His Heart's Revenge (49th Floor Novels) (3 page)

He shook his head. What was he doing? Jesus. You didn’t win a war by humanizing the enemy. So Cary had some balls. That didn’t mean he was going to win the Liu account. Liu would mean hundreds of millions for Dominion over the life of the account, and a nice hefty bonus for Alexander, too, when the board reviewed his performance at the end of the year. So, Alexander vowed, Cary was very
decidedly
not going to win the Liu account. As Alexander intended to remind him—rather forcefully.

And here was his chance. Cary, ambling down the long gravel drive from the house, hadn’t caught sight of Alexander yet. Alexander leaned against Cary’s Beemer, watching his nemesis approach. Since he always made a point of avoiding Cary in public, he hadn’t had a chance to really
look
at the guy in years, to catch more than a sideways glance that was always his cue to leave. Checking him out now, Alexander suspected that Cary
was
still a sportsman. His slim-cut navy suit showed off a trim waist and broad shoulders. It was more than that, though. He carried himself with a certain grace. He always had, even in the years when everyone else had been bumbling, awkward teenagers whose bodies were changing too fast for them to keep up.

He still had that same gorgeous mouth, too. Pink and plump, it was like a fucking rosebud. It was soft, too, he knew. He shook his head. He wasn’t strolling down that particular fucked-up memory lane. So he forced himself to continue his assessment of the enemy with ruthless indifference, letting his eyes continue up from that mouth that had always been his Kryptonite. Unlike back then, Cary’s hair was short. He’d always worn it long at camp, shoving it into a ponytail when they were swimming or playing volleyball. But now it was almost military short.

“What the hell are you still doing here?” he asked as he caught sight of Alexander.

And there were those striking blue-gray eyes, which had
not
changed. Despite twenty years of avoiding eye contact, Alexander had not forgotten those eyes, either. Right now they were a swirling mixture of confusion and irritation. Cary had never been able to hide his feelings. The eyes had always given him away. Or so Alexander had thought. But it had turned out he’d been wrong about everything else to do with Cary Bell, so what the hell did he know?

“Excuse me.” Cary hit a button on his keychain to unlock his car. When Alexander didn’t move, didn’t say anything, just stayed there lounging against the driver’s door with a nonchalance he hated having to fake, Cary said, “Get off my car.”

Alexander still didn’t move. He was being a prick, but that was okay because he
was
a prick. “What the hell am I doing here?” he drawled, repeating Cary’s earlier question. “I might ask you the same thing.”

“What I am doing here is giving an invited presentation to Don Liu about the advantages of moving shitloads of his money under my umbrella.”

Just hearing Cary speak made Alexander’s jaw clench. “You’re in over your head, kid.”

“Kid?” Cary echoed, incredulous. “I’m a year younger than you.”

It took more effort than Alexander would have liked to unlock his jaw. “I’m not a kid,” he said, mocking Cary in a sneery, sing-song voice. “Isn’t that exactly what a
kid
would say? The kid doth protest too much, methinks.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was in the presence of such a mature, wise elder.”

“I’m the CEO of fucking Dominion Bank,” Alexander shot back. “And I didn’t get there because of my family.” It was a low blow, but it was designed to sting. Cary didn’t as much as flinch, though, so Alexander kept going. “You can’t be in business four months and expect to get billions handed to you to play with. You’re way out of your league, and you’ll only end up embarrassing yourself.”

“I guess that’s why Liu just gave me a speech about appreciating upstarts. ‘The power of disruption,’ he called it. Says that’s how he made all his money, by taking calculated risks.” Cary raised his eyebrows. “But thanks so much for your concern. You always were great with the younger kids at camp. Still have that light touch, I see.”

That fucking entitlement. That presumption. Alexander’s fingers flexed of their own volition. He wanted more than anything to hit Cary, or shove him or…something. Instead, he pushed off Cary’s car and straightened the cuffs of his shirt. Then he flicked a leaf off of his suit lapel, waiting until he was sure his voice wouldn’t shake to say, “You’re not going to win. You should just do us all a favor and take yourself out of the running.” He looked up to meet Cary’s gunmetal blue gaze. Neither man looked away for a long moment. But then Cary grinned, which pissed Alexander off even more. “You’re going down, Bell,” he ground out.

“I see.” Cary opened his car door and threw his briefcase inside. “That’s why you’re handling a client personally, Mr. ‘I’m the CEO,’ why you stayed an hour after your meeting was over—to wave your dick around and tell me that the big bad bank is going to crush me, the untested new kid on the block. Because you’re not worried at all. Because you’re
totally
going to win.” He huffed a laugh, and fury surged through Alexander’s limbs. How was it that Cary could still make him feel like the overly earnest, socially awkward kid who tried too goddamned hard?

Well, at least there was fury this time. Twenty years ago, it had been more like shame, and Alexander would take fury over shame any day. A man could use fury. Fury could be capitalized upon.

