“Fine, but later tonight you’ll have to pay up.”
“Oh? And what am I paying with this time?”
“I’ll think of something, I’m sure.”
“Will I like it?”
“Probably not, but you have a safeword.”
“Pumpernickel? Eyeball?”
He kissed her long and hard. “Nope. You’d better work on remembering it. You only have a few hours.”
As he opened the door to leave, she called after him, “Beaver? Blow job? Agamemnon?”
“Try those and see if they work. Maybe I should just keep changing your safeword and not telling you what it is until you guess correctly,” he teased.
There was a deep chuckle from outside the door, and Grant turned to see Luc standing in the hall. Grant gave Arabella a pointed look and shut the door behind him before Luc got an eyeful.
“I was just coming to see if you wanted to come down to the dock,” his second-in-command explained.
Grant nodded but didn’t say anything.
“You look like everything is right in your world, G.”
The new people he’d hired to work at the lodge just knew they were Master and slave, and weren’t aware of the long hard road they’d had to get here.
They got to the bottom of the stairs and Josée, who ran the gift shop convenience store, came bustling toward him.
“Master Grant,” the young woman called, grinning, her round cheeks pink. “I’ve had several people ask me if you’d be willing to sell things on commission and I think it might be a good idea, especially if we had things like leather cuffs and floggers in stock. One of the craftsmen I’ve been talking to has an idea for branding Wild’s logo onto his work, too, so people might pick them up as souvenirs. Oh, and I think Mathieu is looking for you.”
Crap. If the chef was looking for him, that could take a while.
Grant glanced to Luc apologetically. Luc waved for him to stay, and jogged off by himself, leaving Grant to deal with Josée and Mathieu, maybe not in that order.
By the time Luc was back with the new guests, Grant had dealt with Mathieu’s concerns about a carrot shortage, and had decided to move ahead with Josée’s commission arrangement.
He thought he caught a glimpse of Arabella just as he and Luc were dividing the guests to show them to their rooms, but he must have been mistaken.
They were booked solid until the end of the summer, which was a good thing, but he was going to have to figure out how to find more free time. Busy was good, but too busy was exhausting. Then again, with the amount of money he made from Wild, eventually he might be able to retire from Catacombs and spend the lodge’s off-season following Arabella around and making a nuisance of himself.
He couldn’t wait to get back upstairs and see what kind of mischief she was doubtlessly getting into now.
Chapter Eighteen
Dexter’s solitary walk was interrupted by the sound of a quiet female voice cursing to a strange accompaniment of thumps and bangs. Cautiously, she rounded the corner and peeked down the embankment, aware she might be interrupting people who weren’t in the mood to be interrupted.
A woman had managed to get a canoe off a storage rack and into the lake, the turbulent water around the small vessel suggesting it had just gone in. Dex looked around, but the woman seemed to be alone.
Was that Echo? She didn’t seem the type to go canoeing—especially not alone.
Although it was highly recommended that guests not go out on the water without a buddy, Grant was still working on coming up with the lodge’s rules. Just because people signed a waiver didn’t mean he washed his hands of the responsibility of keeping his guests safe.
The young woman glanced up, her lips pressed in a flat line and her gaze miserable. It wasn’t the kind of expression Dex had ever seen on her friend before. Sad. A bit hopeless.
“Oh, hi Dex,” she said, her normally dreamy voice hollow.
“Are you going out canoeing?”