Lucky: The Series, page 38
My hand shifted automatically to my coat pocket. “Yup. Want me to grab the van and drive up to meet you?”
“Yeah. There’s only a half kennel of hounds up here, so I reckon whatever dogs he’s riding out today were moved out last night, but I want to hang on a little longer to be sure. It might be a decoy.”
I’d tried to explain the lengths hunts went to in their attempts to fool watching sab to an outsider once, and in turn, the extremes sabs use to intercept them. I was met with disbelief, but I accepted Rae’s explanation without a second thought. “Meet me at the bottom of the lane in half an hour.”
I ran to the camp and opened the gate with the key Meg had given me. The van smelt like Rae, but was tidier than when I’d last seen it, like he’d hardly been in it. Even his sleeping bag was neatly folded up, as though he’d rolled out of bed with more on his mind than tramping through the woods to spy on Goon’s place.
You think about him way too much.
Hardly news, so I let myself carry on as I drove the van off camp and hopped out to secure the gate. Let myself dream that he’d be waiting for me with a smile at the bottom of the lane.
He wasn’t. But then, with his gaze glued to his phone, he wasn’t looking at me at all.
I pulled up beside him, trying not to get a kick out of him dressed all in black, mud already spattered up his trouser legs. Maybe one day we’d fuck outdoors, rolling around in the dirt and the grass, clean up after in the river.
The fantasy made my heart skip a beat, but it was over before it truly got started, drowned in the reality that it had been me to call time on the fledgling relationship that could’ve led to magic like that.
Dickhead.
Rae pulled himself into the van. Finally, our eyes met. The beginnings of a grin ghosted across his face, but it didn’t materialise. “I see you’re in good mood?”
“Me?”
“It wouldn’t kill you to smile, mate.”
It was so close and yet so far from my own thoughts that I burst out laughing. Inexplicable, ridiculous chuckles that made Rae stare at me as if I was a mutant.
“The fuck is wrong with you?”
It took a moment for me to compose myself enough to answer. And even then, I didn’t have anything sensible to say. I shook my head. “Just happy to be alive, man.”
“Fair enough. Let me second that by having a fag.”
Rae lit a cigarette and went back to his phone.
I wanted to shake him.
And I didn’t want to know what—or who—had him so captivated by his text messages.
The idea of Rae with someone else was enough to obliterate the manic humour I’d arrived with. I scowled at the road ahead until I remembered a small detail from the clusterfuck of last weekend. “No coppers.”
“Hmm?” He glanced up from his phone.
“Coppers,” I repeated. “They were waiting for us last week, and the hunt wasn’t even here. You think it means something that they aren’t here now?”
Rae finally shoved his damn-fucking phone into his pocket. He scanned the road ahead, and stuck his head out of the window to check behind us.
He was windswept when he turned back to me, the tip of his nose pink with cold. “All clear.”
“So?”
“So…” He fished his phone out again. “I guess we’ll see if that means the real fight is going to be here.”
An hour later, we were still rumbling up and down the lanes surrounding the prime hunting ground unimpeded. Goon’s place was quiet, the woods were clear, and there was nothing going on in Hertfordshire either. The Bucks hunt had ridden out and was in full swing. If nothing happened in Beds in the next half hour, I was considering hitting the A5 to give Petra and her crew some back up.
Rae was reluctant to leave. “It’s too obvious. We can’t believe what we see anymore.”
“But what if nothing happens around here, and shit goes down on an actual hunt?”
He shrugged. “Then it’ll be like the hundred hunts that’ve happened here without Bucks support. We can’t be everywhere.”
In practical terms, I knew he was right, but driving around aimlessly pissed me off. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel and mauled my bottom lip with my teeth. My nerves were live wires. Doing nothing was impossible.
Rae’s fingers closed around my forearm. “You’re vibrating,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
Snapping at people wasn’t my jam, and a few years out of sabbing, caught up in my own head, had mellowed me to the point of being apathetically horizontal. But that had all changed when I’d met Rae. I’d been on edge for months, and he was right. I was fucking vibrating.
