Bad First Impressions. - Ch.01.
212 - Azealia Banks.. bleeding through the speakers.
The beat tore across the water in a bright, vulgar pulse, all swagger and provocation, the bass rolling through the tiled edges of the pool and climbing the trunks of the palms lit in electric violet.
Kevin Dalton’s idea of a party always came with production values. Beauty was arranged, excess was managed, and every corner of the place looked prepared for a camera that was not supposed to be there. Heath had barely been at the bar a minute before contempt set in.
He stood at the bar with one elbow against the polished counter, a sweating glass near his hand, and let his gaze travel across the property with open disinterest. The nearer the spectacle came, the less it impressed him.
The pool cut through the center of the garden in a sheet of lacquered blue, bright enough under the submerged lights to make every moving body look stage-touched. Across the far side, white stucco walls caught splashes of magenta and indigo from the lighting rigs hidden among the trees.
The palms had been dressed in color too, each frond glazed in hot pink or violent blue, their shadows shifting over the paving stones and over the shoulders of guests who wore linen, silk, and expensive carelessness like a uniform.
Waiters moved between them with trays of citrus cocktails and narrow glasses of champagne. Somebody laughed too loudly near the cabana section. Somebody else was already drunk enough to mistake volume for charm. The whole place glittered with private access and public vanity.
Kevin Dalton, one of Calderra’s biggest producers and one of its most persistent collectors of beautiful people, liked to pretend he threw these things because he loved art, connection, collaboration, young talent, old talent, and all the other polished lies men of his category liked to repeat into microphones.
In truth, Kevin loved proximity. He loved to gather faces people recognized, let them orbit his property for a night, and call it intimacy.
Heath watched the crowd and found it aggressively repetitive.
Too many smooth foreheads. Too many expensive mouths. Too many men with cultivated stubble and the same gym-built torso displayed beneath identical open summer shirts. Too many women poured into tiny metallic dresses with hair glossy enough to seem contractual. Even the laughter sounded copy-pasted, each burst of delight trimmed and shaped for social survival.
He took a sip from his drink and let his gaze travel without hurry, cataloguing the night out of old habit. Politicians’ sons. Actresses trying to look uninterested while checking who had arrived.
Two socialites who hated each other standing close enough for photographers. A director with his hand on the waist of a boy half his age. Three alphas in the shallow end of the pool, shirts abandoned, grinning too hard at some joke too thin to hold their attention much longer. Security near the hedge line, discreet and broad.
One exit through the house, one through the side gate, one at the private drive where the cars disappeared behind cypress and stone.
His expression did not change.
“Christ,” came Peyton’s voice beside him, amused before he even turned. “What’s with your face?”
Heath glanced sideways.
Peyton Summers slid onto the stool beside him and made herself comfortable at once, all bright control and social instinct. She wore white tonight, which on anyone else might have read angelic. On Peyton it looked strategic. Gold glimmered at her wrists and throat, contrasting with her swept-back blonde hair. Her eyes sparkled with the thrill she found in flirting with danger, all while feigning that she had simply come over to chat.
“You’re at Kevin Dalton’s party,” she said, reaching for an abandoned cocktail menu and fanning herself with it once. “Private pool, top-shelf liquor, half the country’s vanity metrics assembled in one place, and you look like you’ve been sentenced.”
Heath lifted his glass. “It’s boring as fuck.”
Peyton gave a small laugh. “That bad?”
He looked back out at the crowd. “People here all look the same.”
“That’s because you’re impossible.”
“That’s because they do.”
She followed his gaze for a moment, perhaps to humor him, perhaps to see whether there was anyone worth studying from his angle. Her mouth curved first, then sharpened.
“Yeah,” she said. “No face like Keegan’s.”
Heath turned to her so fast the movement sliced the air cleanly between them.
“Say that again,” he said, voice low enough to make the threat colder, “and I won’t care that you’re a woman, Peyton.”
She did not flinch. Peyton rarely gave men that satisfaction.
Instead she leaned an inch closer, rested one forearm on the bar, and looked at him with bright interest. “I’d love to see what you’d do.” Her smile widened. “I’m a black belt, fucker.”
A short breath left him through his nose, half contempt, half exhausted disbelief. “You annoy me. Genuinely. You’re like a leech.”
Peyton placed a hand over her chest with theatrical injury. “That’s such a vile thing to say. Why are you talking to me like that?”
