Slave Wife (4 page)

“Tell me,” Michael relaxed his appraisal, “what made the tall woman rush out of here in such tumult?”

He watched Smith’s eyes quickly narrow then genially widen. Smith waved a hand. “She needed my help but was very ambivalent about asking for it and,” his expression was sardonic, “even more ambivalent about getting it.”

Michael looked at him with interest but before his questioning continued Smith’s phone rang. He listened then extended the receiver to Michael. “Mr. Doud is wondering when you’re going to make it to his office. No hurry. He’d just appreciate an ETA.”

Michael made a decision. He held the phone to his ear. “I hope I haven’t inconvenienced you. I’ll be right down.” He stood and extended his hand to Mr. Smith. “I’m sure we’ll speak again quite soon … and please call me Michael.”

Two minutes later he was seated on the cordovan leather sofa in Mr. Doud’s office gazing at the broad brown
Mississippi
flowing past the picture “windows”. Though he’d been in Doud’s office numerous times, he’d not yet gotten over the windows’ fascination. They were actually part of the security system – high resolution exterior images projected with clarity akin to Nature’s in real time onto screens in the wall. They were illusion but they looked precisely like windows.

Mr. Doud watched Michael with amusement. After several minutes he asked, “Did you find anything interesting on your excursion?”

Michael turned his attention to Doud. “Tell me about Smith.”

Doud’s face lit up like a bemused Christmas tree. “Oh ho! You met our Mr. Smith!” He paused, considering, Michael assumed, where to begin. “Do you remember a note to the Ownership section of the financial statements in which the minor shareholders were named?”

“Hmmm. Yes …” Michael’s wide forehead creased fractionally with contemplation. Recognition dawned and his perfect brow became smooth once again. “Yes, I do remember. Yes. Smith. I’d planned to ask you why you had this one shareholder – smaller than the rest and not a Director like the other four minor shareholders. But since I purchased all the outstanding shares, other issues took precedence.”

Doud’s enjoyment remained visible while his expression shifted to seriousness. “Mr. Smith has proven to be uniquely useful. He embodies an unusual, one might say anomalous, profile, simultaneously very strongly unstructured and intuitive and very strongly methodical and analytical.” The omnipresent twinkle confronted Michael. “Your purchase made him a millionaire, you know.”

The older man cleared his throat. “He’s interested in, you might say, the intimate communication between man and machine – the neural interface between non-automated robotic systems and their operators.”

Michael worked to visualize the words, “Something like bionics?”

“I don’t think he’s interested in implanting robotic systems – though obviously his research has profound implications for the evolution of implant technologies. He just wants to know how many degrees of information refinement a human operator can utilize. His research consists of passing information through the robot to the operator and evaluating the effect. In other words,” Doud smirked at what Michael sensed was a company joke, “he wants to know how much the robot can manipulate the man.”

For some unrecognized reason, an image of Karen rose in Michael’s mind. He ignored it but it triggered an insistent series of ideas that he acknowledged and set aside for later evaluation.

“It’s his research that generated the government grant.”

Doud’s eyes twinkled again. He leaned conspiratorially toward Michael. “You might not think it to look at him but he has quite a way with the ladies. We don’t have too many here but next time we have a general meeting you need to watch them. They hover around him with uneasy fascination, close but not too close, always seeking his approval but not wanting to attract his attention. It’s almost like he has them hypnotized.”

Doud sounded puzzled but gratified. “They also seem to wear more makeup after being around him for awhile.”

He could make her forget her discomfort with only a smile. At those times when he told her how beautiful she would be, she was redeemed, exalted, happier than she’d ever been. The next minute, though, his criticism would plunge her into anxiety and depression.

She’d blushed deep pink when he’d first told her he loved her. Then he’d led her to one of the suite’s closets and shown her the most beautiful wedding gown she’d ever seen. It was white silk as fluid as a negligee, cut into deep Vs over the bust and back, narrow to the knees and full and round to the floor. He told her they’d be married as soon as she fit into it and she’d frowned. The dress seemed so small.

So she struggled to do everything he wanted. She’d had her hair cut and returned to its natural pale brown. She wore only clothes he provided – clothes that were all uncomfortably tight and much too expensive and sophisticated to ever wear with her friends. But then she no longer saw her friends, not even Delia. And she rarely saw her parents – only the few times when he’d invited them to join her for dinner. She’d left school and now spent her days in the suite at the
Saint Paul
with Emeline, a tutor and a trainer, studying his curriculum, following the diet and exercise he mandated.

Yet he frequently expressed his displeasure with her progress. One day after Emeline had weighed her and found she’d gained a half pound, Michael rebuked her particularly harshly. She looked into his corrosive countenance and burst into uncontrolled sobs. She sank to the luxurious carpet and curled into a ball, her knees pulled to her chest.

The too small dress constricted her ribcage, alarmingly repressing her breathing and even more alarmingly threatening to burst apart. She could not imagine what he’d do to her if that abomination happened, couldn’t even contemplate it at this moment. “I want to go home,” she wept. The words burst from her mouth in convulsive gasps.

