The Pretend Boyfriend 2 (Inhumanly Handsome, Humanly Flawed Alpha Male Erotic Romance) (6 page)

“I don’t like to drink alone,” she says.

Her eyelashes bat suggestively at him. So she’s also a predator. He likes that. He wonders what she would be in bed with her hair all mussed up and sprawled gloriously upon the pillow.

A fleeting image of Sam graces the top of his mind, but he pushes it away. This was their deal, after all. They are just ‘hanging out’. No obligations, no commitments, no regrets. The way they
both
like it.

He sinks into the sofa seat next to the redhead and takes the drink she proffers. It’s more bourbon.

“Bottoms up,” he says, clinking glasses with her. “Here’s to laundry.”

“To laundry,” she agrees.

“May your stains always be washed away by the detergent gods,” he adds. He has to restrain himself very hard from making more quips with other types of stains.

She finishes her drink, straight up, and slams her glass down on the table. Her cheeks are lightly flushed.

He grins and does the same to his.

“Now, how do we go about this?” he says.

He leans over. His mouth closes in on hers. She tastes of vodka and clean lipstick. His hands roam down the silky expanse of her bathrobe.
His
bathrobe. He cups her breasts beneath the silk. Her nipples are pointed and hard.

His cock grows hard – ready for action as it always is. He always did have a healthy libido, one he can summon at will. She kisses him back – sensual and raw and needy.

Is it just him or is the room spinning a little? Sam’s pretty face with its upturned nose comes back to his semi-glazed vision. Let’s see. What did he take tonight? Two glasses of bourbon. He didn’t order anything at the bar of the Galois, did he? He could always hold his liquor. It’s his trademark.

He blinks to clear the daze and kisses her with climbing fervor. His hands grow bolder. He gropes her waist, her buttocks, her thighs. He doesn’t come up for air as his tongue probes her mouth.

He feels her hands go around his head, gripping bunches of his hair, and then down his back.

The rest of the evening spirals away into blackness. A blackness that he will try very hard to remember for a long time . . . but can’t.

11

There’s a pounding in his head that he can’t get away from. Someone is hammering nails into the base of his skull. A splitting headache like a hundred hangovers rolled into one comes charging through the noise, breaking through the barriers of murkiness and haze and dreams filled with shadowy figures that are wraiths and yet not wraiths.

He claws through the murk and tries to open his sleep-encrusted eyes. Shapes swim into being. A vivid red and gold pattern assails his vision, and he realizes that he is face down on his own lounge carpet. To be precise, his one hundred thousand Persian weave. The house-warming present from his billionaire uncle’s wife.

He raises his head. There is a persistent knocking on his front door. He groans. His body feels as though a steamroller has flattened it. He raises himself to his elbows.

The door bursts open and feet clatter into his apartment. Black boots, regulation style.

“Mr. Morton?” says an unfamiliar voice.

Brian squints into the light, dazed. Outside, the sun is streaming through the ceiling-to-floor glass windows. He holds a hand up to block out the light. He thought he had drawn the fucking curtains.

“Yes?”

“You are under arrest.”

The rest of his Miranda rights are lost in the drone of the officer’s voice as hands jerk his naked body up, and his wrists are cuffed behind his back. Brian stares in horror at the ruins of the evening. Broken glass coffee table. Scattered shards of glass everywhere. Smashed three thousand dollar lampstand. Torn curtains.

His clothes strewn all over the floor.

And a torn silken bathrobe crumpled in a heap beside them.

What? What? What? What?
A ship is plowing through the mists of his brain – a flotsam of memories struggling to come to the surface, like a shipwreck victim clawing for air. And failing miserably to ascend.

Something cuts through his bare feet. He lifts his right leg up and stares at his sole.

Blood.

Embedded glass fragments.

And that’s not the only damage to his body. The bloody trails of four fingernails have been raked and imprinted upon his chest.

What the fuck happened here?

12

Brian is fucking her, gazing into her eyes oh so deeply and murmuring, “I love you, I love you, I love you” as his hips thrust and slam into hers. She can look into his large liquid brown eyes forever – those eyes of endless promise and discovery.

“I love you too, Brian,” she whispers, wishing this moment will last.

The bedside table phone rings. And rings and rings, even as he continues to fuck her.

Something pops.

Brian disappears and Sam’s eyes flutter open. Beside her bed, her cellphone buzzes insistently. The ringtone she has chosen for this particular caller is ‘Independent Woman’.

Sam sleepily reaches over for her cellphone. It momentarily stops, and then starts up again as she gropes for it and almost drops it. She presses the ‘Answer’ button.

“Yes?”

“Why the hell didn’t you answer?” Cassie’s annoyed voice compresses the Verizon sound barrier. “Caleb’s gone to the police station.”

“What for?”

“Didn’t anyone call you? Brian called his lawyer, and his lawyer called Caleb. So I’m calling you now. Brian’s been arrested.”

Sam sits up in bed. “What?”

“Get dressed and pick me up in thirty minutes.” Cassie sounds almost gleeful.

Sam is peeved. She knows Cassie doesn’t like Brian, but really – is that a good reason to gloat over someone else’s misfortune? Is there ever?

“OK.” Sam rings off, her mind churning. She is going to have words with Cassie about this. She supposes Cassie sees it as retribution for Brian’s collective sins – for fucking around, for ‘cheating’ on her when, really, all Brian has ever done was to be himself. And he has never lied to her, never promised her anything he couldn’t deliver.

What the hell has he done now?

13

The police interrogation room is claustrophobic – grey walls, metal table, four metal chairs, TV and video player mounted on a stand.

