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  “What’s that?”

  Okay, so he wasn’t so perfect. But with those blue eyes and that gorgeous bubble-butt, who needed good taste? He only had to taste good.

  “It’s wine,” he said.

  Bobby shrugged and braced his elbows on the bar. “I’m more of a Bud man, myself.”

  Chris caught the eye of Ramsey, the bartender, and nodded. Ramsey grabbed the Cîroc off the top shelf and assembled Chris’s usual Cîroc martini.

  Bobby pressed his well-packed groin against Chris’s hip. He plucked at Chris’s waistband, and Chris couldn’t help but wonder what made Mr. Perfect so desperate.

  Ramsey dropped a Bud beside Chris’s martini and scooped up his twenty. The press of bodies at the bar made movement nearly impossible. Thundering techno music kept conversation sparse. That suited Chris. He had the feeling if Bobby opened his mouth for talking, anything that emerged would only lessen the illusion of perfection.

  Bobby worked one hand down the front of Chris’s jeans. “You like to live dangerously?” He nipped Chris’s ear, tugging his single diamond stud. “Let’s take this someplace more private. I got beer at home.”

  Chris thought of renewing the invitation to his place, then realized that taking Bobby home might sully the illusion further. He grinned easily. “Who’s driving?”

  “You are.” Bobby grabbed his balls. “At least until we get to my place.”

  Saturday, 1:50 am, Bluebird Motel,

  Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood

  The hot spray washed the last of Bobby’s fluids down the motel drain. The heat helped wake him, but all Chris wanted to do was go home and crawl into his own bed. As happened all too often lately, the production never lived up to its advanced billing. Bobby was a major disappointment in the sack despite his brag about the porn he shot on a regular basis. Rather than argue, he had let Bobby press a couple of cheaply produced DVDs into his hand.

  “Watch them later and think of me,” Bobby murmured before diving down to work through another frenzy of feigned lust.

  Chris stepped out of the shower onto the worn-out bath mat amid a cloud of steam just as his BlackBerry trilled. He dragged it out of the pocket of his jeans and flipped it on. Without checking caller ID he knew who it was.

  “Tell me you’re not busy,” his boss said.

  “Petey?” As always, using the hated name gave Chris a few seconds of silence to gather his thoughts. “Did I miss it?”

  “Bellamere—” Petey stalled again. “Miss what?”

  “Hell freezing over. That’s the only time you ever call, isn’t it?”

  Given Petey’s attitude, Chris always made sure his work was unimpeachable, and Petey was never able to forgive him for that.

  “We’ve got major trouble at Pharmaden.” Petey’s voice rose, losing his normal MBA-trained cool. “That new server you put in has been down half the night. Their techs can’t do anything with it.”

  “The server I put in?” Chris did some quick calculation—the first phone call couldn’t have been more than three hours ago. Half the night indeed. He dragged a towel around his narrow hips, struggling to escape the lingering effects of one too many Martinis, too much Bobby, and too little sleep. He scrubbed his face with a second towel, then used his fingers to work his short blond hair into damp spikes. “Which server would that be?”

  “The one you signed off on,” Petey said. “Pharmaden is holding us responsible—”

  “I signed off on your orders.” Chris couldn’t resist digging at the man. “I told you not to roll those servers out without more load testing. But you had to let Golden Boy call the shots, didn’t you? The guy wants my job and you’re all set to give it to him—”

  “Now hold on just a minute, Tom’s a good worker—”

  Yeah, right. “Then call him in to fix things.”

  “Are you refusing to go?”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  Petey coughed and cleared his throat. “Tom’s only been with us eight months. Cut him some slack.”

  “Why? Wasn’t he the genius you got from Berkeley? The ink on his degree was still wet when you put him in charge of Pharmaden. Now you’re claiming he’s inexperienced?”

  “If you two had worked as a team from the start—”

  “He’d still have screwed up.” Chris furiously rubbed the towel over his already dry chest. Petey had a lot of gall denigrating his skill after all these years. “I’m not even on call this week. In fact I’m supposed to meet with Ortez later today. You remember that studio rep who wants us to handle their payroll servers?”

