The Driver Read online

  “Would you do that thing with the privacy screen?”

  I glanced in the rear view apprehensively, seeing the comforting beige wall staring back. He’d definitely never asked me to do that, not in four months of working for him. The Phantom was equipped with something called electrochromic glass, which meant with a flick of a switch I could dissolve the opaque wall behind me and it would become transparent in an instant.

  I pressed the relevant switch before the silence became oppressive.

  “You want to stop?” I asked, annoyed to hear my voice came out a little hoarse. He was lounging in the back seat, his face turned toward the window, his sharp features highlighted by the streetlights as we passed.

  The problem was, every time I actually spent any time looking at Cal I couldn’t help staring at him like I wanted to lick him…which I did. So I concentrated on the road in front of me, instead.

  “How old are you?” His eyes were dark and reflected the speckled lights that covered the ceiling of the car.

  “I thought we established I was old enough to be your father.”

  He sat up slightly, “What? When?”

  “You told me that the first time I met you. And two weeks after that. And yesterday.”

  “Oh. Fuck. Okay fine, just tell me. You’re clearly too young to be my father.”

  “What a compliment. Thanks.” I shook my head. “I’m thirty seven. How old are you?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Humour me.” He chuckled. He chuckled and it was deep and throaty and it went straight to my cock. I shifted just a little in my seat and swallowed. This was bad. This was very, very bad.

  I focused on the turn I was making and kept trying to picture Kayla sucking his dick. That helped a little. Women just did nothing for me, but it annoyed me that the idea of someone else touching him was vaguely unpleasant.

  “I’m twenty five. Nearly.” I wondered whether he told people the truth about his age. He was the son of a billionaire and lying seemed to be a natural instinct for him. He didn’t look twenty four. He looked younger.

  Beautiful, young and miserable, that seemed a good description of Cal.

  He got a hard time from the press as an Emerson. The media loved their family because it always had some scandal or other to report on. The papers would sprawl his name, or his father’s name, over the headlines, because of a new deal, a new woman, or a new secret that had been discovered.

  If Cal was with women, and he was with women a lot, he would always lie about his name. It tripped off his tongue effortlessly; I’d watched him in action, pretending he was a spy or a self-made millionaire who’d invented some app that would change the world. I actually felt flattered that he told me his real age, although he must have known I knew it. I knew a lot about him.

  “But you knew that already,” He was still watching me in the rear view mirror.

  “I did. So where to? We’re near Tape if you wanted a dance.”

  He pushed his hair out of his eyes and took a long drink. “Nah. Let’s just drive for a while. You got enough petrol?”

  “Always,” I answered with a smile and tried not to let him see how confused I was. We didn’t drive around for no reason and if we did, he certainly never wanted to talk to me. “You okay?”

  I wanted to bite those words back, but they were out there now, hanging in the air like a tragic balloon. I kept my eyes on the road and he just grunted.

  “Yeah, I’m fantastic, John-boy; you just get on with driving, huh?” I clenched my jaw and concentrated on the traffic and the endless blurring lights for a few long minutes. Why had I asked if he was okay? He lived his life to torment me.

  “I knew it.” He said the words softly, and I could tell without looking that he was smiling that cocky little sideways smile he kept, just to rile me. I felt my fingers tighten on the soft leather of the steering wheel. I’d forgotten he could see me. “I knew I pissed you off,” he continued, “you always pretend you don’t care about what I do back here but it pisses you off. I fucking knew it.”

  His voice had no triumph in it. He wasn’t crowing about it, he was stating a fact, unemotionally, and sounding slightly depressed.

  “You don’t piss me off,” I hazarded, “but stop calling me John-boy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my name’s Jonathan and if you have to shorten it and you don’t want to call me ‘Mr Taylor’, like you did for the first three seconds after meeting me, then call me Jon.”

  “Really?” He mulled it over, swilling his drink around thoughtfully. “Can I call you Nate?”

  I pulled over as blue flashing lights erupted in my rear view mirror and an ambulance siren suddenly blared from nowhere. I got into a layby and waited for it to pass. Cal didn’t turn his head to look at it. He was continually staring out of the opposite passenger window, his face in profile, illuminated by the passing headlights, his lips slightly wet from his drink.

  He had a beautiful mouth.

  “No. You can’t.”

  I pulled out in front of some idiot in a BMW who had been tailing me for over a mile of traffic and cut him off as he changed lanes, with some satisfaction.

  “Can I call you Jonah?” Again the inflection in his voice was all wrong. It was flat and dry; he didn’t even vaguely smile, although I was pretty sure he was kidding. He was a cocky arsehole and I’d seen his dry, icy, wit enough times to know there was a very clever brain in that beautiful head of his.

  “You can try, but it probably wouldn’t end well for you.”

  “Okay Jay, you got it.” Finally the barest hint of a smile. I glanced at him and he glanced at me. For a second our gazes locked and I couldn’t look away, and then I dragged my gaze back to the road. “Hey, Jay?”

  “Yes sir.” He chuckled again and I internally growled at my dick as it stood up and took notice.

  “Let’s go to Blakeman’s.”

