However, I only vaguely considered those thoughts.
I was still stuck on the pleasant deepness of the man’s voice.
I wanted that. I wanted that to let my mind take flight. I wanted the next scene I viewed to be stirring and to use that voice and my imagination to make some fabulous man up in my head who had a pleasantly deep voice who could do pleasant things to me. Then I would go home and create an even more fabulous fantasy with my hand between my legs.
These thoughts in my head, I heard the swish of fabric that was probably him setting aside a suit jacket, and out of habit at the sound, my head turned left.
I took one look and turned my attention back to my phone.
His voice had a pleasant deepness.
His appearance was so beyond pleasant, it was startling.
I waited, not wishing to be caught looking, and Ms. Ross returned with his drink only moments before the window illuminated for the next scene.
Only then did I allow myself to look at him again.
He had his eyes to the window, the drink to his lips.
I looked away quickly. But this time I’d noticed something so I couldn’t help myself from just as quickly casting another glance his way before I again looked away.
I’d been correct.
It was Nick Sebring.
I focused on my breathing, keeping it calm, my eyes to the window, my attention on my thoughts.
In my business, no, in my world, one made it a point to know men such as the Sebring brothers.
On several occasions, I had met Knight Sebring, a Denver nightclub owner who also provided protection and client vetting for a stable of ladies of the evening.
We had no dealings with Knight. He had a niche and kept to his niche, making it clear he had no interest in expanding his operation outside the women he had under his protection. Unless a client was exceptionally stupid, Knight also had little to no problems with any of his businesses. He lived quiet and extremely comfortably with his partner, Anya, and their two daughters.
Some years ago, perhaps seven or eight, Nick Sebring had worked for his brother, Knight. There had been a falling out, the reason for which I was not privy. After this Knight cut his brother loose.
It then appeared Nick had lost his way as there was a spell of time where he was either keeping company with a variety of unsavory characters or on the straight and narrow with an office job.
However, four years ago, Nick Sebring had set up his own shop.
This shop included providing a variety of elite services to an exclusive set of clientele who could pay handsomely. In a very short period of time, he’d made a name for himself in this business of acquisitions, deliveries, security, mediation, surveillance, deep background checks, safe-housing, and information collection, dissemination and safeguarding.
Also in a very short period of time, he’d made a fortune doing these things.
Back in the day, Nick Sebring had been known as the incompetent, unprincipled wastrel younger brother of a successful man. Nick also was known to have a fondness for cocaine and a mind filled with nothing but getting laid and living large off his brother’s back.
He was no longer any of that.
What he was was a dark horse. No one had expected anything of him except, perhaps, the frequently earned title of baby daddy and an early death due to his own folly.
But now, in our world, he was respected and even feared.
And, in the club in the seating area next to mine, he also looked nothing like he used to look.
The few times I’d been on the scene and had the opportunity to see him back then, I’d noted he had been very pretty. Unlike his brother, who was remarkably good-looking in an intensely masculine but entirely offhand way, Nick Sebring had been handsome in a look-at-me way. He’d worn clothes that were loudly expensive, his hair was over-styled and he had a body that was meticulously maintained—not to maintain it, but to get attention.
Now, his black hair was clipped very short, only bits at the top and the front longer and sticking up in appealing ways which invited a woman’s touch to arrange or smooth, no matter how hopeless this endeavor might be (or perhaps because of it).
He was tan, my guess, not due to laying by a pool, especially not now when we were heading out of February. The lines emanating out of the sides of his eyes and around his mouth and the nuance of ruggedness barely contained in the elegant confines of a viewing chamber in the club hinted the tan was because he spent time outside.
His stubble was thick and not groomed. He was not a man who forgot to shave that day or had been too busy to do so for a couple. It had been weeks. Though it was not a full grown beard.
I detested facial hair on a man.
But Nick Sebring’s looked good.
And his clothes were impeccable—not obnoxiously so, but in an understated way. That didn’t mean his sky blue dress shirt didn’t catch on his defined biceps or beautifully delineate his broad shoulders, they did—deliciously so.
Since Tommy, unless it was one of the rare occasions where I was in a certain mood and went out to find a man to assuage that mood, it was unusual for me to have a reaction to a male. Not any of them. It was too dangerous.
No-strings-attached and usually no-names-exchanged fucking was one thing.
But I’d learned my lesson.
Three glances and Nick Sebring drew me. In fact, even sitting still I was finding it physically exhausting fighting the urge to look his way. And I was finding it utterly impossible to get him out of my mind.
Thankfully, a noise pierced this thought and my unfocused gaze focused on the scene being played out in the window in front of me.