Iona clamped her teeth together and made her face a perfect mask of calm. She was not going to throw a fit just because Gage wasn’t giving her what she wanted. The truth was, she didn’t exactly know what she wanted. She knew that she wanted more money than she was getting. At her current rates, yes, she made a lot of money and there were plenty of opportunities for a woman with her skill set. The problem with her was that she was not getting enough love in her life.

She knew it.

She wanted to fix it, but when she thought of what she ought to do to get more love in her life, she could only think of three things. She could simply leave Sleeping Beauty Inc. and find something else to do with her life that made her happy. She had enough money to do almost anything she could think of. Except, she couldn’t think of anything. Once upon a time, she had dreamed of being a fairytale princess and her life working for Sleeping Beauty Inc. had given her that completely. If she wanted to keep living in a fairyland, then the best thing for her was to continue living as a model who was treated like a princess.

Her second choice was to choose to be the object of love for one man. If she found a worthwhile husband among the super-rich then the problem was solved. She’d still be a princess and she’d get the love she was craving.

Her third choice was stupid. She knew it was stupid, but she couldn’t get it out of her head. She had this sneaking little attraction to Gage, who always kissed her when she woke up. She had always thought of him as the best part of her job, but in the last year, she had started thinking of him more. Sometimes she got slapped on the ass by a man she did not like at all, but she had gotten into the habit of imagining that it was Gage who had smacked her and when she turned around to scold the man who had touched her, she was so sweet that her reprimand didn’t work at all. If she could convince Gage to leave Sleeping Beauty Inc. with her, what kind of life would she have? Would she still be a princess?

It was all Gage’s fault. Every other man she met looked at her like she was a steak and he was a hound dog who hadn’t eaten in a week, but Gage wasn’t like that. He looked at her like she was more than her face, more than her body, and more than her fake smile. He hadn’t done that much because their time together was always so short. They were together for one week out of fifty-two, but she had to admit he had become her most trusted friend.

There was also the problem that he was ridiculously attractive. His body proportions had a 1% margin of difference from the perfect standard of beauty. That meant that if you took off his shoes and looked at his bare feet, you’d want to use them as a model for a marble statue of a man’s feet. You could look at ninety-nine other men’s feet and you wouldn’t find better ones. That went on as your eyes traveled up his legs, knees, and thighs. True, she hadn’t seen him with his pants down, but when he mentioned dropping his pants on pain of electrocution, her mouth had filled with saliva. She was very interested in whether or not he was in the top 1% there. The same went for the rest of his body. Perfect hands, wrists, arms, he was perfect all the way up. Then his face was a miracle.

It was a miracle because he wasn’t handsome.

He was like a male Scarlett O’Hara because he had a perfect body and a face that nobody could forget because it wasn’t like anyone else’s face! It was hard lines, it was soft curves. He had light brown hair and eyes so blue that Iona thought he looked like the God of the sky.

Something terrible had happened to him. She had always suspected it, but having him say it was something else. She wanted him to tell her more about himself and hear why he felt the way he did.

She could guess what had happened. She had been passed around from man to man before she started getting corporate contracts, but what he was saying felt like it was on another level.

Instead, she found herself saying. “No problem. Let’s change the contract to say that if anything sexual happens between us then it isn’t a big deal. I can’t electrocute you if you refuse me and that change will make sure it’s a casual contract. Besides, no one would ever believe you didn’t want to have sex with me.”

Gage looked at her sideways.

She was confusing him. He had a right to be confused. There had never been anything remotely sexual about their relationship before. All those sexual clauses had been left in because she had lost control of herself when she was creating the contract. It may have been because no one had ever asked her what she might like in bed. She had temporarily forgotten that Gage was not amenable to everything just because the sample contract provided by Sleeping Beauty Inc. had all those crazy things in it.

“Perhaps we need a second contract,” he said slowly. “One that is just between us.”

“Why?”

“So I can understand what you really want.”

Iona frowned. She didn’t have any clue what she really wanted.