“You can’t,” he said, “unless you want your father to go to jail.” He described to her in ignominious detail how her father had stolen from the company and sold the goods illegally. He concluded, “Your father has given you to me as payment.”

She was devastated. In horror, her head jerked involuntarily in his direction and she peeped up at him through her hair’s camouflage. He was smiling down at her. His smile had always assuaged her so, reflexively, her body relaxed. But her solace returned to despair, instantly, when the smile’s true nature fully struck her. She’d never before seen this expression. It was cold and inexorable as an ancient glacier, and hideously cruel.

His eyes locked onto hers and he gave a grand sweep of his long arm. “Please, my dear! Feel perfectly free to leave. I won’t stop you. Go back to your parents.”

Relief overwhelmed her absolutely, incontrovertibly. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how much she wanted to leave. She shook the hair from her eyes and looked timidly up at him. “Really?”

His smile didn’t waver. “Certainly.” He shrugged. “Of course, don’t expect your father to be there to greet you. He’ll already be in prison.”

Wretchedness consumed her. Simultaneously her muscles became limp and convulsed. Her face dropped to the carpet then withdrew like a turtle into the tight ball of arms and legs.

His steely voice penetrated the dense carpet pile into which she’d sunk, “Do I need to remind you that you are a lady? Get up.”

With all-consuming lassitude she complied. He took her frigid fingers in his warm, strong hand and assisted her to her feet. He turned her to face him, peering into her eyes as he tenderly gripped each shoulder in a sedative hand. “Don’t worry, darling. I think you’d no longer be happy in your little farmhouse.”

Several weeks before her eighteenth birthday, he faced her across the breakfast table, his expression grim. “Despite my attention and efforts, you really have not made adequate progress.”

Her already pale face blanched but, as she knew he expected of her, she did not look away. Would he find some exceptional way to punish her?

“Although you are certainly not yet ready, I have decided to marry you.” It took her a moment to quell her shocked stare. She felt as if she was drowning in his dark, relentless gaze. “We will have a small civil ceremony,” a celestial smile transformed his face into that of a loving angel, “then, when you are ready, you shall wear your dress to stand up with me before our friends and relatives.”

Deep in her mind’s recesses the brittle, feeble thought that she no longer knew who her friends were prodded her. Except Delia. She so wanted to see Delia, particularly if she was to fall deeper into his honeyed sink of power. Suddenly she knew – and the realization almost made her weep with hopelessness – that he was marrying her to bind her to him more surely, in adamantine threads of domestic legality.

She heard her own voice’s tinny vibration in the luxurious surroundings. “Please,” she knew she should say his name but couldn’t bring herself to do so, “may I invite Delia?”

The dark expression returned and she was certain he’d say no. Instead he smiled and, as always, she felt happier despite herself, “Certainly my dear. If that is your wish.”

Michael forced his penis deep into the girl’s tight vagina hard against her resilient uterine wall, pressing until the tissues stretched taut against the bulging head. Her fine breasts rippled with his motion but she lay still, making no sound and no move other than at his hand.

She was definitely losing her purity, the glorious dynamic tension, intangible, indefinable, that shrieked to him definitively even while the girl was silent. There was no question about it. His beast told him so. Its clamorous voice was quieted though not entirely stilled. With one small mental corner, Michael mused. He wondered if some means of maintaining their purity existed. Perhaps if Madame Lee cosseted the girls, allowed them to keep the illusion of safety and nurturance while they waited? But of course Madame benefited from his rapid repudiation of his prizes. He paid her well for the new.

As he ripped himself out of the girl, fighting to force the uncontaminated purity of response he so badly needed, he lifted up and examined the slender, opalescent form. The twin swells of her firm breasts and rosy nipples, the tiny waist no bigger than his hands joined fingertip to fingertip, all so frail, so beautiful. He shook his head, allowing a sigh to escape into the still air. At the atypical sound the girl tensed, he felt it like a revitalizing current directly into his penis.

He heard the beast’s voice, “Yes! I will take her, eat her!” and it was as if its hand grabbed his penis like a battering ram and cudgelled her with it. For several long minutes the beast mauled her, pounding until her small body shook, consuming the arduously restrained whimpers like spicy food. Her so-tight vagina clung to him as if to a lifeline, involuntarily hanging on as he tore out of her and re-entered.

When at last he ejaculated, Michael sighed again. He would not see her again. For no more than a second he contemplated what Madame did with his discards. He lifted out and off her, turned away and eliminated her existence from his consciousness.

The spring day was flawless. Pale sun hung golden in a sky bright crystalline blue with just a few feathery white clouds. It spread warm fingers through the crisp, invigorating Northern air. Tiny heads of purple, white and yellow crocuses clustered vibrantly together amid the greening hotel gardens.

Michael had arranged for the city employee who performed weddings to come, with the necessary documentation, to the hotel. Though really it was only a matter of signing the forms, the employee – a short, round, affable man with neatly coiffed grey hair thinning to a round bald spot on top – had a small, pat ceremony he routinely performed. He stood before the small group looking remarkably urbane in a dubious camel hair topcoat and smiled benignly.