Heath looked away again, but not before she caught the flare in his eyes, the one she had come for.
Then her tone altered. The frivolity remained at the edges, though something more attentive moved beneath it.
“Did you see what’s been said about Keegan?”
“I don’t care.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I said I don’t care.”
Peyton watched him in profile for a moment, the sharp cut of his cheekbone under the shifting lights, the irritation already settled in his mouth, the black summer shirt open at the throat. When he lifted his glass, the tattoo showed clearly, black ink crossing the back of his hand and climbing his fingers. Blue, pink, and violet light kept passing over him, catching briefly on his skin before sliding away. He looked expensive, hostile, and far too striking for his own good. Peyton had always thought Heath’s face did him favors his character never even tried to earn.
“You didn’t do it, did you?” she asked lightly.
His head turned again, slower this time, and that was worse.
“Shut your fucking mouth, Peyton.”
The music swelled, I guess that cunt getting eaten, and a cluster near the pool shouted along with the lyric in delighted obscenity.
Heath’s stare never left her.
“I don’t want to hear a thing about that dude,” he said.
Peyton’s fingers tapped once against the counter. She let the silence stretch just enough to feel deliberate. Around them, bottles caught shards of neon. Ice cracked in metal shakers. A bartender bent to reach a lower shelf and rose again into pink light. Somewhere behind them, somebody dove into the pool and came up screaming with pleasure at the cold.
Peyton turned her body toward Heath more fully.
“Want me to make it up to you?” she asked.
He did not answer. His expression tightened by a fraction while he measured Peyton against his thinning patience.
Peyton smiled to herself.
Of course he would not leave. Heath never walked away from a thing once it had begun needling him. He stayed, went colder, then gave the argument another few minutes under the illusion that he remained above it.
She lifted her hand.
Her fingers touched beneath his chin, cool and firm, and before he could tell her to remove them, she tilted his face away from her and redirected his attention toward the far side of the pool.
“Do you see who I’m talking about?” she asked.
For a brief second Heath considered jerking away on instinct alone. Then his eyes landed where she had aimed them, and the impulse died.
He saw.
Near the water, beneath a wash of pink and cobalt light, a blond man stood with a drink loose in one hand, the open collar of his white shirt slipping low enough to catch the glow along his throat and collarbones. Gold rested against his chest in a fine chain, flashing whenever he turned. His hair looked artfully ruined by heat, salt, or fingers, strands fallen forward over eyes that seemed half-lidded from boredom or calculation. From this distance, Heath could not yet decide which.
But his attention locked.
The mouth was the first offense. Soft, full, almost insolent in its shape. Then the line of the neck, pale under the colored lights, the loose white fabric falling open around it with enough carelessness to feel intentional. Even at a distance, the man carried himself with the sort of beauty that made a room rearrange its priorities around him.
Peyton lowered her hand from Heath’s chin.
“Well?” she asked.
Heath did not answer.
His gaze remained fixed on the blond figure by the pool, and boredom left him so completely it was almost embarrassing.
Peyton watched the direction of Heath’s stare for a beat longer, then let a knowing little breath leave her.
“He’s an alpha, though.”
Heath lifted his glass and took another sip without looking at her. “I don’t care.”
That answer pleased her more than it should have. Peyton felt the small thrill of fresh trouble and did nothing to hide it.
“I can call him over,” she said. “I worked with him before. Wait.”
Before Heath could respond, Peyton raised her arm and waved across the poolside crowd, patient at first, then more insistently when he failed to notice. It took him a few seconds. He was still half-turned toward the group around him, drink in hand, head bent toward a brunette saying something into his ear.
Then his gaze drifted, found Peyton, and settled. Recognition brightened his face by a fraction. He lifted a hand in return, said something brief to the people with him, and peeled away from the circle.
He glided through the party with a relaxed confidence, completely at ease with the attention he drew. His white shirt flowed around him, light and loose, already yielding to the night’s warmth, wrinkled at the sleeves and softened at the collar. Up close, his beauty revealed itself with striking clarity. His eyes, darker than Heath had anticipated beneath that pale exterior, sparkled with alertness despite the relaxed demeanor.
He reached them and leaned in to hug Peyton. She hugged him back, brief and familiar, their bodies meeting with the ease of people who had once spent too many hours on the same set.
“Long time no see, Jonah.”
