Limbo by Amy Andrews

week. Closed public holidays.
    The brothel’s laundry bill was staggering.
    Dash found Harry staring into his scotch, sprawled naked on the rumpled bed propped up against the colosseum headboard. Harry liked scotch and the room came with its own mini-bar. Unfortunately scotch didn’t like him. Scotch bought out the depressive in him.
    Harry was a big guy, tall and beefy, with solid brickie-labourer honed muscles beneath the layers of flesh and a crown of golden curls. He looked exactly like a twenty-seven-year-old Botticelli angel.
    With, apparently , an absolutely enormous cock.
    Way more information than Dash needed.
    For god’s sake, someone that good looking and well-endowed could have gotten laid for free anywhere, anytime but Harry had developed a fixation for Gabriella when she’d danced at one of the topless bars in the city two years ago.
    ‘Harry,’ Dash said, striding into the room grabbing the sheet at the end of the bed and yanking it up to cover Harry’s modesty. He didn’t mind having to talk a depressive, obsessive client of Eve’s off the ledge at one in the morning but he’d be fucked if he had to worry about the guy’s cock while he did it.
    ‘I thought we weren’t going to be meeting like this again?’
    Harry looked up from his drink. ‘Dash! I’m sorry man, I’m so sorry but I couldn’t leave her…I just couldn’t leave her. She loves me. I know she does.’
    Dash sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Didn’t we speak about this last time?’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘And what did I say?’
    Harry frowned and looked into his drink as if he was trying to divine the answer to Dash’s question from the liquid amber depths. Clearly it wasn’t in there.
    ‘This is Gabriella’s job,’ Dash reminded him gently. ‘You pay her for sex. She doesn’t love you.’
    Harry nodded his head. ‘I know .’ He turned pleading eyes onto Dash. ‘But she’s so beautiful. And she smells so good. And if she marries me, she won’t have to be a prostitute anymore.’
    Eve entered, balancing a tray with two coffee mugs and a full coffee pot. She placed it on the bedside table constructed from faux Roman columns.
    ‘All women smell good, Harry,’ Dash said prying the scotch out of his hand.
    ‘Not like Gabriella. She smells like honey jumbles and summer rain and a meadow full of flowers.’
    Dash frowned. For fuck’s sake. Harry clearly read too much poetry. Or was ovulating. If Harry dared get a hard-on from this girly shit while Dash was sitting less than a foot away he was just going to haul his ass to the lock-up for the night. And then try and spend the rest of his life forgetting it, although Dash suspected there wasn’t enough brain bleach in the world to erase this little tete-a-tete from his memory banks.
    He glanced at Eve as she passed the mugs and he handed one to Harry. ‘Here. Get this into you,’ he said. ‘Then you’re going home.’
    ‘I love her. I can rescue her,’ Harry said, his blue eyes pleading. ‘And she can rescue me right back.’
    Eve withdrew and Dash resigned himself to drinking a pot of coffee with a giant, naked cherub who fancied himself as Richard goddamn Gere. ‘She doesn’t want rescuing, Harry.’
    He shook his head. ‘This isn’t the life for her.’
    ‘She knows that, Harry,’ Dash murmured. ‘That’s why she’s studying to be a physiotherapist.’
    He got a dreamy look in his eye and smiled. ‘She’ll be good at that. Maybe I can become her first client?’
    Dash wasn’t entirely convinced Harry knew what physios did. His goofy grin seemed to suggest he’d be lining up for a massage — the happy-ending kind — instead of treatment for an injury.
    ‘Drink up while it’s hot,’ he said.
    Dash spent the next hour chatting to Harry about the job he was working on while he sobered up. Dash learned more about how to mix a perfect mortar than he ever wanted to know. But when two guys were conversing and one of them was naked , the manlier the topic the