Chapter 4
4
HER
I hummed a tune from Girl Crazy , the only school musical I’d ever been stupid enough to try to overcome my stage fright long enough to perform in, as I rounded the hall. I planned to jump in the shower, rinse off the day, and rub myself down with that new pomegranate bodywash before Corey’s arrival—it had been a birthday present and more expensive than anything I could afford these days, and it smelled divine.
Maybe I’d been wrong about Corey after all. He’d offered to help me study instead of going drinking, hadn’t he? Sure, his attitude about slaves was a bit harsh, but just because Erica Muller was a professor didn’t mean she was right about everything, either. And who knew? As improbable as it sounded, maybe Max Langer’s plan, whatever it was, would disrupt slavery or even end it. And even if it didn’t, Corey would make boatloads of money one day working for Langer, and if I chose to hitch myself to that wagon, I’d probably be able to coax him to see the light—to treat the slaves we would someday own more like the people nobody seemed to want to acknowledge they were.
I shook my head as I rounded the corner of the hallway. What was I thinking ?
There was no “we.” Yet.
Even before I reached the bathroom, I knew something was wrong. The light was off and the door was closed, but I could already hear water gushing out of the tap and into the tub. When I pried the door open, steam was fogging up the mirror. Someone was running the bath. How? Why? This was my bathroom. Nobody else bathed here.
“Hey, what’s going on in here? I need to use the?—”
Before I could switch on the light, I stumbled right into a rather large form crouched by the bathtub. Whoever it was scrambled backward to steady himself. He’d been holding something over the tub, which he quickly, furtively, shoved beneath his shirt. In the process, his hand—his wrist bearing the kinds of abrasions I’d seen on slaves forced into tight shackles—landed on the top of my foot. I recoiled immediately, not because it was unpleasant but from the shock. Electric shock.
“Sorry.”
Sorry? Did he think he’d touched another slave or something? Because that sure wasn’t how he was supposed to apologize to me .
To his credit, though, he realized his mistake quickly as soon as I flicked the switch. “Oh, shit .” He even shrank back for a second but composed himself, running a damp hand through his hair as he shut the water off and scrambled to rise to a height that was as impressive as his audacity.
The only thing I should have been thinking about right then was how to punish him for touching me. But when I saw what stood before me, I was robbed of all thought and speech. In the past twelve hours, I’d spent way more time than I’d ever admit to anybody dreaming, imagining, and—okay, I admit it—touching myself thinking about that guy on the intercom, but never for a single second had I imagined this .
If my father had bought him specifically to torture me, I couldn’t imagine how he could be more gorgeous than he was. Natural sun-bleached golden streaks shot through thick hair long enough to brush his neck, falling carelessly across and to one side of his milky face with its bone structure sculpted and smooth enough for a sorority girl to envy, all topped off by eyelashes so ridiculously long they cast shadows on his cheeks.
And then there was that body.
Shoulders as broad as a football player's were barely contained beneath a thin gray T-shirt that grazed veiny biceps, flat abs, and narrow hips: not massive, not burly, just perfectly and beautifully proportioned; the archetypal masculine shape. I wouldn’t dare look any lower than his waist—yet—but the thought was there. And I was already blushing, because, oh yes, it was there.
Well, it may be a body an athlete would envy, and yet I knew it hadn’t come from any gym. Corey may have had the prestigious internship, but this was a boy—young man, really—who knew what work was. And, I realized with a sinking feeling, given the bruises and electrical burns marring his face and neck, he apparently knew what punishment was, too.
But surely he must have done something to deserve it.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” Yeah, I could have come up with something more intelligent to say, but my brain wasn’t exactly my number one concern at that moment. Something lower down was. Needless to say, the faucet wasn’t the only thing in here that was gushing.
And he wasn’t even done . What happened next just about shattered me. His eyes—that foxy shape, that fiery shade somewhere between amber and gold, that boldness to confound me and a sadness to break my heart—actually lowered for a split second as if his slave training had suddenly kicked in. But he raised them again, however, and formed his full lips into a half-smile—and suddenly, there was the charming, infuriating sexual deviant I’d spent last night sparring with, in the flesh. “Still want that coffee, miss?” he asked mischievously in that rich, slow, lilting accent, the sharp T just ever-so-vaguely New European. “Or was it a massage? I forgot.”
