Diego: (Brighton Bad Boys 3) Read online

  Whichever way you look at it, I deal in humans ─ a modern-day slave trader. My ancestors would be so proud. Although so far, I have stopped short of getting involved in cleaning crews and fruit pickers. I have some morals.

  Not that any of what I do makes enough money to buy a building like that. I didn’t. I inherited it, along with some older prostitutes who are now retired. It was the last of the big seafront properties that was owned by just one person. My grandmother.

  Nan hated my dad’s guts, but apparently, she doted on me. Could have fooled me, but her last will and testament said otherwise.

  It’s funny, because everyone thinks my parents going up in the world was somehow to do with a notorious fire in one of the most contested properties in Brighton, the occurrence of which realigned the powers in this city somewhat. The implication being that Dad organised it. It’s complete baloney. My father will always be a two-bit-hustler. No more, no less. I guess that’s why Nan despised him so much. He just wasn’t up to scratch.

  But she was a shrewd woman and she didn’t want a family feud on her hands. She knew it would piss off my dad royally that she wasn’t going to leave him ‘The Brick’, as it’s lovingly called in the family. So, long before she died, in order to soften the blow, as a kind of runner up prize, she gifted Dad enough money to buy a house on Woodland Drive, and to carry on playing at being a criminal on a bigger scale.

  He really is shit at it, though. Mostly because he’s got a vile temper. I’m forever picking up his tabs. He constantly needs watching, which is part of the reason I still haven’t moved out of Woodland Drive. There is a penthouse flat at The Brick that is technically mine, but I only use it for business meetings, those that don’t relate to Santos-Benson Security, and shagging.

  The penthouse remains decorated pretty much exactly how Nan left it and still has most of her furniture in it. The old bat had impeccable taste, so I don’t particularly want to change any of it, but it means it never really feels like my place either.

  Plus, call me a pussy, but after a long night in town, I kind of like coming back to the leafy suburban neighbourhood of Woodland Drive. The nature out here balances the blood and the gore and the sweat and the stink I deal with at work.

  I should look into buying my own place somewhere away from both, really. But I’ll be paying back the mortgage I had to take out on The Brick in order to pay the inheritance tax till kingdom come, and I don’t really want to settle myself with any kind of debt that doesn’t have a business return on it.

  I force myself to stop mulling my living arrangements. Today is dedicated to Kalina’s birthday, to forgetting business and number crunching for a few hours. It’s a rare luxury and I intend to make the most of it.

  I wonder what she’ll make of my outfit.

  I wonder what she will be wearing.

  I’ve only ever seen her out of her tomboy clobber and in full war paint once. The first time I saw her, she was dressed up to the nines, all dramatic silent film type makeup, a very short Charleston style sequin dress, heels no woman who isn’t soliciting should be able to walk in and a choker. A fucking choker. She looked like an evil fairy queen, come to haunt my every fantasy. And she has.

  Little did I know then that beneath the veneer of that one night lay a way-too-young girl who is just, well, really fucking nice. Who bakes and sings along to pop songs on the radio at the top her lungs, who works hard at improving her English every day at the language school she goes to and who spends her days off working in a charity shop. I struggle every day with having to consolidate my evil fairy queen with the girl who feeds me home-baked goods whenever I hang out at Sheena’s house. What I don’t struggle with is knowing that I’m not gonna go there. But that doesn’t mean I can’t treat her to a really fucking nice birthday, so far away from home. And if that includes dressing up in stuff I haven’t worn in years, then so be it.

  I sling the battered black leather jacket I had to dig up from the back of my closet over my shoulder. It’s August and way too hot for leather, but it’s part of the look, so it’s coming with me. I learned that where it was always on the big side for me when I bought it, it’s now kinda snug. I’ve bulked out a bit since my teens.

  “Diego?” my mother’s unsure voice floats down to me from halfway up the stairs.

