by Jaime Samms
“That was not his fault,” Preston growled, and he sounded so furious and threatening that all heads swiveled to him. He pursed his lips and looked past them all.
“Naw, I guess it wasn’t.” Matt frowned. “We’ll keep an eye out, though. I know there have been some little shits ruinin’ the hood lately. They just have to know that even if their folks aren’t payin’ attention, some of us are.”
Preston nodded stiffly. “Home, Mr. Co—” He cleared his throat, lowered his distant gaze, and met Cobalt’s eyes. “Shall I take you and Chance home?” Though he still had that fiery glint in his eyes, they were heated with something that wasn’t anger for a pack of stupid, cruel neighborhood miscreants.
“Y-yes. Please.” Cobalt nodded and clucked to Chance. “C’mon, boy.” He tugged gently on Chance’s ruff. “Thank you again.” His thanks this time were far calmer, smoothed by Preston’s sure presence and the feel of his hand solidly nestled in the small of Cobalt’s back.
Chapter 6
“YOU’RE QUIET this morning.”
Preston glanced in the rearview mirror. Azure’s deep blue gaze caught his, and Azure smiled. The expression warmed cool features, and Preston, not for the first time, noticed all the similarities between Azure and Cobalt. Same high cheekbones and thin face, sharp chin, expressive blue eyes—all of it now turned on him with a kind of benevolent warmth.
“I’m sorry, sir?” Sorry for what? Since when is silence a thing? We never talk.
“You usually hum,” Azure said. “Lately, anyway. Since Coby—”
“I can hum if you prefer, sir,” Preston said, ignoring the way Azure had cut off his own words, awkwardly avoiding… something. He proceeded to hum something mostly tuneless. Thoughts of Cobalt distracted his attention from the road enough he didn’t dare risk dividing it further by trying to carry a tune.
“Did you drive him to Peridot’s this morning?” Azure asked after a few minutes.
This was an area that always opened a pit in Preston’s gut. Was he being given the task of driving Cobalt around so his estranged family could keep tabs on him? Preston knew Cobalt had been the one to walk away from his family and their expectations. He’d done it twice: once when he was sixteen and earned a place in Winnipeg’s ballet school, and again when he’d turned twenty-one and come home for his birthday party only to formally turn his back on his family and the inheritance he should have received then.
All his life Preston had worked for—or known friends who worked for—men like the senior Mr. Winslow. Men who didn’t like taking no for an answer, even—or maybe especially—from their own children. He didn’t like to think about the ugliness of the days and weeks surrounding Cobalt’s first departure from his family when he’d been sixteen—barely old enough to be on his own, even as a cossetted rising star in the midst of a relatively safe ballet school. Cobalt’s father had made it clear the matter wasn’t closed and never would be until he got his way and Cobalt either returned to the family fold or was legally removed from every deed, credit card, and bank account they had control over.
They hadn’t wanted him to be a dancer despite the expensive lessons they’d offered to keep him happy. It wasn’t a man’s profession. Certainly they didn’t approve of his sexuality. Azure had never adhered as spitefully to the embargo against all things Cobalt when Cobalt had left home for the stage. He’d even gone to see most of Cobalt’s performances when he was close enough for Preston to drive him to the venue.
Of course, their parents had never seen Cobalt dance, and Azure never spoke of it to them, as far as Preston knew. It warmed him that Azure paid attention, though, and that he helped, as much as Cobalt allowed anyone to help.
But did that mean Azure cared about his younger brother? Or just that he was keeping an eye on his movements lest he impugn the Winslow name in undesirable ways?
“Is it a problem?” Azure asked when Preston didn’t answer his question.
“Is what a problem, sir?” Preston slowed for a yellow light, which gave him a chance to glance at Azure once more.
“My asking you to drive him places. Does it bother you, going against our parents’ wishes like that?”
Preston managed to keep his derisive snort very soft. The twitch of Azure’s lips told him maybe it hadn’t gone unnoticed. “I work for you, sir. I have worked for you for over twenty years.”
