Heartbeat Repeating

By E.M. Lindsey

"If he could keep Avery's eyes on him, just for a few moments, he'd give up everything he had."

It's a deal he didn't mean to take.  It's a deal he had no intention of making, but Avery realizes that being the kept man of millionaire Alejandro Santos isn't too good to be true.  He will, in fact, have every material thing he could ever want.

The only catch is Alejandro's single rule: be there when Alejandro asks for him.

Oh, and there's one other thing.  Don't fall in love.

It seems easy enough considering Alejandro isn't the nicest man in the world.  He's difficult to like, let alone love.  But Avery's heart is almost as foolish as the rest of him, and it does the unthinkable.  It trips and falls over itself the moment he realizes his days with Alejandro are almost up.

There's on a short time left before Avery's going to be let go, and he knows he has to make the best of it.  After all, he's definitely not enough for Alejandro to change his mind and bring down those walls that keep him from ever having feelings for another man.

Right?

Heartbeat Repeating is a stand-alone sugar daddy, holiday novel featuring a too-hot leather jacket, a man allergic to feeling, a sugar baby with his heart on his sleeve, and his sugar daddy who knows what he wants—just not how to get it.  This book contains no cheating and a Happily Ever After.

• Language: English
• Publisher: E.M. Lindsey
• Release date: Nov 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201709068

Book preview

The proper response... is not to curse the darkness but to light a candle.

– Irving Greenberg

Author’s Note

This book wasn’t supposed to exist in the sense that it was not planned, and it was not something I had on my list.  It came to life in the middle of an insomnia stretch, after talking with a friend online about dealing with holiday grief.  This year is worse than some, better than others, but definitely profound for all of us around the world.

I’m giving a content warning here because this book deals with grief after losing a child.  The loss occurs eight years before the events of the book, and is mostly focused on grief-recovery, but please take caution if this subject is hard for you.

This book is also ownvoices in the portrayal of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  OCD doesn’t manifest the same way in people, however most of the time it’s nothing like you see on TV.  Compulsions are real, exhausting, and often lead to maladaptive coping to curb the quiet delusions which are often the root of our anxiety.  This book is not meant as a manual for OCD and how to cope with it, or a textbook of what it’s like for everyone, just a portrayal of what it’s like to live with it. 

While this story is on the angstier side of holiday romances, I hope that the metaphor rooted in the miracle where a single ration of oil burnt for eight nights—giving people hope and strength—comes across.  And I hope there’s a soft landing for each and every one of us this year—because we deserve it.

All my love,

E.M. Lindsey

Chapter One

The Way It Begins

In the car, he takes a breath, and his eyes close. He leans back and tries not to hear the voice of his brother laughing at him as he was leaving the office. Alejandro is subtle to most people—he always has been, but his siblings saw the best and worst of him long before life proved what the worst could actually be. Louis especially, because he’d clung to Alejandro like a shadow when he was little, then hovered like a ghost in his periphery when they were older and Alejandro was too busy to care what his baby brother was doing.

Now, with Louis underfoot all the time at the office, there’s nowhere for Alejandro to hide, and Louis notices even the most subtle shifts in his routine. He supposes that’s expected when you grow up with an older brother whose life is dominated by routines and compulsions that even the most intensive therapies can only take the edges off.

And he wants to pretend like he can remember what normal is supposed to be like, but he’s not really sure he’s ever known. And not just with his OCD or his overwhelming grief, but some days it feels like he sprung to life in a cloud of chaos and discord.

He was born in Derbyshire to parents who had been living there for all of six months after emigrating from Spain. His dad was working on a start-up, getting his fingers in tech, which was new and still a little scary to the rest of the world. Without NASA, it was just science-fiction, but his dad had ideas. He was a working-class man with an engineering degree and a firm grasp on English. It was enough for people to start taking him seriously, but it took more than a few years for him to get there.

