CHAPTER SEVEN #2
I took a moment to think about what I wanted to say.
“In Alliance culture, we use the term ‘sir’ as a respectful way to address men. For women, it’s ‘ma’am’,” I added, just in case that ever came up.
“But in the Alliance, it’s quite unusual for someone to be called ‘master’.
” It wasn’t just unusual, it was entirely inappropriate.
But telling Xel that wasn’t going to help him learn to trust me.
“So from now on, I’d like you to call me sir instead of master.
” I’d actually prefer him to call me Cole, but the manual had made it clear that wasn’t likely to ever happen.
Stating my request in such a direct and dictatorial way made me uncomfortable, and I felt a strong urge to ask Xel if that was okay.
I wanted his agreement, not just his acquiescence.
But, on the advice of the instruction manual, I stomped hard on that impulse.
My place here was to give Xel orders, and his place was to follow them, the manual insisted.
Any digression from that standpoint would be thoroughly confusing for Xel.
Xel stared at me for a moment, seeming baffled by the instruction. But then he brightened, his shoulders relaxing from their tight hunch. “Yes, sir,” he said, a ghost of a smile on his lips.
I answered it with a smile of my own, feeling relieved that I’d managed to solve the first major stumbling block of the day.
“Okay. Good. Thank you.” But then the next quandary was staring me in the face, though I hadn’t yet had time to see if the manual had any answers to this one.
I wanted to invite him to sit with me, to watch a show, maybe, but at the same time, if he wanted some peace and quiet in his room, I didn’t want to force him to be social when he didn’t have the energy.
“Do you want to…” Nope, that was the wrong question.
Bloody hell, it was difficult to solve any problems when I wasn’t supposed to ask Xel what he wanted.
I was almost inclined to dismiss that rule altogether, as simply being too unwieldy to work with.
But Aiden had placed it as rule number one, and until I understood more about why it was so important, it seemed almost reckless to just disregard it.
“You said you didn’t watch the wall screen at all, back at the hotel,” I said, searching for a sideways opening into this conversation.
“Was that because you didn’t enjoy it? Or was there not a screen available? ”
Xel seemed to fumble over his reply for a moment. “I was not allowed to watch it,” he said eventually. He offered no further explanation to the bland statement. Why was he so cagey about everything? Almost like he expected to be punished for even the slightest infraction.
I felt a cold chill run through me. Maybe that was because he had been punished for minor infractions. If my uncle had found a stray dimari, then deliberately failed to register him, it was most likely because he’d hoped to exploit the man for as much free labour as he could possibly get.
And yet I was still stuck in this odd grey area in which I was not supposed to badmouth Xel’s former master.
Well, even if I couldn’t ask him what he wanted, surely I could ask him why certain things had been the way they were? I might just get the bland reply of ‘Because my master told me to’, but there was a chance he might tell me something more meaningful.
“Why weren’t you allowed to watch it?”
“My master believed that I should be working, not pursuing frivolous pastimes.”
I winced. That sounded very much like something my uncle would say. “How many hours each day were you expected to work?” I asked, wording the question carefully. I needed to get a better picture of his life there, without accidentally blaming either him or my uncle for anything.
“Twelve,” Xel said evenly. “Six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock in the evening.”
I felt a weight settle in my chest. Yes, that sounded very much like the type of exploitation I would have expected from Jacob. I braced myself for the answer to the next question. “And how many days each week did you work?”
“Seven,” he said, and my gut churned as he confirmed my fears. Three years without a single day off. It sounded like a nightmare.
I took a slow breath. “Well, things work a little differently here,” I said, as gently as I could.
“The most you’ll have to work each day is eight hours.
And you’ll have two days off each week. You can…
” I was about to say ‘You can do things you enjoy’, but after three years of being treated very much as a slave, would Xel even know what he enjoyed?
“You can try out some different hobbies on your days off,” I said instead.
“I’ll get you a comm, and then you can download some books to read.
You can watch the wall screen. Or you can go into the city if you want to. ”
Xel regarded me blankly. “Yes, sir,” he said woodenly.
Okay, there was definitely something going on here.
We were misunderstanding each other in a big way.
The only real solution to that seemed to be for me to read the entire instruction manual – and likely ask Aiden a long list of questions at the end of it – but given the length of the document, that could take days.
Wasn’t there something I could do about it in the short term?
Or else, I was just going to resign myself to spending the evening reading while Xel moped in his bedroom, alone.
“You know what?” I said, putting more enthusiasm into my voice than I was feeling.
