Runaway Model (6 page)

"You know you are."

"Alex Turner and that lot are celebrities. I'm just a musician."

"A fucking brilliant musician."

They were walking out of the elevator and into a penthouse suite that seemed to take up the entire floor. "I'll order a bottle," Stoney said.

I've had too much already. I should go.

But Kyle couldn't make himself say the words. He couldn't bear to bring this magical night with Stoney to an end.

Stoney picked up one of the many, many phones in the ridiculously oversized suite to order a bottle of Krug and some Alaskan king crab legs. Then he vanished into the toilet for a moment with a silly comment about "powdering me nose."

Kyle walked around the huge suite, mouth maybe a little open. In addition to at least six bedrooms and a conference room, there were three hot tubs, a dance floor, and two stripper's poles. It seemed like the kind of place that was usually rented to entire bachelor parties, not to just one man.

Stoney was suddenly close behind him. "Don't worry for me bank account, mate. It's all comped." Stoney's accent was heavier when he was away from Americans. "Nobody can pay the going rate for these suites. You'd have to be a billionaire."

The frisky star put his arms around Kyle, embracing him from behind like he did at the dice table. His hard cock felt better and better against Kyle's arse, but somehow he forced himself to squirm around.

There. Now they were face-to-face. Stoney's smoky French kisses were a thousand times more exciting than Morgan's practice sessions. Kyle kept telling himself he must be dreaming.

Did pomegranate have hallucinatory qualities? Did vodka?

A chime sounded. The champagne had arrived. A man in a penguin suit opened the bottle for them and then excused himself with a pointedly tactful bow. He managed to never quite look in Kyle's direction.

It was a splash of cold water. This wasn't any dream. It was reality. And people made judgments about the kind of man who went with someone Kyle's age.

Kyle couldn't—he wouldn't—put Stoney's career at risk.

Stoney's music was more important than anything.

"Fuck that old twat. He's just jealous, innit?" Stoney squeezed at Kyle's neck and upper shoulders, massaging him. "You're so tense, love. Relax. Try the champagne. It's quality."

"I'm still dizzy from me martini."

"The fizz will help with the dizzy."

No, it won't.

"I have to wash me hands."

Stoney laughed. "All that dirty money."

Kyle hadn't touched the money, just the chips. But now Stoney mentioned it, Kyle could see dark fibers from the dice table's felt caught underneath his nails.

"Don't keep me waiting too long, baby. I might be naked when you get back."

Might be? There was no "might be" about it. Stoney's rigid cock was already pushing down the zipper of his jeans from the inside.

Kyle experienced such a pang of desire that he almost sank to his knees.

But he had to do the right thing.

Stoney's music was more important than a drunken one-off with Kyle.

He did stop in the toilet, the one nearest the door. It was all done up in mirror glass and gilt and marble.

He really did need to wash his hands. The felt didn't come out easily. Kyle had to dig his nails deep into an orange-scented bar of soap to get himself clean.

Already he felt he'd been locked in here too long.

He didn't want Stoney to come looking. If he had a chance to smile at him just one more time, Kyle wouldn't be able to resist.

Get away. Get away now. Don't see him again until you're eighteen.

Something glittered in the soap dish. Stoney's pink sapphire ring. Of course. Kyle hadn't wanted to think Stoney was doing cocaine when he was "powdering me nose." But the thought had crossed his mind. The man was a rock star, after all.

Now he realized Stoney too had been cleaning the felt from beneath his nails.

He'd taken off the ring to wash his hands.

And there it glittered, the six legs of the star sapphire flashing.

Don't do it. Don't.

But Kyle needed something. He'd sacrificed thousands of dollars he could have slipped into his Pocket during the game without anybody ever knowing.

He was sacrificing a night with Stoney Rockland.

He deserved this.

Kyle put the ring on his right pinky.
I'll bring it back to him one night. When I'm old enough. Then I can tell him everything, and he'll understand.

Still in his stocking feet, his shoes in his hands, he slipped out the door without saying good-bye.

