Seeing Red: Trowchester Series, #4

By Alex Beecroft

Bad boys don't tame easy.

Victor is a bad man. Is there anything he won't do for power and money?

Destroy a local business so he can buy it cheap, kick out its owners and turn it into a cash cow? He relishes the chance.

Idris is a good man in possession of a renowned tea-house. He's put his heart and soul into the place. It's everything he has and wants...

Except for Victor.

He wants Victor too.

Can the love of a compassionate man soften a predator's heart before it's too late? Or is Idris doomed to lose his life's work, and his heart with it?

~

A contemporary mm romance, Seeing Red is a long-awaited new installment of the critically acclaimed Trowchester Series.

Each book in the series is a standalone, and can be read in any order.

Feel free to start here and work back!

Get Seeing Red today and visit the town where love conquers all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Beecroft
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393386254

Alex Beecroft

Alex Beecroft was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the Peak District. Alex studied English and Philosophy before accepting employment with the Crown Court where she worked for a number of years. Now a stay-at-home mum and full time author, Alex lives with her husband and two daughters in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist. Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has lead a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800 year old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn't learned to operate a mobile phone.

Book preview

Chapter One

THE ROAR OF AN ENGINE - throaty, menacing - made even the blase inhabitants of the business section of Canary Wharf turn toward it. The endless scurry of pedestrians paused, and Victor St.John paused with them as he came out of Canary Wharf underground and walked the two hundred feet to the entrance of his work.

His reflection walked beside him, bright in the spring sunshine, immaculately dressed in a slate-blue suit and a tie as orange as his hair. He surreptitiously checked it while everyone else was looking the other way, and approved of what he saw. He was tall, slender, his eyes matched the suit and the creases in his trousers were as sharp as his cheekbones. The glint of the Rolex on his wrist was partly obscured by his plain white shirt—individually crafted by his tailor—and he shoved his jacket sleeves up a little to put it more plainly in view.

He seemed to belong here. That was the thing. He seemed a successful, dynamic businessman with a trust fund and an impeccable heritage. No one would know, just by looking, that he was an impostor, who by all rights should have been picking pockets and petty shoplifting in a knock-off imitation Nike track-suit and an aura of despair.

The approaching engine gave a louder bellow, and even Victor had to look. He had reached the door of Kyneton Capital by that time, and his hand was on the silvered panel ready to push. There were no automatic doors in his part of the building. The public were not invited in.

Crowds parted like the Red Sea, revealing the source of the predatory growl. Shiny red paint was cut with swirls of black. The car slid close to the ground like a panther ready to pounce. The very wheels were gold, and the organic curves of the thing breathed exclusivity.

Though it was warm enough to travel on the underground without a coat, Victor would not have chosen to drive a car with the top down... but this monster didn’t have a top to put up. It was all a huge gleaming basin around two gray bucket seats. The only thing above head height was the roll bar.

With a sensation as though he had been slapped in the face, Victor recognized two things simultaneously. The car was a Ferrari Pininfarina Sergio, worth three million pounds. And it was being driven by his co-worker Jack Archer, with his jacket off and his over-long chestnut hair tangled by the wind, an infuriatingly smug expression on his handsome face.

Victor drew his cuff down over his wrist without thinking, knowing he had been outplayed and resenting it. The only way he would come back from Jack arriving in a three mil car was to act as though the display was vulgar, as if he wore Saville Row suits because he liked them and had no desire to boast about it to anyone.

Victor! Jack waved at him, calling out to make certain Victor had witnessed his triumphant arrival. He idled along the pavement outside the firm’s discreet entrance—naturally there was nowhere on the street to park. What d’you think? Nice, eh? Client parted with it for a song.

Oh, you bought it second hand? Victor managed, his tongue supplying the scathing insult straight out of the seethe of jealousy and covetousness. I should have known. They’re for invitation-only buyers. Of course you couldn’t have got it new.

Jack’s breezy smile hardened into a baring of the teeth for an instant, and then it melted once more into a boyish laugh. Don’t be jealous, he laughed. Get in. I’ll drive you down to the parking garage.

Victor would rather gnaw off his own arm, so he didn’t understand why he opened the door and sank farther than he expected into a seat that cradled him like an egg around a chick.

Perhaps he just wanted to be associated with the car for the few moments it took to drive to the intersection and then around the back of the building and into the firm’s basement garage. It was pleasant to have the ferocious engine noise rebounding at him from all the glass and chrome of the offices, and to know he was turning heads, even if it was at Jack’s invitation.

