14. Mason #2
“She said I needed to tell you first before I did anything.” He went scarlet again.
“I don’t mean… sex… ” He lowered his voice on the last word and glanced back at the room where we could see Xander and Becca looking at something on Becca’s phone.
Probably the photos from the vacation that Dunny had uploaded en masse to our chat group.
I fake clutched pearls and gasped. “Sex?”
He thumped my arm and it hurt. Seriously, does he not remember I’m not a hockey player?
“I asked Becca to go out for dinner, or something, not sex, just talking.”
“Are you and Becca a new thing?”
He blushed again and dipped his head, drying the mug so hard I’m surprised the logo didn’t wear off. “No, I mean I didn’t tell her, but I’ve liked her since I first met her. Only she was with that idiot Harvey, and then there was the whole Xander-and-you ‘thing,’ and I thought, hell, why not.”
“Look after each other,” I murmured. “Make it work so I get to keep my best friend. Yeah?”
He wrinkled his nose at me then burst into song.
“Isn’t it ironic… ” Thankfully, shoving a tea towel in his mouth was enough to stop that because neither of the Kingsley brothers were born with an ear for staying in tune.
We headed out, with Eli offering Becca a lift, even though her car was right there.
I couldn’t get the damn song out of my head even after a shower and athletic sex that left me boneless.
“Do you think it’s ironic that my best friend has a thing for my brother?” I mused as I cuddled into Xander’s side.
“Yeah,” was all Xander said. “It kind of is.”
Amanda McCarthy-Denning was Boston royalty.
As the oldest daughter of a family who owned hotels, she had money, and her wife, Louise, was a former model turned actress.
They’d married in a beautiful open air ceremony two years ago that’d made it onto the news.
The fact that the McCarthy-Dennings had chosen the Kingsley-Clarke agency for their surrogacy journey was a feather in our cap, but they were also our first real new clients.
One week into being live for business we’d mostly been dealing with clients who’d followed us from the Franklin Agency, but this was something very different.
The meeting had been set outside office hours.
There was a bodyguard who loitered inside the main door, and there was an air of money about them that made my skin prickle.
Neither Becca nor I were worried when their first demand was for absolute discretion.
We didn’t even balk at the non-disclosure paperwork.
That was a familiar thing for us, particularly when dealing with high-profile clients.
We signed at the relevant points without question.
They’d brought a lawyer with them, a thin man with round glasses who’d stayed silent so far, but after the non-disclosure was signed, he was the one who collected the paperwork and slid it into his briefcase.
The meeting consisted mainly of the McCarthy-Dennings explaining what they wanted out of the journey, and I thought Becca and I provided a professional explanation for each step.
First, they would need to check out the information we had on each donor, which was connected to another company that dealt with that side of things.
The only thing they were worried about with that was the fact that a third party was dealing with what they called the sticky side of the situation.
“Can you assure us of their discretion?” was the cornerstone question.
“We worked directly with the medical support when we were with Franklin Agency,” Becca reassured and handed out the glossy brochure full of information about surrogacy from the third party.
“You can look through the options and tell us what level you’d like to sign up to.
Options such as connecting with the donor and the legal side of contact after. ”
“We don’t want that.” Louise looked fearful, and Amanda took her hand.
“We want this baby, or babies, to be completely beyond any legal action. As you can understand there is a huge financial incentive there for anyone with a connection to us to want some of it and use any potential child as leverage.”
“Completely,” I said. “And that’s the full service Kingsley-Clarke will provide in conjunction with your own legal team.” I exchanged nods with their lawyer, and that seemed to be enough to reassure them.
“We have something else that’s a potential issue… ” Amanda paused. “Certain photos have come to our notice, and although we appreciate that you’re part of the queer community, Mr. Kingsley, we can’t help but have certain reservations.”
“Photos?” I asked, although my stomach was already hollowing. Was this a college thing? Becca and I’d never been the hard partying kind, not even at college, but there was probably evidence of parties from when we were young. Only none of them would cause reservations, surely.
The lawyer unclipped his briefcase and handed over two photos, blown up to letter size, and I recognized them immediately from a rowdy walk on the beach, taken by Eli and shared on social media, of me and the other guys on the vacation.
There was nothing indiscreet there, just a group of guys pulling faces and acting like goofs.
Yes, we were all only in shorts, but we’d been swimming, and yes, I was on Xander’s shoulders, but we’d been messing about.
There was nothing out of the ordinary there.
Oh wait, was that Dunny? Shit. He was flashing his bare white ass in the photo and I’d never noticed.
“We understand you are in a relationship with the hockey player Xander Holden.” The lawyer wasn’t looking for a yes or no.
“I am.”
“We have concerns… ” he said and glanced at Amanda and Louise. “About your partner’s celebrity and photos such as these, being connected with my client.”
“I can assure you that every step of your journey will be supported with absolute discretion,” Becca confirmed.
I was glad it was her that spoke as I felt a hundred kinds of awkward.
The kind of clients we were attracting would be coming to us from places like the older stuffier Franklin Agency, and maybe they were right to worry that I’d be part of the celebrity culture with gentle idiots like Dunny with his lack of filter.
If they only knew how much I didn’t want any part of being in the media or becoming public property in any way.
We shook hands after some more discussion over timescales and the kinds of services Kingsley-Clarke would give them, but I must admit I was rattled by the veiled suggestion that a lack of moral character would lead to the client’s privacy being put in jeopardy.
Was that something we should be thinking about?
What level of moral character was going to be acceptable for this company to work?
I thought we could start a new way of looking at surrogacy, a responsible effective and discrete service but also different to the old ways from places like the Franklin Agency who were blatantly unsupportive of same-sex surrogacy and adoption.
Was I fooling myself that my clients would want a more relaxed approach?
Maybe some of them actually liked the fact that the Franklin Agency were so stuck in the past about most things.
If they got the job done, then would clients put up with the passive aggressive bullshit that was dished out to same sex couples there?
I scrubbed my eyes as exhaustion swept over me.
Becca sighed and peered at the picture. “I didn’t realize Dunny was uhm…”
“Me neither.”
She frowned at me. “Maybe they have a point, we should get these photos untagged from you.”
I wanted to argue that this didn’t affect what our new company was able to offer, but it probably did.
Shit.