The Prince's Slave

by P. J. Fox

  For men as well as women. The notion that only women sought solace from the opposite sex, sought intimacy from the act of love was a myth. Men had needs, too.

  Ash hadn’t thought much about his own needs, until he’d met Belle. He supposed he’d had them; but he didn’t question them. They weren’t relevant to him at all, unless they weren’t being met. But then he’d seen her perched in that chair, so studious, so out of place. He’d known that she’d never talk to him, which made him feel like an ogre. And then when she did talk to him, in that split second, he’d seen himself through her eyes. Seen the world through her eyes, and everything had changed. Because for the first time, he’d realized how different the world could be.

  Seeing her on the stage had been a third shock. He’d meant what he’d told her, that he might have stolen her regardless. She’d done something to him, had gotten into his blood. He’d heard the experience described before: what Sicilians and Mario Puzo alike called the thunderbolt. A powerful, almost dangerous longing in a man for a particular woman and something that, until it hit him, Ash hadn’t believed could exist. Not in this world.

  Not in his world.

  But Belle wasn’t of his world, and she wasn’t of the sordid world of the club either. He’d known, as soon as he saw her, that he had to have her. To have her, yes, but also to—if not rescue her, precisely, then keep her from becoming part of this world. He wasn’t such a liar, even to himself, that he could characterize his motivations as having anything to do with rescue. He wanted her for himself, and that was that. Her wants and needs were, at least then, irrelevant. Even so, he knew that in his hands she could remain innocent. In mind if not in body. He’d never subject her to the degradations that he knew were part of this lifestyle.

  Of his own lifestyle.

  He supposed that, in retrospect, seeing her had helped him to recognize something in himself. Something he thought had died long ago. That perhaps, by taking her in and caring for her, he could nurture into some form of life.

  She was delicate. Fragile, after her own fashion. She needed to be wanted. To be loved. To feel secure in her place in the world. To have a place in the world. Which, he suspected—now, knowing her better, more than suspected—she hadn’t.

  She wasn’t after his wallet. She wasn’t after anything about him. He’d realized, that first night, and with something like horror, that if he wanted to win her over he’d have to do more than dangle a few trinkets. He’d have to first reach, and then capture, her heart.

  That he’d chosen to do so while keeping her captive…he knew, as well as she, that letting her go meant never seeing her again. A thought he couldn’t bear and, luckily, didn’t have to entertain. Why did the Beast keep his Beauty captive? Why did Scheherazade’s sultan glut himself on virgin beauty, night after night? Why did anyone raised in this modern and politically correct age find such stories romantic? Who knew. The human mind was a strange thing.

  Ash had, as he’d explained to Belle, purchased his other women more indirectly. He was only one of dozens on a party circuit frequented by younger sons and cousins: of royalty, or of those wealthy and powerful enough to have created their own titles by sheer force of will. Eike Batista, now disgraced. Andrew Luster, the rapist. A certain child actress turned adult cautionary tale, who’d sold herself to any number of playboys to feed her habit. Lifestyle junkies who treated their trust funds like ATM machines.

  They came to feed, all of them. On the attention of others, in both directions—and trading shares of that attention like cocaine-fueled stockbrokers. But to facilitate the illusion that their lives mattered, women were needed.

  The actress with the fiery red hair wasn’t the only one who’d pimped herself out as a “party guest,” as women like her were euphemistically known. Men, usually through agents, hired the washed up, the bored, and the desperate. Girls from nice families, or who’d formerly had careers, were a plus. They were paid some exorbitant fee, usually ten or twenty thousand dollars for two weeks’ work, during which time they lounged around looking pretty on yachts, or danced in skimpy outfits in clubs, and let men have sex with them.

  The women got the illusion of being wanted, or of still being important. The men got the thrill of looking down on them. Nothing got a jaded man’s juices flowing like watching, drink in hand, as a once-famous actress hungrily gobbled his cock.

  Once in awhile, those girls became girlfriends. Another polite euphemism, this time describing the transition from town hall doorknob to a slightly more exclusive arrangement. Ash had heard that phrase down in Texas, brokering a deal, and found it oddly charming.

  These girls were no fools: they traded their independence for a life of indolence punctuated by dinners out and six figure shopping sprees. They often received hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts: cars, jewels, purses. Shoes. Whatever they wanted.

  The Sultan of Brunei’s younger brother reputedly had forty girlfriends. And that was in addition to his three wives. He slept with two to four of them a day, but was—again reputedly—also extraordinarily bad in bed. Fast and furious was the most generous term that one former girlfriend could produce, when she penned a tell-all about her experiences. Ash hadn’t read it, but his personal assistant had.

  Ash had a few women stashed about. Sometimes he saw them, or one or two of them, frequently and sometimes he saw them not at all. But what they referred to as mind games on his part was really just disinterest. They were a distraction; nothing more. He, regardless of what they chose to believe, wasn’t trying to provoke any particular reaction out of them. He didn’t care if they cared for him, or not. If they wished to leave, then they could.

