One Night With Gael. Майя Блейк

       Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

      POR EL AMOR de todo lo que es santo! For the love of everything that’s holy!

      Gael Aguilar gritted his teeth and stopped short of invoking actual martyred saints as he listened to excuse after excuse roll off the tongue of the man he was talking to on the phone.

      At the end of his very short tether, he cut across yet another effusive apology. ‘Let me get this straight. You’re supposed to be here, in New York, holding auditions, but instead you chose to go skiing, in Switzerland, and are now laid up in hospital?’

      ‘It was just supposed to be a weekend thing for my wife’s birthday, but... Look, believe me, no one’s more sorry than I am, okay?’

      Not okay. Gael jerked his head back against the car’s headrest none-too-gently. ‘What’s the medical verdict?’

      ‘Leg’s broken in two places. It’s going in a cast tomorrow. Provided there are no further complications I’ll be back in New York on Thursday, to pick things up, but we can’t miss the Othello Arts Institute slot today. It’s been arranged for months.’

      Ethan Ryland, his director, was almost pleading. Gael barely stopped himself from pointing out that he should have known better then than to indulge himself with a continental trip. He also barely stopped himself from uttering the pithy words that would have brought him immense satisfaction right then and there. But temporary relief wouldn’t alter the facts facing him.

      He couldn’t fire the director. Somewhere in the small print of his multipage contract was the perfect excuse for what was happening now, Gael was sure. Had he not had bigger matters demanding his attention, he would have taken the time to seek out other small print, words that swung in his favour, and used them. Hell, he wouldn’t even need to lift a finger himself. That was, after all, why his company had a whole firm of lawyers on retainer.

      But he couldn’t do that. For one thing, embroiling the Atlas Group, the staggeringly successful but still infant global conglomerate he’d birthed with his half-brother in litigation right now would be bad for business. Not only would his half-brother Alejandro take satisfaction in demanding his head on a platter, their Japanese partners the Ishikawa brothers would also have a thing or two to say about the matter.

      The merger between their three companies was barely six months old—as was his personal relationship with Alejandro, following decades of their actively and conspicuously avoiding each other.

      While the business side of their relationship had flourished after a few initial setbacks, personal interaction between him and his brother had taken a two-steps-forward-one-step-back approach. Their once-a-month business meetings had grown decidedly stilted in the past three months and, frankly, Gael was on the verge of deciding it was time to take a permanent step back and run his side of the business from his Silicon Valley base.

      It didn’t matter that he knew the reason why.

      The past. Always the past. And not just his. His mother’s. His father’s—the father who’d been woefully lacking in being worthy of the name. Alejandro himself.

      He pushed the recent confrontation with his mother aside, stepped back from the thoughts of torrid retribution he harboured towards his director, and forced himself to speak. ‘What exactly do you wish me to do?’ he snarled.

      ‘Just sit in on a cast call. You know my work—that’s why you hired me. You also know what you want. It will be filmed, of course, so I’ll see it when I get back. But nothing beats experiencing the raw, visceral performance in person. Tapping in to the emotions of acting is only potent on camera if it’s saturating in real life.’

      Gael exhaled and curbed the urge to roll his eyes at the melodrama of the director’s speech. ‘Send me the details. I will attend this meeting you’ve set up,’ he snapped into the silence thickening in the back of his limo.

      A breath of relief shot from the sleek phone console at Gael’s elbow. ‘Thanks, Gael. I owe you one.’

      ‘You owe me more than one. You owe me a first-class Atlas Studios maiden movie, to be unveiled—hiccup-free—as part of my digital streaming relaunch in six months’ time. Make no mistake: you only get this one free pass. Let me down again and you’ll be out. Is that clear?’

      ‘Crystal.’

      Gael hung up before more useless platitudes reached his ears and instructed his driver to alter their destination. It looked as if he was staying in New York for one more night.

      Activating the phone again, he dialled a familiar number in Chicago. As he waited for his brother to pick up Gael admitted to himself that he felt the tiniest sliver of relief to have avoided the Chicago trip for one more day. Because, contrary to the challenge he’d thrown down to Alejandro a year ago, about his brother acknowledging him as his blood, Gael himself had never been inclined to claim the Aguilar name. No matter that there wasn’t any doubt as to his parentage, the name had never sat well on his shoulders.

      After all, he was a bastard whose mother had tried to cloak his name in imagined respectability by naming him after the father who hadn’t wanted him. Had his mother not pleaded with him, Gael would’ve changed his surname to Vega years ago. But she’d beseeched him—out of the same bewildering devotion to the man she’d chosen to reproduce with, he was sure. And he’d relented. He’d withstood both the blatant and the silent mockery from strangers and gossipmongers from childhood into adulthood for as long as he could. Then, like his half-brother, he’d retreated to the other side of the world.

      The news that their father was once again indulging in the extramarital affairs that had brought Gael into the world had turned his stomach. Alejandro, for his part, after a series of conversations with his parents, seemed a lot less bitter about the whole thing. Not so much Gael.

      And, on top of that stomach-turning news, his last conversation with his mother hadn’t ended well when he’d found out she was entertaining his father’s advances again. Nor had the exchange he’d had with Alejandro lent any insight into why their respective biological parents were hell-bent on perpetuating chaos.

      ‘Do I want to know what you’re thinking?’

      Alejandro’s question, posed after one too many whiskies in his brother’s office a few short weeks ago, slashed into Gael’s brain.

      ‘No.’

      His brother’s brooding gaze settled on him. ‘Tell me anyway.’

      ‘I’m wondering why polygamy was ever banned,’ Gael had responded.

      Low, bitter laughter had spilled from his half-brother. ‘Trust me, I’m a one-woman man, but the same thought has crossed my mind many times about our parents.’

      ‘You know what? I don’t think they’d be happy with polygamy, even were it an option. They’d still find a way to make their lives—and ours—a living hell.’

      Sour amusement had disappeared under the cloud that always accompanied thoughts of his father and mother.

      He didn’t like to lump them together as his parents because they’d never been that to him. Sure, Tomas Aguilar had attempted to make a mockery of a family with his mother when Gael was a child, but that had been more to do with his twisted game to hurt the wife who had worn his ring and borne his firstborn than with love for Gael or his mother.

      His father, his mother...his past...had nothing to do with the issue that confronted him now. And he’d never been one to expend energy on fruitless ventures.

      * * *

      Gael arrived on the doorstep of the Othello Arts Institute late—courtesy of an accident on the Queensborough Bridge—and alighted from the back of the limo in a fouler mood than he’d been in two hours before.

      Not