The Bullion Brothers: Billionaire triplet brothers interracial menage (2 page)

I said, “Me too, Petroc. So as your social media coordinator, perhaps you should bring me up to speed on the business that you were conducting in the room on the stairs with Mi, so that I can update your Facebook friends and the Twitterverse about it.”
 

“Look, it’s nothing, OK?” He was getting flushed, and that meant angry.

“OK, it’s nothing.” I said, “Look, there’s Mi now.” I waved to him. Her. To ‘Mi,’ but she acted as though she hadn’t seen me and ducked away. I looked back to Petroc and he was barging off in the opposite direction, towards the exit.

I went down the steps after him, but he shouted back, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” and he was through the door to the street.

I reached the door and saw Petroc with his collar up, hurrying along the store windows into the rainy New York night. I was debating whether to go after him and on the point of deciding against it. As I was about to turn back into the gallery, a rattle like rolling garbage cans came from down an alley, just ahead of where Petroc was.

He jumped back, his face drained and pale. Then he flattened himself against the window. Two big shapes came slowly out of the alley. I couldn’t make out their features, but they were huge men.

They hunkered in front of him. He was frozen and obviously terrified. A Bentley convertible pulled up sharply to the curb and a big man’s voice called out, “Derrick! Hawser!” The two men hesitated, still leaning towards Petroc, then they both jumped into the back of the car and it swept away into the darkness and the rain.

I stood rooted to the spot. I didn’t even notice Petroc slink away, but I know he did because when I looked back, he wasn’t there. I had recognised the man’s voice. My mysterious companion was at the wheel of the Bentley.

So Petroc was gone, and he was gone. A perfect early end to a perfect evening.

On my slow, resigned walk home a lot of things bothered me. Derrick and Hawser were two of them. They weren’t unique names, but they aren’t ones that you come across every day. The tremors in my little world were all juddering beneath me and they all melted into one sea of turmoil.

The one thing I knew that I really wanted out of the evening drove away in a Bentley, and I couldn’t see any chance that I’d run into him again.

Petroc chose a corner table in the little bar last night to deliver his little, ‘I think we need some space,’ talk. He mumbled the rambling speech into his beer mug, since eye contact was an exertion that his feeble strength couldn’t manage. After I got the headlines, I didn’t wait around to listen to all the sidebar excuses and justifications.

He picked our cozy little corner bar. The bar where I’d taken him on our third date. When I’d started to feel close enough, to trust him enough to take him into my world.

When we first met, Petroc spent his whole life online, blogging, tweeting, chatting and whatever else. His complexion was pale and blotchy, and his contact with actual human beings was scarce. His social skills were, let’s say, overdue for a polish.

We got together and I helped him to turn his invisible blog about the SoHo and TriBeCa arts scene into something that more established arts journalists would want to plunder for trends and gossip.

He thought that they were stealing from him. I told him to check his visitor counts. Also, he started to get invitations to private views and to gallery and show openings from then on, and he began to grow a little reputation on the scene. So people were taking notice of him. That was when he began to think that I should be dressing maybe a bit less ‘showy,’ a bit more, ‘in keeping.’

When we met, he couldn’t peel his eyes out of my cleavage, except when it was to roam around my generous hips and my thighs, or over my round ass. All of a sudden, he doesn’t want to see me like that when we’re out together.
 

When or if. Soon after the invitations started to come in from the agents and artists and gallery owners, Petroc started ‘forgetting’ to mention them to me, or he’d say something like, ‘Oh, don’t you have a thing that evening?’ or, ‘You really don’t
have
to come.’

Like I’d worked my black butt off to get him into these places, and I wouldn’t want to come along for the follow-up? No, it hurts like hell to think it, but I had to face the facts, Petroc was thinking that he could do better. He could do better,
now
. Now that I had helped him to gain some credibility, I’d served my purpose for him, and he was ready to move on.
FUCKER!!!

I took a walk on my first solitary Saturday in months, feeling utterly miserable. I went to Central park and sat on a cold rock by a lake for a while. The autumn sunlight sloped beautifully across the trees. The towers on Central Park West sparkled with a dark gold to match the leaves on the thinning branches.