“Twenty-three,” Azure said quietly, tossing an absent glance out the window at the hurrying pedestrians.
Preston nodded. A grim smile played over his lips. He remembered. He remembered the exact day, the exact conversation that had pulled him into Azure Winslow’s orbit and eventually his employ. It had been a few months before his fourteenth birthday. He’d been too young to legally accept a job, and Azure, at barely twelve, too young to officially offer it. That hadn’t happened until Azure turned eighteen. Not that legalities had meant anything to either of them at the time.
“Dad, you can’t kill it!” Horror spit acid sparks through Preston’s gut as he clutched the tiny mewling creature to his chest. People glanced their way. Other workers frowned and tried to catch his father’s eye. The rich owners tilted their heads or watched impassively as his father took a small step toward him, a flush creeping up his neck.
“You’re acting like a child. Give me the cat, son.”
“No.” Preston took a step away from his father.
“You’re embarrassing yourself.” As his father glanced around, people hurriedly turned their faces away, pretending they hadn’t noticed the confrontation between teenage boy and flustered young father.
“You mean I’m embarrassing you.” Preston curled a lip. “Why do you care what any of these rich jerk—”
“Preston!”
“You’ll never be one of them, you know,” Preston said. “I’ll never be one of them. They don’t care who my mother was. She didn’t want the bastard kid of a farmhand.” He glanced at the nearest spoiled child, who stared back at him, big blue eyes wide.
Azure Winslow. His father owned the stables where Preston’s father worked. The senior Winslow was a conceited asshole. Azure wasn’t half-bad when his parents weren’t around.
“I don’t want to be one of them,” Preston said. “Ever.”
Azure flinched, but he didn’t look away.
“Son, please. We can talk about this someplace more discreet.”
Preston closed his lips tight, looked away from Azure’s hurt expression and back at his father. He didn’t have anything else to say. He was not going to take back what he’d said, because it was the truth. And he wasn’t going to give up the helpless kitten to be “disposed of,” because that was cruel.
“Give me the cat,” his father growled.
“No.”
“It isn’t your job to decide.”
“Not yours either.” Preston lifted his chin.
His father let out a long sigh. “Actually, son, it is. I run the barn. I get to decide what animals live in it. It’s literally one of my job descriptions. A blind cat cannot catch mice. He is of no use.”
“Then I’ll take him home.”
“He doesn’t belong to us.”
“So… I can’t keep him because he isn’t ours. So you take him, ‘dispose of’ him, and they don’t care about that. If they don’t care what happens to him, why can’t I have him? Why would they care if all you’re going to do is smash his brains in?”
Azure gasped and covered his mouth with a hand.
“That is not what I was going to do,” his father said, holding up a hand.
“He can take the cat,” Azure whispered.
“Sir.” Preston’s father took a step toward Azure.
“I said he can take him home.” Azure stomped a foot and crossed his arms over his chest. “My cat, my barn, and he”—he jabbed a finger at Preston—“works for me.” He jabbed a thumb into his own chest. “I say he looks after it until it dies, not until you kill it. And until it does die, he works for me, because he’s lo
oking after my cat.”
Preston had that sweet, blind, eventually old little cat for twenty-one years. Six years ago, on Preston’s thirty-fifth birthday and only months before the old cat’s death, Azure had entrusted Preston with the care of a second, equally blind but less sweet female cat he’d rescued from God only knew where. Insurance, he’d said, of Preston’s continued employment.
Twenty-three years plus the four before they’d been able to make it legal. He knew. He met Azure’s gaze in the mirror again.
“You used to trust me,” Azure said.
“You—we were kids.”
“That cat had no one to protect him except you. All I did was make it official. You’ve never looked back until now.”
“Sir.” Preston pulled the car to the curb outside Azure’s office building. He twisted in his seat to look more directly at his employer. “All due respect, but your brother is not a blind, helpless stray kitten.”
