The door closed loudly behind me, and I wound down my little adlibbed melody as delicate steps clicked across the room. A more muted tapping signaled the point at which Chloe reached the white and neutral patchwork cowhide rug in front of the cream leather sofa set. I tapped out the last notes as she entered my peripheral vision and waited at my shoulder.
When my hands left the keys to rest on my thighs, I swiveled my head to glance over and only slightly up at her. She was petite, making it so invitingly easy to lord over her or scoop her up and carry her off when the mood struck me. “Miss Bloom,” I said in greeting before I noticed she was focused on the piano keys and wearing a pinched frown. “Is it just me, or does my piano playing tend to make you cross?”
This question seemed to wake her from some deep and private thought. She straightened and gathered in a quick breath as she rushed to recover. “No,” she insisted in an apologetic tone. “No, not cross. It just brings up old memories for me.”
“You used to play?”
She folded her arms and retreated a step, perhaps sensing the subtle flex of my muscles as I was about to reach out for her. “No, my mother. I never had the talent for it, but she studied at Juilliard.” A look of pride shone in Chloe’s eyes as she tipped her chip up slightly. “She won competitions there and even played with their orchestra at Carnegie Hall once, before…”
I gave her a moment to continue. When she didn’t, I sensed a gap in that armor of hers and pressed, “Before what?”
Chloe lowered her face and her eyes. “Before she changed her mind about finishing her degree.”
“What happened? What would make her do that?”
Her response was slow and cautious and low in tone, introducing me to an even greater degree of detached control than I’d encountered thus far from Chloe. “Nothing that would have stopped me.”
There was a story there, buried deep, I could tell. And I wanted it. But Chloe was already standing at arm’s length.
It was a gamble, and I wasn’t sure of my own motivation when I asked, “Did you lose her? You sound as though she’s gone.” Even more inexplicably, before Chloe could respond, I added, “I lost my mother when I was two. Never really had the chance to find out what we did or didn’t have in common.” I doubted I was much like Mum, considering her side of the family never had anything to do with me after her death from a lower respiratory infection she had simply been too busy to take seriously until it had put her in hospital.
Chloe finally raised her face and really looked at me, and it was the softest I thought I’d seen her eyes in the few days I’d had with her. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.”
I was the one who looked away this time, quietly disciplining the swell of melancholy,
melodramatic
emotion from my face and voice after my ill-conceived, impromptu disclosure. Smiling and raking the hair back from my forehead, I decided to make light of the moment, advising, “Don’t try. No fun to be had.”
“I…,” Chloe started to say, then paused. I watched her chest rise as she took in a breath and tried again. “I lost her three years ago. Blood poisoning from a cut turned to staph infection, and there was a heart problem no one had known about and…”
Quiet settled between us then, and a breathless stillness. I could have kept pushing for more details, hoping to play on the shared compassion that had spontaneously and so unnervingly sprung up in the wake of such a casual comment about Chloe not liking my piano playing. As conniving and hopelessly venal as I was, even I wasn’t that big a prick.
After enjoying an appraising onceover, from the curve-hugging red strapless sundress she wore to the high heel sandals, I stood up from the bench and told her, “Change the heels for something flat while I take a quick shower. I think we need some fresh air.”
It pleased me to hear from behind me as I started down the hall, from a steady voice, “Yes, sir.”
My mood lightening already, I paused to turn back toward Chloe. “But remember, Miss Bloom, no panties.” I didn’t expect her to shyly, slowly, but so bravely pull up the hem of the short dress to reveal her smooth-shaven pussy to me. So sexy, that breathless allure of hers, and no underwear. “Good girl.” As much as I wanted to retrace my steps and grab her, run my hand along her silky mons, dip my tongue into her mouth and my fingers inside her wet core, I resumed my march down the hallway. If for no other reason than to prove I still had some semblance of control over myself.
