Rapture 2: a BWWM, Alpha Male Romance by Perri Forrest

snuggled against the warmth emitting from his body. My eyes held just a tad bit of water in them, but no tears dropped. It seemed as though Rush sensed something, because he wrapped his arms around me. As soon as he did, everything inside me calmed down, and I knew that no matter what kind of tango my nerves were doing, that everything would be alright.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

ELEVEN

     
     
    Offices of Illusion, Downtown San Francisco
    Monday morning, November 10, 2014
     
    T. McKinney had just plopped down into his office chair. If he didn’t like gossip so much, he would have long ago left his position as contributing editor for the popular sports blog. He wanted to do way bigger things with his life like move to New York or Los Angeles and meet a pretty boy like himself and sit cute by the pool all day long. He looked into the mirror affixed to the side of his large screen monitor, into blue eyes, courtesy of his optometrist, and his naturally curly sandy brown taper. He turned his head side to side to see as much of his profile on either side and smiled at his approval. I’m too pretty for this bullshit , he thought to himself. I need to be somewhere in front of the camera, hunny! Yasss! All fuckin’ 6’2” of me and my fineness! Givin’ the scoop firsthand, live and in living color!
    Snap out of it, girl and get to work , he convinced himself.
    While his computer loaded, T scrolled his Facebook timeline just to see what the basic people were up to. He was something of a celebrity on Facebook and Twitter. Shit, LinkedIn and Instagram too. Everybody and their mama’s wanted to be his friend because they knew he had the juice on just about every athlete from San Francisco to Florida and even abroad. They hung onto his every word. He actually had a small six-figure stash in a separate bank account for the pieces of dirt that he’d been paid to not print. That’s how in-the-know he was. So as much as he complained that he wished he was somewhere else, he’d never leave. Well, maybe to take a better offer. But not just leave. No, not with the power he held.
    After he had clicked the like button on a few photos, and added a few one-liner responses, he placed his phone back onto this desktop and cranked up Pandora to his Marsha Ambrosius’ station, snapped his fingers and rolled his neck, and sang the lyrics to Late Nights & Early Mornings :
     
    ♫
    Hop up out the bed … Take a shower then get dressed … Gotta go to work but I wanna lay with you instead, baby … Softly kiss you there, make you say Ooooh yeeeaahhh … I’ll be coming back to you boy you just tell me when, ooh baby …
    ♫
     
    He clicked on his Microsoft Outlook icon and watched his email load, and continued happily singing.
     
    ♫
    Gonna be a late night, early morning when I get you home … Gonna give you good love, give you what you want and … Gonna do it all—
    ♫
     
    “ Awww , shit!” he exclaimed, in the middle of his lyrics. “ Helll naww!”
    As soon as his screen showed up, two images appeared in the preview pane and his interest was immediately piqued. He looked at the “from” field and saw that it was from some obviously generic email address, [email protected]. T shook his head side to side. Somebody was all set to throw somebody under the bus. When will these people learn about the company they keep ? he questioned himself, with a smile. He knew the scenario all too well. Friend gets mad at friend and then friend goes to tabloids under an assumed name and tells all the business. Because who the hell has an email address with some damn rinkrink-rink? Yeah, okay . But T wouldn’t ever get tired of it because for every one of these there were many who funded his lavish lifestyle in an attempt to keep their business out of the news. He double clicked the message so that it could move from preview pane and into full view. As he read through, all he could say was, “Shit just got real.”
     
    I have