There was no denying it now; no hoping that it was all some bizarre prank or a dream. The proof was right there on his wrist, etched into a metal ID tag on a chain. My mystery guy—the one responsible for my waking up shamelessly wet this morning, unable to function until I reached down to finger the unexpected slickness of my private parts and purr like a tigress at the memory of his voice—was indeed a slave. A shockingly beautiful one, at that. Well, shit. He was a slave, and he had touched me and hadn’t apologized, and now he was standing there, staring me right in the eyes. Had o-chem broken my brain? What was I thinking, letting him get away with that?
“Eyes on the floor, boy,” I said in the most commanding voice I could muster up. That was more like it. I glanced down at the bathtub. “And what were you doing in here, anyway?”
Instead of answering, he extended one long arm, his taut, sinewy muscles flexing beneath his skin in ways that didn’t even seem anatomically possible. He pointed to the book in my hand. “Malchow,” he said. “My condolences.”
“Huh?” I’d been mesmerized by his lips. The last thing in the world I’d expected to come out of them was the name of the author of my o-chem book.
“I can’t stand that pretentious fuck,” he continued. “I swear he must have gotten paid by the word to write that. Hey, guys, why use one page to explain something when we can use ten?”
My mouth went dry. “You—you can read.”
“Yes.” A trace of a smile, an impudent one at that, which was all the more amazing given his eyes were still lowered obediently, though he was still clearly taking in everything as easily as if he’d been straight-up staring.
“And write.”
“Yes.” He was clearly amused at my shock, which was more than a bit annoying. Still, I kept going. I was too in awe to stop.
“And—and do chemistry?”
“And calculus, physics, and engineering. If I were free, I’d be a certified nerd,” he said. “And probably rich, too. But who’s complaining?”
And I thought I’d been blown away last night. Still, a slave was a slave. And I hadn’t yet called him out on it.
“You touched me.”
He shrugged. Shrugged. Slaves didn’t?—
“You going to whip me?”
“I—” His response was correct, logical, and clearly meant to infuriate me. And it was working, of course.
“Ah, I see you’ve met.”
Daddy.
Just like that, the boy’s eyes met mine again. One glance said it all, and even though we hadn’t technically been doing anything improper, we both immediately put several feet of distance between us. But only he looked at the floor.
“I’m sorry, Loulou, I brought him home yesterday while you were in class. I’d hoped to introduce you properly, but I see you’ve already done that yourself.”
Daddy looked from me to his slave boy and back again, with the same question on his lips I’d had when I’d entered. And for some reason, I wondered what the boy was thinking as he studied the bathroom tile—even though slaves weren’t supposed to think anything, and even if they did, I wasn’t supposed to care what it was.
“However, is there any particular reason you were both in the bathroom?” Daddy asked neutrally. Though he clearly expected a good answer. “Loulou?”
“Uh—” I could actually see the muscles in the back of the slave boy’s neck tense in anticipation of whether I was about to have him punished—from the looks of it, for the second time in as many days. And I should. After all, he’d dodged my question about why he’d been running the bath, suggesting that his reasons, whatever they were, were less than pure. Not to mention his behavior had been shockingly inappropriate throughout pretty much our entire interaction.
And yet the last thing I wanted at that moment was for Daddy to know about any of it.
“I-I asked him to listen to the showerhead,” I blurted out. “It was making a funny noise.” It wasn’t a lie. Well, most of it wasn’t.
The boy looked up at me in surprise, but quickly, skillfully, dropped his gaze again before Daddy noticed anything.
“Is that true, boy?”
This slave, though he was likely my age or a bit older, had a man’s body, a man’s shoulders, a man’s everything , no doubt. However, in this house, he was going to be “boy” no matter what, just like all male slaves under about fifty or so. Hell, I’d just called him that myself.
“Yes, sir,” he replied, and though he never looked up from the floor, I could see that not only was he thinking, he was, of all things, calculating , his mind nimbly adapting to the circumstances as they evolved. “Erosion of the gasket in the valve could cause a high-frequency vibration when the water flows past.”
Who knew whether this was an actual thing or not, but coming out of his mouth—and in that accent—it sounded oddly brilliant, like some kind of groundbreaking theory of physics instead of mere plumbing.
To my relief, Daddy looked, at worst, bemused. “Well, we’ll have to get that looked at,” he said finally. “I can’t believe the pipes are going already. This house is only ten years old.”
“You didn’t tell me you were buying anybody new,” I said, borrowing the boy’s tactic of changing the subject quickly.
