Beg Me (20 page)

Strange. I didn’t feel rejected. More like baffled. I knew what I saw, and it was clear desire as much as I recognized it in any man. He was the one who’d asked me:
Will you submit to any prince now by your own free will? Including me?

But he didn’t want to help himself to this princess.

What was holding him back? Danielle? He had to know she had her fun with the other guys.

Damn. No intimacy, no whispered confidences. Guess I’ll have to play detective after all.

When the meditation session was over, Anwar asked me—didn’t order but
asked
me—to come with him. I liked his manners. I liked his passing resemblance to the mystery boy in Oliver’s basement who had let me dominate him. He made the effort to talk with me and ask about my background and my interests before he “took what was his right.” He said he had worked as a systems analyst in Brooklyn before coming to the temple.

“Isaac’s the wisest man I ever met,” he confided. “My dad’s a smart guy, but Isaac’s wise, you know what I’m saying?”

So sweet. And gullible.

We talked for an hour, and he seemed unusually shy for one of the princes. At last he began to stroke my thigh, giving me a signal. He couldn’t even bring himself to use their special vocabulary for his sexual demands. “I can give you pleasure,” he said. “I know I can.”

His lack of confidence didn’t exactly inspire me. But I let him lock my wrists to my ankles in this elaborate metal harness, and I allowed him to put the ball gag on me. It was just as well, because Anwar turned out to be unusually talented, and hogtied like that, I got very loud.

I felt his hot breath on my pussy, and then his lips were gently kissing my labia, his mouth closing around my clit. His tongue probed the shallow depth of my vagina. My fingers shook in this palsy of ecstasy, my toes literally curling, and I could
not move at all,
and still his mouth lapped me and lapped me, my face so hot with blood rush, inhaling rapidly through my nose, and he finally granted me the mercy of removing the gag. Oh, God.

Half an hour later he unlocked me, my limbs with their rubbery feel from the released tension, and he fucked me like a jackhammer, deep, rapid strokes. Harder, I told him, harder. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered, panting after he came.

It was the most personal any of the princes ever got with me, the only show of affection mixed with their touted prowess with domination and sexual acrobatics.

God, I hoped he wasn’t mixed up in any of the sideline business. But I didn’t have the luxury of feeling for him. And the truth was, as good as the sex was, I felt oddly hollow when he got up and left, just as I did with the other princes. Isaac and Danielle could create this family atmosphere for the group, but in one-on-one dealings, all their “philosophy” couldn’t lift the sense of detachment from the intercourse.

Maybe that’s what the other girls wanted. Maybe they had come here to stop feeling emotionally attached—or at least to stop having to worry about entanglements and conventional relationships.

If that was true, I learned, it wasn’t true for them all.

I took to regularly using a terminal with the screen facing the window—less chance for someone to walk up and ask what the hell I was doing. Had to give them some more credit. They were much too sophisticated to try a strong-arm obvious tactic like denying you access to news or outside sources of information. That could always be turned around as a criticism. No, they trusted you with broadband up to a point, I’m sure). There were plenty of firewalls and such to protect against accidental virus downloads, but no blocked sites.

Took me a few seconds to get into the page I needed, and it would take a bit longer to cover my tracks. We’re talking steps a little more sophisticated than going into your properties menu to “clear history.” If they had a screen-monitoring program or a keystroke tracer, I was dead.

But no one interrupted me, and no one came for me later. I was in the clear. And my “research” and library privileges helped me justify all my time on the keyboard.

Chip at the stones of a church, and you scratch corporation. This I expected and already confirmed—the mansion in Danielle’s name, etc. What I didn’t expect to find after patient digging was an ancillary expense account with a Caribbean bank for
Oliver.
Oliver, my brief client, friend, and manager of Bindings bookshop Oliver. It was in his name.

There must have been more than four hundred thousand dollars in there, several thousands for each deposit.