  I turn to look at her, unsurprised by what I find. She’s swaying slightly, clutching the banister for support. She’s already plastered, or maybe she’s still plastered. My mother often starts the day as she means to go on, with a double measure of brandy. My guess is, she has a permanent alcohol level of a minimum of one per mille. She starts getting wobbly around one point five. But then again, it is afternoon already, and by the fresh bruises on her neck and upper arms, her and Dad had a particularly fun night. For him.

  When I was little, she used to wear high necks and long sleeves all the time. She gave up on hiding her war wounds the day I cottoned on. I’ve begged her to leave him, but she hates me too much to entertain anything I say to her.

  “Yes, Mother?” I answer her.

  “Where are you going? Your father wants you back in time for dinner.”

  She must be confused by the clothes. She actually thinks I’m sixteen. Which puts her more at two point already. That’s high this early in the day, even for her. For a moment, I wonder if I can leave her. But then I think, fuck it. It’s not like she even wants my protection.

  “He can fuck off,” I answer and turn away to leave the house.

  The driver of the limo is waiting outside, halfway between the long, sleek black Lincoln and our front door. I notice that he’s trying to hide a puzzled expression on his face.

  I’m pretty certain I know what that’s about.

  My long-time associate Eric at Red Carpet Cars probably told the guy his pick up was of a businessman from the ‘Benson Mansion’. Now the poor sod is wondering if he definitely has the right address. First, there is my outfit and then, well, the house my parents left the old neighbourhood for, back when I was still at school with Silas and I had no idea yet that I was going to be fucking minted once Nan popped her clogs, is no more than a detached five-bedroom mock Tudor family home. It’s got a triple garage and a big enough garden to have a separate indoor pool structure and a summer-slash-guest house, so it’s a fuck load bigger than the house I grew up in, but it’s not what the average person thinks of when the word ‘mansion’ is mentioned.

  It started as a joke. Between Silas and me. Then the joke kind of stuck. Now everyone in fucking Brighton calls it that and nobody knows why.

  “Mr Benson?” the driver asks hesitantly but politely as he retreats to get the door for me.

  “Diego,” I answer. “Mr Benson is my father.”

  I see the recognition flicker in the man’s eyes. He has heard of Diego. That always helps.

  I’m about to lower my body into the limo when I hear my father’s voice behind me.

  “Where are you going, son?”

  I turn to him. He’s standing in the doorway, panting as if he’d run to catch me.

  “Out. To London,” I answer him.

  “I told you, I needed you tonight,” he shouts angrily.

  I hold my hand up to the limo driver to signal that I will be back in a moment, and then I walk back towards the house and meet my father face to face.

  “I’m not having this conversation in front of other people,” I tell him quietly. “I told you this morning that I was busy. I am busy.”

  “Doing what?” he asks with a snarl. “What’s so fucking important you need a limo? More to the point, what is so fucking important that you think you can just blow me off like that?”

  For a moment I feel like I’m sixteen years old and like I’m not actually calling the shots around here. Maybe it’s the clothes. Without my standard Diego attire, I feel my armour is missing.

  “I am taking my friends out to the theatre,” I answer truthfully and sigh. “And, technically, I could only blow you off if we’d had a
n appointment for tonight. Which we did not. You asked me at breakfast to come along and I declined because I had a prior engagement. That is not blowing somebody off. That is sticking to the diary.”

  “You really think you are something, don’t you?” he snarls. “What friends?”

  I debate for a moment whether to tell him, while he carries on glaring at me. But I know that he will find out anyway. Better to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

  “Silas. His girlfriend Grace. A girl called Kalina.” I pause because I know the next bit will be like a rag to a bull. “Sheena.”

  “Sheena O’Brien?” he spits out, his head going a nice shade of choleric-red. “You dare take that bitch and her spawn out for a jolly?”

  There is bad blood enough between my old man and Sheena O’Brien to fill all the abattoir troughs in the county. Although, really, it’s more between Sheena and Dad’s best friend, Cecil O’Brien. The surname is no coincidence. They are all old Brighton and they’ve known each other since they were primary school children. Cecil was Sheena’s husband for a while, back in their twenties. She kept his name, which is how Silas ended up an O’Brien, though thankfully he’s not from the same gene pool as Cecil.

