DECEPTION | MAFIA ROMANCE | SMUT

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

What can I say? I am unhesitant and unpredictable.

Dangerously impulsive.

Hamish watched through sliced, clouded eyes as my hand smoothed on the tasselled pillow and plucked leaking duck feathers, the hollow quills scraping the underside of my fingers in the process.

His nostrils flared, the fine grey hairs of his nasal cavities bristling. "You will look at me when I talk, boy."

"Who is this boy that you speak of?" My eyes slowly lifted to meet his frosty stare. "Last I checked, I am all man. The fantabulous cock swinging between my legs can attest to the accuracy of self-conceit."

Throwing the pillow aside, duck feathers airborne, I swung my legs over the bed and rose to my feet.

It was my favourite form of intimidation, the advantage of interpersonal dominance. I am terrifyingly tall.

Men like Hamish had to step back and make room for me. Each decisive step forward made damn sure of it.

"How does it feel?" I asked with a naughty smirk on my lips, and he craned his neck upward to get a better view of his opponent. "To grapple for morsels of masculinity and fall short of the societal ideal of manhood? To be demeaned and denigrated by a man almost half your age?" My footsteps came to a standstill once the tips of our leather shoes touched. "It must be depressing, breaking your back to genuflect before royalty."

"You insolent fraud." The abhorrence aflame in his eyes seemed to stand the test of time. "You are no better than every other stray mongrel sniffing at the gutters of Mostyn Avenue," he growled savagely, and I recoiled slightly, taken aback by the unexpectedness of his all-knowing tone of voice. "Oh?" His eyes rounded in glee. "You thought I believed the how-I-met-your-daughter charade, did you? Mr Jones, I have lived on that street for over forty years. I can smell deceit a mile off."

I tried to school my expression, to hide the truth in my eyes and quell nausea in my stomach, but the old man soldiered through the pretence of indifference with a derisive laugh and knocked me for six.

"I remember every season, summer, autumn, winter and spring." He circled me like a man on a mission, hands stuffed in his trouser pockets, leather shoes sinking into the carpet. "Every festive holiday. Every emotion, happy and sad."

My heart pounded. Hamish sounded cock sure of himself, like he knew something I did not. Or perhaps I did know the reason behind the man's overoptimistic perception of Mostyn Avenue's darkest secrets.

When I chased the memories of childhood, pain, trauma, suffering and anguish, I could see the regrettable look in his pinched eyes when slipping out of my mother's bedroom, sleazy, dishevelled and half-dressed, as if it happened yesterday.

It is plausible that Yolanda's frequent bedmate recognised me. I am the aged face of the boy who once stood in the doorway of his bedroom as this geezer moseyed along in a half-buttoned shirt and an unbuckled pair of trousers.

Always barefoot.

He never made eye contact with me. Not when I was young. He drifted in and out of the house like I was invisible. Non-existent. Unworthy of his time or knowledge, a pest in the throes of copulation.

Yet, here we stand, wordlessly promising to unlock the door to the skeletons in each other's closet.

Maybe I underestimated the wickedness of the wicked, the knower of all things dark and mysterious. He is more switched on than I thought.

Hamish's dark voice took possession of my ear. "Every neighbour."

"A round of applause for you," I replied with an impassive visage. "You have yet to fall victim to a major neurocognitive disorder." My tongue clicked once. "That can change in the next five minutes."