STONE came out of the bedroom and stopped cold. An attractive woman was glaring at Christian, who looked like he’d just been run over by a freight train. Tucker was looking back and forth between them like the two of them were aliens speaking in tongues. What the hell had he just walked into?
He stepped forward. “You must be Mrs. Lacey. I’m Stone Jackson. Pleasure to meet you.”
She whirled to include him in her glare, and he recoiled. She did know that he had been impersonating her husband, right? He looked over at Christian questioningly. What was he missing here?
“What the hell have you done, Christian?”
Egads. She didn’t know what he and Christian had been up to. She was so going to fire his ass, and Wild Cards, Inc. would get a black eye. And then they’d have to fire him over the scandal. What on earth had he been thinking to agree to this madness?
Christian faced the boss’s wife, his shoulders set defensively. However, he spoke with admirable calm. “You gave me an impossible task. Jack and Chesty absconded to international waters where we couldn’t retrieve him—”
“Chesty?” Frost on a witch’s tits couldn’t have been any colder than that single word.
He felt rotten that Christian was taking so much heat for merely being the messenger bearing bad tidings, and he stepped into the line of fire with the guy. “Chesty Hills, ma’am. She’s the porn star Jack left the country with.”
“Speaking of which, how did your protectee manage to slip out of an entire country without you knowing?” she asked him sharply. “Weren’t you supposed to be guarding him?”
“He insisted that I stay away from him, Mrs. Lacey. And he refused to let Tucker or me guard the suite’s door. The two of them snuck out of here and used a stairwell with no security cameras to make their escape.”
“Well. At least the bastard learned from the last incident with a woman and took precautions not to get caught this time.”
He was stunned at her equanimity over the fact that her husband was currently on the lam with a porn star.
“At a glance, I gather that you’ve been pretending to be Jack in the interim?”
“That’s correct, ma’am.”
Not to be left out of the general ass whupping, Christian dived back in. “That was my idea, not his.”
She glared back and forth between the two of them for upward of a full minute, her mental wheels turning loudly in the silence. The tension stretched out until Stone actually had to restrain an urge to squirm like a guilty schoolboy. A flush was climbing Christian’s fair cheeks, so Stone would guess he felt about the same way.
Without warning, she began to chuckle. “Well, well, well, Christian Brandeis. I give you full marks for ingenuity. And people are actually buying that this impersonator is my husband?”
Stone picked up one of Jack’s cowboy hats off a coffee table and jammed it on his head. He put on his best Texas drawl. “Aww, don’t get your britches in a hitch there, darlin’. I’m not half bad at being ole’ Jackie boy.”
Jill Lacey fell into a chair and stared up at him in shock.
“Walk across the room and back,” Christian encouraged him.
It was a bit of a struggle to get the swagger right without cowboy boots on, but he did his best.
“Put him in one of Jack’s suits and a pair of sunglasses, and nobody can tell the difference.”
“Except for the pictures the paparazzo shoved under my nose at the airport. The bastard wanted cash to keep them out of the press. I’ve got his card in my purse somewhere,” she responded.
A single photographer, huh? Abruptly intrigued, he opened his mouth to ask her the man’s name, but Christian cut him off, snapping, “You can’t kill the photographer, Stone. This is the civilian world.”
“Yeah, but it’s only one sleazeball—”
“No.”
“Fine,” Stone groused. “But if you change your mind….”
“There will be no murders,” Christian replied firmly.
“Party pooper.”
He shot Christian his best pout.
Pointedly ignoring him, Christian turned to Jill and asked cautiously, “What kind of pictures?”
She, in turn, ignored him and instead stared down Stone. Man, she had that whole “mother guilting kid into confessing anything” look down to a fine science.
“You’re gay, aren’t you?” she demanded.
Damn, her gaydar was on point. “Yes, ma’am. I am.”
“And you’re hot and heavy with Christian, aren’t you?”
Tucker made a surprised sound. For his part, Stone frowned. He and Christian had been exceedingly circumspect about their relationship. Neither one of them let their private lives interfere with their professional lives, after all. They’d never touched each other in public. Hell, they barely even looked at each other in public. There’d only been that one quick encounter on the beach at sunrise earlier—
—where’d they’d kissed. Passionately. More than once.
“Aww hell,” Christian muttered. “The beach this morning. I told you we had to be careful.”
“Well, you weren’t careful enough, boys,” Jill interjected tartly.
