Daydreamer

Felix

“Fuck you!” shouted Mike Mayweather, snatching up Lucy’s notebook where it had fallen on the floor and then bearing down on me again. I held up my bloody hand.

“Hey, Mike listen, I don’t want to fight you. Is Lucy⁠—?”

“Don’t you ever say her name to me ever again,” he said, grabbing her bag from my hand and then stepping back as he shoved her notebook inside it. “You stay away from my family, you spineless prick.”

“Mike, you’ve got to listen to me,” I said, feeling really desperate now. I needed to find out if Lucy was okay, and clearly Mike must know as he’d come to pick up her stuff. His gaze shot from the bag to me and the fury in his eyes almost made me take another step back, but I stood my ground. Mike and I had fought plenty over the years. We’d grown up practically as brothers, and we’d always been evenly matched. As adults, we were still the same height and build. Mike used physical labour to give him his body whilst I had my own state-of-the-art gym, but the results were the same. We both were a formidable prospect in a fight. I had no intention of fighting him now, though. All I cared about was his sister.

“I had no idea what had happened.”

He snorted in disbelief, and I started to panic as he turned to walk away. I strode after him, grabbing his forearm to try to slow him down, but he shook me off. “Please Mike, is she okay? I’m losing my mind here.”

He turned to me then, his muscles bunching and a vein throbbing in his forehead. He looked about ready to explode.

“You’re losing your mind, are you?” he said in a low dangerous voice. I’d never heard him so furious before. I mean he could be a grumpy git, but he rarely went nuclear like this. “You’re worried about her now, are you? After you threw her out of your fancy fucking office when she’d just been assaulted?”

“I didn’t know she’d been⁠—”

“You didn’t let her speak, you prick!” he shouted. “You and that stuck-up bloody weirdo were too worried about your precious company secrets.” I glanced beyond him and saw Vicky, Lottie and Tabitha a few steps away, having emerged from my office. Mike followed the direction of my gaze and gave a derisive snort when he caught sight of them before turning back to me. “I told Mum this was a stupid idea. I told her that Lucy would be eaten alive in this world. That she’s better off in Little Buckingham away from sharks like the lot of you.”

Vicky cleared her throat. “We had evidence. She met with Harry York. We saw her pass him information. We didn’t just⁠—”

Mike started laughing then, cutting Vicky off. “Oh my God, you fucking idiots. Are you telling me that you honestly think Lucy would sell information on your shitty company to some finance dickhead? You think she’d do that for money? Lucy?”

“It’s irrelevant now,” I put in. “I don’t care what Lucy thought she had to do. I just want to know she’s okay. Please Mike⁠—”

“She did not sell anything to anyone,” Mike said.

“Mike, I’ve seen where she lives,” I said quietly, not wanting to anger him further but also knowing that we’d been right, at least in this. “The rent for a flat like that is through the roof. There’s no way Lucy could afford some⁠—”

Mike started laughing again. “Jesus Christ, you really don’t know?”

I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“My sister does not need your fucking money.”

“What are you talking about?”

“LP Mayweather could buy and sell all of you dickheads five times over.”

“LP Mayweather?” I turned the name over in my mind. It was triggering some sort of memory, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Of course, Lucy Prudence Mayweather (Lucy hated the Prudence bit, but Hetty had insisted on naming her after a great aunt) was LP Mayweather, but there was something else – something I wasn’t getting. “Mike, I⁠—”

“Work it out for yourself,” he said dismissively. “I’ve got to say that given the man you’ve become, it’s not a big fucking surprise that you’ve taken very little interest in my sister beyond fucking and firing her. Moretti scum through and through. Blood will out, I suppose. Shame, though, I used to think you were a decent bloke and I never thought you’d turn into your old man.”

“Mike,” I said in a hollow voice. “I just need to see Lucy. Is she⁠—?”

“You stay away from my family,” he said, fury lacing his tone. “Stick with your own kind, you entitled, upper-class prick.”

He spun around and stormed off then. When I followed him, he turned, planted one of his large hands in the middle of my chest and gave me a shove. I managed to hold my footing. Mike was forgetting all the times we’d kicked each other’s arses as kids. I wasn’t the soft London wanker he thought, but I wasn’t going to prove that now. I held my hands up, palms forward in surrender.

“Mike, I don’t want a fight,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. I needed to see Lucy, and Mike was clearly the route to doing that. Mike snorted.

“I bet you don’t.” He turned to leave again, and I grabbed his arm.

“Please,” I was begging now as he spun around with a furious expression, ready to punch me again. “Please, Mike. I just want to see if she’s okay. I swear I didn’t know anything about what happened. I’m going out of my mind here.”

Some of the angry tension left Mike’s body. I felt his muscles relax slightly under my grip and he lowered his clenched fist.

“Felix,” he said, his voice losing a little of its hard edge. I thought it was a good sign that he was using my first name. “She’s not going to talk to you now.”

“But—”

“Listen,” he said, turning fully towards me as I dropped my hand from his arm. “If the man I knew is still in there, then he’ll give her some goddamn space. She can’t handle you right now. If you really care about her, you won’t bulldoze your way into seeing her just to make yourself feel better. Even you can’t be that much of a selfish prick.”

I felt myself deflating. He was right. Rationally, I knew he was right. But the problem was that the memory of that footage was making rationality hard to reach for. I kept replaying the image of Lucy’s small frame being thrown against the wall, Brent’s body caging her in, and how hard she was shaking after he let her go.

“Just please, please let me know how she is,” I say in a broken voice. “I can’t—” I broke off to take deep breath in and out. “I can’t stand not knowing. And tell her I’m sorry.”

Mikey jerked his chin up – it was as much acknowledgement as I was going to get from him, given how angry he was. Then he left, and I knew I had to let him go to her. I felt like shit.

Nobody said anything for a long time. The silence was broken by Vicky, and as usual, she was brutal in her directness.

“LP Mayweather’s books are New York Times bestsellers, multiple times over,” she said, her face fixed on her phone. “Her brother is right. She does not need to sell company information.” I moved to Vicky and reached for her phone. She had the Amazon website up. An LP Mayweather book was currently number one in epic fantasy books. As I looked at the cover, a memory stirred. There was a dagger pointed down in the forefront, with a vast foreign landscape behind. “Number one in epic fantasy, number twenty-two in the store overall. According to the online calculator, and including her backlist, she’s doing very well. Of course, she’s a hybrid author so some of that money will be going to her publisher. But her self-published works perform just as well. No wonder she was so helpful to Vanessa.”

“Vanessa?” I said, distracted as I scrolled through all of Lucy’s books. I counted twenty. She had two different series, set in different worlds. “What about Vanessa?”

“Lucy was helping with the advertising campaigns for the new estate.”

“She was helping Vanessa? Like really helping?” But Lucy was useless at work, wasn’t she? Dead weight.

“Yes. She basically took over the social media paid ads. I estimate that she’s increased our revenue by twenty per cent in the last two months,” Vicky said then cocked her head to the side. “You didn’t know that? Don’t you know anything about her? I thought she was your girlfriend? I thought you grew up together?”

Tabitha snorted. “Men are self-absorbed arseholes.” I was still blinking at the phone screen. I didn’t really know what to say to that. I mean, TBea was not wrong.