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“No, Cayman, that will not comeat all.”
I looked into my empty pint glass. The thought of another turned my stomach. “I should head back.”
“We all should. I’ll settle up.”
“Who will drive?” Poseidon asked.
Wilder nodded. “I’ll call Z.”
Thus giving Z yet another reason to be on my arse. I groaned.
The pub door had been opening and closing all night, so I didn’t pay much attention when it did again. Not until a hush came over the room. I turned around and came face-to-face with Paul Fowler—Bexli’s father. Her brother was beside him, and they both puffed themselves up like they were itching for a fight.
It had been years since I saw either of them. While I had had too many pints, I could still see they looked like fucking hell. Bloated, red-nosed, bloodshot eyes, the stench of stale malt permeating the air around them. I turned away from them both. No good could come from a confrontation between me and either man. It was a toss-up as to who the drunker of the three of us was.
“Well, if it ain’t the batty boy who’s been wantin’ in me daughter’s knickers. Not that he’d know what to do when he got there, eh?” He laughed, and while his son did too, most in the pub didn’t.
“Didn’t ya hear me, boy?” he said, slurring his words.
“I heard you,” I responded without looking over my shoulder at him. My eyes met Poseidon’s across the table. There was a fire in them, just like mine.
“Bexli ain’t nothin’ but a fuckin’ slag anyway.”
I was up from the table and in Fowler’s face before he had his first laugh at his own daughter’s expense.
“Whatcha’ gonna do, fag boy?” he sneered. “Ya gonna slap me with those doughy hands of yours?”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Bex’s brother pull back to take a swing at me. Before he landed it, I popped him in the face, feeling the crunch of bone when I delivered a direct hit to his nose. Fowler’s slimy hand grabbed the back of my shirt at the same time I saw the guys moving in.
“Let me handle this,” I shouted, spinning around and knocking him off me with my left hand while my right landed with full force in his gut. When he doubled over, I looked at his son. Blood poured from his nose. While I hated seeing the evidence of me being too drunk to control my temper, what I saw in the doorway beyond him was worse.Bexli.Her eyes were wide, and her hand was over her mouth.
“Forgive me, Bex,” I said too quietly for her to hear me before walking to the opposite side of the pub and leaving through the exit into the alley.
The cold night air sobered me enough to realize her father and brother may very well come after me. When I rushed out of the alley and saw an SUV with blackened windows, I knew it wasn’t them. When it came to a stop, I opened the door and climbed in. I was about to ask Z what he was doing here, but remembered Wilder saying he would call him.
“Paul Fowler and his son showed up,” I said, shaking my aching hand.
“I feared something like that might happen.”
“Bexli saw me level both of them.”
“No doubt they deserved it many times over.”
“I shouldn’t have done it.”
Z shrugged a shoulder. “Perhaps not.”
Neither of us spoke again until we reached the estate. “There’s a briefing tomorrow at zero eight hundred.”
I would’ve balked, but I was already on everyone’s shit list. “Yes, sir,” I muttered before exiting the vehicle.
While overindulging on alcohol typically interfered with my sleep, combining it with the utter exhaustion I felt put me out almost immediately. Right before I closed my eyes, I took one last look at my mobile. As much as I wanted to find a message from Bexli, I cringed, fearing what it might say.
Thankfully, or otherwise, there wasn’t one. The only thing I did see that buoyed my spirits at all was the time. We’d gone to the pub early. Given it was only twenty-one hundred hours, there was a good chance I’d sleep off my drunkenness before tomorrow’s briefing.
24
BEXLI
