Black Tie: Book One of the Sparrow Archives

by Kieran Strange

  He crouched low and swiped a water from the mini-fridge, then armed himself with a second one out of common courtesy for Elliot. He wasn’t entirely sure how long his host was going to be gone, so he wasted no time in removing the balls systematically from each pocket as he circled the table (constructed with what looked like mahogany rails and lined with a stunning royal-purple baize, of course, because it belonged to Elliot and whatever belonged to Elliot was usually purple) and locating the triangular rack.

  Saturday and Sunday lunchtimes in the pub with his father had been commonplace since he was a toddler, and it wasn’t long before he found ways to entertain himself while his father was consuming enough alcohol to poison both his liver and his marriage like killing two birds with one stone. The idea of a seven-year-old boy who could kick a fully-grown man’s arse all over the local dive’s pool table was something that had garnered him more than enough of the highly sought-after fifty pence pieces he required to play the game, and he’d consequentially gotten quite good at it.

  Which meant that if Elliot thought he was going to be a pushover, he was about to learn quite differently.

  Cabe was examining one of the seven racked cue sticks (or just ‘cues’ as they’d called them back in the U.K.) when Elliot finally re-entered the room, a drink in each hand. The agent had been wondering what sort of flowery, over-the-top concoction he may come out with this time, but to his surprise he arrived with an old fashioned glass in each hand, each containing a double shot of what appeared to be a whisky or a scotch.

  “This,” announced Elliot, as if he were about to introduce his personal bodyguard to the person who had first told Paul McCartney and John Lennon they were pretty good at writing songs together, “is the Glenfidditch Janet Sheed Roberts Reserve 1955. Only fifteen bottles were ever filled, the November right after the Megaflare. I picked it up at an auction in Edinburgh for more than I care to admit, but it was worth every single cent.”

  Elliot crossed the room toward him and offered one of the glasses. It was cold to the touch. “It’s got a distinctly fruity, floral taste and aroma brought out by exactly two drops of water, I’ve found is best. I thought considering your appreciation for the fruity and floral, you would enjoy it.”

  “Sir, didn’t anyone ever teach you in your life how dangerous it can be to mix so many liquors in a single evening?” Cabe tutted as he admired both the pale-gold color of the beverage itself and the almost lilac-tinted crystal it was served in. “Do I even want to ask the value of what’s in my hand right now?”

  “Probably not,” smirked Elliot, putting his glass down in order to roll up the sleeves of his shirt one at a time, revealing the toned, tan forearms Cabe had never really been able to forget were hiding underneath.

  “Okay, how about this: what’s worth more, all of the clothing I’m wearing right now, or the liquor in this glass?”

  “Oh, Cabe... sweetheart.”

  “Seriously?”

  Elliot finished with his sleeves and reclaimed his glass of scotch, fully aware that Cabe now appeared to be terrified of his own. “The liquor, Peaches. Definitely the liquor.”

  “All right,” pressed Cabe, “the liquor in this glass, or that Armani suit you bought me the first day I worked here because you insisted my image was affecting your image?”

  “Cabe, stop.” Elliot was shaking his head, his face lit up in a broad grin as he met the other man at the freestanding cue rack again. “I honestly don’t think your adorably impecunious little mind can handle the answers to any of these questions.” He lifted his glass, poised to toast against Cabe’s for the third time that evening.

  “Your turn,” he said, cocking his head ever so slightly toward one shoulder. “And this is a very expensive and exceedingly rare single-malted whisky... so impress me.”

  Impress he who is only impressed by himself. That’s no easy feat. Cabe swirled the liquid around the short cylindrical glass only once, allowing it to release this apparently famed flavor even more. His lips cracked into the teeniest, tiniest of smirks, and he raised his head so that his eyes, almost the same color as the whisky in this light, could find Elliot’s.

  “To my elegant and esteemed new client,” he eventually declared, the glass hovering an inch from the other man’s. “May he adequately spend any moments he can spare over the next few years teaching me the value of dignity, the honor of loyalty, and bestowing upon me his personal privilege of always being fucking right.”