“I wasn’t sure the sale would go through until a few days ago,” Daddy replied, seemingly pleased to be able to transition to showing off his shiny new purchase. “New Europe is notorious for red tape.”
“But slaves are expensive, Daddy. Aren’t we—” I swallowed. If he hadn’t figured it out already, the slave definitely didn’t need to know about our plummeting financial situation. What the hell was Daddy planning on using this guy for, anyway, when he couldn’t even afford to buy me a daily coffee anymore? I knew what slaves cost. And I knew there was no way in hell this one had come at all cheap.
Daddy paused for a moment. “Foreign slaves are a bargain, Loulou, given the exchange rate,” he said finally, but he paused again as if he really wasn’t interested in sharing the full story behind the boy’s price. The way the boy’s eyes shifted as he pretended to stare at the floor suggested he wasn’t, either. “Both the valet and gardener are getting up there, and this boy’s young and strong as an ox. Can do the work of two, no doubt.” Daddy clapped the boy’s impressive shoulder as if it were something he’d had custom-built. “And educated. Not to the level of a free man, of course, but I plan on finding a use for that, just you wait. Sounds like maybe you already have,” he added with a light chuckle. “And of course, that face alone is worth what I paid.” He grabbed the boy’s chin and tilted it up, and his lip curled back as he obviously struggled to keep from making eye contact with either of us. He’d also gone silent, but it was only proper: he was no longer being spoken to, after all. “I thought he’d be a nice complement to the maid. You can never have too many pretty things around the house.”
Classic. Leave it to my father to buy the most attractive slave he could find and then expect me not to touch him.
The front door slammed. “Hey, Lou!” called an impatient voice. Corey’s.
Heat and nerves and God knew what else had made my hair and makeup even more of a sweaty mess than they had been when I’d entered, but it was too late to do anything about it now. I’d have to grab some blotting powder from my bag and hope for the best.
“You home? I got food. Let’s do this already!”
The boy and I both looked up curiously, and I used the opportunity to slip out of the room because if I stayed, I’d do something I was sure to regret. Or maybe not regret at all. Either way, I didn’t want to find out.
Half an hour later, I could at least say one good thing about my study session with Corey: he’d chosen a beautiful day. I would have preferred the privacy of my room, but Corey had insisted on studying outside to enjoy the perfect desert sun. Or maybe just to be seen. He had plopped himself on one of the pool lounge chairs like some movie star in dark glasses, a half-eaten burrito next to him, apparently having forgotten that I’d requested pizza. As he gesticulated his explanation of how halogens combined with alkenes to form dihalides, he paused to slurp a cola with beads of perspiration on the side. He’d said he would have gotten me something to drink, but he didn’t know what I wanted. As if soda weren’t a fairly safe choice.
I shoved my textbook off my lap with disgust, then headed for the kitchen. Anything to get away from this disaster. Much as I hated to admit it, the slave boy had been right. Malchow’s long-winded explanations were what was making o-chem impossible, and Corey’s grandiose methods of trying to explain it to me were making it that much worse.
“Where are you going?” he called after me. “We’re right in the middle of a chapter.”
“I need something to drink.”
As I walked away, Corey leaned back in his chair, unfazed. “You know,” he called out, swirling the cola can like it was full of fine wine, “if you can’t follow the simple mechanism where the electrophilic addition leads to the formation of a cyclic bromonium ion, maybe med school just isn’t for you. But don’t worry, when you get back, I can try another explanation that’s maybe more your speed. Hey,” he remarked suddenly. “Wait, your slave’s right over there. Just make him get you something.”
Oh, shit. I turned around, praying he’d been referring to the gardener, though I already knew he wasn’t.
The boy had pushed up the sleeves of his gray T-shirt—either an old one of my brother’s or borrowed from one of the other slaves—and was dragging a wheelbarrow full of pruned palo verde branches, which he emptied into a gigantic plastic yard waste bag. Every so often, the sunlight would catch his thick, damp, wild hair, sending shafts of gold shooting through it, and when he reached up to brush it out of his eyes, it went flying in eighteen different delicious directions. Oh, and if that weren’t bad enough, the rest of him was glowing almost ethereally from the work, his T-shirt sticking wetly to his torso, outlining the way his muscles bunched and rippled like liquid gold. And how dare he have a strip of skin show just above the waistband of his shorts and below his shirt, where the tiniest trace of soft, fine, sunlight-colored hair was visible? I didn’t dare plunge my eyes lower, but, come on, I’d gotten this far. I hugged my arms to my body, suddenly flailing with jealousy over the women who must have touched that very spot. Who were they? Slave girls? Free girls? And what had he?—
“Lou?”
