“My name is Hugo,” he said, waving them into a wide booth that could easily have held a dozen people. “If you need anything, anything at all, you just have to ask.” He took out a business card and laid it in front of her. “Call any time day or night.”
As he handed each of them a menu, he continued. “I’m a fixer. I can solve almost any problem you have except the Waking Illness. You’ve got me beat there.” He bowed in deference. “Now I will get some wine to celebrate this great occasion of your visit.”
He swept off, leaving behind a faint scent of lime. Pepper reached for a menu, her hand trembling as the words great occasion rang in her ears.
“Told you,” Ezmar said, poring over the menu. “You’re almost famous.”
“Hugo’s a magician,” Renee said. “He can help you with anything you need. And by anything, I mean things you can’t buy in stores, like a fake CommBand if you needed to get home urgently.”
Pepper opened her menu, pretending not to understand what Renee was suggesting. Yet her meaning was clear: she was telling Pepper that if she wanted to go back to Rosemoor, Hugo was the man to get her there.
“Or perhaps you want travel documents to visit another country...” Ezmar added.
“That’s possible?” Pepper’s voice sounded faint even to her.
“Only if a person is desperate but let’s just say Hugo has many solutions to many problems.” Renee stopped talking as a server returned with a bottle of red.
“Wine, ladies?” he held the bottle so Ezmar could read the label. “Compliments of Hugo.”
“Lovely but not for me,” she said, pushing her glass away. “I’m driving. Plus we have some serious shopping to do tonight and I need to remain clearheaded.”
He filled Renee’s and Pepper’s glasses and disappeared discreetly.
They ate a hearty meal and ordered a sampler tray of desserts that included lemon cake, pecan pie, sponge cake with gingerfruit, baklava, and rum cake.
“So we’re getting you something very special for the Harvest Feast symphony.” Ezmar dabbed her lips with a cloth napkin. “I guess we better get started.”
“Will you be at that concert?” Pepper asked.
“Yes, but you’ll be in the box with the bigwigs. Renee and I will be in one of the back rows on the floor.”
“I wish you could be in the box with me,” Pepper said.
“You’ll be fine.” Ezmar licked a last crumb of pecan pie off her fork. “Just keep flashing that ready smile and everyone will love you. They’ll think you’re smiling just for them. Your smile is one of your best features. I suggest you use it as often as possible.”
As soon as they were in the ride, headed back toward town, Pepper looked out the back window. The guard vehicles were right behind them. Hugo might be the man who could solve many problems, but she doubted anyone could help her shake her shadow.
Ezmar navigated to a shopping mall not far from Tribunal Hall. A white-gloved valet took the manual keys for her ride and parked it while they wandered inside. Pepper looked back in time to see the white guard vehicle drive past the valet drop off and park not too far away. She didn’t see anyone get out of it.
The mall was warm and welcoming. They deposited their cloaks at the coat check and Ezmar led the charge toward a row of dress stores that offered more variety and color than Pepper thought existed in the universe. As she took in her surroundings, she noted surveillance cameras at regular intervals. In Rosemoor she’d felt like she was being constantly watched whenever she was in the commercial areas or suburban neighborhoods but there had always been the forest where she could escape scrutiny. So far, she hadn’t found a single place in Rosewyld that offered that type of freedom.
Adapt, she told herself. It’s just another change.
They went from shop to shop with Ezmar and Renee flipping through dress racks critically, despairing over the color of one dress and the cut of another. Every time one of them held a garment up for Pepper’s inspection, the other would find a flaw and sweep it away.
The wine she’d had for dinner, the strangeness of her new life, and being dragged around to look at clothes she’d never known existed a week ago all started to take their toll. In the next dress shop, Pepper leaned against the wall and waited, feeling invisible.
“Aha!” Ezmar’s voice was triumphant.
“Yes!” chimed in Renee.
Pepper, who’d almost fallen asleep standing up, turned to look. Ezmar held up one of the most scandalous dresses she’d ever seen. It was black but it didn’t look like mourning wear. The bodice was pure black with a sweetheart neckline and long black sleeves. It was fitted to the waist before it flared out in a wide black skirt adorned with lavish red roses intertwined with green leaves. A sash of the same patterned fabric at the waist gave the design movement.
“I couldn’t possibly,” Pepper began. “It’s—you know—black.”
Ezmar grinned. “That’s the point! Black is the best color for a gala evening. With your porcelain skin, this will look fabulous. You won’t even need a necklace. Go. Try it on.” Ezmar had the family bossiness. No doubt about it.
When the dress slid over her body and Pepper looked in the mirror, she was transformed. She looked like a princess. A princess in black. She giggled at the audacity of it while Renee tied the sash into a bow at the narrowest part of her waist. A stranger had stepped into Pepper’s skin. Maybe Quinn wouldn’t recognize her. Maybe he’d find her alluring enough to want to bed her.
From where she was sitting on the bench in the change room, Ezmar whistled.
“You’re going to blow Quinn’s mind,” she said approvingly. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you and this is going to push him over the edge.”
Pepper tried not to smile too hopefully at that statement.
