Red Hot Obsessions (182 page)

“All right.” She could keep his secrets on this end, too, though she wondered just who she would be keeping them from.

Rae’s door opened without her touching it. She jumped. If the inside of that sports car hadn’t been so cramped, she would have ended up in Wulf’s lap.

A burly man wearing a black suit stood outside the car. “Madam,” he said, holding the door for her.

“Oh, sure.” She swung her legs out of the car, ducked her head, and tried to emerge gracefully. She teetered on her stiletto heels and tugged her bunched-up dress down her hips. Her underwear had gathered into a wedgie, but that would have to wait. “Um, thanks.”

From the other side of the car, Wulf said, “Danke, Dieter.”

When Rae turned, Wulf was standing beside a man who was almost as tall and blond and buff as he was. That was the guy who Wulf had been talking to in the club, the one Jeff the security guy had asked about. He must be one of the go-between guys.

“Rae, if you will.” Wulf gestured toward a door on the far wall.

Their footsteps clacked and echoed on the steel cars and concrete walls. They walked past several hybrid cars and other low-slung sports cars, all monochromatic silver, dark gray, or black.

Now they were in a dystopian black-and-white movie, with spaceships.

A door at the end of the garage led into an enormous red brick and dark wood kitchen, bigger than the house Rae grew up in, where three people wearing white chef uniforms clattered and cooked. Humming freezers lined the back wall. The skinny woman at the stove nodded to Wulf, who held up a hand in greeting as they passed through.

Wulf’s arm circled Rae’s waist as they went through a door into the main part of the house.

Rae’s first impression was that the horizon and sky had turned to honey-colored marble. Wulf’s arm bumped her butt as she stopped short. A curving grand staircase rose from into the middle of the room to the parapets above. A chandelier dripped crystal from the vaulted ceiling.

People, all wearing black, lined up from the kitchen door to the stairs, at least ten of them, maybe more. They stared straight ahead, at attention. The men wore black suits. The women were dressed in identical black frocks and black stockings.

Above and around them, violins sang a serene melody. A string quartet might be hidden on one of those balconies above them, but maybe it was just a stereo somewhere.

Rae turned to Wulf, who was conversing in what Rae assumed must be Swiss with an older woman. Her gray hair was knotted in a freeform bun. Wulf looked serious, though not angry. Her hands were spread open in the universal hand gesture that meant helplessness, though her I-told-you-so grin suggested that she had no fear of any wrath.

Wulf sighed and turned back. “Rae, may I present Ms. Rosamunde Keller, my head of staff. Rosamunde, may I present Ms. Reagan Stone, a friend.”

Behind her, Rae heard a giggle like three hiccups that was quickly stifled and worried about what about herself was so ridiculous.

Rae asked, “How do you do, Ms. Keller?” and held her hand out to shake.

Ms. Keller hesitated for just an instant before she unclasped her hands and stepped forward to shake Rae’s hand. Her hand was warm and dry, and she smiled first with her eyes, then with her mouth. “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Stone.” Her accent was German … ish.

Wulf, who had been standing aside and watching, held his hand out toward the line of people and said, “And my staff.”

The line of people turned to look at her.

Rae wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do, so she waved. “Hi?”

Several smiled. Most continued their bland expressions.

They all leaned back in line and then filed away and into the house.

Wulf asked her, “Shall we sit down to supper?”

“Sounds great.” Rae wondered what Swiss people ate at home, and she wondered if anything served in this mansion remotely resembled normal food. Perhaps she was going to eat her first atomic pea ravioli, or whatever Wulf had called it.

Wulf waved Rae down a hall to the right, toward the front of the house.

She walked beside him, between rows of urns sprouting ferns. Picture windows lined one wall overlooking a lit swimming pool. Beyond the pool, another floodlit wing of the very same house sprawled into the night.

Rae knew how to be polite around poor people, how to not embarrass them by pretending to not notice their poverty. Being polite with somebody who obviously had more money than horse sense was a mystery to her.

They continued to walk down the hallway, past ferns in urns. The pool sparkled in the moonlight. The carpet underfoot softened her footfalls, and lemon oil wood polish permeated the air. The violin music followed them like ghosts.

