Blazing Page 2

  “But this is crazy!” Eli said.

  They lifted their right eyebrows in unison. Everything about them was so well timed. “We can run the data through again,” one of them said.

  “But the outcome will be the same,” said the other.

  “Well, run it anyway, because you're wrong.” The result was unacceptable, and so Eli refused to accept it. “You'll see. It's going to come up with somebody else. It has to.”

  The television screens rolled, then snapped. Three identical images froze on three screens.

  “I'm sorry, Mr. Feldstone.”

  “But this is your final answer.”

  “This is the man for you.”

  “Your perfect match. All our calculations keep coming to the same conclusion.”

  “It can't be. How can it be?” Eli's shoulders slumped. His arms unlocked, but only so he could bury his face in his hands. “We already tried it,” he said. “We dated in high school. And a little bit in college too. We were a fucking disaster.”

  Chapter 3

  It was so late it was early. The leather walls of the secret room were lit only by the lowest lights from the most indirect of niches. Hendrix Thrush, drunken rockstar, considered the swallow of champagne at the bottom of the nine-hundred-dollar bottle.

  Probably he should drink it.

  It would make less of a mess when he flung the bottle to the floor.

  Two naked men in their early twenties stood at attention in front of him. Despite the low light and the late hour, Hendrix could see they weren't really twins. Marketing hype, he supposed. To be honest, he had only a bleary idea of how he'd been persuaded to bid so recklessly on a night with these boys.

  A charity auction. No doubt in a good cause.

  Not that he could remember exactly which good cause it was after this much champagne.

  They were hot. At one time, that would have been all the cause he needed. When did mere hotness start to seem... a little empty?

  You're spoiled, Hendrix, my man. Spoiled rotten, as they used to say.

  “Well.” He gestured with the bottle toward the California-king-sized bed which filled much of the secret room. “Welcome to my den of iniquity.”

  It was really the venue owner's den of iniquity, but the party boys weren't going to nitpick a rockstar's turn of phrase.

  “May we open another bottle of champagne, sir?” one of the boys asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Help yourself.”

  The boy...

  Stop it. He's not a boy. He's twenty-three.

  It was a bad sign when twenty-three-year-olds started to seem too young. It might mean you were getting old.

  Not old.

  Older but not old. Thirty-two was not old.

  Hendrix shuddered. Who was he kidding? “Older” sounded just as bad as “old.”

  The bottles were magnums. Bad idea, even with three of them there. But Hendrix Thrush was not a namby-pamby twenty-first-century rockstar afraid of a bad idea.

  Bad behavior and bad ideas were practically a hallmark of his so-called brand.

  Hendrix could not remember the names of these particular boys. They were rhyming names, in keeping with the fake twin fantasy, but there were a lot of rhyming names. He inwardly dubbed them Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

  Dee had not one clue about how to remove a cork from a bottle of champagne. His bits bobbled in amusing fashion as he wrestled with the unwieldy magnum. He had a tight butt with a cute dimple that kept winking on and off.

  Half the costly bubbly went spurting across the windowless room like a premature—if highly enthusiastic—ejaculation. Dum, laughing, tried to catch some of the costly spew in his open mouth.

  They were professional models at the beginning of their careers. Professionally attractive. A stirring sight, although Hendrix felt less stirred than he'd expected.

  What was he doing here? How many boys, how many auctions, how many after-parties? They'd all begun to blur after the sixth album.

  You're getting jaded, old man.

  “C'mon,” Dum said, still laughing as he waved Hendrix over. “Let's get this party started.”

  “I'd like to watch the two of you for a while,” Hendrix said. “I've heard you put on a good show.”

  “You heard right.” The bottle went one way, and the two boys went another. Visibly excited, utterly without inhibitions, they began to lick and finger each other in positions chosen to give Hendrix the best possible view of the action.

  He was getting stirred now. Or at least part of him was. Old Reliable.

  Older. Not old.

