CHAPTER EIGHT
Cam had never once given his father the satisfaction of backing down or walking away. That was what the bastard wanted. For the son he perceived as weak in so many ways to step aside. Didn’t matter that the Dallas Stafford Royal was the best performing of the Stafford hotels, didn’t matter that the life Cam had been born into had been his training ground.
Nope. All Sebastian Stafford saw was that Cam was damaged goods. Gay, blind, useless.
And he never, ever let it get to him.
Only, he’d always dealt with it on his own. He’d never taken a date or a friend to a family event, not even ex-from-hell Adam, the bastard who’d fucked him over. So it didn’t matter what people said to him. Didn’t affect him to be told that people were sorry for him, or that tragedy was a terribly tragic thing in an awfully, tragically blind kind of way. Pity was shitty to keep having to take at these things, but it was okay. No one else heard their shit. No one else judged him.
But tonight this stranger in his life had heard it all, and judged him, and Cam was ashamed.
He’d let these things slide for so long that he’d never even thought about how it all looked.
He reached out a hand for the glass with the wine in it, and Gabriel, this man he’d hired, knew to pass it to him and wait for Cam to grasp it properly. He downed that glass in one, and it joined the first glass in burning a nice warm trail to his belly. He knew the bottle in his hand only had one more glass in it, so he poured that and placed it on the coffee table before sitting on the sofa.
“You can go; you’re done,” he announced. “The rest of your money is in the paper wallet on the table by the front door. Six counted and verified it, so we’ll know if you’re trying to fuck us over.” Gidget jumped up on the sofa next to him and nosed at his neck; he gave her a reassuring pat. He sounded like an ass and he knew it.
Then he waited for the familiar sounds of someone leaving his apartment, but Gabriel appeared to be opening his fridge and taking out a bottle of whatever in there was fizzy, because he heard the hiss of escaped gas as it was opened.
“You can go,” he repeated. “You’re done.”
“We have another hour,” Gabriel answered, and sat down on the sofa opposite Cam.
“Call it a bonus to get home early,” Cam suggested.
“I like it here. I’m staying here.”
Fuck. This was yet more pity, and no wonder after everything Gabriel had heard tonight.
“I have Six on speed dial,” Cam warned him.
“Jeez, I want to sit on your comfy sofa, drinking Sprite and chatting, and you want to sic your guard dog on me? Dude, that is harsh.”
A small knot of something collected in his chest. Not panic or fear, but maybe nerves. Was Gabriel acting in a threatening way? Six had warned him that if the hooker wouldn’t leave, he would deal with it. He’d also insisted on locking away anything valuable.
Six looked out for him all the time, but at this particular moment, Cam desperately wanted to feel like he was in control, like he could handle it.
Gabriel was something he hadn’t been expecting. He talked softly, was just there by his side, smelling delicious and turning Cam on. A couple of times this evening the nebulous concept of paying for sex as well had been hovering just out of reach of his rational thoughts.
He needed sex just like the next man, and every time Gabriel pressed into him, the reassuring weight and solid form of him in reach, Cam was aroused. The scent of Gabriel was intoxicating, and the sound of his voice was enough to make Cam want to touch.
The last man he’d touched in any way other than shaking hands had been Adam, and look how that had ended.
“What do you want to talk about?” he asked finally.
“You have a complicated family.”
“Family is always complicated,” he muttered, then realized what he’d said. If the story that Gabriel had used tonight was true, then that had been an insensitive thing to say, even to someone who sold himself for a living.
“How much of what you said tonight about your family life and history was true?”
Gabriel chuckled and moved on the sofa, the knock of his half-full plastic bottle on the table. “I never knew my dad, so him passing away young was a stretch. For all I know he could still be walking around on the wrong side of the tracks in Laredo peddling whatever it was that drew my mom to him. Drugs, sex, who knows.”
“Your mom was a…”
“No, not like me, no way. She was a dreamer, all rainbows and hippie shit, always saw the best in people, ended up with me and a crap job on a ranch outside Laredo. We had it good for a few years, and then she died. Pretty quickly, actually—cancer, we think, although we didn’t have the money for testing or fixing, you know what I mean? She was beautiful. I always thought she was beautiful; she died still so beautiful.”