Azure smiled, warm, but not so benevolent now as knowing. “You sure about that?”
“Very. He is quite capable of looking after himself. Trust me.”
He thought back to Cobalt’s businesslike dismissal of him the night before. Once Preston had dropped him and his dog off, walked them to the house, and waited while Cobalt unlocked the door, he had been summarily dismissed. The cool expression with which Cobalt told him he was no longer needed still stung.
Azure’s smile got a little more wicked. “If memory serves, that little cat was a total bitch to you at first too. Both of them. You didn’t take any shit from my fur balls. Why would you take it from a grown man?” Azure reached over the back of the seat and touched a forefinger to the thin, pale scar that led from the center of Preston’s lower lip to the middle of his chin. “You bled for that little hellion and loved it anyway.”
“And that has what to do with your brother, sir?”
“Look at him again, Preston.”
“Sir….” Didn’t the man know it felt like all Preston ever did anymore was look at Cobalt? From afar. Silently.
“Preston.” Azure stared him down.
“It’s hardly my place, sir. I work for him.”
“Actually, as you rightly pointed out, you work for me. My only instruction to you about him, ever, was to see to it he got where he needed to go, that my resources were at your disposal to do that. You could call him a cab, buy him a bus pass. Hell, you could hire him a driver of his own. But you don’t do that. I never told you that you had to be at his beck and call at all hours, or to check up on him, or run off neighborhood delinquents.” His smile softened. “Or rescue his mutt.”
Preston regretted relating last night’s events now. He frowned. “I could hardly do otherwise. He loves that ugly thing.”
Azure lifted one perfectly plucked eyebrow and hmmed.
The and you love him was implied.
Preston glared.
Azure waited. His smile faded and he sat back, one hand on the door. “You used to trust me, Preston,” he said again.
Preston said nothing.
“Malory.” Azure’s tone softened. “I am not my parents.”
Preston clamped his lips together, hating that Azure not only knew his given name but had the balls to use it. The only thing his mother had ever given him besides life was that stupid, hated name. Only Azure said it with affection, like he had when they were kids—friends against all convention and both their better judgments.
“Not your parents either,” Azure said, just as softly.
Dammit.
“Of course, sir.”
That eyebrow again.
“Mr. Azure,” he corrected, offering the compromise they had settled on—a vaguely unsettling no-man’s-land between friendship and employment.
“Who’s here to care if you drop the formalities, Preston?”
“Fuck.” Preston whispered the exasperation.
Azure grinned, wide open, eyes sparkling. “Trust me. This isn’t about keeping tabs on my little brother. He is his own man, and I admire him for sticking to his convictions.” He placed a hand on Preston’s shoulder. “Even if I wish he would ask for the help he needs.”
“He won’t.”
“So there is you.”
“He is not a stray kitten,” Preston snapped, facing forward and hunkering into his seat again with enough force to shake the car.
Azure opened his own door and got out of the car. He closed his door, then leaned down to peer in Preston’s open window. “Is that what you think this is about?”
“Isn’t it?”
“Maybe it’s about my friend. The guy with a heart big enough to love a stray and ballsy enough to hang on to him, even when he scratches and hisses because he doesn’t know a good thing when it’s right the fuck there.”
Preston frowned, trying to work his way through that.
Azure tapped the windowsill, winked, and was gone.
Preston gripped the wheel, glared at the never-ending stream of morning rush-hour traffic glinting in the spring sunshine. “Well. The fuck.”
What did that even mean? What did Azure Winslow ever mean by anything?
As kids, with every summer spent at loose ends on a farm in the countryside with little parental supervision, they had found the freedom to ignore wealth and station and just be friends. When they were teens, the friendship had stretched thin. The cats—first Blue and now Kyanite—were their connection: Azure’s offer of companionship, of protection through the promise of employment, and Preston’s acceptance and vow of loyalty.
