by Cindy Dees
He eyed Zane. The good news was the guy was an extrovert. He liked to talk. If Sebastian could act dumb enough and put Zane at ease, the guy might let some important detail slip. His gut told him he wasn’t in immediate danger of being murdered. He could roll with the plan for now. Pretend to protect Zane, wait for the contact to set up a meeting, stick to Zane like glue, and get Zane to let down his guard.
He could do this.
But Christ, it was risky.
“Obviously, somebody’s going to contact you and want you to wear that suit to a rendezvous to hand off the printing plates.”
Zane nodded. “Makes sense.”
“Any idea how they’ll get in touch with you?” he tried casually. Not that he expected Zane to slip up and give that away, of course. If Sebastian didn’t miss his guess, the man was a whole lot smarter than he let on.
“Nope,” Zane answered lightly.
“Ah well. That’s their problem and not ours,” Sebastian said equally lightly. “At any rate, when they do contact you, I’ll plan to go with you to the meet. Undoubtedly, they’ll give you some big line about coming alone and not telling anyone about it. I’ll follow you, stay out of sight of the bad guys, and provide cover and protection for you.”
“How?” Zane asked.
Well, fuck. Now he was the one on the spot. He certainly didn’t want to give away to Zane what he planned to do, in case Zane worked for Erebus and would relay the information to his compatriots. But if he didn’t give a plausible answer, Zane wouldn’t trust him enough to go through with the handoff.
He shrugged. “You know. Bodyguard stuff. I’ll stick close enough to tackle anyone who tries to harm you. If you’d like, I can get a hold of a low-profile bullet-resistant vest for you to wear under that suit.”
“I doubt there’s enough room under it for anything but me. It’s perfectly tailored.” Zane turned back and forth, eyeing himself in the big mirror in the front entry.
“The good news is I won’t try to take down whoever meets you. All I need to do is follow them. Get an image of a face or an address where they go. I will do my level best not to trap you in the middle of a shootout or anything equally exciting.”
“Thank God,” Zane said fervently.
“Oh, and one more thing. Don’t try to be a hero. Don’t tackle the bad guys, don’t hit them or in any way try to restrain them or stop them. Just go along with what they want, do what they tell you to, and let me take care of the rest.”
“Which won’t be violent, right?” Zane clarified.
“Right. I’m not here to stop the handoff. I’m just here to watch it and make sure you walk away from it safely.”
“Are you sure you can accomplish all of that by yourself?” Zane asked doubtfully.
“I’ll figure it out,” he said casually. “Don’t worry about the details. We’ve got time to figure those out. I’ll keep you safe.”
“Thanks.” Zane looked up at him, fear naked in his light green gaze for a moment. But then Zane smiled bravely and tossed his head. The mask of the devil-may-care high-fashion model was back firmly in place.
“You hungry?” Sebastian asked.
“Now that you mention it, I’m famished.”
“Let’s order room service. They’re still serving breakfast.”
“Great! I’ll have dry granola, almond milk, and a bowl of fruit. Lemme go change out of this suit while we wait for the food to come up. I wouldn’t want to ruin it.”
Sebastian stared at Zane’s retreating form. Dry granola? Who ate that crap? The guy might as well gnaw on a few twigs and eat a handful of dirt. Shaking his head, he ordered a tall stack of pancakes, three eggs, bacon and sausage, a pot of coffee, and fresh orange juice for himself. Distastefully, he added the granola and fruit to the order.
Zane emerged from the bedroom, back in his jeans and T-shirt. But now that Sebastian had seen him dressed to the nines, he didn’t see the casual hipster anymore. He kept seeing the elegant, well-turned-out man in the suit. The jeans looked like the costume now. Was the whole man an impostor?
Room service knocked at the door, and Zane hastily moved the briefcase and its damning engraving plates off the table and carried it into the yellow bedroom. The waiter laid out their food on the dining room table, and Sebastian sat down in front of his breakfast.
