“And dicking around with them is fun.”
“They’re overgrown teenagers,” Ben said. “You’re a Lee. You don’t have to hang out with dipshits like them.”
“You’re starting to sound like an old fart.”
Ben groaned. He didn’t want to have this conversation with Jason, who was almost six years younger and the closest thing to a brother to Ben.
“Come on,” Jason urged. “It’s going to be a fun week, and if you’re tired from working, you need a vacay. If you don’t have a girl, maybe Jake will lend you one of his.”
“Jake has more than one?”
“Totally! I didn’t know you could bid on more than one. If I’d known that, I’d have gotten a second one. There was this pretty hot Korean...”
Ben tried to ignore the tug at his groin. He needed good sex and had contemplated making a visit to the pretty blond who lived three floors below, but she reminded him a little too much of his mother, a German Russian his father had met on a diplomatic trip to Berlin.
And Ben, who liked to spend most of the year in San Francisco, didn’t want complications with neighbors. He had that in common with Jake. Sometimes he just wanted sex for sex’s sake and nothing else.
Maybe he should have gone with them to the Scarlet Auction.
Jason made a final pitch. “Besides, I rarely get to see you anymore, so it’d be great to hang together.”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Ben recalled what his uncle, Jason’s father, had said to him once:
“You are the only son of your father, the eldest son among his siblings,” Uncle had said. “It is your duty to look after your siblings and cousins.”
“I’ll go,” Ben said, “but I’ll get myself up to this cabin.”
“Awesome! See you soon.”
Ben hung up and threw himself on his bed. Shit. A week with Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
Unzipping his pants, he pulled himself out and tugged. It wasn’t as good as pounding into a hot woman, but it would have to do for now. Tomorrow morning, he’d call his security detail, Bataar, and arrange a sparring match. That would alleviate some of the pent-up energy and frustration. Sex was more soothing, but like masturbating, sparring would have to do.
KIMANI COULDN’T SHAKE the queasy feeling building inside her as the limo headed north on US 101. Marissa hadn’t mentioned being whisked away directly from the auction to her bidder’s place of choice. She talked about being locked up in a nice house and submitting to sexual acts she wasn’t comfortable with. Sex was part of the bargain, Marissa had explained. Even though it wasn’t explicitly mandatory, it was understood.
It had made Kimani sick to hear it. At first, Marissa had played off her injuries like they were nothing. If Kimani hadn’t accidentally walked in on Marissa just as she was getting out of the shower, she would have never known about the bruises, which Marissa kept hidden beneath layers of clothes.
“They’re just old bruises from the club I go to now and then,” Marissa had said. Marissa would sometimes go to a swingers club and dabble in BDSM.
But when Kimani had pressed for details, Marissa’s answers were increasingly suspicious.
“I bet he has a mansion in Marin County,” Claire prattled. “Or maybe he’s meeting us at some fancy restaurant like The French Laundry.”
Kimani would have loved the destination to be the famed Michelin-starred restaurant in Napa Valley, but she suspected that wasn’t the case. She reached into her hobo handbag for her cell to text Sam what was happening.
“Hey! Where’s my phone?”
She rifled through her purse, pulling out her glasses, lip balm, notepad, and pens that had built-in audio recorders. Her canister of mace was missing, too.
Her heartbeat shot up. She turned to Claire. “Do you have your phone?”
Claire looked into her sparkling clutch. “Mine’s missing, too. Oh, well, I don’t really need it. I told my friends I was going away to a spa for some ‘me’ time.”
Kimani tried not to panic. She tapped on the window separating her and the driver.
“Where is it we’re going?” she asked as nonchalantly as possible to the driver.
“No hablo ingles,” he replied.
Shit. Kimani willed herself to relax. Panicking wouldn’t help her out. Sam knew where she was and what she was doing. If he didn’t hear from her in some time, he’d get worried and do something.
Focus on getting the story.
“We are soooooo lucky,” Claire cooed. “We got the hottest bidder. At first, I was really scared that the fat old guy in the front row was going to win me. I mean, I was not going to lose my virginity to that guy. I’d rather forfeit the two thousand dollars I put up, and getting that money wasn’t easy. I’m still trying to pay off these girls.”
Claire squeezed her boobs. “Finally decided to take a cash advance on my credit card.”
Kimani winced. The interest on that couldn’t be pretty, but with over thirty thousand dollars coming her way, Claire shouldn’t have trouble paying back the cash advance and the boob job.
“So what made you decide to do the Scarlet Auction?” Kimani asked as she settled in the leather upholstery across from Claire. She thought about clicking on one of her audio-recording pens, but she only had three of them with her and wanted to adhere to journalistic ethics. She couldn’t record without the source’s permission unless lives were at stake, the information could not be obtained in any other way, or the story would suffer irrevocably without the information.
“Who wouldn’t?” Claire responded. “How else can you make forty thousand in just one week? I mean, it’s tons more than Julia Roberts made in Pretty Woman!”
“I don’t know that—” Kimani stopped herself from suggesting that movies didn’t necessarily make good examples for real life. “I bet lots of entrepreneurs can make that kind of money.”
“I mean regular people, silly. It would take my older sister a whole year—maybe more—to make what I just did in one week!”
In a good mood, Claire chattered on about how being a barista like her sister or taking some other equally boring job was “soooooo not my thing.” She talked about where she went to high school, how none of the classes at the local community colleges interested her, and that she had decided to go into modeling instead. But that career path was going slower than she would have liked as she worked more trade shows than she did photo shoots. She complained about the number of European women who came to the US to try their hand at modeling, and because foreigners were taking jobs away from Americans, she’d voted for Trump. She wanted to become a model and marry a billionaire like Melania had.
“But maybe I’ll get to marry a billionaire first,” Claire said with a smile.
Kimani stared. Did Claire really think something was going to come out of a relationship—if it could even be called that—with a guy who paid for sex?
“I’m actually a little nervous,” Kimani said as she noticed that they were long past Marin County and driving through Sonoma County. “We don’t know anything about this guy. What if he’s not that nice?”