  Cecil is the arsehole to my dad’s cunt.

  I stay cool in the face of my dad having his little paddy. Fuck knows how he made it this far in life with that temper. It is a mystery to me that nobody has taken him out yet. Or that he hasn’t had a coronary. It’s a constant worry. I can’t stand the guy, but he’s my dad. I have some good memories of him from when I was little. Even the biggest arsehole is a hero to his son when he’s carrying him on his shoulders. And if he’s the only one out of your parents who doesn’t outright hate you.

  “Sheena’s spawn is my best friend, Dad. Deal with it. Or just butt out. Whichever. I’m going now.”

  I’m almost facing the limo again, in my attempt to leave a second time, when he goes that little bit further. That one place I really can’t stand.

  “What kind of name is Kalina? Is that the dirty Pollack chick they’ve got staying there?”

  My jaw clenches.

  Out of the many, many things I despise about my father it’s the Britain First bollocks that I hate the most. Racism runs firmly in the family. It’s the one thing he and Nan agreed on. Her family’s riches were built solidly on the seventeenth century slave trade, followed by a couple of hundred years of running black, brown and yellow ─ her words, not mine ─ prostitutes.

  Racism in all its forms is such a load of horseshit, but it riles me even more from a woman who made her fortune from whoring out different skin colours, or from a man who married a Spanish woman.

  Yup. Oleandra Benson, nee Santos, my dearly unbeloved, ninety-five-percent-of-the-time drunk mother, must have already been totally paralytic when she let a British wanker with a Saint George’s cross tattooed on his chest fuck a child into her. Well, two, actually. Story goes, I ate my twin sometime in the first trimester. But that’s a whole different can of worms.

  I turn back to Dad and go toe to toe with him.

  It’s an unfortunate vantage point because I can see all the burst little veins on his face, the spittle that landed on his chin and the yellow in his eyes.

  “Don’t you dare disrespect my friend like that,” I hiss at him. “Go take your racist bullshit and go fuck your Spanish wife. If you still can.”

  He takes a breath to retaliate, but before he can rip into a rant, I step out of his space and retreat backwards towards the waiting limo.

  “Save it, Dad. I’m gonna go do what the fuck I like now. And you go, do what the fuck you like. As long as it doesn’t cost me any money or kills any of my friends. See you in the morning.” I grin to myself as I add, “As-Salaam-Alaikum.”

  Then I bow out.

  Kalina

  I’ve never seen George ‘Diego’ Benson wear anything other than a tan three-piece suit or, very occasionally ─ when he comes back to Sheena’s house after a workout of sparring with Silas in the gym ─ grey sweatpants, a t-shirt and a zip-up hoody.

  So it really is no wonder that I just can’t keep my eyes off his butt when he walks us to the limo, dressed in skin-tight denims. It’s annoying because a red and black lumberjack shirt hangs partially down over it, obscuring half the view. I appreciate that he made the effort and came as an infinitely better-looking Bryan Adams, complete with a tight white t-shirt under the flannel, battered black leather jacket thrown over his shoulder and biker boots on his feet. But he could have left the shirt behind. I would have got the gist anyway. And I would have got a better view. Though even half the view is hot as fuck.

  As we all arrive at the limousine that George made to wait for us in the pub car park opposite Sheena’s house, I tear my eyes away from the backside of the sexiest devil on earth and look at the others.

  I was so blown away by how different George looked when Grace and I came down the stairs and he was waiting in the hallway, I never even asked, who or what Silas is meant to be.

  He and his mum decided to surprise me and while Grace and I got ready in my room, they got ready in the kitchen.