“Forget Quinn,” Renee said. “That makes me want to lay you down in the tall grass.” She stared with open admiration. “Just don’t let him see it before the night of the concert. Ez and I’ll come over beforehand and help you get ready. We’ll want to see his face when he lays eyes on you in this.”
Pepper, tongue-tied and grateful, agreed to everything they said. Next, she let them dress her in luxurious black lace lingerie that they said would make the dress sit even better. Renee asked the sales assistant for the appropriate footwear. While they waited for the right shoes, Ezmar helped her into a pair of fishnet stockings.
The sales assistant returned with three pairs of simple black pumps. Pepper tried on a pair. “I can’t walk in these. I can’t even stand in them.”
“Understood,” Ezmar said. “But you’ve got a couple of days to practice.”
At the service counter, Ezmar held out her CommBand to pay but Pepper protested. “I have money. I don’t want to be any more in your debt than I already am.”
She hadn’t even looked at how much Quinn had deposited. When she touched her CitizenBand her jaw dropped. He’d advanced her more money than she made in a month in Rosemoor. All the air left her lungs. She’d be stuck here forever trying to repay him if he kept giving her money like that.
When the total of her purchases appeared on the buy screen, Pepper swallowed hard. What seemed like a large credit balance was only just going to cover the cost.
Adapting to life in Rosewyld was going to send her bankrupt. She wondered how she’d adapt to that.
Chapter Fifteen: Changing Plans
Pepper tried to creep inside without Quinn noticing but his desk faced the window and the drapes in his study weren’t drawn. He’d seen her and she knew it.
“Pepper?”
“Yes, Quinn?” She’d started doing this now: whenever he called her by her first name, she answered with his. Many of her patients, senior people from the Tribunal, insisted she call them by their first names, the same way they used hers. So far he hadn’t corrected her on this point.
“Aren’t you going to show me what you bought tonight?”
She was at the foot of the stairs. “No, I don
’t think so.”
“Come here, please,” he said,
She set the bags down and went and stood in the door to his office.
“Why the secrecy?” he asked. He’d had a fire earlier and the last glowing embers were still in the grate.
She smiled at him, remembering what Ezmar said about her smile. His posture softened slightly. Her smile broadened.
“Okay, you don’t have to show me if you don’t want to, but I’d like to hear about your evening.”
Pepper had mixed feelings about being in his office. Every morning she had to report there before breakfast for her daily spanking. The spankings stung but the even greater struggle with them was submitting herself to him. When she hesitated before lifting her skirt and assuming the position over his knees, he would start counting. Only once did she wait until he got to three. That morning he paddled her with a thick wooden ruler so soundly she felt the sting every time she sat down for the rest of the day. After that episode, he only had to motion to his lap to get her compliance. She always needed a second to struggle with her decision, her natural reluctance to obey. But no more than a second.
The evenings with him were another story. After dinner and either a run together or a workout in the gym, they retreated to the two chairs in front of the fire. Pepper was working toward her goal of reading every book in his library. Quinn sat down every night with the ponderous amounts of work he brought home with him.
To Pepper, both morning and night in the study were times of great intimacy. Mornings thrilled her. Evenings comforted her.
So it was that night when she arrived home from shopping. While she settled into her chair, he stirred the fire back to life and added a log to it. Soothing warmth filled the room and she entertained him with wide-eyed accounts of shopping with his sister and her partner. He wanted every detail from what they’d eaten to where they’d shopped. She skirted around the details about Hugo and said it was a restaurant on the far side of the city. She couldn’t be sure where. She made sure she smiled a lot.
She raised the troubling subject of money and he forbade her to discuss it further. “I brought you to Rosewyld, I asked you to accompany me to the symphony. It is only right that I should ensure your being here costs you nothing. Your presence is a gift to this city. It owes you everything and you owe it nothing.”
She dropped the question after that. Once he had his mind made up, there was no point in arguing. Then she continued to tell him, in minute detail, every moment of her evening. How grand it felt to go out with two such beautiful women. How clever they were in choosing something just right for her. How impressive the mall was.
She curled up in the big chair and soon the warmth from the fire lulled her to sleep.
* * *
When she woke, it was morning and she was tucked into bed, stripped down to her panties and bra.
She rose quickly and found her shopping bags set on the table under the window. She peered inside. The tissue paper was taped close still around her purchases. Good. She wanted to surprise Quinn, just like Renee had suggested. She hung the dress in the cupboard after giving it one last admiring glance. Before she showered, she tried walking in the shoes for a few minutes. It was easier this time and she was certain, with practice, she’d manage an evening in them.
Dressed at last, she headed down to Quinn’s office. Instead of sitting in one of the armchairs where he usually sat to spank her in the morning, he was seated behind his desk.
“Sit,” he said, nodding at the guest chair.
Pepper sat nervously, worried that he was playing some sort of trick, and a dire punishment was about to follow.
“Your period of daily spankings is now over,” he said. “I’m pleased you had such a good time with my sister and Renee last night. Ezmar said you behaved perfectly and that I should be proud of having persuaded you to come to Rosewyld to help us all.”
Persuaded? Not the word she would have used.
He scratched his chin, peering at her.
