by Lia Lee
"Hello, Miss Madrigal," said a voice she didn't recognize. "This is Forward Edge, and we are requesting a second interview with you. Will you be available today?"
She blinked.
"I... I assumed after the way the first one went..."
"All I know, Miss Madrigal, is that you are on the chart for the second round of interviews. At the end of this interview, you will be awarded two thousand dollars for your time, no matter what the result."
"Two thousand..." she said, her mind reeling from the number. That was rent and groceries and the ability to stay afloat a little longer, to keep her dream alive just a little bit longer. What was she willing to do to make sure that happened?
"Surely that's a mistake, though?" Luna protested weakly. "I was told that it was only one thousand..."
"I am not aware of the details of the offer, I am sorry, but I do see very clearly here that you are meant to be offered two thousand dollars at the completion of the interview."
"I... I see. So when do you want to see me?"
"Are you available to come back to the office around three this afternoon?"
"Um, yes, yes, that should be fine," she said, her mind reeling a little. The person on the other end of the line thanked her for her time and ended the call, leaving Luna stunned.
She tried to stop her mind from venturing towards her first meeting with Forward Edge. She tried not to think about Tucker Keene and those dangerous amber eyes of his. She tried to focus on what an extra two thousand dollars would do, but it already felt as if her body was warming at the thought of his hands and his mouth working over hers again.
He probably wouldn't even be there, she told herself. This was probably just some kind of exit procedure before they let her go from the process. That was all it was.
Despite it all, Luna couldn't help going to her meager closet to find out what kind of outfit she could cobble together. She had shown up the first time in jeans and a hoodie. Maybe things would go a little better this time if she was dressed well...
***
Tucker wished that he had some popcorn. The small dark room behind the one-way mirror had a dozen seats, tiered and upholstered in red velvet. It gave the observation room the look of an old-fashioned movie theater, though Tucker certainly could not remember the last time he had ventured into a movie theater.
The shadowed glass of the window revealed the brightly lit room next door, which looked like a standard empty conference room. On the other side stood one of his staff members, Jordy, he thought. Jordy was wearing a tiny, nearly invisible earpiece, and Tucker toyed with the microphone.
"Testing, testing, can you hear me?" Tucker asked, and Jordy glanced at the window, giving him a slight nod.
Perfect. This was exactly what he had pictured when he had done his planning. Now all that was required was the girl herself, and on the stroke of three, an attractive assistant guided her into the room.
Tucker had remembered Luna being a good-looking woman in jeans and a hoodie, but now his jaw dropped.
She had exchanged the hoodie and the jeans for a dress, but what a dress it was. It was a soft lilac gray, a shade that somehow made her dark red hair glow and her green eyes look enormous and vivid. It clung to her figure, revealing a surprisingly tiny waist and wide hips that made his hands itch to grab. It gave her skin a creamy glow, and he had to shake his head to clear it of the sudden urge he had to simply walk through the door and take her in his arms again.
Then he settled back into his chair, listening carefully to the initial words that were being spoken in the room as Jordy greeted her and told her that this was standard protocol before she was given her due.
He could tell that Luna looked nervous, tugging on the sleeve of her dress, her smile a touch uncertain. There was something endearing about it that made him feel protective and predatory all at once, and he settled back in to watch her.
***
When Jordy greeted her and Tucker was nowhere in sight, Luna felt a rush of relief. This felt more like a normal interview, albeit still an interview for a strange job that she did not totally understand. She still felt as if there were a conversation going on over her head, as if there was some clue that she was missing, but the questions that Jordy was asking were simple enough. She had answered them before, but confirmation never hurt, and as long as they gave her the cash that they had promised at the end, it would all be worth it, no matter how many times she answered the questions about her family's history.
It was all going so well, and then, for a single strange moment, Jordy seemed almost to look through her, as if he were focusing on something that wasn't there. Before she could get too unnerved, he smiled at her again.
"Can you state whether you prefer showers or baths?" he asked, and she blinked.
There was something strange about that question, and though she studied his face cautiously, Jordy's face gave nothing away.
"Um, I guess I generally take showers in the morning, but if I had my way, I would take baths all the time."
"What do you like about them?"
"I... Baths? I like the fact that the warmth seems to really soak into you, and that it gets some of the worst parts of the day out, I guess. I like to bathe at night, if that helps."
"Of course it does," Jordy said smoothly, and then he was asking that question about her family's cancer history again, making her wonder if she had just imagined it all after all.
"Have you ever kissed another woman?"
The question made her gape, and she stared at the man. Jordy, for his part, stared back with completely blank curiosity, and she swallowed hard, narrowing her eyes.
"Can you tell me exactly how this relates to whatever it is that Forward Edge wants me to do?" she asked, and there was that strange pause again, as if he were looking not at her but through her.