  One look at Sheena in her man’s suit and with her newly hennaed, carrot-orange, super-short hair and it’s clear she is Annie Lennox. It suits her down to the ground. Sheena was a pretty successful model in her late teens and early twenties. She is a stunningly beautiful woman, even now, approaching fifty, and she has that slightly glacial aura Lennox had in her heyday.

  Silas inherited a lot of his mum’s good looks, but he’s been bashed up in the bare-knuckle ring a few times, mashing in his nose and giving him an edge that is way beyond pretty boy, catapulting him into the super-hot. Before Grace turned up on the scene, I eye-fucked my landlady’s son every chance I got, but never once entertained the thought of actually going there.

  Firstly, because I’m on a job, and secondly because there just wasn’t any crackle between us.

  As I examine him now, I still can’t figure out who he is going as. All I’m sure about is that he is supposed to be one of the plethora of New Romantic pretty boys that were abundant in the decade the musical we are going to see revolves around.

  He, too, has gone full on outfit, with a short, double-breasted military jacket over a white pirate shirt, buttons open to an obscene level, baggy black trousers, ending in boots ─ and so many studded belts hanging askew off his hips, I wonder if he’s going to develop a limp by the end of the night. He’s also wearing eyeliner, blusher and lip gloss. I’ve got to hand it to Grace’s man, he doesn’t do things by half.

  This is a side I never used to see of him before Grace. I actually assumed Silas would refuse to do the dressing up bit. He used to be so super serious all the time. I didn’t think he had it in him.

  “Who are you?” I ask him over my shoulder as George opens the limo door for me and offers me his hand to help me clamber inside.

  Partially because I am stalling about putting my hand into George’s and partially because I really can’t figure it out.

  Silas looks offended.

  “Simon Le Bon,” he answers with a huff. “Obviously.”

  “Simon, who?”

  “Simon Le Bon. You know, lead singer of Duran Duran. What kind of eighties music buff are you if you don’t know who Simon Le Bon is?”

  Yeah, about that, that’s more a Kalina’s thing. My music taste is quite a bit more modern. And darker.

  “Duran Duran, sure!” I exclaim. “Sorry, did not know singer’s name. You look great.”

  If in doubt, hand a man a compliment and it throws them right off.

  I look away from Silas, and finally take George’s hand. My heart is still racing from the realisation that I’ve made another faux pas, so I try to tell myself that the extra rush I feel when our palms connect is just part of that.

  Can’t remember what the excuse was last time this happened, but as I look into his storm-grey eyes for a moment, just before he gives me the momentum to hustle my tightly
wrapped bottom into the carriage, I realise that it’s not only the lies I’m telling others that are slipping.

  It’s also the ones that I keep telling myself.

  Diego

  She has done it again.

  It’s been three months since I saw her in that little Charleston number and despite the fact, I’ve jerked off over the memory countless times, in reality I had nearly forgotten how extreme a transformation she can pull off.

  And this time, she’s gone a whole lot further.

  I look at her and I don't recognise the girl in those bloody dungarees she’s been wearing all summer at all.

  In her place sits a wet dream in platinum blonde.

  With green-blue eyes!

  I didn’t even know that was possible.

  Thing is, I've never gone for blondes. I’ve always been firmly a gentleman who prefers brunettes. But clearly, where Kalina is concerned, none of the usual rules apply.

  I’ve been hard since the minute she descended down the stairs, bright red lips smiling at me so widely that it showed off that sexy little gap between her front teeth beautifully.

  In hindsight, it was always obvious who she was going to pick for herself as soon as we found out that the brand new musical about eighties cheese pop we had our eye on for her birthday outing was getting a bit like Rocky Horror, in as much as whole audiences had started dressing up as appropriate pop idols of the era for the shows.

  Kalina is tiny, has that gap between her front teeth and absolutely rocks a beauty mark painted above her lip, as I’m finding out.

  Personally, I would have preferred a dark-haired version of Madonna, but who cares? The girl opposite me in the limo, sipping champagne and fishing for the strawberry slices in her glass with her tongue is fucking gorgeous, in any hair or eye colour.