by Rachel Kane
“Holy cow,” Judah said. “That’s an Aston Martin DB9.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds expensive.”
“So, so expensive.”
“Wait,” said Noah, “how do you know anything about cars? You hardly even drive.”
Judah shrugged. “I play a lot of racing games, what can I tell you?”
“If you two could please focus,” said Liam, his voice tight, his eyes fixed on the car as it pulled to the house, circling around the fountain. “This is unexpected.”
The car doors opened, and two men stepped out.
Without moving a muscle of his face, without betraying how his heart had jumped in his chest, Noah whispered to Liam, “I thought you said boring bureaucrats, not tycoon supermodels.”
“All right,” said Liam. “Let’s move to plan B: Panic.”
There were not a lot of people who could make Noah feel like his fashion game was weak. But the men who now approached the wide steps of Superbia Springs had him trembling in his calfskin boots. Figuratively. Mostly figuratively.
The men were clearly related. That jawline was genetic, the sharp cheeks and thick dark hair, all suggested family resemblance. It was the eyes, though, where Noah started noticing a difference. The younger one, who had been driving, had brown eyes, dark, critical. You couldn’t quite see his pupils, and it gave him a suspicious look.
The older one? Holy hell. His green eyes were bright as sea-glass held to the sun, bounded by a darker circle at the rim of the iris. Who had eyes like that? Dangerous eyes.
Noah, who usually kept a checklist on everyone he met, of all the ways they had failed his fashion sense, couldn’t even look away from the guy’s face long enough to check out his clothes.
Why doesn’t Superbia have any guys who look like this? Why did I move here and give up all chance of meeting wealthy men with pretty eyes?
Behind those bright green eyes, a strange intelligence, an instant familiarity, as though he had studied them all, as though he knew all about them without ever having met them. “Gentlemen, I’m Dalton Raines. I think you spoke to my secretary.”
Liam began to put his hand out, but Noah was already down the stairs. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m Noah Turnstock, Director of Social Outreach. These are Liam and Judah Cooper, President and Technical Director, respectively.”
Noah didn’t usually shake hands. It seemed like one of those primitive rituals invented on the schoolyard, boys squeezing each others’ metacarpals until someone squealed in pain, carried on as the boys grew into adults, just another weird way for people to compete and hurt each other. Yet Dalton had stuck out a smooth-fingered hand, a hand embellished with three silver rings, and Noah had no choice but to shake.
Send me a sign, he told the heavens. Make it an electric shock the minute my skin touches his. Come on. Three rings? Clearly gay. Right? Are you there, God? It’s me, Noah, and I need a cute rich boy to obsess over.
“Ah, Noah, yes. Formerly in retail, but you moved here with your friend Liam and his brother Judah after they inherited the property.”
He was stunned into silence—but nothing kept Noah quiet for long. “That’s…yes, that’s me.”
Dalton grinned at him. “Don’t worry, I didn’t stalk you guys. The foundation keeps extensive files on its applicants. Well, I guess that means we did stalk you. Just not me, personally.”
Stalk me, do it. “That’s one way to cut through the small-talk,” Noah quipped.
Liam was right behind him, tense as a steel rod, clearly wishing Noah would move out of the way and let him do the talking.
“I should also introduce my babysitter—or, excuse me, driver—no wait, my brother, Colby Raines.”
The dark-eyed man scowled at them. “Thanks, Dalton. Nice to meet you guys.”
Noah got a cold chill from that one.
“It doesn’t look like it did in the pictures,” said Colby, looking up at the house.
Dalton followed his brother’s eyes up, and smiled. “Yes, it’s even grander.”
“Nah,” said Colby. “It looks like someone asked a kid to build a castle out of Lego, but only gave him half a set to work with.”
“Nonetheless,” said Dalton, barely hiding his glare at his brother, “the foundation is very interested in your restoration project. Could you show us around?”
Gladly, thought Noah.