"Never mind that, Miss Madrigal," Jordy said. "We are just trying to get a good baseline for your experiences, to make sure that we know what we need to know. So if you will simply answer the question?"
Luna glared at him, deciding that she did not care for him at all. There was a fluttery feeling of anxiety in her chest, but she quashed it down to stare at him as haughtily as she could.
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have never done anything... anything sexual or romantic with another woman," she said, and to her relief, Jordy simply made a tick on the paper in front of him and continued.
This time she was not lulled into a false sense of security, and when he twitched again, she knew that something was going on.
"All right, Miss Madrigal, we are almost done. Now can you describe how you pleasure yourself?"
She froze at the sheer absurdity of the question. Surely he didn't mean...
""Excuse me?" Her voice didn't feel as if it quite belonged to her. It trembled, and then on the last syllable, it hissed. She could feel the rage inside her coil up like a serpent, ready to rear back, ready to strike.
"The question is quite clear, Miss Madrigal," said Jordy, who managed to sound disapproving without creasing a single muscle on his face. "Simply explain, in as much detail as possible, how you pleasure yourself."
Luna sat in silence for a moment, and she felt as if she were frozen in time. A dozen possibilities spread out in front of her regarding how she could respond to this. She could storm out, she could burst into tears, she could simply start swearing at the top of her lungs. That all sounded very good. Then she decided that the best response was a direct one, and with a low growl, she lunged across the table.
Jordy flinched back as if she was going to strike him. Given the nature of the questions that he had been asking her, that was a legitimate thing to worry about. However, though her hand darted for his head, she was not trying to slap him. Instead her fingers, trained from long hours on the jewelry bench, shot out, pincer-like, and in the space of a second, she had retrieved the item she thought she had glimpsed in his ear.
It was, as she had begun to suspect, a tiny speaker that
allowed him to receive messages from someone he couldn't see. However, just because the person speaking couldn't be seen didn't mean that he couldn't see them. Her eyes shot to the one-way mirror, and with a snarl on her face, she strode to the door that led to that room.
Now Jordy was shouting after her that she was certainly not allowed in there, but she had no time to care about the fact that he seemed to have suddenly grown a personality.
Instead, Luna threw the door open, ready to give whoever was behind the glass a piece of her mind. She was so full of her own rage that she barely noticed that there was someone in front of her before she barreled straight into them. One moment, she was charging ahead full of righteous rage, and the next moment, she was running head first into a solid mass of muscle. The arms that wrapped around her felt incredibly safe and warm and familiar, but she fought against it. This was no place for things that felt safe and warm and familiar, was it?
Then Luna pulled back and gazed up into a pair of bright amber eyes and a triumphant grin that made her somehow weak at the knees.
"Well," he said, his voice soft and sleek as velvet. "I guess I've found the mother of my child."
WHAT?
Chapter Five
Luna rubbed her head hard as Tucker watched her. She still couldn't get over what had happened that afternoon, what was going to happen now. She could feel an ache rising up behind her eyes, as if there was a headache coming on, but she refused to look weak or frail in front of this man. Looking weak or frail in front of Tucker Keene, she decided, was decidedly a mistake.
“But why?” she asked, aware that she sounded slightly hapless. “Why do you need someone to do this at all?”
“I believe the paperwork made everything quite clear,” Tucker said with what was, for him, extreme patience. “You are going to act as a surrogate, and you will carry my child. After that child is born, you will be given your pay in exchange for relinquishing all custody of that child to me.”
“Yes, with that ugly little rider stating that if the kid's a boy, there's a bonus in it for me, right,” she said, unable to hide her distaste at the idea. “But what you haven't told me is why. Why do you need a surrogate?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. Ever since his little bombshell a few hours ago, she had gotten a very quick but very thorough education on Tucker and what he did. It was hard to understand that she was sitting across the desk from one of the most rich and powerful men in the country, but there it was. The fact that this man could buy her city block a thousand times over felt incredibly abstract to her. Instead, she concentrated on trying to understand the inch-thick wad of papers in front of her.
“You mean, why don't I adopt, why don't I simply get married and have children the old-fashioned way, why don't I do something that does not involve impregnating a surrogate in exchange for what I remind you is an obscene amount of money?”
“I know how much money this is,” Luna said, shaking her head. “Believe me, I know, and I know what a million dollars could do for me. It's just... why? Why, when there are so many other ways to get what you want?”
He stood and started to pace. She had another moment to realize how very tall he was. He looked every inch the rich and powerful man he was as he turned towards the window, looking out over the city that sprawled below.
“Because the name of the game is control, Luna,” he said, and there was a thread of iron that ran through his voice. “Because at the end of the day, in any of those other situations, someone else would have a claim to the child in question. That is abhorrent to me. What I want is to have a child that is completely mine, that I will raise and care for.”
Luna stared at his back, her head tilted to one side.
“That sounds...”
“Creepy?”
