Ace in the Hole

by Ava Drake

  Pere laughed at the other end of the phone. “It’s worth a try. At this point I have no better ideas. As long as he refuses to respond to our messages, our hands are tied.”

  “Please tell me this is the wildest job you guys have ever taken.”

  Another laugh out of Pere. “I don’t know. We’ve got another strange one unfolding in Gibraltar. But you’re right up there.”

  “Good luck landing the senator.”

  “And good luck continuing to be him.”

  Stone snorted and disconnected the call. Jack Lacey could use a good old-fashioned ass kicking for the hassles he was causing a whole lot of decent people. He turned and started back toward the hotel as the sun came up in a blazing ball of red.

  His thoughts turned back to Christian and the intense lovemaking they’d shared last night. An overwhelming desire to do that again rolled over him. In fact, he could do that a whole bunch of times and never grow tired of it or of the man himself.

  He was almost back to the hotel when another runner came toward him on the beach, tall and athletic, moving with the efficient, ground-eating strides of a hard-core runner. With a start, he recognized Christian.

  As they drew near, he drew breath to give a cheerful greeting. He was feeling a million times better after getting some exercise. But then he caught Christian’s thunderous expression and came to a full stop.

  “What in the bloody hell are you doing out here all by yourself?” Christian ground out.

  “Running,” he answered cautiously.

  “In the first place, Jack doesn’t run. And in the second, what possessed you to come out here alone?”

  “Why not? No assassin’s going to be out looking for Jack on the beach. Like you said, he doesn’t run.”

  “And yet you’re not the only person out here. You could be seen.”

  “I don’t see how that’s a problem—”

  “That’s because you have no idea how rapacious the press really is. Not to mention most of them hate Jack’s guts.”

  “I don’t see a mob of reporters anywhere, Christian. It’ll be okay,” he soothed. “Hell, it’s barely sunrise. None of them will be out looking for me either.”

  Christian took a step closer and confessed, “When I woke up and you were gone, I was more than a little freaked out. Last night was… intense.”

  “Did you think I was running away from you?” he blurted, equal parts pleasantly surprised and dismayed that he’d upset Christian.

  Christian mumbled something unintelligible.

  He would take that as a yes. Stone said forcefully, “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, man. Last night was the most spectacular experience of my life. I’m out here trying to wrap my mind around what we shared. I’m not dumping you!”

  Their gazes met, Christian’s troubled and his incredulous.

  “For real?” Christian asked.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he said fondly. He leaned in, grabbed Christian by the back of the neck and laid a quick, hard, smoking-hot kiss on him that was more tonsillectomy than smooch. Forehead to forehead with Christian, he mumbled, “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with you, and we have a lot of shit to sort out, but I’m not pulling a runner on you. I promise.”

  Christian went very still, absorbing his words. It felt as though he was testing their truth and found the integrity and honor he sought in Stone’s voice. “Later,” he said low. “After this is all over.”

  “Deal.”

  They kissed once more to seal the deal, and then Christian stepped back and looked around furtively. Stone commented wryly, parroting back the guy’s words from the first time they met. “This is South Beach, dude. No one’s worried about a little PDA between a couple of guys on the beach.”

  “Still. We can’t be too careful.”

  “So, I still feel pretty good. You wanna go a few miles with me?” Stone asked.

  “While I’d love to take you up on that because, Lord knows, do I need the stress relief, we’d better get you back to the hotel before someone recognizes you. I’ll go down to the fitness center and use the treadmill.”

  He grinned lopsidedly. “Maybe we can find another way to blow off a little of your stress. And I could use a shower while we’re at it.”

  “Is that so?” Christian replied, a grin breaking across his face.

  CHRISTIAN’S near heart failure at waking up to an empty bed had mostly calmed by the time the two of them emerged from a steaming and very lengthy shower that involved a great deal of soap suds and slippery sex.

