Page 6 of Too Close To Home

No, he was someone else. Someone who, for reasons unknown even to him, thought it was the right time to have a stomach-flipping reaction to the sound of a fucking voice. “It’s a nice voice,” Chris’s ghost commented unhelpfully.

“Bugger off.”

“Sorry, what?” the man on the other end said, clearly aggrieved. “You called me, mate.”

“Uh, no, sorry.” Harrison pinched the bridge of his nose. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Oh aye.”

“And sorry to call so early, but I found your number from a card left at a property—”

“If you found my number on a card, mate, I absolutely want you to ring it. Anytime.”

There was a grin in the words. Harrison could feel it.

He straightened instinctively, as if the man could see him. “Of course. Yes. Sorry.”

“No need t’apologise. Not yet, anyhow. What can I do you for, mate?”

The cadence was nothing like London. Or Chris. His vowels were wider, rounder. Less clipped precision, more breath in them. Consonants didn’t snap; they rolled and softened, settling into one another as if the language had nowhere urgent to be. There was warmth threaded through it, too. Ease. And beneath that, something else.

He sounded young.

Not reckless-young. Not careless. But not the thick-necked, sunburnt, beer-bellied stereotype Harrison’s mind had lazily conjured when he’d read Cash preferred on an unbranded business card. This voice carried shape. Intelligence. A man comfortable in his own space. And it gave Harrison’s chest an unexpected flutter that had nothing whatsoever to do with roofing.

Unwelcome.

Deeply inconvenient.

He wasn’t ready for any kind of reaction to any kind of man. Not yet. Not when grief still sat in the marrow of him, quieter now but not gone. Not when he’d relocated counties to put distance between himself and a life stripped back to bone.

Certainly not over a voice.

Someone he knew only as a name printed in plain black ink on a card that didn’t even boast a registered trade number or a five-star review.

Ridiculous.

“I’ve moved into a cottage on Larkspur Lane and—”

“Number five?”

Harrison blinked. “Yes. How did you—”

“Deacon said you might call.”

Deacon? Ah. Deacon Froggatt. The estate agent who’d shaken his hand and assured him everything was ‘sound as a pound’. Harrison rolled his eyes and remembered why Chris used to do this stuff. He’d have checked that survey over with a fine-tooth comb and understood the wording better than he had.

There was a brief rustle on the other end of the line. Fabric against plastic, as if Jake Whitton, Roofing and Repairs, had wedged his phone between his shoulder and jaw. Harrison clenched both of his instinctively. He knew how quickly a moment’s distraction could turn into a sheet over a body.

So it came out automatically. “Are you driving? Should I call back?”

“No, no. Hands free, mate.”

Harrison wasn’t sure he believed him.

“So the roof still a state, then?”

“That’s a rather tragic understatement.”