1 April 2020, New York City
Ram Milner hefted the core sample, admiring the thick vein of gold going through the rock, before passing it on to the next one at the thirty-fifth-floor conference room in New York's Inter-Continental Marriott hotel on 44th Street near Times Square. From the distance at the other end of the table, the usually inscrutable Douglas Wan watched the young man examine the rock. He wasn't inscrutable now; he was showing obvious interest in the half American, half Thai young man at the other end of the table, and that interest wasn't only in the young man as potential investor.
Douglas Wan, himself a slim, fit, cultured and elegantly dressed half-breed in his early forties, with a Chinese mother and English father, the Wan name and fortune being marks as belonging in high society in Singapore, fit right in at the boardroom level. He was here to gather financial support for the mining concern, Busang Limited, he headed on the island of Borneo. He was very much in his element, sitting at the table, assessing the well-heeled entrepreneurs assembled here, while his minions conducted a briefing for the potential investors.
It was Ram Milner, who would be seen as out of his element. No one who didn't read the financial and social papers regularly would recognize the twenty-eight-year-old, small of stature, but handsome of looks, reflecting the best features of two cultures, young man as a Philadelphia mainline billionaire, thanks to his father's family. But he was. And because he was—fabulously wealthy, known for investing heavily in risky endeavors, and a beautiful young man—Douglas Wan, a man of risk and of appetites for young, exotic men, and knowing that Ram Milner was openly a gay submissive, was very interested in the young man. Indeed, all of the other people at the table had been invited to provide cover. It was Ram Milner who Douglas Wan wanted to seduce, both as an investor in the Busan Limited gold mine project on Borneo and for his bed.
Or possible right here on top of the conference table when the rest were gone, Wan was thinking. He hadn't considered that Ram Milner, in the flesh, was so sexy and inviting.
Ram was not unaware of Wan's double-aspected interest. The young entrepreneur wasn't uninterested in either himself, although he wanted to move slowly on both prospects and he was a bit wary on how this was developing. He was here because of the encouragement of one of the family's financial advisors, the fifty-five-year-old lawyer, Walt Remington. Walt was a gay top, although more circumspect about it than Ram was. Walt had a trophy wife and was step-father to her two girls, and was a millionaire Philadelphian in his own right. He didn't just work for and with the Milner family, but they were major clients of his. His interest in working with them was based in his own interest in bedding Ram, but that hadn't happened yet. He had seen that they were both booked into this hotel, and he was hoping to get lucky. What primarily brought him here, though, was Douglas Wan's interest.
Remington was no Wan. He was older and wasn't in nearly the fit shape as Wan was. Neither he nor Ram knew it, of course, but he didn't hold a candle to Wan in endowments and bedding expertise either. But he'd been working on Ram for some time, and Ram's willingness to come to New York and hear this pitch on helping to finance a gold mine in Borneo convinced Remington that the young man was interested in him. The man certainly had dropped enough hints on what they could do in Manhattan so close to the Chelsea area, a distinctly gay-friendly district of the city.
It was Remington who had built up not only the gold mine deal with Ram but also that Douglas Wan would be a good man for Ram to know and network with, and it was Remington who now sat beside the young man at the thirty-fifth-floor conference room overlooking the Hudson River and the New Jersey shore beyond, perusing the company's prospectus and pointing out interesting—and inviting—tidbits of information to Ram.
A wrinkle in Remington's planning had entered the scene in the muscular, outdoorsman figure of the man who was sitting on the other side of him from Ram at the table and who Ram had unexpectedly brought along to the meeting. Jamal Ergon, a burly Turk in his late thirties, a no-nonsense geologist also with a degree in engineering and an international reputation for mining operation startups, worked frequently with the Milner family on their prospective mining operation investments, so Remington shouldn't have been surprised to see him show up, but Remington had thought he sent busywork in the Turk's direction to keep him occupied elsewhere in the world. The man was much too nosey and independent thinking. for Remington's taste. During the meeting, whenever Ram sent a chart or prospectus page to Ergon, Remington had found a way of pulling it back and putting it under Ram's nose. His only saving grace is that Douglas Wan, sitting and brooding at the other end of the table during the presentation, was casting scowls at Ergon. He obviously didn't like the Turk being there any better than Remington did.
When the Busang Limited briefing team had wrapped up its pitch and the meeting was breaking up, Wan showed an intent to walk to the other end of the table to greet Milner and Remington, but he was waylaid by other investors with questions, and Ram left the room with Remington in tow.
"I thought you should meet Mr. Wan," Remington said, as they moved toward the elevator. Ergon, much to Remington's relief, had left ahead of them.
"I'd like time to go over the mining prospectus first and consider this as an investment. If I'm interested, that would be a good time to meet Wan." He knew, of course, that there were other reasons his financial advisor had for him to hook up with the Singapore business man, but Ram found that suspicious. Walt was entirely too interested in Ram picking up this investment, and, more seriously, why was Walt pushing Wan at him with sexual interest? This flew in the face of the sexual interest Ram knew Remington had in him himself. No, this was a time to move slowly, with his eyes open. Besides, he found, as a submissive, that dominants didn't lose interest in you if you didn't fall into their lap immediately—they liked to have to invest some seduction and hard-to-get in the conquest.
"I'll put this paperwork in my room and then let's get something to eat," Ram said.
