Runaway Model (30 page)

"What's a double-tap?" Kyle asked.

"A bullet in the heart and another one in the head," Wilton said. "It's what they give you instead of a gold watch when you retire from the drug business."

"Roman Nigel killed himself," Bryce said. "Forensics will show that. So maybe the LEOs will write it off as some wanna-be drug smuggler steals the plane, realizes he's painted himself into a corner, shoots himself."

"It would have been better if he shot himself in the pilot's chair." Wilton shrugged. "But LEOs like to close cases. Yeah. It will fly as a suicide. Why not? It is a suicide."

"Forensics will place your fingerprints on the Cessna too." Bryce looked directly at Arnold. "You're still taking the greatest risk."

"It's no risk at all. They file digital fingerprints these days. And nothing's easier to alter than digital evidence." Arnold couldn't seem to stop smiling.

Kyle couldn't either. He felt giddy. Like he had champagne bubbles in his blood. Like he was a balloon flying up into the air.

A near-death experience had that effect on men sometimes.

Three vehicles drove up and parked in a row. Marshall Daniels got out of the middle one.

"Come on down," Stoney said. "You missed the party. But you can still give me a hand washing up the dishes. And somebody give me a fucking cigarette before I fucking die."

***

S
toney's security team did help with the clean-up, but Daniels wasn't happy about it. "I wasn't here, and I can only take your word for it that Roman Nigel shot himself. Just in case this thing ever comes unraveled, you cannot be here, Stoney. You got that? You were never here. You were never fucking involved."

"Kyle can ride out with you," Bryce said. "There's some small chance my jet could be tracked to this airstrip. If anyone looks at the flight data closely enough..."

"We should leave now," Daniels said.

Stoney looked at Kyle. He nodded at Bryce. "We'll keep him out of it."

Bryce hated to think of Kyle back with Stoney. But the boy's safety came first.

Maybe it was all for the best...

"No. Not this time," Kyle said. "I'm not running away any more. We have something, don't we, mate? Something?"

Bryce wasn't sure who Kyle was talking to. Stoney? Or... Bryce himself?

Then he felt Kyle's long arms wrap around and around to pull him tight.

"I'm a free man at last," Kyle said. "I don't have to run any more."

Bryce hugged him back. And then he kissed him. He didn't care who was watching or what they thought about it.

Kyle had claimed him. Nothing else mattered.

The End

(Part 2 of The Runaway Model trilogy)

T
hey're the perfect couple. Kyle, a rising model, is the toast of Manhattan. Bryce, a wildcatter who got rich in the Bakken gas fields, is an inch away from becoming America's newest billionaire.

But their world is turned upside-down when a competing oil company wrests away Bryce's business, his personal jet, and even his condo.

Then Kyle steps forward to defend a friend accused of a terrible crime—only to be deported from America.

Can love survive when an ocean divides the lovers?

Coming in March 2016. Turn the page for a peek at the first chapter.

Y
ou know you're playing in the big leagues when you're taking a shower on a private jet.

Oh, it wasn't a very big shower. Kyle knocked his elbows against the walls a couple of times. But he didn't care. It felt so good to get clean.

He liked the citrus peel body shampoo. It was an expensive brand. Fifty-two dollars a bottle. A travel-sized bottle. Kyle liked to smell expensive, and he knew a hint of the citrus fragrance would linger even after he rinsed.

It wouldn't replace the three hundred dollar an ounce men's cologne Kyle usually wore. But it smelled a lot better than the vomit and dehydration he'd tasted as a kidnap victim.

Kyle closed his eyes and threw back his head. Opened his mouth a little. Let the water splash on him inside and out. Yes. He was getting clean. He was washing the perv's hands off his bare skin.

A knock.

"Kyle, you OK?" Bryce. That Lake Charles, Louisiana accent wasn't heavy, but Kyle recognized it even through a closed door.

East East Texas, Bryce once said. Many petroleum speculators came from that region. Many of them had cashed in on the fracking boom. And many of them were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But it was December 2014. The price of oil was a little shaky. So not many of them flew quite as close to the sun as Bryce did these days.

