An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  Then I washed my face and put the dark teal sheets on the bed. (I’d upgraded his laundry closet some months earlier; the man hadn’t known sheets came in any color but white.)

  I'd expected to stay awake until he was home, but it had been a long day. I started sinking around eleven and gave up completely at one. I'd brought over a new, very fancy nightgown but discarded that idea too; we were both going to be way too tired to deal with the complex arrangement of straps and laces, and a girl could strangle herself trying to casually whip off that little number. In the end I just crawled between the sheets in my black lace bikini panties and one of his old T-shirts, the kind that's soft and mellow from many washings and always has a faint scent of the owner. Comfort sleepwear.

  And I actually slept, which I hadn’t quite expected to do. I dreamed that he'd already come home and wrapped himself around me, and that dream changed slowly into the real thing, a warm body at my back and hands sliding under the shirt.

  “Can I turn the light on?” he murmured.

  “Mm-hmm.” He liked to look at me on those dark, dark sheets - and I liked the way he looked at me. When he sat up to switch on the lamp I pulled off the T-shirt and dropped it on the floor.

  He looked me over with an appreciative glint in his eye. He was smiling. Grinning, almost. “The black lace panties are icing on the cake. They make you look totally wanton… and delicious.” He ran one hand over me from shoulder to pantyline, appreciative.

  I was still slightly groggy. “You – how did you do all this?” I waved my hand around the room.

  “Melted the credit card,” he said. “It’s amazing what people will do if you pay them enough.”

  “You – you didn’t have to.”

  “Right. I suppose the scientific approach would have been to bring you over here and calibrate exactly how miserable it made you to be in this room. Then hire the decorators. Anyway, I had to do something; some careless girl had scorched a big spot in the carpet.” He wrapped his arms around me. “I wanted you here. And I wanted to make it as painless for you as I possibly could.”

  I was having to blink fast. He thought I was worth this kind of trouble and expense? “It’s too much,” I said, and my voice, dammit, was wobbly.

  “Yes, imagine spending all that when I could have just put a throw rug over the scorch mark. Well, you’ve been warned: I’m madly extravagant. Really not good husband material.”

  “That,” I said, “is not necessarily what I look for in you.” Which is why I kept him a secret from my family, who looked for nothing else. My father would have seen him as an acceptable suitor for a damaged daughter, and my mother would have seen him as a sperm donor.

  “Yes, well, we can talk about that later… I didn’t take the late flight so we could discuss interior decoration.”

  And for a while the conversation was mostly nonverbal; our bodies were capable of carrying on a fine dialogue all on their own. After all this time apart, my body’s part of the conversation was basically yes! now! yes!

  “The only thing I like better than you putting on black lingerie for me,” he said into my left breast, “is you taking it off for me.”

  A suggestion with which I was more than happy to comply.

  There was a long, slow, tender time that involved a lot more kissing and slow, sensuous movements bringing me to a glow that seemed to last forever. When I sighed, he shivered and said, “Thalia,” and pulsed deep inside me.

  Afterwards he just held me close for a long time, gently kissing my face and neck and breasts. I would have purred if I'd been able to. I had no quarrel whatsoever with Lensky's usual slammed-by-a-tornado approach to sex, but this had been something else. Gentle. Sensitive. Sweet.

  “I want to have this all the time, Thalia,” he said at last.

  “Mmm. Any time.” I thought I was agreeing with him.

  “No, Thalia. Not any time. All the time. You, here in my bed, every night. Waking up to you every morning.”

  “You mean… move in with you?” I practically lived here already. But the thought of giving up my share in the apartment with Ingrid made me nervous. Burning bridges.

  “No, not just move in with me; marry me. I want you every night and every day. I want all your nights and all your days, forever.”

  He was serious.

  I was terrified.

  “Brad, I haven't thought about -”

  “Thalia, I’ve already told you that I love you and that I want a future with you. What did you think I meant?”

  I had been carefully not thinking about it. It had been safer to live in the moment, the more so when so many of the moments were so extraordinarily good.

  “I don't know if I can.”

  “Get married?”

  “Be married. I never thought of myself as a…. wife.”

  Lensky sighed, rolled over on his back and put his hands behind his head. “As I recall,” he said finally, “we had to dance around like this for a while at the start, before I finally got you into bed. So I guess I'll have to give you some time, again, for your feelings to catch up with mine. Only… Thalia, don't take too long?”

  I could hear the tension in his voice. Things flashed through my mind at light speed. The terror I'd been feeling, off and on, whenever I realized how important he'd become to me. His face when he thought me dead. The warm security I felt in his arms. Protectiveness that was sometimes annoying. A sense of being loved and accepted that I’d never known before…. “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes, you'll think about it?”

  “Yes, I'll marry you.”

  Keep reading for a sample from A Tapestry of Fire, the fourth book in the Applied Topology series.

