Love for the Cold-Blooded (21 page)

“She’s awesome,” Cat breathed, when the thunderous applause was dying down. She didn’t even giggle.

Pat beamed at her. He couldn’t claim to have had a direct hand in Helena’s awesomeness, but he still felt a not insignificant measure of proprietary pride. “Want me to introduce you?”

“Are you kidding me? Hell yes!”

Hell yes indeed.

“Patrick,” Hell said, and grinned wickedly before pulling him into a bone-crushing hug. He oofed a little as he returned it, and then tried not to smile too obviously as Cat fawned all over his big sister, the light of challenger worship kindling in her eyes.

“If you end up with Jaguar’s kit as your right hand, I’m taking all the credit — fair warning,” Pat told her later, when the meeting had wrapped up.

“Catalina does appear quite enthusiastic,” Hell replied, hardly looking up from a list of something or other she’d been handed by one of the senior minions. “As for you, Patpat, I’m making sure you have weeknights off. You may have to take some vacation days when things heat up, but you won’t need to give up your promising night job. However, you will have to take a hiatus from university. Neither Sir Toby nor I plan on folding early.”

Actually, hell no, and Hell no too.

Pat knew better than to protest openly, but no way was he taking a hiatus. He was a student, preparing to be an urban planner; that was his priority. That was who he
was
. The minion thing was just a family obligation. Of course Hell didn’t get it — she’d always lived and breathed the family business. But Pat wasn’t going to put his life on hold because of Sir Toby and his plans to take over the city, mind control ray or no.

This would work just fine without radical measures. Pat would
make
it work. He’d started his term papers ahead of time to guard against being thrown off schedule by an occurrence exactly like this, and had already begun to study for the end-of-term exams. Pat might have to retake a course or two, depending on how things went, but he wouldn’t lose the entire semester.

Pat was quite happy with the way things were going in his life, thank you very much. He was going to keep them running right along.

Chapter Eight

Lying is not for amateurs. Get plenty of practice.

D
on’t count your chicks before they’re devoured — wasn’t that what the proverb said? Pat should have listened. He should have known better. He’d been so sure he had everything under control, could keep it running right along, getting more and more awesome… and instead, it all went to hell the very next night.

In retrospect, it wasn’t even a surprise how it went down. Pat should have know to expect it; should have had some kind of contingency plan tucked away in the back of his mind. But he wasn’t expecting it. And he didn’t have a contingency plan. And so it all came crashing down around Pat’s ears in a huge, truffled clusterfuck of horrible. Because the next evening, at around two o’clock in the morning, Nick ordered a pizza with truffles, smoked pheasant and quail eggs, and then walked in on Pat while he was distributing the toppings along the virtual grid laid out in the Nicholas Andersen Pizza Topping Manual.

“Dan-ger-ous, watch out watch out,” Pat sang, innocently bopping along to the not-so-dulcet tones of BadMadRad. Twenty-four hard-boiled little eggs in two neat circles made three eggs for each slice. Three orderly circles of truffle shavings laid down carefully in relation to the eggs so everything was nice and symmetrical. And three circles of smoked pheasant slices, uniformly cut, all angled in exactly the same —

“Patrick?” said Nick, disbelieving.

Pat spun around so fast he nearly swept the pizza straight off the counter, bumping his hip hard into the table’s edge. He hardly felt it, because that was
Nick
, Nick where he absolutely wasn’t meant to be: standing in the doorway to the kitchen, staring at Pat.

“Patrick,” Nick said again, but now his voice was dark, heavy with accusation. It was the exact tone superheroes used when they’d run to ground their most hatred adversaries.

It didn’t compute at all. Pat’s brain spun helplessly, trying to reconcile Nick with the kitchen doorway, a place where he simply did not belong; trying to break through the numbing fog of ice-cold terror to grasp the situation and come up with something to say, something to do.

“Uh,” Pat got out, fighting the sudden constriction around his chest to draw in a gasp of air. “I — I can explain.”

Oh gods, seriously, that’s what he was going with — he could explain? That was only marginally better than “it’s not what it looks like”.