  Elliot’s eyebrow shot up in a deep, curious arch. “What am I right about this time, Peaches?”

  “There’s a bruise forming on my left arse-cheek that would make a banked-track rollergirl jealous. I can feel it against my jeans.”

  The cackle Elliot let out was gleeful and unbridled, and he nudged his glass against Cabe’s in endorsement. “I approve,” he hummed. “Taste while I break.”

  Apparently his host had a favorite cue, because he selected a black carbon composite model from the back for himself and disappeared from Cabe’s line of sight to retrieve chalk. The contents of the crystal glassware was what currently had Cabe’s attention, though. Autumn-gold in hue and oaky in aroma, the liquor lapped far too casually against the side of the tumbler for something that was probably worth more gram for gram than platinum. He’d never been a big scotch guy, he was one of those craft beer enthusiasts that the scotch guys hated. Just being allowed to hold it felt like a sin, let alone actually consuming it.

  Oh, God... if Dasilva knew... oh my God, she would actually kill me in my sleep.

  He could feel Elliot’s eyes on him, even as the other man chalked his cue and prepared to break. He nosed the aroma as much as he felt was polite, appreciating how each inhale seemed to add new notes to the scent. He swore he could make out oranges and violets, which made him wonder if Elliot had a theme to the drinks he enjoyed or if it was just residual in his nose from the liquor he’d already consumed tonight.

  Eventually, he took the smallest sip, letting the liquid spread across his tongue and alight all the different series of buds. It was creamy and smoky and vanilla all at once, warm in tone and not at all harsh in a way that almost made him forget it was a whisky he was drinking.

  “Oh shit,” he muttered, and Elliot – suddenly beside him – chuckled in his ear.

  “Here,” the C.E.O. said, and with all the practice and demeanor of some sort of shady drug dealer, he collected a small sampling of spring water from the bottle Cabe had procured for him in a tiny dropper Cabe didn’t realize he was armed with, and meticulously let a pair of tiny teardrops fall into Cabe’s glass.

  “Try that. It really opens the flavor up.”

  “You know I’m not a whisky guy, right?” Cabe almost whimpered as he relinquished himself to the other man’s will yet again, and savored the priceless scotch for a second time.

  He hadn’t been lying, and the toast had been on point, because he was not wrong either. The finish in his mouth was just as dry as it had been the first time, but contrary to popular belief, he wasn’t opposed to a dry finish every once in awhile. The zesty orange tang unleashed by the addition of the water, just subtle enough to be tasted on the warm tones of the whisky, made the dry finish much more tolerable, and he found himself returning for a third sip before too long.

  The sound of the cue ball striking its peers snapped him back to the present, and he placed his glass on the narrow wooden lip that encircled the walls of the room at about abdomen-height in order to select a cue for himself. As a child, he’d been forced to learn to play pool with something far too long and heavy for him, so as an adult he preferred something with some heft to it.

  Elliot had sunk a striped ball right off the get-go and was currently surveying the layout of the table for his second shot. Cabe wasn’t in any way annoyed or worried; he was confident in his ability to play the game, and Elliot’s little display of skill was giving him more time to realize that if he had the money to buy the top-shelf stuff, he actually probably would be a whisky
guy.

  “So, tell me,” said Elliot as he finally decided at which angle to attack the current set-up. “Just how much spying on me have you and your people done over the past few days?”

  “Uh.” Cabe’s head was spinning a little from the three independent liquors, which was making it mildly harder to focus on his filters. “I guess you’d have to start by defining ‘spying’, sir.”

  “Any instance where W.A.R.D. has been watching me, surveilling me, interacting with me, without my knowledge that the person I’m interacting with or being watched by is affiliated with W.A.R.D.?”

  The tip of Elliot’s cue stick struck the white ball sharply, sending it careening down the table. Cabe was too busy watching Elliot to know where it ended up.

  “Well, there was Agent Faraj, who was the Parks Canada guy who found us with the dog,” recalled Cabe in a nonchalant tone of voice, swirling his whisky absent-mindedly. “There was the instance with the call we accidentally listened in on today, where we overheard about the package being collected from the parkade.”

