Chapter 2

She walked up to him and fixed his collar. “Hmm…Let’s see. Five eleven. Great body. A head full of thick dark hair. Stunning chestnut-brown eyes. Ambitious, intense, and sentimental.” She pinched his cheek. “Yeah, you’re definitelyboyfriend material. You just need to find someone who understands you.” She tugged on his tie. “You know—like a saint. Love the new blazer, by the way.”

Harris glanced down at himself. “It’s not too much?”

She laughed and headed out but stopped in his door. “Hey, by the way, there’s an article on you in the Urbania online paper.”

“About the perfume?”

After months of pitching his new fragrance Erebus, he’d finally landed a deal. Soon, his dream would be bottled up. An American perfumery now owned the brief, and at last, he’d prove to those who’d always judged and condemned him, that he was someone special. Not to be forgotten.

“Well, it’s more about you this time, about how you went from being homeless to being one of the city’s top advertising sales reps.”

“Why do they always have to play that homelessness angle? I was on the streets a few months.”

“Yeah, well, they’ve already dubbed you Hades, Prince of Montreal’s Underworld. Harris, people are gonna be digging up shit on you from now on. You need to get ready for that. You’re about to step into the limelight, my fine man, and as soon as that perfume hits the streets, the fates and furies are gonna take over. You’re gonna be shot to the top, I know it.” She blew him a kiss. “That’s why I’m sticking with you, boss.”

“Are they really calling me Prince of the Underworld?”

“You named your company Hades in Love and your perfume Erebus is named after the god of shadows. What d’you expect?”

“Hades didn’t rule over Hell, you know. He ruled over the land of the deceased, but there were some good people down there with him.” Harris glanced up from his laptop. “He wasn’t the bad guy everybody thinks he is. He isn’t Satan. He’s just the god who got the short end of the straw. Zeus and Poseidon screwed the guy, if you ask me.”

“Ah, interesting. Didn’t know that.” Reshone hesitated in the door for a moment. “Well, maybe it’s time for him to step out of those shadows and show people he isn’t such a jerk, huh?” 2

Harris had to give it to his friend: Charon really knew how to throw a fine party. The man had a talent for putting the right people together in the same room. If it hadn’t been for Charon, Harris wouldn’t have had the right connections in order to break into the competitive world of perfumers. Charon had put him in touch with a well-respected chemist with a nose finer than his, and this man had even donated some of his equipment to Harris—a vintage gas chromatograph Harris kept in his home lab.

“Brother, I got me a serious case of jet lag,” Charon said. They were seated on the high stools at Charon’s corner home bar. Around them, the guests—some close friends and some perfect strangers Harris was meeting for the first time—were getting louder and drunker as the evening progressed.

Harris suddenly longed to be home, in the shelter of his lab. Definitely wasn’t a people person. “So, how was Rio?” He took a gulp of his drink—a deliciously decadent French Chartreuse. Charon made a great living out of collecting art, furniture, and fine draperies around the globe and always served the best imported liqueurs.

“It was fucking hot.” Charon laughed and his green eyes gleamed with pleasure. He was a beautiful biracial man with charm and sex-appeal to spare. “And I mean that in every sense of the word.”

“Meet anybody interesting?”

“More interesting than you?” Charon squeezed Harris’s knee. “That would be impossible.”

Harris and Charon had met years ago on a cruise ship. They’d had a weekend of wild sex and had both believed it would end there. But after crossing paths again later that year at an art exhibit, they’d decided to try something new. Something neither of them had ever shared with another gay man before: friendship. They’d been the best of friends since then.

“Yeah, I stayed with a few people while I was down there,” Charon said. “One of them was an eighty-six-year-old woman. She fed me so well I thought she wanted to cook me.”

“Yeah?” Harris smirked over the rim of his glass. “And how was her grandson?”

“Twenty-six years old. Tall. Sex-craved. With a body meant to be wept over.” Charon winked and finished his drink. “The old lady thought I was staying for her culinary skills.”

“Charon, you’re a devil, you know that.”

“Hey, at least I ain’t straight and leaving fatherless babies behind.”

“Good point.”

They were quiet for a moment, looking around the crowded living room. “Who are these people?” Charon asked after a few minutes.