“Er…V, babe, you totally did,” Yaz said through a big smile. “You can stand down though.”
“And, by the way, Harry,” put in Heath, “my job’s not all saving lives, mate. Yesterday I removed a tic tac from a child’s nose, treated a chest pain that turned out to be indigestion, investigated an ‘abdominal mass’ which turned out to be faeces – the patient was literally full of shit – and then after my shift ended, I spent over an hour finding a home for a cat so the owner would agree to be admitted.”
“Wow, you really know how to get a girl in the mood, Markham,” Yaz said dryly, and Heath laughed before kissing the side of her head and pulling her into his side.
“Not all of us can ponce about in bikinis and wetsuits all day.”
“That is not all I do, and you know it!”
“Stop, don’t ruin it for me,” Heath said with a dreamy expression and Max smacked the side of his head.
“Gross, don’t talk about my sister like that.”
I cleared my throat. “Well, whatever you were doing yesterday, you were helping people. I’m not going to pretend that my job does that. In my defence, as a kid who got into a posh school because my dad was a teacher, I really did stick out as the charity case with the shit clothes. Kids can be fairly cruel. It made me…” I trailed off and then sighed, “…it made me laser-focused on money. My parents were never really that bothered about money. I may have… overcorrected.”
“Cruel?” Verity’s voice was low and dangerous now. “Who was cruel to you?”
Heath shifted uncomfortably in his chair. We’d been in the same house at school with my dad as housemaster, so Heath witnessed a good amount of the bullying.
“Heath, what’s he talking about?”
“They were all major pricks in that year, V,” Heath muttered. “I tried to stay out of their way. Apart from the time I punched Giles Bartholemew-Smithe in the face when he lied about fingering you behind the art department.”
Verity made a gagging nose and I almost burst out laughing.
“To be honest, it wasn’t so bad until my last year,” I said.
“What happened in your last year?”
I sighed. “You happened, Verity. You kept coming to find me to give me books, you hugged me outside chapel when I got into the LSE. Lady V, the most beautiful, unobtainable girl in school was huggingme, the impoverished maths nerd. It didn’t go down well. Giles and Monty Timms beat the shit out of me and made me wear a girls’ house tie for a week. That meant endless detentions from teachers for being in the wrong tie, which I just had to take or risk getting the shit kicked out of me again.”
“Those utter bastards,” Verity said through gritted teeth. “Where are they now? I am going to end them both.”
That startled a laugh out of me. “You can stand down there as well,” I said. “I took over Monty’s family business ten years ago and sold it for parts.”
“Giles?”
“I’ve managed to scupper the financing of two of his start-ups but he’s still plugging away.”
“Hmm.”
I squeezed her hand. “Verity it was over twenty years ago. You knew I didn’t like that school. Let it go.”
“I thought you didn’t like it there because you were cleverer than everyone and they all bored you. If I’d have known that they weremeanto you, I would have removed all their testicles with a spoon. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“I was not going to tell the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, who was the only good thing about my time at school, that I couldn’t stand up for myself against a bunch of jumped-up public-school numpties.”
“B–but I irritated you,” she said, confusion colouring her tone. “You put up with me at school. Towards the end I thought I might have grown on you, but you never–”
“I was terrified, Verity,” I said softly, looking into her eyes, forgetting about the rest of the table as my free hand slid up to her jaw. “You were the only chink of light I had in that place. I didn’t want to risk doing anything to make it go dark. That’s why I waited until the very last week to–to…”
“To kiss me,” she breathed, her mouth now an inch from mine. Just as I started to close that gap a loud throat cleared from across the table, and we sprang apart.
“Listen, I’m happy for you, man, but I don’t think I can watch you snog my sister in the middle of The Pig and Whistle,” Heath said dryly.
“Yes, there are children present,” said Yaz through a huge smile.
“Ugh, Auntie Yaz,” grumbled Teddy as he pushed away her attempts to cover his eyes. “I’mnineteen, you realise.”
