“It wasn’t all plain sailing, no. But for fuck’s sake, Jackson! This is fucking ridiculous. This could clear you. Who was it that you trusted enough to let into your bed but not enough for them be your alibi? ‘Cause I know you fucking slept with someone that night.”
“How do you know?”
“The condom. In your room. They found it. Your prints on the wrapper. Not your DNA inside.”
“That could have been from any day previous. That doesn’t clear me. It’s irrelevant.”
“It could still lead to someone else. Someone who had access to your home. Who was it?”
Jackson forced out a laugh. This was ridiculous. Ridiculous that Fletcher thought he was stupid enough not to know all this already. There was a reason he hadn’t admitted to anything. It was a pact. An agreement. All of that remained unsaid. Now, even more so.
But he guessed that wasn’t good enough for Fletcher. So he moved closer, lowering his voice.
“I come clean about all that now, and what do you think it will do? It’ll bring my relationship with Tallulah into disrepute. It’ll make a mockery of what we had. It’ll give them more reason to look at me. It won’t clear me. It’ll make me the only suspect. They won’t look for anyone else. They’ll only look at how I did it. With the motive stronger, they’ll find a way to prove I did it. Angry, suppressed gay who finally lashed out at his beard. That’s what that does. That’s what they were waiting for, anyway. And when it didn’t happen. When they realised Tules knew, and she was on my side, they intervened.”
“What the feck are you saying? Who are ‘they’?”
Jackson needed to push this away from him. He needed to lead Fletcher off the path of thinking that this was about him. So he gave the truth. “They, Fletcher Doherty, are the real story here. They are the ones who killed her. They are the ones who will silence this if you don’t print it right now.”
Chapter Twenty
Unmasked
Fletcher was dumbstruck.
Literally.
He could not fathom what Jackson was trying to say. Or why he wanted to keep something so massive about himself out of the book. But not just the book, from the police! He should know how incriminating ‘no comment’ was? So much more incriminating than admitting that he was gay… or perhaps bi… or slept with men for shits and giggles.
More than any of that though, what the feck had he just landed himself in?
“I need to know what I’m dealing with here. I need to know the whole goddamn thing. I need to know who they are.”
Jackson stepped back, the sudden heat from his touch leaving a shiver over Fletcher in its wake. “Then let’s do it.” He nodded up to the B&B. “Let’s go write it.”
With nothing more said, Jackson jogged toward the building’s entrance. Fletcher followed, apprehension surging through his veins. He couldn’t tell which was excitement at the ultimate scoop, or fear of what he was about to discover.
Once settled into the room, Fletcher opened his laptop and started up the blank page to get going. He’d write notes first. Everything that Jackson had told him was going into a saved document. Sitting at the dressing table, he hovered his fingers over the keyboard while Jackson took up his position on the bed behind him. His knees brushed Fletcher’s back as he dipped forward, rubbing nervous hands together. Fletcher closed his eyes so as not to look at him through the reflection in the mirror.
He needed his thrashing heart to calm enough to type.
Maybe Jackson sensed something, because when he began talking it was in a hushed tone as though not to disturb the insipid peace.
“They are the fat cats,” he said. “The ones who make you sign a contract for an undisclosed amount, then fail to show you the hidden clause that says they get eighty percent. They are the ones that tie you into contracts that you can’t get out of and put your money into off-shore accounts so you never see it. They are the ones that trawl the kids’ drama clubs and hand-pick the ones they want by which parents they can control.”
Opening his eyes, Fletcher caught Jackson’s gaze through the mirror. He held it. Waiting. Jackson looked away first, down to his wringing hands and finished off with, “They are The Management.”
“The Management? Your management?”
“Exactly. Derek Hopper Management. They found me, they created me, they controlled me, now they want nothing more to do with me after taking every penny I had.”
“How?” Fletcher was aware that celebrities had management, and most of them had ultimate control. Even Heston had an agent who took ten percent for every role he got through her. But Jackson was a millionaire. Where could all that money have gone? Legally?
Jackson took a deep breath. “I was barely out of nappies when I won my first cheeky cherub photo competition. My parents tried everything to get me noticed. I was cute, yes. That was obvious. The confidence and arrogance came later. Amazing how big your head can grow when all you get told is how cute you are and you’re going to make the family thousands.”
Fletcher snorted, lightly enough but Jackson peered up to meet his gaze via their reflection.
“Derek Hopper Management own these contests,” Jackson continued. “Probably all management companies own them. It’s how they do their selection process. Pick a pretty baby and mould them into a celebrity. That’s how it happened for me. And for Kris. They offered me—I say me, but it was my parents—the chance to audition for an exclusive talented kids club. They convinced my parents that I could earn them big money by going on auditions for kids’ shows, adverts, modelling. My parents needed the money. They were poor. My dad had been made redundant from Ford Motors, my mum hadn’t ever worked a day in her life. We were below poverty line. Most days I went without food.”
Fletcher hadn’t known poverty. But he wasn’t rich. Far from it. His parents were landowners and hard workers. The farm paid their livelihood, but nothing more. It was why he’d meant to take over. When his father became too old to manage the livestock, the Doherty family could well be out of house and home.
Fletcher had had that hammered into him before and since his departure to find his gold on the streets of London.
He wanted to find his riches, too. Would he have sacrificed his own offspring’s childhood for it? He’d never know the answer to that.
“I’m sorry, Jax. That can’t have been easy on you. Did you not have a choice?”
“The only commodity they had, was me.” The painful admission was evident in Jackson’s solemn delivery. “And after what happened to my brother, they needed to use me so much more.”
Fletcher swivelled around, his knees brushing Jackson’s. He left them there. Knee to knee. Body part to body part. It felt natural somehow. Not an invasion of personal space. There was something about the way Jackson was hunched over, something about the way his hands shook, the way he seemed to emit a lifetime of pain through his paling skin, that it felt right to cover Jackson’s wringing hands with his own.
He should’ve been typing. He should’ve been taking all this down. He should’ve been a professional.
But he couldn’t and, instead, he said, “I didn’t know you had a brother.”