Through another set of double doors, the dining room stretched far and away. Gold-rimmed china and gold-rimmed crystal packed the table. A setting was arranged before each of the twenty chairs. Huge candelabras looked like golden trees on fire.

“Is someone else having dinner with us?” Rae asked.

“No.” Wulf sighed. “I believe my staff is trying to impress you and simultaneously sending me a subtle message that I am under-utilizing their talents.”

Two men of Wulf’s staff entered through a rear door, carrying an ice sculpture of blooming irises between them on a stretcher. They positioned the silver bowl of icy flowers in the center of the long table. Light from the chandelier above shimmered on the sweating ice.

Wulf lowered one blond eyebrow. “Perhaps not so subtle.”

Rae stared at the opulence. “Don’t you have people over much?”

“About once a month, old friends visit me, though generally not in the summer.”

“No one comes here in the summer. It’s too hot.” But it was only early spring.

“This house has the security amenities to host some friends of mine who require such. I had thought my staff exercises their talents sufficiently during those visits, but evidently, school chums do not inspire such Herculean efforts. I’ll have to make sure Yoshi knows that he does not rate.”

“They didn’t do anything special for me, did they? I thought we were just going to have a bite to eat. I assumed I’d help you cook pasta or something.”

Wulf glanced at her sideways. His startled look suggested that he had not considered such modest plans. “It seems that we both underestimated. Shall we sit down to what, I am sure, will be an extravagant repast?”

“Okay.” Rae surveyed all twenty-odd place settings. “Do you have a usual place that you sit, or should we change seats every five minutes?”

Wulf laughed. “I’m afraid doing so would only encourage my staff to more displays of excess. I usually sit at that end, near the kitchen.”

They walked past the table. Rae’s reflection looped through the gold chargers on the table. She imagined him at the head of this enormous table, eating a solitary supper for one. “So you usually eat in here?”

Wulf took the head of the table and motioned to his right for Rae to sit. “I may scandalize my staff if I admit such to you, but no. I only eat in here when we have guests. I eat with the staff at the kitchen table.”

Rae had watched enough PBS to know that she should gasp and clutch her pearls—if she had been wearing pearls over her bare throat and down the wide and plunging neckline of this red gown that now seemed so trashy—even though her estimation of Wulf had just risen.

She fluttered her eyelashes in mock dismay. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“It took years, if you must know.” Wulf glanced down at his plate, and he pulled his lower lip into his mouth, a habit that Rae thought meant he was about the divulge something that he considered secret. “I engaged Rosamunde when I was fifteen and lived in a small house in Helvetica, in Rolle.”

Fifteen years old and living on his own with servants and what Rae suspected must have been far too much money for a teenager was a recipe for all kinds of disaster. Rae’s brother Amos was fifteen, and he could hardly babysit for Rae’s two younger brothers for a few hours while their mother went to a church ladies’ group. “Oh?”

Wulf said, “Because it was a small house, we often dined with the staff rather than in the dining room.”

His idea of a “small house” must be something entirely different than Rae’s, because this house went beyond her idea of what a “house” was and straight into her concept of what a mansion or a castle was supposed to be.

He continued, “When I moved to London for graduate studies, I lived with my cousins, so I only needed Rosamunde and a few minders, and I dined with the family there, formally. When we moved to the States after that, Rosamunde insisted that we keep up appearances and that I dine in the formal dining rooms, so first I had to coax some of the gentlemen staff members into conversation in the dining room, then goad them into sitting down to ease conversation, then follow them back to the kitchen to discuss matters further, then cajole the rest of them into setting their supper with me in there. It took almost a year of scheming to get back there.”

“Sounds exhausting.” It sounded weird as all heck, and filing away all the secrets that he had just told her made her head ache: that he had lived in Rolle, Switzerland, alone, when he was fifteen and then moved to London, that he had cousins in London and had lived with them while he studied something in graduate school, and that he liked to eat with his staff instead of being served like a spoiled lordling.

“There’s still the occasional mutiny to deal with, but the routine seems to have settled in during the last few years.”

It was funny: in The Devilhouse, Wulf was The Dom, and everyone scurried to do his bidding and serve his every whim. His slightest grimace incited panic.

