“Will he call, do you think?” she asked.
The old man patted her hand kindly. “It’s best to remember that he’s an asshole, my dear. Not the other part.”
The woman sniffled and nodded. “He is an asshole,” she murmured.
“Indeed.”
From my place at the top of the stairs, I watched the car take the woman away. The old man adjusted his suit jacket before starting back up the stairs. His pale blue eyes behind miniscule circular frames fell on me at last and he smiled.
“Ah, you must be Mademoiselle Not Interested.”
I gritted my teeth as I crossed my arms defiantly over my chest. “And you must be Alfred.”
The old man chuckled with such a good-natured laugh that I found my prickly defences immediately weakening.
He patted me on the shoulder and winked. “It’s Benson, rather. Ronan warned me that you had a bit of a bite, my dear,” he said. “Come along with me, if you will. He’s been expecting you.”
“Oh, I’m expected,” I couldn’t help but silently mutter behind the old man’s back as he stepped inside the mansion. “La dee da.” I certainly wasn’t the queen of England, now was I?
“This way,” Benson Not Alfred said when I stopped to gawk at the crystal chandelier hanging high above the marble foyer.
“So he makes you do his dirty work?” I asked as I hurried after him. “Take out the trash, so to speak. Isn’t he old enough to pick up after his own messes?”
The old man just grinned back at me and remained silent. Along a long hallway lined with a deep-burgundy oriental rug, I nearly had to jog to keep up with his brisk, determined steps.
“I mean, if I were you,” I said as we passed a row of tall, narrow arched windows overlooking the sprawling grounds at the back of the mansion, “I’d tell him to fuck off. I’d tell him I’m relaxing in front of one of those massive fireplaces we just passed with a whiskey or something and that I wasn’t doing a goddamn thing.”
We travelled up a second staircase whose worn, warm-hued wood creaked beneath our feet.
“You are rather fond of an expletive, I see,” Benson said as we turned the corner at the top of the stairs.
I ignored this.
“I just don’t see why you put up with him if he pulls this kind of shi—stuff,” I corrected. “I mean, you seem like a perfectly nice dude and, well, he—”
“He is just inside here, mademoiselle.”
We stopped outside a tall wooden door with a carved brass door handle. I eyed the closed door, hesitating, and then narrowed my gaze at the butler. “He’s not a cannibal, is he?”
The old man clasped his hands behind his back and shook his head, an amused twinkle in his eyes. “As far as I’m aware, Ronan does not consume human flesh.”
I nodded, drumming my fingers along my thighs.
“And there’s not any, like, torture chambers or like sex dungeons or weird-ass booby traps around here, right?” I asked, waving my hand in the air.
The butler grinned. “Not that I myself have come across in forty years, no.”
“Hmm.”
“Is there anything else, my dear?” the butler asked, his head tilting kindly to the side.
I chewed at my lip as I thought. Finally, I raised my eyes to the old man and sighed.
Nodding my head toward the closed door, I asked earnestly, “Benson, is it a mistake to go in there?”
The butler’s pale blue eyes were steady on mine as he was silent for a long moment.
“My dear, I’ve been with Ronan for his entire life,” he said, his voice soft. “I think I understand who he is. But I don’t think he does yet. This makes him perhaps a little volatile and certainly a little unpredictable.”
I frowned at Benson and his gentle, patient smile.
“Does that suffice as an answer?”
“Fuck no!”
The old man laughed and then pat my shoulder. “Then you best go see for yourself, my dear.”
He left without another word. I waited till he had disappeared down the wooden staircase before turning to the door. I’d refused to ask for help from my kind, generous, loving friends and instead came in the middle of the night to a stranger’s house (though calling this place a house was like calling an asteroid a rock). A stranger, I might add, who I met in a dark alley and whose last name I didn’t know.
What would I even tell the police should I need to call them?
“Hi, hi, oh, thank God. I don’t really know who this dude is, but he has conflicted blue eyes and an easy smile that betrays nothing.”
“Anything else, ma’am?”
“Um, yeah, and a really sexy Irish accent.”
As much as I wanted to convince myself I was here because I was desperate, because I was out of options, because I refused to ask for money from anyone, let alone my friends, I just couldn’t quite do it. Because there was still the little whisper at the back of my mind. You want to be here… You want to see him… You want to find out what lies behind that door…
I pressed my thumbs against my eyes and exhaled, shaking my head. I was getting myself into a mess and I knew it. I knew it and I was going to do it anyway.
“God-fucking-dammit,” I cursed and pushed open the door.
I stepped inside a spacious bedroom with a peaked roof made of glass. In one corner, an iron spiral staircase led up to a small platform with a tufted high-back leather chair and a telescope aimed out an open window. There was a large fireplace of blackened stone, its expansive marble hearth surrounded by antique floor rugs. There was art everywhere but the walls. Instead the canvases were leaning against several bookshelves or the dark green suede couch or the clawfoot brass tub placed haphazardly in the centre of the room beside an antique stained-glass lamp. My art knowledge didn’t expand much further than Bob Ross and Lisa Frank, but even I could tell the paintings were the real fucking deal.
My eyes skimmed over the rich details of gold and copper, velvet and leather, glass and iron to finally land on a luxurious four-poster bed of deep mahogany and the black lace bra hanging from the top of it.
“Well, what do you think?”
My eyes continued to the bed itself where my stranger lay butt-ass naked on the bed, grinning and wiggling his toes, arms folded casually behind his head. I let my gaze trail down his abs to his cock, which lay as lazy as his smile against his thigh.
I shrugged and looked again around his bedroom.
“I don’t know,” I said with a bored sigh. “Thought it might be bigger.”
Ronan
She thought she could hide the poppy-coloured blush of her cheeks at the sight of my cock, still half hard from the woman from The White Room, with a disinterested scowl and an easy line. She was wrong.
I felt a surge of energy at the sight of her standing just inside my bedroom door. It was like the main act was taking stage after enduring the warmup bands.
“What took you so long?” I asked, not moving to grab the silk robe from the floor beside my bed.
The girl laughed, her eyes moving to a bra hanging from one of the posts of my bed. “If I was late, then thank fucking God.”
I smiled across the room at her. The innocent little thing thought that was the property of the woman who just left when the truth was there were three women with tits who matched that cup size just this week alone.