Adams, Cara - Make Me [Dungeon Masters 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 4

  Trinidad knew her way around town by the bus routes, but in a car it was different. It’d be faster if she concentrated on how to direct them without just replicating the journey as she would have made it.

  She closed her eyes and pulled up a mental map of the area, tracing the most direct way to travel, and then told Kon the next few turns he’d need to take.

  Niel said, “I grew up with a large, extended family around me all the time. When I first came to town to study it was quite lonely. But once I started working at The Dom’s Dungeon it was like I’d moved into a new family. Is your family nearby?”

  “Less than an hour on the bus. Maybe only forty minutes in a car, so quite close really. I moved into the heart of the city for a faster commute and a wider choice of jobs. Where I live now, I can get anywhere in the city itself inside an hour which gives me a huge range of opportunities. Whereas before, I really only had good access to anything on the eastern side of town.”

  “So does that mean you’re really happy with your apartment?” asked Kon.

  “My specific apartment is fine. I’m not looking to move. But it’s more I’m searching for the location and any reasonable apartment inside that location would work just as well.”

  “Okay, that makes sense. And do you still see much of your family?” asked Niel.

  “I don’t visit them for lunch every Sunday or anything like that, but we still meet up regularly. I’m even friends with my brother and his girlfriend on Facebook.”

  Kon laughed. “Ah yes, the twenty-first century definition of family. Liking each other’s Facebook statuses.”

  Trinidad wanted to ask them some questions, but wasn’t sure whether it would seem rude since they were going to be her supervisors. Although asking family questions wasn’t really a supervisor’s privilege either. It was more a friendship, getting-to-know-you, type activity and they’d already given her the job. Finally she decided to ask in a very open way that hopefully wouldn’t get her into trouble. “What about your family?”

  “My parents still live in the same place surrounded by the same people. Every year my father says he’ll retire on his next birthday, and every year he changes his mind and decides to wait another year. I’m pretty sure he’ll never retire, but he works fewer hours a week now than he used to,” said Niel.

  That was interesting. Her father had no plans to retire. Some of his friends had retired but he wasn’t interested in that. “What would I do all day if I retired? I might as well be at work,” was his catch cry.

  She noticed Kon hadn’t said anything about his family, but then he was the one driving. Likely he thought it was Niel’s job to entertain her while he drove. Her father had been like that. He saw his job as driving. When he drove it was her mother’s job to supervise her and her brother, to navigate the route they traveled and tell him where the gas stations and take-out restaurants were located.

  Then, after lunch, her father would take a nap and her mother drove. It was always a minor miracle to her when her father woke up a couple hours later and the car was still on course and going well.

  “Where can I park?” asked Kon as he turned into her apartment block.

  “You can’t. I don’t have a parking space because I don’t have a car.” That wasn’t quite true. It was because she hadn’t paid for a space, but since she didn’t have a car there was no sense in paying for a space just for any of her friends to park in if they visited her.

  “Are you serious?” Kon turned his head and looked full at her face.

  She nodded. “You can see this isn’t all that big a parking lot. Many people choose to park on the street instead of buying a space for their car. Just let me out at the doorway and I’ll be fine. Thank you for saving me the journey on the bus.”

  “I’ll escort you to your door.” Niel was already unbuckling his seat belt.

  Trinidad got the feeling that she’d be wasting her breath telling him not to bother. “Thank you,” she repeated to Kon as she slid out of the car. She walked briskly across the parking lot to the door, but Niel was ahead of her opening it and holding it for her.

  “Why isn’t that door locked? It’s late at night,” he muttered.

  “It never is.”

  “It should be.”

  He was likely right. It probably should be locked at a set time at night. But she’d never found it locked, not that she came in very late all that often. Mostly she came home after work and stayed in her apartment. But she did go out with her friends sometimes, and there was always the occasional trip to the store for something she run out of or forgotten to buy and desperately needed.

  The elevator creaked and groaned but arrived reasonably quickly and clunked its way up to the fourth floor. She marched down the hallway to her apartment and unlocked it, and then said, “Thank you for the job, and thank you for bringing me home.”

  Niel gave her a little half bow. “We very much look forward to you starting work with us on Monday. I’ll see you at eight?”

  “I’ll be there.” She walked inside and shut the door behind her refusing to look back at him again. She was so excited at the thought of her new job but she didn’t want him to read that on her face. It was bad enough they were already starting to feel like friends when she should be concentrating on maintaining a professional distance from them. These men were not eye candy or charming hunks to drool over. They were her employers and she needed to remember that.

  Which didn’t stop her thinking about them all the time as she got undressed and ready for bed.

  * * * *

  “For fuck’s sake, Othniel. Are you a wolf or a cat? Sit down and do some fucking work. You’re driving me crazy.”

  “Huh? What do you mean am I a cat? You know perfectly well that I’m a wolf. And what do you mean I’m driving you crazy?” Niel stopped pacing their office and swiveled to look at Kon, sitting at his desk his arms raised in the air like his team had just made a winning touchdown or something. He had no idea what Kon was talking about.