Walt smiled. Ram was good with his company this evening. If he could keep them together, that might end in bed and that much of what Remington was interested in doing on this trip will have been achieved. What Wan was paying him to accomplish could come more slowly after that—after he had mastered Ram sexually and asserted even more influence over him than he had managed already. "I know of a good steakhouse on 36th Street," he said. "The Staghorn Steakhouse. And we'd be pretty close to some gay clubs towards the Chelsea area. I know you expressed interest in doing some 'out there' clubbing in New York that you can't do in Philadelphia. There's the Eagle NYC on 28th Street and the even more raunchy Get Punished Strip Club, also on 28th. Or, if you want something tamer—"
"The strip club sounds good," Ram said, as the elevator arrived.
"Great," Walt answered, with a grin. I'll just dip back in the conference room for a minute and then meet you down in the lobby.
This was going great for Walt Remington, he thought. It had been a long campaign to get in Ram's pants, and he could earn his fee from Douglas Wan at the same time.
* * * *
Remington worked at cozying up to Ram at the Staghorn Steakhouse, both in body positioning and in verbal inuendo, but the younger man was holding off. Walt reasoned to himself that this was just because they were in a restaurant everyone with money went to and that the handsome young Thai-American would warm up later, when they were in more of a gay element. The young man had picked out the more raunchy of the suggestions for gay clubs to go to afterward with Walt, hadn't he?
Here to, though, Ram threw Walt a curve when they were out on the street and hailing a cab for the clubbing part of the evening.
"I think I'd like to go to Eagle NYC first and then move on to the Get Punished Strip Club later," he said as a cab pulled up to the curb.
"Sure, whatever," Walt answered. That would cause a problem. The plans were for them to go directly to the strip club, but maybe it would be OK, he thought. It did mean that Ram was up for a club crawl—and that everything was to be in a gay mood—and with Walt, at least at the beginning.
Eagle NYC was rocking when Ram and Walt got there. They had a few drinks and ogled the other patrons, with several of the men other ogling Ram as well. A few got him out on the dance floor and Walt could see that the young man was unwinding. So far so good. Either plan A would work or Walt had a chance to get Ram in plan B himself tonight. Plan C—that Ram would hook up with one of the young, handsome men he was dancing with—was the big fear in Walt's mind. Just when he thought he'd have to think of something to pull Ram out of the club, though, the young man took care of that himself.
"OK, I think I'm ready to go to this other club, the strip joint, now," Ram said when he returned to the table from the dance floor. "Did you say it's on the same street, not far from here?"
"Yes, the same street—West 28th Street. But it's four long blocks east, beyond Penn Station. We should get a—"
"Naw, let's walk," Ram said. "The fresh air and exercise will do us good." He was already calling for the tab. He'd pay. It was his family that was listed among the billionaires, not Remington's. Remington was a millionaire, but he didn't accumulate that by volunteering to take bar tabs. He wasn't dressed for walking in the city at night, but Ram seemed so buoyant that Remington wanted to keep him in that mood. So, if the young man wanted to walk, they'd walk.
When they got to the Get Punished Strip Club, Ram realized what this evening was all about. It wasn't just a gay male club. The stripper shows were for women too, and in a wrinkle Walt hadn't told him about, he found that the male strippers were all black men—black and built. Some of them were young, small of stature, and willowy, though. Immediately, as they walked into the showroom and a lot of the attention refocused from the show on stage to Ram and Walt, Ram realized that he was a center of interest here, because he fit in with the strippers. He was half Thai. He wasn't black or even dark brown, but he was light brown. His small size was from his Thai heritage, but his features were more from the Caucasian side. The resultant package was one of male submissive beauty that rivaled any of the submissive dancing on the stage and interacting there with big, black stallions.
That wasn't the only surprise that caught the young man's attention, though. There, in the front row, sitting alone at a table for three, was Douglas Wan. He had been watching the entrance to the showroom as much as the stage and his face lit up when he saw Ram and Walt enter the room. Walt began to walk in his direction, but Ram followed the usher who was taking them to a table across the room, and, reluctantly, Walt turned and joined them.
They didn't stay long. Walt thought that it was because Ram heated up quickly, an act having started on stage, where four big, black studs surrounding a small Thai guy danced around the Thai as they all slowly stripped down.
"That could be you," Walt leaned over and said in Ram's ear. "That could be you with those four musclemen paying attention to you, although I must say you are much better looking and sexier than that small guy."
"Ummm, humm," Ram answered, his gaze plastered to what was going on hum stage—and thus avoiding Douglas Wan's attempt to get their attention from across the room. Wan was talking to a waiter and gesturing toward the table where Ram and Walt sat, but before an invitation could be extended for the two men to join Wan, Ram was up on his feet.
"Let's go back to the hotel now," he said.
"Now? We just got here," Remington responded. He took a searching look at Ram. The young man was flushed. He looked like he was in heat. Remington thought the dancing and stripping, especially since it featured someone much like Ram—someone who the act was making clear was about to be gangbanged by those four black bulls, assuming how raunchy this club could get—had gotten to the young man and this was his chance to cash in on his campaign to bed the boy. "But, fine, we can go back to the hotel, if you like."
He'd schemed to get Ram here for Douglas Wan, but that could all happen later—they'd be business partners soon enough.