  Elliot straightened up and fixed him with a playfully acrimonious stare. “Accidentally?”

  “Well, yeah. We’re not... we’re not very good at our jobs.”

  The dark-haired man sipped his whisky and stepped back as Cabe rounded the table, watching his bodyguard with the eyes of a man who had been trained to read every inch of a person’s body language and analyze that data for his own, manipulative use. “Is that all?”

  Cabe was glad he had the shot to focus on, because he was definitely wobbling along the line of being tipsy now and things like wandering eyes and fidgeting hands might have otherwise given him away. It had been several months since he, Dasilva, and Faraj had last hit one of their many favorite bars in downtown Seattle, and the familiar weight and feel of the cue in his hands was a welcome distraction.

  “As far as I know,” he replied smoothly, a perfect deflection. Because he did know more, he knew that Dasilva was currently posing as a journalist from TIME magazine Elliot seemed quite keen on, and all the while she was still a confirmed guest for the Christmas gala the coming weekend, that cover needed to remain intact. There were still several more things they needed to confirm before they would be confident extending the length on Elliot Wright’s leash anymore. “I mean, there’s some stuff they don’t even tell me. But trust me, I wanna work with you on all this. I don’t wanna be hiding anything from you.”

  The shot sank a solid ball and he drew away from the table to line-up his second. Elliot had half-finished his whisky and was leaning against the wall by the dart board, his eyes half-narrowed at his bodyguard as if studying him as he talked and moved.

  “Good,” he said coolly. “Because this arrangement isn’t going to work if I’m not a thousand per cent sure I can trust you, Sparrow.”

  “With all due respect, sir,” Cabe replied, in a smooth agreeable tone which definitely and deliberately did imply a great fucking deal of respect, “until about fifteen minutes ago, I thought you were straight. I thought the list of people who could gain access to you and your home while you’re vulnerable and sleeping was about half as long as it actually is.”

  “Are you really blaming me for your own ignorance?” asked Elliot quizzically. Cabe peered up at him from his position leaning over the purple baize and Elliot sighed in defeat, pressing on a little further. “You can’t blame me for this one, I’m afraid, Sparrow. I laid the framework, all the hints were there.”

  “Hints? Really?”

  “The flirting, the attention. The fact that I’d already admitted to you my deepest, most desperate desires to keep my business and public life, and the life I actually care about and which contains all the things that truly matter to me, totally separate?”

  Elliot was walking around the table – well, sauntering really, his hips swaying ever so slightly back and forth as he took a leisurely stroll toward where Cabe was currently lining up what appeared to be a rebound off the far cushion. The agent’s butt was jutting out at the perfect angle for Elliot to brush into as he reached him, the gentle nudge he gave him proving to Cabe that he wasn’t the only one feeling the buzz of the whisky between his thighs. The complex maths and physics Cabe was doing to figure out the angle at which to hit the solid blue ball dissolved out of his brain in an instant, and he became urgently aware of how much the wooden railing of the billiards table was digging into his groin.

  “Well,” he uttered, hardly daring to breathe as Elliot’s body moved to press insistently into him from behind again, “sometimes I don’t notice the shit that’s right in front of me.”

  Elliot’s fingers were crawling their way up Cabe’s spine, his eyes half-lidded contently at the view of the British-American agent bent and sprawled in front of him like that. They teased at his skin through the woven cotton of his shirt, so sensitive from a combination of the liquor and the anticipation of what was to come, and Cabe’s thighs trembled a little against Elliot’s own.

  “Take the shot, Agent Sparrow,” the Anomaly murmured in his ear, his lips barely millimeters from the delicate shell as his hand found and secured the nape of his bodyguard’s neck. “The tension is absolutely killing me.”

  He can’t be serious... Concentrating on anything right now seemed to be a daunting and virtually impossible task, and the urgency of Elliot’s growing need behind him wasn’t making his struggle any easier to bear. For his ego, for his pride, he strained against every masculine and feminine urge in his entire body to that was telling him to give into the cravings and just let go. Of everything. Every thread of control, every broken record, every ghost in his skull who whispered to him when it thought he was starting to become even just a little bit less damaged. To just let go... and let Elliot take him.

