Gasp!

by Z. A. Maxfield

  But he’d changed, and he no longer fit in at home, either. Now he was all by himself and stuck with this.

  “It’s only for a few weeks,” Deidre told him.

  Jeff leaned against a magnificently fragrant pine tree in the pristine early stillness of a Bluebird Mountain morning and whined—seriously, whined—at his sister like he was five. “Dee—”

  “I just had a baby, for God’s sake. I can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “He doesn’t need someone like me. He needs a team of hairy nuns to give him the fish eye and keep him in line. He’s out of control.”

  “You think I don’t know that? Nigel is a thirty-nine-year-old man with the mentality of a hyperactive adolescent. We factor that in and move on.”

  “I get that now, but it doesn’t help. The only way I can keep him out of trouble is if I have some kind of leverage. He just looks at me, smirks like I’m not even there, and does what-the-fuck-ever he wants.”

  “I know he can be a pain in the ass, but that’s what you’re there for—to keep him from getting hurt or doing something crazy. He’s already in trouble for that sexcapade recording. I’ve done my best to isolate him there in the mountains. What can he do in the mountains?”

  “Plenty. He can and has done plenty. It’s not as isolated up here as you think. Los Angeles is only ninety minutes away, and a lot of his friends have private aircraft.” Jeff decided it wasn’t a good time to tell her a posse of Nigel’s friends had been at the resort all night, trashing his room. “Yesterday we went rock climbing, and he was a mess.”

  God. He couldn’t tell Deidre what had happened. Nigel was practically her life. They were best friends. Why couldn’t she see how far Nigel was out on the ledge? She’d always been so intuitive. Maybe she didn’t want to see her idol had been falling apart. Christ. If he told her, she’d be there in a second, long before it was advisable for her and the baby to travel.

  “Can’t you keep Nigel out of trouble for a few more weeks? I need to nurse. I need to fucking bond.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that—”

  “I’ve made enough milk to open a dairy. I just ordered a holiday sweater and perfume from the television. Do you know how desperate you have to be to want perfume you can’t even smell before you buy it? Meanwhile all you have to do is—”

  “Can you hear yourself? Just take a second, all right?” Jeff took a deep breath. If he had to cuff Gasp to the wall, he’d make sure he was still in perfect working order when she took the reins again. “Look, it’s okay. I’m sorry I bothered you. I know it’s hard. I’ll take care of your big prince if you take care of the little one. I promise you it will be okay.”

  “Thank you.”

  “At least tell me what you named the baby.”

  “All will be revealed in time.”

  “Dee. Come on. I think as his uncle I have a right to know what the baby’s name is.”

  “We haven’t told anyone yet.”

  “You could tell me. Did you tell Mom?”

  “We’ll let you know when we’re ready.”

  Jeff smacked the tree with his open hand. “That’s bullshit, you know? It’s total bullshit. I’m here doing everything you asked me to do and now you’re playing—”

  “And I had a C-section. I haven’t slept since I don’t know when”—Deidre started sobbing—“and I’m leaking from every o-o-orifice of my b-b-body.”

  Jeff hissed a curse. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ll handle it. Don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”

  “What can I do? Katje and I just want to keep some things to ourselves for a little bit. You’d think—”

  Hormones. “God. Chill out. It’s going to be okay. Let Katje take care of you and my nephew. That little sprout is going to be the love of our lives. I just hope he appreciates the sacrifice.”

  Jeff hung up the phone. He wished he were with Deidre. He wanted to hold his goddamned nephew. He wanted to be a part of something pure for a change, and instead…instead he was stuck here, doing Deidre’s job.

  He had to stop and rest again before he headed back to the hotel and the next skirmish in the Nigel Gasp wars. The altitude, along with the amount of caffeine he’d consumed, left him light-headed. Damn Nigel and damn Deidre. Family responsibility could be a heavy burden, and Deidre could play that card like no one else.

  Getting his grip, he lurched along the path back to the hotel. On top of everything else, he was coming down with something. If babysitting Nigel at 100 percent was hard, he hated to think what it might be like if he was sick.

  When Jeff opened the door to Nigel’s suite, he recoiled.

  The aging rocker’s latest friends littered his hotel room. The place stank of sex, booze, and stale perfume.