I jerked my arm away, and instantly regretted it, my body crying out for his electric touch. “I’m fine.”
“Cash.”
“What?”
Rae reclaimed my arm, his grip this time so absolute I couldn’t escape it without swerving the van. “Pull over.”
“What? Why?”
“Just do it.”
“For fuck’s sake.” A layby was up ahead. I drove into it too fast and braked to a stop with a screech that should’ve made me wince.
It didn’t.
Rae scowled at me. “What the hell is going on with you? If you haven’t got the right head on for sabbing today, do me a favour, and go home.”
I wondered what constituted the right head for sabbing. What made his level glare more suitable than the fire I knew I was chucking right back at him? Then I realised it didn’t matter…because he was right. As riled-up as I was, challenging Goon to a duel, him armed with a pitchfork, and me with nothing but my temper, sounded like an ideal day out.
What the hell was wrong with me?
I sighed and banged my head on the steering wheel. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, man. Just talk to me. Maybe I can help.”
A bark of humourless laughter escaped me. I gestured at the bleak winter countryside around us. “Unless you’ve got the answer to making this shit end already, I very much doubt it.”
“Define this,” Rae said. “You mean today in general, or the reason we’re here?”
“Both. Neither.” A heavy sigh escaped me. “I guess I’m used to either hiding away from all this, or doing something about it, you know? I’d forgotten what it’s like to wait around for the worst thing in the world.”
Rae’s hand was still vice-like around my arm, but his grip loosened a bit. Suddenly it was friendly and not restraining. “I figured you’d have trouble adjusting.”
“Oh you did, did you?”
He shrugged. “Not tangibly. I just remember watching you storm the horse charge last week and wondering how you did it—how you went from your day job to being a fucking warrior in the blink of an eye.”
“Did you ever find the answer?”
“Not beyond the belief that fixing cars is what you do, and sabbing is who you are, but you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“Thanks for the wisdom, granddad.”
Rae laughed, and it held none of the bitterness of my own forced chuckle. He let go of my arm, sat back in his seat, and threw his booted feet up on the dashboard. “You’re welcome.”
I didn’t have a witty comeback, or even an unwitty one, but ending the conversation when we’d been so long without one felt like sacrilege. The van rumbled to life as I turned the key in the ignition, but I didn’t put it in gear, because for reasons I couldn’t comprehend, this moment seemed sacred.
My left hand twitched, and it took only a split second for me to give in and reach for Rae.
Never one to make things easy, I stretched across him and took the hand farthest from me, tugging on it, until he turned in his seat to face me. “I miss you.”
It wasn’t what I’d planned to say, but fuck, I meant it. Returning to sabbing had been a call I couldn’t ignore, and I’d fought hard to convince myself the intensity of how I felt had been nothing new—that it had nothing to do with Rae, but perhaps I’d been wrong. Fuck that. I was wrong. Sabbing was a part of me, but not the whole of me. There was room for more, there had to be, or none of it meant anything. “I mean it, Rae. I really have.”
Rae stared. For a moment he was very still—too still. Then a smile broke through, slow and sweet, and his fingers tightened around mine. “You fucker.”
“Am I?”
“Damn right. I’ve been a mess since you binned me off, but it was easier because I thought you didn’t give a shit. Knowing you miss me too makes it so much worse.”
Guilt charged through me. Just a few short weeks ago I’d been so certain of my actions, but the madness of it now hit me like a ton of bricks. Yeah, I’d been burned before, and fuck yeah being in love with someone who put their life at risk every weekend scared the shit out of me, but pushing my feelings for Rae aside hurt so much I couldn’t see how I’d ever thought it was the only way. “I’m sorry.”
Rae’s gaze flicked out of the window and back again. “You shouldn’t be. I got it then, and I get it now, I just wish things could be different.”
“What if they could be? Different, I mean?”