Alejandro still remembers a couple of skint birthdays, but they’re faded, foggy memories eclipsed by their homes getting bigger and their cars getting more expensive. He started seeing his future in terms of a company take-over, and his passions fell by the wayside. Those little primary school declarations about what he wanted to be when he grew up turned into funny memories for his parents to tell around the dinner table—firmly rooted in another universe where a quieter, more humble version of him existed.

Some days, when he can let himself think, he wonders if his daughter would have turned out like him, or if she would have fought to keep her sense of self, untainted by the pressures of money and success. She was sweet and bright and perfect—but she would have grown up a child of this world, and he knows first-hand how utterly consuming that is.

He sometimes thinks that what truly broke him was the realization that money and prestige couldn’t protect her or the people he loved from tragedy and loss.  Money can’t stop a single clock, and it can’t bring back the dead.  It can’t fill the hole in him shaped like a grinning three-year-old with her hair in bunches and a smudge of dirt on her cheek.  His entire world crumbled to ashes in less than a year, and the only thing he has left is his name on a building and far too many zeroes in his bank account.

Alejandro knows his life is a mess—that he is a mess—but that’s who he is now. And it never ceases to be painful, the way people watch him and wait for him to either break down entirely, or grow numb to the pain that losing his family caused.

It was yet another way he knew he’d never be able to escape this hell that grief created around him. It was just another reason why he’d offered his business card and a promise of more to a man in a dirty car park with the bright eyes and trembling hands. It was why he had his secretary draw up a contract that was binding almost nowhere, putting a monetary value on Avery’s time with hopes that Alejandro might find someone to finally—finally—fill the silent void, even if it was just for an hour or two a week.

You want this, he tells himself as he sits behind the wheel of his car. He can see the hostess in the restaurant window trying and failing not to watch his internal freak out.

You need this. He bites the inside of his cheek as the words echo around him. He glances out the window and waits until he can count four blue cars. It’s enough to settle the white-hot, painful sparks of anxiety hovering at the base of his spine.

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel as he counts. One, two, three—tap tap tap. One, two, three—tap tap tap. He shifts over and pats his pocket to make sure he has his key fob. He checks the console to make sure he hasn’t left his medication in there. They’re in his small carrying bag that he loops around his wrist. He shakes it to hear them rattle, then he gets out.

Putting his hand into his pocket, he thumbs the fob, feeling for the bumps before he pushes down. The car beeps twice, and he grabs the handle to check, knowing he’ll only check again before he gets in. But this helps. He knows his face is passive—he knows strangers can’t read him. He knows his tongue won’t do much to form words or to settle whatever fears Avery might have the moment he sits in front of him for the first time since they signed the contract.

Alejandro thinks about the first time he saw Avery—the way he was messy and wet and flecked with dirt. He looked like he radiated rays of the sun in his smile, and it was the first time in so many years that Alejandro’s heart skipped a beat. He should have kept driving—if he knew what was good for him, he should have kept driving.

But, Alejandro supposes, he’s never really known what was good for him.  And something about the younger man triggered a feeling in Alejandro that he thought long dead.  A feeling that eclipsed even the strongest desire he’d ever had for Connor.  It was senseless need that was eclipsing all of his rationale, and it had him pulling over into the charity car wash, digging for what cash he had in his pockets, and sending a prayer to the universe that he wasn’t making the biggest mistake of his life.

He’d never forget the way Avery looked when he approached—the slack-jawed, wide-eyed wonder and suspicion.  Alejandro hadn’t even counted the bills he shoved at the younger man, he just kept their gazes locked and hoped he could invoke the same, powerful want, so Avery would be helpless against anything except telling Alejandro yes.

He’s not sure it worked.  Avery had showed up to sign the contract, but there was a tremble in his hands and expectation in his tone that Alejandro knew would ruin them both.  Because Avery wanted more than Alejandro would ever give, and his only hope was that Avery would be willing to settle for less.  He felt like a bastard—because he was one.  The worst kind of man, but he had no intention of changing.  He knew the hell weakness could bring.  He was too bloody intimate with the pain that loving and losing caused, and although he was a selfish prick, he knew it would be better this way.

