Bought (His For A Week)

“Being Jake,” she muttered.

“He give you trouble?”

She considered telling him the truth. She would like nothing more than to see Ben, if he were so inclined, beat the crap out of Jake. But what if Jake threw them out of his cabin? Without having exchanged numbers with the women, she’d have no way of contacting them. And she couldn’t leave Claire. It was fortunate that Jake had ended up with someone whose disposition tolerated his assholeness.

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

Her response, however, felt like a lie. She couldn’t have been more relieved to hear Ben’s voice. And it sucked. She didn’t want to have to depend on Ben, whom she wondered whether she could trust a hundred percent, given that they’d known each other all of thirty hours. But if Ben hadn’t arrived, she’d be stuck with Jake. The thought made her shudder.

That was what was so messed up with the setup of the Scarlet Auction. The women were put in powerless situations—and not just for the sake of kinky role-playing.

As she tossed the salad, she silently vowed that she would write the story that would put an end to the Scarlet Auction.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Dude, how many calls you going to get in one evening?” Derek asked over the table when Ben’s phone rang for the third time during dinner.

“It’s Monday morning in Hong Kong,” Ben explained as he got up. He almost didn’t want to let Jake and Kimani out of his sight. She had been agitated in the kitchen. But since she was having her spaghetti and salad over with the other women at the coffee table, she was probably okay.

He took the call out on the back patio. It was May, the second eldest of his three sisters.

“I need you to talk to Father about the bodyguard,” she said in Cantonese, her dialect of choice when she was upset. “I’m sick and tired of it. You don’t have one all the time.”

May was a sharp woman, so the response to such a statement should have been obvious to her.

“The fact that I don’t always have Bataar with me has no persuasion value,” he stated. “Remember, Father tried to stick a bodyguard on me, too.”

Ben had ditched his bodyguard enough times that his father had finally stopped keeping track. Ben liked Bataar, though, and kept the man on payroll. May had done her fair share of eluding her bodyguard, but their father wasn’t going to give up as easily for a daughter, especially after the recent high-profile kidnappings that included a young fashion heiress.

“And I’m six-two, a hundred and ninety pounds with advanced training in kung fu,” he added.

“The bodyguard makes Little Red nervous,” she said of her girlfriend. “She can’t be herself. She wouldn’t stay the night at my place.”

“You’re trying to convince the wrong person. First of all, if Red wants to be with you bad enough, she’ll find a way to deal with it. Secondly, I would pay for your bodyguard if Father didn’t.”

“Some help you are! I don’t know why I even bothered to call you.”

Ben knew she had called because he was the closest ally she had. Growing up, she and Ben would sometimes team up against their older sister, Phyllis, who was in line to be the company’s CFO and prone to lecturing them on how they should behave. As kids, if Ben was confined to his room as punishment, May would sneak him comics under the door. And May butted heads with their father almost as often as Ben had before he’d turned things around.

“I’ll talk to your bodyguard,” he offered. “Maybe there are some things he can do differently so you won’t feel his presence so much.”

“I guess that’s better than nothing,” she huffed.

Her partial mollification indicated to Ben that this wasn’t the last he was going to hear about the bodyguard. Glancing into the cabin through the patio doors, Ben saw that Jake was no longer at the dining table.

“May, I’ve got to go.”

“Talk to the bo

dyguard soon. Now would be good.”

“I’ll call in the morning—evening for you.”

“Why can’t you do it now?”

“I have to check on something.”

“On what?”