He glanced over her with a slight smirk. She could see where that smirk had gotten him just about everything that he wanted from women in the past. She could feel her own heart start to beat a little faster, and she told herself that that was foolish and dangerous to say the least.
“No,” Luna said when she knew that she could speak without her voice trembling at all. “Just lonely.”
There was a split second there where the charming mask cracked and she glimpsed something that seemed real, perhaps a little too real, underneath. Luna caught a moment of doubt, a moment of hesitation and something that looked like a great deal like longing underneath before he hid it away again.
“I am sure you know what this could mean for you,” he said smoothly, as if they had not had that small divergence. “With a million dollars, you could start that... what was it that you wanted, a candy shop or florist or something like that?”
“I want to start my own line of jewelry,” she said, refusing to back down from his condescending smile. “It's what I've always wanted and yes, a million dollars would absolutely get me there.”
“So what's the problem?” he asked. “Sign the damn paper and we can get on with things.”
Luna could have torn her hair out at his flippancy. Didn't he know what this all meant? He was proposing to change both of their lives forever, to actually create another life, and all he could say was for her to get on with it? She could have shouted at him, but she had the idea that many people shouted at Tucker, and it made no difference at all.
But...
She did want her jewelry store. She did want to realize a vision that she knew all too well would only come with having enough cash and enough credit to get her where she needed to go. She was painfully aware that if she let this deal go by, she might be looking at years, even decades of poverty before she could even begin to realize her dream. She knew all of that, but if it was only that, she might have chosen to walk away anyway. After all, she had been prepared to simply be poor until her dream was realized anyway. She had starved before.
The thing that truly kept her from doing that, however, the thing that made her pull back from simply rejecting all of this outright for the lunacy it was, was that touch of longing in Tucker's eyes. There was something there that spoke to her, that called to her, that told her that there was more to this man than the simple arrogance he had shown her, that she guessed he showed the rest of the world as well.
“Tell me something first,” she said. “Do you want to be a good father?”
He looked at her, and he was frankly shocked.
“It's not a hard question,” she said. “Will you love a child? No matter what else, will you fight for your child and make sure that he or she has the best, and that they feel loved and supported no matter what?”
Luna wasn't sure what she was looking for in that moment. However, in that unguarded moment, she knew that no one had dared ask Tucker Keene this question before. She knew that no one had ever questioned him like this, and what came out of his mouth she felt was the truth, felt it somewhere deep in the very marrow of her bones.
“Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, I will do that.”
“All right then.”
Luna didn't know quite what she was doing when she picked up the pen, but she signed the paper in front of her with a flourish. There was no doubt in her, none at all. That would come later, but right now, she knew that this was what needed to happen. It felt as if the tides of fate were swirling around her, tugging at her and making her want to shout. There was something here that she could not truly see or understand, but she felt it at work.
After a moment, Tucker reached for the paper, and he signed as well. His signature was an elegant dark scrawl, and something about seeing their names together made Luna's heart squeeze. Then she looked up into his eyes and gasped.
There was such a burning victory there, such a triumph, that she took a step back. His amber eyes were bright with a kind of conquering fury, and as if Tucker sensed her alarm, he nodded.
“Yes,” he said, not bothering to hide the need in his voice. “You belong to me now.”
***
An hour later, Luna had been sent home with clear instructi
ons and Tucker stood alone in his office. He gazed out over the spread of the city beneath him, and there was still something elated in him. It felt as if his heart had sprouted wings and would now very much like to flee his body. He felt... light, somehow, and he didn't understand it.
He typically didn't like things that he didn't understand, but there was already something inside him whispering that he did like Luna Madrigal, perhaps liked her a little too much?
It didn't make sense at all. Perhaps it was all that red hair that made people look up as soon as she entered a room, or perhaps it was those flashing green eyes. The thing was that that didn't even cover it. Tucker had romanced and been seduced by some of the most stunning women in the world. Luna might have been a spitfire, and she might have had a mouth on her that could drive a priest to sin, but she certainly did not compare.
Why then, was she the one to whom he had offered the contract? Why was she the one who had refused to leave his mind? The truth was that ever since he had met her in his office, ever since their kiss that she had ended so quickly, he had stopped looking at other applicants. There was no one else who could compare to her, who could hold his attention.
The truth was that there were better candidates. He knew that. Ones that he could feel knew how to play the game, who would be pleased to deliver a child to him and leave, never looking at him or the child again. Others had had children before, meaning that physically it would be easier and a more predictable process. However, once he had seen Luna, all he could imagine was a little boy with her flashing green eyes and courage, a child that would fight with a fury that came from both parents.
Tucker had not gotten this far in a very tough world by lying to himself. There was something else at the bottom of all of this. He knew it. There was something deep down that told him that he needed to hang on to Luna and never let her go. It practically screamed for her until he could hear nothing else, and then he shut it away.
No.