He was just getting ready to dig in when Zane returned. “Good Lord, man. You’re going to eat all that by yourself?”
Sebastian looked up from his forkful of fluffy pancakes dripping with butter and syrup. He answered defensively, “I work out.”
Zane slipped into a chair across the table. “I work out too. But I would have to run a marathon every other day to be able to eat all that.”
Sebastian shrugged. “High metabolism, I guess.”
“Lucky bastard.” Zane nibbled on a mouthful of the crunchy cereal.
“Do you always eat like a bird?”
“When I hit about twenty-seven, I suddenly couldn’t eat everything in sight anymore. If I wanted to keep working, I had to start editing my food choices.”
An interesting way to describe dieting.
“What do you do for exercise that lets you eat like a lumberjack?” Zane asked.
Sebastian shrugged. “This and that. I lift weights. Run. Swim. Play handball. Do some yoga.”
“Yoga?” Zane exclaimed. “That sounds too zen for you.”
He looked up from the sausage he was neatly slicing. “Why don’t I strike you as a zen guy?” He actually did meditate on a daily basis for stress management and anger control. He’d grown up in a world where people swung their fists first and stopped to think later. He would be damned if he fell back into those early patterns that had cost him so much. In fact, he took quiet pride in how nonviolently he dealt with life these days. His gut might slow burn from time to time, but he never let on. As far as the entire world knew, he was a totally chill human being.
“I don’t know. You strike me as the competitive sports type.”
“Like what?”
Zane leaned back, studying him closely. “Something mano a mano. Boxing, maybe.”
“Good guess. I do box.”
“Why yoga, then?” Zane followed up.
“I need the calm and focus. Plus, studies have shown that keeping muscles supple and flexible prevents injury.” He sliced into a sausage and savored the succulent pork fat and sage flavor. “How about you?”
“Me? Yoga? No way,” Zane declared.
“Why not?”
“You can’t win at yoga.”
Sebastian glanced up sharply, reassessing Zane. His initial impression had not been of a hypercompetitive person.
As if sensing the train of his thoughts, Zane shrugged. “Don’t kid yourself, buttercup. High-fashion modeling is as cutthroat a sport as there is. It’s vicious.”
“How so?”
“Every pretty gay boy who’s too dim-witted to head for Hollywood heads for the fashion industry.”
“You don’t strike me as dim-witted.” Far from it, in fact. The longer he spent with Zane, the smarter he was starting to think the man was.
“That’s why I’m successful. I mean, obviously, it takes sharp fashion sense. When you’re getting started, you have to align yourself with the up-and-coming designers and ride their coattails at first. But it also takes professionalism, business savvy, and an ability to read people and give them what they want.”
Sebastian jolted. Had Zane been reading and playing him? “How do you read me?”
Zane stared at Sebastian’s chest and arms. “On the surface, you want to be taken for a physical guy. The kind who talks with his body first. You wouldn’t go to a lot of trouble to build all those muscles if you didn’t use them from time to time. When do you use them, Sebastian?”
Sebastian almost missed his mouth with his fork. Sheesh. Was that a come-on or an innocent question? He actually couldn’t tell.
Most people missed that he was gay. He didn’t advertise it,
and since he stayed out of the news and the publicity spotlight, and more importantly, rarely had time to date, his sexual orientation wasn’t a subject that came up often. Had Zane correctly pegged him? Huh. Note to self: Zane might be much more perceptive than I’ve given him credit for.
Discomfort rumbled in Sebastian’s gut. He didn’t like being wrong about anyone. Made him worry he’d missed something else important. He studied Zane across the table. What was he missing about this guy?
“What else do you read from me?”
“Well, the whole dumb bodybuilder bit is totally a cover, of course. What you really want to be respected for is your mind. I think you hide behind your looks.”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
Zane leaned back, smiling a little. “Yes, but I make no secret of hiding behind my looks. I accepted a long time ago that people were going to take one look at me and make all kinds of assumptions about me. It makes my life so much easier not to fight against the stereotype.”