“I’ve also had excellent reports from your patients that they’ve slept well for a few nights after your treatments.” He sat straighter. “You have made a place here now in Rosewyld and it’s time for you to have more freedom. You may move out of the old dressing room and take up residence in the apartment on the first floor here now if you like.”
“The housekeeper’s apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you need it for Renee?”
“You know she doesn’t want it. She told you that.”
Pepper studied her hands that were folded in her lap. It felt like he was pushing her away. “I don’t mind being in the old dressing room. I feel safer when you are so close.” She blurted out that last statement without thinking.
A sudden shot of black lust darkened Quinn’s hair before fading immediately. “Right then.” He studied a piece of paper on his desk. “We’ll leave things as they are.”
“One question, please.”
“Yes.”
“Renee doesn’t seem to be like a regular housekeeper. Is she something different, other than Ezmar’s partner, I mean?”
Quinn smiled. “Not much gets past you, does it? She and Ez have been best friends since they were in bright socks, but Renee is more than Ez’s partner. They own two hotels, both called the Raven’s Lair. One here and the one we stayed in back in Torpeth. Ez is the face of the hotels and Renee is the administrator, making sure everything runs smoothly. She’s the oil that keeps the machine working. She extends her services to me in a housekeeping capacity because I don’t have time for it. If either Ez or I need something done that we can’t do ourselves, she’ll either do it or know who can. Now if you have no more questions, perhaps we can have breakfast?”
“One last question: who cooks and fills the fridge when we’re at work? Is that Renee?”
“Renee or one of her workers. Does it matter?”
It mattered to Pepper, but she didn’t say anything. It mattered because they also did the laundry and cleaned the house. They would have seen her old-fashioned drawers and probably laughed at them. They would have seen the straight-backed chair, the one that could leave a distinct tulip pattern on her rosy bottom, that was permanently faced toward the corner.
* * *
Two days before the symphony, Pepper’s first patient was Hugo. Away from the glittering lights of his restaurant and wearing a treatment robe rather than a finely tailored suit, the Devmaerean man was small-boned and short in stature for his species. His coloring suggested he was a pureblood, but he wasn’t even as tall as Ezmar. When Pepper examined him, checking his nails, tongue, and the glands in his throat, he flinched as though unaccustomed to human touch.
“Do I make you nervous?” she asked.
“Everything makes me nervous these days and that’s not good for a man in my business.”
“Please lie, face down, head in the rest at the end.”
She warmed her hands and prepped them with the massage oil that she’s made herself from wild roses. As she waited for him to settle comfortably, she commented, “I imagine the restaurant business can give you a lot to worry about.”
He snorted. “Yes, I imagine it can.”
Pepper reflected on what she knew about him. He could get her anything. What did she want the most?
She emptied her thoughts and engaged the deep tranquility that she called on to relax all her patients. Her ability to create a restful aura around her patients was her gift. Chameleon-like, she assumed the colors and moods they needed to still their troubled hearts, at least temporarily.
At the end of the massage, Hugo looked ten years younger and a couple of inches taller. The anxiety in his face had smoothed. His eyes no longer darted around the room restlessly as if he was expecting to be attacked by an unseen foe.
He took both her hands in his. “Thank you, talented healer,” he said. “I’m known as the man with a solution to many problems but nothing I found has been able to help me sle
ep. I think I will rest fine tonight.”
“It may only be for one night,” she said. “For some people the benefit lasts longer.”
“I will come back when I can but if there is ever anything I can help you with, you have my card, right?”
Pepper didn’t need to be asked twice. “I don’t have a CommBand and communication is often difficult for me. It’s rarely private.”
“I will bring you a CommBand when I come for my next appointment.”
Pepper wondered how he was able to get two appointments, so close together, when many senior Tribunal members were still waiting. None of that was up to her. The clinic manager did all her patient scheduling.
A flutter of excitement brought a smile to her lips.
“How will that work?” she asked. “Wouldn’t someone know I had it?”
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.” He smiled, his amethyst eyes flashing. “Let’s just say there are some things that work around the known communication systems, using its power without leaving a fingerprint anywhere.”
“I don’t want to get busted the first time I use it.”
“My bands are untraceable. Don’t worry.”
Pepper didn’t know who she’d use it to contact, other than maybe Hugo to ask for more favors. Lily didn’t have a CommBand, but Brother Brinley did and he was smitten with Lily. Pepper could tell him she got hers with her job and she was sure he’d let her talk to her sister.
* * *
Setting aside thoughts of how Quinn had recently shown so much trust in her, she decided he didn’t need to know what she was planning. A troubling thought occurred to her: maybe he hadn’t so much as shown trust in her as he had pushed her away.
First he’d stopped the daily spankings, which she didn’t enjoy getting but always treasured the afterglow that started her day. Then he’d tried to push her into the housekeeper’s suite as if he didn’t want her close to him.
Worst of all, he’d never once returned the kiss she’d given him that first day. She’d hinted many times at how much she wanted him, but he ignored her. The reason was obvious: he had what he wanted from her, the regular treatment of the members of the Tribunal. Now he was content now to let her fend for herself.
Bound to the Commander Page 11