  Wimberley, Sunday

  The guest house was actually two buildings: a narrow three-story frame house and a long, low and much more modern building of native stone, which was where the office was located.

  Getting to the Inner Light Guest House outside Wimberley this afternoon had supposedly been so urgent that nobody had time to brief me, so urgent that I couldn’t take time to look the place up and get an idea of the setup, so urgent that I had to throw a few respectable clothes into a suitcase and take off with faith that the GPS in the car would find the place. But apparently it hadn’t been urgent enough for one of the owners to wait in the office and give me a clue where to go next.

  I dropped my suitcase on the stone-flagged floor and headed for one of the squashy leather sofas under the chandelier. Doubtless not where the hired help were supposed to hang out, but I could hardly be blamed for that, could I?

  I had just sat down when I heard a couple of people laughing and joking outside. The French doors opening on the deck out back were brilliant with afternoon sunlight; the couple who stepped inside paused for a moment, blinking, no doubt readjusting to the shadowy interior. My new bosses? No, they looked too young, too rich and too carefree to be the Fosters. Guests, then; some of the people I would be expected to wait on as soon as the Fosters turned up and briefed me on my duties.

  “Oh, you’re here already!” the girl, a lanky brunette with an incipient sunburn on her exposed shoulders and midriff, squealed as soon as she registered my presence. “Isn’t it marvelous, Chet, she won’t miss any of the activities!”

  The young man with her looked like a Chet. Probably short for something like Chester Allandale Whitehead III. Artfully cut blond hair, horn-rimmed glasses, designer shirt, khakis: he could have posed in GQ over a caption like, “Weekend Chic.”

  The brunette closed in on me while I was making these observations. “Hi, I’m Ginny,” she said, holding out her hand, “and you must be Sally. I do hope we’re going to be friends.”

  Sally, yes. Potential friend, no. “I think there must be some mistake,” I said. “I work here – that is, I hope I’m going to work here. Is Margo Foster around anywhere?”

  Ginny dimpled. “Oh, don’t bother with that silly cover story!”

  Damn. Busted already? I was going to have a hell of
a time getting out of this big, squashy sofa. And then there would be the problem of running in these high-heeled sandals. I hadn’t exactly dressed for flight. But then, hadn’t it been reasonable to expect my cover would hold up for more than fifteen seconds?

  In emergency, I could always teleport, but we were discouraged from doing that in view of outsiders. Maybe I could sneak out using Camouflage.

  “The Fosters told us at lunch that you’d be coming,” Chet said.

  “But you don’t really expect us to believe that you’re just some extra help they’ve hired, do you?” asked Ginny. “Not after that story in Whirred?”

  What story?

  “We know you’re here to spy on us,” Ginny said. “But it’s just silly for you to pretend to be some little waitress, especially after that photograph! We don’t have any secrets! We all talked it over after lunch and decided the best thing was to include you in all the retreat activities. After all, the whole point of the retreat is for us all to get to know each other better and make a stronger team. And obviously you’re going to be a team member – at least I hope you will.”

  “What photograph?” This time I said it aloud.

  “Just this afternoon. Didn’t you see it? I’ve got my phone set to alert me every time there’s a new posting on Whirred. They have all the best Austin-area industry gossip and usually before anybody else.” Ginny’s coral-painted nails tapped at the surface of her phone. “See?”

  The words “Secret Love” dominated the screen. The man who was the reason for my coming here was pictured just below that, with a paragraph of dreadfully coy, gossipy innuendo about how the reclusive Austin financier Shani Chayyaputra had lost his heart to a certain young lady. Below that was a blurred picture that, okay, could have been me. Could have been almost any short girl with spiky black hair, though.

  “Mr. C. probably thought it would be funny to slip you in here without telling us who you really are. Tell the truth now: didn’t he want you to find out what we say about him behind his back?”

  “He never suggested any such thing to me,” I said with perfect truth.

  “And is your name really Sally? Or is that just part of the cover?”

  “For now,” I said, trying to look knowledgeable and mysterious, “Sally will do just fine.” And if I was slow in answering to that name, well, they’d already come up with an explanation for that, hadn’t they?

  “But you are Mr. C.’s fiancée,” Ginny pushed.

  I looked at my nails. “I wasn’t supposed to…”

  “It’s all right,” Ginny said, “when he gets back we’ll explain to him that you tried to slip in incognito but we saw through your act. He can hardly blame you for the fact that you couldn’t fool a group of brilliant, highly intuitive people with a particular talent for seeing hidden connections!”

  When she put it that way, I had to admit that it seemed silly even to try.

  “And I love your belt,” Ginny added. “Did Mr. C. give it to you? Is it, like, some piece of antique Indian jewelry?”

