Foolish Me

by Tinnean

  Readers Love

  Tinnean

  Greeting Cards

  “… despite being a feel good holiday release, the story isn’t too sweet. It’s well written, Ben and Jason’s personalities are nicely developed, and the plot progresses at a believable pace.”

  —Literary Nymphs Reviews

  “There is so much I loved about this book, it was written really well, the characters were brilliant, the storyline was sweet and romantic and Ben and Jason were ssssssooooooo wonderful.”

  —MM Good Book Reviews

  “I loved the men’s cutesy cards and unique holidays… I liked that both men have very different backgrounds… I liked the secondary characters… A little more tension and heat, and this would have been a nearly perfect story.”

  —Hearts on Fire Reviews

  Bless Us With Content

  “… like any good mainstream historical, Tinnean is able to construct the world during that time period effortlessly. I truly enjoyed the relationship between the two men and the believability of how Ashton emerged as a stronger man by novel’s end was flawless.”

  —Dark Divas Reviews

  Houseboat on the Nile

  “I LOVE the secondary characters of in the book, and this story has stuck with me a lot longer than some I read. If you like spy books or movies and like a multi-layered plot with intriguing characters, then this book is for you.”

  —Guilty Pleasures Book Reviews

  By TINNEAN

  NOVELS

  Bless Us With Content

  Two Lips, Indifferent Red

  SPY VS. SPOOK SERIES

  Houseboat on the Nile

  Not My Spook!

  Forever

  THE LIGHT IN YOUR EYES

  Pick Up the Pieces

  Foolish Me

  NOVELLAS

  The Best

  Call Me Church

  Greeting Cards

  No One Should Be Alone

  To Love Through Space and Time

  SPY VS. SPOOK SERIES

  The Start of a Beautiful Friendship

  Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Copyright

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  5032 Capital Circle SW

  Suite 2, PMB# 279

  Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886

  USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Foolish Me

  © 2014 Tinnean.

  Cover Art

  © 2014 L.C. Chase.

  http://lcchase.com

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

  ISBN: 978-1-62798-825-4

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-62798-826-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  April 2014

  As always, this is for Bob, who empties the dishwasher, folds the laundry, picks up takeout, runs the vacuum over the carpet, walks the pup when he visits, takes the car for an oil change, makes the coffee, waters the plants, and sets up the Christmas tree so I have the time to write.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the editing staff of Dreamspinner. I’d also like to thank Tim Mead and Tony for their help, to Robb of CRVBoy for being such an accommodating archivist, and most especially to Gail Morse, who asks the tough questions and who’s been along for the ride from the very beginning.

  Chapter 1

  I NEVER thought anyone would love me. How could they, when Franky, the one man I’d been certain loved me, had showed me the only thing I had to offer was my youth and my body?

  Of course a good many men did love me—physically—but that was because, from the time I was fifteen and my father threw me out of the house for being gay, I’d been a rent boy.

  And then I’d met William Matheson. Wills… of the ordinary brown suits and nothing-special haircuts… someone I shouldn’t have looked at twice.

  But I did. Something about his warm, chocolate-brown eyes brought my gaze back to him again and again.

  I couldn’t say I fell in love with him at first sight. As much as I might have yearned for it, what rent boy would ever believe shit like that?

  But I did. I’d asked him to move in with me, hoping but never believing….

  And now…. Now I couldn’t believe the turn my luck had taken. We were living together.

  THROUGH TOO many years—those years when I’d been a rent boy—I’d learned to keep my mouth shut, stifling any curiosity I might have about my clients. Wills wasn’t a client, had never been a client. He was my lover, but….

  Old habits die hard.

  Oh, I knew Wills was a troubleshooter who dealt with computers, and his company was in DC, but I’d never questioned him about his job or about why, on occasion, he carried a gun. He traveled throughout the country, and some of those areas probably weren’t too safe.

  Mark Vincent, his boss, worked him like a son of a gun. Weekends, holidays, early morning, late into the night….

  And that was something else I never questioned.

  I WAS putting a fresh supply of lube in Wills’s nightstand when I found them: a small stack of credit cards neatly banded together.

  The name on the cards was William Matheson. I realized they were the ones I had given him shortly after he’d moved in with me.

  Seeing them reminded me that, although all the statements had been paid for the month of August, none of them had the charges for our vacation in Key West.

  I went to his office, hovering in the doorway for a moment. It was his office, after all, and I never went in there unless he was there also. Still, I had to know what was going on.

  The bottom right drawer of his desk was for hanging files. They were in alphabetical order.

