Divine Solace: 8 (2 page)

As she hung up, the side door opened, flooding her with
relief. Glancing down the access hallway to Marguerite’s office, she saw her
boss come up the two stairs, her heels tapping against the old wood floor.
“Good morning.”

Lyda Coltrane might come off as scary in the right
circumstances, but Marguerite Winterman was that way 24/7. Tall, with
moonlight-colored hair and direct, pale-blue eyes that could laser through
steel if needed, she was a woman who commanded attention and compliance from
everyone around her. While she could be so calm it was eerie—Chloe’s words, but
they fit—they knew the loving and generous spirit beneath that reserve. The
three of them had been through a lot together. As a result, no matter how
intimidating M was, Gen and Chloe were as protective of her as she was of them.
She was friend, confidante and family, all rolled up in one. The world would
balance again. Marguerite was here.

As Marguerite snapped on the light in her office, Gen moved
out of view of the public floor to stand in her doorway. “You have a visitor.
Lyda Coltrane?”

Marguerite’s gaze became marginally warmer, which said Lyda
was a friendly acquaintance, not close friend. No surprise there, since
Marguerite didn’t have a great many in that inner circle.

“All right. Will you bring in some of the new Ceylon from
the storeroom? I’ll cover things here while Lyda and I talk.”

“Sure. We have a phone order for six. It’s written up on the
counter and I’ve gotten it started. They said it would be about thirty
minutes.”

“All right.” Marguerite put her purse in the bottom drawer
of her desk. “I like your hair down. You haven’t worn it that way in a while.
And you’re flushed, eyes bright as spring leaves.” Her silken brow rose. “New
love interest?”

“No,” Gen said emphatically. “Lyda took it down. She—”

Marguerite’s lips firmed, her blue eyes getting a less
friendly look, hastening Gen to explain further. “She was checking the color,
said she liked it.” She’d actually said it was beautiful, but it was clear Gen
shouldn’t have said anything. “I—”

Marguerite held up a finger. “It’s not your fault, Gen. Lyda
is like that. You’ve done nothing wrong. Ceylon?”

At a loss, Gen chose to escape. Heading out the side door,
she made the turn into Marguerite’s private garden, stopping to put her hands
to her cheeks. She
was
flushed. And she’d just stood there while Lyda
was touching her. What the hell…

A walk in Marguerite’s gardens tended to calm the mind.
Taking a couple breaths, Gen inhaled the scents from the herb garden, trailed
her fingers through the fountain as a good morning to the circling koi, then
followed the stepping stones to the storage building. Just before she reached
it, a thought brought her up short.

Lyda is like that.
Of course. It should have been
obvious.

Less than a couple years ago, a break-in at Tea Leaves, a
terrible event connected to M’s past and one that nearly lost her both M and
Chloe, had taught Gen what lay beneath Marguerite’s formidable calm. During
that time, she’d also found out some pretty eye-opening things about her boss.
Marguerite was a sexual Dominant, a Mistress. Tyler, was also one—a Master that
is. Chloe’s husband Brendan was a submissive who inhabited that world.

Eventually, Chloe had revealed to Gen the shocking fact
Marguerite had been Brendan’s Mistress of choice before meeting Chloe. While Chloe
wasn’t a Mistress, she was a sexually adventurous young woman. Somehow, she and
Brendan were making it work, but there was an undeniably strong bond between
them, more than the usual overt affection of newlyweds.

Before those revelations, Gen hadn’t known anything about
the BDSM world except the distortions of pop culture, but once she
learned—again through Chloe—more about what a Mistress was, it had certainly
explained a lot about the effortless power Marguerite seemed to exercise over
everyone in her world, though Chloe said that Dominants were as diverse as any
other group. Not all Mistresses were like Marguerite.

Actually, I think there’s no one like Marguerite
,
Chloe had said, with a twinkle in her eye.

Lyda exuded similar qualities. Obviously. So it made sense.
She was a Mistress. Maybe she had trouble containing those boundaries within a
proper environment, and Gen was just inexperienced in dealing with that kind of
thing.