  Approaching the bed in a bow-legged manner intended to exaggerate the weight of his hardon, Hendrix perched on the end where he had a great view but was not yet compelled to join in. The two boys were well worth the watching.

  Aware of his eyes, they adjusted the angle of their legs. Their tongues flirted a little more teasingly at belly buttons or the undersides of shafts. Despite their raging young hardons, they were making an obvious effort to string out the action so they might tempt the famous rockstar to pile on.

  And, of course, soon he would pile on. That's what he was here for, after all.

  Pleasure. Hedonism. The rockstar life of total excess.

  This is the life other men only wish they had.

  The venue owner insisted on health checks. Not just for the so-called party boys, but for the guests as well. Considering some of the video leaks of some of Hendrix's more athletic activities, he wasn't surprised the club's doctor was particularly thorough when it came to Hendrix's checkup.

  He could be confident he had a clean bill of health, and so could his playmates.

  No reason not to dive in.

  But, for now, he was oddly content to watch a little longer.

  Those two were a partnership and not a recent one. Hendrix knew that not because they'd told him, but because he could see it plainly for himself. The understanding between the two fascinated him. Their lips, fingers, eyes spoke without the need for words.

  Each knew what the other desired almost before the man himself knew it. They were a team, perhaps even a future marriage.

  When Hendrix was their age, would he have been so sensitive to the needs of another? He seriously doubted it. He hadn't even known such a depth was possible.

  They were lucky to meet each other at such an early age.

  Lucky to share a dream.

  Lucky to share the same ideas about how to achieve that dream.

  Most people never had that.

  Certainly, most rockstars never had that.

  People worshipped idols. They did not understand them.

  Hendrix needed to shake off this mood. An idol you understood was no longer an idol worthy of the name.

  And it was very good to be an idol.

  Wasn't it?

  “C'mon,” Dee called.

  “Plenty of room for three,” Dum said.

  Four arms reached for Hendrix to pull him down. What strange thoughts he'd been thinking. The night was not for thinking.

  It was for pleasure.

  The boys were kissing and massaging him everywhere, adoring him like the idol he was, expecting nothing in return. Somehow, he was on his back, and they'd posed on either side of his hips, their mouths kissing each other with his hardon mashed between them. A double-suck job.

  Dee's eyes sparkled at Hendrix. So did Dum. Then, still kissing and licking Hendrix's shaft, their eyes defocused to gaze on each other.

  Hendrix was their lollipop. He was a story they'd tell each other for the rest of their lives.

  Our night with the rockstar.

  He didn't mind. He was a story to a lot of people. It felt good.

  What was better than this? He was living the dream.

  He didn't need to envy anybody else's dream.

  Everybody else needed to envy him.

  After, drowsy, Hendrix had almost persuaded himself. Talk about living the dream. Here he was tumbling into sleep naked a
nd tangled between two equally naked twenty-three-year-olds, and life couldn't be more delicious.

  Except...

  The fuck?

  What was that sound of pounding on the door?

  Who could get past the venue's much vaunted security and Hendrix's personal bodyguards? Who would even fucking dare?

  “Don't even pretend you're not in there,” called a loud voice out of his past. “Don't even try it.”

  Hendrix groaned and pulled a pillow over his head.

  Who the fuck else?

  Eli Fucking Feldstone.

  Chapter 4

  Martin Oh, the club's owner, was wringing his long, graceful hands in a way that somehow told Eli that he didn't make a habit of wringing his hands. “Mr. Feldstone,” he said. “This is private property.”

  Oh's security team was armed. So were Hendrix's bodyguards.

  But, of course, they were not going to open fire on Eli Feldstone. They weren't even going to touch one tiny finger to the person of Eli Feldstone.

  Nobody wanted to open themselves up to beef with a billionaire who owned an entire Manhattan skyscraper full of high-priced litigators.

  What's the point of being a billionaire if you can't go where you want to go?