  I warmed to her. Some people thought that the belt of silver scales, finished off with an elaborate silver knot around a beaky protuberance, was a bit excessive on somebody as short as I was. “Actually,” I said, “it’s Mesopotamian.”

  Chet looked down his patrician nose. “I heard a lot of Iraqi national treasures disappeared from their museum during the war.”

  “Well, this isn’t a museum piece,” I told him. Even if part of it was three thousand years old, the rest was all modern manufacture. And I hadn’t gotten the authentic part of it out of a museum; I found it in a turtle pond. Or you could say that it found me.

  I wished one of the Fosters would turn up. I wanted to unpack. I wanted a shower. And most of all, I wanted to get away from ebullient Ginny and patrician Chet, and call the Center for Applied Topology to find out how I was supposed to handle this.

  Not that anybody I could ask was likely to have a good answer.

  Like an answer to prayer, a slim middle-aged woman in leggings under an embroidered tunic glided into the room. “I’m Margo Foster,” she announced. “And you must be Sally. Come along now, you’ve barely time to change before we start serving dinner, and you certainly can’t wait tables in those heels.”

  “Oh, Sally isn’t going to be working here as a waitress,” Ginny said.

  Margo Foster managed to raise one eyebrow without disturbing her makeup. “She isn’t?”

  Ginny produced a positive shower of dimples. “She may have fooled you and David, but I stay up to date with industry news!”

  “Industry gossip, anyway,” said Chet.

  “Oh, you!” Ginny elbowed him and giggled. “Sally is Mr. C.’s mysterious fiancée. He sent her down here to report on how we talk when he’s not around, but I saw through her at once!”

  “You… did?” Margo couldn’t frown; it would have cracked her makeup. The most she could manage was a slightly puzzled expression.

  “She had to admit it when I asked her straight out, didn’t you, Sally?”

  “Oh, well, in that case…” Margo’s voice trailed off.

  “She needs to join the retreat with us,” Ginny said. “That way we’ll really get to know all about her.”

  Oh, I hoped not.

  “And she’ll know all about us.”

  At last, something consistent with my original plan.

  “Now don’t be difficult, Margo darling,” Ginny urged. “You know there’s plenty of space. Your brochure says you can handle groups of up to ten, and there are only six of us – well, seven, now that Sally’s come.”

  “And how am I supposed to handle any groups without a waitress?” Margo snapped.

  Ginny shrugged. “Put out everything buffet-style,” she suggested, “and we’ll serve ourselves. Nobody will mind. And now that we know who she really is, we’d be much more uncomfortable having Sally wait on us!”

  By the time I got to the bedroom Margo had hurriedly assigned to me (quite an upgrade, I suspected, over the lodgings for the hired help) I was exhausted just from agreeing with Ginny’s assertions and saying nothing that would contradict the story in her head. Well, actually that second bit wasn’t too hard; what would have been difficult was getting a word in edgewise.

  Ginny would probably have been exhausting even if I hadn’t been acting a part; that woman should come with a warning sign reading CAUTION – HIGHLY INTERACTIVE. Pretty much the exact opposite of me, that way.

  Once alone, I sagged down on the end of my bed and tapped the ornate flourishes of my belt buckle. The tapered silver coils unwrapped; the turtle head looked up at me with bright black eyes. Mr. M. slithered out of my belt loops and undulated across the floor to the bureau. (Mr. M. is short for Mr. Mesopotamia, which is what we called him after it became clear that our American tongues were never going to wrap around a Babylonian name that started with ‘Niiqarquusu Adrahasis Galammta-uddua’ and went on from there.) Anyway, there he was on the floor, giving the bureau the evil eye.

  “Climbing this thing will be too much work,” he complained. “I need coffee.”

  “Fly?” I suggested.

  “That is even more work. Coffee!”

  I was not going to deal with a hyper-caffeinated, snake-bodied turtle mage on top of everything else. He would never be able to hold still enough to pass as an ornate belt if he got into the coffee. Worse, he’d probably want to sing.

  Instead, I scooped him off the floor and set him on the top of the bureau, where he promptly arranged himself in a spiral around a ceramic candleholder.

  “Mr. M., what am I going to do now?” I asked him. “I was going to be a waitress. A semi-invisible servant. I can’t possibly pass myself off as Shani Chayyaputra’s fiancée!”

  “The role is, indeed, loathsome and abhorrent,” Mr. M. agreed, “but since you are not required to consort with the man in person, I see no reason why you should not allow these people to believe what they will. Participating in their planned activities shou
ld give you a far better chance of penetrating SCI’s secrets than merely eavesdropping on them at their meals.”

  “Yeah, until they see through me. Then what?”

  “If they suspect you,” Mr. M. said cheerfully, “then boot, saddle, to horse and away! Or, to be literal, Brouwer! and away!”

  “If I have to teleport out of this mess,” I said, “Chayyaputra will know exactly who’s been spying on him.”