Cary started his car and rolled down the window. “Well, good luck, Evangelista.” There must have been a delay in his car picking up a Bluetooth signal from his phone, because all of a sudden the car was flooded with the jarring, harsh sounds of Nine Inch Nails. Apparently, Cary still liked his music loud and off-putting. Even though it was chilly, early May, Cary didn’t roll up the window. No, he winked at Alexander—he fucking
winked
—and sped away, spraying gravel and Trent Reznor behind him.

When Alexander got home that night, he poured himself a glass of Barolo and shook off his suit coat, wishing he could shake off the day as easily. He’d gone back to the office after the confrontation with Cary, of course, and carried on with his afternoon, but he hadn’t been able to keep his mind from wandering back to Camp Blue Lake. He was usually extremely mentally disciplined. The jujitsu he’d taken up that summer after coming home from camp and continued to this day had made his body strong, but it had also honed his mind. He could break anything down into steps, like a chess game. That’s what he told the kids’ groups he worked with. The key to success was to think about the playing field in front of you even as you projected several moves ahead. But, he would tell them, under no circumstances should you think about the past. The past didn’t serve you.

That wasn’t quite right, though, or at least, it wasn’t the whole story. It didn’t serve you to
think
about the past, that much was true. But Alexander was fully aware that his past had made him who he was. He’d even come to appreciate the past for that reason. If he’d been more of a normal kid—a jock, a popular kid, one of those guys who made their way easily through the world with a smile on their faces—he’d probably be living an unremarkable middle-class life today. He’d be settled down with an unremarkable guy, have two-point-three unremarkable kids, and commute in an unremarkable compact sedan to his unremarkable nine-to-five job every day in an unremarkable suburban office complex. He would have to save up to take the kids to Disney World, set up spreadsheets to figure out the best financing options for his fucking suburban ranch house. His mom would still be waiting tables. He would give her perfume for Christmas, just like he had always done as a kid. A bottle of her favorite, Chanel Number Five, which she wouldn’t buy herself because she saw it as too much of a splurge when there were winter boots for a growing kid to buy. Not that she ever complained. So she had scrimped to buy him the necessities of life, and he had scrimped to buy her a bottle of her favorite perfume once a year.

No thanks. He preferred his life the way it was today, where he could buy his mother enough Chanel to bathe in. Or he could send her to Paris to buy it directly from the source. He was living his own personal revenge of the nerd, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

But it wasn’t only the trappings of success he coveted—he swirled the fine vintage in the crystal glass made specially to showcase the tannic ruby beauty—though he did appreciate the hell out of the trappings. It was knowing he’d had the last laugh. He was the youngest-ever CEO in Dominion’s history. He had the penthouse, the vacation homes, the sweet wheels, and the hot guys on his arm. Everyone who’d hassled him in school and at camp could go fuck themselves.

The point was, Alexander had a healthy respect for his past and the role it had played in shaping his life.

He just didn’t, as a rule, think about it.

Until he couldn’t keep it contained anymore.

Chapter Three

Camp Blue Lake

Twenty years ago

Alex hated camp, and this summer was no different.

As he transferred pancakes to a warming dish in preparation for the onslaught of two hundred boys soon to shuffle through the dining hall line-up, he pondered the particulars of his aversion.

He wasn’t athletic. He had to push himself through swimming drills, and his arrows rarely met their target on the archery range. He was no help in tugs of war. He wasn’t musical, either. Thanks to a completely tin ear, he couldn’t sing for shit. He’d learned his first year here, when he was ten, to mouth the words to campfire songs so as not to set himself up for any more ridicule than necessary.

And it wasn’t like his mom could afford this place—hence his job as a kitchen aide. The first year, he’d come on a scholarship from an agency that paid for impoverished city kids to attend sleep-away camps. In subsequent years, he’d paid for some of his tuition himself, from his earnings from the part-time job he held during the school year. The rest was made up by the camp in exchange for working, something the camp’s director had come up with once Alex was old enough to help with the grounds crew or in the kitchen. It probably made her feel pretty good about herself. Help the charity case from the concrete jungle to experience the wonders of nature.

The problem was that the charity case from the concrete jungle was woefully unprepared for mingling with the sons of the region’s richest and most powerful families.

And it was only getting worse as the years wore on. As ten-year-olds, the differences hadn’t been so stark. But as they grew, it became harder to hide the fact that he didn’t have the right gear. His second-hand shorts were ragged at the start of the summer, his sleeping bag from an Army surplus store, his hiking boots not name-brand.

And it wasn’t just the class difference. Alex wasn’t a natural outdoorsman. He tried to embrace it was much as possible. He had memorized knots suitable for any occasion, for example. He knew which plants were poisonous. But he wasn’t a good swimmer, never having had the chance to learn properly. His fires went out as often as they roared to life.

In short, Alex was a nerd, and, just like at school, there was no hiding it. But at least at his school in the city, it wasn’t weird to be poor. There were plenty of kids there worse off than he was. But at camp, he had the double whammy of being the poor kid
and
the nerd.

So why the hell, he asked himself, filling a gallon jug with maple syrup, did he keep coming back?

The doors opened, and the first wave of boys came shuffling in, most of them yawning and wiping sleep from their eyes. He scanned the group for one who wouldn’t be. One who, like him, had risen before dawn.