  “And I want you at Pharmaden. You’ll be done in plenty of time to meet with Ortez.”

  A dull headache pulsed behind Chris’s eyes. “Then I’ll be there.” He hung up.

  “Asshole.”

  It was already after five-thirty by the time he climbed the single stone step to the two-story Art Deco Silver Lake house his grandmother had left him at her death five years ago. Hurried or not, he dressed with care, knowing it could be hours before he got home again.

  On the Hollywood Freeway, early-morning heat spilled into his Lexus SUV. He dodged a slow-moving produce truck and picked up speed as the lanes ahead of him cleared. On his right, downtown L.A. was dominated by the phallic seventy-three-story First Interstate World Center, which glowed pink in the advancing daylight. Already the days smog was building, softening the outlines of distant buildings and hills behind a brown mist.

  He pulled into Pharmaden’s parking lot just as the sun cleared the row of ragged palms that lined the cracked asphalt lot.

  Pharmaden’s front door opened and a figure stepped out. Chris trotted up the shallow steps to greet him. His steps faltered as the man stepped into the light.

  Tom Clarke, a.k.a. Golden Boy, folded his arms over his chest. His hair looked damp, like he had just stepped out of a shower.

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  CHAPTER 3

  Saturday, 6:55 am, Lansdowne Street, East Los Angeles TOM BLOCKED THE steps. His full lips curled in a half-smile that would have been sexy as hell if Chris had felt an ounce of attraction to the guy. He didn’t.

  “Petey sent you?” Chris asked.

  “He says we lose this account, we’re screwed.” Tom swung the heavy glass door open. A thatch of heavy blond hair fell over his face, momentarily covering his eyes. “We can’t let this go down the toilet.”

  Fine words from the man who had put them there in the first place.

  Chris pulled the door shut behind them. Their footsteps echoed through the empty building. They headed for the stairs that led to the basement. All six of Pharmaden’s sixty-four-bit UNIX servers resided down there in the temperature-controlled server closet.

  “You get a chance to talk to anybody?” Chris asked.

  “The head tech, DePalma. They’ve rebooted the server a half dozen times. It won’t come up.”

  From the other end of the hallway a thin black man appeared. He sported a lush growth of salt-and-pepper hair covering both his head and most of his face. Phil DePalma, Pharmaden’s senior technical analyst, glanced at Tom before holding his hand out to Chris, who shook it vigorously.

  “Glad you could stop by.” DePalma grinned. “What kept you?”

  “Life.” Chris smiled in return. “You met Tom Clarke?” he asked, knowing the two had to be well acquainted. He wasn’t surprised when DePalma blinked three times in rapid succession. Tom had that effect on people.

  DePalma opened the door with an electronic ID card. They entered the cool, well-lit data center and crossed toward the wall of rack-mounted servers.

  “Quickest solution is restore from backup,” Chris said.

  DePalma nodded. “But we’d lose today’s transactions, wouldn’t we?”

  Chris nodded. “They’d roll back. You’d have to input them again.” Chris pointed at two yellow blinking lights. “When did this start?”

  “Last night around ten,” DePalma said.

  C
hris restarted the server, this time with a diagnostic disk in place. Keeping his eyes fixed on the screen he watched it go through its boot-up process. Yellow lights flashed green briefly before flaring yellow again.

  “Diagnostics say there’s nothing wrong with the hardware,” Chris said. He pointed at the yellow lights. “That says otherwise.”

  “So which is it?”

  Chris glanced at Tom and decided to see if the guy had a clue. “What do you think?”

  “If it’s not hardware then what is it?” Tom asked.

  “Bad parity.”

  “Parity?”

  “The server will have to be rebuilt.” Chris pulled a disk out of his CD case. “There’s no way to recover the most recent data, I’m afraid.”

  DePalma sighed. “How long are we looking at?”

  “Couple of hours at least.”

  DePalma swore, then nodded.

  It took just over three hours to rebuild the server and restore the available data from backup. Another hour was spent verifying the restored data. Back outside, the empty parking lot sizzled like the African savanna. In the distance a siren wailed. His gold-tinted SUV threw the sun back at him. His head ached, his legs felt weak, and he desperately needed a shower. Why hadn’t he parked in the shade?

