Room at the Top (34 page)

“Look, I’m sorry, okay? Is that what you want?”

What he wanted was for her to leave him alone, but he wasn’t quite mad enough to say that. “I want you to grow up,” he said instead.

“What, just because I need to borrow a little money, it means I’m not grown up?” April looked at him pleadingly, and he found himself softening. “I appreciate your friend bailing me out, you know?”

“You should. Otherwise you’d be in deep trouble with Mom right now.”

“You’re my big brother,” April said. “I knew you’d help me.”

He sighed. “I can’t give you two hundred,” he said. “No way. But I can swing fifty bucks, if that will help. As long as you promise you won’t use it for drugs or anything.”

“Are you serious? Do I look like someone who’s on drugs?” Right then, scrubbed clean, she didn’t.

“It’s not about whether someone has a certain look,” Austin told her. “Just tell me. And don’t lie to me.”

April glanced away. “It’s not for drugs. I just…I have kind of a big credit card bill this month.”

“You shouldn’t have a credit card at all, if you’re going to run the bill up.” He should probably just be glad that she hadn’t asked their mother for the money.

“I need stuff, okay?”

“What
kind
of stuff?” God, she made him feel so old and responsible. He’d always had to be. No adolescent rebellion for him. Hell, he’d never even slammed a door at home after yelling that he hated his family and wished they were dead. Wasn’t that a rite of passage or something? Maybe April was rebelling for both of them.

Her gaze fell. “I went shopping with Christy and Brittany at Crestview Mall. They have so much money, and they were buying everything they wanted. When I said I couldn’t afford stuff, they just laughed at me, and I hate that, okay? I hate being the poor one!”

Crestview? Ouch. Unlike the local malls that contained the usual midrange chain stores, Crestview, an hour’s drive away, was packed with luxury stores. To be fair to April, she’d done a good job of developing a style of her own that—extreme though it was sometimes—wasn’t too expensive to maintain. Faced with the glitter of Crestview with those two empty-headed girls egging her on, though…

“Can you return any of it?”

Her eyes widened in what looked like genuine bewilderment at his suggestion. “What? No way!”

“You don’t hang around with those two much. They’d never know. If there’s anything you haven’t used, anything that still has the tags on…” He sighed, reading the answer in her face. “Too late, huh?”

“
Way
too late.” She gave him a hopeful smile. “So you’ll help me out? If I don’t pay it, I’ll get hit with a load of interest charges. And that just means you’d have more to pay off, so it makes sense to pay it now.”

Austin shook his head. April’s version of logic made his head ache. “I can’t do this, April. I can’t keep bailing you out. Stop using your card, pay it off as fast as you can, and think about getting a job maybe.”

“It’s not as easy as that!”

“Yeah, it is, if you just open your eyes and realize that you’re leeching off your family and making things harder for everyone.”

“You’re so fucking mean.”

“Honest,” he corrected her. “And it’s time someone was, because you’re just—you’re spoiled. Maybe that’s our fault, but it’s got to stop, April. You can’t keep
doing
this.”

Frustration made his voice get louder; anger at her, at himself, made it shake. He was saying the same things over and over, and none of it was sinking in, he could tell.

“Austin?” Sue tapped on the open door and put her head around it. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah.” He turned his back on April. “She’s leaving now.”

And he’d watch her leave to make sure she didn’t steal anything. His own sister and he didn’t trust her. God, how had they gotten to this?

He wanted to go home and hug Jay, wanted the evening to come and bring with it Liam’s phone call. Instead he walked a sullen, tight-lipped April to the door and locked it behind her, then went back to work.

Sometimes being a responsible adult sucked.

Chapter Twenty

Liam hung up the thick, soft, white—and now damp—towel on the back of the bathroom door and glanced in the mirror despite himself. He hated hotel bathrooms, with their bright, unforgiving lighting and unavoidable reflective surfaces that reminded him that he was getting older by the minute. He had wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and his hair was just a bit thinner than it had been last year.

