Chapter Fourteen

BLAKE paced the living room of his apartment, still too wound up to settle. Thane had asked him out. Thane Dalton had asked him out.

And he’d turned him down.

Oh, he hadn’t had a choice. He couldn’t go out with Thane. But that didn’t stop him from feeling like the biggest idiot in town. He could have played dumb and treated it as an invitation from a friend, but that would only have prolonged the inevitable and made things harder later. The tone of Thane’s voice hadn’t been friendly. It had been downright seductive. Blake might have appreciated the time to get to know him, but when dinner was over—if not the first date, then soon—Thane would expect a kiss, maybe even more.

Blake had no doubt he’d enjoy it. He’d enjoy any way Thane chose to touch him, but it couldn’t last, no matter how much Blake might fantasize. Thane had nephews to think about and a business to run, and Blake… Blake had his job and all the constraints that went along with it. If Thane weren’t the guardian of students Blake was responsible for, if he had no association with the school and wanted something lasting, Blake might have considered it, but Blake had no illusions. Thane’s attitude toward him had started changing after Thane saw him at the club, decked out to attract attention. It had worked, obviously—he allowed himself a momentary thrill at the thought of Thane finding him attractive enough to pursue, however temporarily—but that was hardly the basis for a lasting relationship. Lots of men found him attractive enough to pursue at the club. None of them yet had wanted more than that.

“Self-pity is unbecoming,” he muttered. “You didn’t want most of them either.”

He wanted Thane, though, and not just because he was exactly Blake’s type. Lots of men pushed his buttons on a physical level, but he needed more than that to sustain his interest. He needed a man with a heart as strong as his body. If anyone had asked him a month ago if Thane would fit his criteria, he’d have laughed. Then he’d watched Thane swoop into his office, an avenging angel set on protecting his nephews no matter what. He’d watched Thane take time off work to be involved in their lives—granted, some of that was probably to make sure Blake didn’t make things worse, but he’d still done it—and he’d watched Kit and Phillip bloom under the attention. They bore no resemblance now to the sullen teens who sat in his office a month ago, in trouble yet again and refusing to tell him what had happened. Sure, he caught glimpses of lingering grief when one of the other kids mentioned their parents, mothers especially, but then Thane would be there with a comment or a joke and the grief would disappear in the face of Thane’s presence.

It would be so easy to fall in love with him for that alone, but Blake couldn’t allow himself to go there. He’d end up with a broken heart, and that wouldn’t help anyone. It probably didn’t matter now anyway. He’d turned Thane down, and Blake knew him well enough to know that would have pricked his pride. Thane wouldn’t waste any more time on him.

If only that didn’t hurt quite so much.

THANE sat at the kitchen table, beer in hand, as he mulled over his conversation with Blake. He’d rushed it. He should have known Blake would be skittish. They’d only known each other for a month, and Thane had spent half of that antagonizing Blake left and right.

Things had gotten a little better in the past couple of weeks as he’d come to see that there was more to Blake than Thane had first thought. Seeing him at the club had been an eye-opener, but maybe not for Blake. Seeing him with the stage crew kids had been even more of a revelation once he realized why Blake did things the way he did. Seeing him stand up for Kit and Phillip had turned every preconception on its ear. He’d made the mistake of assuming Blake was just like the principals who had made his own life such hell in high school, but he wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Blake had said something about high school. Thane frowned. He’d assumed—damn, he’d done a lot of that where Blake was concerned—that their meeting in the principal’s office was their introduction to one another, but Blake’s comment made it sound otherwise. Had Blake been at Tates Creek while Thane was there? Surely he would have said something sooner if they’d known each other. Surely Thane would have remembered if they’d known each other. Even if Blake had changed over the years, Thane hadn’t been blind in high school. He would have noticed Blake. Wouldn’t he have?

He had a yearbook around here somewhere. Not that it would change anything, but at least he’d know. He set the beer down and went in search of the box where he kept his high school mementos. He didn’t have many, not having been involved in sports or other organizations that gave out trophies or awards, but he’d kept things from prom and graduation and a few other events along with photos, mostly of him and Derek mugging for the camera. He found the box at the back of the attic, buried beneath rarely used Christmas decorations—that would have to change now that he had the boys—and a pile of moth-eaten blankets. Maybe he ought to think about cleaning out the attic at some point.

It was too cold to sort through the box in the attic, so he carried it back down to the living room. He dug around until he found his senior yearbook. He didn’t think Blake was older than he was, so his best chance of finding him would be that one. He flipped open to his class first, although he really didn’t think they’d graduated the same year. He had known the majority of his classmates in passing at least. He found the Bs, but Blake wasn’t there. That made him feel a little better. He could be excused for not knowing all the students in the years behind him. Tates Creek wasn’t a huge school—about 1500 students on average—but that was enough to make it hard to know everyone.

He checked the junior class next, but Blake wasn’t in that set of photos either, nor was he in the sophomores. When Thane flipped to the freshmen, he found a very young Blake Barnes smiling off the page at him. He studied the picture, trying to match the face in front of him with his memories. Blake hadn’t changed all that much since high school. The inevitable teenage acne had cleared, but he still had the same curls on the top of his head and the same quiet smile.

He recognized the photo as being a younger version of the man he now knew, but he couldn’t summon memories of Blake as he’d been then. Not terribly surprising given the age gap. He’d had a few classes, mostly electives, with students in different grades than him, but none of his classes as a senior had included freshmen. A few sophomores, but no freshmen. If Blake remembered him, it was from the halls or the cafeteria.

They wouldn’t have had any reason to be friends back then, and Thane had only started to accept his bisexuality. He hadn’t acted on it until later, so at the most he would have pretended not to notice Blake anyway because he wasn’t ready to do anything beyond look. Not to mention that he’d been shallow enough in those days that he wouldn’t have seen past the acne and the conservative sweater to the boy underneath. He’d like to say he’d outgrown that unfortunate tendency, but his initial reaction to Blake made a lie out of that assertion.

That was in the past. He’d seen inside Blake now, and he liked what he saw. Now he just had to convince Blake to give him a chance for real.

He closed the yearbook and leaned back in the recliner. He needed a plan. Just asking Blake out hadn’t gotten him anywhere, so it would clearly take more than a simple invitation. He’d given Blake a bad first impression of him, with the way he’d barged into the office, cursing up a storm. He didn’t regret it—he would never apologize for standing up for Kit and Phillip—but he could have been more diplomatic about it. Then again, he hadn’t ever imagined Blake’s opinion of him would matter, so he hadn’t given any thought to how he came across. He’d wanted to scare Blake into cooperating. That had backfired on him, for sure.

The first task, then, had to be to change that impression of him, and the best way to do that was to spend as much time with him as possible while being himself as honestly as possible. He couldn’t make Blake like him, but he could show Blake the rest of who he was, not just the overprotective uncle with a potty mouth.

He could also make it clear that he wasn’t going away easily. Blake’s comment hadn’t just been about high school. He’d specifically said he’d have accepted the invitation if Thane had asked in high school. That implied a certain level of attraction. Thane could work with that. He might not pay a lot of attention to his appearance most of the time—nobody at the jobsites cared how he looked—but he got appreciative looks when he put any effort into it. He’d have to be subtle about it. He could hardly show up to work with the stage crew dressed to impress, but he could fan Blake’s attraction while he figured out the rest of his reasons for saying no.

It might take a while, but they had time. He wasn’t a particularly patient man, but some things were worth doing right, and Blake was definitely worth the effort.