Karen’s drifting attention repeatedly returned to the sunshine glinting on the man’s bald pate. She stood beside Michael, magnificent as always in a dark suit and topcoat, holding a simple bouquet of six languorous white Christmas lilies tied with a wide cream ribbon that matched her suit. The suit was cream raw silk by Yves Saint Laurent, beautiful of course and of course uncomfortably small. The skirt’s stiff waistband bit deep into the flesh at her waist and the perfectly cut, collarless jacket’s narrow armholes pulled tight into the nerve clusters in her armpits causing her arms to ache and her fingers to tingle unpleasantly.

Over her shoulders was thrown a wide stole, indescribably thick and soft, of Russian sable. She’d never hoped to own any fur other than rabbit, had not even known anything as rare as sable existed. Once the garment would have delighted and amazed her. Now though, her clothing had become burdensome – gossamer prisons. Michael had further destroyed her joy by telling her he’d had to buy her a stole because she was still too large (only in moments of extreme displeasure did he use the word “fat”) to warrant the outlay on an ill-fitting coat.

It was Emeline, not Delia, who stood at her side, encased in a column of black mink almost incandescently luminous and too impossibly narrow to contain a human body. She held two lilies tied in red that perfectly matched her brilliantly lipsticked pallor.

On the other side and slightly behind, Karen’s parents hovered awkwardly in drab cloth coats and functional boots. Delia stood beside them, restless and tensely alert, encased in the pink down jacket that had once, long ago Karen thought vaguely, matched her own. Karen’s gaze lighted on the hazy halo radiating around Delia’s head off her bright blond streaks, then moved impassively lower. She was startled by the dullness surrounding Delia, who stood out so vividly in Karen’s memory.

Then, for a moment, Delia’s eyes met hers. Was Delia trying to communicate something? Karen didn’t seem to be able to focus, to be able to connect with her old friend, and soon her eyes moved on.

The ceremony was so short that Karen did not even realize it was over when Michael slipped a large, blue-white, emerald cut diamond on her finger and bent his beautiful face toward hers. He smiled warmly, so soothingly, down on her and his full soft lips brushed hers. She heard clapping, then Michael’s deep voice. “Please, join us for a meal in our suite.”

Delia was on her guard. Still she could not take her eyes from the suite’s décor. She’d never been in a place like this.

Michael had seated her between Karen and Karen’s father, who occupied the foot of the table across from him, their gracious host. Karen’s mother sat next to Michael and Emeline sat on her other side, across from Delia and next to Karen’s father. Delia’s eyes darted from person to person – though toward Michael with wary circumspection – taking in every minute fluctuation in mood and action. At first she felt surprise at Karen’s father’s minimal discomfort at his proximity to Emeline. But she guessed he’d been there before and was at least a little used to it.

Delia really couldn’t get over Emeline. Under other circumstances she would have devoted much attention to the elegant woman. It was now, however, Karen who absorbed her. She so wanted to gossip with her friend about the beautiful suite and clothes and that fabulous fur. Delia was both bemused and puzzled by Karen’s listlessness. Karen looked slim and elegant but Delia had never seen her so lacking in energy – in life. Karen almost looked drugged.

A clear soup littered with a few vegetable pieces and topped with small stippled leaves of a strange-smelling, bright green herb was served. Delia glanced and then stared paralyzed at Karen. Her friend bent over the porcelain bowl, an oddly piercing expression – like a starving wild dog, Karen thought – in her eyes.

Michael’s eyes were also on Karen. As Delia watched he smiled solicitously and placed a hand over his new wife’s. Karen’s body jerked. Perplexingly, her back straightened yet simultaneously listlessness again overtook her. Slowly she took a sip then laid her spoon next to her bowl on the fine linen. Her bowl was removed.

Salmon with asparagus in hollandaise was served – except to Karen. On Karen’s plate lay a piece of unsauced salmon half the size of the others accompanied by two stalks of plain asparagus. Delia gaped as Karen’s shaking fork moved toward her mouth carrying a tiny flake of salmon.

Delia rearranged her face into a masque of untroubled blandness. Had Michael drugged her friend? Was he abusing her in some inexplicable manner? Karen seemed so strange. What had Michael done to her? And why were her parents going along with it so quietly? Her glance quickly swept Karen’s father. She’d never seen him act so cowed. Something was going on and she was determined to find out what. She was also determined to help her friend.

Her attention was distracted by Michael. Throughout the meal, he and Emeline had done virtually all the talking. Now, however, he raised his glass. His deep voice resonated across the crystal glassware. “A toast to my dear wife.” He swirled the flaxen liquid then tipped it between his sensual lips. His opaque eyes sparked as he lowered his glass. “We leave tomorrow morning for our house in
Berkeley
.” He scanned the table, a paternal smile on his lips. Then he sighed, a sigh replete with weariness, “It’s time to go home.”

Delia heard Karen’s small gasp and turned to see her friend’s face finish its rapid transition from shock to … nothing. Again Delia scanned the table. Karen’s mother seemed crestfallen to the point of abjection. Her father looked like a felled beast. Certainly no one was prepared for this news – Delia turned her head to the alabaster face – except perhaps Emeline.