man walk away, certain that he would never lay eyes on him again.

Justin made his way back to the airport, his pride stinging and his throat sore, but satisfied that he’d thrown a grenade into his brother’s life in the form of a screwed up, beige envelope.

Lucien walked back into the club, passed by Dylan’s table, and strode straight to the bar. Two glasses and a bottle of vodka in his hands, he returned and pulled up a chair at the table.

“Do you mind if I stick to Dylan?” His tone was neutral. “I’m kind of used to it.” He poured two good measures and pushed one across the table.

Dylan scrubbed his palms into his eye sockets. “I’m sorry, man.” He didn’t have any words to explain the weight his brother’s unexpected appearance had dropped back onto his shoulders. His hard won peace had dissolved around him like ice on a hot day, showing up his life on Ibiza for the cheap illusion of smoke and mirrors it was.

There was a long silence. They both drank a measure, not meeting eyes.

“So. You’re nothing like your brother,” Lucien said, eventually.

Dylan swallowed the remaining contents of his glass in one mouthful.

“That’s just about the best thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

Lucien refilled Dylan’s glass.

“There were three of us. Billy. Me. Justin.” Dylan didn’t raise his eyes from the bottom of his glass. “Billy was the best of all of us. Now there’s just me. And him.”

“What happened?” Lucien watched Dylan’s face as he searched for the right words, and he recognised the expressions that twisted his features. Grief, and guilt. He recognised them because he’d shouldered the same emotions for too many years himself over someone he’d loved too.

“Billy… he was my big brother, and… my best friend. Sunshine followed him into every room, you know?”

Lucien didn’t know. Not when it came to family, anyhow, but for the first time he was learning it now about a friend. Dylan had brought a new aspect to his life that he hadn’t even known had been missing. Brotherhood.

“He got himself into trouble… gambling… debts he couldn’t make… I missed the signs. Too busy on my way up to notice, and he was too proud to come to me.” Dylan swirled the vodka in his glass, and Lucien sat still, in silent solidarity opposite him.

“They found him hung by his own belt out in the woods behind his house. Open and closed case.” Dylan shrugged, his face etched with disgust.

“Was it?”

“Hell, no. Billy was no coward, and no matter how much shit he was in he’d never have broken our mother’s heart that way, on purpose.”

Lucien’s affinity with the man opposite increased with his every word. Both of their lives had been overshadowed by loss and consumed by guilt. The difference between them was that Lucien had worked his way out the other side, thanks to Sophie. Dylan was still living in his own version of hell, and his brother’s appearance had just turned up the heat to unbearable levels. To Lucien’s eyes, he looked very much as he had the first time they’d met. Beat.

“Justin has been spoiled his whole life. He grew up with a sense of entitlement, for no good reason. He was always going to get himself in trouble, and I was always going to be the one who had to bail him out. I think he gambled too just to prove he could succeed where Billy failed, to be the big man. Except he wasn’t. He got in way over his head, debt on debt, and then he came to me with his hands out. ‘They’re going to kill me, they’re going to take mom’s house.’” Unconsciously, Dylan adopted his brother’s drawling tone, his expression miserably disgusted. He shook his head, his eyes still downcast. “So I bailed him.” He shrugged. “It took my club and my home, but I did it, because I couldn’t fail a brother again.”

“And then you came here?”

Dylan nodded. “I didn’t plan on lying.” He knocked back the vodka. “I just wanted to be someone else for a while. To get away. Just…” He tailed off.

Lucien sighed heavily. He could understand that.

“Seems to me that you’ve pulled it off pretty well up to now,” he observed.

“I was a fool to think I could make it work.” Dylan’s tone was savage, castigating himself.

“Way I see it, nothing has changed.”

Dylan’s laugh held no trace of humour. “I don’t think Kara is going to see it that way. She deserves so much better than another liar in her life.”

“She told you, huh?”

Dylan nodded. “And trust me, I could not feel like a bigger shit than I do right now.”

“Look,” Lucien sighed. “I can’t tell you what to do, and I won’t lie to Kara and Sophie for you. But find your own way to tell her over the coming weeks. I won’t push you. And in any case, I don’t think that brother of yours is likely to come back any time soon.”

Dylan nodded slowly. He recognised the wisdom of Lucien’s words, and appreciated the trust he’d bestowed by allowing him to dictate the pace. His idyll had to end, but he could choose how and when. It was a bittersweet privilege.

“Don’t underestimate Kara,” Lucien said, leaning back on his chair. “She might just surprise you.”

“She already does. Every single day.”

Lucien nodded, cradling his glass in his hands. He knew a woman like that too, and he recognised in Dylan the signs of a man falling hard.

“About the wedding…”

Dylan looked up, his troubled expression clearing a little at the change of subject.

“We’re keeping it low key,” Lucien said. “Just a handful of people, and I… I kind of wondered if you’d be my best man.”

Dylan was unaccustomed to hearing Lucien sound anything but ultra confident, making the trace of nerves behind his question all the more noticeable.