Pat gulped down another shallow breath of air. He was dizzy, and in another moment he would start hyperventilating, and oh gods, how had he not seen this coming? Of course Nick would follow up on the pizza mystery. Of course Nick would want to see for himself just where his so-called delivery service assembled his gourmet dinner. It was
Nick
, for god’s sake, he was a scientist, he always wanted to know exactly how things worked —

Nick did not move. He was so still he didn’t even seem to be breathing, posed in the doorway like a statue. He was wearing his faded work jeans and a sweatshirt with four dark streaks of grease along the front, where he must have wiped his hand in the middle of fiddling with something. His jaw was set and hard, his expression chiseled from granite.

Explain. Explain, right, he was waiting for Pat to explain as he’d promised, but the thing was, Pat couldn’t. There was no explanation. Padraig Ouest the Hooker had absolutely no business in the mansion’s kitchen, making Nicholas Andersen’s pizza, and they both knew it.

Maybe if Pat had been more like Helena, or like Boadicea or Zenobia. Maybe if Pat had been better at evasion and lying and — but no. He didn’t even want to, was the thing. He didn’t want to lie to Nick. He’d never wanted to, and now… now the mere thought was enough to make him nauseous.

In the end, Pat did the one thing his parents and sisters had taught him to never do — not under any circumstances, but most especially not when in trouble and faced with a figure of authority. He told the truth.

“I’m the night manager.” It came out thin and strained, and Pat tried clearing his throat before going on. It didn’t really help. “I’m not a hooker at all. I never have been. That was a misunderstanding. Mistaken identity kind of thing.”

“Companion,” Nick said, flatly, and nothing else.

“Yeah, that, uhm. Look, I mean, you must have wondered. Didn’t you wonder why I was… I didn’t exactly have a lot of experience, you know? It must have been kinda obvious. Not like your usual model clones, and not just because of the hair.”

“Model clones?” But Nick shook his head impatiently, dismissing the distraction. “I thought it was a game. A role you were assuming for variety’s sake.”

The stone façade was crumbling around the edges a little. Nick’s voice wasn’t quite as cool and even as it might have been; a vertical wrinkle had appeared between his brows, and when he took in a slow, deep breath, Pat imagined there was something unsteady there, echoing the queasy trembling in Pat’s gut.

“I thought it was… original. I liked it.”

Neither of them said anything for a long moment.

The AI pinged, jarringly piercing. “Mr. Andersen has requested a pizza with truffles, smoked pheasant and quail eggs.” The blandly pleasant voice was oddly disturbing, coming in the middle of the stifling silence. “Delivery is to take place fifteen minutes after the order. We are at twelve minutes. Please confirm.”

“Cancel the damned pizza,” Nick barked.

Down in the kitchen, of course, the AI was deaf and couldn’t hear him; Nick must have forgotten. In blissful ignorance of its lord and master’s wishes, the AI started up the grating thrumming it liked to use as a subtle hint that not everything was going smoothly, and someone (read: Pat) had better snap to and take appropriate measures double quick.

Pat turned towards the interface and poked at the glaring warning flashing there. To be exact he lifted his hand, realized he was clutching a severely mangled slice of pheasant breast, dropped it on the counter, and then proceeded with the poking. He was glad of the distraction, glad of anything that allowed him to look away from the hurt and betrayal dawning in Nick’s eyes. Pat had no idea of how to make a pizza request go away without actually making and delivering a pizza, though, so he only managed to make the AI emit a series of irritated ‘input error’ bleeps.

Nick shouldered him aside roughly, tapping through the AI’s menus so rapidly Pat completely lost track. When he slapped the interface forcefully for the palm print authorization, Pat jumped. “Do go on, Patrick. You were explaining how you are not a companion, which I should have realized because you suck in bed.”

Pat flinched back involuntarily, retreating a step. It was more the quietly vicious tone of Nick’s voice than the words themselves, really. Nick had only just said that he’d enjoyed having sex with Pat, after all, regardless (or because?) of Pat’s lack of experience.

“That’s not what I said,” Pat mumbled. Even he could tell he lacked conviction. “I wasn’t saying that you should have known. I just. I didn’t — I’m not a good actor, okay, I’m a lousy actor all around, and I wasn’t acting. I got pinged that you’d said to send someone up there and I didn’t get that it was code for getting a hooker. Companion. Nobody had told me that. You’d think that little detail would be in the orientation talk for night managers, you know? I mean, Suze did talk a lot but it was kinda hard to concentrate after the first ten minutes of serving heart stuff. If she did mention the hoo- the, the companion code, then she was probably being tastefully indirect or whatever, and that subtle shit never works with me.”

