His agent, a friend of Glen’s from his military days, had been absolutely adamant that this kid be found. “Look—I don’t care about the money—”
“Ha!”
“No, seriously, Echo. This kid trusted me, I put him on a stage, and I protected him. He dragged his bestie along as part of his entourage, and I guess she got into the drug scene pretty hard. I know he’s got party boy written all over his résumé, but I’m thinking something else was going on when he specified he was going to be gone for—and I quote—thirty-five days max.”
Four more conversations like that with Clive Royer, and Glen could practically believe the kid was a saint.
But it didn’t matter if he wasn’t. Glen had given his word.
Finally—finally—frustrated and horny and pissed off at the world, Glen had ridden his motorcycle from Agujero en la Roca to Las Varas and walked into the nearest bar for nothing more than a beer.
A beer. Goddammit, that’s all he wanted.
And there, in a corner playing poker, was the kid whose picture he’d been studying since Clive had first contacted him.
The kid had looked over at him as he’d nursed his beer and seen Glen’s intent expression—eyebrows arched, head cocked—and had known the jig was up.
Sort of.
Glen approached the table, noting that the two guys with their hands toward him both had three aces.
“So you’re a friend of Clive’s?” Cash asked, over the mutter of the poker table—most of it in Spanish.
“I am.”
“Well, you know. Let me finish the game, and we can talk.”
Glen was about to say this kid could damned well talk to him now when he noticed a couple of things in quick succession.
One was that the kid had been winning. Big.
Two was that one of the guys with three aces was fondling a knife under the table.
Three was that the other guy was slowly pulling a gun.
Glen had nodded like everything was copacetic, and then, before he could think about what a complete and total dumbass he was, he’d dropped his beer and slammed the two cheaters’ heads against the table hard enough to concuss them.
“Run, kid!” Glen snarled, and all hell broke loose.
He emerged from the resulting melee with a cut over his eye, bruises over his kidneys, and a scratch down his shoulder from a knife he’d mostly ducked. He hauled ass for the back entrance and sprinted into the tiny alleyway behind the bar, only to find it empty.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!
Glen had kept running, figuring if he was snug in his hotel room before anybody figured the guy who started WWIII in a bar in Nayarit was already gone, nobody would spend too much time tracking his ass down, and he’d never have to call Damien from a Mexican prison, which was what they’d always told each other would be their last straw before they retired on a beach somewhere and wore nothing but Bermuda shorts and smiles.
Damien’s HEA was so damned close Glen wanted to smack him, and Glen was planning on rubbing his daiquiri-drinking, Bermuda-shorts-wearing, sleeping-with-all-the-pool-boys ass in Damien’s face, so he pretty much had to stay out of prison.
Ugh—speaking of Damien, Glen needed to contact him. After so many years of having each other’s backs, knowing where the other one was had become not just habit, but almost superstitious necessity. Glen’s contact from Damien had been the only reason they’d known where his helicopter had gone down—and the rescue presence near the crash site had probably saved Damien’s life.
He pretty much fired off two sentences into Damien’s sleeping ear before hanging up. By then, he’d reached the corner to the main street. He paused to make sure there were no police at the bar. He’d sort of figured there wouldn’t be. Las Varas wasn’t a bad place, but this was a seedy bar. He moved on, skirting the shadows, keeping his footsteps quiet on the dusty, cracked pavement, until he made his way to the town’s second-best hotel. Glen liked it. The place had a fountain in the center quad, boasted some truly amazing mole on their dinner menu, and rented the little cottages circling the place for a fair rate.
Glen had one of the cottages, and as he drew up, he was fairly surprised at the figure sitting with his back to the door, knees drawn up to his chest.
“Heya, you little carpetbagger,” Glen said dryly. “Need a place to hide for the night?”
Cash pushed to his feet and grinned gamely. “Hey—I wasn’t the one who was cheating.”
“Counting cards? Marked deck? What?” Glen opened the door for him anyway. “There were two guys there with three aces, which meant you had the entire table pretty fucking desperate.”
“Good at math, mostly, and it couldn’t be helped,” Cash muttered, ducking under his arm. “I’m not hitting Clive up for any more cash. That’s not fair.”
“You like the guy so much, why don’t you go back to make some money for him?” Glen shut the door behind him and locked it. Then he drew the shades and turned off all the lights but the one in the bathroom. “I suggest you sit on the floor,” he said, grabbing a pillow for his own ass because he wasn’t twenty-five anymore.
Cash Harper was, though—he plopped down cross-legged like hard floorboards on the assbones wasn’t a thing, the pair of them sitting in the aisle between the two queen-size beds. Glen had left the ceiling fans on and opened the windows halfway since a closed window on a muggy night with only a swamp cooler for company would have looked suspicious too.
“I’ve got to do something first,” Cash said softly. “It’s… it’s not Clive’s fault, but I have to do it anyway.”
Glen laughed softly. “Kid, ten minutes ago all I wanted was a beer and bed. Now I’m just hoping those assholes don’t find me the same way you did. How did you find me anyway?”
Cash’s even white teeth glinted in the dark. “I bribed the clerk—told her you were my uncle. She raised her eyebrows, so I’m thinking you just became my sugar daddy.” Cash gave an impudent leer. “Hellooo, Daddy.”
Glen had to chuckle. “Well, she’ll probably not tell those guys, then. She likes you.”
“How do you know they’re not going to charge through the door and bash my gay ass?” Cash asked, confirming pretty much everything Glen had sized up from the minute he’d seen the kid in the bar, his artfully tousled sandy-brown hair falling softly over one eye, his award-winning cheekbones on display like porn.
“’Cause she likes me too,” Glen said meaningfully.
“Ooh.” Cash’s eyes got wide. “I did not know that. Hello, Daddy, indeed.”
“Don’t even think about it, kid,” Glen told him. “You are way too young for me, and Clive thinks of you as a son. I am so not going to let that man down, you hear me?”
“He’s a good guy,” Cash said, his shoulders slumping. “I wish I could have been a good little pop star for him. He deserves a meal ticket like no one else in the business.”
“Yeah, well, he got the idea from the guy who manages Outbreak Monkey—but Clive decided to go more Hollywood, I guess.”
“Damn,” Cash said, sounding impressed. “Well, pop was more my thing. I don’t know what made him decide to go searching Puerto Vallarta—”