“Yeah,” he said, drawing back. “You vanished after Children of the Sun and Moon. What happened to you?”
Peyton rolled one shoulder, as though the answer were too tedious to warrant shape. “Got into a hassle. Anyway, this is Heath Anderson.”
Jonah turned.
The look he gave Heath lasted only a second longer than politeness required, but it was enough to register the measurement taking place. He let the corner of his mouth lift.
“Hi. Jonah Spacey.”
He extended his hand.
Heath took it. Jonah’s palm was cool from the drink in his other hand. His grip stayed restrained, offering neither welcome nor challenge. Jonah understood the choice immediately.
Peyton slid off her stool with a small, satisfied glance between them. “I’ve done my civic duty. You two enjoy yourselves.”
Neither of them stopped her.
Jonah took her place at the bar, turning slightly so one elbow rested against the counter. The bartender appeared at once, eager in the presence of a recognizable face. Jonah lifted two fingers, requesting another drink without breaking eye contact with Heath.
“I heard you were auditioning for one of Kevin’s movies,” he said.
Heath swirled the remaining liquor in his glass. “Auditioning is a generous word. I told him I’d be interested in acting and he proceeded to blast that information across social media like he’d discovered me himself.”
Jonah let out a low laugh, the sound warm with practiced disbelief. “Yeah, Kevin has a huge mouth.”
“So do you,” Heath said. “I’ve seen you on television.”
That earned him a more direct look.
“What makes you say that?”
Heath studied him openly now, the lines of his face, the gloss of light over his throat, the calm with which he occupied his own beauty. “It’s obvious, Jonah. If it weren’t for your face, people wouldn’t have tolerated you nearly as long.”
Heath said it smoothly, without softening a word, and watched Jonah with open interest once it landed.
Jonah’s expression sharpened. The easy warmth disappeared, leaving wit and a far colder kind of attention behind.
“Right back at you, Heath,” he said. “A man raised on privilege deciding he can judge who gets tolerated and why. That’s rich.” He took the fresh drink from the bartender, thanked him without looking away, then continued, “You’re missing the point entirely, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Mediocre people usually mistake access for insight.”
Heath laughed, and this time the sound carried genuine pleasure. “I like you. You bite back.”
“I don’t like you.”
“Even better.”
Jonah took a sip from his drink, set the glass down, and rose from the stool with a movement smooth enough to feel dismissive. “Enjoy your evening, Heath.”
He had barely turned when Heath caught him by the hand.
Jonah stopped.
It was a contorted dance, the tension between them palpable and charged. Heath’s fingers were possessive, claiming Jonah’s wrist like a trophy while Jonah’s expression remained a mystery, his emotions hidden behind a mask of annoyance and intrigue. The subtle power play between them was intoxicating and filled the air with both tension and attraction.
“Wait,” Heath said. “Do you want to go somewhere else?”
Jonah gave a short, incredulous laugh. “No. I don’t want to be near you anymore.”
Heath’s mouth moved with something close to amusement, though it never softened fully. “Don’t be delicate. I throw one jab at you and suddenly you’re offended.”
Jonah’s eyes narrowed. “You are so full of yourself it borders on performance art.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“It means you’re exhausting.”
Heath did not release him. “And yet you haven’t pulled away.”
That was true. Jonah seemed to realize it the same moment Heath voiced it. His gaze dropped once more to Heath’s hand around his wrist, then returned to Heath’s face.
“You’re dreadful,” Jonah said.
Heath’s thumb shifted once, barely there, a movement small enough to be denied if needed and direct enough to make denial pointless. “Aren’t you into that?”
Jonah gave him a look that should have ended the conversation. Instead it lingered. His mouth curved despite himself, unwillingly entertained by the audacity of the question and perhaps by the fact that Heath had asked it without charm, apology, or softening polish.
“A little,” Jonah said.
Heath’s gaze sharpened at once, pleased in a far more dangerous way than open satisfaction would have been.
“See?” he said quietly. “We can reach an agreement.”
Jonah tilted his head and studied him in silence, interest still there now, edged with caution.
“That depends,” Jonah said. “On whether you’re always this irritating or whether tonight is a special event.”
Heath let go of his wrist at last, though only after allowing the contact to remain one second longer than courtesy required. “Stay another five minutes and find out.”
Jonah looked at the spot Heath had held, then back at him, and for the first time since crossing the pool, he seemed properly interested.
