Rome opened his mouth, and before he’d said a word, I knew whatever was about to slide out of it wasn’t going to be pretty. I sent him another warning glance. We really couldn’t afford for him to disgrace us before, during, or after this meeting—parking lot faux pas notwithstanding.
Luckily he took the hint—it really could go either way where Rome was concerned. He clamped his jaw shut and shot me another evil look. I ignored him, which was my usual way. I looked down at his fists as they curled and uncurled, and then addressed James.
“So what’s the 411? Do you have any more intel on why we’re here?’
He looked around furtively before leaning forward slightly.
“No clue. I’ve been trying to do some digging—a few off-the-record conversations with various contacts, but I’ve come up empty-handed every time. They are being uncharacteristically cagey, which worries me more than a little. But I guess we’ll soon find out either way, so let’s not jump to premature conclusions.” He grabbed a handful of his thick blond hair, and yanked at it before sitting down next to us.
“It’s fucking bullshit.” The words tore through the near-silence in the room, and all eyes were suddenly on Rome. I nudged him sharply again with my knee. “Do that again and you’ll lose the leg.”
Jesus. He was tightly wound at the best of times, but today he was too much.
“Then keep your fucking voice down,” I hissed out of the corner of my mouth.
“Why should I? It is bullshit, and I’m only saying what everyone else is thinking.”
That part was true enough, but in all the years we’d known each other, I’d never managed to make him understand that there were good reasons why grown adults didn’t verbalize every thought that came into their minds, no matter how right they were.
Actually, that was a lie. Rome understood it to the extent that he knew it was a cultural norm, but he didn’t agree with it, or adhere to it. In fact he didn’t adhere to most social rules.
The only norm with him was that he marched to the beat of his own drum, and did whatever the fuck he felt like doing at any given point in time. That seemed to be another genetic trait he shared with his brother.
I decided to let it go. There was nothing more guaranteed to make him obsess about something than telling him to forget it. Speaking of which, I sidled another glance at the other side of the room, at the chick from the car park. She really was something else.
We saw pretty women all the time. It was kind of an occupational hazard, to the point where I, for one, had become a little blind to girls like Carolina from this morning’s bathroom episode. She was pretty in the way that models mostly were, but that was it. I appreciated her beauty in the same way I appreciated that paintings by the French Masters were “good”, but that didn’t necessarily mean I wanted one hanging in my home.
Carolina was pretty by accepted standards. Beautiful, in fact, but beyond that aesthetic, she did nothing for me. I’d gotten hard watching her and Rome together, because the scene was hot—two obnoxiously attractive people, naked and horny, was enough to turn on most people with a pulse, and I definitely had that. Still, I wasn’t attracted to her, necessarily, as much as the scenario.
The girl from the parking lot was different. She was objectively beautiful, yes, but there was also something about her, beyond simple beauty, that got my pulse racing. As I observed her, she raised her head and glanced sideways furtively. I wondered whether she’d looked up purely out of curiosity about what was happening on this side of the room, or if she’d felt the weight of my stare, even as I tried to be discreet. Either way, when her gaze hit mine, she turned away shyly, a deep blush blooming under her rich, golden-maple-colored skin. My dick twitched in appreciation.
Chapter 5
Rome
* * *
As I watched King watching her, I wondered idly why what I saw made me want to knock his head right off his shoulders. It was a free country. He was a free agent. I knew nothing about her, apart from what she’d felt like wrapped around my dick a year or so earlier, but even if she wasn’t free, there was no harm in looking. So why did that blush make my dick hard, but my hands involuntarily ball into tight fists again?
We were saved by the bell in the form of the receptionist calling out to the room, “They’ll see you now in the boardroom, if you’d like to follow me.”
I stood up, as did King and James, and, to my surprise, so did our uptight “friend,” and her flamboyant companion. I was guessing also a manager—though he and James couldn’t have been more different if they’d tried. Still, that wasn’t my concern at that point in time. What bothered me was the fact that they were clearly headed to the same meeting as us. What the actual?
We filed into the boardroom behind the receptionist, and I couldn’t help but feel like we were being marched before a firing squad, except that, instead of a line of cocked rifles, we were facing a lineup of label cocks. In many ways I’d rather the firing squad. At least I’d know where I stood. This was a row of smiling assassins, and we wouldn’t even see the end coming.
When the introductions were over and done with—a bunch of overdressed goons from Sonic Bully and a bunch from Audio Dissonance, the names of whom I didn’t even pretend to want to remember—I threw myself into the nearest chair, swinging my feet onto the table and crossing them at the ankles.
This time both King and James looked like they would happily have taken me out, if the firing squad didn’t. I flipped them both off in my mind, but resisted the urge to do it in real life. Instead, I made a mental note to tell them to go fuck themselves when the meeting was done.
One of the assassins across the table kicked off proceedings.
“Okay, so now that we know who’s on this side of the room, I guess you probably want to know who everyone else is. No fucking shit, Sherlock. “This is Quincy Copeland, otherwise known as Que Violin, and her manager Carson Daniels. As well as a violinist, Quincy is a singer-songwriter, and the jewel in Sonic Bully’s classical music portfolio crown, in my opinion. And not just in classical music, but across genres.”
“Yeah, we’ve ‘met,’” I air quoted, and all eyes in the room swiveled my way. Quincy Copeland looked at me like she wanted to gut me like a fish, and King raised a questioning eyebrow. I shrugged in response.
Label Guy, whose name I hadn’t bothered to listen to, recovered himself. “And over here, we have James Portmeirion and his clients, Anthony “King” Kingston, and Roman “Rome” Ivanenko, the virtuosic cellists who make up Bowed & Dangerous—similarly standout properties in Audio Dissonance’s catalog across genres—”
I had no fucking idea what was going on, but one thing I did know, was that I hated it. I looked around at the assembled suits—all trying way too fucking hard to be something they weren’t: cool, funky, young, hip, or whatever the hell they wanted to call it.
They were entirely too curated, too groomed, and trying to seem effortlessly authentic and cutting edge—or whatever people like that said about themselves—while probably consulting a stylist, hairdresser and fucking make-up artist before they left the house every day. The whole thing was so contrived that all they managed to do was look exactly like the dude sitting next to them.