With a sigh, he turned off the light switch and went back to the bed, which was a much more comfortable place to sit than the padded chair at the desk. The afternoon and evening had been a long-drawn-out affair at the party his ex-wife, Barbara, had thrown to celebrate Alison’s graduation. He’d felt so awkward, standing around with a drink in his hand as people who had once been his family, if only by marriage, gave his daughter gifts. Many of Alison’s friends had come to the party as well, cheering when she cut the first slice of cake and taking photos of each other constantly with their cell phones.

Now Liam was relieved to be back in his hotel room. He’d planned to order room service but had eaten far too much at the party and at that moment couldn’t imagine ever being hungry again. He had promised to call Jay and Austin, just to check in—he knew Austin in particular had been dreading their separation, and Liam wanted to do what he could to alleviate the younger man’s stress.

As he reached for his cell phone, he caught sight of the glossy advertisement for cable television sitting beside the lamp and noted that a movie he’d missed in the theater was now available. He clicked the TV on and then had to reach hastily for the remote again to turn the volume down.

He watched the first twenty minutes and realized that his thoughts kept drifting to Austin and Jay. The night before, at the family dinner Barbara had hosted, when eight o’clock had rolled around, if he could’ve wished himself back home ready to open the door, he would have. He’d made polite conversation, a smile pasted on his face, laughing at the right moments, playing the role of proud father and civilized ex-husband.

And his mind had been filled with images—not the anonymous fantasies that he’d used to console him in the barren years of his marriage, featuring faceless subs, kneeling, begging, hurting, but clear, detailed memories of Austin and Jay, naked, obedient, his.

He’d excused himself and gone into the beautifully kept garden, the air sweet with the scent of roses. Closed his hand carefully around the stem of one, the flower a tightly furled bud but the thorns sharp. He’d let the triangular point of the thorns dig into his palm, not gripping tightly enough to break the skin, and given himself up to a fantasy of whipping Jay with a bunch of rose stems, the thorns leaving his olive skin beaded with blood from his shoulders to his thighs. Jay would scream for him, his body locked in ecstasy, his cock as darkly red as the petals strewn on the bed. Liam had pictured Jay’s cock, a thorny stem wound around it, Austin’s tongue lapping at the head, making Jay harden even more so that the thorns dug in deeper, and he’d groaned, his breath coming in harsh gasps.

He’d had to stay out there for ten minutes before his erection had subsided sufficiently for him to return to the house.

With an impatient stab of his finger, he muted the movie and reached for his phone. He’d worked himself up again, his cock insistently demanding that he do something about the state it was in. The idea of jerking off when he was talking to his subs was looking more appealing by the moment. It wasn’t as if either of them would mind. Hell, they’d love it and so would he. Not that he’d let them come when he did, of course. Maybe at midnight. He’d enjoy picturing them both suffering for a few hours.

As his hand closed around his phone, it rang, startling him. He glanced at the call display but didn’t recognize the number.

“Thornton.”

“
Hi
, suit. Guess who?”

“I don’t need to guess, do I. April, isn’t it?” Liam was fortunate enough to have an excellent memory for some things, even in cases like this when he rather wished he could have forgotten. The little he knew about Austin’s sister told him she wouldn’t be calling about Austin’s health. “Was there something you needed? In addition to the gift of six hundred dollars, of course.”

“Yeah, I figure you owe my family that much at least.” Liam could imagine April’s sneer. “Since I’m pretty sure you’re not paying my brother for whatever sick stuff you’re getting up to with him and his boyfriend.”

Liam found himself frowning even though there was no one there to appreciate the expression. “Was that an answer to my question?”

“I don’t owe you any answers, asshole,” April snapped. Then, clearly directed at someone else, “Excuse me, I’m sitting in this car! Find somewhere else to make out!”

“Amusing as this conversation is, it sounds as if you have other things to attend to,” Liam said. He actually had no intention of hanging up first—for one thing, he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, and secondly there was part of him that found her entertaining, in a twisted sort of way.

“Lame party,” April muttered. Her voice was slurred just enough to make her words blend together. Liam hoped that if she was sitting in a car, it wasn’t one she intended to drive later. “I wanna know who you are. I don’t like you.”

Liam grinned. “I’m deeply hurt.”