Welcome to the next level, Brian thinks with a grimace.
Congrats, you’re going up the ladder.
He has been arrested before for drunk driving when he was in college, but he has never been in an interrogation room. This is a whole new level of misdemeanor entirely.

Karen Sandler, his lawyer, is seated beside him. She is an attractive brunette in her mid-thirties with a no-nonsense attitude. And yes, he has slept with her. Once. She totally gets him – gets what he’s about – because she’s the same way too. She doesn’t believe in marriage or relationships or being shackled to a ball and chain for the rest of her life. She’s a woman after his own heart.

Shackled is a good word to use in this place.

He has told her exactly what happened.

“Don’t say anything unless I tell you to,” she cautions him.

That should be a first for him. He has never been one to keep mum on anything. He supposes it’s as good a starting point as any.

“I’ll try very hard not to,” he says.

“And none of your snide remarks.”

“Yes, Mom.”

Speaking of Mom, he hopes his parents will never find out about this. Or his uncle.
Especially
his uncle.

The two officers opposite the table are polar opposites. In fact, he’s certain they are going to stick the good cop, bad cop routine on him. One of them is a black officer with a badge that says ‘CUTTER’. The other is a hulking Norse god named ‘RILEY’.

Quaint.

Both of them have officious-looking folders on the table before them.

Officer Cutter says, “Now, Mr. Morton, tell us exactly what happened last night.”

“I will speak on his behalf,” Karen says.

“No, I’m OK about this,” Brian says. He ignores her glare. “I have nothing to hide.”

“Go on,” Officer Riley says.

Brian takes a deep breath.

“I was at the Galois, watching some opera about some ancient Egyptian people who have been wrongly accused.” Well, that was what he read in the program, not that he watched Act Three. “I was with my friends – Samantha and Caleb and Cassie.”

Well, Cassie is kind of a friend. OK, a friend of a friend, but spare him the technicalities.

“I received an alert on my cellphone during intermission that the alarm in my apartment had gone off.”

“You live at 675, North Drive, don’t you, Mr. Morton?”

“Yes.”

“Penthouse?”

“Yes.”

“And you are the President and CEO of Vanguard Advertising.”

“Yes.”

“You own a hundred percent of it.”

Brian hesitates. There is a technicality involved, and he wonders if he should tell the good officers about it, especially since it has nothing to do with the case. “Yes. But my uncle, Jefferson Morton, is still the Chairman. Vanguard belongs to the Morton group.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t see what this has to do with the case,” Karen interrupts.

Brian says, “In the spirit of being an open book, I’ll answer. My uncle gave me the money to start up Vanguard after college. I had an experienced partner, Jane, my uncle’s daughter. She taught me everything she knew. She left after three years to start up the New York office.”

“So you are beholden to your uncle,” Officer Cutter remarks.

“You could say that, yes. But I do own a hundred percent of Vanguard now.”

It didn’t start out that way, but as a reward for growing it by triple figures every year, Jefferson Morton ceded his majority shares to his nephew.
With
one written caveat.

Little does Brian know that this caveat will return in full force to slam him in the face within the next few days.

Karen quickly cuts in, “Which goes on to show that a man of my client’s position has no reason or motive to do what you claimed he did.”

“We’ll get to that soon enough, Ms. Sandler. Please continue, Mr. Morton. Tell us what happened last night.”

Brian isn’t sure if Officer Riley has been selected to play good cop today, or if being the CEO of a company begets natural politeness on the part of policemen.

“I returned to my apartment. The security guards were already there. We found nothing amiss. I locked up to return to the Galois.”

“But the opera had already finished by that time, Mr. Morton,” says Officer Cutter. “Why would you be trying to get back to the Galois?”

Brian frowns. He hadn’t thought of it like that. “I was trying to catch my friends for a drink.”

“Did you call or text any of your friends?”

“No.”

“If you were trying to catch your friends at the tail end of an opera, wouldn’t you at the very least text them to ask to meet you someplace, or at least to stay put at the Galois to wait for you?”

Fuck. Now they are trying to make him look like a criminal.

Karen says, “Brian, let me answer.”

Brian says drily, “I didn’t have time to call or text my friends because when I got down to the lobby, the elevator doors opened, and I literally crashed into Ms. Faulkner. Only at that time, I didn’t know her name.”

He only learned her full name at the police station.

He goes on, “She was carrying some sort of dish filled with Bolognese. I was thinking . . . who the hell carries an uncovered dish?” He pauses, his mind churning.

Yes . . . it did seem premeditated. Almost like an accident waiting to happen.

“The sauce spilled down the front of her dress. I apologized and asked if she would like to use my apartment to clean herself up.”

“You apologized?” Officer Cutter says.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Karen narrows her eyes. She says in an icy tone, “Because Mr. Morton is a gentleman?”

Brian can see where this is heading. “Apologizing is the natural thing to do in this sort of situation. Or would you rather I push her brusquely away and tell her she’s a dodo for carrying spaghetti sauce around without a warning siren?”

Officer Riley holds up a hand as a conciliatory gesture. “The security camera captured the lobby incident rather well, Mr. Morton. It is as you described, although we can’t hear what you are saying, of course.”

He gets up, his chair pushing back with a creak. He walks to the TV and depresses a button. The screen flickers to life.

Validation
, Brian thinks. And hopes.

The entire lobby scene displays, showing grainy images of Brian colliding into the woman. They speak. The camera is fixed on Brian’s face while the woman has her back to it. Her body language appears doubtful, reticent. Brian coaxes her. They finally reenter the elevator. The time clock on the lower left hand corner of the screen shows 9.15 p.m.