Stone winced. He and Christian deserved that. But ouch. He’d been naïve to think that a man like Jack Lacey wouldn’t be stalked morning, noon, and night. Christian had tried to warn him, but he’d refused to listen. This was his screwup.
Jill was holding out a business card. “The paparazzo wrote down the address of the website I can visit to preview the layouts that will go public if I don’t buy the images from him.”
Which was a fancy way of saying that if she didn’t pay the guy’s blackmail demand, he would send the pictures to whatever tabloid would pay him the most for the scandalous pictures.
There wasn’t really any question of her paying off a blackmailer. Once that faucet was opened, it was nearly impossible to shut off, and besides, they had no guarantee the photographer wouldn’t take Jill’s money and then turn right around and sell the damned things to the highest bidder anyway.
He looked over Christian’s shoulder reluctantly as the pictures popped up on Christian’s laptop. The quality wasn’t great; they’d obviously been taken with a telephoto lens from some distance away. But they were clear enough. The passionate kiss was clearly between two men.
The next photo of him and Christian, foreheads pressed together, might be achingly romantic in any other situation. But it was damning as hell in this one. Worse, their faces were clear enough in this photo that there was no question it was Christian and him. Or rather, Jack and Christian.
Any chance Christian had ever had at protecting his privacy was completely, irrevocably blown. Stone rested a hand on Christian’s shoulder, and it was like touching ice. Or maybe glass. There was a brittle quality to Christian’s posture that made him feel as if he might shatter at any second.
“God, I’m sorry,” Stone breathed. “I should’ve listened to your warnings. You told me they’d be watching me 24-7, and I didn’t take you literally.”
Christian looked up, but at Jill, not at him. “If we’re lucky, these photos will smoke out your husband. I can’t imagine him letting them pass undisputed and unrefuted.”
Stone looked back and forth between Christian and Jill candidly. “This screwup is squarely on me. What can I do to make it right? Anything. Just name it. I’ll do it.”
Christian was the one who answered. “How do you feel about an impromptu press conference with your wife?”
Jill started. “Stop the wagon there, Nellie. You want me to go out in public with a man who’s posing as my husband? What if somebody realizes he isn’t Jack? Then I’ll go down in flames too.”
Christian nodded solemnly. “Here’s the thing, ma’am. If you do nothing to disprove or refute these pictures, you’re going to come under intense pressure to take action. Your conservative constituents will demand that you divorce Jack to save your reputation and continue the charity work you so love doing.”
“If I try to refute the allegations that Jack is gay and the public believes them anyway, then I’ll look weak and pitiful for standing by a man who suddenly likes boys better than girls. Hell, I won’t only have to divorce Jack. I’ll have to move out of Texas.”
Stone couldn’t fault her logic.
“Or I go all in, stand with Stone—Jack—and we laugh off this whole thing as… what? A joke? A bet Jack lost and he had to kiss his aide full on the mouth?”
Christian tossed out a few suggestions for silly reasons why Jack might have had to kiss his aide. A dare, maybe. Or proving that he wasn’t homophobic.
Stone looked back and forth between the two of them desperately trying to cover for a man they both despised. Abruptly, the insanity of it all was too much for him. “Or,” he interrupted, “we could have me appear as myself and explain that I’m a security guard and am involved with Christian in my off time. We can laugh it all off as a case of mistaken identity.”
“But then you can’t appear as Jack at the casino night,” Christian objected. “Worse, they may expect you and Jack to appear together to prove that you’re two different people.”
“Maybe. But not definitely. After all, I’m a sitting senator. The onus is not on me to prove these crazy allegations by a scumbucket papparazzo.”
Christian sighed. “Sadly, the public is more inclined to believe a salacious accusation from the media than it is the word of an elected public official.”
He supposed he couldn’t blame the public on that one. “But what if I go back to looking a lot more like myself and much less like Jack?” He warmed to the idea the more he thought about it. “I haven’t shaved today. If I don’t shave tomorrow, I’ll have a good stubble going. I’ll wear my own clothes. I can get you a bunch of official photos from my military days. Wild Cards, Inc. can verify that I work for them. I’ve got an official résumé picture on file with them too.”
Jill nodded slowly as Christian murmured thoughtfully, “It could work. But it would make a casino-night appearance by you doubly risky. People would be checking to see if Jack was actually Jack or not.”
“One crisis at a time,” Stone retorted.