And my immediate cold-sweat thought was: I’ve been played. Oh, shit, all this time, I’ve been played.

Had to calm down, had to. It took enormous self-control not to bolt out of there and run for the road.

Oliver? Behind all this?

But that didn’t make sense. Sure, the whole Nigeria trip could have been a wild-goose chase just to delay me and throw me off. But I had told him who my client was. I had been chained up in his dungeon weeks ago, and if he were a killer, he could have killed me then. If you think you’re big enough to go after Ah Jo Lee in Bangkok, you won’t be afraid of murdering his investigator on your home field.

Then I got another shock that threw me—and yet it helped me understand how that secret bank account got started.

I helped prepare the big meal with the other women in the kitchen, washing and chopping vegetables, and as I obeyed Danielle and fetched a colander from a top shelf, I bumped into one of the girls I hadn’t met yet, her hands full of tomatoes from the mansion’s garden. Hadn’t seen her before.

“Hi, I’m Eve Baker,” she said. “You must be Teresa.”

“Hi.”

I smiled and my face froze to hide my reaction. Pretty girl, mocha complexion, oval face framed by short hair, nice smile. Kelly Rawlins.

The same Kelly Rawlins who was supposed to have died with her face bludgeoned to hamburger in a hotel bedroom.

9

W
e were free to come and go as we chose, and it was left to peer pressure and gentle coercion to herd us back for the group regimens, including the curfew (which they never came out and referred to as a curfew). Since I was so new, I expected them to follow me on my trip back to Manhattan, and they did.

While they excelled at sex and head games, they sure could have used a course on surveillance. Two big mistakes. One, using Eve Baker, not knowing she’d made an impression on me in our brief introduction. Second mistake was the guy. All I had to do was to check for whichever shaved African-American head was a few yards behind.

I needed to ditch my tails at some point and go to see Oliver. He was in for a shock when I explained the massive expense account in his name and an even bigger shock when I informed him of the “resurrection” of his lover Kelly. But Oliver would have to wait awhile—pleasure before business.

Violet had come with me into the city. I invited her to go shopping and to play tour guide—no surprise that she dragged me to the Hayden Planetarium. I loved it, actually. Gotta tell you—I loved the department stores more.

There seemed to be a contradiction, though, in the two of us looking at fabulous clothes and handbags when we spent so much of our time in thin cotton robes in the mansion.

“But that’s temple life,” said Violet. “When we go out with the princes, they love us looking fine! They want a princess to have taste, to take pride in looking good. And they make sure we have nice things. We get an allowance—you will too.”

An allowance. What am I, ten?

Bite your tongue, Teresa. Change tack.

“I know I’m new,” I said, “but what if you start to get sweet on one guy? You feel a real connection with just him, and he feels it with you—”

She shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no, no, no. You can’t fall into that trap.”

Trap?

“We have been disempowered and brainwashed into thinking one man, one provider, and then look what happens?” she went on. “Your mom ends up taking the burden.” She looked away a moment, a cloud of bitterness passing over her beautiful face. A note too personal? “Isaac has freed us, all of us. You know guys! They want variety—they can’t help themselves. They tell you they’re dogs, right? But we’re branded sluts if we feel like a change. Now, that’s unfair. It’s natural for us to submit, but in the temple we don’t have to put up with all the BS of being
pursued.
We have our own circle. We have lovers we can trust.”

But
we’re
not choosing. And I kinda like being pursued sometimes. Yeah, sure, with the right guy, but I never had a problem telling a guy gently or bluntly to get lost.

The logic was inverted, bent to fit a shape, rationalizations that you could pick apart. And at the end of the day you can’t explain taste. Or primal desires. I think the girls must have got it into their heads—or been told—that by sharing within the group, there was loyalty to the group. Why would a prince stray if he had variety in the mansion? Or a princess, for that matter? No such thing as promiscuity if you didn’t venture outside.

Which would be great if desire was logical.