“Huh?” I spun around guiltily, realizing I’d been engaged in some serious one-woman foreplay—right in front of Corey. Fucking hell, I was out of breath over it. Goddamn this guy, and no— not guy . Slave, slave, slave. I wasn’t supposed to be wondering about his package, or what he’d done with it, or what he could do with it. I wasn’t supposed to be wondering about him at all . He was furniture. An accessory. A tool. As much as the fucking wheelbarrow he?—
“I told you to ask that slave to get you something to drink,” Corey demanded.
“I don’t—he’s busy.” I gasped.
Corey stared at me as if I’d sprouted a third eye. “So?”
“But—”
“He’s new,” Corey announced like a royal decree, studying the boy with narrowed eyes, which couldn’t be good. “Where’s he from?”
“Not sure,” I said, desperately trying to keep my voice neutral. “His accent is weird, though. He almost sounds German or something. And I think he knows chemistry?”
“Fantastic. A tutor you don’t have to pay for, and he weeds the garden.” Corey laughed at his own joke. “Hey, you! Slave,” he called, shaking his empty can. The boy raised his head and set down the wheelbarrow. I face-palmed. I’d wanted to let him work undisturbed, but I also couldn’t let him ignore the request. It just wasn’t done. “Another. And one for Miss Louisa.”
I cringed at Corey’s rudeness, but the boy, so far, took it in stride, saying “yes, sir” as he accepted the can, kept his eyes down obediently—well, maybe not so obediently, since he was actually checking out Corey’s calculus textbook. Spotting his interest, Corey smiled nastily.
“Louisa says you’re educated, boy. Where did you go to college? Oxford? Sorbonne? Were you Phi Beta Kappa?”
“Shut up, Corey,” I hissed, glancing between them. This was about to spiral quickly out of hand. It always spiraled out of hand with Corey. He’d been like this since our mothers’ book club meeting when we were six when he’d convinced me to help him eat an entire box of sandwich cookies out of the pantry and blame it all on his family’s slave boy. I didn’t know what exactly happened to the kid after that. But I didn’t have to know exactly.
“Simon Schechter, sir?” the boy asked, indicating the book’s author. “I met him a few times, actually. He used to crash on my old master’s sofa whenever they went out drinking in Heidelberg. You don’t want to know the kinds of things I used to find when I cleaned the flat the next morning.” He had raised his head now with the trace of a smile, and I realized that, despite what he’d no doubt been taught his whole life, this guy didn’t have a submissive bone in his body. Frankly, it was hard to believe he’d survived this long, talking to free men so casually. The burns and bruises on his face suddenly seemed to make a lot more sense, and my heart clenched despite myself.
But no. He deserved it. He was defiant. He was disobedient. He was a bad slave. No, he was just bad in general, and it wasn’t my job to care what happened to him. Not like I didn’t have enough problems of my own.
“I studied in Germany last year.” Corey, much to my dismay, was still talking. “I co-wrote a paper on the P versus NP problem with Simon Schechter. It won an award from the International Mathematics Forum.”
“That must have been rough, sir,” the boy replied.
Corey scoffed. “Of course it was rough. Mathematicians had been working on that for two decades.”
“No, I mean not getting credit for your paper.” He pointed to the textbook on Corey’s lap. “May I?”
Corey’s mouth had dropped open in shocked silence. Not waiting for permission, the boy flipped to the biography page, pointing out the award Schechter had won and the year he’d won it—with a different coauthor.
“Ah, it’s probably just a misprint, though, sir,” the boy added, completely straight-faced.
I couldn’t help it. I felt a slow grin overtaking my face. Corey’s face, meanwhile, instantly flushed an unattractive shade of strawberry. The textbook rolled off his lap and onto the grass.
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Corey growled, which told me all I needed to know. “How dare you contradict a free man?” He turned to me. “Aren’t you going to do something about this?”
I looked at the slave, who stood there, defiant, unapologetic, unafraid. Dangerous. “He’s—he belongs to Daddy. I can’t—It’s up to him.”
“Oh, come on, I know you’ve got a switch inside. Draw some blood. Show him who’s boss, or he’ll think he can walk all over you.”