  It wasn't like he wanted to go to Mars, the Moon, or even low-earth orbit. The only place he wanted to go was inside this notorious private club for gay degenerates with more money and hormones than sense. And he didn't even want to go into the main body of the club, with its casinos, its dance floors, its BDSM dens of darkness.

  Some billionaires might live for BDSM red rooms. Eli wasn't ready to become one of them.

  He wanted to go into this one small windowless room, and that's all he wanted.

  Of course, Eli's team wanted to enter the building with him. More of their Westchester County helicopter mom crap. If he let them, he'd end up wrapped in cotton like too many other hedge fund guys he knew. They got further and further from any experience of the real world, and Eli suspected he was already quite far enough away from reality, thank you very much.

  It was a lonely life, being wrapped in bubble wrap like a china doll. And it was getting lonelier all the time.

  He had to do this. And he would do this.

  “No need.” He surprised himself. His voice was relaxed, almost jovial. “Besides, it's better if you all stay outside so you can launch the missiles faster if something goes wrong.”

  The new hire blanched.

  “That was a joke.” Eli always hated to explain jokes, but after a few unfortunate off-the-cuffs made their way to Twitter, his social media people had drilled it in that most people don't get it when mathematicians joke. It's something in the way they say it or the expression on their faces when they say it, but people tend to take them a little too seriously.

  Eli's head of security, Bruce Carlinson, took the cue to nod at the newbie. “We don't use missile backup on American soil.” Carlinson was an excessively literal and humorless guy, so the newbie could safely assume that what Carlinson said was what Carlinson meant. “If need be, we'll call our contact on NYPD to release a SWAT team.”

  The new hire went, if anything, even paler. Eli bit back a sigh. Why did being rich involve managing so many people's moods? Some mornings, you should have just stayed in bed. This whole day had been weird ever since the fog.

  “There will not be any need for SWAT teams.” Eli forced himself to speak slowly and calmly. Like the billionaire CEO who'd had remedial coaching in how to communicate with human assets, rather than the math nerd who grew up speaking mostly to computers. “I'm just going to go inside and have a nice come-to-Jesus chat with my old high school bestie.”

  Marble's come-to-Jesus chats were infamous. Many a CEO discovered he'd just lost his company to Marble in one of those chats.

  Seeing the expressions on the faces around him, Eli wondered if he should have selected a different turn of phrase. But he was in no mood, and remedial coaching in human-to-human communication could only go so far.

  “I'm going in,” he said, and then he did.

  As predicted, nobody stopped him. Pretty soon, he was pounding on a door. Hard. No reason to hold back. His private investigators were never wrong.

  If they said Hendrix Thrush was on the other side of that door, he was there all right.

  Of course, somebody somewhere down the line had called in Martin Oh to see what he wanted to do about Eli's unexpected appearance on the scene.

  Martin Oh wasn't going to do any-got-damn-thing.

  “Mr. Feldstone!” he kept expostulating. “Private property, sir. With all due respect for you, have some respect for us and our private property.”

  Eli was still in no mood. “A word in the ear of the mayor of New York, and it will be public property. I am sure you are familiar with the term, 'eminent domain.'”

  Oh blanched. “But, sir...”

  “Stay out of this, Oh.”

  “My clients... confidentiality... privacy,..”

  “Shut up, Oh. Nobody's interested in the grubby sex lives of your grubby clients. I'm here to speak to one man on personal business that's got fuck-all to do with your sleazy sex club.”

  “Grubby! Sleazy! Mr. Feldstone! I must object! We are a very exclusive...”

  Blah, blah, blah. Eli wasn't even pretending to listen. “Get your ass out here, Hendrix, or I'll have Oh unlock the damn door and drag you out.”

  Oh's mouth stopped flapping. He was shocked into silence. A relief. He'd probably only just that second admitted to himself that he could never dare deny Eli Feldstone.

  There was some mumble from behind the door. Hendrix wasn't alone. Not that Eli had even momentarily entertained the thought that he would be.