She sounded like she was reciting stuff that had been fed to her again and again. And I got the sense that it wasn’t relationship fatigue that had led her to the group anyway.

“So you’re saying you’ve never had an infatuation with just one guy at the temple?”

“Not one guy, no,” she said cryptically.

She linked her arm through mine and steered me down an aisle. “I want to look at hats!”

“Hats?”

“Hats!” she giggled, and then she pleaded in a mock whine, “Hats? Please? Hats, hats!”

“Okay, okay!”

I got another insight into Violet over lunch at a diner. She was looking through a brochure she’d picked up from the planetarium when I said, “I’ve got to ask. What’s all that stuff you’re writing on the blackboard at the house?”

“Just my work. Nobody ever wants to know about my work.”

“I do.”

“Okay,” she relented in a singsong, “but you’ll get bored of it like everybody else, so stop me when you’ve had enough.”

I wiggled my fingers in my direction:
Give.

“I’m trying to develop my own megastructure concept,” she offered.

My face went blank.

Violet leaned forward, grabbed one of the napkins, and started to scribble diagrams. “You’re going to think I’m a real geek—”

“Too late, darling.”

She smiled up at me, tried to cover her laughter. “Hey! Listen up. Okay, a megastructure is an artificial construct, and most people, like, know ’em from science-fiction books and movies, but they really do exist as concepts in theoretical physics. You know what a
Dyson sphere
is?”

“Nope.”

Her eyes lit up as she warmed to her favorite subject. Her small hands with their childlike fingers gestured frantically in the air, mapping an outline for me.

“This is my thing! How do I explain? ’Kay, right. Imagine this, like,
huge
globe that completely encapsulates the sun and the earth. Well, what would you get? You could use the total energy output of the sun! Think of it. Freeman Dyson proposed that you could have these, um, energy collectors that just orbit around to get the energy. But that’s just one megastructure. There are others that are
way
cooler, like a Niven ring.”

“A Niven ring?”

“Yeah, this science-fiction writer Larry Niven came up with it.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar—probably my brother had read his books. He liked sci-fi. Violet drew what looked like square plates on the napkin.

“This is so cool! You have a ring that’s about a million miles wide and the diameter of the earth’s orbit, so that’s, what? Six hundred million miles in circumference?”

I laughed. “If you say so!”

“Okay. You place it around a star, and it spins to create gravity. You have walls about a thousand miles high to keep in the air.”

“Wouldn’t this thing be massive?” I asked stupidly.

“That’s the whole point!” said Violet. “If the world’s overpopulated, on a thing like this, if you could build it, you’d have…”

She paused, and I watched her scribble down equations I couldn’t even begin to work out. Then she tapped the napkin and said: “You’d have a surface area three million times that of earth. It would take ages to fill that up. Imagine the biospheres you could put on it!
But
the thing wouldn’t be stable.”

“Ummm…Why?” I was really out of my league with this discussion.

“It’s not in inertial orbit,” Violet explained (yeah, right—like I understood this). “It’s rotating around the sun, sure, but the center of mass doesn’t move at all. Gravity, like, pulls an object into a curved path as it attempts to fly off in a straight line, right? But with this thing—” She saw me lost in a fog and erupted in giggles. “Poor Teresa! I warned you, honey.”

“I’m interested, I am!” I protested. “I wish I could understand it better, that’s all.”

“That’s okay,” she said, her hand touching my arm. “Like I said, this is my thing. So I’ve been, you know, going over concepts like Niven rings and Alderson disks, trying to come up with my own. My very own megastructure. Gravity’s the main battle.”

“It is for us all,” I quipped. “Why is Isaac interested in all this?”

“Oh, he’s been so supportive!” she gushed. “He says this is just like our rediscovery of our lost teachings, the whole thing of, like, how we’re supposed to live together. Isaac says
I’m
rediscovering our lost sciences—that my work is crucial. He says one day soon, it’ll be the black man who harnesses these great energies and leaves earth behind—because why would we stay? Why should we after so much oppression? All our stolen nations are corrupted and past salvaging.”