“If you do something to my brother, you will be.” The threat in April’s voice didn’t scare Liam in the slightest. In fact, he was pleased to see that she was concerned about Austin. That, at least, was common ground between them. “I mean it.”

“I have no intention of hurting Austin or Jay in any way.” If April knew what he did to her brother on a regular basis, she wouldn’t agree with that, but it was the truth.

“Don’t give a fuck about the hobbit, but you’d better not mess with my brother.”

“I won’t,” Liam assured her. Hobbit? Jay was actually more like an elf. God, he’d soaked up more of those movies than he’d realized. “Is that all?”

“What? No!” April made an exasperated sound. “God, why won’t anyone tell me who you
are
? It’s not normal, an old man like you hanging around with them. It’s sick.
You’re
sick. Do your kids know about you? Is that why your wife left?”

All amusement left him. Refusing to acknowledge her accusation or answer her speculations, he said, “I’m about fifteen years older than them, yes, but they’re adults. They can choose their own friends.”

“Is that all you are? A friend?”

No, I’m their dom. I tie them up, spank them, leave their skin bruised and tender so they have to sleep on their stomachs, and the things I want to do to them beyond that… You have no idea, but they do, and I can’t wait and neither can they.

“That’s right. Just a friend. Is that concept really so hard to grasp? Don’t you have any friends?”

Privately he doubted it. People she hung around with, maybe, but no one as bitter and selfish as April would attract real friends.

“It doesn’t make any sense. It’s pathetic. Do you want to pretend you’re young or something? Do you go clubbing with them, trying to look cool?”

“God, no,” Liam said involuntarily. “I can’t think of anything I’d hate more.”

“So it’s all about the sex, then.” April didn’t sound drunk now, just viciously triumphant as if he’d fallen into a trap she’d dug. “They said you were straight, but you’re not, are you? Just in denial and too cheap to pay for it. Do you give them little presents for being your good boys? Do you like watching them fuck? What gets sickos like you off, suit?”

“Certainly nothing I care to discuss with an immature child like you,” Liam said. He reminded himself to stay calm. Once he lost his cool, this would go from being a minor amusement to something else entirely. “Perhaps you should leave adult topics to adults. Like your brother. He’s more than capable of making his own decisions.”

“I don’t care how capable he is.” In the background, behind April, Liam could hear raucous laughter. “I care about you using him.”

“Ah, but that would be the pot calling the kettle black,” Liam pointed out.

“Huh?”

“You’re the one who uses Austin.” Liam was an expert at remaining patient under difficult circumstances. “How did you get this number, by the way? I take it you didn’t steal his phone, or I’d have recognized his number when you called.”

He could almost see the shrug that preceded her words. “Lifted it off his phone when I paid him a visit at work. He really needs to be more careful with his possessions, you know?”

It sounded as if she was echoing something Austin or another adult had said to her in the past.

“That was very enterprising of you.” He didn’t bother hiding his distaste. “I think it’s time we ended this, don’t you? You’ve expressed your concerns, and I’ve answered them.”

“What do they get out of it? That’s what I don’t get. You, yeah, you get two hot guys to play with, and I bet that’s a fucking rush for you because there’s no way they’re lining up to jump between the sheets with you. Not unless you pay them. You’re
old
.”

She made it sound like the worst of perversions. Liam admitted that his vanity was stung. His fortieth birthday was coming up, after all, and yes, compared to Austin and Jay, he
was
old.

Younger than Patrick, though.

“Or maybe that’s it. Austin misses his daddy, and he’s using you as a stand-in?”

“I’d have to be a few years older for that to work.” Not that the thought hadn’t sometimes crossed his mind. Doms didn’t need to be older than their subs. When he’d first become involved in the scene, he’d met more than one pairing with a dom considerably younger than his or her sub. It was all in the attitude. Jay and Austin seemed to prefer submitting to an older man, though, and Liam wasn’t going to complain about that.

He didn’t feel comfortable with the idea that either of them saw him as a father figure, though.

“What they get or don’t get is none of your business.”

“I could report you.”

Liam sighed, putting every ounce of boredom that he could into it. “Good luck with that. You’d get nowhere, and you’d put Austin into a very difficult position. You claim to have his best interests at heart, so prove it by letting him live his life his way.”