One whose very existence answered the question of why Alex kept coming back to camp.

“Hey, Alex.”

Cary Bell. Alex arranged his features into what he hoped was a neutral expression and tried not to be too obvious about checking out his friend. Cary’s dark-brown ponytail was still damp from the exertion of his morning run. His skin was a beautiful, flawless expanse that Alex fantasized about touching—unlike the rest of them, teenage acne seemed to have bypassed Cary. And when Cary smiled, which he did often and easily, it lit up his whole face in a way that never failed to make Alex’s heart twist. Alex often had to force himself to stop looking at Cary’s full, pink lips. His eyes just kept going there.

“Good run this morning?” he asked, digging around in the serving tray for the best-looking pancakes to transfer to Cary’s plate. Cary was a cross-country superstar at his school—he’d won the provincial championship in his distance category last year, in fact. So he had special permission to go for early morning runs since he was preparing for the fall season. That meant he was always among the first people into the dining hall.

“Nope,” Cary said, still smiling. “My time was crap today. I think last night’s s’mores are still sitting in my belly.”

“Oh, so you probably don’t want these, then,” Alex teased, pretending he was going to take back Cary’s pancakes with his tongs.

“No way!” Cary protested, lunging.

Alex let himself be caught. Worked on keeping his breath even as Cary’s hand made contact with his bare forearm, sending almost painful jolts of electricity shooting all the way up to his shoulder.

“I’m starving,” Cary said, waiting a beat before removing his hand from Alex’s arm.

“You’re always starving.”

It was true, and it wasn’t surprising considering how active Cary was. In addition to the running, he played baseball in the spring. A natural athlete, he won most of the events in the camp’s “Blue Games,” both land-based and water-based. But he wasn’t one of those jocks who couldn’t talk about anything besides sports. There was something about the way Cary moved through the world, with such a sense of ease, that was universally compelling. It bordered on entitlement, and perhaps it would have been less palatable if he’d been less of a nice guy. But that was the thing about Cary Bell. On top of all his talents, he was a nice guy.

“Bell, you wanna cut short this marathon convo with Kitchen Boy here and move it along?”

Alex jerked his arm back from where it had remained extended long after Cary had stopped touching him. He was getting sloppy, which was dangerous. Because although Cary Bell was a nice guy, his friend Brooks Martin III was not.

Cary shot Alex an apologetic look. “See you at programming later?”

Alex nodded, chastened. He needed to be more careful. If Brooks and the rest of the guys in their year knew that Cary was the reason Alex came to camp, they would crucify him. Alex knew the drill. This wasn’t his downtown school, with its gay-straight alliance and its obviously gay science teacher who always made a point of telling Alex he could talk to him about
anything
. Nope, here, you shared a cabin with seven other guys, most of them rich, arrogant jerks just looking for a reason to fuck with you. So if the guys talked about the girls at the neighboring camp, you smiled and agreed with their assessments of who was hot and who was not. You kept your eyes unwaveringly on the floor in the communal showers.

Alex wasn’t exactly out and proud at school—he hadn’t had that “talk” with his science teacher—but his mom and his close friends knew about him. He was out enough. But it couldn’t be like that here. At Camp Blue Lake, you kept certain parts of yourself private. You took the gay part of yourself and shoved it way down inside. It was a matter of survival.

But in past summers, his feelings for Cary hadn’t been so overtly sexual. When they were younger, they just clicked. As friends. Cary was easy to talk to, shared lots of Alex’s “nerdy” interests. They read the same books and traded them back and forth all summer. They didn’t share the same taste in music, Cary favoring metal that sounded like noise to Alex. But he liked that, because it gave them something to spar about. Whether they were agreeing about books or bickering about music, it was easy to be with Cary. Being around Cary made Alex feel good about himself. Hell, being around him made Alex feel
invincible
. It was like there was a force field around Cary inexorably pulling Alex in. So he kept coming back to camp, despite all the shit that came with it.

Except this summer, there was something else happening, too. A casual touch, like with the pancakes just then, practically made him pass out. He replayed each conversation, every glance, in his head before he fell asleep at night. When Cary lent him a book, he obsessed over the idea that his hands were touching pages that Cary had also touched. He wasn’t sure why everything felt so much more intense that summer. The force field was still there, but it felt orders of magnitude more dangerous, like a black hole whose orbit he couldn’t escape if he tried. His senses were full of Cary. Everywhere he turned, there he was. Dressing in the dim light of dawn to go for a run. Lying on the floating dock in the lake, letting the sun dry his drenched skin, a golden Adonis. Sluicing through the water in his canoe, biceps bunching, as if he and the boat were one creature. Sometimes Alex feared he was going to have to go through the whole summer with a half-woody. And there was no relief, no way to take the edge off. Cary slept on the bunk above him, so unless he managed to hit the showers at a time when he was alone—which was rare—he was just shit out of luck.

Yes, Alex came back to camp every summer to be with Cary Bell. But, somehow, this summer,
being
with Cary Bell had become indistinguishable from
wanting
Cary Bell.