I looked in vain from one boy to the other. I should have been furious that a slave would speak to my guest that way, but instead, I was frantic to think of something, anything, to get us out of this situation. “I-I’ll do it inside,” I said desperately, jabbing my thumb toward the kitchen. As satisfying as it was to see Corey humbled so completely, this was getting serious.
“What were you thinking?” I hissed at him as soon as I slammed the patio door. I was scolding him, but for some reason, it didn’t feel like scolding a slave. It felt, somehow, like scolding an equal. There didn’t seem like there should have been a difference, but there was. “You see what you’ve done? He wants me to switch you!”
He crossed his arms and leaned against the marble island top, glaring back at me. “Ah,” he said. But in his accent, it didn’t sound like “ah.” It sounded more like “ach,” with a guttural little noise at the end that I might have found oddly adorable if I weren’t so furious. “Worth it. Trust me, anybody who uses that douchebag as a tutor is going to end up on the seven-year plan. Don’t tell me you’re dating him, too.”
“What did you say?”
“I’m not going to repeat it. Douche. Dating. Don’t tell me. I thought the meaning was fairly clear,” he said, turning around to the sink, flicking on the tap, and filling a glass. Wait, was he going to—did I even need to ask? Of course he was. All the dishes in this kitchen were off-limits to the slaves, and he knew it. That was why he was doing it.
“It’s none of your damn business!” I sputtered as he knocked back most of the cup and set it stubbornly on the counter. He was clearly daring me to say anything, so I didn’t. And just how that gave me the upper hand, I wasn’t sure. “You’ve known me for less than a day, and you’re a slave. On what planet does that give you the right to question who I spend time with? And for the last time, keep your eyes on the floor!” I snapped because they were enthralling and fathomless and liquid gold, and they were making my pulse race in a way I had no control over. So why, when he reluctantly obeyed, did it make me want to start sobbing? “Anyway, Corey’s not a douchebag. He’s one of the most popular guys on campus.”
“Really? How big is the campus?” He paused and tilted his head a little. “Wait. Corey? Corey Killeen?”
“Yeah,” I said cautiously. “How do you know?”
He shook his head. “No reason.”
“His dad owns every it-restaurant in the city, and we’ve been friends since preschool,” I explained. “And his boss is a tech mogul who got rich by, among other things, launching rockets into space. They’re both going to be over for dinner soon. We can’t afford to piss them off.”
He seemed to consider this seriously. “Well, I’ll say this. If your dad needs money, it can’t hurt to borrow it from somebody too dumb to calculate simple interest.”
A giggle escaped my mouth. I met his eyes again—yes, on purpose this time—and suddenly, we were both melting into the counter with laughter.
He had a beautiful smile.
“I suppose you think you can do better?” I finally said.
“This kitchen sponge could do better,” he scoffed. “I know that textbook he was holding.”
“So what? Corey’s been an engineering major for three years.”
“I was studying that shit when I was sixteen. And I bet he didn’t get his knuckles switched whenever he forgot to carry the one. I never made the same mistake twice after that.”
“But you must have!”
“Never.”
“Come on,” I insisted. Then, after a pause: “Will you show me?”
“How much is it worth to you?” He rubbed his thumb and finger together, a sly look on his face.
“Are you crazy? You’re a slave. You don’t get paid. If I tell you to tutor me, you tutor me.”
“Nope. Not how it works. You said it yourself. Your dad owns me. It’s up to him.”
“Forget it, then.” If I asked him, I wasn’t a hundred percent convinced my father would say no. In fact, the odds were very good he’d say yes, which scared me even more. Was I hoping he’d say yes? And if I was, was it because the boy’s knowledge could save me from flunking out of school, or because I was already melting into a puddle at the prospect of seeing that magnificent body sitting across the desk from me every day while I ordered him not to look me in the eyes and secretly, breathlessly hoped that he would?
Probably better that I didn’t find out.
“Come on. We’ve both got work to do.” I gestured toward the door.
But he didn’t move. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
I couldn’t help it. I followed his gaze downward to where his arms were crossed in front of his chest. Looking closer to where hundreds of small, precise scars were on display, following the trails of his veins.
He must have read my expression. “Like I said,” he explained quietly. “Every time I got a problem wrong.”
I knew then I couldn’t hurt him again. I just couldn’t. “I’ll make up a story,” I said. “Just stay in here until he leaves. It’ll be fine. It’s my house. I don’t care what he thinks.”