But Cobalt wasn’t a cat. They had grown up. They had learned that billionaire heirs were not friends with stable boys and chauffeurs.
With a sigh, Preston put the car into gear so he could maneuver it back into traffic and around to the building’s underground parking lot, where he had left his own sedan. Azure would call when he was in need of Preston’s services.
Chapter 7
ASS GOING numb, Cobalt gave his dog a dirty look as he shifted the cushion under him. Chance lifted his head long enough for Cobalt to make the shift, then plopped it down proprietarily when Cobalt settled.
They had arranged themselves on the floor, Cobalt with his back against the couch, Chance curled up on a pile of towels to keep the dampness off the couch cushions. Cobalt had foregone his usual breakfast visit with Peridot in favor of bathing Chance and soothing some of the fright and trembling from his pet. It had nothing to do with avoiding seeing Preston again so soon. Or the feeling of unrest that had caused him to kick Preston out as soon as he got inside his home. Or the worse feeling this morning because now, in the light of day, it seemed like a stupid thing to have done.
Or… Preston’s subdued tone that morning when he had called to confirm the usual pickup and Cobalt had put him off. Chance needed him. Peridot hadn’t questioned the change of plans. And if Cobalt’s best friend hadn’t questioned his motives, there was no reason for his driver to either.
“I’m an asshole,” Cobalt told the dog. Because Preston wasn’t his driver. He was… what was he?
Peridot had merely told Cobalt to rest up and take care of Chance. Well, and extracted a promise that Cobalt wouldn’t beg off teaching the modern class at Conrad’s studio that evening. Cobalt had to admit he had thought about asking Peridot to take over the class. Maybe he did that a bit too often. But teaching mostly recreational dancers at the community center was a lot less stressful than teaching seriously talented hopefuls at one of the best studios in the city. Even if the studio belonged to one of his oldest, dearest friends.
“I’m being a fool, Chay,” he said quietly, scratching the dog’s scalp through the newly fragrant fur. “My career is over. Pretending otherwise is—” He clucked his tongue. “Listen to me. I have no career. I shouldn’t even be teaching. Focus on survival. That’s what I need to do. After this show. I’m not opening a company. It’s too much. I just need to stay healthy and walk my dog and have eggs in the morning with my friend.”
A little v
oice in his head told him that wasn’t living. Wasn’t a life.
“We’re good, though, yeah?”
Chance flicked his gaze up at Cobalt. He looked mournful. His tail thumped once.
“Shut up. You’re the one who had to pee in the bathtub because you were too chicken to go outside.”
Chance continued to watch him.
“I know it’s scary after last night.” Cobalt cupped his hand under Chance’s shaggy chin and lifted his face. “You will have to go back outside someday, baby. No way are you taking a dump in my tub.”
Chance whined and thumped his tail a few times.
“I won’t let anyone hurt you. I promise.”
Chance licked his lips and lifted his head to stare at Cobalt a second. Then his attention whipped to the door and he made a quiet whimpering noise in this throat.
“What?” Cobalt glanced toward the door.
Someone knocked.
Cobalt didn’t want his stomach to clench the way it did, or his heart to pound like a jackhammer. His palms began to sweat and he licked his own lips. “Stay,” he told the dog as he scrambled to his feet.
In the kitchen, he hesitated, then picked up a frying pan before he flicked a corner of the curtain over the kitchen door window to peek outside. Feet encased in heavy boots at the ends of jeans-clad legs didn’t look familiar. He moved more of the curtain to reveal a man’s large, generous frame in a wool sweater and leather jacket, a toolbox in one hand, the other raised to knock again.
The man tilted his head to see through the portion of bare window. “Can I come in, Mr. Cobalt?”
“Preston?” Had he ever seen the man in anything but his chauffeur’s uniform? Not in years and years. Not since…. “Of course! So sorry.” He scrambled to unlatch the chain and spin the deadbolt.
Chance had come over, tail wagging his entire back end, his little whines now small, sharp yips of anticipation.