  Stone was in an expansively good mood, and Christian was feeling pretty damned skippy himself. They sat down to go over the day’s itinerary.

  “Okay, so we can safely cancel your golf-tournament appearance after last night’s fiasco. That leaves us with just the casino fund-raiser Saturday night.”

  “Thank God,” Stone replied fervently.

  “Tired of playing senator already?” he asked.

  “I’ve had my fifteen minutes of fame. I’m ready to return to my anonymous life, thanks.”

  “Introvert,” he snorted.

  “That’s not a dirty word, you know.”

  “Maybe not if you sneak up on people and kill them for a living. But in politics you’d damn well better like being around hordes of people.”

  “The way I hear it, congressmen are pretty good at sneaking up on unsuspecting victims.” He shrugged. “Like, oh, you. Jack dumped a hell of a mess in your lap without a word of warning.”

  Tucker hung up a phone and interjected, “The mess is about to get more complicated. That was Mrs. Lacey. She’s flying in this afternoon. Show of support for her husband after last night’s near miss and all.”

  Stone rolled his eyes. “Great. The last thing I need is a wife.”

  Christian muttered dryly, “What would you do with one?” Stone scowled at him, and Christian’s twitching lips broke into the grin he’d been holding back. “Never fear. You’ll like your wife.”

  It was decided that Tucker would go alone to the airport to pick up Jill Lacey. There was too much potential for awkwardness if Jill and Stone’s first meeting was in public. People might pick up on any formality or lack of displays of affection. Best to bring her fully into the conspiracy in the privacy of the hotel suite.

  Assuming, of course, that she agreed to go along with the risky scheme at all.

  Tucker duly left for the airport, and Christian made one more pass through the speech he’d drafted for Stone to deliver at the casino fund-raiser. Although the appearances to date had been important, the really big fish would turn out in force on Saturday night. Not only did the speech have to strike exactly the right note to loosen purse strings, but it also had to sound like vintage Jack. Any number of people who knew Jack well would be at the event.

  His current working plan was to hold Stone out of the main casino party until it was time for his speech, have Stone deliver the speech, and then have him get “called away” immediately afterward by an emergency. Everyone thought it was cool when congressmen had “classified crises” to deal with. It made the politician look important and observers feel like insiders to know that something was up before the rest of the world did.

  His cell phone rang, and Christian fished it out of his pocket. Now why was Tucker calling him on his personal line? “Hey, Travis. What’s up?”

  “I’m at the airport with Mrs. Lacey. She’s being mobbed by reporters and paparazzi.”

  Alarm sliced through his gut. “Why?”

  “Something about pictures of Jack and his lover. They’re going crazy. Full-on feeding frenzy.”

  Oh Jesus. Had someone gotten pictures of Jack and Chesty? That was the one variable he had no control over. He’d prayed that Jack’s innate hatred of paparazzi and well-developed radar for when they were around would save them all. But no.

  He closed his eyes in chagrin as the whole house of cards unraveled before his very eyes. His career was over. His life was over. The scandal was
going to be horrendous.

  Belatedly he mumbled, “You know what to do. Pull her out and get her over here.”

  “Roger that.” Tucker hung up the phone, and Christian slumped in his chair.

  Stone wandered into the living room. “What’s up?”

  “Pictures of Jack and Chesty have hit the press.”

  “Aww jeez. I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do? Maybe deny that the pictures are me? After all, I’ve been in Miami the whole time. The pictures will be coming out of the Caribbean. You can have an analyst declare them to have been taken in St. Thomas or wherever they were snapped. A bunch of people can verify that I’ve been making public appearances here over the past few days.”

  He had a point. Maybe they should brazen out the ruse and dare the press to prove them wrong. “We’ll need Jill to corroborate the story. Everyone loves her, and people will listen to her. If she calls the story a ridiculous lie, that will hold weight.”

  “Wow. Jack must hate it that her credibility is higher than his.”

  “It drives him crazy.”

