Trust (London Love #5)

“That okay?” God, I hoped it had been.

“Mind blown.” He laughed. “You’re good. Really good.”

“Okay?” He was lying. But whatever.

“See. Sex isn’t complicated. It’s just…you know. Whatever we need.”

We didn’t say much more. I got up and turned off the light. He crawled under the duvet. I hadn’t put the pillowcases on the pillows, but never mind. I shoved them under his head and Mr Snuggles under mine.

Then I held him, my face in his neck, his hair tickling my nose.

Breathed him in.

My fingers were sticky.

Him.

God.

What on earth had I become?

I had to laugh.

“Go to sleep, Reubs,” he whispered.

Oh, yeah. Gray’s boyfriend. His ‘baby’.

That’s what I’d become.

Love and other dumb feelings

GRAHAM

He was gone when I woke up, leaving me curled up in his bed, naked and sated and with the radiator burning my knee.

It was nice, other than the sore knee, obviously, which I rubbed furiously as I unfolded my limbs and stretched out properly. Sharing a single bed and duvet with a big lanky bloke wasn’t all sex and fun. It was really bad for my back, and I had an awful crick in my neck that I would have to loosen up before today’s hell hour with the personal trainer.

But my head was clear, and my alarm hadn’t gone off yet, so I still had time to enjoy a bit of a lie-in before whichever driver who was on Dieter-duty today came and picked me up.

They were all moaning about it, the drivers. This wasn’t their favourite place to hang around in their highly polished executive cars. I blamed management for insisting on luxury to ferry around a bunch of blokes they worked so hard that they hadn’t had time to learn to drive. If they treated us better and actually paid us our proper percentage of royalties, we could buy our own cars.

We’d never have known about it if it hadn’t been for Musa and his cousin or uncle or whoever it was—the newly minted hotshot lawyer specialising in entertainment contracts, who’d picked through the past ten years of Blitz’s career with a fine-tooth comb.

We were being fucked over. From every angle.

He hadn’t put it so crudely, but that was the truth.

We’d raked in a massive profit from our last tour, huge amounts of money, most of it paid out as bonuses to our management and the parent company that owned the Blitz trademark. There was a further offshore company with a few familiar names as stakeholders. I didn’t need to have a law management degree to understand how incredibly dodgy that all looked. Suffice to say, those stakeholders weren’t us.

It was wrong on so many levels.

Musa’s relative had shown us the accounts, payments in and out that led to nowhere, massive deposits that suddenly ceased to exist. Added to that, our contracts included a bunch of clauses that meant that those contracts could be changed, without notice and without our agreement. No signatures required.

We were currently paid almost nothing in royalties because we’d apparently accepted the latest contract change.

The six of us didn’t even own the Blitz trademark. We were just…employees.

It turned me cold.