“I hope you’ll excuse our intrusion,” Dalton said, as Noah led them on the tour. “Normally we would’ve sent one of our researchers over, but when I saw the pictures of the house, read its history— Well, I had to see it.”
“Yes, he really dropped everything. Everything,” said Colby bitterly.
“There’s no use being a billionaire if you can’t do what you want,” Dalton told his brother. “Besides, I imagine this place is a huge, huge effort. I want to hear all about it.”
Interesting tension there, Noah thought, although he kept getting hung up on the word billionaire. He’d never met anyone truly rich before. He had to keep checking, did they walk like normal people, or did they float just above the earth? It was hard to pay attention to his task, showing the place off.
Still, outreach was Noah’s job, and he’d studied hard. Architecture was a little like fashion, after all: Everything interesting was either happening right now, or a hundred years ago. Anything in between was déclassé. “One challenge has been the wallpaper,” he said to the visitors, as they strode through the vast gallery overlooking the gardens. “Silas Cooper was insistent on very modern looks for the interior, but often when you try to find reproductions of 1920s wallpaper designs, they lack the depth and brightness of the originals, especially ones that would’ve relied on gold leaf and arsenic back then.”
Dalton laughed. “Arsenic? As in the poison?”
Noah nodded. “The poison, exactly. It turns out it makes a gorgeous, classy green…but a deadly one. Hard to reproduce with modern dyes.”
Colby scowled. “So you’re using my dad’s money to buy toxic wallpaper. Nice.”
You know, you could learn some manners from your brother.
Liam cut in. “That would only be with the foundation’s approval, of course. We definitely want to stay within the guidelines of the preservation grant.”
Noah started to speak, but he saw Liam gesture with his hand by his side, a little sign that said, Let me do the talking.
Well, that wasn’t fair. This was his job, after all.
Besides, how was he supposed to impress Dalton with his knowledge, if he wasn’t allowed to talk?
As Liam started in on how obedient and good they were going to be, Noah had a second to actually study Dalton.
What a loss, that such a man should be so out of reach.
Because he wasn’t just rich. He was beautiful. Not only his eyes, his entire bearing. A man who was used to power, who wore it like old, comfortable clothes. A man used to ownership and control. The more Noah looked at him, the more it hurt.
And speaking of clothes, god. Colby was more formal, in a suit a few hundred times more expensive than Noah’s. But Dalton was dressed surprisingly casually…but still expensively. Noah had seen that Zegna suede overshirt in magazines. The jacket was clearly Prada, but not off the rack; it had been tailored to his broad shoulders, tucked to that trim waist.
Guys like this didn’t go for twinks like Noah. He knew that. This guy could afford to date European underwear models, men with cool accents and fascinating histories. Not people like Noah.
Forget it. This meeting isn’t for you to go hunting for boys. It’s business. This guy controls all the money you’ll need to rebuild this house. And the only way he’s going to approve it, is if you make a good impression.
Unlike the town council meeting.
Liam was still talking.
And Dalton was talking to him.
And nobody was talking to Noah.
I studied so hard, he thought. I stayed up, I memorized, I practiced in
front of the mirror.
Yet just that easily, he had been snipped out of the conversation, while the billionaire and one of his best friends chatted about the house’s history, about the work still yet to be done, about all the stuff he’d been prepared to talk about.
Like Dalton just gravitated toward the older, more responsible person in the group.
Like Noah wasn’t good enough to pay attention to.
4
Dalton
The idea hit Dalton while they were touring the upstairs, looking down over the property. From up here, you could see the gardens, the lawn, stretching down to the border of trees, and just beyond, where the land got flatter and the farms started.
It was peaceful in a way the city was never peaceful.
Quiet.
Hidden from the world.
Dad would love it here.