  A statement that, whenever he made it, was invariably taken as some sort of coded plea by each individual member of a group of women who’d collectively convinced themselves that he was in love with them. With them, and only them. Because he bought them things. Because he was emotionally unavailable, just like daddy the investment banker. Because he was unpredictable, just like mommy the drunk. Who knew. Who cared.

  He’d never understood why indifference should be so alluring, despite that being rather good for him.

  “I always pictured….” Belle trailed off.

  “Yes?” He was still looking up at the ceiling. It was easier to talk when he didn’t have to face her.

  “That these women were…that this was something they were forced into, either directly or as a means of survival. It never occurred to me that this was anything anyone would choose.”

  She stopped. He glanced over at her. She was biting her lip, no doubt concerned about what she’d just said. Which boiled down to, that it had never occurred to her that being with a man like him—that being with him—might be a choice made voluntarily. Except that wasn’t fair. She wasn’t like the others, and never had been. She was as separate from them as ground slugs were from the moon.

  He smiled slightly. She smiled back, more slightly. How fragile she was.

  “What the world offers is…a livable, balanced life. A life of meetings and school lunches and running on the treadmill.” He studied her eyes, such a beautiful blue. “A life like that has its rewards, but doesn’t have the adrenaline rush. Not like a dangerous fantasy world, where every moment is pregnant with the knowledge that things could change at any moment. End, without warning. Step out of the world long enough, experience your only euphoria from drugs and shopping sprees long enough, and things cease to be real. You know you’re living in a house of cards, but you don’t care because nothing matters. Nothing except the next party. The next high.”

  “You speak from experience.”

  He did. Ash felt older in his mid-thirties than most men in their mid-nineties. Was older.

  He’d lived a lifetime, and most of it not terribly productive, before deciding to do something else about five years before meeting Belle. He wished he could say that his entrepreneurial ambitions had bubbled up from some deep well of passion that he’d nurtured since he was a ch
ild but the truth was, he’d taken the path of least resistance. Worried that he’d end up like Paul Castle, throwing himself in front of a train because he couldn’t stand the peaceful life of a non-playboy, he’d woken up one morning surrounded by people he didn’t know and determined that it was time to get a job. And so he’d picked something at which he could succeed and, well, succeed he had. He was neither Britain’s youngest polo sponsor nor a particular friend of Prince Charles, whom he regarded as a man with no spine, but at least he was still alive.

  A fact that, quite purely, sometimes astonished him.

  “Do you miss your adventures?”

  “Not those adventures.” And he didn’t.

  They shared the silence for awhile. “Would you like this space?”

  She smiled. She had such a genuine, unpracticed smile, like that of a small child. “Yes,” she said. “The light is good.”

  “Give Diana a list of what you need.”

  Belle frowned. “Everything? But that would be expensive.”

  Ash found her concern charming, although he certainly didn’t wish to let on about that fact. If she knew the effect she had on him, he’d have no power over her at all. “I hardly think that matters,” he replied, rather coolly. “At least not to the housekeeper. I wish you to do it, and so you shall.”

  Her smile deepened, almost as if she saw right through him. “Alright,” she said.

  He noticed that she was shivering. The chill, damp air had caught up with her as, indeed, it had with him. Even the best heated castle was still a castle and thus no model for comfort. He took off his shirt and draped it around her shoulders.

  “Shall we?”

  She nodded

  He helped her to her feet and then, his arm around her as she leaned into him, they went off to bed.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Belle gazed around at the airstrip. She’d only been in a plane once before and that had been when she’d left for her semester abroad. She hadn’t expected, either, that that one trip would prepare her for airports throughout the world—had never really considered the issue. And why would she? Airports were boring, to everyone except pilots. Or maybe aircraft mechanics. No one left home on a grand tour of airports.

  But even so, this place was nothing like Logan.

  Logan Airport, in Boston, was a ’70’s-style fortress in the middle of a concrete jungle. She vividly recalled driving in, with her mother, who’d come down from Maine for the experience and who over Belle’s protests had insisted on driving her to the airport. An airport far more easily accessible by public transportation. Belle tried her best to flash-scrutinize each sign as it flew past, Donna yelling all the while that they were going to miss their exit.

  She thought of that now, and smiled. In the middle of Boston, confusing which terminal was which—or even leaving the airport altogether, by accident, and winding up in Charlestown—was a real possibility.

  Out here, there was nothing.

  They could no more have missed this airport than Jack could have missed the giant beanstalk, had Jack been a Martian and the beanstalk the only vegetation growing on Mars.

  They’d spent what felt like hours in the car, Alec driving in silence as Ash studied something on a tablet and Belle gazed out the window at the surrounding countryside. Finally, they arrived at a glass-fronted building that looked like a communist holdover. A sign that Belle couldn’t read seemed to announce that this was an airport, but only because airport was a borrowed word in Romanian.

  The building was the only thing for miles in any direction; it appeared to have been dropped down into the fields, like a forgotten shoebox. Alec pulled up and let them out, and Ash led Belle into the building itself. Which, despite its impressive façade, proved to be quite small. There was one baggage claim on the ground level; arrows seemed to indicate that the handful of gates were upstairs.