Fuck, he was starting to babble. That happened sometimes when he got really nervous — all of the intermittent verbal stations shut down, leaving totally unfiltered thoughts tumbling straight from Pat’s brain out of his mouth. People had stopped talking to Pat entirely because of things that had come out of his mouth when he was babbling, which was super unfair because he hadn’t even meant to say them. He just hadn’t been able to stop himself; couldn’t stop himself now. Words kept pouring from him, speeding up until his tongue tripped and he stuttered in his desperate haste to get them all out now, right now, make Nick understand, make Nick stop
looking
at him like that.

“So there you were, and you were, like, this unfairly hot freaky dude and suddenly you were taking your clothes off and offering to have sex with me, and seriously, what was I supposed to do? That shit never happens to me! Nobody has ever thought I was fuckable enough to, I mean usually I just strike out a lot, which gets real old I can tell you. So I jumped at the chance, and I’m not proud of it or anything but come on, like you wouldn’t have done the same in my shoes? I had no idea there was any kind of confusion or whatever going on. I’m not actually used to being mistaken for a — a companion. I only realized when I got back to the kitchen and the AI was having vapors all over the place, all ‘oh my gods you didn’t tell me the size of the model clone’s dick what the fuck is wrong with you’. And yeah, then I did make up an escort agency so I could have the money, but the AI was pushing so hard for an account number and all and I just, I — do you even know how much textbooks cost? You don’t, do you, because you never have to worry about that kind of thing. Newsflash, you’re loaded, man. It wasn’t like you were going to miss the cash. You were happy with the, the companionship and I hadn’t meant to impersonate anyone but it had already happened and my computer was busted and I needed a new winter coat so I thought why the hell not I wasn’t hurting anyone!”

Pat was getting light-headed from lack of air, voice rising higher and higher. He had to stop to catch his breath, panting in shallow little gasps that would have been embarrassing in themselves, if he’d had any energy to spare right now to worry about that kind of thing.

All the while, Nick just stood there, glaring at Pat as though trying to drill a hole through his skull by means of sheer derision and contempt.

“It just… happened.” Pat had lost babbling momentum, thank all the gods, but now it felt like all his words were freezing up inside him instead. Everything he wanted to say, all the compelling points and heartfelt pleas, the sincere apologies and irresistible appeals to Nick’s fairness — they were all swelling up in his head uselessly, only coming out in fits and starts, sounding nothing like the way he wanted them to. “And then it just, it just. You asked for me again, and I. It was so easy, you know? So easy. I wanted — I didn’t mean… it was so weird, man. I liked, I mean, the money was great, but that’s not — it was only the bonus. I would have — I wanted to. And so did you. And, and anyway, what would have been the right moment to tell you about the night manager thing? It was always already too late.”

Not even Pat could make sense of everything he’d spouted, but Nick merely listened in stony silence, lips pressed into a hard, pale line. In the end, Pat forced himself to shut his mouth and stop speaking not because he thought he’d said everything there was to say, but because he was almost shaking with the force of his emotions, and he was out of air again and couldn’t seem to figure out how to breathe normally.

After Pat fell silent, Nick waited for a while longer, staring at Pat. Eventually, he lifted his eyebrows in wordless query, inclining his head the slightest bit as though inviting Pat to go on and get it all out. Pat swallowed on a throat as dry as parchment. It took him a moment, but then he shook his head once, jerkily. He had no words left right now.

Nick nodded, still staring at Pat. And then, he turned and walked out without another word.

Several minutes passed while Pat concentrated on trying not to shatter into tiny razor-sharp pieces all over the expensive tiles.

Pat finished the pizza for lack of anything better to do. He left it in the oven half a minute too long. It didn’t burn, but the cheese and toppings were well-browned, far beyond the hint of gold that Nick preferred.

He ate a slice of Nick’s canceled pizza while he waited for Assistant House Manager Suze to arrive. She’d been grumpy when he got her on the phone, but not nearly as angry as he’d expected. Not nearly as unwilling to rush over as Pat would have been, had he been awakened in the middle of the night by an underling.