Chapter Four
Warm air wafts in from an open window and Micky undoes his top button, discards his tie, sighs and goes to the glass pane, looking out. He hates being inside on days like this when it’s too warm and he hates shirts, unless he’s stripping one off another man. With his teeth.
My chief of security has a range of kinks that I’ve become aware of over the years: bondage, flogging, threesomes, a little heated wax here and there. I would never have discovered them if it had been up to him, but being taught observance and intrigue had given me a mind that was too enquiring.
The places he frequented were where people would attend wearing masks; having a name wasn’t an option and although I recognised voices occasionally, I never considered whose they were.
I was a voyeur. Still am. To watch and imagine it being me in those places, to live inside my head while I become the person bent over a bench or taking a man in my mouth and one in my cunt.
We made a point, Micky and I, to never be in the same room. If one of us was there, the other left, but I’d caught glimpses of him over the years,
It was our secret.
One of them.
“How long’s this fucking thing going to take?” He drops the tie onto the floor. Patience is not one of his virtues unless he’s stalking a potential threat. “Ben should be up to speed by now. This is a fucking pointless waste of time.”
“You got someone waiting in your room or something?” I mutter under my breath even though it’s only us in the room. I can hear others outside, sounds of laughter, joviality. Ben’s voice.
“No.” He shrugs and I feel his pain. He doesn’t want to be handing this over. He doesn’t want to be away from the front line. Leaving me.
“Once you’ve recovered…”
He laughs. “Blair, this is a life changer.”
“It’s a life changer either way. You have it, you’re fucked for a bit. You don’t have it, you’re fucked for good.”
“By the time I’m back, Ben’ll be reigning. And that’s probably right. He’ll help you blend in more.” He finally sits down, stretches out and folds his arms. He oozes pissed-off.
“Not sure he’ll be the same at blending in at some of the places we go.”
He raises his brows and looks moody. “It’s getting too dangerous taking you there.”
He was right. He often was. It wasn’t like we made a regular thing of going or planned it, not now. Not since tensions between us and England were as high with people demanding a better agreement or even for us to re-join a union with them.
“Guess I’ll have too…” The door opened and I shut up, watching the stream of men enter the room. Lennox is there; Gethin, his head of security; Murray; Franklyn; Kelvin, the head of the intelligence unit and three others who I know from various meetings but tried to avoid. And Ben. I try not to look at him.
“Guess you’ll have to what?” Lennox sat down next to me.
“Visit Micky after his op.” I turn and smile, my brother will know I’m lying.
He smiles and says nothing, then looks round the room. “Everyone’s here. Dad’s not feeling great so he’s giving it a miss.”
That worries me. This is the second day when his health’s not been good.
The meeting starts, there are conversations around places I’m due to go to, functions I’m attending, people who have been hanging round, my pet stalker who’s recently been done for indecent exposure. I’m spoken about like a commodity, which should annoy me and if I stew on it too much, it does, but I’m used to it by now and I am a commodity. I’m owned by my country. Their princess.
Ben sits across from me at the table. Like the rest of the men, he’s wearing a suit, charcoal grey with a light pink shirt and no tie. His shoulders look broader and it seems he’s given up shaving, because the fair stubble’s still there. When we were kids he was clean shaven, now he’s rougher.
The observation turns me on.
Cuba was too long ago.
About fifteen minutes in, I’ve tuned out and I’m thinking about all the ways I can have a normal night where I’m just Blair and not a woman with a title and a duty. Lennox is getting heated with Kelvin over an upcoming rally where he’ll be making a speech about working together and improving relations between us and England and Kelvin is pretty much asking him to tone it down.
At this point, my head is on a beach in Bali. Or Hawaii. Or the Maldives. I’ve always wanted to visit the Maldives. It isn’t that I don’t know about this, it’s my job to, but I can’t concentrate and I wish I could go to my room and scream, read one of my mother’s romances. Find some relief.
“What about the threats to Blair. They can’t be discounted.” Ben has said nothing much until now which hasn’t surprised me. He was always quiet, waiting until the right moment, when he had something to say. Like now.