  Hendrix was a far more popular topic of gossip than Marble. Like any rockstar worthy of the name, he always seemed to be romancing at least three models at any given time, with rumors of cheating, orgies, and auctions popping up on the regular.

  You fucker. It isn't enough for you to be more famous.

  You have to rub my nose in it.

  “Unlock this fucking door before I get my people to blast off the lock,” Eli said.

  Oh looked helplessly at his head of security, who shrugged and handed over an old-fashioned set of metal keys.

  If it had been an electronic lock, somebody on Eli's team could have arranged to pop it wirelessly from outside the building even before the billionaire had arrived on the scene. There wouldn't have been a need for three-quarters of this drama.

  Eli secretly admired the use of the metal keys. Martin Oh's security service wasn't entirely hopeless. This setup would have been sufficient to deter ninety-nine percent of the pushy people out there.

  Not Eli. “You hear that rattle of keys?” he yelled. “We're coming in. Stand back from the door!”

  “Oh, for fuck's sake,” Hendrix called back. “We're coming out. Right now. You stand back from the door.”

  Eli shouldn't yield one fucking step. But it seemed like such a simple request. And it's always nice when a billionaire appears to be a reasonable guy instead of an autocratic ass.

  Or so said those expert advisors on human-to-human communications.

  When Eli stepped back, everybody else stepped back too.

  Not a minute too soon.

  A pair of twenty-something males dressed only in sheets burst out of the door the moment it swung open. No “hey,” no “oops.” They just zipped off jogging down the hall without bumping into any armed security guards but not quite meeting anyone's eyes either.

  We were never here. So bye.

  Martin Oh's team let them go. Fine. Eli didn't need them hanging around anyway. He simply stared after them in bemusement.

  Not shock. Never shock.

  He'd never expected anything else.

  Of course, Hendrix would be getting it on with young model types. Of fucking course.

  One of the sheets slipped. Eli got a glimpse of a dimple winking in a tight butt before the two men
disappeared around a corner.

  When Eli turned back to the open door, Hendrix was already there, and Hendrix wasn't running.

  He simply stood there, arms folded, chin lifted in defiance.

  Stark naked, by the way.

  He hadn't bothered with any sheets.

  Arrogant rockstar prick who couldn't be embarrassed or shamed.

  Eli wanted to kick him.

  Also, he kind of wanted to kiss him.

  How did a guy who lived like Hendrix maintain that fit, hard body?

  Chapter 5

  A rockstar known for his bad behavior must learn to think fast on his feet. Even when he's naked.

  Especially when he's naked.

  Ten years later, and Eli Feldstone's banging down the door to roust Hendrix out of his rumpled bed of threesome sin. He couldn't imagine what brought this on, but he figured he needed to take control of the narrative as soon as humanly possible.

  For some reason, Martin Oh, the normally urbane club manager, was standing there rattling a ring of iron keys like something out of Dickens. Or the Marquis de Sade.

  The two bodyguards assigned to guard the door—and what a joke they'd made of that job—belatedly scampered over to protect their charge's naked body from the public view. Other uniformed and business-suited security—some of them bouncers Hendrix recognized from years of devoted partying at the club—were looking at Martin for instructions.

  “Fuck sake,” Hendrix said. “Martin, can you get us a room?” A pause. He repressed the urge to glance back at the windowless, video-less romper room. “A meeting room, I mean.”

  Think conference table, not California-king-sized orgy bed.

  “Of course.”

  Eli mumbled something almost, but not quite, too low to be heard.

  Martin nodded again. Someone appeared almost instantly to wrap Hendrix in a floor-length black kimono with a dragon embroidered in gold, scarlet, and silver trailing down the back.

  Hendrix had hoped he'd imagined Eli's mumble. But no.

  “Put some clothes on him, for God's sake!”

  Same old Eli. Same old hangups.

  There were too many men in this hall—most of them trained security. Hendrix should be fucking furious about how they'd all sat on their hands while this sanctimonious self-appointed billionaire burst into his private sanctum.