Page 41 of Blown

Nally sighed heavily, though Jake didn’t hear the sound. He rolled his eyes, then reached up to grab his bears behind their necks and pull them down so he could talk to both of them over the noise. Jake couldn’t help but grin. For all his elven good looks, Nally had the makings of a man who topped from the bottom.

The bears nodded, phones were pulled out and numbers exchanged, or so Jake assumed, and with a pair of quick, sloppy kisses, complete with a shocking amount of groping, Nally broke away from his dance floor finds and walked with Jake out of the club.

“You owe me for this,” Nally said once they were on the sidewalk, his voice too loud at first as he adjusted to the change in volume. “You really, really owe me for this. I was about to get spectacularly laid. That was going to be my first threesome, my first Nally sandwich.”

“Sorry,” Jake said as they strode quickly along the street to where Nally had parked. “I’d make it up to you by doing the job myself, but I don’t think your bears or Rafe would like that.”

It was supposed to be funny, but Nally glared at him. “What did you do to screw things up with Rafe so badly that he abandoned you in London in the middle of the night?”

It was the question Jake had hoped Nally wouldn’t ask, but he knew he couldn’t avoid it. “I lied to him,” he said, starting with the broadest explanation and hoping Nally wouldn’t ask questions.

“How did you lie to him?” Nally pressed on, immediately dashing his hopes.

“Spectacularly. Epically.”

Jake waited until they were in the car and Nally had navigated out of the garage and onto the congested London streets before explaining the whole thing. He hoped that the logistics of getting from the garage near Cupid’s Arrow to the complicated and inadequate roads that would take them back to Hawthorne House would make Nally forget his question.

He had no such luck.

“Well?” Nally asked a good ten minutes after the original question had gone unanswered. “Why am I driving home with you right now instead of being spit-roasted by two perfectly charming barristers?”

“Those two were barristers?” Jake asked, squirming in his seat.

Nally sent him a brief, flat “don’t change the subject” look before focusing on the road again.

“Okay, okay,” Jake said, then took a deep breath. “When I asked Rafe if he would marry me so I could get a visa to move over here, I promised him something in return.”

“Which was?” Nally asked, arching one eyebrow. For someone who was barely twenty-one, Nally could look uncannily like a middle-aged man sometimes. It had to be the aristocratic blood.

Nally cleared his throat when Jake delayed answering.

“Okay,” Jake said, holding up his hands. “I promised him that I could get him an internship working with Hélène Rénard, the renown French glass artist.”

“I know who Hélène Rénard is,” Nally said.

“Then you know how big a deal it is for someone like Rafe to score an internship with her.”

“Yes,” Nally nodded. “It would be the chance of a lifetime.” He peeked at Jake for a second, then looked forward and asked, “So what went wrong?”

Jake swallowed. “We ran into Hélène outside the hotel across the street from the club.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know her,” Jake said, his body going hot. He suddenly felt like he needed to pee, too, which didn’t help the situation at all.

“What do you mean you don’t know her?” Nally asked. “You promised Rafe an internship in exchange for marriage.”

“And I don’t know her,” Jake repeated. “At all. Which Rafe just found out when Hélène stared at me like I was the paperboy.”

Nally frowned. A moment later, his expression popped with understanding. “You didn’t,” he said breathlessly.

“Yeah. That’s the whole problem. I did.”

Nally clenched his jaw and shook his head. “You lied to my brother to get him to marry you by promising something you never had any intention of delivering on, that you didn’t have any possibility of delivering on, and now he’s not speaking to you.”

“That pretty much sums it up,” Jake sighed.

“Were you ever planning to tell him you’d manipulated him into sticking his neck out for you and risking the wrath of the Home Office for marital fraud?” he asked, his voice rising. “Or were you just going to keep telling him that his goldenopportunity to work with one of the giants of glass art was right around the corner indefinitely?”

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