He’d have Avery—and Avery would have him.  But only in the form of a contract that promised two things: money, and an eventual end.  In reality, he expected the younger man to turn him down, but Avery said yes.  To all of it.  And now here they were.

Opening the restaurant doors, Alejandro’s aware that all the eyes are on him. He’s used to it, of course. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s bearing the Santos name, which is also emblazoned on a massive tower above his building downtown. It’s on products and boxes and letterheads—a legacy in print that means less when the stock market crashes and more when it soars.

He doesn’t squirm under the attention, but he wants to. If this had been his teenage years—before the therapy and the medications really started working, his brain would go to strange places. He’d get stuck in a loop of thinking something was wrong, and he wouldn’t be able to rest or calm down until he tapped his fingers and counted in his head and found every single blue object in his room.  And it’s still like that, sometimes, even if those spirals are fewer and far between.

But those are the days he desperately wishes Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder was the way they always showed it on telly. That it started and stopped with wanting his cupboards organized and his grass cut in even rows. Those are the days he wishes it was just a matter of washing his hands and clicking locks, because maybe he wouldn’t spend some nights starving and unable to eat, with his back pressed to the kitchen cupboards trying to stop the feeling of all the air being wrung out of him by invisible hands.

But that’s just life. It’s his life, and has been for as long as he can remember. And while it got easier with therapy and medication, mostly it’s just living as the person he is and hoping it’s enough.

He would have laughed himself stupid back then, if someone had come along and told him what his life would be like in twenty years. That he’d be creeping toward fifty with a hole where his heart once was and his hand in the pocket of some college kid ready to bleed money from his veins for some semblance of peace.

And the reality is, Alejandro has no idea what he’s doing.  He’s a lonely, divorced man who can’t stand human touch, who just became a sugar daddy.  He’s stepping into a world he’d only heard of in the periphery of his too-rich colleagues, trying and probably failing to look like had has his shit together.  And, of course, he’d asked for this.  He’d set the wheels in motion, had drawn up the contract, had invited Avery to sign. Regret is as familiar and constant a companion as grief, though, so nothing feels alien as he sets foot inside and nods to the nervous woman behind the tall desk.

His only saving grace is that Avery isn’t there yet, so he can get down at least two glasses of scotch to calm his nerves. No one would have known he was shaking apart inside though, because Alejandro has been a master of his outward emotions for longer than he cares to remember. It was his ex’s biggest complaint about him, and he thinks it’s almost ironic that they got divorced for the very opposite reason.

When he met Connor, he was just as stoic as he was now.  He was quiet, he was reluctant to give or receive affecting.  But Connor wasn’t like men he’d dated in the past.  He spent most of their first year together reassuring Alejandro that he wouldn’t need to hide is compulsions or compromise himself. 

Connor was bright and he was beautiful, and he looked at Alejandro like the sun rose and set in his smile. Being with him made sense in ways most things didn’t. Alejandro might not have felt fireworks—his heart beat the same way every single day, but he didn’t need more than that.

And it stayed easy with Connor as time passed. They got married after a few years because that made sense, speaking vows that Alejandro didn’t really envision himself breaking because Connor offered Alejandro everything he was supposed to want in a future. They were well off and something akin to happy. They had big careers and big dreams and the vague notion of family planning in a few decades when it made sense to take those steps.

It took the death of their child to crack Alejandro into a billion pieces and leave him unable to do anything but express the wordless ache he would never, ever stop feeling. And he knew his grief was drowning those around him. He was flailing, but he’d lost the will to save himself, and Connor knew the only way he could breathe again was if he let Alejandro go.

Not that he blames Connor for it—or for this current mess he’s in. He lost all sense and reason long ago, so the day he saw Avery standing there looking like a drowned puppy in the freezing November air, he had no defense against him. He was dripping and sudsy, looking like some Greek god with his hair tied back in a bun and two nipple rings showing through the impossibly thin fabric of his t-shirt.

