by Holley Trent
“No, silly!” She bumped his thigh with her hip and rubbed her eyes again. “Of course not. Stick around. Adrien’s working, but Dara’s here. She’s working, too, though. Trying to get my inbox down to zero. If you can entertain yourself until dinnertime, we can promise to be much more interesting after that.”
Raleigh drummed his fingertips against the sides of his arms. His goal hadn’t been to bust in on the threesome and be the bad guy. He’d only wanted Stacia to know that she wasn’t being as discreet as she thought she was, but that wasn’t true. She was perfectly discreet, but Raleigh’s tuning was calibrated a bit differently than the general public’s. Stacia was the one person on a planet of billions who’d seen his foundation and all the bare wood studs that held up the roof that was his personality, and yet she still loved him anyway.
Of course he’d notice if something was off, even if no one else would.
He raked a hand through his travel-flattened hair and shook his head. “Okay. I’ll leave you to work. I’ll catch up with you later, I suppose. I booked a one-way ticket not knowing how long I’d be here. I need to try to get a ticket back to New York for tomorrow, and I suppose I can find some other way to entertain myself in LA for a few hours, right?”
“If you can’t find something to do here, then where can you?”
“Exactly.”
“Use Dara’s car, if you want.” Stacia was already shuffling toward the door. “She won’t care.”
“Thanks, but I can just call for a ride. I hate driving in LA.”
She shrugged and passed through the open doorway. “Suit yourself. Keep me updated. My cell’s on.”
Stacia left him to his own devices with no further pleasantries.
Raleigh jammed his hands into the pockets of his slacks and stared at the spot where she’d been standing.
Typical.
He’d flown three thousand miles to save someone who hadn’t needed saving.
It could have been worse, though. He could have crossed the country to support someone who’d never return the favor for him. He’d been systematically pruning people like that out of his life for more than a decade. He was used to people trying to use him for access to more powerful or more important individuals. His father, mainly, and that said a lot about them.
Stacia had been the only person he’d met in recent years who’d not only recognized him on sight—“Oh, God. You’re that polka-dot-tie guy’s son.”—but who hadn’t interrogated him about his past privileges. In fact, when she’d been formally assigned to his author roster, he hadn’t even been able to get her to respond to his emails.
That’d been the basis of an honest friendship, to him—him doing the chasing for a change, and her knowing whom he had access to but tuning out any mention of it, just like he did.
Groaning, he headed to the bathroom with his bag in tow. He needed a shower and shave to feel like himself again, and then he’d deal with travel plans and figure out what he’d do with himself for a day. He was in the land of sunshine and excess. The sun, he avoided by virtue of being a natural ginger. The excess, though—that, he could appreciate.
For a day, anyway.
Then it was back to business as usual. Books didn’t sell themselves, after all.
Chapter Two
Plopping into his purchased seat at the Hollywood Bowl, Raleigh peered into his wallet at his credit card for hints of imminent melting, but the plastic remained structurally sound. He was going to have to transfer funds from savings to cover that whopper of a bill when it came, but it’d be worth it. He’d been wanting to see Rock Paper Sinsters live since college, but senators’ sons didn’t let themselves get seen watching bands who had famous proclivities for stripping down to their underwear between songs. It was their shtick. Everyone knew that, but supposedly, there was such thing as propriety.
At thirty-eight, Raleigh was nearing a stage where he was giving far fewer fucks about propriety. The band was still amazing after so many years, and he didn’t know when he’d ever have a chance to see them again. Their touring future was up in the air, and Raleigh had bought a seat close to the stage. It’d been spendy, but it was either that or a slice of bench up in the nosebleeds.
Intermission came far too quickly and Raleigh mourned that the halfway point had already arrived. Still, as concertgoers hovered around him, he took a moment to check his messages and send a text to Stacia that he was going to miss dinner. He also scrolled through emails from work. There was nothing urgent happening. No major book launches imminent, or even any minor ones. Athena had recently merged with another house and they’d put a moratorium on August releases so they could streamline their processes. He was ahead of the game on everything else he needed to do and had left some work for his assistant to finish up.
He hated leaving the office, even when there weren’t a million fires to put out. If he wasn’t there to answer questions, instead of emailing him, people would go looking for the other fiction publicist, Everley, as though they were interchangeable.
They weren’t, and it was obvious to him that the scheming witch had been trying to absorb some of his list since her first day. She’d come by her job without having a single qualification for it, and likely assumed she could collect a few of his bigger authors with the same ease.
There was no doubt that the moment he gave her an inroad, she’d snatch what was his and run. He worked his ass off for the authors on his list and like hell if he was going to let a woman who’d landed a rare publishing job via nepotism reap the perks of his decade of effort.
“Phones are a cancer,” the man seated at his right said.
Curious, Raleigh shifted his gaze toward him.
He wasn’t even looking at Raleigh. He had his forearms propped atop his knees and was staring ahead at the empty stage.
