Red Hot Obsessions (189 page)

Two Weeks

Rae curled her big toe to depress the touchy accelerator on the Porsche 911. With even that ginger touch, the Porsche kicked and pressed her back in the seat, speeding them down the flat, straight highway that cut through the desert.

Rae watched the shallow sand dunes roll by as she drove. At the heart of every dune lay the skeleton of a jackrabbit or coyote or murdered woman. Wind heaped sand over desiccated dead animals or anything else that caught the air. Snakes slithered between the berms and sunned themselves on the blazing asphalt until a car smashed them into roadkill.

Wulf hadn’t said anything to her. He sipped his coffee and stared at the road. The toasted tar smell of their hot coffee overpowered the plastic new-car smell.

Rae didn’t know what to open with. She wanted to bring up so many subjects: his black-clad security entourage like he was the freaking President, what he had meant by
fallen
because he sure didn’t act like it, and why the heck he was moving, and where, and when, and why, oh Lord,
why?

“This is a really nice car,” she said. “Thanks for letting me drive it.”

She saw Wulf nod out of the corner of her eye.

“The accelerator is kinda touchy.”

He nodded again.

“Are you moving?”

Wulf nodded. Rae sneaked a look but didn’t see any other reaction from him.

“Why?”

He sipped his coffee again and swallowed hard. “It’s getting dangerous.”

“Has someone threatened you?”

“Not as such. It’s too dangerous for people around me. Friedhelm, who is in the other car, his father was hit in the spine the day that we were shot. He was in a wheelchair the rest of his life. It’s negligent of me to take chances, to endanger them, and you.”

“Me?” It squeaked out before she could stop it.

“Yes.” He sipped his coffee and leaned his head back.

“I won’t tell anyone about the tatt or the scar or your name. I haven’t told anyone. No one else knows anything.”

“Jeffrey saw the scar. He heard you call me ‘Wulf,’ though he didn’t recognize it as a name, but it is a matter of time.”

Rae tightened her fists on the leather-bound steering wheel. “I can’t believe you’re just going to up and move.”

“Perhaps it is rash, but it’s done and it’s the right thing to do. Besides, I still have some family, and they would rather that I wasn’t killed.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t want anyone else to die for me, or to be hurt. It is enough.”

“Are you in the Mafia or something?”

“No. It’s nothing that I have ever done.”

“Who are you?”
She gripped the steering wheel, holding on as the highway and desert slipped behind them. Lizzy and Georgie had warned her about that question on that very first night in the limousine on the way to The Devilhouse party downtown. No one knew who Wulf was,
what
he was, under that shiny shell.

“It doesn’t matter,” Wulf said. “I’ve managed six years here, but it’s time to go.”

“Because of what I saw. Because of
me
.”

“Especially you. I couldn’t stand watching you die while someone pulled me to safety. I won’t let it happen.” He closed his eyes.

“I don’t want you to leave,” she said. If she could have taken it back, she wouldn’t have. She wanted him to know. If he still left her, fine.
Fine-goshdarn-fine, dang it.

“I know.” Wulf set his coffee in the cup holder, reclined his seat a few degrees, and reached for her hand on the steering wheel. His fingers wound around hers, and he drew her hand down between them. “This, also I know: life is precious and all too short.”

The pain in those words drove into her chest. The news picture of the screaming child drenched in blood on a sunny day filled her memory again.

“Let’s enjoy these two weeks before I leave. Let’s not regret the time that we have.”

Two weeks.
She had two weeks with him.

Why didn’t she tell him that every time she took a breath, her heart swelled with longing for him?

Because he was leaving in two weeks, and no matter how he tried to dress it up, he must have seen all her feelings for him written in her eyes last Saturday night, and that might be the real reason he was leaving.

Because he had told her that he wanted her to sit naked at his feet wearing nothing but his collar, but when Lizzy had offered him exactly that, he tossed her to some other guy because submissive women were as common as muck.

Because he was The Dom of The Devilhouse, and he liked women,
craved
women, in the
plural
, and everyone knew that he never took any of the girls out on a Dom-Date twice in a row.

Because Rae didn’t want her heart to break, not just yet, not if she could have two more weeks with him before she broke all apart.

Rae said, “All right. Two weeks.”

“I have sold The Devilhouse to a friend. You and everyone else will remain employed at the same rates. You’ll be fine, Reagan. You can finish college. You can open your clinic. You’ll have everything you want.”

She hadn’t even thought of that. The job and college bleached like bones in the desert, compared to the thought that in only two weeks, Wulf would be gone.

