Poker Face

by Cindy Dees

  “Thank God. As a golfer, I’m a pretty good tennis player,” Stone admitted.

  Christian winced. “Jack’s actually not a half-bad golfer. My plan was to fake a wrist injury for you and have you drive the cart and drink beer.”

  “Well, hell. That sounds like the first fun thing I’d have gotten to do as Jack.”

  “If you were a womanizer, you’d have a deep appreciation for living in Jack’s skin for a few days.”

  Stone snorted. “Even if I did swing that way, I think it’s skeezy to use status and power to get anyone in my bed.”

  “And that’s why I lo—” Christian broke off. Holy shit. He’d almost done what Stone had. “Metaphorical,” he mumbled. “Metaphorical.”

  Stone leaned back, though, studying him speculatively.

  He said hastily, “That leaves us with the casino fundraiser Saturday night to get through.”

  “Thank God,” Stone replied fervently. “Only one more appearance.”

  “Tired of playing senator?” he asked.

  “I’ve had my fifteen minutes of fame. I’m ready to return to my anonymous life, thanks.”

  “Introvert,” he snorted.

  “That’s not a dirty word, you know.”

  “Maybe not if you sneak up on people and kill them for a living. But in politics you’d damn well better like being around hordes of people.”

  “The way I hear it, congressmen are pretty good at sneaking up on unsuspecting victims.” He shrugged. “Like, oh, you. Jack dumped a hell of a mess in your lap without a word of warning.”

  Tucker hung up a phone and interjected, “The mess is about to get more complicated. That was Mrs. Lacey. She’s flying in this afternoon. Show of support for her husband after last night’s near miss and all.”

  Stone rolled his eyes. “Great. The last thing I need is a wife.”

  Christian muttered dryly, “What would you do with one?”

  Stone scowled at him, and Christian broke into the grin he’d been holding back. “Never fear. You’ll like your wife.”

  It was decided that Tucker would go alone to the airport to pick up Jill Lacey. There was too much potential for awkwardness if Jill and Stone’s first meeting was in public. People might pick up on any formality or lack of displays of affection. Best to bring her fully into the conspiracy in the privacy of the hotel suite.

  Assuming, of course, that she agreed to go along with the risky scheme at all.

  Tucker duly left for the airport, and Christian made one more pass through the speech he’d drafted for Stone to deliver at the casino fundraiser. Although the appearances so far had been important, the really big fish would turn out in force on Saturday night. Not only did the speech have to strike exactly the right note to loosen purse strings, but it also had to sound like vintage Jack. Any number of people who knew Jack well would be at the event.

  His current working plan was to hold Stone out of the main casino party until it was time for his speech, have Stone deliver the speech, and then have him get called away immediately afterward by an emergency. Everyone thought it was cool when senators had classified crises to deal with. It made the politician look important and observers feel like insiders to know that something was up before the rest of the world did.

  His cell phone rang and Christian fished it out of his pocket. Now why was Tucker calling him on his personal line? “Hey, Travis. What’s up?”

  “I’m at the airport with Mrs. Lacey. She’s being mobbed by reporters and paparazzi.”

  Alarm sliced through his gut. “Why?”

  “Something about pictures of Jack and his lover. They’re going crazy. Full-on feeding frenzy.”

  Oh, Jesus. Had someone gotten pictures of Jack and Chesty? That was the one variable he had no control over. He’d prayed that Jack’s innate hatred of paparazzi and well-developed radar for when they were around would save them all. But no.

  He closed his eyes in chagrin as the whole house of cards unraveled before his very eyes. Jack was ruined. His own career was over. His life was over. The scandal was going to be horrendous.

  Belatedly he mumbled, “You know what to do. Pull her out and get her over here ASAP so we can coordinate damage control.”

  “Roger that.” Tucker hung up the phone, and Christian slumped in his chair.

  Stone wandered into the living room. “What’s up?”

  “Pictures of Jack and Chesty have hit the press.”

