Runaway Model (7 page)

Maybe it was a prejudice of his, but Bryce was convinced that if he had trouble understanding a Brit, it was because they hailed from the lower classes. But maybe it was just that one Guy Ritchie movie he'd seen.

Anyway, whether you loved or loathed a thick-as-molasses and sweet-as-honey English accent, you couldn't ignore the boy's visuals. Born to be photographed, Bryce thought. He should have been a model. Or a movie star.

Tall and lean, with suggestively long hands. Slightly shaggy brown hair that framed deep brown eyes. A quirky smile with lips that seemed to turn up at the ends, so that it looked as if he were forever swallowing secret laughter.

And the clothes...

Saint Laurent cigarette jeans that looked as if they'd been painted onto his legs by Hedi Slimane himself. A raw silk button-down shirt allegedly designed by the aging member of a dysfunctional Britpop band. An eighteen-karat rose-gold pinky ring set with a huge star sapphire loud enough to be worn on the oilpatch.

The clothes and the accent weren't congruent. This boy was trying to pass as something he wasn't.

The six of them all bent to study their smartphones. It was a common enough sight, especially with a group of young people in their early twenties.

But Bryce still felt uneasy. They were plotting something. He knew it in his gut, and his gut wasn't often wrong. He wouldn't have closed so many multi-million dollar deals in less than twenty-four months if he wasn't damn good at reading people.

"Another Eagle Rare, sir?"

"I'll have a sparkling water this time." He didn't want to be fuzzy around the edges if something went down.

The bartender thrust a menu into Bryce's hands. When did ordering water become so fraught?

"Pellegrino® is fine."

"With a dash of pomegranate juice? I've already got it out." He nodded in the direction of the table.

Bryce hadn't always had 500 million. He'd once tended bar himself and recognized a man whose employer expected him to upsell. "They do say it's good for the heart."

He absently signed the tab, glancing at the absurd total only long enough to calculate a healthy tip. Back in the day, he'd paid four whole American dollars for a bourbon with a water back, along with a dollar or two as a tip. But he'd come a long way from Louisiana 2007.

"Fuck me, fuck me!" The boy was getting excited now, and his sugary voice carried. The English always thought "fuck" and "fucking" were fancy ways of emphasizing their words. The Irish were just as bad, but Bryce was reasonably sure he could distinguish any English accent from any Irish accent.

Anyway, the American girls were swearing just as much, if not more so.

"Stoney's in fucking Los Angeles already."

"This fucking bitch just tweeted a pic from SMO." Santa Monica Airfield. Bryce, the proud new owner of a private jet, recognized the code.

A chorus of squeals and groans. The boys seemed as disappointed as the girls.

"The whole thing was a fucking Twitter hoax."

The brunette turned to the fashionable boy. "If that's really Stoney's ring on your finger, why didn't he text you and tell you where he was going?"

The fashionable boy—oh, fuck it, Bryce, admit it. The good-looking boy. The damned good-looking boy.

Anyway, whatever Bryce called him, the boy looked briefly sad but not really all that surprised. His lips were already quirking upward again, as if he were laughing at himself.

"He said his record company wouldn't let me see him again. Nobody's supposed to notice he's gay, innit?"

Bryce had no idea who Stoney was, or why he couldn't be gay this time of century, or indeed if the good-looking boy just liked to spin a colorful tale to impress his friends. But what he'd just learned was enough to stop his heart. The boy was gay. Gay and probably available.

There was a little moment of bitter silence taking place at the crowded table opposite.

Then the other boy spoke up in an accent straight from Michigan. Suburban Michigan. "It was a shit concert anyway. Invitation only. For a bunch of rich fucks who probably don't even know who he is." Michigan too was tall and thin. He too boasted brown hair, brown eyes. But it didn't look the same on him. "We should have known Stoney wouldn't hang around for an afterparty in this shithole."

If you bet five hundred dollars a pop at craps, you got a truckload of invitations to all kinds of private events. Too many to pay attention to. Bryce wondered if he'd thrown away an invitation to a concert with this Stoney. Or if his personal assistant had done it for him.

Pink glitter girl: "Who said he'd be here?"

