The Club At Cool Harbor

By Christiane France

A year ago, all private investigator Gabe Muller needed to complete his perfect life was the perfect man. Then he met fellow P.I., Raz Reynolds, the man of his dreams. The attraction was mutual, and they made a date for dinner at Raz’s house. But when Gabe arrived, he found Raz on the patio with another man. Raz said there was nothing going on, but that’s not the way it looked to Gabe. Hurt and disillusioned by what he believed to be Raz’s duplicity, he turned his back and walked away.

Now, their paths have crossed again. The security firm where Gabe works has been hired by the owner of an exclusive men’s club to stop the leak of members’ personal information. Posing as a waiter, Gabe arrives at the club to investigate and runs into Raz who is also working there undercover. Although Gabe is working for the club owner and Raz for one of the club members, their goal is the same. Gabe suggests they temporarily put personal differences aside and share information and Raz agrees.

For Raz, it’s the perfect opportunity to try to convince Gabe what he thought he saw a year earlier wasn’t what it seemed. That’s if Gabe has cooled down sufficiently to listen to what really happened.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christiane France
• Release date: Feb 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386198284

Book preview

The Club At Cool Harbor

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Gabe Muller locked his apartment door, picked up his suitcase, and made it onto the elevator just as the doors were closing. At the next stop, a man got on who vaguely reminded Gabe of a guy he’d met the previous night in the Take Five Bar. If he hadn’t been heading out of town on a case, he might have made an effort to get to know the guy at the club better, but then again, maybe not. Despite a great smile and a cute ass, the dude hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary. He couldn’t kiss worth a damn, and he hadn’t exhibited that special combination of excitement and daring Gabe looked for in a hook-up. In other words, he’d been borderline boring.

Before moving out here to the coast, Gabe knew he’d been practically a duplicate of the guy from last night. With no confidence in himself or his powers of seduction, he’d just gone for men he figured were safe—the low-key kind who were looking for release rather than a challenge or anything beyond a brief one-off. Even the odd time he had succeeded in snagging a real date, he’d usually managed to turn himself into a nervous wreck by wondering and worrying about each tiny detail every single step of the way. Was his hair okay? Were his clothes in fashion? Was he fun to talk to? Was he sexy, or was he just out-and-out boring?

The elevator reached the garage level, and Gabe stepped out, a short distance from his personal parking spot. It had taken time, but at least he’d managed to either lose or stifle most of his old insecurities. He’d even stopped worrying about the unimportant stuff. It had been a gradual process, but now he’d changed to where he was pretty much the person he’d always wanted to be. These days, he could hang with ease with guys he’d once thought of as the big boys—the confident, smart-mouthed types who wore a trace of five-o’clock shadow with pride and had a ton of attitude; the type who had an air of danger and could keep him up nights fantasizing about way-out what-ifs and totally unreal possibilities. Guys like Raz Reynolds, who could make him hard in a heartbeat and fill his mind with the most amazing—

No! Gabe quickly wiped the pictures of Raz from his mind. He had absolutely no intention of wasting one more second of his life wondering about the famous—or maybe the correct word was infamous—affair that never was. Raz Reynolds had been his dream come true; the culmination of every fantasy he’d ever had right there before his eyes in living, breathing color. And if hadn’t been so naïve and trusting, he’d have realized it was all too good to be true right from the word go and saved himself a ton of heartache.

Despite the disappointment, and for a while it had been huge, Gabe’s life was more than good. Moving out here to the West Coast and finding a job with Timpson Security Services had turned out to be the perfect move for him, even better than he’d hoped. Instead of writing traffic tickets and arresting the Saturday night drunks at Roley’s Roadhouse, he was now wearing designer clothes, driving a convertible and rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. That’s when he wasn’t hanging out with one or another of his new friends at the beach or wherever.

