with his hand propped contemplatively on his jaw, tendrils of his slightly graying hair spilling into his handsome face.
Sterling Crane was a name everyone in the industry had heard at one point or another, but he stayed out of the spotlight he was so adept at acquiring for his clients. I didn’t know why I’d been expecting him to be some surly blue-beard with a curly mustache who looked like a politician from the Hunger Games or something. He had to be around Drake’s age, and Drake certainly wasn’t what I’d consider an older man.
Their age wasn’t the only thing they had in common. The moment I’d met Sterling, it was like all the air had drained from the room. The way he looked at a person made you feel like you were just a squirming microbe squished between glass slides under a microscope. Those piercing blue eyes saw everything, and as intimidating as I’d always found Drake, first as my friend’s absentee father and then as our manager, Sterling was so much worse.
In theory. He hadn’t actually said as much as a cross word to me since I’d started working for him, but it was the way I could feel him watching me when my back was turned that made me feel like prey. It didn’t help that he was stupidly hot too, and the combination of scary and attractive had my daddy issues working overtime.
“Okay, now let’s get Jake in there with him,” Sam called.
I gulped instinctively as his silhouette blocked out the light. Jacob was every bit as intimidating as Sterling in his own right. Sterling was like all the stuffy country club assholes who had made the summer I spent as a golf caddy a living, sweater-filled nightmare, but Jacob was like the bastard spawn of the bouncer at the gates of hell and a bodybuilder. He was a solid six-four without the stacked combat boots he was wearing, with jet black hair and bronze skin covered in faint white scars of varying age. I had no doubt he’d earned every single one, unlike the fakers who notched their eyebrows to look badass. He was about as far from the scrawny rocker stereotype my new aesthetic seemed to be modeled after as a guy could get.
When he came into view of my squinting eyes, I could see the hungry smirk on his lips. The sound of a camera shutter had become a trigger for me, but he ate this shit up, and I was just the latest toy Sterling had thrown him to play with.
Jacob’s gaze traveled over me, darkening with lust even though I was wearing more clothes than usual, since the main reason for the shoot was to sell skintight jeans with more holes than fabric. They looked the way they were supposed to on Jacob, but I felt like a try-hard emo kid who got carried away with his mom’s scissors.
“Alright, let’s see some affection, lovebirds,” Sam coached, watching eagerly. At this point, I was used to shooting softcore porn while rich straight dudes yelled things like “fierce” and “so hot.”
Before I could move, Jacob grabbed me by the waist, his fingerless gloves brushing against my spine as he pulled me against him hard enough I expelled most of the air in my lungs. My arms were trapped between his chest and mine, and when he leaned down to shove his tongue into my mouth, the only thing I could really do was open up and take it.
It wasn’t that I found Jacob unattractive or anything. He was ridiculously out of my league, and while the team of stylists Sterling had hired to remake me in his desired image were good, they weren’t miracle workers. The past few months just hadn’t done anything to heal my heart anywhere near enough to look at someone else the way I still dreamed of Raf every time I closed my eyes.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Sam gushed as the camera’s shutter went off in rapid succession.
At least it didn’t matter if the lights were blinding. Jacob had assumed complete control, manipulating me however he liked. Without me realizing it, he’d backed us against a wall and pinned my wrists to it.
“Yeah, the readers are gonna love this,” Callum agreed. “Do some of that BDSM stuff you did for Variant. Can we get him a leash?”
I grimaced. That photoshoot was the first time I’d ever tried putting my foot down with Sterling, and it had gone about as well