  “Doesn’t give him the right to cheat on her,” Stone commented.

  “Amen.” Thank God Jill had arrived. This thing was getting bigger than him. He didn’t have the authority to be making some of the decisions that were going to have to be made soon. This involved the Lacey marriage, and he needed Mrs. Lacey to be on board.

  The door to the suite opened, and Christian stood to hug her, but she screeched to a stop and demanded angrily, “What the hell have you done?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “The pictures, Christian.”

  “I haven’t seen them. Jack and his girlfriend must have come ashore—”

  “They’re not of Jack and a woman. They’re of Jack and you!”

  Chapter Twelve

  STONE came out of the bedroom and stopped cold. An attractive woman was glaring at Christian, who looked like he’d just been run over by a freight train. Tucker was looking back and forth between them like the two of them were aliens speaking in tongues. What the hell had he just walked into?

  He stepped forward. “You must be Mrs. Lacey. I’m Stone Jackson. Pleasure to meet you.”

  She whirled to include him in her glare, and he recoiled. She did know that he had been impersonating her husband, right? He looked over at Christian questioningly. What was he missing here?

  “What the hell have you done, Christian?”

  Egads. She didn’t know what he and Christian had been up to. She was so going to fire his ass, and Wild Cards, Inc. would get a black eye. And then they’d have to fire him over the scandal. What on earth had he been thinking to agree to this madness?

  Christian faced the boss’s wife, his shoulders set defensively. However, he spoke with admirable calm. “You gave me an impossible task. Jack and Chesty absconded to international waters where we couldn’t retrieve him—”

  “Chesty?” Frost on a witch’s tits couldn’t have been any colder than that single word.

  He felt rotten that Christian was taking so much heat for merely being the messenger bearing bad tidings, and he stepped into the line of fire with the guy. “Chesty Hills, ma’am. She’s the porn star Jack left the country with.”

  “Speaking of which, how did your protectee manage to slip out of an entire country without you knowing?” she asked him sharply. “Weren’t you supposed to be guarding him?”

  “He insisted that I stay away from him, Mrs. Lacey. And he refused to let Tucker or me guard the suite’s door. The two of them snuck out of here and used a stairwell with no security cameras to make their escape.”

  “Well. At least the bastard learned from the last incident with a woman and took precautions not to get caught this time.”

  He was stunned at her equanimity over the fact that her husband was currently on the lam with a porn star.

  “At a glance, I gather that you’ve been pretending to be Jack in the interim?”

  “That’s correct, ma’am.”

  Not to be left out of the general ass whupping, Christian dived back in. “That was my idea, not his.”

  She glared back and forth between the two of them for upward of a full minute, her mental wheels turning loudly in the silence. The tension stretched out until Stone actually had to restrain an urge to squirm like a guilty schoolboy. A flush was climbing Christian’s fair cheeks, so Stone would guess he felt about the same way.

  Without warning, she began to chuckle. “Well, well, well, Christian Brandeis. I give you full marks for ingenuity. And people are actually buying that this impersonator is my husband?”

  Stone picked up one of Jack’s cowboy hats off a coffee table and jammed it on his head. He put on his best Texas drawl. “Aww, don’t get your britches in a hitch there, darlin’. I’m not half bad at being ole’ Jackie boy.”

  Jill Lacey fell into a chair and stared up at him in shock.

  “Walk across the room and back,” Christian encouraged him.

  It was a bit of a struggle to get the swagger right without cowboy boots on, but he did his best.

  “Put him in one of Jack’s suits and a pair of sunglasses, and nobody can tell the difference.”

  “Except for the pictures the paparazzo shoved under my nose at the airport. The bastard wanted cash to keep them out of the press. I’ve got his card in my purse somewhere,” she responded.

  A single photographer, huh? Abruptly intrigued, he opened his mouth to ask her the man’s name, but Christian cut him off, snapping, “You can’t kill the photographer, Stone. This is the civilian world.”