  “Aww, jeez. I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do? Maybe deny that the pictures are Jack, err, me? After all, fake Jack has been in Miami the whole time. The pictures will be coming out of the Caribbean, right?”

  “True.” A glimmer of hope flickered in his gut.

  “You can have an analyst declare them to have been taken in St. Thomas or wherever they were snapped. A bunch of people can verify that I’ve been making public appearances here over the past few days.”

  He had a point. Maybe they should brazen out the ruse and dare the press to prove them wrong. “We’ll need Jill to corroborate the story. Everyone loves her, and people will listen to her. If she calls the story a ridiculous lie, that will hold weight.”

  “More than if Jack, aka I, call the story a lie?”

  “Oh, heck yeah.”

  “Wow. Jack must hate the fact that her credibility is higher than his.”

  “It drives him crazy.”

  “Doesn’t give him the right to cheat on her,” Stone commented.

  “Amen.”

  Thank God Jill had arrived. This thing was getting bigger than him. He didn’t have the authority to be making some of the decisions that were going to have to be made soon. This involved the Lacey marriage, and he needed Mrs. Lacey to be on board.

  “Oh, no,” he groaned.

  “What?” Stone said quickly.

  “We’re going to have to tell her about Chesty.”

  “Surely she suspects that Jack fools around beyond Valerie.”

  “Their deal is that Jill tolerates the long-term mistress. But any other women are to be kept strictly under wraps.”

  “Oopsies. Ol’ Jack is gonna get his pee pee whacked when he gets home, isn’t he?”

  Christian rolled his eyes. “Not my job to get in the middle of their shitstorm of a marriage.”

  Stone said evenly, “So let me be the one to tell her. I’m the outsider who’ll be gone soon enough. Let her hate me.”

  He lifted his stricken gaze to Stone. He’d been trying so damned hard to pretend Stone wasn’t going to waltz out of his life as suddenly as he’d waltzed into it. But the guy had just thrown it out like it didn’t mean a damned thing to him to move on to the next town and the next job.

  “Aww, man. I’m sorry—” Stone started.

  He whirled and turned away, rejecting the upcoming lame attempt at an apology before Stone could insult him by uttering it. Behind himself, he heard Stone slip into the bedroom and close the door.

  The door to the suite opened, and Christian moved over to hug Jill, but she screeched to a stop and demanded angrily, “What the hell have you done?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “The pictures, Christian.”

  “I haven’t seen them. Jack and his girlfriend must have come ashore—”

  “They’re not of Jack and a woman. They’re of Jack and you!”

  Chapter Twelve

  STONE CAME out of the bedroom and stopped cold. An attractive woman, who was aging as spectacularly well as money could buy, was glaring at Christian. For his part, Christian looked remarkably like he’d been run over by a freight train. Tucker was looking back and forth between them like the two of them were aliens speaking in tongues.

  What the hell had he walked into?

  He stepped forward. “You must be Mrs. Lacey. I’m Stone Jackson. Pleasure to meet you.”

  She whirled to include him in her glare, and he recoiled. She did know that he had been impersonating her husband, right? He looked over at Christian question
ingly. What was he missing here?

  “What the hell have you done, Christian?” she demanded forcefully.

  Egads. She didn’t know what he and Christian had been up to. She was so going to fire his ass, and Wild Cards, Inc. would get a black eye over this mess. And then they’d have to fire him over the scandal. What on earth had he been thinking to agree to this madness?

  Christian faced the boss’s wife, his shoulders set defensively. However, he spoke with admirable calm. “You gave us an impossible task. Jack and Chesty absconded to international waters where we couldn’t retrieve him, and we were forced to improvise—”

  “Chesty?” An Antarctic winter couldn’t have been any colder than that single word.

  Stone felt rotten that Christian was taking so much heat for merely being the messenger bearing bad tidings, particularly since he’d volunteered to be the designated bomb dropper. He stepped into the line of fire beside Christian, physically moving up to stand with him.