From outside came an angry pounding on the door. “Lou, what are you doing in there? Hitting the shit out of him, I hope.”
“Did I mention your boyfriend’s a real charming guy?”
“He’s not my?—”
“Whatever. Look, if we go out there and I’m not bleeding, or if he thinks you’re lying, he’s going to think something’s up. There are witnesses. And then it’s going to get back to your dad.”
I hadn’t thought of that. If Corey told Daddy I’d refused to punish his new slave, all of a sudden, Daddy’s mind would be racing to places it shouldn’t race. But. I bit back a sob, looking from him to the door. Why was I the one who felt like I was about to cry? “But I can’t. I told you, I never?—”
“There.” He had turned, his eyes alighting on the thin bamboo switch, sitting innocuously in the umbrella stand by the front door.
Slowly, my heart pounding, I crossed the room and picked it up.
“Give it to me.”
He’d just given me an order. The irony of it was bitter. Still, slowly, mechanically, I handed it to him and took a step back, but not before meeting his amber-gold eyes guiltily one more time.
What’s one more? They seemed to reassure me.
He closed his eyes briefly. Then he brought it down on his own hand, hard.
But only I flinched.
I opened my eyes to a thin red line of blood glistening on his wrist, perfect and jewel-like, over the old scars. He handed me back the switch, then opened the door to the terrace and held it. “After you, miss.”
HIM
It was a real estate title.
2481 Salt River Boulevard in Glendale. That number, that address, looped around in my mind all day and all night. What was it? I knew it wasn’t corporate headquarters—that was One Langer Drive, reprinted on the envelope’s return address. It was something else. Something Wainwright-Phillips thought was important enough to file away in a sealed envelope but not open. Something he didn’t want to know but also didn’t want anybody else to know.
It had to be where Langer was keeping my sister.
I thought about it the next morning while the green-eyed maid sucked me off. Her mouth was even bigger than it had looked, and I closed my eyes and at least tried to enjoy the sensation of her full lips working my shaft hungrily, licking and kissing her way up and down with little moans of delight like someone had treated her to a crème br?lée. Of course it didn’t help the mood that my back was pressed up against a bag of rice, the individual grains poking into my skin, and the pantry was hot, cramped, and smelled like stale cereal and old dog food. It was far from the worst place I’d ever tried to get my rocks off, but as much as this girl was trying her best to make things interesting, I couldn’t pretend this wasn’t exactly like most slave sex: rushed, clinical, matter-of-fact. Just a way to release tension—to forget, for a few minutes, that life was shit.
And then all of a sudden, nothing was shit because it wasn’t her anymore. It was the other her. Ridiculous reams of curls, huge gray eyes staring up at me, as rapt and dilated as the glossy, pouty, spoiled (virgin?) lips wrapped luxuriously around my shaft, inhaling?—
Fuck. No. Just no.
Shoving the image away violently, I came with a grunt in the maid’s mouth, and she swallowed greedily, continuing to moan her squirrely little moans even as she choked a little. But I wasn’t even seeing her anymore as I zipped up and reached for the door.
“Hey,” she purred, grabbing my raw wrist in a gentle way that sort of broke my heart. “Stay. They won’t be down here for a few minutes.” I turned around. She ran her tongue around the edges of her lips enticingly as if gulping down my entire wad had still left her hungry. But I saw the desperation behind it. Briefly, I wondered if Wainwright-Phillips himself was fucking her—it was rare for a slave girl as enticing as she was to go unused by at least one free man, and our master was the only free man currently living there. But that was unlikely since if she were his favorite, she probably wouldn’t be stuck scouring ovens. And if she wasn’t, that meant she hadn’t been laid anytime recently. It wasn’t like she was swimming in options. The valet looked like he hadn’t had sex in decades, if ever, and the gardener was such a perverted creep that the housekeeper had said they’d had to board up the window of the women’s quarters to keep him from peeping in at them from outside. Plus, the property was sprawling; even the closest neighbors were a half-mile away. She was lonely. In other words, she wanted to form an attachment.