  He cranked the air conditioner on and was about to throw the SUV into gear when Tom appeared beside the driver’s door. Reluctantly Chris powered his window down.

  Hot air rolled into the cab. “Yeah?”

  “Can I catch a lift?”

  “Sure.” Chris stared at the man as he crossed around to the passenger side and slid in.

  “How’d you get here if you didn’t drive?”

  “Cab.”

  “Car in the shop?”

  Tom looked away. “Don’t have one.”

  Chris had heard about people like that. He’d never actually met one. He threw the SUV into gear and wheeled out of the parking lot.

  “Where you going?”

  “Drop me at L’Orangerie. I’m meeting my uncle for lunch.”

  “You can eat at L’Orangerie but you can’t afford a car?” Before he could answer, Chris shot a glance at his watch and swore.

  He was late. Des was going to kill him.

  Chris braked hard at the next set of lights. Plastic rustled and snapped and he glanced over in time to see Tom staring down at the cheaply produced cover of one of the DVDs Bobby had given him. It had slipped out its bag. Even from where he sat, Chris could see the enormous erection halfway down Bobby’s perfect throat.

  Tom’s face was stoplight red.

  Chris almost felt sorry for him.

  He left Tom in front of the stone door of the venerable eatery on La Cienega Boulevard, and sped east to his place in Silver Lake. Thirty minutes later he pulled into his driveway. He groaned as three figures stepped out of the shaded courtyard.

  “Don’t tell me you forgot lunch?” His best friend, Desmond Hayward, pulled the driver’s-side door open.

  He smiled weakly before focusing on the tallest man in the group, Trevor Watson.

  “Hey, Trev,” he said, wondering if he’d blown things big-time. Wondering how much he cared. Trevor wasn’t normally his type. Chris wasn’t big on blond, blue-eyed pretty boys; he preferred his men dark and lithe. But Des had been persistent in setting the two of them up. “Sorry I’m late. How long were you waiting?”

  “Longer than you deserve,” Kyle Paige said. He sniffed at Des. “I told you we should have left an hour ago.”

  Des put a hand on his lover’s arm. “Now, hon, don’t be such a stress puppy. We haven’t been here anywhere near that long. Barely forty-five minutes. I’m sure Chris has a good reason.” Des glared at Chris. “And please tell me it wasn’t work.”

  “Okay, I won’t.” Chris slammed the SUV’s door. “But it’s going to make my explanation a tad on the short side.”

  He caught Trevor studying his SUV, but before he could say anything Des cut in. “Oh, don’t let the wheels fool you, sugar. It’s the butchest thing about him.”

  Chris threw him a look, but Des only smiled before he said, “We had reservations at the Blue Cactus.”

  “I know, and it took you weeks to get them.” Chris led the way into his blessedly cool house, the others followed. “What can I say? I’m sorry.”

  “Say you’ll take a shower. You are ripe, boyfriend.”

  “Give me five minutes. I’m sure we can find someone who will take our money.”

  Chris paused at the foot of stairs. “Maybe even someone with decent food. Hey, how about Crazy Fish?”

  “South of Wilshire? Please,” Des said. “No one who’s anyone eats south of Wilshire.”

  “Right, just what was I thinking.” Chris rolled his eyes and caught Trevor’s grin.

  Damn, he was a hot-looking guy, all coiled muscle and lazy, dangerous eyes. Maybe this could turn into something after all. Chris felt a lot better all of a sudden. He bounded up the stairs, calling over his shoulder. “Be back in five.”

  They ended up at Spago, one of Kyle’s favorites. At least they deferred to Chris in their choice of wine, though he had a spirited argument with Trevor over the Australian zinfandel he ordered. Chris was surprised. Most of Des’s acquaintances didn’t know Chardonnay from shiraz.

  Trevor played kneesies with him under the table and regaled them all with stories about the up-and-coming actors who plied their trade for the low-rent production company he worked for. Chris was sorry when lunch ended. Especially when he wound up with the bill.

