by Trina Solet
Key To His Heart (Gay Romance)
By Trina Solet
Copyright © 2016 by Trina Solet
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locales or actual events is entirely coincidental.
All sexual activity takes place between persons eighteen years of age or older.
This novel contains material intended for mature readers.
Cover image is only for illustrative purposes. Any person depicted is a model.
Key To His Heart
Gay Romance
Trina Solet
Chapter 1
After years of separation, of not speaking, he was finally hearing from Tony. Phillip could take a good long look at his little brother while he talked. There was Tony with his curly, light brown hair, lively brown eyes, smiling, with an irrepressible spirit shining through.
Phillip was the boring older brother wearing a suit, hair short, and gray eyes that were always too serious. Both brothers did have their father's long fingers, but Tony's were never still, always tapping and fiddling with anything he could get his hands on. Phillip could see him doing it right now. Tony was flipping a pen over his knuckles, almost dropping it a few times.
Phillip watched those familiar tics with rapt attention, but sometimes he couldn't see Tony very well through the tears that clouded his vision. The video he was watching came from Tony's phone. He made it just in case then sent it to his lawyer.
Just in case...
Tony died in a car crash two weeks ago. Driving too fast and under the influence when he crashed, it was pure luck that he hadn't taken anyone with him. The wreck had killed him on impact. This video was the last time Phillip would hear or see his little brother.
Phillip sat alone in the shabby conference room at Mr. Poller's law office. Trying not to let grief overwhelm him, he watched and absorbed every word. He didn't want the video to end. He wanted to sit there and watch Tony fidget, scratch his chin now and then, and smile disarmingly.
Every characteristic gesture broke Phillip's heart a little more, brought back memories of his brother as a little boy. Tony always leaned forward slightly when he talked, like he was confiding something to you and it was very important. It was Tony so he also rambled a bit before he got to the point.
"At first I was thinking I'd write this down. I figured you'd appreciate a letter so I sat down to write all of it. Had a big yellow legal pad in front of me and a pen in my hand, but you know me." Tony shrugged, shook his head and grinned. "So now you get to look at my pretty face while I yammer on."
Tony talked about a girl. "There was something about her. She really got to me, but Tara had some problems. I thought I could save her. I didn't do such a good job." Tony sighed and looked down then raised his eyes to the camera again. "Now for my big news. Tara didn't stick around. She dropped a bomb on me that she was preggers then ran off. That was a while ago now. I've been looking for her ever since. She went by the name Tara West when I knew her, but that turned out to be fake. So far I haven't been able to track her down. What happened in Missouri makes me worry that I might never get around to it. I had a little rollover. I didn't come out of it too bad. But it got me thinking how anything can happen to me. I live just a little over the speed limit." Tony grinned, but Phillip felt sick.
He could see the evidence of what happened in Missouri on Tony's face and on his head. He had cuts and bruises and his curly hair had been shaved right over his right temple. Every time Tony turned his head, Phillip could see the ugly red gash and the stitches keeping it closed.
If that accident was a warning, why didn't Tony listen? Phillip didn't have time to dwell on that as Tony continued speaking.
"Somewhere out there I have a kid. If anything happens to me, I want you to find him or her and make sure my kid is taken care of. I might beat you to it. Hope I do. Maybe I'll be coming over to show off my progeny, the fruit of my loins, hear the little squirt call you Uncle Phil." Tony chuckled then grew more serious. "The way I'm living plenty of things might happen before I ever set eyes on that kid of mine. So you're my insurance policy. Be my big brother one more time. Find my kid for me. Do it for old time's sake. Do it for that little boy who used to run after you and hang on your every word even if he didn't always do what you told him to," Tony said with a new urgency to his voice and a smile.
In that moment, Phillip saw him as the disobedient little boy he used to be. He could hear him squeal and run away because he had been told it was bath time or bedtime or some dreaded vegetable was being served for dinner.
For a while, Phillip was lost to that vision. Tony was running down the hall, feet kicking, curls bouncing, screaming because bedtime was the end of the world. His parents were telling Phillip to go catch him, but he couldn't catch that little boy now any more than he could bring his brother back to life.
"Be my big brother one more time." Those words hit Phillip so hard. The agony in his chest wouldn't subside as Tony's voice still echoed in his head – casual but earnest, so familiar, so real. How could Tony be gone when he was so alive and didn't know how to sit still even as he was telling Phillip something like this.
Phillip felt like he could reach through the laptop screen and touch warm skin and unruly hair. Of course he would be his big brother. He would always be Tony's big brother. Phillip knew that in his heart as it filled with grief and pain at every heartbeat. Tony grinned one final time, the video stopped playing, and Phillip sat in that conference room and convulsed with silent sobs.
Phillip didn't know how long he sat in front of his open laptop. Long enough for the screen to go dark. Even after he stopped crying uncontrollably, he didn't move. He sat like he was frozen. Only the thought of what he needed to do brought him out of it.