Even though Chloe frequently encouraged Gen to join them at
The Zone, the BDSM club they frequented, and in which Tyler had an ownership
interest, Gen had always declined. It wasn’t her world. She wasn’t drawn to
that. Or rather, by not exposing herself, she was making sure she wasn’t. She’d
been down the sexually adventurous road in her early twenties. Two marriages
had pretty much burned her out on all of it.

She had gone as far as looking up the club online. It was a
classy, high-end establishment, the membership fee making her blanch.
Marguerite had never encouraged her to visit it the way Chloe had, but that
didn’t mean anything. Marguerite really wasn’t the “C’mon, girlfriend, let’s
get our freak on at the BDSM club tonight” type.

Gen grinned, equilibrium restored.
This
was her
world. It was comfortable, quiet, what she knew. Things made sense. She amused
herself by imagining Lyda in stereotypical dominatrix gear. Sleek, form-fitting
black latex that clung to hips and trim waist. Those generous breasts would
swell out the top of a corset, her long red hair loose and caressing pale
shoulders. She’d be wearing gloves, the kind that fit like a second skin and
went past a woman’s elbows. Gen had a black, silky pair she’d picked up at a
yard sale. She wore them at home sometimes for no reason, since she had nowhere
to wear them.

She imagined Lyda reaching out, black-clad fingers touching
Gen’s face, then sliding up to her temple, into her hair, tightening there. Gen
would sink to her knees, right in front of those sleek, latex-covered thighs.
Would she put her lips on one and stay there, eyes closed, as Lyda stroked her
hair?

She’d moved into the storeroom, was measuring out tea, but
that thought brought her to a halt. Arousal dampened her panties. Weird.
Another word for bizarre, peculiar and uncanny. Uncanny. She liked that one.
She’d become addicted to the thesaurus as part of her collage hobby, trading
out words for the patterns she created, preferring the aesthetic look of one
word over another because of its combination of consonant tails and fat vowels.
Other times she just liked how it fit the tone of the picture she was making.
Earth instead of dirt… Rain instead of water… A choice of one versus the other
made a different impression on the senses.

She was spending too much time daydreaming. The phone was
going to start ringing with more orders, the door opening on the midmorning
rush. She shouldn’t be dallying, not when Marguerite was handling customers and
a visitor.

She laid a light towel over the container holding the
Ceylon, seeing no need to seal it for a quick dash. Until it was too late. She
came out of the storeroom at the quick march and ran smack up against another
human being.

Tea leaves did a tsunami wave over the dislodged towel, the
fruit-and-molasses smell clouding the air.
Oh, shit.
She should have put
a lid on the bowl, should have…

A pair of strong male hands caught hold of Gen to keep her
from tumbling, but in so doing, the kind stranger was unable to defend himself
from the onslaught and took the shower of leaves square in the face. Now he was
sneezing.

“Oh God. I’m so sorry. Are you all right?” She snatched a
paper towel from the storeroom, wet it down in the utility sink and came back
out with it, bending down to insert it in his field of view. He had his hands
on his knees, his head down. “Here, wipe this under your nose and on your
face.”

He managed a quick grin between another couple hard sneezes.
“Sorry.” He complied with her direction, took another paper towel from her to
blow his nose, then one more damp one to finish things off. As he straightened,
she saw he was a handsome mid-twenties, slim but charismatic, his sleek dark
hair pulled back to show sharply sculpted facial features. He wore
black-and-silver braided bracelets double-wrapped on his wrists, black jeans
and a white T-shirt. A matching choker was wrapped around his throat,
completing a somewhat Goth look. No eye makeup or black nails, though.

“Subdued Goth?” she ventured, seeking something to say other
than apologies.

Brown eyes like rich cocoa sparkled at her, setting off
those butterflies again. She must be going through some weird hormone surge
today.

“I teach sailing at the community college,” he explained.
“Runny black eye liner scares the students.”

“But you are a Goth?”

He shrugged, cleared his throat. “When I go to a club, I
might trick myself out with the full regalia, but not so much on a day-to-day
basis anymore. I’m evolving. I was never much of a music-inspired Goth anyhow.”

