Red Hot Obsessions (183 page)

No, she would have whatever Wulf was having, especially if it was currywurst. Time to expand her rural world.

Wulf motioned the man over and said something in Swiss or whatever. Rae wondered if all his staff spoke Swiss and whether any of them spoke English.

The man turned toward her, obviously waiting for her choice. His hair was shoe-polish black, but his gray eyebrows straggled toward the smile lines around his eyes.

She smiled. “Um, I’ll have what he’s having?”

The waiter’s mouth pulled to the left, a grimace. “That is what Mr. von Hannover said.”

So now she got to choose for both of them. No pressure, there. Rae glanced at Wulf, who smiled back. “In that case,” she asked the waiter guy, “would it be too much trouble to ask for the steak?”

The waiter bowed from the waist. “No trouble at all, Miss Stone. How would you like your steak prepared?”

“Medium rare?”

“Excellent. Thank you, Miss.” He collected their menus.

“Good choice,” Wulf said, when the guy was gone.

“Oh, good. You like steak?”

“I like all of them, but after the whiskey at the club, I am in the mood for something substantial.”

Rae worried that, if she ate too much, she was going to pooch out in the form-fitting red gown, and then she wondered if Wulf meant that he was in the mood for her.

After that, the conversation swirled back and forth between them, touching on her classes, her thoughts on music and books that she had read, and amazingly he had read most of them, too. Wulf’s arms rested on the table, and all his casual gestures seemed like he was beckoning to Rae.

“One of my professors assigned a paper on neuroplasticity this week that was really fascinating,” she said.

“Neuroplasticity?”

“Basically, if you use your brain, you build it up. It seems like the brain is more like a muscle than a gland. A gland can be exhausted by overstimulation and burn out. A muscle just gets stronger. Ever since they discovered that you make new neurons your whole life, it’s been an interesting area of research.”

“Fascinating.” His bright blue eyes scanned her face, watching her.

“This is pretty specialized stuff. You must be bored.”

“Not at all. You’re passionate about it. I find it fascinating.” He asked about her hypothesized autism therapy clinic, A Ray of Light.

So Rae told him everything she could think of, about the different types of therapy that A Ray of Light should offer, how she would structure the time slots so that kids moved from one section to the next and from basic to intensive levels, and how the caregivers would have a special area for training and socializing to reduce stress.

Wulf smiled the whole time and sipped wine, as if she were being entertaining instead of blathering on about particulars that bored her family to dismissive hand-waving.

When she was thoroughly sick of talking about herself, the staff guys delivered the steaks with suitable flourish, and the delicate beef and that creamy sauce tasted better than the salad had. She tried to hold up her end of the conversation, but the steak that fell apart under her fork and those scalloped potatoes oozing cheesy cream and the white asparagus—white asparagus!—all seemed to jump into her mouth every time she tried to talk. She washed it down with two glasses of red wine, and even the wine tasted good and she didn’t even like red wine.

Wulf filled the time between his bites with small talk, mostly observations about their common books but also a few comments about A Ray of Light, mostly about the business structure that Rae had never thought about, and she nodded while she chewed.

When both of them fell comfortably silent, they listened to the music drifting from the ceiling and walls.

Rae had grown up eating her mother’s cooking because eating out more than a few times a year blew their budget. Her mother had been grown from austere Norwegian stock, so she boiled a hunk of beef in water with salt, dehydrated onion bits, cloves, and a bay leaf. Throwing in a couple potatoes and a carrot rounded out the meal for the six of them. The dorm cafeteria hadn’t been much of an improvement, the one semester that she had had a meal plan. Since then, she had subsisted on cheese sandwiches grilled in foil with an iron on the cotton setting, oranges, and vitamin pills.

The door to the kitchen rattled and cracked open. A black cat pushed its face through and then slid the rest of its body after. It trotted two steps and leapt onto Wulf’s lap.

“Oh! You have a cat? He’s so cute!” Rae said.

“She. Her name is Brunhilde.” He stroked the cat, who kept trying to nose its way toward the steak on Wulf’s plate.

