Timothy by Greg Herren Read Free Book Online

beach, he immediately called the Coast Guard and reported him missing.
    No trace of him was found, until his body washed ashore at Montauk later the next week.
    After the news reports about the inquest—which found that he died as a result of accidental drowning—there were no further mentions of Carlo Romaniello anywhere online. He had apparently gone into seclusion after his husband’s death, and who could blame him?
    I also did an image search for Timothy Burke.
    I remembered that he’d been handsome and in excellent shape, but I was really only familiar with his image on underwear boxes and in the ads I used to see in magazines. But I always figured those had been touched up, Photoshopped and airbrushed. They had also been stylized, so that sometimes you really couldn’t tell what his face looked like.
    But Timothy Burke had been a model long before he married Carlo and became an underwear mogul, and thanks to the Internet, those images were forever.
    He’d done a nude photo shoot for a famed celebrity photographer in black and white, and every one of those images was a work of art.
    He had enormous brown eyes that stared out of the images like they could see into your soul, under perfectly trimmed and shaped black eyebrows perched on a ridge of bone. His hair was an unusually dark black with hints of blue when the light caught it. His cheekbones were sharp and definitely pronounced, and the cheeks below looked hollowed out. He had thick and sensual lips above a strong and square chin with a dimple in the center. His shoulders were broad and strongly muscled, his tanned skin stretched tightly over chiseled and defined muscles. His nipples were round, his pectorals round and symmetrical. He didn’t have a six-pack of deeply defined abs—I counted eight muscles between his rib cage and his navel. His legs were strongly defined and muscular, and even in the nudes he made sure his genitals weren’t exposed—I remembered reading an interview with him once where he’d said that he wouldn’t do full frontal nudity.
    â€œIt’s not that I think it’s bad,” he’d said, “I just like to leave a little mystery, you know? You should always leave them wanting more.”
    Jealously, I dismissed the enormous bulge evident in front when he modeled underwear as Photoshopped—until I realized it was evident in every photo of him in skimpy clothing—whether it was underwear, a jock, or a bikini. Even in jeans that bulge was unavoidable.
    And the back view was just as magnificent.
    I’d sighed and closed my laptop. Across from where I was sitting up in bed, I could see myself in the mirror. I’d kind of thought Carlo Romaniello was flirting with me—or at least showing some interest in me. After all, he’d included me in the lunch date with Valerie.
    But what I saw in the mirror wasn’t in the same league as the man in the images I’d been looking at.
    Obviously he was simply being really polite.
    I turned off the light and slept fitfully until Valerie’s call woke me at six.
    I ordered coffee from room service and got out the South Beach phone book from the drawer in the nightstand and flipped it open to hotels. Obviously, the budget hotels and lower end ones could be ruled out—surely a man as wealthy as Carlo Romaniello wouldn’t be staying at a Best Western or a Motel 6.
    It was far too early to try reaching him, anyway.
    I got out of the bed and took a shower, shaving and going through all my usual morning rituals, and had just finished getting dressed when the knock came on the door with my coffee and yogurt. I took the coffee out onto the balcony and drank it while I watched the gorgeous sunrise over the ocean. It really is beautiful here , I thought as I finished the yogurt, and I know I shouldn’t be glad that she’s sick—but I am, and I’m going to make the most of this day off down here.
    I imagined