  I smiled. Blakeman’s was a good spot for me and Cal knew it. He didn’t specifically know why it was a good spot, and I wasn’t about to educate him.

  Cal had surprised me once by only going into the bar for ten minutes and then reappearing. He’d caught me in the coffee house across the street chatting to Martin, the owner, who also happened to be my big brother. I’d managed to make up some excuse at the time, scurrying back to the car with my tail firmly between my legs and changing the subject three different times to try and get Cal off the scent. The last thing I needed was for him to get curious about the parts of my life outside of the car.

  Martin and I had been running the café for nearly five years and I’d been helping him cover the morning shifts whenever he needed me to. Recently, that had been on far too many occasions whilst juggling a full-time job.

  I managed the driving and the late nights with Cal as best I could but I knew eventually something would have to give before I fell asleep at the wheel and put my life and Cal’s in danger. I’d never explained who Martin was to Cal, and I had no intention of telling him we were related.

  It wasn’t far and soon I was pulling into the familiar turning circle in front of the club. There were female bouncers on the door and they were aggressively terrifying to everyone; but Cal could charm the pattern off an adder and he had them in the palm of his hand long before I met him.

  I watched him get out, with his usual annoyingly graceful movements, and he leaned back inside to murmur quietly, “Say hi to Martin for me, Jay.” And then the door closed and I heard the gentle greetings from the bouncers and I pulled away from the curb, trying my best not to analyse why he knew my brother’s name or why his gentle farewell had made me warm all over.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mama’s Hut was our little coffee house opposite Blakeman’s. We’d bought the place together about seven years before, but it had always been Martin’s baby. I wasn’t much for interior design but we’d had the help of Martin’s wife, Marie, for decorating the little space and it was smart and chic inside, often attracting touri
sts in off the street just from the look and feel of the place.

  The wall behind the bar was painted a deep shade of blue, with a cross-hatching of gold lines across the whole length of it. The blue was then repeated as a theme on all the tables with dark blue table legs and white table tops, bright blue crockery that was rimmed with gold and a white floor.

  The menu boards were made up of three wooden pallets, which had been used to carry in some of the furniture and we’d asked the builders if we could keep them in a moment of nostalgia. I still remembered the drunken hysteria from the night when Martin, Marie and I, had sat up until three o’clock in the morning, painting the surfaces of the pallets with blackboard paint, wondering what the hell we’d got ourselves into.

  The mortgage for this part of London was astronomical, even for such a small space, and Martin and I had been working day and night to earn enough to pay for it.

  Martin’s dream was to be a chef and we knew that if we could extend into the shop next door and make it into a restaurant in the evening and a café in the day, we could make a lot of money. It was one of the reasons we were both so stubborn about hanging onto it, despite the aggressive landlord and the unflinching demands of the council to justify planning permission.

  Everything made in the café was either a recipe from my parents, or one Martin had cultivated himself. He loved cake and he loved steak and although he was yet to make something that incorporated both it wasn’t for lack of trying. What’s more, his wife had been vegetarian, so not only could he cook amazing food for carnivores he also had some killer recipes for vegans and veggies and with the upswing in that trend, we’d started to make a tidy profit.

  We had been right on the cusp of it all, about three weeks from getting the final renovation plans off for approval when Marie, my beautiful, wonderful, sister-in-law, had found out she had breast cancer and then everything had fallen apart for a long time.

  At the time of her diagnosis and all of us felt like we were on the brink of meltdown, it had been a pure panic move for me to offer to help out in the café in the mornings. I knew nothing about serving customers, zero about being a barista and at the time I was working all the hours God sent with a CEO from a cigarette company who kept threatening to fire me at the drop of a hat.

  It had been awful, but I had realised after a few weeks that despite the sleep deprivation and having to deal with snooty women in yoga leggings complaining their coffee wasn’t ‘wet’ enough, I really loved the atmosphere of the place and I found that I enjoyed working there, too. I was able to quit my job as a driver for a while with the savings I’d accumulated and I knuckled down to supporting Martin, Marie and their twin girls. It had been a good thing too, because it wasn’t long until we lost Marie to the disease, and we needed each other more than ever.

  After Marie died, we had to constantly juggle the shifts between us to keep the café open. Martin was a single dad with a lot of time that had to be dedicated to Molly and Cassie and getting their lives to remain vaguely normal after the loss of their Mum.

  All in all it took a lot of late nights, hard work and tears before after about three years we started to break even again. Sounds simple when you sum it up like that, but the number of times we both thought we were going to have to abandon the whole thing must have been in the hundreds by the end of it.

  I had had to constantly take freelance work, even working as an Uber driver for a while, to keep money coming in and we’d both been constantly exhausted.

  Then, by some miracle, I had met Donald Emerson at a business event Martin and I had bribed our way into, and he offered me a job as Cal’s driver. Even then Irene’s influence was still helping me. Donald had known her well and when I mentioned our connection he had called her on the spot, something I now know is a tactic he uses a lot, to check on my references. I wasn’t even sure what time it was in New Zealand but she answered on the third ring and in thirty seconds I had the job.