The brunette: "JLawsFirstWife97. She makes shit up. She really does. I'm so fucking done with her." It was time for the ritual casting around of the blame. Teenagers.

Then Bryce reminded himself they couldn't be teenagers. Was he ever that young when he was twenty-one?

"I don't want to say I told you so, love," said the boy. "But I told you so. I live here. I'm in this casino all the fucking time, innit? There's no way Stoney's going to be in a place like this. I told you it were a piano bar. He's too fucking cool, innit?"

"Hey, fuck me, look at this!" If only the redhead's voice wasn't so high-pitched. "HarrysStylishBeard just tweeted she saw—" The girl glanced around, noticed Bryce, and lowered her voice to a mumble. He couldn't hear the name of the celebrity in question. But he could guess it was the A-list.

The boy bent over his own phone. "She's in the VIP room already."

Despite the thick accent and unusual grammar, Bryce now understood every word. He didn't mean to listen that closely. He didn't want to be that creepy older guy who eavesdropped on where the younger kids were going.

Somehow he got rich and twenty-eight. And then it just happened.

The brunette: "She can't stay there forever."

The pink-tinged blonde: "This one's for real. There's some fan photos just posted to Instagram."

The boy was the lone voice of sanity. "There's another way out. You'll never see her leave."

The redhead: "You don't know that. I'm going. I'm fucking going. What about the rest of you?"

"I'm finishing me drink," said the boy. Was it Bryce's imagination or did he lift his glass in his direction? Not high. Just a couple of inches, like the tiniest of tiny nods.

"Me" for "my." Everybody was his "love" or his "mate." Northern England, maybe?

"Fuck you, Kyle, you're no fun."

"We're going. Come on."

In a flurry and a hurry, the four girls and the other boy trooped out of the bar.

The bartender vanished too. Taking a break, no doubt, with the place virtually empty.

Now it was just Bryce and the boy. Bryce tried to regulate his breathing. It should come easy to him. After all, he'd always made a point of not slobbering over the hot guys who worked in his oilpatch. He could practice self-control. He could. No, really.
I've got this
, he told himself.

"Take a fucking picture, mate, it'll last longer." The words were aggressive. But the corners of that teasing mouth twitched upward.

"What?"

"You've been staring at me since I walked into the place."

"I thought I recognized you."

"Ten points for originality."

Their love of sarcasm wasn't Bryce's favorite thing about the British. But he took his bottle of San Pellegrino® and came over to sit at the boy's table.

Up close, Kyle smelled as expensive as he looked. The name of the three hundred dollar an ounce men's cologne tickled the tip of Bryce's tongue. He could almost remember what it was called. It hadn't been that long since he'd smelled fragrances in that price range for the very first time.

"Let's start over. Can I buy you a drink?"

"You already are, mate.
Muchas gracias
."

"What?"

"The bartender may be laboring under the impression you're a good friend of me and mine. Maybe a bit of the jealous type but still enough of a good sport to pay for our adult bevvies."

"Don't I have to sign the tab?"

"You don't know what you were signing whilst you were staring down me blouse."

So much for the hyper-alert Bryce Auburn. While he was on the lookout for kidnappers, he should have been watching for the common Vegas drinks hustler.

"You tip very well," the boy was saying. "The mark of a kind man." He placed his hand on the side of Bryce's face, making his skin tingle at the contact. "Nice eyes. Light blue. I like that. I can see into your soul."

Bryce wondered how often the boy had used that line. He told himself he could still back out. Then he remembered he'd paid three hundred dollars for a professional trim of his sandy-blond hair—all the better to frame the blue-gray eyes in question.

If you put out bait, you had to expect the fish to bite. What was he running away from? He wanted—he needed—the fish to bite. All work and no play wasn't a life.

"I'm Bryce. I'm from North Dakota."

"Nice to meet you, Bryce from North Dakota. I'm Kyle from the UK. Except I really am from the UK, innit? You can tell by me accent."

"I didn't say I was born in North Dakota. Nobody is, I guess. I... my business... I work there."

"Cool story, bro." Kyle, if Kyle was in fact his real name, was openly laughing now.

Bryce had a short brutal fantasy about what he'd like to do with that teasing mouth.