Rae held his warm hand while she drove down the open highway, passing dusty towns and winding through mountain passes, trying to think of anything that would make him stay.

After a while, his grip on her hand loosened, and his breathing deepened.

In sleep, some of the severity left his face, and she could see what that stern child in the photo must have looked like when he slept.

After a while, a black SUV drove up on their right, then drifted back. Rae wondered if Dieter and Hans were checking on them, or whether that was Friedhelm, who had seen his father confined to a wheelchair while in Wulf’s security detail and yet had followed the same career path.

Rae couldn’t imagine the responsibility of being the focus of such violence and trying to keep everyone around herself safe from it.

She would have gone to live in a cave in the desert with the rattlesnakes.

Holding onto Wulf’s warm, soft hand, Rae drove two hundred miles through the searing desert, trying to hold onto each fleeting moment.

~~~~~

The Ranch

The brown slump-block houses of Pirtleville huddled with their rear walls to the constant wind-driven sand. Rae’s family’s ranch was on the outskirts of town, vulnerable to dust devils, scorpions, and rattlesnakes. Every year, they hacked back the tumbleweeds and scrub brush where the desert made incursions into their cattle pasturage. Locoweed grew everywhere no matter how they tried to eradicate it and drove the cattle mad. A locoweed-drunk bull will kill a grown man out of sheer cussedness.

As they approached Rae’s family’s ranch, Wulf phoned his staff and asked them to wait with the SUVs at the head of the dirt road. It wouldn’t do to arrive with a parade, he said, and Rae and Wulf switched seats at the trailhead so he could drop her off and drive away.

The car’s tires slipped on the gravel in the dirt driveway as Wulf stopped the car in front of the hunkered-down house.

To Rae’s consternation, her father was sitting on the top rail of the fence beside the house, holding a rifle in the crook of his arm and reading a paperback book.

Good thing that Dieter and the guys had waited up the road. They might not have reacted well to a gun-toting welcome.

She suppressed the urge to jump out of the car and hug her dad because that would have encouraged him to hassle Wulf.

Her father hopped off the fence and landed heavily on the hard-packed dirt because the poor guy had arthritis in his knees from years of hard work. He advanced on the car.

Rae thought about her backpack under the car’s hood, wondering if she really needed her toothbrush and stuff or whether she could grab it later so Wulf could get out of there.

Wulf set the handbrake between them. “I’ll pick you up at three for the funeral.”

“I can’t. I’ll ride with my family. You should meet us there.” Rae pushed open the door and tried to step out of the car before her father could say anything to Wulf but he was already standing right there and opening the door for her. She loved her father, but she knew how he felt about boys and his little girl.

“Hey there.” Her father leaned down to peer in the door as Rae turned back to Wulf, worried about how this might go. “Is this here that fellow Dominic that Hester’s been telling us about?”

Dominic?
Oh, Rae had told Hester that “Dom” was Wulf’s name when she had freaked out over seeing those newspaper pictures.

She said, “Yes, this is my friend, Dominic. He’s
just a friend.
He just drove me down here because he didn’t want a delicate creature such as myself subjected to the open highway.” Good Lord, even accounting for sarcasm, her redneck accent had come right back. “Dominic, this is my father, Zachariah Stone.”

Her father leaned into the car and offered his hand to Wulf. “Right charitable of you to drive her down, Dominic. Is that a Catholic name?” Her father said it casually and with friendly tones, despite what Rae knew was under it.

Wulf leaned over the handbrake to shake her father’s hand in front of Rae’s nose. “Pleased to meet you. I was baptized Lutheran.”

“Well, there’s that, then,” her father said. “But you are a man of faith?”

“I would say so,” Wulf said, which surprised Rae.

“He’s coming to escort me to the Celebration of Life,” Rae told her father, looking him in the eye. “But then he’s going right back to town. He’s not staying.”

“How’re you getting back to that college?”

“I’ll ride up with Hester tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s all right, then.”

Rae stepped out of the car to end that ridiculous conversation, but her father dodged her and stuck his head farther into the car. He was spry for someone with that much arthritis. “Where’re you going until the Celebration of Life, Dominic?”

From inside the car, Rae could just hear Wulf’s deep voice say with his British accent, “I had planned to find lunch.”

“The Hungry Bear’s food isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Come on in the house for a spell. We’re just about to eat. Plenty for company. It’s just simple fare, of course.”

“I would appreciate it.”

Rae froze. Dear Lord. Her family was going to get out the flood lamps and truth serum and give Wulf the third degree. Or else they would get out the Bibles and drag him down to the creek to baptize him or hold him under until he agreed to a shotgun wedding.

It hadn’t rained lately. The creek would be a dry ravine. They’d have to use the horse trough.

She leaned into the car beside her dad. “Dominic, don’t you have people waiting for you?”

“I’ll phone them. It would be nice to have a home-cooked meal.”

Anything served in her family home would be an albino-pale imitation of the grandiose meals that were served at his house. Rae kept herself from cringing.

She loved her family, but Pirtleville was very different than how Wulf must have been brought up in Switzerland.

Dustier.

Less stuff.

Simpler food.

More real, she was sure.

“Reagan,” her father said. “You run on inside and help your mother with lunch.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rae had gotten used to living outside the shadow of her father’s proprietary attitude. Maybe Rae should establish her autism clinic, A Ray of Light, in Cochise, the next town over and three times the size of Pirtleville. Pirtleville didn’t have enough autistic kids for the size of clinic that she wanted to build, anyway.

Rae went into the house to change into one of her long skirts and white blouses, as befitted an unmarried woman.