Certainly, he’d been sitting there all along, but before that moment, Raleigh hadn’t paid any attention to him. He’d been in such a hurry to find his seat before the warm-up band took the stage.
Raleigh couldn’t see his face. A sheet of limp inky hair curtained the side. Hadn’t been washed in days, probably. Some people claimed their hair styled better a day or two after shampooing, but Raleigh wasn’t one of those people. Black soap and a hot blow dryer were two of his dearest friends.
“A cancer,” the man repeated.
He was wearing a long tweed coat that hadn’t been in style since the midsixties, and even then, only with certain Madison Avenue types. The cuffs were frayed, and there were buttons missing. The temperatures may have been falling at night, but they wouldn’t be cold enough to justify the tent he was wearing. His build was too slim for the coat. Perhaps it’d been a thrift store find and he’d really loved that plaid pattern.
Raleigh grimaced. People who dropped nearly a thousand bucks on VIP-section concert tickets tended to prefer bespoke.
And they brushed their hair.
The man rotated one of the many rings piled on his left fingers and turned his head toward Raleigh. Dark sunglasses. No visible eyes.
Gorgeous tan skin, though, despite the distraction of his uneven shave.
Wide mouth. Full lips.
Raleigh’s gaze lingered there for longer than was polite, but his fascination couldn’t be helped. Lips were his weakness, and had been since high school when a lacrosse player named Devin Williker had cornered him and informed him at extremely close range that Raleigh would be taking Devin’s sister to the fall formal. Devin had the lips his little sister should have been born with, and perhaps he knew it. He wouldn’t have licked them when he realized Raleigh was staring if he didn’t. He wouldn’t have laughed and leaned in even further to whisper, “Sorry, McKean, I’m already taken,” before walking away.
Raleigh had never seen a more beautiful mouth on a man until that very moment.
“They should bring back pay phones,” the stranger in the coat said. “I�
��ll call you when I fuckin’ feel like it, you know?”
His voice had the kind of growly quality to it that reminded Raleigh of past nights of consensual depravity and the rough mornings that followed.
It’d been ages. Depravity was easier when the actors were anonymous, and Raleigh couldn’t feel completely anonymous anymore. He’d been burned too many times.
But the visceral memories of those old wounds inflicted by Allison and the mistakes before her didn’t quell the desire to chase and win and claim. To touch those lips with the pads of his thumbs and hold them there until they parted and moans escaped from between them.
Fuck, I’m hard up.
Swallowing a self-deprecating laugh, Raleigh forced his stare downward toward his phone, because he couldn’t risk his imagination running any wilder than it already was. Respectability was his shield. The media ignored him when he was boring.
But he was only human, and humans hadn’t yet evolved to completely overcome their harmful temptations. He looked at the stranger again, gaze immediately tracking to that sumptuous bottom lip.
“You don’t carry a phone?” Raleigh asked, struggling to keep his tone level and normal in spite of his heart’s sudden racing. “What if someone needs you?”
The odd man didn’t immediately respond. He just kept staring at Raleigh, or at least, Raleigh thought he was. It was difficult to tell with the dark shades. After a minute, and a jostle from his other neighbor returning to her seat, he said, “I guess I have a phone.”
“You guess?”
“I didn’t buy it.”
“Oh. I see.” Raleigh chuckled, somehow managing to keep his focus on the opaque dark lenses. He needed to be able to see through them. Eyes said everything. Mouths lied. “You’re a Luddite. I don’t see how it’s possible for anyone to be one nowadays.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I like tech. Wireless this and that. Guitars and televisions. I just don’t like phones. I don’t like being at people’s becks and calls.”
“You could just not answer.”
The man snorted, turned forward, and fidgeted his rings some more.
Raleigh would have been content to let the conversation peter out so he could get back to his phone and ignore his wicked urges to do reckless things like flirt or touch. He was at a number of people’s beck and call, even during the hours when he wasn’t contractually obligated to be. Adulting was a scam.
“What do you do?” Raleigh’s new friend asked.
“What? For a living?”
The man grunted.
“I work in publishing.” Raleigh had never been able to easily explain his job in a compact sentence. His job was one of the sorts that he had to give a brief overview for, before launching into a few more sentences of detailed explanation. He wasn’t in the mood, though. “I get books in front of the readers who want to read them.”
If the guy was enticed at all by the revelation, he didn’t show it. He didn’t move a millimeter.
“Pay’s okay,” Raleigh murmured, gaze falling to that mouth yet again. He closed his eyes against the sight.
Get a grip, McKean.
It hadn’t even been that long since he’d last kissed anyone. He’d had a fling during his most recent vacation. Nothing serious. No sparks, but he’d scratched the itch.
Or so he’d thought.
“And I get to stay behind the scenes for the most part,” Raleigh muttered.
“How does one get into a job like that?”
“If you’re asking if I went to college thinking I’d get a job in the publishing industry, no.”
