Chapter Seventeen

Ornette knew the house in question when she arrived inside the bubble gate. It was a house in her old neighborhood. Everyone knew it. It was spectacular. It was huge. It was modeled after old buildings back on Earth. It was extravagance to a fault.

She was not literally wearing brown paper. The seamstress explained to her that brown paper was what he referred to when he spoke of company swag. She was wearing a black sheath dress. They’d given her panties, but no bra. She hated that. Ornette did not enjoy the feeling of her breasts flopping around. They were too heavy to go braless. Suddenly, she wished she was back with Joel. That dude had not been her idea of a good time, but the dress he had given her was a power move she could get behind. The dress Hans had given her made her want to fold her arms across her chest in a defensive pose and keep them there.

When the doors of the house were opened to her, she was greeted by a butler and a camera crew. They were to do the tour of the house without the master of the house present. Apparently, they couldn’t even suggest that Hans had time for such a task. He was entirely too busy.

Ornette thought that the problem was that he didn’t want to be filmed in case someone didn’t like something he did. He’d rather be bland than awful, which was what he was. Some public relations officer in the past had probably told him how to be media savvy and he was still taking their pointers by staying away from the cameras in general.

His mansion had everything.

Indoor pool? Yes.

Ballroom? Yes.

Library? Yes.

Balconies? Yes.

Decks? Yes.

Grass? Obviously.

Flowers? Too many to count.

Anything grown on Venus that couldn't feed someone was luxury beyond luxury.

After Ornette had seen so much that she felt a little sick at the contrasting life situations she had experienced in her past, she was taken to the room where she would be sleeping that night. The room was beautiful, but as soon as the camera crew had gone, she was informed by the butler that it had all been a ruse. She would be staying in the master bedroom with Hans.

“He knows he’s not allowed to sleep with me, right?” she clarified, feeling uncomfortable.

“He is absolutely allowed to sleep with you,” the butler replied. “He’s not allowed to have sex with you, which he would never do.”

Ornette rolled her eyes.

The evening wore on the way the butler had hinted it would. Hans surfaced from somewhere lower in the mansion. Then he brought her into the dining room where he fed her foam and crumbs for dinner. The silver forks and knives clattered on the plates as though they were empty. Dessert was meringue that was made from half of an egg white that had been whipped until it was a dollop of white on her plate. If it had been sweetened, Ornette couldn’t tell.

She and Hans did not talk. They dined alone. He only said offensive things to her when there was someone around to hear it. Otherwise, he wasn’t interested. Instead, he seemed satisfied to look at her across the table.

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After dessert, he took a sip from his full goblet and said, “Are you impressed by my home?”

“A strong impression has been left on me,” she replied, not clarifying whether or not it was a good impression or a bad one. Instead, it was merely an impression.

“Could you see yourself living in a place like this?” he asked, again seemingly pretending to drink his white wine.

“I could see my body in this chair from somewhere up above,” she replied. Ornette had no idea if Hans understood that what she was saying was that if she stayed in his mansion she would surely die of malnutrition and her spirit would be hovering over her dead body.

Whether he understood it or not, he looked satisfied with her answer.

“What do you normally do after dinner?” she asked, drinking from her water glass.

“I go to bed,” he answered crisply.

Which meant Ornette was going to bed with him.

She sat as still as a statue as she waited for him to blot his mouth with his napkin, rise from his chair, and come to her seat at the table to collect her.

If Ornette was honest, she was quite bored. His bony hand on hers as he helped her rise from her chair and the chill of his skin as he retained his hold on her as he led her across the house to his private room.

The reason she was bored was because her favorite part of the whole selling herself transaction was the opportunity to design clothes. Owners who enacted these kinds of seduction scenes did it for their own amusement. Most times it didn’t make for a very interesting evening. If she was allowed to be honest, she would have told him something that would have turned his already cold blood to ice.

Whatever he had in mind, she’d already done it.

With someone else.

She’d already done it.

She’d already done all of it.

As they walked, she refrained from sighing and asked clearly, “What do you have in mind?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “I’ll just get you in your nightgown and put you to bed.”

“A chainmail nightgown?” she asked, still bored. She’d worn one to bed before.

“No. I’ve been informed that if I want to continue to be part of the show, I mustn’t do anything that causes you to report a scandal.”

“The Coordinator gave you that limitation?” she asked curiously.

“No,” he said, holding the bedroom door open for her. “The head of my public relations department gave me that instruction.”

That made sense to Ornette. He was probably hanging on by a thread. Men in his position could do anything… Just so long as no one found out about it. The nature of the show, her place on it, his place on it, and everything being so totally in the public eye protected her.

On his grand four-poster bed, he had a black box for Ornette to open. It was a red nightgown. Hans insisted on dressing her himself, which was little more than a view of her in her underwear and two uncomfortable squeezes.

Then he opened the bed for her and instructed her to lie down. He tucked her in and asked her what kind of stories she was told as a little girl when she was going to bed.

“I wasn’t told stories. Not until I was sold as a model,” she said, refraining from saying that she had been raised a few streets over in a skyscraper penthouse.

“How did you go to sleep?” he asked, pressing her for details.

She raised her cold eyes to his. “I was told to go to sleep and left alone.”

It was true.

He stood up and said in his sternest, old man voice, “Go to sleep now, Child.” Then he flicked the bed curtains shut and disappeared from view.

Ornette looked at the ceiling and waited for him to join her. Any moment now, he would stop playing daddy and become Daddy (with a capital D). He wasn’t allowed to do much to her, but she wondered at his self-control. She waited with shallow breaths until she heard him snoring from the position of an armchair on the other side of the room.

That was lucky.

She still didn’t sleep.

When she finally did sleep, she slept like a helocarrier that was only idling, but not off.

In the morning, she was taken to the office where she tried on everything for the show and was approved. Then she was taken back to the dorms where a package from Desmond was waiting for her. It was the gloves she’d asked him for. She put them on as she sat on her private bed and fell asleep wearing them.

She slept all day.