  “Paybacks are a bitch,” Des said and patted Chris’s smooth cheek. Then he leaned forward to brush his lips across Chris’s mouth. “Why don’t you invite Trevor home,” he murmured. “He’d be good for you.”

  Des the matchmaker. Chris smiled his regret, wishing he hadn’t agreed with Petey’s request to meet with the studio exec. For one brief instance he considered canceling the meeting, then common sense overrode his lust. “Can’t, I’ve got to work.”

  “All work and no play makes Chrissy a dull boy. You need to get out more.”

  Chris thought of Bobby from the night before. But he knew what Des would say about that. He hated it when Chris picked up strangers in bars. “You deserve better,” he always said. Chris never bothered telling him he didn’t agree.

  Chris looked regretfully at Trevor. “Maybe we can do it again sometime.”

  Trevor frowned. “Sure, I guess.”

  After meeting with Ortez and making what he thought was a persuasive argument for having DataTEK take care of the studio’s data, Chris found himself really regretting the brush-off he’d given Trevor. Maybe he should have gotten the guy’s number. He wondered if Des knew it, then decided he didn’t feel like hearing his friend’s I-told-you-so’s.

  Maybe a drink would tame his regrets.

  The Nosh Pit on a Saturday night was busy. He got his regular Cîroc martini from Ramsey, then grabbed a place at the end of the bar where he could watch the action.

  There was lots of the usual trashy eye-candy spilling off the tiny dance floor and crowding the tables. The music was bone-jarring techno glitz, making even the simplest conversation difficult. Chris got his share of attention and before long was sharing some close space on the dance floor with a twenty-something music producer slumming it from West L.A. He had almost let the producer talk him into taking it to the backroom when someone bumped into them hard enough to break their embrace.

  “Hey—” Chris protested, then froze when he found himself face to face with Trevor.

  “Oh, hey, man...”

  “Work, huh?”

  Chris flushed. “Well I was working, but...I meant to get your number earlier...”

  Trevor eyed Chris’s glassy-eyed companion, who was still swaying to the music. “I can see that.”

  “Listen,” Chris said. “I was just heading out, why don’t you come back to my place for a drink...”

  “Can’t.” Trevor showed his teeth. “You’re not t
he only one has to work.”

  Before Chris could react, Trevor slipped through the crowd and was gone.

  Chris swore, then tried to walk past the producer. The younger man grabbed him.

  “Com’n man, I wanna fuck.” Chris stared toward the exit, hoping to catch sight of Trevor. No luck. He looked at the dark-haired, sloe-eyed bombshell trying to hump his leg.

  “Not tonight.” He disentangled himself and made his way back to the bar.

  “Ah, Silver Lake’s own Lothario.” Ramsey grinned at him. “You’re blowing hot and cold tonight.”

  “Just give me another drink and keep it to yourself.”

  “Well don’t I know who’s sleeping alone tonight.” Still grinning, Ramsey pulled the Cîroc off the top shelf and mixed Chris’s drink. “What happened to the cutie you were with last night?”

  “That was last night,” Chris muttered and buried his nose in the glass Ramsey handed him. The sharp odor of top-shelf vodka tickled his sinuses.

  He finished the drink and decided against another one. Tossing a ten on the bar, he wove through the press of warm bodies and made his way back out to Hyperion Avenue.

  His SUV was parked less than a block away, in an alley off De Longpre Street. He approached a crowd gathered at the mouth of the alley and hoped he wasn’t interrupting anything violent. He watched the all-male crowd warily, until he recognized a guy who went to the Pit occasionally. When he tried to catch his eye the guy turned away, shuffling through the tension-filled crowd away from Chris.

  A low mutter of excited voices rose and drifted over the whisper of traffic on Hyperion. A high-pitched voice giggled and cried, “My God, do you think it’s true?”

  “Get a grip, Michael. Would the guy advertise?”

  “That’s sick,” Michael—at least Chris assumed it was Michael—said.

  He rounded the corner, and it took him a full thirty seconds to realize that the source of the attention was his Lexus. It was another five seconds before he saw what the words spray-painted in red on his vehicle actually said.

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  CHAPTER 4