“How about we watch something now?” I tapped my comm, using it to switch on the wall screen.
I pulled up the latest episode in a series I was watching – a comedy about a pair of ghosts haunting a bakery – then glanced sideways to see how Xel was reacting.
He seemed more surprised than anything. But thankfully, he wasn’t looking scared or upset about it. “I’m halfway through season two,” I said, “but you’ll get the hang of who the characters are pretty quickly.” I hit play on the episode.
“You want me to watch the wall screen with you?” Xel clarified, as the opening credits rolled.
“Yes. Absolutely.” I hoped he was going to like it. If he didn’t, then next time, I’d have to find something different for us to watch.
“You want… my company?” he clarified again. I turned to look at him fully now, a little baffled by his ongoing hesitation.
“Yes, I do,” I said, not sure how I could make it any clearer.
All of a sudden, his entire body relaxed. “Oh,” he said, relief and delight lighting his face. “Okay.” He sat back on the sofa to make himself comfortable, and I smiled, one more minor breakthrough under my belt. We could do this. We could make this work.
But a moment later, I felt an instant wave of regret about having asked him to sit with me.
Because, in the process of letting himself relax, I had a sudden and vivid reminder of the most obvious thing I’d noticed about him when we’d first met.
Namely, that he was absolutely fucking gorgeous.
He sat with his hips tilted slightly and his legs apart, subtly but noticeably emphasising his groin.
He slung one arm over the back of the sofa, giving me a divine view of his shapely bicep.
And his mouth settled into that sultry pout again, as if daring me to kiss him.
Fuck. I turned away, staring resolutely at the screen, though I didn’t have a clue what the characters were doing. How did he make being so damn sexy look so effortless? Especially in those horrible beige clothes. Put him in a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt, and he’d be downright lethal!
I’d had a couple of boyfriends through university, but since the fire, I hadn’t even attempted to date.
It had been hard enough getting people to even want to speak to me, never mind anything so complicated as kissing, or removing our clothing.
But Xel was like one of those jocks who’d been born with the world at their feet.
I almost snorted at the ridiculous thought, remembering at the last moment to hold it back in front of my guest. A slave with the world at his feet? Yeah, right.
But seriously, how the hell was I supposed to sit next to him every evening and not want to jump him? He had an unconscious grace and natural seductiveness that I found completely mesmerising. And the irony was that he probably wasn’t even aware that he was doing it.
I managed to get through two episodes of the show before deciding I’d tortured myself enough.
I used my comm to switch the screen off, then pointedly stood up, collecting my cup to take it back to the kitchen.
“I’m going to head to bed,” I told Xel. “I usually get up pretty early to start checking on the animals. We’ll start at six-thirty, and I’ll show you around and start teaching you what chores need doing. ”
“Yes, sir,” Xel said, standing up as well. He stretched his arms behind his back, his shirt pulling tight against the muscles of his chest. He was standing unexpectedly close to me, and I found myself looking up into ice-blue eyes. My mouth went dry and my heart rate picked up.
But then he spoke again. “I had an alarm at the hotel to wake me up. Is there anything similar I could use here?”
“Oh, damn it,” I muttered, realising how obvious the problem was, though I’d completely failed to think of it.
I opened a reminder in my comm, jotting in a note to order a comm for Xel.
“I’ll order you a comm in the morning. There’s a pretty good delivery service in the city, which means we should have it here by midday.
But just for tomorrow, I’ll come and wake you up at six.
I usually do a quick check on everyone just to make sure nothing’s gone wrong overnight, then I have breakfast, then I start with the real work – cleaning, feeding, doing any repairs.
” I looked up at him again, forcibly shoving my ridiculous fan-boy reaction to him back down into my chest. “Do you need anything before I head off?”
“No, sir,” he said, his voice a low purr. He tilted his head slightly. “Do you need me to do anything for you before you go?”
I felt my whole body flush with heat. If he’d been anyone but a dimari, I’d have taken that husky lilt to be an invitation of the most decadent variety. It had been a long time since I’d even hugged anyone, never mind getting as far as flirting and seduction…
But he was a dimari. A slave. And he likely had no idea of the effect he had on me.
I was going to have to do some serious research into dimari culture, to try and work around his inadvertent come-ons.
“No, thank you,” I said, forcing a smile as I stepped around him.
“Sleep well. I’ll see you in the morning. ”
“Good night, sir,” he said, as I headed for the kitchen, and I had the fleeting thought that he sounded… disappointed? But that couldn’t be right. What did he have to be disappointed about? “See you tomorrow.”