This was the kind of eccentric conversation Chloe loved.
She’d jump with both feet into someone’s head, ferret out every intriguing
thing about them. Usually Gen had a sideline seat to enjoy the show, but maybe
today she’d try something different. Maybe she’d be the one daring to find out
more.

“Is there another type of Goth?” Stepping back into the
storeroom, she began to measure out more Ceylon, trying not to think of the
gimlet eye Marguerite would level upon her for her carelessness. It wasn’t
cheap, one of the Sri Lanka teas that came from the highest elevations.

“I’m inspired by movie and literary geniuses of the genre,”
he said, leaning in the door, entirely comfortable. Of course, trying to
asphyxiate someone with tea did bring down social barriers. “Like Edgar Allan
Poe.”

“I really don’t know much about Goths,” she admitted. “I
didn’t know there were different…sects.”

“That’s all right.” He grinned again. “My perspective isn’t
that common. I tend to do my own thing. I was born in the wrong time period.”

She replaced the lid, sealed the container and efficiently
swept the counter. As she moved to the doorway and he straightened, she saw he
was probably close to six feet. Not quite as tall as Marguerite’s Tyler, but
still a nice height.

“Maybe you weren’t born in the wrong time period,” she
suggested. “Maybe you were alive then, and now you’re here, reincarnated. You
can’t stay in the same time period forever.”

Good God, Chloe was rubbing off on her. Not only was she
talking like her, she was finding the topic engaging.

“Except during sex,” he observed. “That’s the only way you
can make time stop, during any lifetime.”

She gave him a sharp look, prepared to say something a
little more distancing, but his serious expression said he wasn’t flirting,
just making a simple observation. “Spoken like a guy,” she responded lightly.

“No,” he said. “It’s not like that. Everyone knows about
that kind of sex. Or they should.”

He met her gaze as directly as Lyda did, but there was a
different tone to it. Whereas Lyda’s gaze could hold her like a restraint, his
drew her to him like the offer of a young satyr to dance with him on a moonlit
night. She’d done a collage of a fairy ring recently, a birthday gift for a
friend in her book club who loved fairies. That was the only reason she could
think why such an impractical idea had jumped into her mind.

She decided to take it back to safer footing. “Favorite
Edgar Allan Poe quote?”

“‘Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there,
wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream
before.’” His lips quirked. “My favorite partly because I liked the quote,
partly because it taught me the dangers of academic pretentiousness.”

A college grad. Of course. Usually she had an aversion to
that type, knowing how little she’d have in common with them and not really
wanting to be reminded of her comparative lack of education, but the comment
made her curious. “How so?”

He sighed. “I wrote it up on the board for a class, a visual
aid for a presentation on Poe. Couldn’t figure out what all the snickering was
about until the end. I had left the ‘r’ out of peering.”

“‘Deep into that darkness, peeing…’” She chuckled. “Well,
conceivably, one could pee into the darkness and experience fear, doubt and
wonder at the same time.”

It was stupid to get uptight about it. Lots of people hadn’t
attended college. She hadn’t done well in school, too busy living up to low
expectations while her single mother worked. Gen had become a hairdresser to
make ends meet and found she did that well enough, but she didn’t have any real
flair or passion for it. Her life was littered with mediocre attempts at a lot
of things. She’d liked writing poetry in middle school, until she read one to
her mother and Momma made it clear girls from trailer parks didn’t write
poetry. They found a guy who, if they were lucky, didn’t drink to excess and
beat them, and settled down to have babies.

It had probably been very bad poetry. She’d thrown it away,
but in the past few years she’d thought about going back to school to get an
English degree, just for the pleasure of learning. Which was ridiculous. Not
only because she didn’t have the money to waste on “fun” classes, but because
she’d made so many mistakes early on in her life, with education
and
men, learning a practical skill like accounting had made more sense. She
channeled her creative side into her crafts. Collages required only access to
discarded magazines, newspapers and other recycled paper sources, and a healthy
supply of glue. She loved her monthly book club, though.

“Oh.” She realized she was shirking another responsibility.
She really was off her game today. “This is a private area. The main entrance
to Tea Leaves is on the front porch. Did you get lost?” She asked it kindly but
firmly.