Compassion swelled inside Cam. Cancer was a horrible way to lose a parent. His mom might be in a constant state of battle with his dad and his dad’s new wife over everything but, at least she was in his life and actually cared about him, which was more than his dad did.
“I’m sorry,” he offered, without a hint of the pity he hated hearing all the time. “How old were you?”
Gabriel didn’t answer straight away. “Ten,” he finally said, his tone a curious mix of sadness and anger.
“And you stayed on the ranch? Or did you end up…” Leaving and living on the streets. Cam would be the first to admit he knew very little about the motivations of a man who chose to sell his body for money.
“I stayed,” Gabriel said. “Can I ask you a question?”
Ah, so that was a touchy subject, and one that Cam was happy to leave alone. A man was entitled to privacy, after all. Which was why the concept of a question from Gabriel had him wincing inside.
“I can’t promise to answer.”
“People have probably asked this before, but can you see in your dreams?”
Wow, that was a deep question. “I didn’t start to go blind until I was twelve, and I have images in my head, so yeah, I still have pictures in my dreams.”
“Do you ever feel you miss out in life, or do you take it all in your stride?”
“Jeez, what is this? Twenty question? I feel like I experience differently, no less or more, so no, I don’t think I miss out. I might not be able to see, but that doesn’t mean I’m emotionally blind.”
“Wow, that’s deep.”
“You asked.”
“Well, how do you know where your mouth is when you’re eating? I mean, I watched you pour wine, for god’s sake, into a glass, and you were balancing the wine, testing its weight—is that how it works?”
“My mouth is where everyone else’s is, and it’s instinct, and yeah, to pour a drink it’s useful to find a center of balance and have the glass in your other hand, and then it’s a matter of pouring carefully.”
The sofa moved on the other side of him to Gidget, and Cam realized that Gabriel had moved to sit closer to him. Why would he do that?
Gabriel sighed. “I guess you find some people condescending?”
“Frequently.”
“Like they expect you not to be able to do things?”
“Uh-huh.” Cam was running out of things to say here.
“How can you have sexual thoughts about a man if you can’t see him and don’t know what he looks like?”
These questions were changing slowly each time, becoming way more personal than Cam wanted to answer. He could feel himself closing down emotionally, like he always did when he was worried about adding another vulnerability for others to see.
“I don’t judge people by how they look,” he offered, simple and to the point.
“So you don’t have the prejudices others have, then.”
“That’s not entirely true. I have a whole other set of criteria—voice, sense of humor, intelligence, politeness, the smell of a man, the way he touches me or I touch him. I’m the first person to judge, and actually use more criteria than just assuming that what a person wears or what they look like is what defines them.” He stopped for a moment and appeared to be considering what to say. “Meekness, hesitance, arrogance…they all come through in tone and choice of words. Maybe you’ll see a gorgeous man and think he’s hot because of a fortunate mix of genetics—eye color, build, hair—but really maybe he looks hot because he’s hot from the inside out.”
Gabriel moved on the sofa, knocking Cam’s leg and touching a hand to that point in apology. Cam could have him tonight—he could ask for what he’d essentially paid for. It had been months since he’d last had a man’s mouth on him. His cock got into the image and began to harden, and he hoped to hell it would stop, because the last thing he needed was to get turned on right here and now. In fact Gabriel really needed to leave. He took another healthy swallow of red wine, and the faint buzz in his head and the softness in his limbs told him he’d reached that perfect point where he was all warm and mellow but still had control over his inhibitions.
After tonight he needed that.
“I bet even you would fall for someone where the beauty was only skin deep.” Gabriel rested a hand on Cam’s thigh, his thumb tracing patterns on the material of Cam’s pants.
“Stop doing that,” Cam said, and made a shooing motion with his free hand. He could have pushed the hand away, but he liked it, so his physical side was winning over his sane, rational thoughts. Didn’t matter, because Gabriel ignored him, the thumb pushing a little harder, the hand moving just that tiny bit higher.