  Among them, Jeff found the heir to a pricey leather goods fortune getting sick on what looked like a hand-loomed Oriental carpet, and there was an underage girl passed out on the couch. Nigel was singing to the world at large while standing on the railing of a balcony five floors up. He took a step and wobbled, windmilling his arms. Jeff’s heart thundered, and not because he’d just attempted to jog at an elevation of five thousand feet.

  Jeff slipped on the entry rug when he broke into an all-out run but righted himself and pounded across the hardwood floor and out the slider to pull Nigel down by the waistband of his leather pants. When he had a grip on Nigel—when it would have been perfectly acceptable to at least imagine killing him—Jeff pulled him into his arms and held him tight against his body.

  Why couldn’t he make up his damned mind?

  “What the fuck?” Nigel asked.

  “Are you trying to kill yourself?” Jeff’s blood roared in his ears. “The least you could do is wait until my sister’s back before you—”

  Nigel pushed back, his voice soft and deadly. “Take your hands off me, you bastard.”

  Jeff put him down but kept hold of his arm. “Not if you’re going to dance around on the balcony railing like an idiot.”

  Nigel’s famous blue eyes narrowed. “I’ll dance wherever I like.”

  “We’re five stories up and you’re a drunken mess. If you were to slip—”

  “I don’t slip. I am grace itself. Ask anyone.” The words would have been more powerful if he hadn’t turned to his friends for backup and lurched drunkenly into the wall. “Anyway, what the fuck do you care if I die? What’s one more old—”

  “Okay, that’s it. We’re done here.” Jeff took Nigel’s arm and ducked to pull him into a fireman’s carry. Just like that, with Nigel’s pert ass in the air and his long hair draping along the backs of Jeff’s bare knees, Jeff felt fully in control of things again.

  “All right,” Jeff shouted at those who were still capable of hearing him, “everyone out.”

  Jeff balanced Nigel as he frog-marched two Nigel Gasp-look-alike boys out the door first, shoving them through as politely as he could. He barked orders at the rest, those who wandered aimlessly in varying states of dishabille. He left Sleepy Girl in the suite but used her cell phone to find and call her family.

  That underage thing could come back and bite Nigel in the ass, but it was Nigel’s ass and Jeff could only protect it so far.

  But damn. Nigel still had a pretty great ass for an old guy. It was right there on Jeff’s shoulder, and it was easy to see the ass in question had lost none of its allure since the early days, when it could be found clad in skintight black jeans, shaking and grinding in those old-school music videos.

  Damn. In his wildest dreams he’d never expected Deidre’s job would be anything like this. Weeks of cleaning up after insensitive rich kids and deluded, aging baby boomers. Weeks of Yes, sir, Mr. Gasp, sir. I’d be happy to forego my unimportant four hours of sleep to get you toffee peanuts.

  Nigel was gorgeous. He was talented. He was brilliantly funny. And he was the most spoiled, immature, self-centered…the most self-destructive human being Jeff had ever had the privilege of meeting.

  What a goddamn waste.

&nbs
p; “Out you go, Your Highness.” Time to test a theory. “The door is this way.”

  “The Doors?” Nigel lifted his floppy head and looked around. “Where? Jim Morrison is dead, mate.”

  “I know that, Nigel. Lo these many years. It happened before I was born. It happened before you were born, probably.”

  Jeff’s usual problem was once he made up his mind to do something, it was hard for him to stop himself. He had impulse control issues too, and—just like Nigel—he had problems with authority. It was a miracle he hadn’t been rejected in the first three weeks of boot camp because of it. He hadn’t washed out because, to everyone’s surprise, he’d discovered he liked being bound by a rigid code of conduct. Let loose within that system, he’d been the most perfect Jeff Paxton he could possibly be.

  Without the army, he floundered. Like now, when he needed someone to tell him how to deal with a spoiled rich man without losing his shit. Like now, when the devil on his shoulder was driving and the angel was watching scenery.

  Carrying his squirming burden, Jeff exited the hotel suite and headed for the back stairs. It wouldn’t do for His Highness’s adoring fans to see him being dragged bodily outside for a little lesson in what happens if you fuck with Jeff Paxton. Sure. The paparazzi were probably using long-range telephoto lenses from every angle outside the hotel room, and what he was about to do…well, that would probably cost him his job.