  “Yeah, but it’s only one sleazeball—”

  “No.”

  “Fine,” Stone groused. “But if you change your mind….”

  “There will be no murders,” Christian replied firmly.

  “Party pooper.”

  He shot Christian his best pout.

  Pointedly ignoring him, Christian turned to Jill and asked cautiously, “What kind of pictures?”

  She, in turn, ignored him and instead stared down Stone. Man, she had that whole “mother guilting kid into confessing anything” look down to a fine science.

  “You’re gay, aren’t you?” she demanded.

  Damn, her gaydar was on point. “Yes, ma’am. I am.”

  “And you’re hot and heavy with Christian, aren’t you?”

  Tucker made a surprised sound. For his part, Stone frowned. He and Christian had been exceedingly circumspect about their relationship. Neither one of them let their private lives interfere with their professional lives, after all. They’d never touched each other in public. Hell, they barely even looked at each other in public. There’d only been that one quick encounter on the beach at sunrise earlier—

  —where’d they’d kissed. Passionately. More than once.

  “Aww hell,” Christian muttered. “The beach this morning. I told you we had to be careful.”

  “Well, you weren’t careful enough, boys,” Jill interjected tartly.

  Stone winced. He and Christian deserved that. But ouch. He’d been naïve to think that a man like Jack Lacey wouldn’t be stalked morning, noon, and night. Christian had tried to warn him, but he’d refused to listen. This was his screwup.

  Jill was holding out a business card. “The paparazzo wrote down the address of the website I can visit to preview the layouts that will go public if I don’t buy the images from him.”

  Which was a fancy way of saying that if she didn’t pay the guy’s blackmail demand, he would send the pictures to whatever tabloid would pay him the most for the scandalous pictures.

  There wasn’t really any question of her paying off a blackmailer. Once that faucet was opened, it was nearly impossible to shut off, and besides, they had no guarantee the photographer wouldn’t take Jill’s money and then turn right around and sell the damned things to the highest bidder anyway.

  He looked over Christian’s shoulder reluctantly as the pictures popped up on Christian’s laptop. Th
e quality wasn’t great; they’d obviously been taken with a telephoto lens from some distance away. But they were clear enough. The passionate kiss was clearly between two men.

  The next photo of him and Christian, foreheads pressed together, might be achingly romantic in any other situation. But it was damning as hell in this one. Worse, their faces were clear enough in this photo that there was no question it was Christian and him. Or rather, Jack and Christian.

  Any chance Christian had ever had at protecting his privacy was completely, irrevocably blown. Stone rested a hand on Christian’s shoulder, and it was like touching ice. Or maybe glass. There was a brittle quality to Christian’s posture that made him feel as if he might shatter at any second.

  “God, I’m sorry,” Stone breathed. “I should’ve listened to your warnings. You told me they’d be watching me 24-7, and I didn’t take you literally.”

  Christian looked up, but at Jill, not at him. “If we’re lucky, these photos will smoke out your husband. I can’t imagine him letting them pass undisputed and unrefuted.”

  Stone looked back and forth between Christian and Jill candidly. “This screwup is squarely on me. What can I do to make it right? Anything. Just name it. I’ll do it.”

  Christian was the one who answered. “How do you feel about an impromptu press conference with your wife?”

  Jill started. “Stop the wagon there, Nellie. You want me to go out in public with a man who’s posing as my husband? What if somebody realizes he isn’t Jack? Then I’ll go down in flames too.”

  Christian nodded solemnly. “Here’s the thing, ma’am. If you do nothing to disprove or refute these pictures, you’re going to come under intense pressure to take action. Your conservative constituents will demand that you divorce Jack to save your reputation and continue the charity work you so love doing.”

  “If I try to refute the allegations that Jack is gay and the public believes them anyway, then I’ll look weak and pitiful for standing by a man who suddenly likes boys better than girls. Hell, I won’t only have to divorce Jack. I’ll have to move out of Texas.”