“My ex had that issue. He was a good actor.”
“I think we’re all one big mess of insecurity about the world and what image and attractiveness mean. People who pay me can look beyond the fact that they’re paying for sex, and instead they talk about my eyes, or my lips, or my ass.”
The reminder of who and what he was should have been enough for Cam to switch off this dangerous, tantalizing need that coiled inside him. It wasn’t, and Gabriel was still talking, his voice mesmerizing.
“I have this one client, you know, he likes me to push him into the shower, tie his hands behind his back and make him kneel, then order him to tell me what he thinks of me. He says I’m beautiful, that my eyes are the color of coal, that my face is all angles and my lips are pouty. He talks about my nipples and how they need to be sucked and how my belly is flat and it’s that perfection that gets him hard. I look in the mirror and I don’t see what he says about me, though.”
Fuck. Cam was getting harder now, and it had to be obvious. “What do you do then?” The image of being on his knees, his hands tied behind his back, was a thing of beauty. He could imagine kneeling, looking up at the man who was tracing those patterns on his legs, higher and higher.
Looking. No. But at least feeling the bite of rope on his wrists, completely in the dark, the power that would give the other man; hell, the power it would give him. He could bite on his lip, tell Gabriel exactly what he thought of him.
“What do I do when?” Gabriel was close now, his lips right by Cam’s ear, the breath soft on his skin as Gabriel spoke.
“After he’s told you that, what happens next?”
“I turn the water on. He wants to feel that on his skin, which is so soft, impossibly soft.” Gabriel’s hand finally rested over Cam’s cock, and he squeezed the rigid length firmly before slipping a hand up to open his fly. “I order him to suck me, right under the water, and he struggles to breathe. It’s like heaven looking down at him, struggling, his eyes closed, his mouth wrapped around my cock.”
He slipped a hand under material, inside Cam’s shorts, and circled his cock.
“And?” Cam asked, a little breathless.
“He tries to rub off against my leg, but I push him away. He has to come on his own—no hands, just what’s in his head.”
“What are you doing?” Cam asked, a little breathless as Gabriel cleverly twisted his hands around the length of him.
“If you have to ask,” Gabriel said, “I’m doing it wrong.” He closed his teeth around Cam’s lobe, tugged at it, and Cam was torn between hearing Gabriel’s voice and needing that small tug of pain to finish him off.
“Tell me how he comes,” he said, his mind one mess of need.
Gabriel chuckled, gave one last tug at the lobe. “I reach down and I twist my fingers in his hair. He wants me to fuck his mouth—he’s asked me for it before, and I hate being held like that, but he wants me to stop him moving, and then he’s coming so fucking hard. I feel every pulse as his body bucks, and he’s gasping around my cock, and I don’t let him breathe.”
And that was it, game over, Cam was pushed right over the edge into orgasm just by words and fingers alone. Right there in his best suit pants, right over the hand of the hooker he’d hired for the night. He waited for shame, but there was none.
He’d paid for that, and Gabriel had been doing his job.
“What about you?” Cam murmured, his breathing ragged.
“What about me?”
“In the shower, with this guy, do you come in his mouth, on his face?”
The answer was slow in coming, and not before Gabriel had released his hold on Cam’s cock and padded to the bathroom to wash his hands, coming back with a cloth and wiping at Cam as best he could. “I don’t get off unless someone pays me for to get off; that’s extra.”
Something about the way Gabriel phrased that was wrong, just off, and it didn’t sit right.
“You don’t come unless someone pays you to come.”
“That’s right. Time’s up,” Gabriel murmured, and rose from the sofa, leaning over and fussing over Gidget. On the way up, he pressed a gentle kiss to Cam’s lips. “Watch out for your sister Sophie. I don’t like the way she is with Mitchell. And don’t let your family drag you down,” he said.
And then he left.
* * * * *
Gabriel had done something to him.
Not just given him a handjob with added dirty story, which still didn’t fail to get him off whenever he replayed it.
Not just created a fantasy in which Gabriel and he were climbing Mount Everest.
But made sex a frame of reference for Cam in which he’d tasted something with Gabriel that could well become an addiction.