***

Over the next few days, Iona was still ill, so they ironed out the details. No matter what she said, Gage wasn’t happy. He didn’t like the contract. He didn’t like what he was asked to do. She increased his pay twice, but that didn’t seem to ease his mind about what was about to happen.

She was going to use him to try to catch a bigger man. She was going to take him out in public in order to achieve this. He was going to have to shave with a razor against his skin, which was something he hadn’t done in years. He was going to have to have a tailor measure his inseam. He said all this to Iona, but she merely brushed his concerns aside and told him she would measure him instead of the tailor.

“After all,” she said haughtily. “You’ve seen me in the paper dress on your medical table often enough that my measuring you with your pants on shouldn’t be that big a deal.”

“Those creepy men are always so damn happy when they see the numbers,” Gage complained.

“I’ll be the only one touching you. Surely, that doesn’t upset you,” she said, reaching forward and touching him on the thigh.

He rolled his eyes and tapped his fingers on his bicep in a show of mild irritation. This wasn’t the only plan of hers that he disapproved of. He disapproved of everything.

Iona sat back. “Just out of curiosity, what would you do if you were me?”

“I’d make a plan,” he said simply.

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“What sort of plan?”

“I’d plan to do corporate jobs until I had enough money stockpiled that I could live off the interest and then I’d go find some little hermit hole and hunker down.”

She gawked. “You would not.”

“I would so. What’s happening right now is that I’ve found a hermit hole where I’m getting paid to be here. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not living my absolute best life right now. Someday, I’ll leave all this behind and have a life somewhere quiet, but I’m not sure that right here isn’t the best I’ll ever have it.”

The idea of that made Iona squirm. Her highest ideal was to be treated like a princess with pretty clothes, pretty looks, and a calendar of fun meetings with nothing but parties on the horizon. When she worked for the helocarrier company, every day had been a bit of a party. There was always a party atmosphere.

Just now, she realized that Gage did not have anything like that. She tried to get it to make sense to her, so she asked a question. “I’m not sure I see the appeal, but I guess the food on board the Cannonball III is pretty good.”

He laughed. “I don’t get the same food to eat as you. Actually, none of the models get the same food as you.”

“What?”

“Well, for one thing, most of the models only eat two meals aboard this ship. They’re not sick, so they don’t sit around sipping cold nutritious bubbles. They come on board, get reset, have a bite to eat, brush their teeth, and go straight into a sleeping chamber. That bite to eat is either a blueberry smoothie with a sandwich or a bowl of french onion soup… with a sandwich. When they wake up, they get a bowl of hot oatmeal and a banana or a bowl of cold cereal… and a banana. That’s mostly what I have on board for the models, but that’s not what you get.”

Actually, Iona had never been offered any of those meals. “Do those models not bring in as much money as me?” she asked slowly.

“It’s true that they make less than you, but for many of them, they don’t want to be aboard this ship for any more time than they have to. They take vacations and this ship is not their home-away-from-home. They don’t like me. They resent me.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t comfort them. In all fairness, I don’t comfort you either. You just don’t seem to mind.”

Iona stared at him, perplexed. “You always comforted me after my jobs.”

Gage huffed a laugh. “Really? How have I done that?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s always you. It’s been you who has dropped me off and picked me up for the last seven years.”

“How old are you?” he suddenly asked.

“Thirty-one, but I’ve only been awake for twenty-seven years of it. But I started doing this when I was sixteen which is the earliest they’ll let anyone do this legally. I used to have a revolving door of different handlers. You have been a constant. That’s comforting. Why? How old are you?”

He replied that his personal clock said he was twenty-eight, but he was much older.

“What do you eat when you’re on board?” she suddenly wanted to know.

“Whatever I want. I stock the ship.”

She refrained from chuckling. If he stocked the ship then he was treating her like a princess personally. He was also doing something different with her than what he did with the other models. Iona had always wanted to know what their stays aboard his ship were like, but she’d never had the courage to ask.

Gage’s frown deepened. “Why don’t you show me your boys?”

“Okay. Let’s do that.” Iona flipped a few buttons on the remote placed next to her bed and a picture came up of the first man she was going to try for.