  “Look at you. It’s not even lunchtime and your hair is a mess, your shirt is half-untucked, you’re pacing the floor like a father outside the maternity ward, and the pile of work we came in to deal with today still hasn’t been touched. It’s Sunday. Our day off. You dragged me in here to work, so get your ass in the chair and start helping me. If you’d just wanted to pace the floor you could be running around the high school athletics track and I could be at home watching the ball game on TV.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Niel crossed to his chair and sat down, pulling the file he’d been working on last Friday afternoon into the center of the desk.

  “Hang on a minute. Your imagery is ten years out of date. These days expectant dads are in the maternity ward with their partners, coaching them in their breathing or whatever. And no one would ever mistake me for a cat. I’m a true wolf.”

  “So get your fingers on the keyboard, wolf, and do some work.”

  Niel grunted and settled down. He did have an outrageous pile of things needing his attention. But mostly he wanted to catch up his in-tray so he could spend time with Trinidad tomorrow showing her around the club and helping her settle in. He could picture her with him and Kon as they leaned over her desk explaining work, maybe looking down the front of her shirt to see how big her breasts were. They’d looked nice enough under her sweater, but he’d really like a closer look at them. If she wore a shirt…Hmm. Yes.

  Or maybe he could take her upstairs and show her a few of the public rooms, nothing too kinky, but if she had on one of those pencil skirts women seemed to like, and he was walking behind, her, he could watch her ass move with every step she took. Hell, yes. Maybe she’d let them take her home again at the end of the day. And this time they’d figure out a way to kiss her good-bye. Nothing too sexy, but he’d like to place his hands on her shoulders, maybe trail his thumb over the skin of her neck, under her hair, as he kissed her lips. Fuck, yes!

  Suddenly his pants were too tight and he wiggled his a
ss on the chair, tugging on the front of his jeans to give his balls some room to breathe.

  Okay, this really wasn’t good. He did need to concentrate on his work. He didn’t—they didn’t—even know Trinidad yet, not really. What was her last name? Had anyone even told him what it was? Maybe it was Wiltshire. It seemed like someone had told him about Wiltshire recently, but he couldn’t really link the word with Trinidad.

  He clicked through all his e-mails but there wasn’t anything to do with Trinidad. Tammy could have taken her to sign the paperwork that would have been logical, except that they’d only really offered her the position when they were all together and she’d been with them until they’d taken her home. Which meant she hadn’t signed any paperwork yet. That would happen tomorrow.

  No, surely not. Leif or Simon would have e-mailed her the paperwork to sign these last few days. They couldn’t expect her to leave one job without formally offering her a replacement position. It must just be that he didn’t have a copy of the paperwork.

  “Kon, do you have a copy of Trinidad’s job offer? What’s her last name? Is it Wiltshire?”

  “Whatever happened to ‘shut the fuck up and do some work?’ Let me see.”

  Niel waited as patiently as he could while Kon scrolled through his e-mails just as he’d done himself. With what were apparently the same results. Nothing.

  “No, I don’t have anything and I don’t know her name. There is something about Wiltshire though, as you say. Now stop thinking with your little head and use the bigger brain. We have work to do.”

  “Ouch. That was harsh.” Nevertheless he supposed Kon had a point. Work. He needed to focus on work. At this point in time Trinidad was just a shining hope for the future. Their new coworker and nothing more. Although he planned to change that as soon as she’d let him.

  * * * *

  Kon felt a slight stab of remorse. Maybe he’d been a bit hard on Niel. But the point was that neither of them knew anything definite about Trinidad yet, except only that she seemed to know her job and would be a suitable worker for them. She also had an attractive figure, sleek black hair, and intelligent gray eyes. None of which added up to anything except that they needed to get to know her better before allowing themselves to hope that they’d been as lucky finding their mate as Leif and Simon had been.

  In a way, it was a damn shame Leif and Simon had found Tamara so quickly at that wedding they’d attended. It set a really high standard and led them to expect they could do as well or even better than their friends. But the point was that they were different, Trinidad was different. The situation was different. And even if it had been an identical situation, that didn’t mean that just because a woman was attractive and could type and add up, that she’d be their perfect mate.

  Kon could think of few things worse than trying to convince a woman that BDSM could be very freeing to her sexually and would give her perfect orgasms, if the woman’s idea of sex was once a month, flat on her back, in bed, in the dark, almost fully clothed.

  But surely someone prepared to work in a BDSM club wouldn’t have ideas that were quite that vanilla about fucking?

  Ugh. Now he was as bad as Niel, thinking about Trinidad instead of getting on with his work. If he didn’t pay attention he’d be even farther behind with his tasks than he was already and instead of having some time to show her how to do things he’d be staying up until midnight to catch up on everyday details.

  But the more he thought about her, the more the situation seemed like Fate being kind to him. Maybe Karma had realized she’d been too cruel on the werewolves and had decided to hand out some help. The wolves had suffered through fewer and fewer female births leading to more and more males unable to find a mate. He and Othniel were close work colleagues and best friends. Living together had shown them they were compatible enough to share a woman. Very occasionally they already had in various BDSM scenarios when that had been a woman’s specific request.

