Fireball (Cheap Thrills #1)(45)

“You got a sec?” he asked, not waiting for a response before he walked in leaving it open behind him.

He was a great guy, and I had a lot of time for him, but right now I didn’t have it in me to spill my deepest darkest feelings to him, or listen to how if his grandsons could do it then I could do it.

“Look, Hurst, I appreciate you…”

“Well now, that’s nice to hear and all,” he interrupted. “But I’m not here for some ‘Brotherhood of the Testicles and Taints’ meeting.”

Just hearing the word taints shouldn’t make me think about Tabby, but the last time I’d heard the word her sister had been saying it to her about me, so it didn’t get the normal smile or laugh it would have.

Apparently, Hurst assumed my grimace was because of the name of the brotherhood, because he nodded and sat down in the seat in front of my desk. “Yup, apparently that shit exists. Anyway, I came to talk to you about the shit that happened. I didn’t realize the story behind your dad’s marriage, and once I heard, I got a friend of mine to do some digging. You might remember Ben from when all the shit with Adam, Scarlett, and Tuck went down.”

Who could forget him? The man’s name was Ben Bakake for Christ’s sake.

Sighing, I reached for a new pen and started fiddling with it. “Yup, couldn’t forget a name like that.”

“True story,” he snorted, and then yelled, “Alex!” over his shoulder, making me jump and my new pen go flying out of my hand.

“Son,” a familiar voice rumbled from the doorway, and I looked up to see my dad standing in it.

I’d inherited a fair bit of my mom including her hair color, but I’d also gotten an equal amount of my dad’s genes too, including the color of my eyes. Given what he’d gone through over the last five years, I’d expected him to have aged since I’d last seen him, but the man in front of me look younger than he had before. He also had a twinkle in his eyes as he made his way toward my desk.

Getting up, I walked around to meet him, catching him up in a hug. Him and Mom had met and had me early in life, even before he’d joined the police at the age of nineteen, and now at fifty he still had a physique not far from my own. For the last three years since I’d moved here I’d told myself repeatedly that I hadn’t intentionally cut him off, that I’d had to do it for his sake and safety, but hugging him now I knew that was a lie. A really big, bad, fucking lie. Some of it might be down to that reason, but a large part had been because I was hurt and disappointed in the choices he’d made and how my life had been made a living hell by Rita and Luli because of it.

Speaking of which – looking over his shoulder at the door, I frowned at not seeing his constant shadow there watching us.

“Where’s the wicked witch of Hades?”

“Oh, she relocated,” Hurst informed me, sitting back and locking his hands behind his head as he stretched out in his chair.

“What, did Satan ask for his sidekick to come home already?”

Chuckling as he let me go, Dad took a step back and looked me up and down, frowning at whatever he saw. “Something like that,” he agreed looking at me thoughtfully. Whatever it was that was going through his mind was pushed to the back as he sighed and gave me a gentle push back toward my own chair. “Sit down, son. We need to talk.”

The last time he’d said those four words to me, it had been to tell me he’d married the woman, so hearing them now didn’t fill me with joy. Jesus Christ, please don’t let her be pregnant. Biologically, she was old enough for that to not have been the case, but I wouldn’t put anything past her.

“If you’re going to spill any news about impending births, don’t bother. I don’t want to…”

Holding a hand up, Dad stopped me mid-sentence. “I’m sorry, Dave. So fucking sorry. I…” he paused and took a deep breath. “I couldn’t tell you why I married her, and when things started to come out I could only tell you part of the story, and it’s been eating away at me. I haven’t been able to see my son because of it, and when you become a father, you’ll understand how painful that is.”

Staring at him in confusion, I looked over at Hurst to see him doodling flowers on the sticky note pad on my desk. Realizing he was giving us time while also giving us both his silent support, I turned back to Dad. “What do you mean?”

“The part which wasn’t a lie was that I was working on a case based on Luli’s involvement with the group who scammed men out of their divorce settlements. What I couldn’t tell you was that five years ago, a man called Marty Simpson committed suicide after being scammed by them, and his ex-wife demanded an investigation into the group, partly funded by her. She’d hired a PI who was the one who discovered that some of the key members of the group lived in the States, even though it was headed by the guy in Greece. One of those key members was Luli Wang. Because the suicide and scam had happened in our jurisdiction, we were pulled into the case, and it was decided that I’d go to her last known location – Vegas. We disguised it as a men’s weekend away, and after we found her in a casino, we placed high bets to get her attention.” His mouth twisted slightly as he looked away from me. “I was the one she focused on because I placed the largest ones. When it looked like she was losing interest, I bought her a few drinks, and pretended to marry her.”