This might be the last time he got to do anything for Tony. He started by going to speak to the lawyer, Mr. Poller. He was elderly and called himself semi-retired. He seemed to have known Tony personally.
Coming out of the conference room, feeling numb, Phillip knocked on his office door.
"Come in. I have here what your brother left for you." Sitting behind his desk, Mr. Poller put aside an open file and picked up two others. He invited Phillip to have a seat. "Last year, Tony and my nephew's boy got into some trouble together, drag racing." He sighed. "I got them out of it with a fine and time served. After that Tony came to me with the information about this girl known as Tara West, and he also recorded the video that you saw. He left with me everything he had on the girl, which isn't much. Since he moved around so often, he wanted the information kept safe."
Mr. Poller handed him the two files. Phillip flipped through some printouts quickly, lingered over the photos of a young woman. She was blond with weary, blue eyes. In some of the photos, she was with Tony. He had his arm around her and wore his cockiest grin. As he stared at the photos, Phillip felt too overwhelmed to actually take in any information that was in front of him. The photos of Tony smiling so confidently were too painful to see.
Mr. Poller must have noticed his state of agitation because he summed up a few things for him without being asked. "Tony met her in Augusta at some party. She was partying pretty hard. Some guys took an interest in her. She wasn't in any condition to do much about it so Tony stepped in. He got her away from them. He took her home and they began a rather stormy relationship. They s
tayed together for less than six months. After she left town, he couldn't find any sign of her. Tony managed to hire two private investigators over the last few years, but neither of them got very far before Tony's money ran out."
Phillip could imagine what kind of private investigators Tony could afford to hire. But one question lingered on his mind. "I don't mean to be cynical, but did these private investigators find any evidence that this woman was really pregnant?"
"The people she knew in Augusta can only confirm that she made the claim and that it was based on a home pregnancy test," Mr. Poller told him.
"Do they know if she intended to keep the baby?"
"She said she was going to go up north where she had family. One of her friends told Tony that she said, 'If I can get cleaned up, I'll have it. If I can't, I'll get rid of it. I don't want to have a messed up kid.'"
"And this family she mentioned?"
Mr. Poller shook his head.
"Her phone records..."
"That's the first thing the investigators checked. Tara's phone was on Tony's plan while they were together. Those phone records didn't lead anywhere. The raw data is on the micro SD card that's attached to the file if you want to go over it. Everything else is in there too."
Phillip thanked Mr. Poller and told him he would keep in touch. He left his office in a daze. When he stepped out, sunlight hurt his eyes. He closed his eyes and stood on the sidewalk. Did he dare to hope and get his heart broken all over again?
Chapter 2
In the early dawn hours, Leon's friend, Pavel, had texted him to say goodnight. It was his way of letting Leon know he got home safely from clubbing all night. When Leon answered his good night with good morning, Pavel texted back that having a job sucked.
Leon didn't agree. He and Pavel were about the same age, but while Pavel was in college, Leon started working full time right after high school. Still, he didn't expect he would be wearing a suit and going to work at a stodgy office at the age of twenty.
He was an assistant at a consulting firm and proud to have such a serious job. Since arriving in Easton, homeless and with no job prospects, Leon had come a long way. Now he could afford his own place and this clunky, bright red little Ford Focus that was a million years old and sounded like an old man with bronchitis was trapped under the hood in place of an engine.
As he drove to work with the windows down, Leon enjoyed the fresh, fragrant air of late spring. The constant gray skies of winter were just a distant memory. All around were signs of nature coming fully to life. These days, Leon couldn't go anywhere without hearing birds singing. Sometimes he saw so many flowers in bloom that it seemed impossible that this was the same city of a few months ago. The air itself seemed brighter and more alive.
It was only Leon's second day at his new job as an assistant to Phillip Morton. As soon as he went in, he found out that his boss would be gone all day on personal business. Settling in behind his imposing desk, Leon looked around the office and wondered how he had found himself in such a traditional, stuffy place.
Morton Consulting was located in an old building and furnished to fit the age of that building. Dark wood shelves lined the walls. The desks were hulking and solid. The paintings on the walls were old-timey landscapes. Leon felt like he had stepped into an office from an old movie.
His own desk sat in a waiting area outside the door to Mr. Morton's inner office. While he wondered if his new boss would be coming in at all, he noticed the contrast of the antique brass lamp on one corner of the desk while the skinny monitor for his computer sat on the other side. That was this place in a nutshell.
When Leon first walked into Mr. Morton's office, he expected his boss to match the look of the place and be at least in his mid fifties. He was surprised to find that Mr. Morton was fit, broad-shouldered, sandy-haired and in his late twenties. That made him only five or six years older than Leon.