O
nly the worst sort of poseur would bring his bodyguard into a Vegas casino. There were cameras everywhere. Hundreds of cameras. Thousands. What could possibly happen?

But there was something odd about the little group that burst in moments after Bryce sat down at the bar. Something off that made him glance around for an entourage he didn't have tonight.

They were the only customers besides Bryce himself. The outrageous price of the drinks—in a town where booze was still free to anyone who grabbed a seat in front of a dollar slot machine—kept most people out of this quiet oasis. It was April 2014. Perhaps alcohol wouldn't be free for much longer. The casinos had learned to monetize everything else. But, for now, Bryce usually expected to see kids that age crowded around the quarter video poker machines, slamming down as many drinks as they could order before their twenty-dollar buy-in ran out.

Four girls, two boys. He corrected himself. Four women, two men. Legal adults for all their rose-petal skin. The yellow bands on their wrists confirmed that some casino rent-a-cop had checked to be sure they were twenty-one.

An exceptionally beautiful boy seemed to be the leader of the gang. When he gestured to the bartender, he let the sleeve of his raw silk shirt slide down to more fully expose his wristband.

A preemptive maneuver, Bryce thought. The boy didn't want the bother of bringing out his ID again.

He knew Bryce was staring. Of course he did. Boys like that always knew. This one looked directly at him with brown eyes just a little too large for the size of his face. He smiled a tiny intelligent smile which was really just the ends of his lips crooking upward.

Bryce smiled back without thinking about it. How could he resist?

The boy had already turned back to the bartender, leaning in a little too close to whisper the drink order into the silver-haired fiftysomething's ear.
Give an old man a thrill
, Bryce thought. Keep him off-balance.

Off-balance for what?

All his life Bryce had heard people say that money changes everything. But he hadn't really understood how paranoid it made you. Five years ago, he would have assumed the stranger was flirting with him. Now? After a recent consult with the underwriter for his abduction insurance, he couldn't help wondering if he was being set up.

Chill, man
, he told himself. It was silly for Bryce to be so hyper-alert.

This bar was nestled deep inside the circuitous maze of one of the most luxurious casino resorts on the Las Vegas center strip. Multiple camera eyes must have tracked this group for at least thirty minutes before they started pushing overstuffed leather chairs together around a marble table.

From his perch on the bar stool, he could keep a casual eye on the people around him—emphasis on the word "casual."

There was nothing happening here that he should stress about. He was having a drink on his own for the first time in months. A carefully curated bourbon. That was it. Nothing deeper. Two years ago, it would have never crossed his mind that he'd need an armed escort to go about his day—much less his night.

Bryce wasn't built like a self-obsessed gym rat with nothing to do but drink smoothies and lift weights for six hours a day. But he was fit enough. Six foot two. Only a little on the slim side of his ideal weight, with sleek muscles toned by a personal trainer who knew how to make him look good in a bespoke suit.

It would be ridiculous for wanna-be kidnappers to target him within the boundaries of this well-defended casino. If he wasn't safe here, he wasn't safe anywhere.

Besides, it wasn't as if he was a celebrity. It wasn't even as if 500 million dollars was all that much money any more.

Let the billionaires and the pop singers have their entourages.

Bryce just wanted to be a normal 28-year-old out on his own in Vegas. He
was
a normal 28-year-old.

Just for tonight.

"This can't be the place." The redheaded girl—
woman
, Bryce reminded himself—might not be jailbait. But she had a child's piercing shriek and an unfortunate concealer that failed to conceal. Even at this distance, he could clearly see the scattering of spots on her forehead.

"There's no fucking way Stoney would be in a fucking piano bar." The token brunette. Her Southern drawl was as slow as the muddiest river in Alabama.

The other two girls were blondes. Bottle blondes. The tiny Vietnamese had pink glitter highlights in the straight thick hair that framed her face.

A pianist in a white tuxedo was playing sappy classical music very, very softly under a chandelier that must have held twenty thousand individual Swarovski crystals. The resigned look on his face suggested he knew no one was listening. It was the kind of bar where Bryce could sit with the quiet of his own thoughts and sip a shot of seventeen-year-old small batch bourbon.