For all his wealth, for all that Dad had spent years working to amass it, he reminded Dalton of one of those dragons sitting atop a pile of gold, grumpy and uncomfortable. He’d reached the height of his powers, and then his heart had reached the limits of its own. He hated the city, no matter how much Dalton had paid for the view.
I could bring him here.
Dalton didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about his childhood—there weren’t any big traumas or nightmares for him to work through with a therapist (or drink through, like some of his friends)—but what he did have was memories of his father, commissioning architectural models, buying landscapes and house portraits by the yard, thinking about houses. One of these days, I’m selling everything and getting out of here, he’d say at dinner, pointing at a painting of a Palladian home, and Mom would beam at him from her end of the table and say, One of these days? And he’d give her that grumbly old smile. You don’t believe me.
I always believed you, Dalton thought. As the tour continued, he put his hand out onto the balustrade, feeling its solidity, its age. Nothing in the city felt this old. The city was addicted to the new, to demonstrating your wealth and status in novel ways. How many times had designers descended on Raines Holdings, changing out the furniture, the rugs, the windows and doors, a mad chase to be a little more modern than the competition?
“How old did you say the place was?” he asked.
Liam and Noah spoke at the same time. “Ninety-five,” they said.
Even as entranced with the house as he was, he couldn’t help noticing the way Noah blinked, blushed, and shied away, as though it weren’t his turn to speak.
Dalton asked Liam a few more questions, not really listening, but using it as cover to study them all further.
What a strange trio this group made. Liam, practical, as solid as the wood of the house, clearly as proud of the place as if he had driven in every nail himself. He reminded Dalton of one of his managers, one of those men in the middle of things, always keeping the company going. His brother Judah, content to fade into the woodwork, was more behind-the-scenes, clearly an IT guy, more comfortable with computers than customers.
That left Noah. How did he fit in here?
He didn’t make sense. Unlike his friends, he seemed to belong to another world. His suit, while nothing spectacular, had been a pretty good choice, emphasizing his slim build. His hair suggested he was a club boy, someone who liked to hang out on the dance floor, someone who expected you to buy the drinks. Yet he seemed eager to squeeze himself into a role that wasn’t quite him, nattering off these historical details about wallpaper and ceiling tiles and square footage.
You don’t get to be a billionaire without studying systems closely, without figuring out how they work…and how they break. You get an eye for what doesn’t fit, what stands out.
Noah definitely stood out.
“Next up,” Noah said, “we’re going to go downstairs and look at the spring-house. That’s the most important part of the tour.”
“Then why didn’t we start there?” asked Colby, his arms crossed, scowling. He’d scowled the same way when Dad had taken them to the Louvre when they were kids. Why do we have to look at all these pictures? Doesn’t anybody sell ice cream in France?
“You’ll have to forgive him,” Dalton said. “My brother isn’t as enamored of beauty as I am.”
“Whatever,” Colby said. “Some of us are in business. I don’t even know what we’re doing here. The foundation is just charity. Someone else can handle it.”
“The foundation is Dad’s way of giving back to the world.” Please don’t argue with me in front of strangers. Please? He hoped his tone was cold enough to get the message across.
Liam and Judah were politely looking away, but Noah was staring like he was memorizing every word.
“I get why we do it,” Colby said, not getting the signal. “It’s a tax break. Looks good in the papers, too. But these guys are asking us to risk a ton of cash so they can open a glorified bed-and-breakfast, and I have to ask whether that’s a good use of Dad’s money.”
What Noah said next was interesting, not for the words themselves, but for his expression when he said it. “We completely understand. That’s why we’re working so closely with the Superbia town council, so they can approve the project and show you that it’s historically important for this area.”
Dalton almost laughed, but he kept himself in check. Colby was fuming.
How did you do that? He wanted to ask Noah how he had read Colby that quickly.
If there was one thing Colby hated—hated!—it was meaningless soothing business-speak. He wanted talk about cold hard cash, mergers, acquisitions, not the calming noise of working closely together.