“How is that possible with everything you said? I don’t want to make things harder for you, Cash. I—” Rae stopped and inhaled a shaky breath. “Fuck, I don’t know what I want. I just know that trying to unravel it while we’re sabbing is a bad idea. You consume me, man. I can’t fucking think straight around you.”
I was still clutching his hand like a drowning man. His words made sense, but something inside me wouldn’t accept them, even though I knew when perspective returned, there’d be no other way. “I—”
“What?” Rae demanded. “Cash, we can’t keep turning this circle of half sentences and contradictions. We—”
Fuck half sentences. I cut him off with a kiss—a rough, dirty clash of lips that stole his breath and mine.
He didn’t resist, just melted against the glass behind him and let me ravage his sweet mouth, until it awoke the same desperate beast in him.
We fought for dominance, shoving and pulling at each other. I was heavier than Rae, but he was fierce, and something in me cried out to have him push me back across the seat and straddle me. We ground together, still kissing, and for the first time in weeks—in months—everything felt right.
I slid one hand under his clothes, gliding my palm over the smooth skin on his flank, as the other found its way to the nape of his neck, fingers seeking soft hair like a moth to a flame. The smell of him, his taste, fuck I’d missed him.
Breathless, I pulled back to tell him so, but was instantly lost in his liquid stare. There was so much I needed to say to him, but my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.
And I couldn’t work out if he was amused, or pissed off. Rae was like that—addictively inscrutable. Dangerous. I kind of wanted him to hit me, as though I craved a connection to him so primal only pain could ever be the bridge. You fucking loon. But I didn’t care. I wanted him. I needed him. And I’d take him anyway he’d let me.
Rae leaned forward and sucked in a shaky breath. His gaze darted to my lips and back again, and then something seemed to shift in him, to give way. He cupped my face in his rough hands, his thumbs stroking my cheekbones. “I wish I’d never met you.”
How many times had I thought the same about him? Too many to be hurt, but it hurt all the same. In another life, perhaps being together would’ve been easy. Fun. Like it had been the night we met. Foxes had died since then, and foxes had been saved. But without this…without him, it wasn’t enough.
I held his wrists, counting his pulse against my fingers. “But we did meet.”
Rae opened his mouth to reply, but an obnoxious chime from his phone shattered the charged air between us. Conflict raged in his beautiful eyes, but in a thump of my heavy heart, he was gone, scrambling off me to get to his phone.
He swiped at it, oblivious to me crumbling beside him. “Fuck.”
“What?”
“The hunt. It’s moved out on the next farm over. Headed this way.”
I stared at him a beat longer, then shrugged as reality kicked me in the nuts. “Well then. Sab on.”
Chapter 22
Rae
There was no time to dissect the mess I’d made of things with Cash. With his kiss still burning my lips, his taste still seared on my tongue, I shut down the message from the unknown number, and we hit the road, following directions from the tip-off.
I didn’t let myself wonder if it was genuine. Fletch and I had sworn a plan to flush out whoever it was, expose them as if need be, but right now, only the hunt mattered.
If I made it there alive.
As ever, Cash’s driving equal parts terrified and thrilled me, and this time, I sensed an undercurrent in him that I fucking knew was my fault.
I reached out and squeezed his arm. “Easy.”
He tossed me an irritated glare that clearly said “whatever” and cracked on.
“I mean it.” I gripped him harder. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Cash. Don’t fucking one-line me. I’m with you, okay? Let’s just get this over with first, preferably without dying in a car crash.”
The van slowed infinitesimally, but Cash kept his eyes on the road, showing no indication that he’d heard me, believed me, and could wait that long. Because that was what I sensed in him, a desperation for something, anything, I could give him, despite him being the one to push me away so forcefully in the first place. He wanted me, perhaps even needed me.
And I was right there with him. Whatever happened, my days of pretending I could give him up were over.
The hunt came up on us faster than I was ready for. We hit the lane leading to the neighbouring farm at the same time as the hounds. A swarm of tan and white leapt over the low, drystone wall as Cash jerked the handbrake up, skidding us to a stop.