Jeez. He’d done that exact thing, himself. He’d taken one look at the glamorous model façade and not looked one inch deeper into the man. He’d not only been played, but played deftly, by Zane. Color him impressed.
“What?” Zane demanded in the silence that had fallen between them.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re staring at me like you’re trying to x-ray my insides.”
“Sorry. You must get that a lot, though. People staring at you, I mean.”
Zane shrugged. “I guess so. It’s more of a hassle than a blessing most of the time.”
“Why?”
“Have you ever tried living under a microscope where every move you make is seen and judged? It gets old fast. Especially if you’re trying to figure out who you are and grow up. Every mistake you make is magnified a hundred times. I may not be movie star famous, but I still live in enough of a spotlight within my own career field to have the same problems.”
“That sounds like it would suck.”
“It sucks rocks.”
Sebastian leaned back to let the pancakes settle in his stomach before he started in on the eggs. “How old were you when you started modeling?”
“Eighteen.”
“Wow. That’s young.”
“I got out of the house as fast as I could.”
“Rough home life?”
Zane toyed with his melon balls and strawberry halves. “Home life was fine until I came out.”
Sebastian asked quietly, “How bad was it?”
“They didn’t kick me out or harm me. But naïve little me thought my parents would be okay with it. When I told them, I didn’t expect them to be ashamed.” He added lightly, “Imagine my surprise when they told me to hide it from their friends.” He toyed with his cereal for a moment before adding, “And then they suddenly wanted me to go out of state for college, and we skipped the family reunion that year.”
“It went a hell of a lot better than it could have.”
Zane looked up, his eyes bleak. “People keep telling me that. But it didn’t feel that way when they gave me a bus ticket to New York City for my eighteenth birthday. Not subtle, my folks.”
“They paid to get rid of you, in other words?”
Another shrug from Zane. “It’s okay. They still speak to me. And they’re less freaked-out about it now. Turns out most everyone suspected already, so it wasn’t a huge shock to their friends, after all, when word got out about me.”
“Do you go home to visit? Or do they come to New York for holidays?”
Zane laughed a little. “Don’t get carried away, now. They’re not that enlightened.”
Sebastian caught Zane’s pained gaze. “I’m sorry.”
“How about you? What does your family think about you being gay?”
Sebastian blinked. “How did you know I’m gay?”
Zane snorted. “I’m not blind. I saw how you checked me out in that suit. Hell, I felt how you reacted to me when you landed on top of me in the car.” He fiddled with a piece of dry wheat toast and then looked up sharply. “You are out, aren’t you?”
“More or less. I don’t hide my preferences, but I don’t hang a neon sign over my head announcing that I like to fuck men.”
“Being gay is about a lot more than that,” Zane said seriously. “Particularly in this country.”
“Hence my being… circumspect… about it.”
“Does your family even know?” Zane demanded.
“My dearly departed old man would’ve killed me with his bare hands if he knew.”
“Ahh,” Zane said in sudden understanding.
“Ahh what?”
“Is that why you’re so buff? You’re subconsciously defending yourself against attack from your late old man?”
He blinked. Stared at Zane. Opened his mouth to tell the guy that was crazy talk. Closed his mouth without saying anything. Sonofabitch.
“And your mother? What does she think?”
“She doesn’t think. She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Zane said quickly and in what sounded like genuine regret. Empathetic, he was.
“She died a long time ago.”
“Long enough that she never saw you become rich and successful?” Zane asked.
“Do you have to keep asking all these insightful questions?”
Zane shrugged over his cup of black coffee. “Just trying to understand what makes you tick.”
“Is this how you succeed in the fashion industry?” Sebastian snapped.
Zane’s voice held infinite sadness as he answered, “No, man. This is how I stay alive in a world that would otherwise beat the shit out of a pretty boy like me.”