~~~~~

Plinking

For Wulf, lunch was a tense affair, though he tried to set Reagan’s family at ease.

Rae’s mother fried cheese sandwiches, and Rae served the men at the table, who began eating as soon as she set the plates before them. Wulf waited until Rae and her mother sat down with their sandwiches, though the men pressed him to eat while the sandwiches were hot off the griddle.

He sat amongst Rae’s family, whom she had described as the most important people in the world to her, and watched.

Ingratiating himself was preposterous. He merely wanted to ensure that no damage had yet come to Rae’s relationship with her family. Any other motive was ridiculous.

He was being civil because it was the standard of decency, not from any ulterior motive, not because he wanted them to like him as if he might someday be a member of this family, and not because he wanted to understand Rae better. It was just basic decency and manners. Wulf was Swiss by nurture, German by birth, and carried a British passport. He was civilized to his very core.

He watched the glances and micro-expressions between Rae and her mother as they held a silent, complex conversation composed of notice, mock despair, and resignation about Rae’s father’s bluster and her brothers’ table manners. Rae’s mother would later chastise the boys but not her husband, Wulf was quite sure.

Rae’s father, Zachariah, was a man who liked pry and to phrase his own prejudices as questions.

Some questions, such as Zachariah’s inquiry about Wulf’s age, he answered straight-forwardly. “Thirty-two,” he said and watched Rae’s startled reaction out of the corner of his eye.

Yes, he was a full decade plus eight months older than she, his little ingénue with a big heart. Her height and self-assurance had fooled him that first night when he met her at the party and he had thought her to be twenty-six or so, but Lizbeth and Georgie had corrected him the next day to his utter dismay.

When they asked where he was from, he was once again mortified that people detected a Teutonic accent.

One of the supposed benefits of
Institut Le Rosey
, his childhood boarding school in Rolle and Gstaad in Helvetica, was the international student population and the opportunity to learn languages proficiently through osmosis, though very few Americans matriculated there due to the ten percent population cap per language group. Most of his Anglophone friends had been British and he had lived in London, so he knew his English was rather posh British English, but Wulf had thought he was more versatile than he obviously was. He had cultivated a Helvetian inflection and vernacular in his German when he had naturalized his citizenship to Swiss, but good Lord, might his French be accented, too? He would have to ask Yoshi about his Japanese. Wulf wasn’t as proud of his Italian, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian, or Arabic. He had no illusions that he could pass for native in those.

But his English? He had thought he had an ear for English.

Wulf answered, “I am from the
Confoederatio Helvetica
, Switzerland.”

“And how long have you lived in the United States?” Zachariah asked.

“Six years.”

“You going to become a citizen?” her father asked. Again, Zachariah’s sharp glance betrayed that this was not a casual question. There was a correct answer.

Wulf said, “I’m a permanent resident, so I have many of the rights and privileges of citizenship, with the exceptions of the vote and jury duty.”

“You
want
to be an American?”

“There is much to admire about Americans and American culture,” Wulf said.

“Bet you think we’re funny, here, we Americans.”

“Of course not. Europeans think America is like England, only bigger, with bigger cars, and everyone carries a concealed handgun.”

“Dang straight.”

Rae’s brothers laughed. Their boisterous laugh was charming.

Wulf said, “Yes, and no. That rather shallow stereotype doesn’t convey the kindness, the gentleness, and the innate decency of Americans.”