  The blunt, chalky end of the stick jabbed forward sharply, rocketing the cue ball toward the cushion at the other end of the table where it rebounded and struck its target, sending it careening into the corner pocket directly to Cabe’s right.

  Cabe never really got the chance to enjoy or acknowledge his victory, though, because the second the strike was made, Elliot’s free hand had flicked open the button and zipper of his 501s, sliding between the folds of denim to wrap around the very solid, cotton-bound ridge inside. Cabe gasped and choked on the noise in an attempt to stop it, the cue stick sliding out of his grip and clattering rather noisily to the floor.

  “Bedroom?” he panted, as Elliot’s apparently rather practiced hand became acquainted with what it had found in the confines of his trousers. Each squeeze, each stroke sent a new jolt of pleasure coursing through his body, making his knees quiver and his thighs grow taut.

  As his wet, hot tongue flicked out to trace the shell of Cabe’s ear, Elliot chuckled.

  “No, Peaches... I’m afraid you haven’t quite earned my bed yet.”

  Cabe didn’t resist as Elliot’s hands curled beneath his thighs and hoisted him up onto the bed of the billiards table, his limbs sending balls flying as he kicked both shoes off and rolled gracefully onto his back. In fact, quite the opposite, he helped. Elliot was already climbing up after him, his chocolatey hair cascading about his face as he stared down at the brawny blond man, so expectant and so damn hungry beneath him.

  “Pick a safe word and don’t use it,” growled Elliot, as Cabe’s impatient hands found his tie and yanked him down for another vicious, almost violent kiss.

  Sixteen

  Cabe could smell bacon. Bacon, and coffee. Which was a good thing, actually, because even before he’d fully roused himself he could tell he’d worked up one hell of an appetite. The smoky notes of orange, violet, and vanilla were still playing a lazy melody on his tongue, a fragrant reminder of the night before. Both his brain and his body protested his sudden consciousness together. Unlikely partners for a time.

  He appeared to be curled up on one of the large, plump, leather couches, the bright yet gloomy city sprawled out beneath him through the bespeckled windows as it was swathed helplessly
in a shower of heavy rain.

  A enormous sheepskin blanket was draped atop and around him, and if he remembered correctly, this was the last place he and Elliot had wound up before he’d finally succumbed to liquor and exhaustion and passed out. Flames crackled lazily in the low fireplace beneath the television, upon which CNN silently gave a morning news report and offered rolling stock reports.

  Just another ordinary, uneventful morning in the home of Elliot Wright, he thought to himself, not disliking the way huge raindrops were splattering against the vast honeycomb windowpanes. No wonder there was no C.C.T.V. network that he knew of set up in here.

  He said ‘that he knew of’ because, even after a night of being unashamedly intimate with the man, he wasn’t entirely convinced he was divulging absolutely everything there was to know about the building, or the company and staff housed within it.

  “I’m going to presume you like lots of protein in the morning.”

  Of course, Elliot had noticed him waking up. Having been addressed, Cabe took the opportunity to slide up into a more vertical position on the couch he was occupying, remaining bundled in blanket from the waist down. He was relatively sure he was fully nude. Elliot, on the other hand, was clad in a soft gray tee-shirt and black Thai pants, his hair damp likely as a result of showering.

  “After a night like that, yeah.” Cabe semi-sprawled over the back of the couch, getting comfortable so that he could watch Elliot cook in the large, open-plan kitchen behind the bar. “Bacon?”

  “Bacon, Canadian bacon, eggs, hash. You looked like the sort of meat-and-potatoes-fed youth who would appreciate a solid breakfast.”

  Cabe scratched at his hair, which was standing up hilariously in only one direction. “I always just sorta presumed you had a chef you hired,” he admitted a bit sheepishly, but Elliot didn’t seem at all fazed.

  “Most people do. I’m guilty of ordering from my favorite nearby restaurants more times than I should, but my mom taught me the value of home cooking, so I always try and make sure I use this space at least once every few days. Beverage?”