  “Chesty Hills, ma’am. She’s the porn star Jack left the country with.”

  “Speaking of which, how did my husband manage to slip out of an entire country without you knowing?” she asked him sharply. “Weren’t you supposed to be guarding him?”

  “He insisted that I stay away from him, Mrs. Lacey. And he refused to let Tucker or me guard this suite’s door. The two of them snuck out of here and used a stairwell with no security cameras to make their escape.”

  “Well. At least the bastard learned from the last incident with a woman and took precautions not to get caught this time.”

  He was stunned at her equanimity over the fact that her husband was currently on the lam with a porn star.

  “Am I to gather that you’ve been pretending to be Jack in the interim?”

  “That’s correct, ma’am.”

  Not to be left out of the general ass-whupping, Christian dived back in. “That was my idea, not his.”

  She glared back and forth between the two of them for upward of a full minute, her mental wheels turning loudly in the silence.

  The tension stretched out until Stone actually had to restrain an urge to squirm like a guilty schoolboy. A flush was climbing Christian’s fair cheeks, so Stone would guess he felt about the same way.

  Without warning, she began to chuckle. “Well, well, well, Christian. I have to give you full marks for ingenuity. And people are actually buying that this impersonator is my husband?”

  Stone picked up one of Jack’s cowboy hats off a coffee table and jammed it on his head. He put on his best Texas drawl. “Aww, don’t get your britches in a hitch there, darlin’. I’m not half-bad at being ol’ Jackie boy.”

  Jill Lacey literally fell into a chair and stared up at him in shock.

  “Walk across the room and back,” Christian encouraged him.

  It was a bit of a struggle to get the swagger right without cowboy boots on, but he did his best.

  “Put him in one of Jack’s suits and a pair of sunglasses, add a little stage makeup to age him, and nobody can tell the difference,” Christian declared.

  “Except for the pictures the paparazzo shoved under my nose at the airport. The bastard wanted cash to keep them out of the press. I’ve got his card in my purse somewhere,” she responded.

  A single photographer, huh? He opened his mouth to ask her the man’s name, but Christian cut him off, snapping, “You can’t kill the photographer, Stone. This is the civilian world.”

  “Yeah, but it’s only one sleazeball—”

  “No.”

  “Fine,” Stone groused. “But if you change your mind….”

  “There will be no murders,” Christian replied firmly.

  “Party pooper.”

  He shot Christian his best pout.

  Pointedly ignoring him, Christian turned to Jill and asked cautiously, “What kind of pictures?”

  She, in turn, ignored him and instead stared down Stone. Man, she had that whole “mother guilting kid into confessing anything” look down to a fine science.

  “You’re gay, aren’t you?” she demanded.

  Damn, her gaydar was on point. “Yes, ma’am. I am.”

  “And you’re hot and heavy with Christian, aren’t you?”

  Tucker made a surprised sound. For his part, Stone frowned. He and Christian had been exceedingly circumspect about their relationship. Neither one of them let their private lives interfere with their professional lives, after all. They’d never touched each other in public except for on the beach at dawn this morning. Hell, they barely even looked at each other in public. And there’d only been that one quick, furtive embrace on the beach—

  —where they’d kissed. Passionately.

  “Aww, hell,” Christian muttered. “The beach this morning. I told you we had to be careful.”

  “Well, you weren’t careful enough, boys,” Jill interjected tartly.

  Stone winced. He and Christian deserved that. But ouch. He’d been naïve to think that a man like Jack Lacey wouldn’t be stalked morning, noon, and night. Christian had tried to warn him, but he’d refused to listen. This was his screwup.

  Jill was holding out a business card. “The paparazzo wrote down the address of the website I can visit to preview the layouts that will go public if I don’t buy the images from him.”

  Which was a fancy way of saying that if she didn’t pay the guy’s blackmail demand, he would send the pictures to whatever tabloid would pay him the most for the scandalous pictures.