One of the waiters rushed out, jabbering in Swiss or whatever, and tried to remove the cat. Wulf said something, and the man argued but returned to the kitchen, then came back with minced steak on a small plate, which he set on the ground at Wulf’s feet. The cat hopped down and nibbled at the steak.

Obviously, the staff weren’t the only ones who ate in the kitchen with Wulf.

Rae turned back to her food, though she watched the cat out of the corner of her eye. Every now and then, Brunhilde arched her back and rubbed Wulf’s leg, then resumed her supper.

Yeah, that cat was no stranger to eating at Wulf’s feet.

The steak on Rae’s plate parted under her fork as she ate it. Sopping up the creamy sauce only made it better.

Wulf smiled as he watched Rae devour the food, and he said something else about Orlando by Virginia Woolf. She nodded again.

She squeegeed a last smear of whisky-peppercorn sauce off her plate with her fork and licked the fork clean. “That was so good.”

“I’m glad you liked it. My staff will be gratified by your appetite. I hope you saved room for dessert,” Wulf said, just as the waiter guy reappeared holding, dear Lord in Heaven, yet more menus.

“I’m so full. I couldn’t.” The red whalebones were cutting into her bloated belly. Other waiter guys cleared Rae’s embarrassingly clean plate.

“Do try something, even if it is only one spoonful. Yvonne is an excellent pastry chef and chocolatier.”

Rae knew that wine made her stupid, which is probably why she turned to the waiter guy who was waiting for her to say something and said, “Maybe the chocolate mousses?”

“The same,” Wulf told him and handed over his menu.

He was obviously mirroring her choices, so Rae asked him, “Do you want something else? We could have the Bavarian cream or one of the things that I can’t pronounce.”

The waiter turned his impassive face toward Rae. Gray stubble grew in the deep wrinkles around his mouth like grass sprouting in sidewalk cracks. “Mr. von Hannover, the chocolate, he prefers. If you would prefer something else, you should say.”

Rae glanced at Wulf, but he merely shrugged and said, “They know my tastes.”

“The chocolate is fine, thank you, sir.” Rae shrank in her seat a little.

The waiters filed out, leaving them alone again. Brunhilde the cat had wandered off some time that Rae hadn’t noticed.

“Do you eat chocolate for dessert every night?” she asked.

“It is often fruit and cheese with a little chocolate, but yes.”

The dessert came within a minute, suggesting that it had already been made, and Rae resolved to eat just a little taste of each of the three chocolate layers in the tall flute, a little from the white chocolate froth on the top, a bit from the milk chocolate layer in the middle, and just a taste of the deep chocolate silk down in the base.

Of course, she ate the whole thing and drank a glass of the sweet white wine, which was called Riesling, that another waiter poured in another glass around her plate.

Between the wine and the chocolate and the enormous amount of food, Rae felt on the verge of falling asleep and dreaming about flying through clouds. She slouched and rested her head on the back of her chair. “That was amazing.”

Wulf’s smile was kind. “Sometimes I forget that my people are all excellent at their jobs.”

“I have never tasted anything like that.” Her eyelids drooped.

“Yvonne trained here in the States, at the culinary institute in the north of the city. When my previous chef decided to open a restaurant, she wanted to try her hand at the kitchen, so we sent her there for classes.”

“Is his restaurant here?”

“No. He located it in Los Angeles. It’s worked out well for him.” Wulf’s voice was getting kind of far away.

“That’s cool.” Really cool. Dang nifty. She yawned.

“Quite.” Rae felt his warm hand slide around hers. “Shall we go upstairs?”

She sat up in shock, and the twinkling dining room glared before her eyes adjusted. She whispered, “No! We can’t. Not here. They will all know what we’re doing.”

He chuckled. His thumb rubbed the back of her hand, and a wisp of desire rose like smoke through her. “They are all adults, as are we.”

“Oh my God. I would never. That’s like doing it in your parents’ house.”

“I assure you, they are not your parents, nor mine.”

“They’ll laugh at me. They’ll talk.”

“Rae,” and Wulf pressed her hand between both of hers, calming her, “if everyone thought that way, the nobility would have died out generations ago.”

“Still, it’s not like we’re married or something.” That should make him back off.