Adrenaline punched through me, eclipsing the torment being with Cash had brought to my cynical heart. Hooves thundered, quad bikes roared. Thanks to the tip-off from my mystery friend, we’d driven right into the middle of the hunt.
Cash killed the engine. I ripped my seatbelt off, and opened my door, but he grabbed my arm before I could jump.
“Listen,” he said, his other hand clutching the driver door, ready to leap into the fray. “Today, when this is done, I’m taking you home.”
And then he was gone, springing out of the van and over the wall in a fluid motion that left me wanting to weep. Somehow, even though he’d left me with hope, it seemed final, as though what didn’t happen today would never happen at all.
I didn’t understand it, and there was no time to try. I abandoned the van and took off in the opposite direction to Cash, following the hounds, while he took on the horses. In my peripheral vision, I saw Meg and Fletch cross into the next field, bringing with them a band of weekend sabs. Then Sprig called my name and I realised that against all odds, we were all here. We had a chance.
Sprig sprinted up alongside me, chucking me a bag of our faithful raw chicken distraction. “Lead them west,” he shouted. “There’s a high wall over this field no fucker’s getting around.”
I didn’t know this small dairy farm well. Up until now, the owner had been the sole local farmer who’d refused Goon permission to trash his fields. And perhaps he still was. Over the past few months, Goon had proved more than ever that there were no rules anymore. At least none that he wasn’t prepared to break.
Regardless, I followed Sprig’s instructions, and joined the rear of the hound pack, laying my bait as soon as I was entrenched enough for the baying dogs to notice.
The first clutch began to follow me. I heard shouting and commotion from the mounted hunt hot on our tails, but I paid them no heed. Even Goon had yet to ride over his own hounds. In their midst, I was safe, if only for a few minutes. I didn’t let myself think about Cash.
I can’t.
We led the hounds west across the huge field, away from the scent they’d been tracking east. Something happened behind us to slow the horses, but still I didn’t look.
Quad bikes swept into the field to take their place. In open space, we had nowhere to run, so we kept going, making for a small copse of trees. Out of nowhere, a disoriented fox cub burst into the field, eyes wide, staggering, standard characteristics of an animal who’d been released from a cage with no bearings of where it was, or the danger it was in.
Despite our best efforts, the hounds smelt it. And then they saw it.
The fox was juvenile and green. It stood no chance, even if it had possessed the sense to run in the right direction.
No.
I called desperately to Sprig. “Sab! Bring them round to me!”
It was all we had—to drive the hounds and the cub towards me in the impossible hope that I could get to it first. Too many times, we’d failed, but the fire in me today was irrepressible. That cub wouldn’t die unless I did first.
Sprig made his move, herding the wayward cub and the hounds in an arc towards the copse. I ran along the treeline, my heart in my mouth, knowing that the cub stood no chance if it dug in under a tree and the terrier men caught up with it. My only option now was to subdue and remove it, and one way or another, I was going to get hurt.
The cub ran into my path. Foaming at the mouth, it was exhausted, despite its short stint in the field, and unbidden my mind pictured what might’ve happened to it before the quad bike gang had released it. What I saw poured fuel on my determination, and I lunged for the cub, catching it by the scruff of the neck.
It was small for its age, and male, which worked in my favour. Vixens tended to have more fight in them when it came to people. This little boy didn’t even struggle as I whipped him from the ground and tucked him into my coat.
The hounds were on me; only Sprig was between us with the last few pieces of chicken. He tossed them out wide enough to spread the dogs, buying me valuable time. I prayed the fox cub wouldn’t struggle, and bounded up the nearest tree.
Minutes later, I was surrounded—hounds, huntsman, sabs. I peeked down through the leaves…it was a Roald Dhal moment if ever I saw one. I searched the crowd for Cash. He wasn’t there, but as the police descended on us—all two of them—I didn’t blame him. I hugged the fox close and settled in for a long wait, because nothing had changed. I’d die before this fox did.