Yeah, man, for a small town cop whose life hadn’t gone beyond a beer with the boys or an occasional quickie in the town’s only gay bar, this had been one helluva big step in the right direction. Timpson didn’t do regular security work, like preventing home invasions or patrolling shopping malls. Timpson specialized in keeping the lives of its wealthy clientele running trouble free, and that included handling whatever small annoyances were causing them pain. Such as keeping uninvited guests from crashing their parties, doing background checks on household staff, getting the goods on cheating spouses, and even convincing rejected lovers to back off quietly. During the time Gabe had been with Timpson, he’d done all that and more. He’d dealt with overly enthusiastic fans posing as delivery people, rescued kidnapped pets that were being held for ransom, and even investigated false claims by a small business owner who’d figured out a plan to be paid twice for his services.

In fact, Gabe thought he’d just about seen it all until he was handed this latest case. Now, he didn’t know what to think, except that the new job promised to be anything but boring.

The client who needed help this time was Le Club, the super-classy, super-private, brand new, all gay male beach club at Cool Harbor, located on an otherwise deserted strip of oceanfront property some distance up the coast. So private that very few people even knew about it. Le Club did everything possible to assure their well-heeled and, in many cases, highly recognizable guests complete privacy, however, it now appeared Le Club had a mole on the premises. A nasty little mole with a great big mouth who was apparently busy selling out the celebrity guests to anyone interested as fast as they arrived in their six-figure sports cars, or their fancy stretch limos deposited them at the club’s front entrance.

The owner of the resort at Cool Harbor, billionaire entrepreneur, Teddy St. John—pronounced sinjin—had been frantic with worry when he’d met with Gabe and his boss a couple of days earlier. If the mole wasn’t found and muzzled ASAP, he dreaded to think about the fallout. According to Teddy, Le Club could be sued, lose business and probably have to close, and his own personal finances would take one helluva huge hit. Teddy was determined none of those dreadful things could be allowed to happen.

So far, no really big names had been mentioned and there was nothing too specific. What had surfaced amounted to little more than a few juicy items of innuendo and speculation in the tabloids that had made a few people very nervous. That being the case, Teddy was positive the information hadn’t dropped into the reporter’s hands from a clear blue sky. It hadn’t been idle speculation either; it had to have come from an informed source.

Bottom line was, to use Teddy’s exact words, There was no bloody way, and no bloody how his guests could be exposed to that kind of public embarrassment. He wanted it stopped, now, before any of said guests became aware of the problem and, heaven forbid, began asking uncomfortable questions.

After Teddy left, Gabe and the owners of Timpson Security, Bart and Merv Timpson, discussed various possible ways in which the mole might be caught and quickly disposed of. Preferably, of course, without anyone else knowing. The mole evidently knew the difference between outright blackmail and casually passing something he thought he saw or overheard on to the media, and for that reason, he didn’t have to worry about the cops being involved. So what if he was paid a few cash bucks for his trouble? There was no money trail, so who was to know? All in all, in Gabe’s opinion, a clever way to earn a little extra on the side without breaking the law and with little chance of getting caught.

But, as both Gabe and Timpson’s owners had been trying to figure out ever since Teddy’s visit, how the fuck did one go about catching something that had no more substance than a shadow? Especially, at a place like Le Club, where, despite what Teddy seemed to think, the culprit could just as easily be one of the guests as one of the employees. It wouldn’t be the first time a celebrity had dropped a tiny but intriguing tidbit to catch a boatload of personal publicity. It could be anyone at all, even a visitor or a delivery person. There were no fingerprints or DNA for anyone to check, nothing definite to observe or follow, and nothing solid that might give Gabe or anyone else a lead. All the mole had to do was to use his eyes and drop an interesting hint in the right quarter—an innocent, If I didn’t know better, I would have thought otherwise, remark that might have surprising results if carefully followed up.

At Gabe’s suggestion, Teddy had fixed it for Gabe to be hired on at Le Club as a member of the bar staff. Gabe had worked in bars while in college,