Page 49 of Lord of Passion

This fucking trip was full of surprises.

The driver pulls into the second level parking in my building. It's reserved only for residents and there's very few of us. The first forty floors are luxury office suites. The forty-first floor is residential, the forty-second floor is mine. My penthouse spreads over half of the top of the building and the other half opens up into a massive garden with a swimming pool.

When we were pulling into the building, I could see that the lights were on, welcoming us home. My mother still does that when I'm away on long trips.

My mother, in a fit of whimsy, had draped strings of Edison bulbs all along the pool and garden for, "a cheerful illumination," she'd said, grinning happily. At the time, I thought it looked like a upscale fairy garden, something a fucking eight-year-old would consider paradise. I'd simply thanked her and kissed her cheek.

The Maserati comes to a stop. Caroline remains asleep, her head on my shoulder, lips open. I could kiss her awake. I could put my mouth on hers and breathe in her sleepy gasp, my thumb stroking over her cheekbone. Would she slap me? Grab my lapel and kiss me harder? With my new wife, the outcome is 50-50. As if she's heard my last thoughts, her eyes open and she sits up abruptly, subtly checking around her mouth. I suspect to see if she had drooled.

"Where are we?" she asks. "I need to be back at the Lyric. I have meetings all day tomorrow."

"We had this conversation," I say. My guards are standing outside the car, looking vaguely puzzled that the doors haven't opened.

Let them wait. I suspect she's about to scream. And there's no reason for them to hear it.

"You will remember that as the wife of the MorozovSovietnik,you have responsibilities," I say patiently. "Certainly, living with me is one of them."

Her mouth flattens out into a mutinous line. "Well, why don't you drop me off at The Lyric tonight and I'll arrange for movers for later this week?"

I smile pleasantly. "Oh, that's already been done."

Her eyes bulge with fury. "What? You had people in my suite, touching my things?" I open the door, sliding out and courteously offering my hand. She avoids it, moving toward the elevator, not exactly stomping, but not particularly ladylike either.

The ride up is deathly silent. Leaning against the wall, I watch her with some amusement. My wife is vibrating with fury, I can feel it.

***

Caroline…

"Would you like a tour?" Nikandr asks as the elevator door opens.

"Not tonight." He nods, turning toward a set of stairs. I get a quick glimpse of a massive bank of two-story windows in the main room before I follow him.

Has he moved me into a guest room where at least I would have my own privacy? Or did he catapult me straight into the master bedroom, clearly indicating he's planning on this being a real… everything?

It's not just the sex. We could do that anywhere.

There's something about actually living with another person, the intimacy of brushing your teeth in the same bathroom, skirting around each other in the closet that I do not feel with Nikandr and I'm not sure I want to. We pass three closed doors going down the hallway. "Those are guest rooms," Nikandr says. "You can use one for an office if you like."

So, hedidput me in the master bedroom with him. He opens the door and all I see is a bed the size of a cruise liner beforestalking over to the dressing room. Thedressingroom. Because of course, he has a dressing room, no walk-in closet for this man. Yep. All my clothes are on one side, everything's been hung up, each hanger precisely placed at the same distance to the next one. All of my shoes are placed in expensive little shoe caddies.

There's a tall chest of drawers on my side of the dressing room and I open it to find my underwear, neatly folded andgoddamnit.Now, I'm upset. No one folds theirunderwear. You would have to be a serial killer to fold underwear. Not to mention, it means a stranger actually touched my panties!

"Thank God I didn't have any sex toys," I mumble.

"Yes, I was disappointed, too," Nikandr calls from the bedroom. "But we can always pick up some of our own."

The things that make up a life, though, are all still shoved carelessly into boxes stacked in the corner of the dressing room. Personal items like the framed photos of my family, pictures of me and Liria on vacation, my books that I had stacked all over my suite. They've been shoved into the boxes, photos are bent, spines cracked on a couple of my books.

The worst is the fifth box. I see the flash of something silver hanging over the edge and my heart sinks. My wind chimes are jammed inside it. I have three wind chimes, all made of memories of my parents. The silver spoons Mom would put out for her special tea parties, the first set of keys from the car my father gave me, and the remains of a necklace that Mikal clumsily strung by hand at summer camp. Wind chimes strung with a jumbled mix of items that shouldn't belong together, but when the wind runs its fingers across them, the sound is gloriously harmonic.

Two of the windchimes are broken, pieces scattered at the bottom of the box. I pick up one of my mother's spoons and a silver locket my brother Bobby had bought - didn't steal -boughtfor my birthday. They're both bent beyond repair.

Nikandr is giving me a moment alone here, which is wise, and I gently lay the broken pieces down on the dressing table. I'm trying to sort through all of the bits and pieces of my rising fury. It's like standing in the middle of a tornado. All of these thoughts and feelings swirling violently around me; the careless handling of parts of my life that really matter, this goddamn situation I find myself in, how I feel railroaded.

He's sitting in one of the big chairs by the window. He has a drink in hand and there's one on the table there for me. I walk past him and into the master bathroom to find out all of my personal hygiene products have been neatly stacked in drawers on one side of the enormous vanity.

I step to the doorway of the bathroom, holding one of my perfumes. Dior Addict, in a nice, heavy crystal bottle. My aim is excellent. I was the star center on our high school basketball team. I could hurl this bottle right at his smug face and flatten his nose. Tossing it up and catching it, I eye him thoughtfully.