Hoooo, boy.

“I don’t know science, but it would take
trillions
to make one of these ring or sphere thingies, wouldn’t it?” I asked gently. “And how would you even build it in space?”

“That’s just it,” said Violet, without losing an ounce of enthusiasm. “There are technologies people don’t even know because they stay so freakin’ illiterate. I mean, do you ever read about new theories of skyhooks or orbital towers in the news? No. Exactly! I’m not saying
we’re
going to be around to see the exodus, but Isaac, he looks forward.”

I gave her a patient diplomatic smile. “What if this isn’t you ‘rediscovering lost science’?”

“What do you mean?”

“Those are your equations on the board, right?” I argued. “You’re the one who’s coming up with all this. I know there’s supposed to be nothing new in the world, but it sounds like you don’t give yourself enough credit. Whatever concept you dream up, it’s going to be your own accomplishment.”

Her shoulders lifted in a self-conscious shrug. “Yeah, guess so. This is boring for you, right?”

“Not at all! To be perfectly honest, Violet, I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“Same here,” she said, and lightly touched my arm again. “The other girls are great, you know what I’m saying? But they can get real bitchy when it comes to my work. It’s like, should I be embarrassed because I happen to know this stuff? And there’s no one I can talk to about it, not even the guys. It’s the only thing about the mansion that…” She clapped her thigh and looked away. “I shouldn’t be whining. Complaints erode the center.”

Complaints erode the center.
A mantra to reinforce discipline.

I hadn’t known her very long, but I needed very little convincing to think she was a dupe in all this. For all her book smarts and genius, she was still nineteen years old. Isaac and Danielle had done quite a number on her. They made her feel special by encouraging her work and attaching a purpose to it for themselves, but they couldn’t prevent the intellectual alienation the girl felt with the others.

You had the ceremonies, the sex, the great house, but Violet cared about the moon and the stars.

When you don’t have at least one person to share your interests, you get awfully lonely.

“So talk to me when you’re bursting with this stuff,” I offered.

“You can’t help me.”

“I can listen,” I countered. “No one else is doing that for you.”

“No,” she admitted. “They don’t.”

“I’ll even try to read up on the subject. They make a
Physics for Dummies,
don’t they?”

“Yeah, I think they do. We might have to get you something simpler.”

“Oh, ha-ha. By the way, this does not mean I will ever watch
Stargate
with you, if you’re one of those.”

“Please!”

Half an hour later, I told her I wanted to fetch a bag from my fleabag hotel and say good-bye to a casual acquaintance I’d made, a tourist girl from Holland. I kissed Violet on the cheek in Bloomingdale’s and watched her take an escalator, humming a Rihanna tune.

I had no intention, of course, of going to any “fleabag” hotel. I was checked in at the famous Chelsea on Jeff Lee’s dime, but I couldn’t let my surveillance tails learn that.

It took fifteen minutes of effort to shake them off, and I couldn’t make it look like I was deliberately ditching them. Fortunately, when I ran for the bus (didn’t matter where it went), they didn’t have a hope of catching up. Or a clue.

I made my way back fast to Fifth Avenue, and the New York Public Library. It took combing through old stories in the
Post,
but I found her in about an hour. The late Kelly Rawlins, dead in a hotel room.

Definitely Kelly Rawlins, but not the Kelly I met at the mansion.

Well, well.

Oliver gaped at me when I breezed into Bindings. I assured him everything was cool, but he reminded me how paranoid they were about him, despite accepting me as “tribute.” No, I wasn’t followed, and, no, they didn’t know I was coming here. Nice to know he cared.

I got down to the business of explaining about his ex-lover. A girl who had definitely
not
had her skull bashed in and been left in a bloody hotel bed.

“When you came back that day, you panicked, didn’t you?” I said, hardly needing to make it a question.