Instead, Wulf stood and tugged her hand gently, pulling her to her feet. His fingers wound around hers. She bobbed as the wine rushed to her head.

He said, “Let’s go.”

She scooted out from around the chair and snagged her purse from where it hung on the back. Dizziness spun her head. “I couldn’t.”

“Come on.” He snagged the half-full bottle of Riesling and two clean glasses by their stems, and he led her through the dining room. The candlelight slanted one way through the glasses, then the other, as they walked beside the long table.

She followed him. “Everyone will know.”

“We’ll sneak upstairs. No one will notice us.”

“I so doubt that.”

He tugged her arm. She followed.

The wine and chocolate sang in her head. She wanted to press against his skin and feel him under her palms. Her body followed where he led her, even as her brain protested that everyone would know.

He stopped at the door to peer around the corner, and Rae didn’t see and bumped him from behind. When he turned to shush her, lest the staff hear them, she couldn’t help herself and kissed him.

His other hand slipped around her waist and drew her closer. The whalebones in her dress poked her ribs and hips as she fit her body against him.

He pulled back and grinned at her. “Careful. Given an opportunity, I will sweep all these table settings to the floor and have you on that table.”

She couldn’t breathe for wanting him to do just that, but Wulf looked out the door again and led her down the hall of ferns and urns to the main room. He paused at the base of the staircase to glance around them, scrutinizing the conversation groupings of satin couches and chairs and peering at the supersized grand piano for lingering servants.

Yeah, he was definitely mocking her.

Rae wanted to scurry away from all the eyes in this house, so she gathered up the skirt of that red-beaded girl plumage and led the way. Wulf chuckled all the way up the stairs behind her.

At the top, she waited for him to climb the last steps because she didn’t know which direction to go. She looked back, and the enormous chandelier hung like a crystal sun suspended at eye-level.

Wulf bounded up the last step and tugged her hand again. “This way.”

“All right.” She followed him to the left and hoped like mad that no one had seen them go upstairs.

The balcony skirted the chandelier and the entertaining room below. Rae wanted to hug the wall, but her scarlet dress was worse than useless as camouflage. She felt like a flag snapping in the wind.

After far too long a walk down a beige and gold hallway with too many doors in what must have been the house’s other wing, Wulf opened a door at the end of the hallway. Rae dashed in, and he closed the door behind them.

Rae had almost expected to find herself in a dungeon, a Black Room of Despair and Punishment kind of place, but the blue comforter draped over the oak four-poster bed looked more nautical than naughty. Blue stuffed chairs grouped around a coffee table.

The bookcases on the walls—three of the walls, carpet to high ceiling and corner to faraway corner—those caught her attention.

The books on them weren’t stuffy leather-bound volumes that might have been hollow stage props but bright books of fiction and biography and nonfiction and essays. Three doors and a television were cut into the shelves.

The unsettling thing was that the books, instead of being a crazy quilt of colored spines splattering the walls, were shelved by color.

The wall they had come in was coated in red books, and books in the near corner shaded from red to orange, and then a meticulous rainbow of book spines flowed down the walls. Violet merged into black at the far corner, and monochrome shades of black lightened to gray and then white on the far wall. “Good grief, don’t you have an e-reader?”

Wulf hauled her toward him and caught her in his arms. She was still trying to take it all in when he kissed her and pressed her against the door with his body. His hard muscles under his suit crushed her, and her heart jumped. The smoky wisp of desire sparked.

On the long wall on Rae’s left, plate-glass windows overlooked the pool. Across the blue water and rocks, the other wing of the house spread out, and Rae could see, down on the first floor, through the windows to the fern-filled urns that led to the dining room. “Can they see us through those windows?”

“That, I can fix.” Wulf grabbed a remote from his bedside nightstand and pressed a button. The windows darkened like enormous light-detecting sunglasses. The lights dimmed to something like candlelight.

Without Wulf holding Rae up, her knees buckled, and she sagged against the door.

He stood the wine bottle and glasses on the nightstand.

He crossed the room in three long strides and Rae’s feet flipped off the ground as Wulf swept her up in his arms. “Now, where were we?”