He spoke softly. He wouldn't want to disturb the team who'd helped him rescue Kyle from his stalker. They were entitled to grab a quick snooze in the jet's custom-designed lie-flat seats.

"Yeah, love, I'm OK. Coming right out." Kyle's northern English accent was thick on his own tongue. He was too tired to make much effort to practice his American.

It had been the longest twenty-four hours of Kyle's life.

"Just making sure." Bryce sounded worried. Kyle knew why.

The wanker who abducted Kyle fed him one drug and injected him with another. The cocktail might still be having some unpredictable side effects.

It would be terrible to send out an unauthorized paramilitary operation to rescue a hostage—only to have that hostage collapse and die afterward in his white knight's shower.

Kyle knew what he looked like when he stepped dewy and pink from the tight stall. Six feet tall and most of it legs. Tight ass barely the size of a ripe peach. The satin chest of a boy in an ad for men's cologne. Often, these days, the boy in the ad was Kyle himself.

Too tired to hold his arms above his head for long, he toweled briefly at the soaking-wet hair matted against his scalp. The shower had turned his brown hair black, all the better to frame mahogany eyes slightly too large for his face.

And, as always, the focus was on his crooked little smile. His lips curved upward at the corners, hinting at secrets he was laughing about somewhere deep inside. It was the smile that sold his look, his agent said. It was a smile that promised things.

Sweet things. Tasty things.

Forbidden things.

Bryce's nostrils flared visibly when he stepped close to wrap a larger towel around Kyle's sleek body. Ah. The citrus peel fragrance. As well as a slight musk that was all Kyle.

He knew what he was doing to Bryce. But Bryce was also doing it back to him.

Kyle's knees sagged for a moment. He should have been exhausted. But there was something intoxicating about being pampered by a fit all-American man who was a good ten years older.

He twisted around in the towel to grind against him face-to-face. Bryce's blue-gray eyes half-closed with pleasure. His sandy hair, neglected and grown slightly too long since Kyle had last seen him, had been brushed off his face to get it out of the way.

Bryce kissed him. Firm lips. A flirt of the tongue. "You need your sleep. We all do."

Of course he was right.

Bryce was wearing a pair of designer tracksuit bottoms. Turquoise velour trackie bottoms. A dated look Kyle associated with middle-aged Russian mobsters. He'd have to teach Bryce a thing or two about real style.

But Kyle would never wear the clothes he was abducted in again. Not one fucking time ever.

When Bryce handed him a second pair, Kyle slipped them on without protest. At least they were gray.

He wished he could kiss Bryce again. But it wasn't the time or the place.

Some private jets are configured like a commuter plane—the kind of plane that reminds you of a public bus. An aisle too narrow even for a supermodel's hips. Two tiny plastic seats on each side of that aisle.

Not this one.

It was configured more like a billionaire's flying RV, with a series of elongated rooms that ran from the bath at the back to the cockpit at the front.

The bath exited into a mini conference room complete with elongated table. Empty, of course. No one was in the mood for a business meeting after their long night.

The next section was a living area complete with a leather couch that could be converted into a bed.

Arnold Geurne was currently stretched out there. He was only twenty-eight but it was an out-of-shape twenty-eight, and he snored audibly when he rolled over onto his back.

Next came the galley complete with a small breakfast nook. It was a litter of abandoned smoothie glasses and espresso cups.

The front—the last major room before the cockpit—looked the most like something you'd find in a conventional aircraft. Here were six leather seats that converted into fully lie-flat beds. The three soldiers were sleeping in those beds.  

The back row featured Leon Roberto and Irwin Johnston—Army vets who'd honed their skills in hostage extraction in Iraq and Afghanistan. They now slept the deep sleep of the just, although Johnston had somehow found the time to keep his scalp shined and shaved even after a dramatic dawn rescue. This tiny attention to detail made him look decidedly dangerous.

Wilton was alone in the middle row. The job over, he was back to standing a little apart from the other two. Kyle didn't know the whole story about the muscular Cajun, but he could tell he wasn't proper Army.