The honest truth was that Raleigh had gone to college doing anything that wouldn’t make people immediately think he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps. He avoided classes on law and policy, and even the interesting sociology ones that called to him. He’d heavily stacked his schedule with coursework in the sciences until he learned that science was political, too. By junior year, he’d switched to history. History wasn’t always honest, but it taught him when to ask questions. He’d been a skeptic before. His degree only legitimized his curiosity about truth.
“I got into publishing kind of sideways,” Raleigh said, opening his eyes and turning his attention to the stage, the venue, the sky—anywhere but at his companion. “Picked up some fact-checking work at a small press. One thing led to another.”
“Nice.”
“What do you do?”
Again, the guy didn’t immediately answer.
Raleigh hated that shit. He hated having his personal business probed and then for people to not expect that turnabout was fair play.
“You’re not from here,” the man said, sidestepping the question.
Facing forward, Raleigh gritted his teeth. The guitar techs were scurrying about on stage. The show was due to begin again soon.
Thank God.
Any excuse to discontinue the disquieting chat would be a welcome one.
“What gave it away?” Raleigh asked.
“Accent.”
“Which one? People who know me say I have at least three.”
“Maybe that’s what it is. Can’t figure it out.”
“Living in New York for any period of time does interesting things to speech patterns.”
The guy nodded. “Aye. I’ve heard that.”
And there were some interesting things happening with the stranger’s speech patterns. Raleigh had always thought he had a pretty good ear but the sounds the guy made didn’t fit into any neat accent box. Not quite American or any kind of English, really.
“I do lots of things. Sometimes in New York.”
Raleigh raised a brow. “Yeah? What does that mean? People as evasive as you are usually make their money via illicit means.”
“Do I look like I have money?”
Suspecting he’d regret it, Raleigh gave him a look from head to toes. That coat was awful and his ripped black jeans had evidently been through some traumatizing things, but his boots were high end. Burgundy crocodile. Metal-wrapped heels.
He’d seen those boots in a magazine spread during one of his recent bouts of insomnia. When he couldn’t sleep, he flipped through magazine pages and let his eyes blear on the pictures until he could no longer keep them open. Those boots had been memorable because they’d evidently been hand cobbled by a retiring Italian elf and built on a magical golden last that was stored in unicorn tears.
That elf had made three pairs.
Raleigh cut the guy a look and hoped he could read the suspicion in it.
“What?”
“You have money or you have a rich patron,” Raleigh said.
“Sugar daddy?” His lips quirked.
“Or momma. You’re pretty enough, I guess, from what I can see of your face.”
The man turned his hands over in concession, but shrugged. “My own money. Can’t say I made all of it, though.”
“Why’s that? Are you so rich that your money makes its own money?”
“Aye.”
Raleigh sucked in some air through his teeth and let it out. He avoided the rich ones usually. They were always so demanding. “All righty then.”
Raleigh understood wealth. He’d grown up a prep schooler in a neighborhood populated by old money and start-up geniuses. Naturally, he’d never considered himself wealthy. His parents were wealthy. He was simply privileged. His financial safety net had been cut off sometime around his junior year of college. Generally, in childhood, he’d been left to his own devices. The press in his university town in Connecticut had afforded him privacy. But eventually, the gloves had to come off. A reporter had identified him outside a bar and had asked him if he shared his father’s politics.
He’d told the reporter to go fuck himself.
Truly, he understood that the guy was just trying to do his job, but
Raleigh had felt a bit put upon at the moment. He was standing outside a popular gay venue and hadn’t exactly been out at the time.
He still didn’t know if his father cut him off for being queer or because he hadn’t spouted the perfect sound bite for the press. Apparently, Raleigh’s response had been a big deal. His father had to issue a press release about it and about how Raleigh was simply “a kid” and that he “didn’t think” and that people should “ignore the sensationalism and concentrate on things that really mattered.” Raleigh had taken a picture of that statement, and for the longest time, it’d been the screensaver on his phone.
The guy canted his head toward the stage. “You like this band?”
“I should think so, given what I paid for the ticket.”
“You can never tell. Some people go where they want to be seen, not where they want to be.”
Raleigh was going to argue that point but, ridiculous as it was, there wasn’t anything dishonest about it.
“Maybe you’re right,” he murmured.
At the buzz of his phone, he looked down at the screen and immediately rolled his eyes. There was an email notification from his work account flagged as important.
The sender was his department rival Everley Shannon. The subject line read: Would you like me to take care of this?
Immediately, Raleigh’s mind spun myriad possibilities. That she was at his work computer, scrolling through his notes. That she’d taken some calls for him and was trying to take point. That she was, again, discovering new “opportunities” for her authors and asking if he wanted her to include his.
The woman couldn’t keep her eyes on her own paper even if she had on blinders and her head bracketed in place.
He opened the message and quickly scanned the tightly written note.
I saw you were out. Crate of early review copies came in for that tie-in book. I can get them mailed out before the weekend if you need me to. Let me know.
—ES
“Need me to,” he mocked, tucking the phone away.
“Cancer,” his neighbor said.
“I’m starting to agree with you.”