Jack smirked in the knowledge that he had won this round. The reflected glory in which Victor was traveling was Jack’s glory, the glory of the outrageous car.

How d’you like that engine? Jack leaned in close to whisper it into Victor’s ear as they sat for a moment with it idling in a parking place. The purr of it went right through Victor’s body, rumbling through his ass, thighs and back like an expensive massage. Jack was too close. Cold menthol heat flashed down his spine at the graze of lips on his ear. Feeling small again, panicked, he threw himself out of the machine.

It’s quite a car, he allowed, trying unsuccessfully to at least play the ‘unaffected and gracious’ card.

You come in by tube, don’t you? Jack laughed. He was always laughing—famous for it, in fact—very popular in bars and nightclubs, where his easy confidence and his confiding, slightly over-affectionate manners got him read as a good-humored party animal. Victor didn’t buy it. Can’t you drive?

Gentlemen!

Victor was glad he was already out of the car, able to stiffen like a pointer dog and turn towards their boss’s voice with an impression of alertness, of being ready for anything.

Lose your license or never learn?

I’m perfectly able to drive a car, Victor snapped back. But my apartment is barely a mile away. The tube is more efficient.

The boss cleared her throat. A-hem. We have something to discuss. Follow me.

Victor twitched off the accusation of being too stupid to drive, though it rankled. He followed Ms Paige dutifully into the lift and rose silently towards her penthouse office, Jack’s looming presence beside him.

London stretched out in panoramic splendor beneath the office’s wrap-around windows. Splendid it was indeed today, beneath the mild spring sun. The Thames twinkled, and a silvery haze obscured the dirt and traffic. Canary Wharf’s glass-and-silver skyscrapers seemed to float in a lemon mist above the old dockyards, where the boats steered stately down the river as they had done for a thousand years.

I’ve been promoted, Ms Paige said from behind her steel-and-glass desk. Her hair was as lemon as the mist, but the sunlight brought out a few wrinkles around her eyes that would undoubtedly be Botoxed away by the next time they met.

Victor made appropriate congratulatory noises, while his mind jumped immediately to who would succeed her. It was him or Jack, and Jack, surely, had exhausted his luck for one morning. Ambition sat on his tongue like salt, making his mouth water.

Ms Paige picked up two brown folders and handed them out, one to Victor, one to Jack. She didn’t smile. He wasn’t sure she still could.

As I’m sure you’re well aware, one of you will replace me. To decide which, I’ve given you a task. You’ve each been given the address and details of a business you are to acquire for the firm. This is work below your current status, but I want to know that you still have that killer instinct. Your particular business is in your home town, so you should be familiar with the area. I will be judging you on speed of acquisition, cleanness of operation—no law suits or adverse publicity against the firm—and...

Her lips did twitch up a fraction as if to call him a liar, and style. Get to it at once; I have already instructed your assistants to take over your regular duties for as long as it takes.

As long as it takes sounded like a veiled threat. If she was suggesting that his assistant could handle his job for as long as it took, she was also suggesting he was replaceable.

Yes Ma’am, he said, nodding acquiescence and hurrying back to the lift to get started.

Jack knocked his shoulder in his haste to get through the doors too. Want to make it interesting? he asked.

More interesting than who gets to be the boss in future? Victor’s empty stomach cramped at the thought of Jack being in charge of him, Jack with the restraints removed. The man gave him a vibe he recognized all too well.

More personal, then. Jack grinned. Your crash-pad in town is worth about the same as my car. A boss should have both, don’t you think? What d’you say? Your flat against my car. Winner gets it all.

Was that all? He breathed out, relieved. He’d been afraid of something more personal, more demeaning. I’d be delighted, he said.

ALTHOUGH HIS FIRST instinct was to throw an overnight bag into his own car and drive immediately to Trowchester, to begin on the spot, Victor resisted it. Jack of course went roaring away at once. He’d be relying on his charm and his ability to wing things. Victor had neither, so he spent the day in his own office, researching his victim—the Mermaid Tea House.

Why Kyneton Capital wanted this particular tea-shop was clear to him at once. It was a local landmark. Though he hadn’t been in, himself, he knew of it. He’d passed it many a time and seen the queues that trailed from its door. The superiority of its tea and the coziness of its ambiance were lauded all over social media. The twee frontage of the shop featured on every tourist guide the city put out.

Kyneton Capital would make it into a chain, capitalize on that reputation for personalized quirkiness and make sure every town with a tourist trade had one just like it. Then they would go after the rest of the independent cafes and force them to close, leaving themselves in direct competition only with the ‘corporate,’ ‘soul-less’ coffee-chains like Starbucks. He could see how that would work, and he spent a couple of hours drawing up a business plan, detailing the steps necessary to turn this charming labor of love into a cash cow.