  Maybe he couldn’t say boo to big sister Deidre, but that didn’t mean he had to do what she wanted, exactly how she wanted him to do it.

  And if she didn’t like how he did it?

  She’d have to catch him to kill him, and in her condition, he had a distinct advantage.

  “Did you get my toffee peanuts?” Nigel suddenly asked from where he was hanging, upside down with his head bouncing off Jeff’s ass.

  “I got your damned peanuts.” Toffee peanuts. Nigel’d had Jeff call the owner of the local confectionery at three in the morning for toffee peanuts. He’d slogged out in the dead of night, and when he’d returned with the damned things, Nigel was nowhere to be found. Jeff assumed Nigel took one of his guests behind locked doors for privacy. “I thanked Rachel with an extra hundred bucks.”

  “I really wanted those toffee peanuts. But now I’m feeling sick, mate. Does the world seem upside down to you?”

  “Nope. My world is right on target.” Jeff slapped Nigel’s leather-clad ass hard.

  Nigel gave an indignant, “Ouch. Hey!”

  “Today we’re examining the words ‘selfish’ and ‘immature.’” Jeff carried his charge through the resort kitchen. This caused the staff to stop what they were doing and stare at him in shocked silence. “And the number zero. Why zero? Because zero is the exact number of times I’m going to take your crap ever again. We have now entered the zero-tolerance zone, Nigel. That is the zone between your nonsense and my gut, ’cause I can’t take your roller-coaster shit.”

  Jeff shoved out through the heavy back door, which someone kept propped open with a chair, presumably to allow the cold, crisp air to circulate in the warm work area.

  Nigel shrieked with outrage as soon as the chill hit his skin. “I’m going to call Deidre and have your ass so fired you will have to live under a bridge like a fucking troll.”

  Jeff continued toward the lake and out onto the long boat dock, liking the way his feet made a hollow thudding sound as they stomped onto the wood—like a drum. It had a martial sound to it that appealed to him. He wished he was wearing combat boots.

  “I’ve been here a week, and in that time I’ve suffered more degradation than I ever experienced in boot camp or at the hands of enemy combatants. I’ve watched you drink until you pass out and dance on railings and fly off cliffs like you don’t give a shit about yourself. It stops here.”

  “Put me down, you idiot.” Nigel used his fists to beat against the backs of Jeff’s knees, but Jeff barely felt it.

  “You want to die? Do you? Let me help you with that. You won’t be my first.”

  Jeff reached the end of the boat dock and threw Nigel into the ice-cold water of the lake.

  Just threw. Him. In.

  * * *

  NIGEL HIT THE water with a shocking crash. Consequently, his lungs stopped working. Every muscle in his body clenched, and his heart seemed to hang quivering in his chest, on hold. He could not breathe. Could not move. And since he couldn’t swim anyway, it was a foregone conclusion he was about to sink like a rock through the murky green water.

  Which was not to say it wasn’t interesting—even sort of exciting—like watching an old-style cinema serial where the heroine is tied to the train tracks and the director cuts between the train and the hero on horseback.

  Time became elastic, speeding up and slowing down.

  Nigel’s hair swirled around him like seaweed. He allowed himself to relax, to go utterly boneless, and was surprised to find himself falling through the water headfirst.

  Figures.

  Headfirst was about the only way he ever did anything. Headlong, his aunt Irene would say, because his head—or more precisely the brain in it—was the part that came in dead last in any decision-making process. His cock came first, of course, and then his heart. His brain was barely even a tiebreaker.

  Deidre would have agreed wholeheartedly with his aunt. Headfirst, because even if his head got chopped into tiny bits or eaten by sharks, that part wasn’t what defined Nigel Gasp.

  But then Deidre had sent her brother in her place, and from the very first moment they’d met, Nigel had lost whatever minor control he’d ever had on his head. Or maybe it was his heart. Jeff Paxton entangled him like thick cobwebs.

  Jeff Paxton was a bloody goddamn game changer.