“Yeah?” Zachariah leaned back in his chair and cradled his iced tea in his hands.

Rae’s mother hadn’t said a word the whole lunch, Wulf noticed. She didn’t seem downtrodden, just the type who listened rather than spoke. Her brown eyes were as lively as her daughter’s, and Wulf guessed that Rae’s intelligence and altruism were from the matrilineal line.

Wulf said, “I lived in Chicago for a year when I first moved to the States. On one cold night, driving to a conference in Iowa City, I was sitting in my car at a truly enormous truck stop on Interstate Eighty while some friends went inside to fetch us some coffee.

“It was cold that night, Midwestern cold, cold enough to frostbite skin in a half a minute. Ice crystal snow scraped the windshield. I was starting to shiver, even though the car was idling. I had parked directly in front of the truck stop’s sliding doors so that my friends could dash in and dash out, even though yellow lines marked it as a no-parking zone. Behind me, I saw a police car pull up, his lights flashing red and blue. The state trooper came up to the window, and I was prepared to tell him that I was sorry for parking there and I would move along. He told me that it was too cold to sit in my car, that I should go inside and warm up, and that he would watch my car while I was inside.”

Zachariah nodded. “That was right nice of him.”

“I have a dozen stories like that, of Americans being astonishingly decent.”

Rae’s family nodded at each other.

Wulf continued, “That, and you can generally count on the fact that when you meet an American, they are probably not drunk. In Europe, after ten o’clock in the morning, everyone is in their cups.”

The boys all guffawed and drank their iced tea or crunched chips, while Wulf watched Rae and her mother smile quietly and continue eating their grilled cheese sandwiches.

“So, all’s y’all Europeans think that Americans carry concealed all the time, do you?” Zachariah asked him with a bit more good humor.

“That’s the prevailing stereotype.” Wulf ate the dill pickle, which was garlicky and crisp, and he thought it must be homemade.

Rae’s father asked, “You wanna go plinking after lunch?”

“Surely you have more important things to do,” Wulf demurred.

“Not at all.” Zachariah wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, crumpled it, and dropped it in the middle of his plate. “We’ll round up some rifles and send some soda cans to meet their Maker.”

Zachariah sat back in his chair and grinned, probably content that he would easily outshoot the effete European.

Wulf calculated whether he should let Zachariah best him.

After lunch, Rae’s father opened the gun safe and distributed rifles. He handed Wulf one of the better ones, a Ruger Varminter .204, while Zachariah took a Remington .30-06 for himself. Wulf wasn’t offended by the smaller gun. The Varminter was supposed to have excellent accuracy for a hunting rifle.

They fished some soda cans out of a blue bin to take with them and started walking out the door.

Wulf called back, “Rae? Aren’t you coming with us?”

“Naw,” her father said. “She’s needed here.”

Rae looked between them with her lovely brown eyes, obviously unwilling to disobey because, as she had said, she would do anything for them, even stay behind.

They treated her like a servant instead of the ambitious, intelligent young woman that she was.

No, not like a servant. Wulf had servants. Dieter was not more than two years away from incorporating his private security firm. Wulf’s upstairs maid Lilli went to the local university a few hours a day and practiced her languages with him because she wanted to be a translator for the UN.

No, Rae’s father treated her like a hunting dog, trained and useful in its duties, but it had better be in the yard when you needed it to fetch a dead bird for you.

Wulf watched Rae, torn between his invitation and her father’s wishes.

Rae turned to her mother, who rolled her eyes and flicked her head toward the door, giving Rae tacit permission to go with the men.

“I just need to change,” she said to Wulf. “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

The males started out into the desert. A pack of rowdy retrievers bounced around them, snuffling and barking at them. Wulf let them nose his hands, and they bounded away, satisfied.

They all traipsed out into the beige and sage cacti and brush, and Wulf was glad that he had worn these old fatigues and planned to change clothes for the funeral. It would not do to go plinking in a suit and tie. The desert smelled like wood that was smoking, just about to catch fire in the heat.

As they walked into the wild desert, Wulf caught rustlings around the tops of the dry and dusty ridges, though Rae’s brothers and father didn’t seem to notice that Wulf’s security detail was stalking them. He hoped they had brought the snakebite kits.

Wulf’s mobile phone rang. He saw Dieter’s phone number and answered it.
“Ja?”

Dieter asked in German,
What are you doing going out
“wo sich Hase und Fuchs gute Nacht sagen,”
which meant
where the hare and the fox say good night?
The connotation was of the wilderness, though the German made Wulf think of dark, cool forests, not glaring sand and brittle bushes.