“This is the man I’m trying to get on Callisto. His name is Dante Hemmington.”

When the picture of Dante came up on the screen, Iona tried to see what Gage was thinking when he saw him. The pictures she’d chosen for Dante and the other men were the best she could find: the most heartstopping, the most captivating, the most jealousy-inciting. At least, Iona hoped they were.

Dante was gorgeous in the picture. Iona knew the picture did the man a dozen favors, but that was exactly what she was looking to accomplish. He had dark hair, bronze skin, and eyes the color of pewter. His bone structure was nothing to smirk at as people with as much money as him needn’t look less than beautiful, but his figure was quite impressive in person. Not as impressive as Gage, as Dante was less chiseled but more imposing in his height and shoulder breadth.

Iona glanced at Gage for his reaction and received nothing. His face was blank.

“He’s the son of the CEO of Solarship. His father was one of my first clients when I was in my early twenties. I wasn’t his main model though and my entire job was merely to train with him in the gym. Dante used to visit and occasionally, I thought I saw his mouth water when he looked me up and down. He’s put in bids for me on more than one occasion, sometimes the highest bid, but I always chose the corporate client instead. If I can get his mouth-watering, I might get him to open his wallet even more.”

Another sideways glance at Gage gave her nothing.

She went on.

“This is Sherman Wilson,” she said, flicking to the next picture. “He’s on Europa.”

In the picture on the screen he was handsome in a Texas farm boy kind of way with sun-bleached hair and a sunkissed tan, but Iona knew that his looks were both unnatural and his only good quality. He wasn’t a bad person for a trillionaire and he habitually purchased Sleeping Beauty Inc. models to try to help him with his inflexible personality. He was known for shutting down, crying, and finding it impossible to deal with real life. It was the job of the model he purchased to placate him and transition him from one part of the day to the next.

The reason he was on the list was that he was the highest-paying buyer in the Juno region. There was talk that the primary model he had had for the last three years, Jessica, was tiring of him and unlikely to sign another contract with him. Iona didn’t have any desire to marry him herself, but if she impressed him enough that he offered her a contract, she would go up in the rankings dramatically. In the case of Sherman, she only wanted a temporary contract at first. She wasn’t sure she would be able to tolerate him any more than Jessica had been able to.

“Sherman is the son of the genetic engineer who not only revived an extinct species of sea cow but also genetically altered it to survive life in the frigid oceans of Europa,” Iona explained. “I’m sure you’ve heard of him. His father is still around, but most of his wealth is in the hands of Sherman, who is better with numbers than his father ever was.”

“So, who will we be meeting on Io?” Gage asked tentatively.

“This is Benediction Hallows,” Iona said, moving to the next picture. “He’s head of the Church of Voynich.”

Benediction was so tall and dark and handsome that there actually wasn’t a woman in the solar system who didn’t know who he was. Information on him was sketchy as he rarely talked openly about himself but only taught the Voynich Bible. Iona was not religious herself, but she did find the gospel of Voynich to be compelling when Benediction preached it.

Without question, he was the one Iona was most attracted to and actually, she wasn’t sure whether she thought Gage was better looking or not. They were very different as Benediction had undergone a treatment that turned his skin onyx black and his hair forest green as was the custom for followers of Voynich. All of them got the pigment removed from their eyes as well so that they had no color, they only reflected light. It was something they all did to show their devotion to their Lord.

When Iona had been back on Callisto working all hours, she had taken a little time to herself to run a simulator to see how she would look if she had the procedure done on herself. Goodbye pink hair and honey eyes. The end result was startling. She didn’t look anything like herself.

“Him?” Gage asked, bringing Iona back to reality.

She nodded. “Though, that’s not actually why I’m interested in him.”

“You’re attracted to him?” Gage asked, obviously more interested in her answer to that question than any other question he’d asked her all day.

She tilted her head to the side. “He’s very attractive. Especially the way he speaks.”

“So do you have a plan to try to snare each of these race horses?” he said coldly as he leaned back in his chair.

Iona put a practiced smile on her face. “I do.”