Fuck attachments. It was bad enough that I’d been raised with my sister long enough to know her and love her. It was even worse that I’d known my mother long enough to go feral with rage when she died. I knew attachments. Attachments were why I was trying to figure out the best way to get to 2481 Salt River Boulevard without getting hauled in as a runaway. Why part of me just wanted to take off—hitchhike, steal a car, whatever I had to do. But it would be suicide. For one, I didn’t know the area, and removing the metal chain on my wrist was impossible without the right tools, not to mention being a crime in itself. Worst of all, the minute Wainwright-Phillips realized I was gone, he’d trigger the GPS tracker in my microchip. I’d be shackled in the back of a police van by morning. I might not end up in the mines as a first-time runaway, but either way, I’d be fucked, and no closer to finding my sister.
Attachments were what was going to get me killed.
Horny or not, I’d have to keep my distance from the maid from now on. It would hurt her, probably, but not as much as if I led her on further. I needed to get entangled with her like I needed more welts on my back, and given what I was planning, it was for her own good, too. In the aftermath, she’d be the first person they’d question, and it would only go downhill for her from there.
Plus, there was Louisa Wainwright-Phillips.
Plus? Plus what? An attachment with a slave girl may be stupid, but an attachment with a free girl would be like digging my own grave and jumping into it. So what if the dim-lighting theory didn’t hold up? So what if it had turned out that, despite all my hopes, my new master’s daughter had a body that drank up every kind of light, a body made entirely of soft lines and slow curves, one of those tiny, sexy moles right under her eye, gray irises that reminded me of a stormy day on the North Sea, and more long, thick cascades of curly hair than a guy—any guy, no one in particular—could ever run his fingers through in a million years?
And the smile. When she deigned to let it blossom over her entire face, it transformed her from daddy’s Type A princess, anxious to do everything proper and correctly, back into the carefree, goofy, gap-toothed girl she must still be, somewhere deep down where for some reason she was determined to never let it show.
Not that I’d been looking at her. That would have been inappropriate.
Plus, she couldn’t hum a George Gershwin tune to save her life, and adorably, still couldn’t decide whether she wanted to screech at me not to look at her or giggle at my jokes, most of which, let’s face it, were B material at best.
And rather than hurt me, she’d been willing to risk her father’s wrath. There had been tears in those gray eyes over it. Like I hadn’t already experienced 100 times worse than whatever she could possibly do to me.
And absolutely none of this should matter. Fuck, I was here to save my sister, and getting myself flogged and thrown in a mine for touching my master’s daughter would put more than a slight wrinkle in that plan. At this point, it didn’t matter what I planned to use Louisa for, or how good or lucky I was at doing it. The trouble she could get me in outweighed whatever value she offered. I should have shut it all down after the intercom, for fuck’s sake. Not to mention she was dating Douchebag McQueen or whatever his name was, even though she said she wasn’t. I wondered if he’d fucked her yet. I couldn’t imagine that creep would wait—but maybe she would. Maybe she was a virgin. Or maybe they both were.
And again, why the hell should I care?
Focus, kid. I needed a computer, or at least a phone. And no, not to watch porn, as much tension as I still needed to blow off.
A computer might be easier to get to. It was illegal for slaves to use the internet—too many dangerous ideas there—but that had never stopped me from sneaking online whenever my old master’s back was turned. In the chemistry lab, it had been easy enough. They had satellite images of almost anywhere in the world. If only they had X-ray images; then I could see into Langer’s building to figure out just what diabolical project he had in the works and whether it included my sister. But where to find a computer?
“Hey, you okay?”
I’d forgotten the maid was even there. But even as she reached up to arc her hands around to touch my broad, solid shoulders, her fingers digging into my back, I couldn’t relax. The massage felt good, and it was clear she wanted me to open up to her. But the only two things on my mind right now—my sister and, fuck it all, Louisa—were impossible to tell her about.
“Tell me,” she murmured. “Can I help?”
“Yeah,” I replied with a sudden burst of inspiration. I was good at those. “Maybe you can. How many computers are in this house?”
As she kneaded, she spewed valuable intel. “The one in the master’s office, of course, and the mistress’s laptop and a tablet. And Miss Louisa has a laptop.”
“Where does she keep it?” I asked casually.
“On her desk. But only when she’s home.”
Damn. “Who usually cleans Miss Louisa’s room, and when?”
“Me,” she said, long fingers magically digging out a knot that had been there for days, while I valiantly tried not to melt too far into the touch because it already wasn’t her hands I was feeling anymore. “At two o’clock.”
I gently took her wrist and slid it off my shoulder, easing her disappointment with an irresistible smile and an offer. “You know, I was just thinking you look like you need a break.”