Blackmail Boy: The Runaway Model, #2.5

By Parker Avrile

A contemporary male/male rock star romance short story complete in 8,400 words...
Carlin has appeared in the tabloids before- as the boy used by his mother to blackmail a  rock star.  Now, all grown-up with a brand new name, Carlin is back to pursue his own music career.
Stoney has been a famous rocker since his mid-teens.  He thinks he's seen it all and done most of it.  But Carlin is special.  He has that outsider sound Stoney had forgotten.
The trouble is, the paparazzi follow Stoney around everywhere he goes-- and Carlin's old identity just isn't that hard to figure out.  
Will Stoney's attraction to Carlin heal him-- or will it destroy him?
A cliffhanger-free standalone story set in the world of The Runaway Model.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paris April Press
• Release date: Nov 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781519936424

Parker Avrile

Like Kyle, I ran away to Vegas. Now I'm running from it. 

Book preview

Blackmail Boy

by

Parker Avrile

©2015 by Parker Avrile & Paris April Press

all rights reserved

CARLIN IS AN UP-AND-coming noise musician determined to overcome his past. Stoney is the rock star who looks at Carlin and only sees his future...

Carlin has appeared in the tabloids before― as the boy used by his mother to blackmail a rock star. Now, all grown-up with a brand new name, Carlin is back to pursue his own music career.

Stoney has been a famous rocker since his mid-teens. He thinks he's seen it all and done most of it. But Carlin is special. He has that outsider sound Stoney had forgotten.

The trouble is, the paparazzi follow Stoney around everywhere he goes― and Carlin's old identity just isn't that hard to figure out.

Will Stoney's attraction to Carlin heal him― or will it destroy him?

A cliffhanger-free standalone story set in the world of The Runaway Model series, this contemporary 8,400-word male/male rock star romance short story is a complete standalone prequel to The Runaway Father. Available worldwide at almost any distributor you can name. Visit the Parker Avrile official website to find out where you can buy it today.

Blackmail Boy

JANUARY 2016

It was his mother's last wish. Carlin shouldn't have let himself be manipulated into sitting on this stage. But she'd always wanted him to try out for television.

And she'd been gone two years now. He'd waited long enough to give her what she wanted, hadn't he? But her death had been so sudden. The new experimental medicine hadn't seemed to do anything.

In that, it was like all the other medicines she'd taken.

But it had been doing something. Something hidden.

To her heart.

He didn't take the chair at center front like all the other kids. He used the ugly metal folding chair as a mark― walked right up to it, turned on his toes, sat down next to it cross-legged on the scuffed stage floor. Not everybody could do that with an acoustic guitar, a violin bow, and a drumstick clutched in his sweaty hands.

At twenty-one, Carlin was painfully aware that he wasn't the youngest man auditioning for the part. He might well be the oldest. But if nothing else, he'd just proved he had the strong thighs of a professional dancer.

You were asked to play one cover and one original tune. The main character was supposed to be someone who could write his own songs. Not that Carlin was under any delusion that those original songs would go unedited by the cable network's songwriter.

The series was set in the early eighties. If Carlin never heard another seventeen-year-old deeply and meaningfully shout out a cover of Eye of the Tiger, it wouldn't be too soon. Ditto for Toto's Africa.

So. He'd decided to cover The Clash's Charlie Don't Surf.

Miguel Winterloon, the director, dressed like he was from France although Carlin knew perfectly well he was from Hackney. Ripped jeans, cashmere scarf, striped shirt. A caricature. Hard to read his eyes behind those wraparound shades. Hard to know if the man even had eyes.

Carlin bent over the acoustic guitar. His long side-parted blond hair fell over his face, making a veil he hid behind. The spotlight wasn't the most comfortable place in the world for him to be.

There was a constant stream of assistants coming and going. He didn't know what they were doing. Didn't much care. One of them brought Winterloon a steaming paper cup. OK, he knew what that one did. The coffee getter. It was a job he'd held himself before.

In a loan office, though. Not a TV studio.

If anybody had noticed he wasn't playing Eye of the Tiger, Carlin didn't have any evidence of it. As if on cue, everyone turned to stare at a side door. A man was walking in, shadowed by two matching bodyguards, except one was bald