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Didn’t what? Didn’t touch him? Didn’t spend half his twenties trying to fill every empty space in his life with someone else’s body? Hadn’t touched Brodie in months? Hadn’t looked twice at anyone since Harrison had stumbled into his life with polished shoes and tired eyes and made Jake want things he’d long since taught himself not to need? Hadn’t meant for any of this to matter so fucking much?
It all tangled uselessly behind his teeth.
But Harrison had stopped walking, and he glanced over his shoulder, sunglasses dipping down as if waiting for him to finish.
Jake swallowed hard. “I didn’t…do owt with him.” He tried again. Honest enough to ache. “I remembered it from before.”
Harrison said nothing. He just adjusted his sunglasses back into place, another wall sliding carefully between them, and walked away across the yard. And Jake could only stand there in the heat and watch him go.
He hated how much it bothered him.
A month ago he’d have laughed this off.
Now Harrison Black could walk away without even touching him and somehow leave him feeling emptier than any bloke ever had.
* * * *
Harrison shut the car door and sat motionless behind the wheel while the industrial estate carried on around him. He stared ahead, but he could still see Jake perfectly anyway. Through the rearview mirror, standing in the sun with sweat dampening the collar of his T-shirt and hurt sitting openly across his face despite how hard he’d tried to hide it.
I didn’t do owt with him.
It was absurd to feel anything about that. Jake Whitton was thirty-one years old, rough-edged and beautiful and emotionally complicated in ways Harrison was only just beginning to understand. Of course there had been other men before him. But Brodie wasn’t some nameless ex buried in the past. Harrison knew Brodie. Knew his history. How he’d survived before Hartswick. And knew how fixated on Jake he was.
That was the part he didn’t like.
Not because Jake had slept with him. But because Jake had a habit of throwing himself headfirst into things and dealing with the consequences afterwards.
That was how he’d ended up with Brodie.
And that was how he’d ended up in Hull.
And sooner or later, Harrison feared, it was how he’d end up getting hurt.
Christ.
The jealousy was bad enough. But the fear? That sat somewhere so deep inside him he couldn’t shake it.
He scrubbed a hand over his mouth and finally forced himself to start the engine as the detective in him took over. At least that he could rely on. Years of major investigations had trained his brain to compartmentalise ruthlessly; emotion shoved into one locked room while procedure occupied the other. But the doors between them had warped, and Jake Whitton had his fingerprints all over the cracks.
As Harrison guided the car off the estate road, he connected Murray through the hands-free system.
She answered immediately. “Guv.”
He’d dropped her back at Hartswick CID an hour earlier with instructions to formalise the Kayleigh Brennan interview notes and start circulating actions to intel and ANPR teams. Then he’d peeled away under the vague excuse of “another enquiry.”
Murray had been far too professional to ask what kind.
“I want broader vice intel requests pushed through Humberside tonight. Everything linked to Lauren Pike. Known associates, outreach contacts, drivers, regular clients, transient workers operating between Hull and North Yorkshire. Anyone connected to private bookings.”
The silence on the line lasted barely a second, but Harrison knew Murray well enough now to hear the shift in her thinking. She was reorganising the investigation in her head.
“You think she was working with someone?”
“I think there’s a possibility she was operating within a larger network than we initially thought.”
That much, at least, was true.
Because Lauren Pike had been marked with the same stitched heart Jake had seen on Brodie Simmons. A Hartswick barman from Hull himself, with his own history around sex work, suddenly sitting far too close to a murdered woman from the same place for Harrison to dismiss as coincidence.