  I checked A first, for American Express. There was nothing there. There was nothing under C for credit cards, D for Discover, or M for MasterCard either, but there were a number of bills for different cards under V for Visa.

  And there it was. He had paid for everything—the hotel, our meals, the excursions—with his own card.

  “Son of a bitch!” I sank back in the plush chair I’d bought for him. Why hadn’t he used the cards I’d given him? He loved the power drill I’d bought him. He said he liked having me buy things for him.

  There was another photo on his desk across from the grainy one of the two of us kissing. The grainy photo must have been taken with a telephoto lens, and I had no clue where that had come from. He’d just grinned when I asked, and refused to tell me.

  I picked up the new picture frame. This photo was of the two of us at one of Davis House’s happy hours, where the management offered complimentary soda, beer, or wine to its guests. The staff had gone around snapping pictures, and onc
e they were developed, one set went into the hotel’s own gallery, while another set was available for sale in the lobby. Wills had gone down to look at them and returned with a plastic bag.

  “This is mine.” He’d grinned at me and put it in his suitcase. “You go get your own.”

  We were going snorkeling that day, and when we got back to the room, I was nursing a headache from the sun. I never did get down to the lobby.

  In the photo Wills had bought, I was smiling into the camera, but he was looking at me. The expression on his face….

  He loved me for who I was, not what I could give him.

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and put the frame back in its place. Then I shut the file drawer and made sure I left no evidence that I’d been snooping.

  I went back into the bedroom, took the small stack of credit cards, refastened the rubber band around them, and put them back into the drawer exactly where I’d found them.

  SEPTEMBER MOVED into October, and autumn settled over the capital.

  We’d been living together since Memorial Day.

  For a change, Wills had the weekend off. After an early dinner at Raphael’s the evening before and then taking in a concert, where I’d bought him the group’s T-shirt, we’d come home and fucked like bunnies. I was looking forward to a long, lazy Saturday in bed, where eventually we’d do more of the same.

  I was drifting in and out of a dream where, instead of meeting Franky the day my father had thrown me out, I’d looked up to see Wills standing there, smiling at me and holding out his hand for me to take.

  But when I reached for it, suddenly it was gone—he was gone—and I was alone.

  “Wills? Wills?” I woke up to realize I was alone. I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

  Where was he?

  I clambered out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and went looking for him.

  I found him standing outside our front door. He did look good shirtless, his treasure trail disappearing beneath the waistband of the low-slung sweats he wore.

  I blinked. “Wills, what the fuck…?” Tucked into the back of his sweatpants was his gun.

  “Mr. Vincent is grinding his coffee.”

  “Huh?” What did that have to do with Wills having his gun on him? I looked past him to where Vince sat on the stairs leading up to the attic and offered him a confused smile. “How come?”

  “I have no idea. You want to ask him?”

  I scrubbed my scalp and blinked. It was too freaking early for this. “Vince? Why are you grinding coffee on the stairs?”

  “I have a houseguest. I didn’t want the noise to wake him.”

  Okay. That made sense. I still hadn’t met the man, but Wills had run into him on the stairs once or twice when Vince had been taking him up to the attic apartment he rented from me. “What does he look like, babe?” I’d asked, curious as to what kind of man Mark Vincent would actually bring to his own home.

  Wills had got that blank look and then shrugged. “Oh, just your average, everyday-looking kind of guy.”

  Before I could press for more details, like height, weight, age, eye and hair color, and did it seem as if this guy cared about Vince, Wills had curled his lips into the half grin that made me weak in the knees—I’d always thought that was a bunch of bullshit until the first time he’d turned it on me and my knees had become like jelly—and he’d given me an actual come-hither look and sauntered into the bedroom, lazily stripping off one article of clothing at a time. My cock had hardened, my tongue had hung out, and I’d forgotten all about Vince’s friend.

  Now Vince set aside the grinder, his expression thoughtful. “Theo, I need a favor.”

  “You’ve got it.” I still felt I owed him for what he’d done for Paul.

  Vince claimed he’d had nothing to do with the death of the bastard who’d put Paul in the hospital last spring, but either way Shaw, or whatever the fuck his name really was, was dead, blown up when he’d tried to get into Vince’s apartment, which was why Vince was back living in the attic apartment.

