Red Hot Obsessions (186 page)

“My phone doesn’t usually beep like that, that constant beeping.” Her useless, too-late paranoia joined in with its stupid alarm bells.

She fished her phone out of her bag and went back to the bed.

“Yeah, it’s a text,” Rae said. Her phone message light blinked green and kept blinking. “More than one. Lots of texts. Holy cow.”

Wulf rolled over and raised himself on one elbow. “Is everything all right?”

“I don’t know.” Rae traced the pattern on her phone to unlock it. The text icon had a 15 next to it. “Oh my gosh.”

She thumbed the text icon. Hester’s name was on top, but a list of six of her cousins and her brother Ezekiel ran beneath Hester’s. “My family’s been trying to get a hold of me.” Rae tapped Hester’s name.

The top text read, You didn’t answer your phone. Aunt Enid is in the hospital. I’m leaving now. I’ll text if you should come home tonight. The time stamp said that it was sent at eight o’clock that night.

A moment of worry crossed her mind for her Aunt Enid, who was nearly ninety-seven and suffering from dementia.

Hester’s last text, sent just a few minutes before Rae had opened her phone, read, Aunt Enid is with Jesus. Celebration of Life will be next weekend at the church.

At least Aunt Enid wasn’t in such pain any more.

A text from Craigh, her screwball cousin, asked her to come over for supper after they all planted Aunt Enid next weekend.

Grief and relief warred in Rae. The last time she had visited her Aunt Enid in the nursing home, her aunt had sobbed the whole time, asking for her own mother.

Oh, Lord. Rae didn’t want to go home. They would all show up for the service: her cousins, her aunts and uncles, Minister Stoppard, everyone. Aunt Enid was related to the Hardings, too, and Jim Bob Mulligan would certainly attend and insinuate stuff just to watch her squirm.

“My great aunt passed away.” She met Wulf’s eyes, and they were so blue that they matched the comforter over his waist and legs. “The Celebration of Life is next weekend. I have to go home. Jim Bob will probably be there, darn it.”

Wulf raised up and braced himself on one elbow. The sheet slid down his body, revealing more of his muscled stomach. “I’ll go with you.”

“Oh, good Lord, Wulf. You can’t.”

“Whyever not?”

Why not? Because her whole family would give him the third degree and it would come out where she was working to pay for college and at the very least they would harry him like a flock of hawks after a rabbit to find out what his intentions were. “Please don’t.”

“That cousin of yours will not dare anything while I am present. Of course, I will come. Text me the details.”

She cringed because this was going to sound needy. “I don’t have your cell phone number.”

Wulf’s easy laugh made her feel silly. “Give me your phone, and I’ll call myself so you have it.”

“Sure.” Rae handed him the phone, and he thumbed a number into her phone. His pants, on the floor by the bed, chimed.

He asked, “The funeral is when?”

“Celebration of Life. It’s next weekend. Just let me check my email to see if my mom sent me the details or anything.”

“Ja. Here.” He extended the phone toward her.

Rae reached for it, intending just to lift it from his hand by the edge, but her thumb brushed the internet browser icon on the screen.

The browser opened.

The news photo of the screaming, blond child that was Wulf flashed on her phone, beside the formal portrait of Wulf and his twin brother.

Rae’s heart stomped.

Wulf’s face was as pale as porcelain, and his blue eyes were as emotionless as clear water as he stared at the phone screen and then looked up at her.

Rae’s futile swallow hurt her dry throat.