He had money. Gabriel gave handjobs for money. In Cam’s head, that was a match made in heaven.
And really that was all he could think about as he sat in the conference room a full two days after the engagement party. Close family were still in the hotel, and unfortunately that meant his dad was still there, although he was going back up to Chicago that evening.
Cam had tried to avoid the inevitable, but as fast as he was, he couldn’t outrun his dad.
“So we’d like to talk to you about the Royal.”
Cam stayed quiet. He was there with his dad and his idiot brother-in-law Mitchell. What Sophie saw in Mitchell, he didn’t know. The man was seriously shifty, and he wasn’t entirely sure that his sister was actually happy, which Gabriel had also alluded to. Who was he to judge, though? Not like he was in a serious relationship.
Or like he was getting sex, even.
“We’d like to work with you,” Mitchell said, so earnestly that it set Cam’s teeth on edge. “Take some of the load off you; make your life easier.”
“There will come a time when you won’t be able to run this hotel,” Cam’s dad interjected.
“It’s a long time until I’m seventy, Dad,” Cam said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. Okay, so it was a defensive position, but it was also an effective way to hold in his temper.
“Don’t be smart,” Sebastian Stafford snapped. That was what he did when he was being less dad and more hotel owner. Only this wasn’t Sebastian’s place to do with as he wanted, and certainly nothing to do with Mitchell.
“No help needed, thank you,” Cam said, and pushed himself up from the table. “Are we done now?”
“Sebastian?” Mitchell asked, confused. No doubt Sebastian had sold his favorite son-in-law, the normal son he’d never had, the idea that him running this hotel was a shoo-in.
“Sit down, Cameron,” his dad snapped.
“Too busy, Sebastian.” He deliberately didn’t use the word “Dad”, didn’t want to personalize this more than he had to.
“Sit the hell down.”
“I have a meeting—”
“Mitchell, leave us, please,” Sebastian ordered. “And you, Cameron, wait there.”
The door shut, and for a second Cam cursed his lack of sight. He had to assume that Mitchell had left and wasn’t standing in a corner watching. He concentrated hard on the noises and scents in the room, relieved to smell that Mitchell’s expensive and cloying cologne was diminishing.
“You have five minutes,” Cam said.
“Ever since Adam left, we’ve been worried about the future of the Royal, son. For his faults, he worked well at being your support network.”
“Adam who stole from the hotel, and me, and lied to everyone he met? That Adam?”
His dad ignored that. “Still, you’re alone here, and vulnerable to any and all perverted men who want to steal from you—”
“What the hell?”
“That man at the party, who was he?”
“A friend.”
“He was staring at everyone. How well do you know him?”
“I know him very well, and you wouldn’t believe the observations he made to me about what was going on at that party.”
“You mean he was your spy?”
“No, Dad, I didn’t mean that at all.”
“Whatever,” Sebastian continued. “I just feel it would make sense to bring in a co-manager.”
“You mean Mitchell.”
“Yes.”
“No,” Cam said, and that was the end of it. But Sebastian had other ideas.
“I wouldn’t want to involve the legal team in insisting that you have help.”
And there it was. The threat that Cam had been expecting. He wasn’t going to rise to it. The hotel had been left to him by his grandfather, bypassing the great Sebastian Stafford, who had recommended that Cam be cut out of the usual inheritance of a hotel and given cash instead.
No sense in him losing out, give him the money, but a blind man running a hotel, for god’s sake, how will that work?
Oh yeah, he remembered that conversation very well, sitting in the office of the lawyers who’d handled Grandpa Stafford’s estate. Sebastian had talked about him like him being blind meant he couldn’t hear every single word.
He headed for the door, ignored the curse from his dad, and muscled his way past a surprised Mitchell.
“We only want the best for you,” Mitchell called after him.
Jesus, it was hard not to turn around and flatten the moron.
He headed straight for the security office and the reassurance of Six, whom he knew was on his side. Six wasn’t there, but if Cam sat there long enough, he’d be back.
“What’s happened?” Six said from the doorway. “Who do I have to kill?”