  Ash ignored these, walking over to a desk where a man immediately jumped up to greet him. They exchanged a few words and then, within minutes, Belle found herself walking through a long, glassed-in tunnel that let out onto a vista of nothing.

  There were three planes, parked at different angles according to painted lines that Belle couldn’t even begin to understand, on what appeared to be some sort of parking lot. A short taxiway led to a runway that ran perpendicular to where she was standing. No planes appeared to be landing or taking off. Nothing appeared to be happening, at all. She might as well have walked out onto the set of some movie about the end of the world.

  Two of the planes were enormous but the third was small and snub-nosed. White with a stylized red stripe, it bore no outward identification save for call letters. The door stood open, folding down to create its own staircase. There was even a metal guard rail.

  Alec reappeared, announcing that he’d parked the car. Ash nodded once, but he was distracted. A man was already walking toward them. He was young, with a shock of blondish hair and expensive sunglasses. His sleeves were rolled up casually. Only the shoulder boards on his white shirt indicated that this was a pilot’s uniform. And this, apparently, the pilot. He barely seemed old enough to drive a car.

  He greeted Ash equally casually. “We’re gassed up and ready to go.”

  “Who’s with you?”

  “John and Maria.”

  They were walking across the tarmac, Ash and Belle in the lead with the pilot and Alec trailing along behind. Beyond the runway, the fields were flat and dull and brown. There were no baggage handlers, no air traffic controllers. Belle fought down a rising panic.

  Stopping, the pilot addressed her for the first time. “Ma’am,” he said, sketching a little bow as he gestured up the stairs, “welcome aboard the best plane in the world.”

  Ash sniffed. The pilot straightened. Behind them, Alec issued what might have been a snort.

  Belle stared up the stairs, intimidated.

  Ash offered her his arm. “Shall we?”

  Hesitantly, she took it.

  At the top of the stairs, they met John and Maria: John, the copilot, was a dour-faced older man and Maria could only be described as a pin-up girl. Instead of the usual stewardess’ pencil skirt and middy blouse, she wore a tight-fitting number in some drapey fabric that molded to her every curve. That it was modestly cut with a neckline hitting at the collar bone and cap sleeves only, ironically, made it that more revealing. Both of her arms bore graphic, anime-style tattoos and the top of another, obviously large tattoo peeked out from underneath her collar. Long tendrils of bottle-black hair curved down around her face, from a chignon piled high on her head. A medusa piercing winked above her top lip.

  “Welcome aboard,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Belle replied. She wondered, unwillingly, if Ash had slept with this woman. Her friendly attitude belied her stern, almost unpleasant expression. Belle could see how a man might—would—find her attractive.

  “Do you want the tour?”

  “No,” Ash said, answering for her. “Just bring us drinks.”

  Maria’s eyes met Belle’s. “Are you having what he’s having?” There was just the faintest hint of laughter in everything she said. Now, she appeared amused at the fact that Ash was speaking for his companion and that Belle was letting him.

  “No. Thank you. Just water.”

  Maria turned on her heel and vanished into the depths of the plane. She had a way of looking at you when she spoke that made you wonder what she wasn’t saying. Belle, much to her surprise, discovered that she liked the other woman. Quite a bit.

  Even if she had slept with Ash.

  She pushed the thought from her mind.

  The interior of the plane was divided into several portions. To their left was the pilot’s cabin and to the right was the first of several seating areas. This first boasted four reclining chairs and two tables. The chairs were upholstered in luxurious camel-colored leather and the tables were high polish burl wood.

  The second area beyond that was for dining, with a table that seated four
on one side and a sideboard on the other. The third area was an expanse of plush leather like Belle had never seen: two divan-style couches faced each other across the aisle. Both were covered with throw pillows made from rug remnants, an understated but expensive touch.

  Beyond that, Ash explained, was the head, while the galley was between the first seating area and the pilot’s cabin. Those terms Belle well understood, being the daughter of a fisherman. The flight from Boston to Frankfurt had served peanuts and something more or less resembling a yogurt parfait; Belle wondered what, if anything, she might eat here.

  “Where would you like to sit?”

  Belle jumped, startled out of her reverie. “What? Oh. Whatever’s safest.”

  He chuckled. He sat down on one of the couches and then, a minute later, Belle sat down next to him. There didn’t appear to be any seatbelts. She felt another stab of anxiety.

  Maria returned, drinks in hand. “We’re cleared for takeoff,” she said, “unless you want me to do a little show for you. Demonstrate the safety procedures.” She winked.

  Ash accepted his drink, and Belle’s, which he passed to her. “Show your routine to John. He could use a little livening up.”

  Maria gestured to the window. “In the event of an evacuation, points will be given based on form and artistic impression.” The humor, Belle realized, was for her benefit.

  “Air condoms are stored overhead for in-flight quickies.”

  “Tell Max that we’re ready when he is.”

  “Suit yourself.” Maria vanished again.

  Ash relaxed into the couch, which Belle had to admit was one of the most comfortable she’d ever encountered, and sipped his drink. Belle, still sitting ramrod straight as she contemplated their impending death, said nothing.

  Finally, “she’s interesting.”

  “Who? Oh, Maria? Yes, never a dull moment with her.”