He knew.

~~~~~~~

Episode 6: Into the Fire

Wulf: Aftermath

Wulf paced the corridors of his house, past the long windows overlooking the pool that glowed alien green in the darkness, past ferns in tall pottery urns, past the dining room and back. He stalked through the empty kitchen, trekked through the garages, and walked the balconies above the main floor.

Rae knew.

She knew too much, and she was one “translate” button away from knowing everything.

After he had taken her home, he returned to his house in the quietest of cold rages. He pulled Dieter aside and tasked him with once again deleting those damned Wikipedia pages because they had risen again like goddamned vampires, especially the one on the de.wikipedia.org site that summarized his life in thirteen excruciating paragraphs.

Then he paced.

His staff kept out of his way. They respected his privacy.

If Rae didn’t know who he was yet, she would soon. The Wiki pages summarized, but all the information was available.

He paced all that night, until the brilliant desert sun rose over the back section of the house.

Once she knew, others would, too. Even if Rae told no one, her demeanor toward him would change, and Jeffrey Jackson would pounce on such a change.

Then more people would know, and then the wrong people would hear, and then they would find him.

Almost,
he raged as he sat in the cream satin chair, watching gold and scarlet streak the sky. He stretched his legs and leaned back. The sunlight shone on his serene face.

Almost.

He turned his hands over, trying to feel the sunlight. The thick windows blocked the warmth, and it felt like the sunlight passed entirely through his flesh.

He had
almost
fallen for her. She had
almost
fallen for him before she realized what that meant.

It was better this way, this
almost
.

He could leave before she broke his heart.

He should let her go rather than place her in danger.

Almost,
damn it. This indulgence of his had
almost
hurt them both.

Ms. Keller came down the stairs, wearing her housecoat. “Herr von Hannover.”

Doubtless the evening people had roused her when they saw him pacing. “Frau Keller.”

“I heard you were watching the sunrise,” she said in German, the language of his childhood and the one they used together. She glanced at his rumpled slacks and creased shirt, confirming he was still wearing his clothes from yesterday.

Wulf shrugged.

She settled herself in the chair beside him and leaned back, watching the sun’s rays crest over the rooftop. The peach light shone on her face, smoothing the lines that had accrued in the last seventeen years.

Over half Wulf’s life.

“Up all night?” she asked lightly.

“Yes.” Lying was futile in a house full of whispering servants.

She reached over and took his hand, something she hadn’t done in a very long time. “You are all right, Wulfram?”

Wulf paused at her intrusive gesture, then he turned his hand over and held her fingers for a moment. “I’m fine. Thank you, Rosamunde.”

“You seemed happy last night.”

Wulf felt seventeen again, when Rosamunde had unsuccessfully attempted to dissuade him from flying to Saudi Arabia to chase after a Saudi princess, Reem, whom he had had fallen for like only a motherless teenager could.

“I was mistaken. I was trying to have a normal relationship. She doesn’t know about all that.” He gestured to an empty wall where a darker caramel shadow of a rectangle suggested something large was missing.

“There is nothing normal about your life. It’s unfair, to her, to not tell.”

He had been trying to have a normal
life,
as normal as it could be, or at least different from his life before. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“I’m sorry.” She patted his hand twice and then pulled her hand back. “Would you like some hot chocolate?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind.” She shuffled past the stairs. Her slippers shushed on the marble floor. “I was up anyway.”

A bald-faced lie, but she was stoic in all things.

She said, “I will have the boys hang the portraits back up. The house looks dour without them.”

“Frau Keller.”

“Yes, Herr von Hannover?”

He swallowed, hating to say it, but she had a need to know. “We’ll be moving the household. Probably within a few weeks.”

She paused, which was an admission of astonishment for her, then nodded. “Very good, Herr von Hannover. I’ll begin preparations.”

Wulf had found Reem at a mall in Riyadh and announced that he had come to rescue her. She had sobbed in desperate terror, her tears soaking her black niqab below her eyes, at what her father would do if he found Wulf, and she begged him to leave and not try to contact her again.

He was, again, utterly helpless to protect someone he loved.

Within a few years, Wulf could list dozens of reasons why their relationship would never have worked—from their religions to their priorities to her vicious temper,—but he had stalked her from Switzerland, demanding assurances from mutual school friends that her father hadn’t murdered her, until he heard Reem was married and had children, only two years later.

When he knew that Reem was happy and safe, he let go, relieved.

Wulf wasn’t going to find that peace about Rae any time soon.

He stood and paced.

~~~~~

Back to the Dorm

Rae lay in her bed in her cramped, solitary dorm room, curled up under the scratchy pink and purple afghan that her Aunt Enid had crocheted for her in better times, eyes open, refusing to cry.

Aunt Enid had always been kind enough to Rae when Rae was a kid, but her passing was no shock. Enid had been almost ninety-seven. She was longing for Jesus, everyone said. The last time Rae had visited her, she groaned from osteoporosis pain in her spine, stared at the decrepit nursing home through a milky fog of incomprehension and cataracts, and cried for her mother to come and take her home.

Rae wouldn’t cry about Wulf, either. That was her own doing.

Wulf had been polite while he drove her home through the dark morning. Even his electric car gave her the silent treatment.

At one point during the uncomfortable ride out of his floodlit fortress, through the sleeping city, and into the university’s dorm district where the drunks straggled home, Wulf had asked her, so quietly, “Do you know who I am?”

His British accent seemed so strong, like his jaw wouldn’t move.

She knew too many things about the secretive Dom that no one else at The Devilhouse knew: that he was raised at a boarding school in Switzerland, that he liked chocolate, that he had a fearful scar on his back where he had been shot when he was a child, and that his brother had been killed in the same attack. A tattoo of cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums camouflaged the twisting scar, which had become a pale dragon amidst the ink.