He looked like a wet dream and an emotional nightmare all wrapped up in one beautiful package. Alejandro hadn’t so much as glanced over at the two women holding signs on the corner, so he didn’t exactly know what he was stopping for, only that he couldn’t stop staring at the hope glinting in the younger man’s eyes.

The rest of the moment fell like dominos, the kind that reveal some intricate portrait once they all fall.

And they’re still falling, Alejandro thinks as he taps out his rhythm on the tablecloth. He has no idea what the endgame is, what the big picture will reveal once they all finally hit the ground. He knows that it’s not him and Avery riding off into the sunset, because he’s not a fool. He’s a walking curse that brings pain and death every time he allows himself to love and care for something.

It’s been a fear of his for so long, and losing his daughter made it feel like every vague delusion his therapist had walked him through were at risk for coming true. Fleeing England, taking over his father’s American offices and losing himself in work has only done so much. It’s helped him bury his grief deeper, withdraw from people further. It’s helped him become this vague shape of a man, who fell for a person standing outside in the winter chill trying to raise money for a trip to Crete. 

If only he was able to offer Avery more than the mess he is.

He wants to blame his disorder for it sometimes, but he can barely do that because Connor had spotted him and looked past all of the things that made him unapproachable and awkward and loved him—maybe for it, maybe in spite of it. He never did get the chance to ask him though, and by the time they were signing divorce papers, he just stopped caring why Connor stuck for nearly two decades.

What little progress he’d gained being married to Connor for all those years had been obliterated by Gabrielle’s death. What little feelings he’d taught himself to express openly without fear that they were going to cause some global disaster had been frozen in ice and buried in the tundra the day she took her last breath.

And with eight long years of living without either of them, he’s sort of settled into whatever man he knows he’s going to be for the rest of his life. Of course, he hasn’t offered more to Avery, and that alone comforts him as he sits at the table waiting to see if he’s going to show up for this date. The day Avery showed up to sign the contract, Alejandro made it very clear what he expected.

Dates, he’d said, and Avery’s eyes—wide and watching—narrowed a little. You’ll get a text with a few hours to change any plans you might have. I will send a car or you’re free to drive...

Avery had laughed, his head shaking. I don’t have a car.

We can remedy that, he’d said, and made a mental note to have someone take this man car shopping. After a beat, he cleared his throat. All I require is that you show up, we converse, and then you go home.

Okay...

And I have four rules, Alejandro went on. He was already tired of talking, but he was desperate to get this over with. The first, you don’t dig into my past. Not online, not through friends. The second, you show up for every date, no matter what the circumstances are. The third, do not touch me. Ever. The fourth, you are not to see other people for the duration of our contract. Simple, straightforward, and he’d expected Avery to balk at every single one.

But he didn’t.

Avery seemed confused, like he had a thousand questions, but he asked none of them. He simply signed his name on the dotted line that held all of his personal information, which would transfer control of his school expenses and every one of his bills, then he took the envelope of cash and didn’t offer to hug Alejandro or shake his hand before leaving the room.

Louis found him sometime after that, sitting in his office staring at the blank computer screen wondering what the hell he was doing. His brother does that sometimes though, and Alejandro thinks he’s trying to catch him mooning over old photos of his lost family. Louis thinks that Alejandro just needs to break—that something has to give and he’ll be able to conjure something like a real, human emotion.

Of course, Louis only ever watches from the outside in. He’s not a man who ever engages in long-term relationships, and he’s never had his heart broken. He can only see what life has done to Alejandro, and he wants to believe that something exists out there that will ease and eventually erase the pain of his loss.

Alejandro lets Louis think whatever he wants, because nothing’s going to change. Life is what it is, his choices are what they are. It’s not coping, of course. Signing a contract and shoving money at a man he has no intention of pulling closer isn’t going to make life easy. But it might make some things bearable.

They will meet here, at Quatre. Or at Luciano’s. They will sit, he’ll drink, Avery will talk. He hasn’t heard it much, but in the short time Alejandro has been around the younger man, Avery’s voice quieted the storm raging in his head. Their initial meeting to sign the contract lasted only