In Wulf’s home, he negotiated with his staff to gradually get what he wanted.

“Well, that’s good,” Rae said. She laid her hand on the table between them, reaching but not grabbing. She needed to broach a delicate subject, and she whispered because, for the first time in her life, there might be staff lurking behind the door to the kitchen. “Um, you know I can’t spend the night, right?”

Wulf cocked his head to the side, and his so-blue eyes twinkled at such a thought. “I thought that side of a relationship was not an option for us.”

And yet he invited her to his home anyway. “Well, I just can’t stay all night. My roommate will freak if I’m out all night.”

“So it is staying the entire night that is a problem.”

“I can, um, stay for a while. Before, it was Lizzy. She’s my friend. She was in love with you. She thought that she was in love with you. I thought that she thought she was in love with you.” Rae was making precious little sense. Nerves did that to her.

Wulf smiled. Rae couldn’t read a thing into that smile, other than he was encouraging her to keep talking.

“But she seems to have gotten over you,” Rae said.

Wulf was still smiling. He really didn’t kiss and tell, but his kind expression soothed her.

Leap of faith time. “But I haven’t gotten over you.”

Now, surprise changed Wulf’s face. He leaned toward her and took her hand just as two of his staff breezed through the doors, bringing salad. A third guy carried an enormous pepper mill. A fourth man carried wine wrapped in a towel.

Wulf sat back and looked to his staff.

Dang it.

The men—Waiters? Butlers?—slid salad plates in front of Wulf and Rae. The third man hovered, offering fresh pepper. Wulf signaled him to grind some pepper over his salad. The fourth gentleman poured white wine into one of the glasses surrounding Rae’s plate. A fairy ring of crystal goblets surrounded her plate. Rae had the urge to pour a little water in each of them and make the crystal sing.

She wondered what Wulf would do if she started playing the glassware like a harp.

She wondered what his so-proper staff would do.

The dark, delicate salad leaves on Rae’s salad plate looked as unfamiliar as Martian food. When she was growing up, her family ate iceberg lettuce because it was cheap and kept well. At the student cafeteria salad bar, the one semester that Rae’s parents had had the wherewithal to spring for a meal ticket, the students grazed on iceberg and romaine littered with a few shreds of the expensive stuff.

This salad looked like a red, purple, and green rainbow chopped and served on an ethereal cloud of china. She whispered, “Wow.”

Wulf smiled at her.

“This is beautiful.” Rae gazed at the delicate greenery, afraid to shove a fork in it.

Wulf tucked into his salad.

Rae scooped some of the foliage with her fork and tipped it into her mouth. The salad was crispy and spicy and tender and tasted like springtime someplace cool. “Oh my gosh. This is so good.”

The staff exited into the kitchen. The man who had served the salad winked at Rae as he left.

“Thank you,” Wulf whispered.

“I’m serious. This is good.”

“It’s all right. They’re gone.”

“No wonder rich people are so skinny if their salads taste like this!”

Rae ate as fast as she could without looking like she was gobbling the salad and sipped the white wine. The greens were gone in a few minutes. Asking for seconds seemed gauche.

Two of Wulf’s staff, different tall men wearing suits, came in. They handed long cards to Wulf and Rae.

“Menus?” asked Wulf and then continued speaking in Swiss, which sounded like German but Rae didn’t really know what German sounded like, either.

The closer man responded with the prim air of having already won the argument.

If anyone at The Devilhouse spoke like that to The Dom, Wulf would have taken a riding crop to them, or flogged them, or something, but here, he was suppressing a wry smile.

He turned back to her. “It seems that we have menus to choose from.”

Rae examined the menu, afraid that she would find blood sausage or horse meat or gizzards or the whole thing in Swiss. She had eaten rattlesnake and quail plenty of times, but who knew what foreigners ate?

Instead, she found listings for ginger and scallion-crusted trout on a cedar plank, filet mignon with whiskey-peppercorn sauce, chicken pie in puff pastry, vegetarian spring risotto, and currywurst with spätzle. Because she had no idea what the last one was, she resolved to ask for whatever Wulf did unless it was that one.