Thoughts of Petroc brimmed whether I wanted them or not. Little things he’d given me. Believe me, they were all
very
little things. Bizarrely, the smaller the thing, the more trivial the event, the more sentimental the memory made me.

I recalled the first time we had dinner together, gawky, awkward thing that he was then, reaching across the table to brush a hair out of my eye and I welled up and almost lost it completely.

The whole of the time we had spent together washed through me like an endless series of ocean waves. Inside I was drenched in the overwhelming regret and remorse. I rolled, slewing between ‘how could I let something so simple and fragile get so messed up?’ and ‘how could I have let that emotional cockroach into my life?’
 

There was no way I could stay by the lake then, I had to move.
 
Several blinks, a long, slow straightening of my clothes and I carefully, hesitantly stood. One more pull of my lips between my teeth and I set off.

The warm breeze in my face helped me back to the real world. Visualising the past blowing away behind me like ribbons and thinking of myself striding into the future, I clenched my teeth just for a moment as I strode off.

Traffic noise faded behind the birdsong and rustling leaves. Children squeaked and scampered nearby. All of it left me miserable but with a clean feeling.

I left the park and crossed the busy street. I walked by the Dakota building where John Lennon had lived. And died. And I was miserable again, but the feeling was transforming.

I crossed the noisy traffic of Broadway by the block with the lovely green Beaux-Arts domes and carvings and I wandered aimlessly down to Riverside Park, where the Hudson gleamed and shimmered. There’s a pretty café by the marina where I thought I might get a coffee and an ice-cream.

As I got nearer the idea made of it me lonely and glum. Fuck it, Petroc was hardly the world’s most eligible bachelor, but I’d put a big chunk of my little life into him and I had really believed that we could be going somewhere. Only to find out that he wanted us to be going to different somewheres, and he’d tossed me away like a candy wrapper.

Well, I was done crying about him. I did so much of that last night, I must have shed a couple of pounds of saltwater at least. So,
best fucking foot forwards, Maya, onwards and fucking upwards
.

As I got closer to the dazzling waterfront,
 
the trees behind me muffled the honking buzz of traffic. Lower, slower, sputtery engine sounds of the river ahead were occasionally punctuated by the rasp of a boat horn that echoed on the water.

Across the river is New Jersey, hundreds of thousands of apartment windows, where people were all living their lives, just like they were yesterday, just like they would be tomorrow.

Leaves were turning golden yellows, reds and browns on the trees in the park, and every few moments a jogger huffed by. The breeze carried a few brown leaves, and a slight chill.

As I wandered towards the river’s edge, and a big, unsteady
 
street-dweller came towards me, his arms outstretched. Nine times out of ten in Manhattan, these encounters are funny, charming or just plain goofy.

As a girl, I always expect them to be the one time when it’s not any of those. The large, round man had a straggly beard and a grin with an incomplete set of teeth.

His breath reached me long before he did, a mix of fuel and decay. I tried not to flinch as he croaked, “Hey, baby,” at me. His hand reached out towards my shoulder and I moved a step back. “Aw, don’t be like that,” his gappy grin widened and I saw a flash in his eyes that I didn’t like. I shrank back towards the bushes. He came after me.

Then he froze. He was looking past my shoulder. His eyes stretched wide and his face went gray. Behind me I heard a rustling in the bush, then a deep low, grating sound. Soft but still shocking. I didn’t think I could risk taking my eyes off the wooly homeless man, even though he was starting to back away slowly, with a look of terror growing across his face.

Behind me I heard a rustle of leaves and I felt heat. The warmth of a large body moved close to my back. When the homeless man had backed a safe distance away I turned, but all I saw was a large shape slipping back into the bushes and I heard the rustling of the leaves.
 

As I looked around, the homeless man fled in a panic. The few other people I could see were just enjoying a balmy Saturday, like nothing was going on. In the marina nearby, little boats bobbed on the water, and a massive, silver yacht was cutting through the Hudson and heaving by.

