It then appeared Nick had lost his way as there was a spell of time where he was either keeping company with a variety of unsavory characters or on the straight and narrow with an office job.

However, four years ago, Nick Sebring had set up his own shop.

This shop included providing a variety of elite services to an exclusive set of clientele who could pay handsomely. In a very short period of time, he’d made a name for himself in this business of acquisitions, deliveries, security, mediation, surveillance, deep background checks, safe-housing, and information collection, dissemination and safeguarding.

Also in a very short period of time, he’d made a fortune doing these things.

Back in the day, Nick Sebring had been known as the incompetent, unprincipled wastrel younger brother of a successful man. Nick also was known to have a fondness for cocaine and a mind filled with nothing but getting laid and living large off his brother’s back.

He was no longer any of that.

What he was was a dark horse. No one had expected anything of him except, perhaps, the frequently earned title of baby daddy and an early death due to his own folly.

But now, in our world, he was respected and even feared.

And, in the club in the seating area next to mine, he also looked nothing like he used to look.

The few times I’d been on the scene and had the opportunity to see him back then, I’d noted he had been very pretty. Unlike his brother, who was remarkably good-looking in an intensely masculine but entirely offhand way, Nick Sebring had been handsome in a look-at-me way. He’d worn clothes that were loudly expensive, his hair was over-styled and he had a body that was meticulously maintained—not to maintain it, but to get attention.

Now, his black hair was clipped very short, only bits at the top and the front longer and sticking up in appealing ways which invited a woman’s touch to arrange or smooth, no matter how hopeless this endeavor might be (or perhaps because of it).

He was tan, my guess, not due to laying by a pool, especially not now when we were heading out of February. The lines emanating out of the sides of his eyes and around his mouth and the nuance of ruggedness barely contained in the elegant confines of a viewing chamber in the club hinted the tan was because he spent time outside.

His stubble was thick and not groomed. He was not a man who forgot to shave that day or had been too busy to do so for a couple. It had been weeks. Though it was not a full grown beard.

I detested facial hair on a man.

But Nick Sebring’s looked good.