We’re going shooting for sport,
Wulf told him, also speaking German.

So they are all armed?

“Ja.”
Wulf told Dieter that he estimated the danger level at zero for intent and five for unintended consequences.

“Wunderbar,”
Dieter sighed.

Rae caught up with Wulf and her brothers. She was wearing jeans instead of those odd, archaic clothes she had donned before lunch. While Wulf generally had little opinion of people’s clothes beyond utility, he was glad to see her in a modern outfit. The long skirt and tied-back hair had changed her appearance to shudderingly young and dismayingly innocent. When they got back to town, he would dress her in a sophisticated evening gown to assuage his conscience.

He would take her out on a proper date.

Perhaps several proper dates.

He would show her several of the things she had not checked on that Devilhouse application: concerts, travel, and perhaps a few things from the other list.

All in two weeks.

They had two weeks before Wulf moved his household, and then he would leave her alone. He had wrestled with himself for days, pacing at night and wanting to stay, imagining sweeping her up into his life and flying her to Paris now that she knew about Constantin and she had not run from him, and she had trusted him to truss her up in
kinbaku-bi
and still she had wanted him, but he couldn’t risk her life. He could not stay with her.

Surely two weeks wasn’t too much to ask. Surely nothing would happen to him or to her in only two weeks.

Rae glanced at the barren blue sky and then to the right, a double-flick of her warm brown eyes and lovely dark lashes that she did when she was nervous.

She asked, “Are you sure you’re all right with going shooting?”

“Your family seems fine with it.”

“I mean the guns. Are you all right with the guns?”

Ah, she thought he might have some lingering trauma associated with firearms. His scar stiffened like it gripped his back. “I’m fine.”

“It’s okay if you’re not,” she said. “I’ll get them back inside. We don’t have much time before the Celebration of Life, anyway.”

“I’m acquainted with firearms.” He allowed himself a bit of a smile, but he didn’t want to seem smug. He shouldn’t show off too much.

Yet he did not want to appear incompetent and thus earn their scorn.

Part of him wanted to best Zachariah after he had treated Reagan with such high-handedness.

A delicate balance.

Rae shrugged and hiked beside him.

Zachariah led the way between the cacti and thorny bushes, and they hiked up to a ridgeline in the hot desert sunlight. Her father sent one of the boys around to line up two dozen soda cans on another desert ridge fifty yards away, and when the brother had returned, they all took aim at the cans.

Wulf pressed the rifle on Rae. “Can you shoot?”

“Heck, I taught all these whippersnappers how to shoot.” She ruffled her youngest brother’s dark hair. The boy, whom Wulf estimated to be thirteen plus or minus one year, had the lean physique of a Greyhound puppy that was growing too fast.

He handed the rifle to her. “Show me.”

Her eyes flashed with surprise, but she took it from him. “All right, then.”

Rae held the rifle tight against her right shoulder, took her time, and sighted in on the cans on the opposite ridge. Wulf watched the red cans glaring in the harsh, desert sun. She eased off a couple shots with a nice, smooth pull on the trigger, hitting a can both times. One shot, one kill. Properly done.

She held the rifle correctly when she handed the gun back to him, pointing the muzzle toward no one. “Here you go.”

Wulf smiled at her and wanted to touch her face, but he held back. “Very nice.”

Rae’s father called over, “Nice shooting, for a girl.”

The skin on Wulf’s back chilled despite the hot sun. Her dry father’s tone held no irony, and Rae didn’t remark on the backhanded compliment. It pissed Wulf off just a bit more, just enough.

Zachariah shouted to him, “You know how to shoot that?”

Wulf called back, “I’ll do my best.”

The rifle felt too light and too short in Wulf’s hands, though it was well-balanced. He pressed the stock against his shoulder, but it had been many years since he had shot a standard-sized rifle. He couldn’t seem to get comfortable with it while standing.

Finally, he eased himself down to the desert dust and pebbles and curled his body into a knot around the gun. The rifle was still too short and wasn’t equipped with a bipod, so he braced his left hand under it to hold up the barrel.

Wulf slowed his breathing, and a memory flashed behind his eyes, an image of rows of bunk beds in the barracks from his year of obligatory conscription. He had stayed a further year after that. Those years, when he and his friends around him had been armed, had set the standard for relief for him. He had been tempted to make the military his career, but his sister Flicka had quite correctly dispelled that notion.