On the prow stood a big, fine looking man in white pants, a white shirt, Raybans and a white sailor’s cap. He shielded his eyes and gave a jolly wave towards the shore, the way that people on boats do. I gave as jolly a wave as I had in return. His golden beard made him look like the man from
Gush
.

In Manhattan, that kind of a chance meeting never happens. Not to me anyway, and not to anyone I knew. He pointed. I looked around, he must have been waving to someone else. Me, misreading signals again. I didn’t see anyone, and he was still pointing, towards the marina.

I knew that he must be gesturing to someone out of my view, but I gave him a friendly wave goodbye as I turned back. Then I heard a man’s voice in the distance. It sounded familiar. It sounded as though he was calling my name. He couldn’t be

But he was. “Maya!”

I looked back up. That really couldn’t be my arrogant companion from the gallery opening, shading his eyes on the front of the yacht. It couldn’t be. He called out again, “Maya! Wait for me!” and his voice carried easily across the water. He turned and headed towards the rear of the boat. It wasn’t a short walk.

A motor launch was winching out at the far end of the yacht, and as soon as he reached it, he climbed into the launch and it began to lower into the water. The boat reached the river and was released from the winch and I heard the engine start.

I stood transfixed, plucked out of my miserable meandering as I watched the big man expertly steer the long, sleek wooden launch to the shore. As he jumped out, he seemed to tie the boat up in a single, fluid movement.
   

A thrill that I tried to suppress ran through me, watching the lithe skill he displayed. Then he strode rapidly up the gray wooden jetty towards me, pointing again at the café.
 

My teeth clenched. Is that how he treated everybody, I wondered, telling them what he wanted with nods and gestures and expecting them to comply? In spite of myself I waited at the entrance to the café.

I watched his long, thick legs, beautifully draped in the white flannel pants. The top of his broad, dark golden chest peeked out of the loose white shirt. As he peeled off the sunglasses, his deep brown eyes locked into mine and my insides turned to jello.

His arm stretched out and went around my waist. I realised too late that he was coming in for a European cheek kiss, or maybe a fashionable metrosexual hug. My arms were already as far around him as they would go and his scent was like a big leather armchair by a crackling fire.

Feeling my soft, hot cheek against his warm, hard chest, my swelling breasts squeezed against his firm rippled stomach, and my arms tight around him, the emotions that I had been holding down and suppressing bubbled and frothed over, and I let out a quiet sob. No blubberer, me, I held on just long enough to get some composure, then I pulled away.
 

It was a reluctant retreat, I admit it. My nipples had sent crackling sparks all the way into my panties. Standing there, holding him, enfolded in him, I had felt a tenderness, a huge strength, and I felt so safe, as though nothing could reach me there. Nothing but him. I felt as though something was growing between us. And something had been quite literally growing between us.

Something hard and strong and very large had uncoiled and hardened against my stomach and it made my thighs quiver. If I had stayed pressed there against him for much longer, I don’t know what I might have done. Out there, in the broad daylight.

I needed to recover myself. In spite of everything he was the perfect gentleman. He said, “Maya, I think you might like something to eat. Perhaps you’d allow me to buy you lunch.”

His low, honeyed voice melted my insides. At that moment, he could have finished his sentence any way he liked.
Perhaps you’d allow me to… 
Yes, I probably would. I would likely have agreed to just about anything he could have said.

He guided me into the café in the sharp morning sun, and he sat across a metal table from me. I had no appetite, but he told the waiter to bring me coffee and a piece of lemon meringue pie.

“Pie?” I said when the waiter had left, “Do I look to you like a girl who needs
pie
?”

His grin was as infuriating as it was delicious. It had an easy warmth and, even with the assumption that I would do what he told me, there was an openness in his face. There was nevertheless something that was perpetually amused and unbearably pleased with itself.

The sound of his voice was soft and intimate under the café sunshade as he said, “You look to me like a girl in an urgent need of pie. I would say that you were a borderline emergency.”