Rae said, “I looked up your name. I couldn’t even breathe when I saw that picture. The article was in some other language, Swiss or something. I couldn’t read it.”

Lamplight swung over Wulf’s impassive face, glinting on his blond hair. His strong jaw bulged, and his teeth didn’t open when he said, “I imagine that seeing such a picture was upsetting for you.”

“Um, yeah. I got pretty upset,” she admitted.

“Ah.”

Rae wasn’t sure what to make of that, and she couldn’t seem to fold her hands into a comfortable position. She kept clutching them together, and then twining her fingers, but nothing felt right.

He drove methodically back to her dorm, wished her a good morning, and stayed in his car until the lobby door closed behind her. Through the glass door, she watched his car drive silently away.

The dorm assistant on duty, Leo, leaned over the front desk. He pulled his brown dreadlocks off his face and asked, “What on God’s green Earth kind of car was
that
?”

“A Tesla,” Rae said. She considered getting her mail, but her hands were shaking too much to insert the miniature key into the lock. “It’s electric.”

“Jesus, Lord, I thought that was a Tesla Roadster, but I’ve never seen one in real life. Righteous.”

“Yeah. I’ll see you around.”

He looked her up and down, just noticing her scarlet, beaded ball gown sweeping the asbestos tile floor. “Nice dress. Want to study together for Abby Psych this week?”

“Sure.” She still needed to pass her tests, now that she was back in the normal world of dorms and classes, having left behind Wulf’s silent cars, garage elevators, and walled mansions with hot and cold running servants.

Since Hester was still in Pirtleville and wasn’t home to judge, Rae fell into bed still wearing the red ball gown and listened to dorm around her. Behind her headboard, someone on the other side of that wall, either Krista or Deborah, was listening to soft music. One of her suitemates, either Georgie or Lizzy, flushed in their shared bathroom. Rae wondered if Lizzy had gotten home all right or was still with the tattooed Dom.

Rae curled up hard, trying to not cry.

Do you know who I am,
Wulf had asked her.

No, she didn’t. None of them knew who he was. Rae knew a few incidentals, but she didn’t want to pry into his life any more.

He was too wounded to strip away any more of his shiny, mirrored shell.

~~~~~

A Moment Alone

Rae stood in the pharmacy, holding the box, cupping her hands around it so that other students milling around her couldn’t see what it was.

Her childhood church told her this box was a sin. When Rae’s friend Baptista had used it when they were in high school, she had been disfellowshipped. Her family had sent her to live with an aunt in New Mexico rather than risk being thrown out, too. Baptista never even visited her parents.

Her childhood church told her that premarital sex was a sin, too, but she had done that.

Her childhood church said that birth control was a sin. They hadn’t used a condom, and she had been so crazed for Wulf and tipsy that she hadn’t been thinking straight.

No, if she had learned anything from Wulf and The Devilhouse, it was that wine or passion or handcuffs merely gave her permission to do what she was starving to do. Blaming passion or the booze was a lie.

She had been mad for the feel of his skin. When he had plunged into her last night, she had managed to look at him once.
Something
had transformed his face so that he looked younger, sweeter. She had been transfixed until he had slid into her again, and then she didn’t want to stop him because she felt the same—
something
—on her own face.

It had scared her. The Dom should have his shiny shell. She shouldn’t fall for this guy. It could only end in broken hearts because he wasn’t that kind of guy.

When her phone had fweeped for the texts, she had chosen to go pick it up rather than stay in the bed with him.

That morning, she would have done anything to feel the weight of Wulf’s hand in hers.

She put her hand to her stomach.

Her own mother had used the rhythm method all her life and had explained it to Rae, even guided her through it a couple months, just to show her, not that Rae had needed it in high school. She hadn’t cashed in her V-card until she got to college.

Rae figured that last night was dicey. It was close but probably okay. In, like, one day, she would be safely in the post-ovulatory phase, and then it wouldn’t matter. She would get a prescription for The Pill for next month from Student Health Services, but there wasn’t going to be a next month anyway, not after Wulf had seen that picture on her phone.

She was probably fine. She probably didn’t need to buy this expensive pack of pills that would make her sick for days.

If it happened, she could just leave the city and go home to Pirtleville. Her church would cast her out for being pregnant without being married, but her family would take her in or at least help her by finding a relative somewhere for her to live with.

She wouldn’t tell him, of course.

The ache in her heart spread to her stomach.

If she took these pills, she would destroy even a little spark of life that they had created, if there was one.

Maybe.

Probably not.

She set the box back on the shelf.

~~~~~