Page 1 of Blown

ONE

Rafe Hawthorne grippedthe steering wheel of his Skoda with white knuckles, his brow knit in a frown and his jaw clenched as he stared out the windshield at morning traffic on the M25. He couldn’t believe he was doing this. Hereallycouldn’t believe he was doing this. Picking up someone from Heathrow in the middle of the morning rush was an act worthy of sainthood, as far as he was concerned, but welcoming his worst enemy to his home and giving him a place to stay while he hatched some new harebrained scheme to steal focus qualified him for divinity. Or the asylum.

“Come on!” he shouted at the slowing traffic in front of him. He pressed hard on his horn, causing the driver in the car next to him to turn his head and stare with offended, British pride. Honking was a habit he’d picked up in his days in America, and it was one he needed to drop.

He needed to drop it like his misplaced sense of hospitality and his trust in his colleagues in the art world to treat him fairly. He needed to turn his back on Jake.

Jake Mathers had done anythingbuttreat him fairly, and being kind to the man had cost him more than a few chancesfor professional development. They’d both had residencies at the Corning Museum of Glass the year before. Corning was one of the most prestigious places in the world that a glass artist could enjoy a residency. It was the sort of thing that rocketed someone from blowing glass along with all the other production artists and hobbyists to making a name for themselves in the larger world of art.

It was supposed to be Rafe’s step up in the world, but Jake Mathers had come along with his Midwestern charm, his tight arse, and his winning smile and undercut him at every turn. Worse still, Jake was one of the most brilliant glass artists Rafe had ever witnessed.

How dare the wanker be better than him?

“Watch it!” Rafe shouted and honked again as some nob in a BMW cut in front of him just as traffic started to move. He glared straight at the woman’s rearview mirror on the off chance she might look behind her and see his strong disapproval of her driving style.

It was ridiculous, really. He shouldn’t have been in such a mood. Things had been going well since he’d returned to the UK and his family’s ancestral home, Hawthorne House. Part of him wanted to roll his eyes at himself for even having an ancestral home. He wasn’t living in the nineteenth century, even if he was the eldest son of the ninth Earl of Felcourt and probably had some frivolous subsidiary title that should have gone extinct decades ago.

Hawthorne House had been turned into a community arts center at the beginning of the twenty-first century, which was more than could be said for most of the old estates that had once held aristocratic families with their stiff upper lips and closets full of family secrets. Everyone in his wildly eccentric, extended family, for the most part, had gone into the arts and now taughtat the Hawthorne Community Arts Center. He had just started teaching glassblowing again himself.

But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t what he’d wanted. His jaunt to Corning was supposed to gain him recognition in the glass world. He didn’t need to be the next Dale Chihuly or Toots Zynsky, but he wouldn’t have said no to gaining the fame and fortune that those two and others had gained. It was certainly better than making glass goblets and Christmas ornaments for his family’s online gift shop and for the Renaissance Faire held on the grounds of Hawthorne House a few times during the summer.

Jake Mathers was five years younger than him, and he had already had solo shows, not only at Corning, but across Europe and the UK as well. He had bragged about them incessantly throughout their time together.

Rafe clenched his jaw again and let that frustration roll around in him as traffic inched on. Jake’s plane had probably already landed. It would serve him right if he had to wait in Heathrow’s noisy arrivals area until he could be fetched. Rafe imagined Jake standing in the middle of the foot traffic, his outlandishly American good looks being ignored by travelers with business of their own and places to go. That was what Jake needed, a good, honest dose of being ignored for a while.

Rafe had just started to smile at the fantasy when his phone rang. He wouldn’t have answered it, but the number that showed up on his car’s central console was his dad’s. It didn’t matter that he was a grown man well into his thirties, he answered when his dad called.

He tapped the display, then leaned back and said, “Dad,” eyes on the road again.

“Rafe,” his dad answered in his usual cheery voice. “Where are you? It sounds like you’re in the car.”

“That’s because Iamin my car,” he said, gripping the steering wheel as he shifted to the lane marked as the exit for Heathrow. “I’m on my way to pick up a…colleague.” He refused to refer to Jake as a friend.

“Oh! Jake Mathers. I remember now,” his dad said with far too much glee.

Rafe huffed a breath through his nose. “Don’t use that tone with me, Dad.”

“What tone? I don’t have a tone,” his dad said.

“You’re insinuating,” Rafe said. “I go away for one year, and everyone in the family gets relationship fever. I’m not interested in falling prey to your matchmaking machinations. If you want to see someone else in the family settle down with a partner, why don’t you tell Rebecca to move in with the rest of her polycule.”

His dad chuckled. “Who said anything about relationships? Jake is a fellow artist is all. I’m overjoyed to be hosting him at Hawthorne House for as long as he wants to stay here. You can’t stop talking about him or his work, so your mother and I are eager to meet him for ourselves.”

Rafe’s face flushed hot as his dad spoke. He hadn’t been talking about Jakethatmuch, had he? He’d needed to mention him a little, since Jake had more or less invited himself to Hawthorne House so it could serve as his base for the mad immigration scheme he thought he could pull off. And yes, he might have talked to his brothers and sister about Jake’s astounding artistic skill a time or two when the family got together for supper, but he could stop talking about him when he wanted to.

“Jake Mathers is a parasite and a cheat,” he growled, throwing on his blinker and moving into the second exit lane. “I can’t believe I’ve agreed to let him impose on us all this way.”

“Now I really want to meet him,” his dad said. “Anyone who canimposeon my firstborn and heir is someone I want to meet.”

“Dad,” Rafe said in his flattest voice. He didn’t appreciate being made fun of, by his dad or by Jake.

“No, no, I mean it,” his dad went on. “I haven’t seen you so passionate about anyone in ages. Maybe ever.”

“Sod off,” he grumbled, which only made his dad laugh harder. Rudeness was a form of affection in a family as close as the Hawthornes. “Jake is a deceptive, sycophantic, lying bastard.”

“Oh, so youdolike him,” Dad continued to tease.

Rafe huffed and made a turn at the end of the ramp that would take him to the Arrivals parking garage. “Does this call have a point?” he asked. “I’ve just reached Heathrow, and I need to concentrate now.”

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