When I emerged from the shower and into the bedroom, I found clothing laid out for me—a soft white pullover and thin blue trousers loose enough and light enough not to stick to my skin in the heat. Chloe was standing by the shutters out to the patio, the sunlight playing over her high cheekbones and the subtle shimmer of her massaged and oiled skin at shoulders and arms and shins. I didn’t hide my effort as I glanced at key points in the room—the day’s mail neatly stacked on my desk in one corner with the letter opener at the ready, the bed made and the canopy tied back just so, the shoes I’d kicked off on my way into the bathroom lined up under one of the three standing wardrobes with the rest of my mint collection of vintage loafers, dress shoes, deck shoes. So far, I hadn’t needed to remind Chloe even once how I wanted the villa kept. I dearly hoped she would realize soon how enjoyable a little
correction
could be and let just one detail slip, leave just one item out of place.
Sometimes that methodical, overachieving nature of hers worked to her detriment. And mine.
Whistling to get her attention and motioning with a nod that she follow me, I led her outside to a golf cart. Having made this trip at least three or four times a week for the past few months, I was comfortable with taking the sharp turns and steep inclines of what I called O Jardim Caminho, the Garden Path, at rather the barreling clip. Chloe had a white-knuckle grasp on one of the cart’s canopy poles with one hand, her seat cushion with the other, as the greenery whipped past us.
When the path opened up to skirt a ridge, with a sheer drop to the ocean on her side, Chloe let go of her seat to take a fistful of my pants at one thigh. “I’m scared of heights. Please, slower.”
She could have been speaking of more than the cliff side, I realized, and I slowed down not only for her comfort but for the chance to mull the implications of her telling declaration. Scared of heights. Scared of drops. Rushing headlong into the unknown under someone else’s control. I was familiar enough myself with that discomfort to feel compassion for her situation—while, on the other hand, I had every intention of pushing her toward that emotional abyss of sexual surrender. If I could just get her to leap…
As much as this—Chloe and I—was about the urge to mark my territory, the competitive instinct to steal her from Penn, from even his memory, it was also about prying her open and being the one man there when she leapt. When she blossomed. When she surrendered and realized her capacity for total abandon.
I almost missed our turn down into the little valley, and I had to correct sharply. “Sorry,” I muttered and squeezed her hand when the cart’s path down the incline smoothed out and stopped bouncing us in our seats. She sighed openly with relief when I braked and pulled us to a stop at the bare earthen pad above Gabriel’s camp, and I reminded myself to try to make her sigh at least as loudly later, when we were alone again in the villa.
After a short walk down a foot-beaten, wheel-worn path, we found the slightly built project manager crouching over a broad, messy pile of loose dirt and shaking his head as he exchanged a flurry of heated Portuguese with Luiz. Instead of focusing on the argument between Gabriel and the lanky teen, Chloe scanned the small camp, from the scattering of mud-crusted hand tools nesting in wheelbarrows to the faded tent resting on a hastily raised wooden platform, from the irregular daises of earth to the composting toilet in an outhouse sheltered in the tree line.
“What is this place?”
What kept me going, got me up in the morning. “The resort only takes up about fifty acres of the island, and Ilha de Flor is over twenty thousand acres. There’s the matter of what to do with the rest.”
Her brown eyes flared. “You’re not going to develop all of it, are you?” A characteristic reaction, from what I knew of Chloe, but it was still refreshing to see it firsthand.
“No, not by a long shot. I want to turn the rest of the island into an eco park. Build some low-impact dwellings… Set up about a half-dozen demonstration projects into sustainability. Invite a few scientific NGO’s to do some long-term surveys of the local flora and fauna and help fund them by selling eco-minded tourists spots on the teams as grunts for the lifting and carrying and busy work...”
This gave my Miss Bloom a moment’s pause, and she folded her arms and tilted her head at me. “There must have been quite a few surveys already to get your permits lined up.”
“A few,” I acknowledged with a nod, then pivoted to avoid her scrutiny. “Less than you’d think. I have an easier time of it after buying the island in freehold instead of leasehold.” I chuckled at my own careful wording and turned my face toward a rare breeze, strong enough to pierce the thick undergrowth that surrounded most of the camp. “Of course, that also means brokers are constantly after me to sell the island to their
discerning clients
.” Meaning developers who wanted a way around as many government regulations as possible. Like my father’s family, for instance. Even my eldest half-brother, or more specifically his lawyer, had made an offer on the island.