  That made for damn good sex, but a relationship was only possible with a woman who wanted to be theirs forever. Sharing a woman’s body was excellent, but sharing her mind and heart as well would be ten times better. To please a woman in a BDSM scene was a nice challenge, one he and Niel were ready to meet whenever they were asked. But to please a woman in bed and out of it, was the kind of challenge it would take the two of them a lifetime to fulfill, and they were eager to find the right woman and take up that challenge. Maybe it was Trinidad. Maybe Karma had used Leif, Simon, and Tammy to bring their woman right to their doorstep. Kon sure as hell hoped so.

  * * * *

  Trinidad had taken her empty laptop bag to work each day, filling it with personal possessions from her cubicle and bringing them home. She’d also checked her work e-mail, carefully deleting anything that might be considered personal and making a list of people to tell she’d changed jobs. Fortunately, management didn’t seem at all concerned that she was leaving, and were absolutely accurate with her vacation entitlements, so she heaved a huge sigh of relief over it all. She’d been worried that with Tamara leaving so recently, there might have been arguments about her going as well. Not that she said she’d be working for the same people as Tamara. But basically no one cared, which was symbolic of her entire career with the company. This time it suited her to have them pretty much ignore her.

  She was still a little bit worried about having left her job so quickly, but Tamara seemed blissfully happy and Trinidad respected Tamara’s intelligence. If Tamara had no concerns about working for the BDSM club, it seemed reasonable to Trini that she would be happy as well.

  Not that she was planning to rush out and celebrate just yet. She did have almost a week’s extra pay from her unused vacation time, which was nice, but a vacation last year would have been nice as well. Oh well, maybe the BDSM club would let her take her vacation this year. A week somewhere warm in the middle of winter would suit her perfectly. It didn’t have to be anywhere expensive like Florida or Hawaii. Just somewhere her toes wouldn’t ache with cold would be perfect.

  On Friday she’d checked and double-checked that nothing belonging to her remained in her cubicle or on the computer she used. She said good-bye to the people she worked with and to her friends, and thanked her supervisor for his advice and help. That was just to prove her Mama had reared her right. He was pretty useless as a supervisor actually. He was terrified of doing anything that might make management complain about him, but he hadn’t been abusive or horrible and she was grateful for that.

  And then she’d shouldered her laptop bag for the last time and headed home. Saturday she’d cleaned her apartment and shopped for food supplies, knowing she needed to take a brown bag lunch every day this week at least until she knew where the good places were to buy a cheap and nutritious meal. Trini knew plenty of people who thought paying five dollars for a cup of coffee was no big deal. She had no intention of becoming one of them. A bottle of water and a sandwich or salad for lunch, all brought from home, suited her just fine.

  By midday Sunday she was as organized as she could be, so she wrapped herself in a blanket, curled up on her couch, and reread one of her all-time favorite books. She was in bed at ten, and wide awake ready to start her new life at six thirty.

  This time when she walked into the lobby of The Dom’s Dungeon, both Niel and Kon were waiting for her, leaning against the side wall, but with their gazes fixed to the front door. Worried, she slid her cell phone out of her pocket and checked the time, but she wasn’t late. It was still five minutes before eight. They said eight, not ten to or something, I’m sure.

  Trini hesitated, not sure whether she should walk toward them or whether she should go to the registration desk. It didn’t matter. As soon as she hesitated they both hurried across to her. “You can’t be given your swipe card and ID card until after you sign the club paperwork. Do you need to sit down and rest for a few minutes first? We can bring you a coffee while you get your strength back,” said Kon.

  “Get my strength back
? I’ve only come from my apartment to work. I haven’t crossed Death Valley or something, you realize?”

  “Yes, but traveling on public transportation can be very stressful,” said Niel.

  “That’s true. But it can also be very pleasant. I don’t have to worry about the traffic. I don’t have to look for a parking space when I arrive. I can sit back in my seat and relax.”

  “So did you? Sit back in your seat and relax?”

  “Absolutely. It gave me an opportunity to read some more of my book.”

  They escorted her to one of the other offices, a bigger one, but still with no external windows, where one of the two managers of the club went through her contract line by line with her, and then they both signed it. She’d already read it extremely carefully at home, and simply needed to check that what she signed was the same as the one she’d been e-mailed, which it was.

  Next they took her to her office, which looked very different from when she’d last seen it. Tamara’s desk was fully set up and piled with work. Her own desk faced it across a small open area with a computer, and empty in and out trays. Against a wall was a bookshelf with a range of books and files on it, a metal filing cabinet with a printer sitting on top of it, and a couple of guest chairs.

  Tammy jumped up from her desk and greeted her with a hug. “I’m so excited you’ve decided to come here with me. We’re going to have so much fun together.”

  “And no work will ever be done.”

  Startled, Trinidad turned around to see that Leif had followed them here.

  “Of course it will. Just not this morning. I need to show Trini all around and introduce her to everyone. But that’s helping you. That means you, Simon, Kon, and Niel can all keep working hard without being interrupted.”