Cam smiled at that. “A stubborn idiot and an entitled ass.”
“So basically your dad and your brother-in-law. I can do that. Might be difficult to hide two bodies at the same time, but there’s construction all over the city. It can be done.”
Cam heard a chair move, imagined Six as he’d known him fifteen years before. Tall, strong, he’d been brought in by the family as a personal bodyguard after an attempt at kidnapping one of the Stafford kids had been foiled. Then, when Cam’s eyesight had deteriorated, Six had become Cam’s protector, and then friend. He used to turn chairs and straddle them with his arms on the back, and that was how Cam was picturing him now.
“How much gray do you have in your hair now?” Cam asked.
“Enough so I look devastatingly sexy,” Six snarked back at him.
They laughed together, the stress of Cam’s dad slowly slipping back to where it belonged.
“I need to get on to Charlie and make sure the terms of grandpa’s will are still airtight.”
Charlie had been the family lawyer, but Cam had outbid his dad a long time ago to retain Charlie’s services.
“Shit, Cam, not that again.”
“Yeah. Implication is at some point I’ll want to give up the Royal, that I won’t be able to cope.” He air-quoted the word “cope” and sighed noisily. “He wants Mitchell to co-manage, despite the Royal being the most financially lucrative boutique hotel that the Stafford’s run.”
He rolled his neck and heard the crack, feeling the tension slip a little. This was why he hated family events at his hotel, but given that Chloe had chosen to go to college in Dallas, then fallen in love with Luke at an event at this hotel, it was inevitable that the Dallas Stafford Royal would be the center of celebrations.
“Okay, so we check with Charlie. Nothing has changed since last time we all met up.” Six spoke confidently, but Cam hadn’t been totally honest with his best friend. The small amount of peripheral vision he had was becoming more blurry.
Inevitable degeneration, they said to him. Was that enough for someone to insist he had to leave the Royal?
I couldn’t handle that.
“Can I ask you another question? It’s about Sophie.”
“Your sister Sophie? What about her?”
“Gabriel said something about Mitchell, about how we should look out for Sophie.” Six stayed suspiciously quiet, and dread began to build. “What aren’t you telling me, Six?”
“I don’t like Mitchell with her, I think since they married she’s got quieter, and sometimes…” He trailed away, and Cam grew impatient.
“What? For god’s sake, Six.”
“I think he has a hold on her that I don’t like.”
Cam thought for a moment. “Find out more. I want to know what’s going on.”
“That could be a can of worms you could never put the lid back on.”
“I don’t care, she’s my sister.”
“On it.”
“Also, I need the number for Gabriel.”
“Why?”
“Because I do.” How was that for a snappy comeback?
Six huffed. “What are you, four? Give me your phone.”
Cam passed over his phone and there were some noises—beeps from the phone, soft curses about Gabriel’s parentage from Six, and Cam’s own breathing, which was loud in his ears.
“There, but I’m fucked off with you for wanting it.” That was Six, cutting to the chase with a complete lack of respect. Which meant Cam had to be completely honest right back at him.
“Six, I’m fucked off with myself.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because there’s something there—heat and desire and need and something forbidden.”
Six huffed again. He was doing a lot of that at the moment. “I will label this your hooker stage, and we will never refer to it again after you’re done.”
He meant it for real. Six was very good at compartmentalizing his emotions.
Back in his room, Gidget next to him, his hands buried in her fur, Cam decided that until his dad and Mitchell had gone, he would be taking Gidget with him everywhere. Just so she could bite either of them if needed.
He scrolled to his sister’s number listening for the code for her entry; he just wanted to let her know he was there for her. She didn’t answer.
“This is all shitty,” he said as he scruffed Gidget’s neck. She nosed at his leg and said nothing back to him. Which was a good call, because he had so much inside him that needed to come out.
“The one thing I can’t handle is pity,” he murmured to her, and she butted his leg again. “I’ve had enough pity to last me a lifetime. You know what I need right now? To fuck someone, to be fucked, to replace the shit in my head with sex. Is that wrong?”
This time Gidget laid her head on his leg, and he knew she would drool on his pants.
That was the least of his worries.