The mouth of a model. Quirky little smile. It wasn't the kind of face Bryce usually met on the oilpatch. Men among men weren't shy. But their boldness could be cheap. This one's boldness... it was anything but cheap. You felt as if you were the only person in the room.

Kyle's right hand, the one that featured the garish pink star sapphire, had somehow slipped into Bryce's lap to brush him very high on the thigh. A brief whisper of a touch that was there and gone. Almost Bryce might have imagined it.

"We could have some fun, couldn't we, mate?" Kyle's left hand brushed a sandy curl out of Bryce's eyes.

Bryce swallowed hard. "There are too many cameras here. Let's take this discussion upstairs."

"Thought you'd never ask."

As they approached the private bank of elevators that went directly to the penthouse floor, Kyle wound a sinuous arm around Bryce's waist. The security guard, who probably recognized Bryce from an alert about the hotel's premium guests, held an elevator specifically for the two of them.

"There will be no stops until the car reaches your floor, sir," the man said. He seemed not to register Kyle's existence.

"Did he get a memo about your elevator blowie fantasy?" The door hadn't quite shut when Kyle asked that question.

"My... what?"

There was a camera in the elevator too. A very round and very conspicuous one probably designed to deter evildoers from robbing the hotel's elite guests. Kyle blew a kiss in its direction and then knelt smoothly on the gleaming gilt floor. For the benefit of the hotel's claustrophobic visitors, the walls were made of mirrors, so that Bryce could see endless images of Kyle using his gifted lips and long fingers to unzip his fly.

"We can't. What if they're videotaping?"

"Oh, they're definitely videotaping. That's half the fun."

They had to shoot past a lot of floors to get to forty-six. Bryce's fly was already open and Kyle's tongue was nuzzling inside. From the multiplicity of mirrors, Bryce could see that surveillance was getting excellent shots of Kyle's bouncing head but nothing more.

A tease.

One hell of a tease.

And it wasn't just the eye in the sky who was going crazy.

The elevator car began to slow. Kyle was on his feet in an instant, as fast and as lithe as a professional dancer. Bryce didn't know quite how he got the zipper back up over his bulging erection, but he managed.

A bell dinged. The door slid open.

Bryce was afraid to look down in case he saw a damp spot on the front of his jeans. More cameras in the hall. He just hoped they were focused on faces, not on crotches.

There were few doors on this level. The square footage of each suite was larger than the average American suburban home—the so-called McMansion kind.

Most hotel guests in Vegas called room service and waited an hour for crappy food and overpriced bottles. It was bad business to encourage the standard tourist to linger in bed when they should be sitting in front of the slots.

But life was different up here above the clouds. On this floor, each guest was assigned a personal butler who would make sure his deliveries would arrive in under thirty minutes.

And the refreshments would come from one of the top gourmet places. If the butler had to wake up a celebrity chef or a fêted bartender to make it happen, so be it.

"Fuck me, mate. You must have lost a fuck ton of money." Kyle's voice sounded serious for the very first time.

"Not this trip. I'm actually paying for the suite." Bryce could have kicked himself. Why did he admit to that? He wasn't trying to impress this hookup, was he?

If so, it wasn't working. Kyle's eyes rolled upward in a clear expression of incredulity. "Why would anybody come to Vegas if they had to pay?"

"Some people can afford to buy what they want."

"You think you can afford to buy me?"

Bryce didn't know how to answer that one. It seemed a rather aggressive question. In any case, he considered himself a generous man. But sometimes generosity came close to being an expression of insecurity. The child of two party people, Bryce sometimes maybe tried too hard to prove he'd made it.

But you could say that about any self-made multi-millionaire, couldn't you? You didn't work that hard because you were secure and satisfied in the life you already had, did you?

His eyes dropped to the level of Kyle's long feet stepping out of crocodile lace-ups that seemed much too expensive for somebody his age. Especially since they probably sold for several times the cost of Bryce's own hand-tooled Tony Lama cowboy boots.

I should have noticed the shoes before.
Was he messing with some rich man's son—or with somebody's pampered pet?  

The chandelier in the great room boasted even more crystals than the one in the bar. Housekeeping had left it on its dimmest setting in order not to detract from the view. Kyle's eyes, always warm, seemed to sparkle with flecks of gold as he walked over to the window to draw the curtains wider.