Somehow Noah knew exactly what to say to get under Colby’s skin, and it was amazing. Colby knew he couldn’t even say anything in response, because Noah hadn’t said anything offensive—just something so offensively bland that he’d checkmated Colby into silence.
Nice work. This might not be your world, but apparently manipulation is your natural element.
Mention of the town council did, however, bring up the problem that had brought Dalton here today. “About that paperwork,” he said, “I understand your council has refused to give you their stamp of approval.”
Stamp of approval made Colby squirm with disgust. Excellent. Noah saw it too, Dalton could tell.
“Oh, believe me, I can explain that,” said Noah. “But first…here is the spring-house. The thing that takes Superbia Springs from a historical curiosity, to a resort of the first caliber.”
Dalton didn’t stop to check how the marketing-speak had affected his brother, just stepped through the open door.
“Holy…”
His voice trailed into the cool air.
Dalton had traveled all his life. Traveling is what let him pick up ideas, what let him think. He was the one, after all, responsible for so many of those redesigns of Raines Holdings, chasing whatever new decorating ideas he’d seen in Denmark or Singapore. Yet while he preferred things sleek and modern, where glass and steel met perfect efficiency, he couldn’t deny the power of older places, ancient ones.
What the spring-house brought to mind was an old memory, a trip to Florence he had taken when he was young. Young enough that Colby hadn’t been able to come, he’d been back at the hotel with the nurse.
The Buontalenti Grotto in Florence had been like moving through an oceanic dream, a dream of undersea caves full of old gods and goddesses, mother-of-pearl and massive handmade stalactites, and he’d wandered through, mouth open and eyes wide at what art had been able to accomplish, drowning him in beauty, pulling him under into a water-world of myth.
In the time that had passed since then, he’d grown up, and art had lessened its immediate hold on his heart.
But the spring-house was like traveling right back to that moment, right back to the child he had been in that grotto.
The first thing that caught the eye were the mosaics on the walls, tiny tiles coming together to make pictures that crossed some historical boundary between ancient Greece and Belle Épo
que Paris, gaudy and golden and impossible to look away from, sea-gods with tridents frolicking with mermaids and naiads, great trumpets of conch-shells blown like trumpets, dolphins whose wet sleekness was suggested by nothing more than broken chips of marble.
His heart had not beat this fast over art since those childhood years of his memories. Back when he had seen beauty in the world, before the need to imitate his father had led him to surgically replace his sense of rapture with business-sense.
He looked back at Noah, a helpless expression on his face, and was surprised to see Noah carefully watching him, looking at him rather than at this gorgeous room that surrounded them, as though Dalton were the high art here.
He gathered himself. For all that he was enjoying the tour, these were strangers, and you could not react like this in front of strangers, not if you were a Raines. He put out a hand and leaned casually against a pillar carved to suggest an Athenian temple. “Well, well,” he said. “So this is the showcase.”
“We love it,” said Noah. “This is what first gave us the idea of bringing the place back to life.”
It wasn’t until he had calmed his breathing and put forward his nonchalant expression, that Dalton got a good look at the rest of the place. Giant bronze tubs with massive taps. Copper pipes exposed, polished and shining, part of the decor as much as they were part of the plumbing.
“It’s functional right now,” said Noah. “If you turn those taps, you’ll get hot mineral water from our springs. It’s very relaxing. People came here from all over the world to soak in those tubs. Actors from the golden age of Hollywood, diplomats, congressmen. We think, with the right backing, we can return it to that state.”
Why do you sound like you’ve memorized every word of that speech? Why, in a place like this, do you sound so unnatural?
The real question was why it bothered Dalton. What did it matter, if this little twink had set aside his true nature to make a sales pitch? It was the way of the world. Everybody was cynical. Everybody was out for themselves. Fake it till you make it wasn’t just some dumb rhyme. It’s something people believed, something they practiced every day, until they couldn’t tell their masks from their true faces.