  Nigel thought he’d set his course. He truly believed he owed it to everyone to give up his bony grip on record charts and tabloid covers before he was a mess like all those women who have so much plastic surgery their belly button rings end up on their eyebrows. He wasn’t going to cling to youth, and he wasn’t going to grow old—gracefully or otherwise.

  He wasn’t about to live his life as the staple of reality television shows. Celebrity Circus, Wrestling with the Stars, or God forbid, in one of those Dr. Oz segments on some incurable disease. He wasn’t about to hawk his greatest hits on the Home Shopping Network.

  Forty. God, what in hell was that about? How had it crept up like that?

  Just knowing he had a plan—just realizing that soon all his worries were going to be over and the anxiety he’d been living with would end—actually gave him a new lease on life. He’d begun to enjoy himself again. He’d taken the edge off by giving up, but then Jeff Paxton had come along.

  Jeff. Bloody. Paxton.

  Jeff was huge—six-four at least. He made Nigel feel like a toy. He had a nice, steady aspect and a brush of buzzed brown hair Nigel was certain would be thick and shiny when it grew in.

  Handsome. Honest. Tan and tidy. Impossibly moral. Everything Nigel wasn’t.

  The veriest of white-hat cowboys—only cast in the wrong movie.

  Jeff didn’t want to be there, which only made Nigel try harder, which meant, true to form, he wasn’t trying to make things easier.

  Jeff liked order, so Nigel created chaos. Jeff was principled, and Nigel had been known to be anything but. Jeff expected him to behave, and on some molecular level, that expectation made behaving impossible.

  Nigel didn’t really want Jeff—or anyone—to despise him; it was just that at some point, everyone Nigel had ever loved lost patience with him. They got bored or they got better, but they inevitably moved on, and lately, as he’d approached middle age, Nigel had tired of the buildup. Like the pioneering directors of the serial movies he’d considered earlier, Nigel had learned his most important lesson by trial and error.

  Cut to the chase.

  It’s true. You really do see your life pass before you when you drown. It takes for-fucking-ever…

  Jeff Paxton put everything in fast-forward. Ev
erything Paxton was, everything he represented fanned the flames of the first genuine attraction Nigel had experienced in years. But they were only staying at Bluebird Mountain Resort for a six-week retreat. After that, Nigel planned to go out in a blaze of glory. He either had to go back to the daily grind, the entourage, the personal assistants, and the road crew—or get off the carousel, and Paxton…

  Jeff would go back to wherever it was the True American Hero was kept when he wasn’t needed to save a widowed woman and her child from a bandit attack or face down a vengeful outlaw.

  Nigel pictured himself as a little blond kid yelling “Jeff…Jeff!” into the wind as Paxton rode away on his horse alone.

  He was fucking old, and this Paxton kid, this twenty-eight-year-old godling/gunslinger had come into his life and turned it upside down. Jeff Paxton was Captain America, for fuck’s sake. He had a heart like Deidre’s and her fine, soft-brown doe eyes. He was everything Nigel liked in a man, and Nigel couldn’t keep himself from acting out, from pushing him away because he couldn’t bear to let him in and then lose him. He couldn’t let himself believe Jeff Paxton would want an old oddity like him—even for a diversion.

  Just as Nigel realized he was really, truly going to pass out and probably die, he discovered dying was not okay. Besides being slower than he planned and despite the fact that it was silent and green and serene, Jeff was watching over him. How would Jeff feel, having thrown him into the water and—

  Shit.

  This was no good. Jeff would never forgive himself. Nigel hated guilt.

  But damn it, no matter how much he wanted to spare Jeff, Nigel couldn’t swim. Bloody hell. Why had he never learned to fucking swim? He did try, because Jeff wouldn’t be able to carry this around with him forever. This would hurt him, badly, and Nigel couldn’t bear it.

  He burst into action, thrashing like a blood-frenzied shark, unable to discern which way was up.

  His lungs burned like fire, ready to burst, and he felt his first real emotion in years. Whatever that feeling was, it was rusty, shocking, and painful. Maybe it was anger at himself for putting Jeff in this untenable position—for his selfish, stubborn behavior and terrible timing. Maybe it was fear. God, how would Jeff live with himself if Nigel drowned, and how would Deidre cope with the grief? It would break her heart.