Husband Material (London Calling #2)(64)

“Which means?”

“Which means we need to make sure you and your friends aren’t planning something…disruptive.”

“Disruptive?”

“People do all kinds of funny things at society weddings.”

I let my head fall forward onto the desk. “Can you not just call Alex or Miffy? They’ll tell you who we are.” Probably. Although Alex was never completely reliable when it came to remembering little things like who people were, what day it was, or what was going on.

“Sorry,” she said. “Out of my hands.”

I went back to…it wasn’t a cell exactly because we weren’t strictly under arrest. It was more a kind of waiting room. There Oliver was busy having an in-depth conversation with somebody who looked like they were important, and since he was an actual proper lawyer, I figured he knew what he was doing, so I went and sat with the rest of the party. More specifically, I went and sat with Barbara Clench.

“Hi,” I said.

She looked at me. “Hello.”

“I…” That was as far as I got.

“You don’t have to like me, Luc,” she said.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. My initial instinct was good because I don’t, but that sounded dickish even to me. “It’s not…” I tried, but that seemed insincere. “I mean, I don’t not… You didn’t invite me to your wedding.”

Barbara Clench gave me a look. “I was married when we met.”

“Okay, but you wouldn’t have invited me.”

For a moment she didn’t reply. Then she laughed. She had quite a nice laugh, just cold enough to sound like she meant it. “You’re right, I wouldn’t.” She looked around the room, then leaned in conspiratorially. “I wouldn’t invite any of this lot, to tell you the truth.”

“I know, right?”

“And if I’m being really honest,” she added, “I don’t think I’d want to go to your wedding either.”

I breathed one of the deepest sighs of relief I had in a long time.

“Oh, thank God. No offence, it’s just…”

“We’re not friends,” she said with an at-last-somebody-gets-it expression. “I’ve got friends. I assume you’ve got friends. I don’t see why we can’t just accept that the only thing we have in common with each other is that our inadequate paycheques are signed by the same people.”

“Exactly.” This was actually turning into one of my better work conversations. “Tell you what, how about we make a deal. I won’t invite you to my wedding, and in return, you don’t have to tell me anything about your life or give a single shit about mine.”

She held out a hand. “Done.”

I shook it and did my best to smile at her.

“But I don’t hate you,” she added.

“I don’t hate you either.”

She let go of my hand. “And…let’s leave it at that.”

Oliver had finished talking to whoever he was talking to, but from the look of very mild frustration on his face—he’d gone into professional mode, so very mild frustration was the worst he was going to show—he hadn’t got anywhere. “They’re being stubborn,”

he explained.

“Are we going to prison?” I asked. “Are we going to prison for breaking and entering? Did we break and enter on the way to a wedding?”

Oliver pulled up a blue plastic chair and sat down next to me.

“How much detail do you want on this?”

Damn, he was sexy when he was doing the lawyer bit. “All the detail.”

“If you insist.” He smiled, and everybody else—mistaking my request for interrogation rather than flirtation—gathered round. Well, everybody except for Professor Fairclough, who was looking at a spider, even though, as I was embarrassingly proud to remember, it wasn’t technically an insect.

“For a start,” Oliver continued, somewhat surprised to suddenly have an audience. “We’re not going to prison for breaking and entering because that’s not a distinct crime under UK law. Burglary is a crime, and trespassing is a civil infraction. We did trespass, but it only becomes burglary if the Crown can show that we trespassed with the intent to either steal or commit grievous bodily harm or unlawful damage.”

“We stole tea,” Barbara Clench pointed out, with the pedantic attention to detail that made her frustratingly good at her job.

“Technically we didn’t,” said Oliver. “We drank tea that didn’t belong to us, but stealing is when you dishonestly appropriate property belonging to another person with the intent to permanently deprive them of it. Of those five elements—”

“How do you get five elements out of one sentence?” I asked, partly because I liked playing my part in the law-is-cool-and-you’re-cool-for-knowing-it game we sometimes played and partly because I was genuinely confused.

“Dishonesty”—Oliver counted on his fingers—“property, appropriation, belonging to another person, and intent to permanently deprive.” He held up his open hand. “Five.”

“Also,” added Rhys, who was lounging across two chairs on the other side of the circle with his head in Ana with one n’s lap, “it’s only tea.”