  It had been a godsend and even though Martin disliked the Emerson’s almost as much as me, we both acknowledged that it had saved our business. Cal tended to avoid early morning meetings if he could; he was much more of a ‘midday until midnight’ kind of guy. That meant I could work at the café in the mornings, while Martin dropped the girls at school, and then he could take over and I’d head to work.

  We managed to hire help at the weekends with my new salary for support, and although the late nights were tiring and I still wasn’t getting enough sleep, it was the best solution we had and we were both managing to cope okay.

  Once all of that had been sorted out and we had a steady way to pay the rent and keep the business on its feet we were, unfortunately, still struggling.

  The venue was amazing, and it would have had a high yield if we could have done what we wanted with it, but it was hard getting loans to pay for the refurbishments when I was freelance and Martin was from a single wage household and running his own business to boot.

  We both knew we were going to need to make some very hard decisions in the near future, but as I walked through the door and breathed in the familiar smells of the place I couldn’t ever imagine us selling up.

  I plopped myself down at the far end of the bar and there was a black coffee in front of me in a few seconds.

  “You look awful.” I glanced up at Martin, who was almost as wide as he was tall now, beefy, huge hairy arms, and massive muscles - entirely unlike me. I loved watching him with the twins because he could throw them around as though they weighed nothing at all. They adored him.

  He was also bald with an enormous beard and tattoos everywhere. I grinned at him halfheartedly and did a salute with my coffee.

  “Fuck you.”

  “That shithead still running you ragged?”

  “Of course,” I gave him a look, “you’re a slave driver.”

  He chuckled good-naturedly as he expertly added whipped cream to a mug of hot chocolate he was making and went off to deliver it to a little girl of about seven who had clearly been given permission to order it herself by her mother. Her eyes went wide when she saw the marshmallows on top.

  I smiled. It was early evening and that kid wasn’t going to sleep a wink after that much sugar.

  Martin made her squeal with glee as he handed her the cup and she walked very carefully back to her mother.

  Martin came back over to me and crossed his arms, giving me an assessing look.

  “You do look dreadful, though.”

  ”I was here this morning at five am, so that’s your fault.” I said, pointedly, meaning it as a joke, if not a gentle rebuke, but regretted my works immediately.

  I was still finding my way around the new Martin. Since Marie had died he seemed to worry about everyone and everything and it was extremely difficult to convince him I was okay when he could see the bags under my eyes. He squinted at me with his head cocked on one side.

  “I can get in another temp. I don’t like the idea of you being so tired all the time behind the wheel.”

  “I’m ok, Marv. I just need some coffee.” I picked up the cup in front of me to make a point and drank a healthy swig of it. “How are the girls?”

  His eyes softened a little. “Monsters.” Then he narrowed his eyes at me. “Molly said to say she loves you more than me and she misses you.”

  I nodded sagely, because he hated how much Molly, the oldest of the twins by two and a half minutes, loved me.

  “I’ll be sure to give her a long hug next time I see her.” I smiled and he shook his head.

  His eyes drifted to the doorway. “Where is the little shit, anyway?”

  I shook my head. Martin had taken an instant dislike to Cal for reasons I was yet to probe too far into.

  “He’s in Blakeman’s and he was being almost human just now, it was alarming.”

  “You’re losing your mind.” He took my cup, which I’d already finished and then went out the back to the kitchen, returning with another coffee and something green covered in icing.
I eyed it suspiciously.

  “Would you stop with this?” I said wearily. “You know I don’t have a sweet tooth.”

  “I don’t have anyone else to try it on.”

  “There are five other people in here.”

  “Yeah, but it may not be fit for human consumption. I can’t kill my customers, I’ll get bad reviews.”

  I looked at the cake again. “What is that?”

  “Okay, so you’re not allowed to laugh.”

  I stared at him, already smiling.

  “Molly follows a load of people online. She has loads of baking accounts that she’s obsessed with and a lot of the yummy mummies at her school were talking about all this healthy crap the other day. They know I’m a chef and seem to think they have to educate me about how to fill my arteries with spirulina or some shit.” He shook his head. “But there’s this thing called Matcha that’s been all the rage for ages, according to Molly, and I’m only just catching up.”

  “It’s green.” I poked the cake suspiciously.

  “I know, so is Matcha. Anyway, she wants a green cake for her birthday now. There’s loads of recipes online, but obviously they’re all super healthy and I’m more into treats in my belly, so can you try it? I need my daughter to have a good birthday.”

  I groaned at the cheap shot. “What does Cassie want on her cake?”

  “Somehow she doesn’t want one, she just wants to go and see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”

  I groaned again and we exchanged a look. That play wasn’t cheap. I picked up the cake, rather than mention the money elephant in the room again and eyed it like it was the poisoned apple from Snow White. “If I shit neon green tomorrow it’s your fault.”

  He laughed in the way I loved where his whole head rolled back and he looked a bit like a threatening Father Christmas.

  “Okay. Deal.”

  I took a bite. The icing was very sweet and made the top of my mouth itch. I really didn’t do well with sweet food, but the cake actually tasted pretty good, despite the colour.