Tucker piped up. “If the would-be killer thinks we’ve duped him or her, that person could come after you with a vengeance. Your profilers said the stalker is volatile and prone to violent outbursts, remember? Recognition wouldn’t be your main problem at the fund-raiser. Staying alive would be the real challenge.”
Stone shrugged. “And we can deal with that when the time comes. I’m not entirely inexperienced with high-threat situations.” He continued persuasively, “At this point I don’t give a crap for Jack’s reputation—no offense, Mrs. Lacey. I’m only concerned with protecting your good name and Christian’s professional reputation. The two of you need to come out of this with a future ability to do the work you enjoy and are committed to. You just have to buy me one lousy day to get scruffy, Christian. I’ll do the rest.”
Of course the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the corner was that by him and Christian publicly admitting to being lovers, it blew any chance Christian would ever have of keeping his private life private and separate from his professional life. There was coming out and then there was coming out. A press conference on national television couldn’t get a whole lot more high profile.
Jill looked back and forth between him and Christian. “I say we do it. As much as I dislike my husband, I’m not giving up my charities if I don’t absolutely have to.”
He winced. She didn’t have any idea how abhorrent it would be to Christian to parade his personal relationship all over the media.
The brittle quality clung to Christian more than ever, but as Stone looked at him questioningly, Christian met his gaze grimly and nodded just once. “Agreed. Stone and I go public.”
He tried to catch Christian’s gaze again, to offer him silent support and sympathy, but Christian was having none of it and instead turned away to stare down at his laptop. Stone could feel Christian silently shattering into a million pieces. And something painful in his own chest ached in response, as if a few of those shards of Christian’s splintered dignity were stabbing him. And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.
The deadline for Jill Lacey to buy the photographs from the scumbag came and went.
Ominously, the phone stayed silent. No last-minute pleas for cash came from the photographer, so they could only assume the greedy little worm was now engaged in a bidding war with the tabloids for his pictures of Christian and Senator Lacey making out on the beach.
The dinner hour approached. “Anytime now,” Christian murmured. “The phone’s going to start ringing, and it won’t stop until we put you in front of the press, Stone.”
“If it’s any consolation, I think you called it. Once this story breaks, it’ll smoke out Jack. I can absolutely see him prancing out in front of reporters with Chesty on his arm to refute accusations of being gay.”
“Oh Lord. I hadn’t even thought of that. At all costs he cannot be seen with that woman. Then Jill will have to divorce him anyway, and everything we’ve done to protect her will be for nothing.”
Fuck. He hadn’t thought of it that way. “Have you considered sending Tucker down to Barbados to meet the Wrastle Castle when it docks and stop Jack from committing career hara-kiri like that?”
“Yes, but if you have to go through with the casino fund-raiser, we’ll need Tucker here. If he’s in Barbados, you’d be even more exposed to Jack’s stalker. You heard what Tucker said earlier. The stalker’s going to be royally pissed off if he figures out that he’s been duped. I won’t leave you unprotected like that.”
An entirely unfamiliar feeling seeped into his awareness. It was… fuzzy. And warm. All cuddly and soft and…. Nauseating, dammit. Totally nauseating. Yeah, that was it. Good Lord. His machismo restored, he said sternly, “Christian. In the first place, it’s my job to take risks. But in the second place, I’m very good at what I do. I know how to stay out of an assassin’s sights.”
“You’re asking me to bet your life on it.”
“Indeed I am. Do you trust me?”
They exchanged a long look. Christian still looked doubtful, and Stone did everything he could to inject reassuring vibes into his gaze. He murmured, “I’m just trying to look out for the people I care about, here. Please let me do that.”
Christian swore under his breath. “And you say I’m good at managing people. Ha! Bastard.”
“I’ll go tell Tucker to pack a bag and jump the first flight to Barbados.”
“Impress on him how vital it is that Jack not be seen by anyone with Chesty.”
“Got it!” Stone called over his shoulder as he went in search of Tucker.
THE phone started ringing a little after 6:00 p.m. And it wouldn’t freaking stop. One call would no sooner be transferred over to voice mail than the damned thing would start ringing again. It made Christian want to scream. Every ring shouted at him of his betrayal of his employer, of his principals, of a lifetime of class and privacy.
Losing his freaking mind, he resorted to turning off the ringers of every phone in the suite. Even his cell phone was exploding. He really didn’t want to take those calls because they would be from friends. Possibly even family. Oh God. He was going to be ill.