  There was also the matter of the fee Paul had been rooked out of. An envelope addressed to him had come in the mail while he was still in the hospital. It had contained a cashier’s check for fifteen hundred dollars. I’d had the feeling that Vince was behind it, but he’d denied it when I’d asked him, and I’d dropped the subject. If he didn’t want anyone to know he was a sweetheart of a guy, his secret was safe with us.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve bought a condo in Aspen Reach. The woman who used to own it liked pink, and—”

  “Jesus! Don’t tell me you bought Delilah Carson’s place!” I’d heard through the grapevine that it was on the market. I could have talked to the other rent boys and come up with a down payment for it and either rented it or eventually sold it—it wasn’t large enough for any of the various stables to move into. We’d have done it as a courtesy to her relatives, because Delilah had been well-liked by all of us, but it turned out her next of kin were real sleazes. They’d descended like vultures, turned their noses up at her profession and her possessions, and put the condo up for sale for three quarters of a million dollars.

  But a condo where a vicious murder had been committed? No one seemed to want it, and they’d had to keep dropping the price. I hoped Vince hadn’t been taken to the cleaners.

  “You’re familiar with it?” Vince asked.

  “Are you kidding? I was there!” I felt bad when I thought about how Delilah’s life had been snuffed out. She’d deserved better than that.

  “You were there, babe?” Wills had been lounging against the wall, looking amused, but at that, he straightened, his expression abruptly unamused.

  “Well, we’d tricked with her once or twice, and she called to ask if we’d mind working a threesome with her.” I wasn’t thrilled about what I’d done to support myself, but that was part of me. I would never deny it.

  “When was this?” His voice was as cold as the look on his face.

  “The call or the actual job?”

  “The job.” He was pissed. Maybe Vince couldn’t tell, but I’d been with Wills long enough to know his moods.

  “Oh, around the beginning of the year.” I couldn’t help remembering how badly 2002 had started. “Maybe a little earlier. So?”

  Wills spat a curse under his breath. He rarely swore.

  I felt my gut clench.

  I’d known it was going to happen sooner or later. I’d known it. Living with him was everything I’d always dreamed having a lover—a partner—would be. The sex was great, but it was the little things he did for me… making repairs around the house, bringing home takeout when he knew I didn’t feel like cooking, going grocery shopping with me when I did, rubbing my feet when I complained they hurt….

  Having someone this special wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like me, though, someone who, while it turned out I wasn’t a murderer, had spent almost half my life peddling my ass. So I’d kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  It seemed the other shoe had just dropped.

  “Oh, what? You’re worried I might have gotten fucked?” I wanted to strike back at him for making me believe he didn’t care about what I had done. “That was my job, smart guy! But just to set your mind at ease, I didn’t get fucked. That time.” I emphasized the fact that other times I had gotten fucked, and Wills turned pale. That’s right, bleed a little, asshole! The way I was bleeding. “I was in her crawl space, and I filmed it. Spike got to fuck this gorgeous babe’s ass while she deep-throated Pretty Boy, and the two of them kissed while the john jerked off. Hot stuff, I wanna tell you! I made Spike and Pretty Boy a copy. They took it with them, but if you want me to look for the original…. You could take it with you on one of your troubleshooting trips out of town and jerk off yourself.”

  “Don’t bother.” Just two words, but it was like having a bucket of ice water tossed in my face. “Mr. Vincent.” He nodded to his boss, then went back into the apar
tment. I could tell from the way he was walking that he was more than pissed.

  Well, what the fuck did he have to be pissed about? And what right did he have to be… to be….

  “Y’see, Vince?” My throat felt clogged with tears. “I knew he was living in a dream world! It’s dawning on him what I did, and he can’t deal with it!”

  “You think so?”

  “What else am I to think?” I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t going to cry.

  “Bascopolis, her murder was all over the front page of every newspaper in town around the beginning of the year.” Vincent sounded impatient. “You think maybe he was worried you could have been in her condo at the time she was killed? That maybe it could have been your body found there as well?”

  “Yeah, but….”

  “You said you were up in the crawl space? How come?”

  “He was a new client. Delilah said she was a little unsure of him. After he left, she laughed and said she felt really silly about at how nervous the setup beforehand had made her, but I could see she was still nervous. I asked her if she wanted me to make a copy of the tape. She said yes, and Spike begged me to make one for him and Pretty Boy too.” I tore at a cuticle. “She was dead before I had the chance to give her the tape.”

  “Yeah, well….”

  “Funny thing. I happened to see a picture of him in the Post a couple of weeks later.” If I thought about something else, talked about something else, maybe my heart would stop feeling as if it was cracking into bits.

  “Who, the john?”

  “Yeah. He was with the prez in the photo, and he had his clothes on, but it was him.” I forced myself to laugh. I didn’t want anyone, not even Vince, to know how I was hurting. “And y’know what was even funnier?”

  “No, but I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

  I kept laughing. If I stopped…. “The prez was commending him for being such a morally upright member of the CIA.” Him, the john who liked to wear long red wigs and women’s pink underwear.