Page 1 of Dirty Rotten Love

Chapter one

Rory

“Rory,” says Tam, appearing at my elbow with the expression of a man bearing genuinely wonderful news. “You’re on drain inspection with MacLeod.”

I turn to look at him. He is delighted with himself. His round face is doing the thing where he is trying not to grin and failing completely.

“Brilliant,” I say. “Love that for me.”

“Just you and him. One on one. Quality time.”

“Tam, I swear to god.”

He loses the battle with the grin entirely. Several of the other lads look over, and Dazza makes a sound that is technically a cough and absolutely is not.

This is why I love it here. This. This exact thing. The banter and the noise and being one of the lads in a way that feels real and earned rather than something I have to work for. Back home I always had to work for it a bit. Always had to be on, always had to land the joke or take the hit first before anyone would fully relax around me. Here it took about forty-eight hours, and now I feel like I’ve known these idiots my entire life.

MacLeod appears from around the corner, and the atmosphere shifts in that way it always does when he arrives, like a pressure change before a storm. Conversations don’t stop exactly, but they recalibrate. Everyone becomes about sixty percent more focused on whatever they’re supposed to be doing.

I become about seventy percent more focused on whatever I’m supposed to be doing. Obviously. For the same reasons as everyone else.

He is looking at his clipboard. This is good. When MacLeod is looking at his clipboard he is not looking at me, and when he is not looking at me, I get a free pass to just. Look at him. In a completely normal way. The way you’d look at anyone who walked into a room. The way you’d look at, I don’t know, a very large and imposing piece of industrial machinery. You’d clock it. Take note of it. Acknowledge its presence in your vicinity. That’s all I’m doing.

He is tall. Genuinely impressively tall, and built in a way that suggests the North Sea has been trying to knock him down for twenty years and has not yet succeeded. Dark hair, a bit longer than you’d expect, and a jaw that looks like it was assembled from spare parts left over from building a mountain. He’s somewhere in his late thirties. He has the kind of face that has absolutely no time for your nonsense, which would be more intimidating if I had any nonsense to speak of, which I don’t, I am a consummate professional.

He looks up from the clipboard. His eyes go straight to me. They are very dark and extremely unimpressed.

I give him my best smile. Bright, easy, the full wattage. The smile that has been charming people since I was seven years old and worked out it was a more efficient strategy than crying.

MacLeod’s expression does not change in any way whatsoever.

Right. Fine. I drop the smile to a more moderate setting. Something relaxed and professional. One of the lads. Just a guy. Nothing to see here.

“Gallacher,” he says. “Drain inspection. Now.”

“On you go, boss,” I say, and fall into step behind him.

Tam gives me a thumbs-up behind MacLeod’s back. I give Tam a look that communicates a wide range of feelings very efficiently. He mouths something that I think is good luck, and for some reason it lands as the funniest thing he has said to me all week, but I absolutely cannot laugh, so I bite my bottom lip and hold my breath.

MacLeod sets a pace that requires me to move my legs at a rate I find personally offensive. The man walks like he is permanently late for something, or possibly like he is trying to walk away from something and hasn’t quite accepted yet that it is following him. I match his pace because I am fit and capable and I am not going to be the one huffing to keep up, absolutely not, I would rather die.

On the plus side, the exertion swallows up my need to laugh.

“You’ve done drain inspection before,” he says abruptly. It’s not a question. With MacLeod nothing is really a question.

“Aye, did the training,” I say. “All signed off.”

He makes a noise. It is not a positive noise. It is the noise of a man who considers training to be the absolute bare minimum and is deeply unimpressed that I am presenting it as a qualification.

“The training,” he says, in a tone that makes me feel several kinds of inadequate, “and doing it are two different things.”

“Aye, I know that.” I keep my voice easy. Unbothered. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it. To learn the doing part.”

He glances sideways at me. It’s a quick look, sharp, like he’s checking something, and then he looks away again.

I don’t know what he’s checking. Whether I’m being cheeky, probably. I’m not being cheeky. I’m being genuine, which is rare for me, but here we are.

We reach the inspection point, and MacLeod crouches down to check the first drain with the focused efficiency of a man who has done this approximately ten thousand times. I watch and then I do exactly what he does, checking the second one, and I do it correctly because I did actually pay attention in training and I am not, despite what certain supervisors might imply with their silences, an idiot.