Although burying his head in the sand wasn’t going to change a damned thing. Manning up, he forced himself to park in front of the television and turn on the evening celebrity gossip programs.
The press was all over this story like a rash on a cheap hooker. The glee was palpable as everyone made arch comments and snide jabs at the conservative, Bible-thumping senator from Texas secretly being gay. In their defense, he had to admit the hypocrisy of it was too rich for the media not to react exactly that way.
Not to mention that reporters loved nothing better than bringing down a rich and powerful public figure, particularly one who’d consistently been an asshole to them over the years. They might be going after Jack, but he was caught squarely in the crossfire whether he liked it or not.
Christian drove Tucker to the airport but didn’t get out of the SUV lest someone recognize him and shove a cell phone camera in his face. When he got back to the hotel, he was touched to discover that Stone had arranged for hotel security guards to meet him at the loading dock, park the SUV for him, and escort him in a service elevator to the suite.
It was a bizarre sensation being the man in the media’s bull’s-eye. That had always been Jack’s job. Christian had been the invisible aide standing in the shadows, well clear of the spotlight. And then Stone had been the guy at the podium, getting all the attention. No wonder both of them had freaked out in their own ways—Jack running off with a woman, and Stone just running. He couldn’t entirely blame either one of them for needing an escape. It was a suffocating sensation to always be looking over one’s shoulder, trying to spot one’s watchers.
He made it back to the suite, and Stone wrapped him up in a hard hug as soon as the door closed behind him.
“Jill?” he managed to gasp past the rib-crushing embrace.
“Spa,” Stone muttered into the side of his neck. “God, I’ve been waiting all day to get you alone so I could apologize to you. I should have listened. You warned me the press was everywhere, but I didn’t believe you. This is all my fault.”
“What’s done is done, Stone. Don’t beat yourself up over it. You have to let go of it and move on. I’m going to need your undivided attention tomorrow. You’ll have to do exactly what I tell you—”
The doorknob rattled, and he and Stone leaped back from each other as Jill returned to the suite. He lifted a bag of complimentary beauty supplies out of Jill’s hand and hustled it back to the master bathroom. It had been decided that Stone would move back to his own room since he was supposed to be himself again. They would all pretend that Jack was spending time alone with his wife in the suite after his big scare at the gala with the helicopter crash.
When Christian returned to the living room, Stone was gone. He cursed silently. He hated every second they had to be apart. Which was to say, he had it bad for the guy.
“I like him,” Jill commented shrewdly.
“Who? Stone?”
“Of course, Stone. You’ve fallen hard for him, haven’t you?”
“What makes you say that?” he asked cautiously.
“For one thing, those pictures that got shoved under my nose. That’s as hot a kiss as I’ve seen between any two people in a long time. And my dear boy, you positively glow when you’re around him. I’ve never seen you happier.”
He didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was merely seeing the absence of misery because he wasn’t having to deal with her husband 24-7.
“Go on. Get out of here already,” she ordered him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The story is that the two of you are lovers. So go be lovers. If you made that poor man live out your cover story and be my husband for three days, the least you owe him is to live out his cover story for a couple of days.”
A smile broke across his face, and he couldn’t stop grinning like a love-struck idiot no matter how hard he tried. “Call me if you need anything, ma’am.”
“I’m sure Jack and I will be fine in the suite by ourselves. I may need one of you to come down and eat the breakfast in bed that the two of us are going to order in the morning.”
“Call me before you do that. We’ll have Stone come down and make a brief appearance as Jack so the hotel staff can verify that Jack’s in the suite with you.”
“An excellent idea. That’s why you’re the best staffer on Capitol Hill, Christian,” she said warmly.
He ducked his head and then all but ran down the hall to Stone’s room. He slipped into the suite and into Stone’s arms with profound relief.
Stone was already looking more like Stone again. A five o’clock shadow darkened his square jaw, and the tight athletic T-shirt that clung to his prodigious biceps was pure badass. Even the close, European cut of his black jeans screamed of a soldier or security type and not a middle-aged politician.
And that fire in his eyes. Oh no. There was no sign of Jack Lacey in this man.
He breathed, “I need you to be the soldier tonight. No civilization. No nice manners. I don’t want there to be any confusion as to who I’m in bed with. Erase all memory of Jack Lacey from my mind.”
“Jack who?”
They traded grins.