But before that, the present owners had to be bought out. He dug out the business’s tax records, identified the owners—Idris and Lalima Malakar.

Malakar took him to tea producers in Bangladesh. That was a powerful family owning acres of tea plantations and trading in tea wholesale. The shop seemed like a test project. Perhaps the Malakar family were thinking of controlling all aspects of the tea-drinking business, from production to consumption? In which case Idris and Lalima Malakar would be savvy young operators themselves.

Victor smiled at his monitor. Going up against two scions of a business dynasty, who had already successfully put together the pilot store of a potential new franchise? This would be quite a challenge.

He pulled up pictures of the two from when they had been interviewed for a five-minute advert by the Trowchester tourist board. They didn’t look anything special—Lalima was in jeans and a flowery headscarf, a fresh-faced, pleasant girl. Idris was older, his face round and his smile beaming. But of course an appearance of being harmless and likable was a potent weapon. Not one that Victor had ever really mastered.

Having learned everything he could, and mapped out several potential plans of action, he stretched and raised his head to discover that the windows were dark and he was, as always, the only one left in the office. He stood and indulged himself by meeting his own eyes in the reflective glass.

Yes, he still resembled a man who knew what he was doing—like a potential boss, with one foot already on the rung. Only he knew himself well enough to recognize the ever-present fear in the back of his eyes.

He would not fail. He would not fall. He could relax later, when it was safe.

Driving to Trowchester, as he did every Friday, was automatic. He listened to ‘teach yourself German’ on the stereo and tried not to contemplate what life would be like if Jack beat him to this. Despair was not useful, and fear only made him strive harder. He was a long way away from the boy he had been in the home, and every step of it had been done against the odds. The Malakar family of Chittagong would not be the ones to stop him.

He drove straight to the waterside and parked in the public car-park behind the square, where a statue of a luminous crayfish brought soap-bubble highlights from his Lotus’s pearly finish. Getting out, he tucked his car keys into his shoulder bag along with his laptop, wallet, business cards and phone, and set it carefully on his shoulder where it would wrinkle his jacket least.

Jack kept these things in his pockets. Pockets! Which meant the line of his suits were full of bulges and the material dragged down into unsightly creases. It was no way to treat a suit that cost most people’s monthly rent.

He checked his watch. Eight thirty pm. The tea-shop was closed at this hour, but a delivery of rare teas was due—the schedule had been easy enough to find with a bit of data mining. While the supplier was the Malakar family itself, the delivery drivers might be encouraged to let the occasional load spoil or be ‘mislaid,’ and it was a start. Nothing like finally getting to grips with the operation on the ground.

Victor idled past the closed door, walking through a wash of sweet-pea scent from the long trailers of flowers in the hanging baskets. He took his vape-pen from his bag and breathed in a gust of cinnamon-flavored water, letting it out in a cloud silvered by the single wrought-iron street lamp that stood in front of the shop.

The other shops on the small square were shut up tight and silent. A narrowboat moored below the steps to his right made a series of clunks as someone inside shut the shutters over the portholes. Then silence fell, the kind of silence he always forgot when he went to London—the kind that reminded him how insignificant he was.

Something whimpered, and the hairs on Victor’s scalp stood up with an aching prickle. He switched off the e-cig and listened harder, coming alert as he had in the home, day or night, sleeping or awake, when he heard the approach of danger.

Voices were muttering urgently, but no one was in sight. Without thinking too much about what he was doing, he opened the tea-shop’s side gate and walked through its neatly kept garden toward the alley at the back.

The voices grew clearer; I still think if we sold ‘em we’d get a bob or two.

Just put a bloody brick in it and sink ‘em.

Victor melted into the shadow of the tea-room’s industrial bins. To his right, silhouetted against the light reflected from the river, two men were putting something small and struggling into a sack. A piteous whimpering was already coming from inside, and as the first man’s meaty hands closed over the wriggling thing, it gave a sharp, high-pitched yelp of pain.

Primal fury and instinct boiled out of Victor’s spine, up his neck and took over all his thought processes. He dropped the e-cig, sprinted out of the shadow and kicked the man in the shin as hard as his shiny dress shoes would allow. What the fuck are you doing?

"What the fuck are you doing?" The man echoed, trying to fend Victor off with one hand while hopping on his unhurt leg, his other hand clamped tight around the nose of what Victor now saw was a tiny puppy. By the squirming of the sack the second man held, there were more in there.

