Page 34 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
As his mouth moved into a lazy smile, I kissed it off him. After a moment of fumbling, the gloves and toilet brush crashed to the floor and his hands were in my hair, holding me steady as he kissed me back until we were breathless and potential was colliding firmly with actuality.
Eventually we drew apart and I took in a huge lungful of the scent of domestic toilet cleaner, which was filling the air. ‘Well,’ I said.
‘Not just well but pretty bloody amazingly fine, I’d say.’ Flynn shook his hair back. ‘And maybe now we should talk.’
Talking had not been the verb that I’d had in mind, not with him looking so dishevelled and sexily overheated, but I’d go with it. ‘What about?’
‘Let’s go and sit in the bar. Would you like a glass of wine?’ He was watching me.
‘No thanks. I want to know what we’re talking about.’
We shuffled awkwardly out of the toilets and through to the cleaner air of the bar, where we pulled our chairs around the club’s usual table, and Flynn took out his phone. ‘This is what I showed Dexter.’
It was a photo. Flynn, with shorter hair and looking smart in a business suit, next to a man I vaguely recognised. The man had his arm around Flynn’s shoulders and a broad smile on his face.
‘That’s…’
‘That’s me. Yes. Last year, in Oz, right after we’d won an award for the rooftop bar I was managing.’
‘That man, that’s Andrew Mays-Harrison, isn’t it?’ An entrepreneur, a TV pundit onThe Apprentice, sometime Dragon onDragon’s Den. Businessman, football club owner, sponsor of an F2 team, general public moneybags. Made AlanSugar look as though he was scrabbling about down the back of the sofa for 50p’s.
‘Mmm.’ Flynn put his phone away. ‘He’s my dad.’
I jumped to my feet unwisely fast and felt the stabbing of those thousands of splinter cuts anew. ‘What? Bugger, ow!’
‘And I told Dexter that if he came near you in future, I’d bring the whole of my dad’s security detail to bear on him and he’d be lucky if he ever saw daylight again. He’d actually be lucky if he ever saw anything other than the bottom of a deep river, and nobody would know where he’d gone.’ Flynn cleared his throat. ‘A little bit hyperbolic, I have to admit, and Dad’s not quite as much of a gangster as I made him out to be, but the end result would be the same.’
I stared at him. ‘But that’s…’ The ends of my sentences had clearly wandered off again.
‘I apologise for not telling you this before,’ Flynn went on, leaning his elbows on the table. ‘But I had to be certain that you didn’t already know this. About who I am, I mean.’
‘What the hell difference would it make?’
‘Ah, you sweet innocent.’ He gave me a grin that was almost pure mischief. A small proportion, though, seemed wary. ‘Margot recognised me. Her husband and my dad were on some kind of committee together, apparently, so she’d met me before, a long time ago. I didn’t remember. We meet a lot of people.’
‘She didn’t say anything to me.’ I still felt winded by his revelation. Why had I never asked his surname? Why had I gone on assuming that he was just a barman?
‘No.’ Now Flynn looked serious. ‘I had to know that you thought we might have a shot together before I said anything to you. I needed to be sure…’ He stopped and became very interested in the floor underneath our table. ‘I needed to be sure that you wantedme,’ he said, slightly muffled by his own collar.
‘As opposed to? Henry Cavill? He wasn’t here snogging me in a toilet though.’
‘As opposed to wanting an “in” on Dad’s corporation. I’ve got a bit of precedent for women who – well, let’s say that I wasn’t the main reason they wanted to be with me.’ He was still talking to the floor.
‘And that’s why you left Australia?’ The winded feeling had turned to a vague prickliness, almost like the onset of a faint. As though the world had suddenly become unreal.
‘Mmm. Two in a row. Second one wanted to move in with me, and I was just starting to clear the ground for that to happen, finding us a bigger place to live in one of the suburbs…’ Flynn looked up at me now. ‘In Australia, there’s a common law agreement. If you live together for two years then split up, it’s the same thing as a marriage split: you divide property and finances and all that. Luckily I found out in time – she already had a boyfriend. She was using me, going to wait out the two years and then take me for financial support and a share of the property.’
‘Oh, Flynn,’ I said softly. Although his words were matter of fact, there was a creasing around his eyes and a tightening of his mouth that said he’d cared, and finding out that he was being used had hit him hard.
‘Yeah, they were in it together, her and her boyfriend. She was going to set him up in his own business with the money she took off me. Marry him and leave me in the dust.’
Despite our recent close encounter, I felt strange touching him, but I put my hand on his arm. ‘That must have been hard.’
‘My mum died when I was fifteen,’ he said.
‘Right. I have no idea why that should have any relevance to this, but I’ll go with it.’ I kept my hand on his sleeve and he put his over the top.
‘After she… died, me and Dad… we only had eachother. He taught me all about business but he kind of left out the mum stuff. The bits about how you deal with women. So, I’m an idiot sometimes.’