Mr. Morton wore a perfectly tailored gray suit, which was just as conservative as the office. The color of his suit made Leon take another look at Mr. Morton's eyes. Yes, they were gray and, for some reason, looked very sad. Instead of giving him the standard, firm handshake, Leon had the urge to take the man into his arms and hold him tight until that sad look went away. To keep that impulse in check, he forced himself to look away from those melancholy eyes and focus on the suit. That suit said this man was all business.
Starting with that first meeting, Leon had to suppress every natural reaction he had to the man inside the suit. He kept reminding himself that this was work, not play, and Mr. Morton's somber attitude took care of the rest. Faced with someone who never smiled or said one casual or friendly thing, Leon found it wasn't that difficult to keep himself in line around his new boss.
That morning, Leon had been ready for another dreary day of suppressing his urges in the presence of his strict boss only to go into work and find that he had the office to himself. It was like that for most of the day. Leon spent the hours familiarizing himself with his new computer's quirks and the company phone he had been issued.
Poking around, he got some pointers from the other assistants down the hall. He also got updated on some office gossip, including the information that his boss was gay. He mulled that over until he was assigned to help out Mrs. Lahari whose own assistant had called in sick.
Mrs. Lahari was a junior executive, who had to handle two of Mr. Morton's appointments in his absence.
"Sorry it's taking me so long. You've been really patient," Leon told her over the phone as he scrambled to find some additional information she needed for her second meeting.
"That's the Morton effect," Mrs. Lahari told him.
"The what?" Leon asked as he scanned through files looking for the right one.
She explained, "Mr. Morton believes that the lowest paid employees have to be treated with the most courtesy. This is nothing. You should see how nice I am to the people who clean the office."
"That's weird. My boss didn't strike me as the warm and fuzzy type," Leon said as he emailed the files to her. He was thinking that Mr. Morton seemed kind of cold and forbidding, especially for someone who was so young and good-looking that he took Leon's breath away when he first met him.
"Warm and fuzzy? No, I don't believe anyone would ever call him that. OK. I got the files. Thank you. Good work," she said and hung up.
Leon sat back and huffed, relieved that he got the job done. Things were quiet for a while until Leon got a text. It was almost the end of his workday and Mr. Morton was telling him that he was on his way to the office. Leon set up and put on his suit jacket. He wanted to look professional and alert when his boss walked in.
Watching Mr. Morton come in an hour before quitting time, Leon could tell that whatever he had to deal with must have been something heavy. Pale and drawn, he stopped in the doorway and stared at Leon for a moment.
"I forgot you had curly hair," Mr. Morton said.
Caught off guard, Leon didn't know what to say to that.
"Sorry. My brother..." Mr. Morton started to say but he only blinked a few times and breathed raggedly.
"Is there anything I can do?" Leon asked and got up from behind his desk. He wondered if something had happened to Mr. Morton's brother for him to look like that when he mentioned him.
"I..." Mr. Morton shook his head in confusion. Then he seemed to focus by sheer force of will. "Yes. There are a few things you can do," he said decisively.
Mr. Morton gave him a whole list of calls to make. Some of them had to do with business but two were calls to private investigators and another was to his lawyer. Then Leon called a third private investigator whose number was supplied by the lawyer's assistant. It was all very odd, but Leon wasn't about to ask any nosy questions.
After that Mr. Morton had him scan the contents of two files. When Leon went into Mr. Morton's office to return the files, he tried to keep his expression neutral. But inside the file he had noticed photos of a pretty, blond girl and a young guy with curly, light
brown hair.
"Is everything OK?" Leon couldn't help but ask seeing the pained look on his boss's face.
Sitting behind his desk, clenching and unclenching his fists, Mr. Morton looked up at him. "I'm keeping you late," he said as if he only now realized that it was past Leon's quitting time. "I'm sorry. I'll be paying you personally for the overtime."
"It's fine. I didn't have plans," Leon told him.
"I appreciate your help. I've... My brother died a little while ago, but I just learned that he might have a child. I'm trying to trace the whereabouts of the child's mother," Mr. Morton said as he looked through one of the files kind of frantically. His eyes never settled on anything until he held a photo of the girl and the curly haired guy.
"That's him, I guess," Leon said. "And the kid's mom?"
"Possibly. I don't even know if the child exists. She claimed she was pregnant then disappeared."
Leon frowned. He could see how desperate Mr. Morton was to will this child into being. "I hope you find this girl and everything else you're looking for."
Once again Mr. Morton looked up at him as if he had forgotten he was there. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to burden you with personal matters. Thank you for staying late, but I think I've kept you long enough."
Leon wasn't surprised to see him turn formal like that. If he hadn't been overwhelmed by what he was dealing with, a standoffish guy like him wouldn't have said a word about any of this to Leon. He wasn't the type to over-share at the office. In fact, this was the first time Leon was hearing about his brother's death. No one at Morton Consulting seemed to know about it or Leon would have been told before now.
"Should I order you something for dinner before I go?" Leon asked. He had a feeling his boss might be staying late, and he doubted Mr. Morton could even think of food in the state he was in.