Or so he'd thought.

No need to concern himself with the girls. Their dresses were hopeless for hiding weapons. Thigh-high hems. Spaghetti straps that left shoulders and most of their cleavage bare. Printed cotton so flimsy it flirted with being see-through.

The accessories were just as bad. Spike heels that would snap if they tried to give chase. Gold and silver sequin clutches with just enough room for a credit card, a cell phone, and a lipstick.

It was the boys he needed to watch. Especially the one who looked like a model and dressed like he knew it. A distraction? A lure?

The boy knew how to accessorize. His ostrich-skin messenger bag was truly droolworthy. Bryce could always use the excuse of asking where he'd bought it to strike up a conversation.

But the real question was the contents. The bag might well hold nothing more dangerous than a laptop or a change of clothes. But it could also hold enough handguns to equip the entire gang.

Focus.

Who knew Bryce Auburn was here?

Stop it, he told himself. Be a normal man out on the town.
He slammed down the rest of his bourbon. A waste. It wasn't distilled—or priced—to go down in one gulp.

Maybe a normal man out on the town didn't pay that kind of crazy money for a single shot of bourbon.

Maybe it was foolish for Bryce to pay crazy money for any kind of drink. If he'd been standing at his usual spot at the five-hundred-dollar minimum craps table, wagering stacks of black and purple chips on a roll of the dice, he'd be getting it for free.

And Bryce used to love the game. Used to love everything about it. His father was in and out of all the local casinos for the company that serviced the slot machines, and he'd shoot the shit for a few minutes with the guys at the entrance to the riverboats who always made such a show of checking Bryce's ID.

One thing you can say about men from Louisiana. They love to talk.

And getting in was just the game before the real game. Women could play craps but they mostly didn't. It was oil roustabouts, duck hunters, shrimp boat captains, and construction workers betting five dollars on the pass line and five on the come and five more on the come and double odds and then five more...

Sooner or later you had everything in your wallet on the line in front of you.

That's when you knew what you were made of.

The clatter of the dice. The screams when a roll went on and on and on, and you had to decide whether to keep investing or if it was time to pull back.

That crazy never-to-be-duplicated night when Bryce turned his last eighty dollars into twelve hundred dollars in less than ten minutes.

The all-too-frequently-duplicated nights when you went home with nothing except the alcohol in your bloodstream.   Those nights when you had a choice of whether to bet your last dollar on the hard eight in a hopeless attempt at a comeback or whether you'd just toss it at the cocktail waitress as a tip for one last beer.

But there was no thrill in shooting craps for him any more. Not when a fifty thousand dollar loss at the game could be easily covered by wells from Bryce Yourself Petroleum pumping out one hundred thousand in royalties every hour. When you had nothing at stake—when you had nothing to lose—gambling became a tedious exercise in ego.

Easy to be a good sport when the fifty thousand dollars you just lost meant sweet fuck-all to you. No test of manhood in that, was there?

Bryce played for keeps. Anything less bored him.

Yes, there was something off. Suddenly he knew. Oddly enough, it
was
the dresses. Cheap summer dresses that high school girls would buy off the rack at Tar-gay. Bryce remembered the sarcastic pseudo-French pronunciation of the popular discount department store from his days as a high school student in Lake Charles, Louisiana. How could he forget, being the token gay friend who helped the popular girls do their shopping?

The dresses on the girls' backs were cheaper than the pomegranate martinis on the table in front of them.

One of the boys, the ordinary one, was dressed just as cheaply. Bryce had once worn Faded Glory jeans and thought nothing of it. Of course he was eleven at the time. This boy was eighteen if he was a day.

Well, he was twenty-one if he was a day—according to the band on his wrist.

It didn't add up.

Of the group, the only person who looked as if he belonged in a place like this was the boy who first caught Bryce's eye. He was no older than the rest but he wore his clothes so well Bryce assumed he was either gay or foreign.

"I told you so, love," he was saying to the brunette. Foreign then. Bryce had to listen hard to understand the boy's accent.