They traded a long look of loss and betrayal, a deep understanding that a regular person with a normal life would never get. Zane might be more open about his wounds, but his own scars ran at least as deep as Zane’s.
Whereas Zane wore his on his sleeve, Sebastian had built the thickest walls around himself that money could buy. “How do you do it?” he murmured.
“Do what?” Zane responded.
“Stay open to other people?”
Zane looked away then, staring down at his plate. “Some of the hits I’ve taken—physically, psychologically, emotionally—they weren’t worth it. I ran around looking for love everywhere I could. But I eventually figured out that for people like me, the odds are damned low of ever finding my soul mate. Hell, it’s hard enough just to find a half-decent guy to date, let alone one who fits me perfectly and forever.” He shrugged. “You call it being open. I’d say I’m cynical. I’ve set the bar so low for so long that my faith in love is shot.”
“Wow.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” Zane replied, smiling brilliantly. So brilliantly Sebastian almost mistook it for a real smile. “Life’s a lot easier this way.”
Easier maybe, but it sounded empty. “Are you happy?”
“I’m not in pain.”
Sebastian frowned. Those were not the same thing.
They ate in silence for a few minutes. Then Zane asked, “What’s your story?”
It was not a thing he liked to talk about, that was for damn sure. But having torn open a few of Zane’s scars, he reluctantly allowed that he owed the guy an answer. “I grew up in East London. Tough part of town. Dad died when I was thirteen, Mum died when I was fourteen.”
“How?” Zane interjected.
“He died of stomach cancer. He should’ve gone in to get the symptoms treated earlier and the NHS should have treated it more aggressively. Shitty way to die. My mum ODed.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry. And you were alone after that?”
Sebastian shrugged.
“How did you survive?”
He chose to misunderstand the question. “I got emancipated by the court, shoplifted cheap stuff, and sold it on the street to make ends meet. I got by. And I learned how to sell to people, which is a skill I monetized into all of this.” He waved his fork at the posh
suite.
“Did you live, I don’t know, on the street?”
“I went to live with my mum’s sister, who threw me out of her flat promptly on the morning I turned eighteen. Kind of like your parents did, but not as nicely. Overnight, she’d packed up all my shit and threw it off her balcony. Told me to get the hell out and never darken her doorstep again. Which I haven’t.”
“Does she know how rich you are now?”
Sebastian’s mouth turned up in what could probably be mistaken for a smile but was far less pleasant. “Oh, yes. She came sniffing around not long after I made my first million. Flew to New York to visit me.”
“What did you do?”
“I let her stay in my condo overnight, and when she woke up in the morning, all her shit was scattered on Fifth Avenue beneath my balcony.”
“Nice.”
“It was petty.” He did grin then. “But satisfying.”
Zane held out his fist for a fist bump, which Sebastian touched lightly with his own knuckles.
“Okay, so bitchy aunt tossed you out at eighteen. How did you get to all of this?”
“I joined the Army. Definitely didn’t come out there, but I got my shit together, learned carpentry and plumbing, and figured out what I wanted to do with my life. After the Army I went to work for a private security firm for a while to make real money. Saved my pennies and eventually decided to move to the States. I bought a crappy little apartment building and renovated it myself, unit by unit. And I got lucky. It was in a neighborhood that got sexy to live in, and it doubled in value by the time I was done fixing it up.”
Zane snorted skeptically enough that Sebastian stopped his story to lift a questioning brow.
Zane explained, “In my experience, luck doesn’t just fall into anyone’s lap. You make your own luck. You work hard, prepare, and are ready when the timing lines up and an opportunity comes your way.”
“Fair point. I did work damned hard on that building. Day and night for almost two years.”
“Then what happened?” Zane asked.
“I bought another building. Rinsed, lathered, and repeated. Now I own more buildings.”
“So that’s what you do? Flip real estate?”