“These look…
vaguely
like raised garden beds. You’re implementing biointensive gardening?” This got my attention and made me face her again. “Small-scale, I’m assuming. I know the Brazilian government has been cracking down on selling land to foreign investors if they’re planning much in the way of agricultural activity.”
“You’re very well-informed, Miss Bloom.” As I would have expected, but again, it was another matter seeing her quick mind in action.
She shrugged as though it was nothing, but I saw the faint smile that hid along the line of her lips as she pressed them together. “I work in environmental law.”
Finally, today, the personal details were trickling out. I nodded and perked one brow and tried to look mildly impressed and surprised. Like I hadn’t already known that. Like I hadn’t made a ludicrous request in suggesting she give up her career and her life in the States to be my submissive. A proposal I hadn’t believed she would accept, not right up until the moment I’d seen her start to stride up the path to my villa, long hair and hips swaying like a brunette Aphrodite.
Perhaps a comparison to Brazil’s own Pombra Gira, goddess of beauty and desire and sexual liberation, would have been more appropriate. The temptation to cast myself as Exu—trickster god, spirit of fertility and strength, businessman, keeper of roads and keys and enemy of the status quo, and for whom Pombra Gira acted as consort—was a little too tempting, so I set the analogy aside with all the reluctance expected of a hubris-ridden rake like me.
Gabriel, dusting off his hands against the legs of his khakis and shaking his longish, fine black hair back from his deeply tanned face, interrupted my thoughts as he called out a greeting that sounded almost happy to see me. Luiz must truly have been testing his patience if dealing with me was the relief, the lesser evil.
Behind the project manager and only about eight years his junior, nineteen-year-old Luiz leaned on his shovel and grimaced at the both of us before wiping his face with the hem of his dirty blue t-shirt. Even with his own dark hair buzzed short and high off the back of his neck, and hiding under a straw hat, he wouldn’t be finding manual labor in the Brazilian sun at all to his liking, but those were the terms of his community service sentence when I… Well, when I bought him like something of an indentured servant, slipping the clerk at the courthouse a well-stuffed envelope to make certain Manuela’s grandson served out his three-year sentence as an “environmental volunteer” on Ilha de Flor.
While Gabriel shook hands with me, I kept my eye on Chloe, as she wandered through the maze of half-finished garden beds and ended up chatting with Luiz over bottles of water from the manager’s ice chest. The lad had a weakness for pretty girls that had gotten him into far too much trouble on the mainland—running with a rough crowd to impress the bonita meninas in his neighborhood, petty theft to get spending money. Manuela was struggling to make the trip over from Natal every day to work at the resort and raise the teenager who’d lost his parents in a car accident three years earlier. She’d been afraid he would start getting into drugs. Then his first arrest had given me the opportunity I needed to put a leash on the boy and his grandmother’s mind to rest.
Half-listening to Gabriel’s complaints about Luiz’s attitude, his need for more workers, and his continued disagreement with me over the actual intensity of our little biointensive endeavor, I concentrated on keeping my expression neutral while catching fragments of the increasingly passionate conversation going on between Chloe and the teen. Passionate on Luiz’s part, that is, as he did all the talking and gesturing while she nodded politely. I heard my name—taken in vain—a few times from the lad. Chloe glanced in my direction, caught my eye, and turned pink before looking back at Luiz.
I knew well enough she was getting the litany of my sins from little Luiz, because he’d said it all already to my face. I had to respect him for that, for telling me I was a self-important blowhard who thought that building a few houses with Habitat for Humanity on my summer breaks from university made me an architect, that turning the rest of the island into an eco park made me a saint, and that all my money made me God.
Fair play to the boy, he was insightful and articulate with his barbs, but he was at a disadvantage knowing so little about my true transgressions, from original sin all the way to whorishly using my trust fund—that I supposedly had too much integrity to touch—to pay for my expensive American education and seed my own development ventures. If he’d only questioned the details of how the police had known exactly when and where to find his little gang of hoodlums that night as they were breaking into the dockside warehouse…