All three soldiers knew how to sleep with one eye open. In fact, both of Wilton's bloodshot gray eyes flickered to track Kyle as he zigzagged down the aisle to the empty seats in the front row.

Perhaps the jet's interior designer had imagined a rich couple with a trio of kids and a nanny. Each of the two seats in the previous rows were divided by the aisle, so that each man had a separate bed. However, at the front of the middle row, the aisle made an abrupt turn so that it ran along the left side of the aircraft. That put both front seats together on the right.

Someone had already converted those two seats into the lie-flat position.

It reminded Kyle a bit of business-class commercial flights. Except that on commercial airlines, if you had two business class seats, there would always be a little barrier between them.

There was no barrier here. This pair of seats was, in effect, a double bed. And it was expertly made up complete with full-sized pillows and soft-as-butter six-hundred thread-count sheets. Kyle's deft fingers brushed the Egyptian cotton to be sure.

Of course there was no cabin crew on this quasi-legal flight. Bryce must have made the bed himself. It looked like he'd even thought to fluff the pillows. Sweet gesture, that. If Kyle's heart wasn't melting already, it was now.

Bryce started to touch Kyle's hip. Pulled back. "I don't know if you feel comfortable having anybody close after that perv snatched you. If you don't want me sleeping here, it's fine. I'm going to the galley to have some coffee. You need to get some rest."

Kyle crawled into the window seat and patted the one next to him. "Don't be silly, love. Come here."

The darkness was coming. Not the drug cocktail's darkness. Just good honest exhaustion. Kyle felt himself glide down into sleep almost before he was fully under the sheets. Two minutes after that, he was curled against Bryce, his arms wrapping around and around the other man's firm waist.

But his sleep wasn't dreamless. Kyle's body flashed on all-too-real memories of curling around Michel in their flat in Hell's Kitchen.

When they were together, it was like two vines twining around each other. A very different feel from Bryce's more muscular build.

In dreams Kyle saw a blurred snapshot of the two of them, Michel and Kyle, posing together for Kyle's very first modeling job. They'd been dressed as twins.

"My English twin."

"My brother."

There was nothing brotherly about Kyle's magnetic attraction toward Bryce. Nothing brotherly about his desire to run his hands over the older man's sturdy muscles. He was as tall as Kyle and probably twenty pounds heavier. But Bryce wasn't a self-involved bodybuilder with an eight-pack. He was a real man with real muscle beneath the lightly tanned skin.

Kyle snuggled closer. They were spooning. Slender Kyle was the big spoon today. Even through the trackie bottoms, even through the dreams, he could feel the suggestively firm muscles of Bryce's toned ass.

Kyle's dreams turned dirty.

Dirty and delicious.

Too bad it was only an hour flight.

***

T
he voice of Vernyn Carter, the jet's pilot, jolted Kyle awake. "It's been a long night, folks, but it's time to prepare for our landing in beautiful Teterboro, New Jersey. Check those seatbelts, please."

It was well into a sunny December afternoon by this point. Kyle lifted the shades on the window to admire the view. Manhattan was only twelve miles away.

They weren't assigned to a gate. They didn't need one. They could land on a back airstrip and descend down their own retractable steps.

"Uh oh." The pilot's voice again. "We've got a welcoming committee."

"Shit. It's about deviating from the flight plan," Bryce said.

He started to get up, then remembered that he wasn't supposed to be out of his seat during the landing process. He pressed a button on an intercom that went directly to the cockpit. "Vernyn. The deviations are my fault. Blame it on me. I'll pay your fines. I'll make this right."

There was a pause.

A crackle of static. Then Carter's deep voice: "Nobody's talking. I guess we'll find out after I land this bird."

Another brief silence.

"I really don't think it's about the deviations," Johnston said. "He never got close to another plane. We were careful to avoid any of the secure areas around New York. And we never went anywhere near the shore or the Canadian border. We didn't put anybody else at risk. There's no warning flags to say the deviations were anything except what we said they were—an inflight emergency."

"According to Carter, civil aviation seemed to accept that we did everything we could to make a safe landing." Roberto was tugging on his jacket as he spoke, even though he no longer had a weapon to conceal.