Family Camp (Daddy Dearest, #1)(58)

Marcia’s lips thinned. “Yes, Travis, that’s what I mean. How far did this go? Could someone have pictures?”

Travis rubbed one eye tiredly. It wasn’t the drive to L.A. that had exhausted him, or even the Gordian Knot of traffic getting into downtown where Marcia’s office was, nor the fact that he checked three garages before finding one that wasn’t full. No, it was the weight of doom that was sitting on his shoulders. And it was the abrupt end of what had been an awesome week up until a few hours ago.

Geo and the kids—gone. His days with his family at camp—gone. It was like being awoken from a pleasant dream by a bucket of cold piss. All he wanted was to be back there.

But this was his life. And he had to face reality. He made himself consider Marcia’s question seriously. The kiss photo looked like it had been taken near Geo’s cabin. Probably, if he had to guess, it was from that first night, when all they’d done was kiss. The second time, when Geo had given him a blowjob, they’d gone deeper into the woods, into the dark and behind a tree. On Parent Party night, they’d gone up to his room and the curtains had been shut. “Um… if the guy had a phone, it probably doesn’t get worse than this, no. If he had a high-end camera with a three-foot lens and a night scope? It might.”

Marcia made a hrmph sort of noise. “Those photos don’t look that professional to me.”

“Agreed.”

“Okay. Let’s assume that if they had worse, they would have published them already.”

“Or they could be hoping to blackmail me for millions,” Travis said bitterly. It was supposed to be a joke.

“We can only hope,” Marcia deadpanned. “Because, frankly, I’d advise you to pay millions rather than get anything worse out there. But that’s not the point. My friend, Rajit, thinks we can bluff through this if this is all they’ve got.”

“Bluff?” Travis didn’t get it. He felt like his entire heart had been laid bare in those photographs.

Marcia leaned over her desk and swung her computer monitor around so he could see it. She scrolled down the line of photos. “The only one that’s irrefutable and explicit is the kiss one, which is dark and blurry. The others…well. People see what they want to see.”

That one of him trying to comfort Geo when Lucy had been hurt. God, they were sending all sort of messages with their eyes in that one. But at least they weren’t eye-fucking like the one on the baseball field. That one looked like the opening of a porno. Travis felt his face heat. And even so, even in the midst of all this drama, his body still reacted to that image of Geo, to the memory of the way Geo had teased him.

You can’t do that! You’re on my team.

Blood before bros, man.

The corner of Travis’s mouth twitched with a smile while, at the same time, his heart gave a sad throb, missing Geo.

“We can say he’s an old friend of the family,” Marcia suggested. “That you’re just trying to support him because he’s a new foster dad.”

“How did you know that?” Travis asked, surprised.

Marcia waved a hand in the air. “I told you, I brainstormed with Rajit this morning. He needed to know more about the other guy in the pictures. Since you were on the road, I called your sister. She gave me a little info about him. He’s a teacher and just started fostering these two kids, right? That’s good. We can play up your whole foster care background and spin it as a friendship-empathy-good-guy kind of thing.”

Travis felt a spike of anger. She’d called Cindy to grill her about Geo? For fuck’s sake! But before he could even begin to formulate words, Marcia marched on.

“Yes, the photos are suggestive. But if we spin it as an innocent friendship taken out of context, all they’ll remember is that they saw some pics that might have implied something. Everyone’s wary of fake news these days. Denial, when done with utmost sincerity, goes a long way.”

“You mean lying.”

Marcia gave him a warning look. “Well, I guess that answers that question. But yes, I mean lying, Travis. You know, that thing you’ve been doing by omission since I met you.”

Her voice was bitter and she had a point. Travis clamped his mouth shut.

“I don’t suppose I need to tell you that if you’d ever intimated to me that you were gay, I could have been a lot more prepared for today.”

“Not anyone’s business,” he said tightly.

“Well, it’s sure as shit my business now, isn’t it? Anyway, there’s no point arguing about that. Back to the photographs. The kiss one is obviously the most incriminating. But Rajit had an idea about that.”

“What?”

She brought the picture up on the screen. “It’s so dark and murky. And your faces are, well, mashed together.”

Travis grunted. “That tends to happen when you kiss.”

“You can only identify the two of you because of the other pictures. You seem to be wearing the same clothes and you’re roughly the same size, hair length, etcetera, etcetera. But Rajit pointed out that this one could have been staged. Like, if you saw those other photos and wanted to make it look like you guys were kissing, actors could be hired, clothes could be matched.”

Travis blinked at the image. It was so clearly them. But then, looking at the photo made him feel things. Down in his bones. He remembered that kiss, the feeling of Geo pressed against him for the first time. The way they’d clung. How good Geo’s body had felt under his hands, how right.