  There wasn’t really any question of her paying off a blackmailer. Once that faucet was opened, it was nearly impossible to shut off, and besides, they had no guarantee the photographer wouldn’t take their hush money and then turn right around and sell the damned things to the highest bidder anyway.

  He looked over Christian’s shoulder reluctantly as the pictures popped up on Christian’s laptop. The quality wasn’t great; they’d obviously been taken with a telephoto lens from some distance away. But they were clear enough. The passionate kiss was clearly between two men.

  The next photo of him and Christian, foreheads pressed together, might be achingly romantic in any other situation. But it was damning as hell in this one. Worse, their faces were clear enough in this photo that there was no question it was him and Christian. Or rather, Jack and Christian.

  Any chance Christian had ever had at protecting his privacy was completely, irrevocably blown. Stone rested a hand on Christian’s shoulder, and it was like touching ice. Or maybe glass. There was a brittle quality to Christian’s posture that made him feel as if he might shatter at any second.

  “God, I’m sorry,” Stone breathed. “I should’ve listened to your warnings. You told me they’d be watching me 24-7, and I didn’t take you literally.”

  Christian looked up, but at Jill, not at him. “If we’re lucky, these photos will smoke out your husband. I can’t imagine him letting them pass undisputed and unrefuted.”

  Stone looked back and forth between Christian and Jill candidly. “This screwup is squarely on me. What can I do to make it right? Anything. Just name it. I’ll do it.”

  Christian was the one who answered. “How do you feel about an impromptu press conference with your wife?”

  Jill lurched. “Stop the wagon there, Nellie. You want me to go out in public with a man who’s posing as my husband? What if somebody realizes he isn’t Jack?”

  “We feed them the same contingency line we’ve always planned to in that event. Someone’s threatening your husband’s life, and his security team felt a decoy in his place was the safest alternative.”

  “And when the donors are pissed all to hell that they’ve been tricked?” she demanded. “At this point, I’m half-tempted to let Jack go down in flames. But all my charity work will go down in flames too.”

  Christian nodded solemnly. “Here’s the thing, ma’am. If you do nothing to disprove or refute these pictures, you’re going to come under intense pressure to take action. Your conservative constituents
will demand that you divorce Jack.”

  “No way!” she declared. “That bastard’s been demanding a divorce for months, but there’s no way I’m giving it to him until he wins this election. It’s going to be his last term in the Senate, in case he hasn’t shared that with you, Christian.”

  “Umm, no. But I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “One more election,” she ranted. “All he had to do was behave himself through one lousy election season. But could he do that? No. He had to take off with a porn star right under my nose. I’ll kill him. I’m going to grab him by his scrawny, shriveled wiener and cut that sucker off. Maybe I’ll stuff it in his mouth and watch him bleed out.”

  Whoa. She was pissed. Not that Stone blamed her, but dang. That whole “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” thing was no joke.

  Christian said evenly, “I’m sure we can find a way to save your reputation so you can continue the charity work you so love doing.”

  She said a little more rationally, “If I try to refute the allegations that Jack is gay and the public believes them anyway, then I’ll look weak and pitiful for standing by a man who suddenly likes boys better than girls. Hell, I won’t only have to divorce Jack. I’ll have to move out of Texas.”

  Stone couldn’t fault her logic.

  “Or I can go all in, stand with Stone—Jack—and we do what? Laugh off this whole thing as… what? A joke? A bet Jack lost and he had to kiss his aide full on the mouth?”

  Christian tossed out a few suggestions for silly reasons why Jack might have had to kiss his aide. A dare, maybe. Or proving that he wasn’t homophobic.

  Stone looked back and forth between the two of them desperately trying to cover for a man they both despised. Abruptly, the insanity of it all was too much for him.

  “Or,” he interrupted, “we could have me appear as myself and explain that I’m a security guard and am involved with Christian in my off time. We can laugh it all off as a case of mistaken identity.”

  “But then you can’t appear as Jack at the casino night,” Christian objected. “Worse, they may expect you and Jack to appear together to prove that you’re two different people.”