Victor’s body was doing the thinking for him. Something along the lines of small, helpless, scared, hurt. When the puppy growled and sank its tiny teeth into the webbing of the man’s hand, Victor laughed and bared his own to do the same.

The second man grabbed him before he could take a chunk out of the first’s nose and hauled him back. His bag swung forward and cracked the first man in the stomach, and the guy made a grab for it.

Victor snatched it away, but in the moment’s distraction the second guy got him by the collar again and threw him aside. He crashed into the closest bin, knocking it over with a dull booming sound. The first guy was already dismissing him, turning the two steps with the bag of puppies dangling over the dark water.

Victor pulled the butterfly knife he had stashed in an outside pocket of his bag and dropped the rest of it—it was getting in the way of his knife hand. In his brain, things had tangled together—he was the one being threatened, being murdered. His life was in danger, and he had no one but himself to defend it.

Put the fucking dogs down and get the fuck out of here, he slurred, fury putting a tremble in his voice. It sounded like he was scared, and the truth was that he was always scared, but these dogs had inexplicably just become part of him, and he was going down before they were.

Chapter Two

OUT, OUT! GO HOME, all of you. Idris made a shooing motion at his waiting staff, Aidan and Molly, who stood chatting in the tea-room’s empty main salon. They had finished wiping down tables half an hour ago and were now only chatting, pretending to be monitoring the open fire as it burned down to ashes.

They were a handsome pair. Not actually a pair—they both had their own partners—but they looked good together in a tableau of fake Englishness that made them excellent for front-of-house work. Aidan had a slightly rakish bad-boy look reminiscent of Tom Hardy, and Molly’s pretty face and ginger curls distracted the gentlemen customers from how their wives giggled when Aidan spoke to them. Harmless flirtation was supplied with the tea, and hopefully left the customers feeling just as warmed as the real log fires in each room.

Are you sure? Aidan asked, giving Idris a nervous look as if he was eager to help but sure to be criticized for it. The man’s skittishness was habit and it was fading, but Idris still didn’t like to see it. He had to remind himself that Aidan placated his own ghosts by it, and didn’t mean to imply that Idris was an unreasonable employer.

Of course I’m sure, he said, as kindly as he could. There’s nothing left to do but douse the fires—

And wait for the suppliers! his cousin Lalima called from the office—technically just an anteroom between the kitchen and the front of house, where the till and the computer was. If he craned around the arch from the main room, he could see her there with her face still lit up by the blue-gray light of the screen.

I’m waiting for them! he shouted back. And I’m a big boy who doesn’t need company while he waits. Don’t you all have other halves to go to? Go and rejoice in the rest of your lives, in your loved ones and the blessings they bring to you. Go!

The flippant words tripped him up even as he said them—they’d been meant half jokingly, as the sort of thing one said without thinking. But they brought home to him once more that he had no one waiting outside. The business was his life, and that was—

I’m waiting with you! Lalima yelled, just as Aidan and Molly finished placing fire-guards in front of the hearths and began to struggle into their coats. I can take the time to go through the books.

Technically, Idris shouldn’t even have complained about being alone. He and his cousin shared a flat just five minutes walk away, on Watergate Street. Nothing fancy, neither of them had expected to be in it for long. When they came to England from Bangladesh, it was with the starry-eyed determination that they were their own people now. They would own a business and find their own partners like very up-to-date modern people, and whichever of them married first would buy their own house and leave the flat to the other.

That was still the plan, but it was now ten years later, and although business was thriving, it was at the cost of everything else.

He walked into the office and leaned against the arch of the doorway. Lalima was hunched over the computer in a curve that hurt his back to see. The gray light picked out the bags under her eyes and the fine wrinkles beginning to spider out around the corners of her lips. She worked all day in the kitchen cooking. She did not deserve to work all evening in the office.

They’ll wait a little longer, he said, quietly enough to hear the front door closing behind his last employees. With their energy withdrawn, the tea-shop seemed to revert to the private house it had once been—quiet, homely and full of the good tiredness that comes after a long day, when the evening is one’s own. Go home. It’s fine, I mean it. I will eat the left-over soup and scones, and simply luxuriate in my own kingdom for a little while. It doesn’t need two of us, and I am not afraid of being alone.

She glanced up at him with eyes almost as dark as her hijab. Aren’t you? I am. Then she grimaced at her own intensity and gave an apologetic laugh, closing down the computer one application at a time. I mean, I will go home, if you’re sure. The washing needs doing, and I would like to make some real food to put in the freezer for the weekend. But... she laughed again. "Tell me you’re not beginning