Naked for Her Two Masters(11)
“But we don’t know she’s our mate. Likely she’s just another gold digger.”
Raleigh sighed at Kingston’s deliberate obtuseness. “And scaring her away is a good way to discover if she is the woman we’ve been waiting for because?” he asked.
“I don’t like that she came here. All the way up the mountain and right onto our doorstep. It’s not sensible or logical and the reason she gave for doing it is so stupid as to be unbelievable.”
“What? That she wanted to get to the top? Don’t people say that all the time about mountains? I’d have said it was a very natural response.”
“Not when she’d run out of food. If she didn’t know we were here she would have gone back down again to fill her pack,” argued Kingston.
Raleigh wasn’t convinced. He liked Andorra. Well, what he knew about her. He’d been able to read her reactions in her face because she was as transparent as a pane of glass. He knew she’d understood what Kingston was doing and trusted him. But as to why she’d kept climbing the mountain, that was a conundrum. Although he was certain he’d heard about famous explorers and mountaineers who’d done the same thing. “So what now?”
“Tomorrow we play a full dungeon scene with her. Her ass will still be sore. No party girl will agree to a full scene so soon after being double fucked. She’ll be so busy trying to think of a good reason to say no, we’ll catch her in her lies and then ship her off home, wherever that really is.”
Once again that sounded harsh to Raleigh, but he had to agree that if she was lying, the sooner they discovered her falseness the better. “What about tonight?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were you planning to feed her?”
Kingston turned away from Raleigh and marched across the room to where Andorra’s backpack was leaning against the wall near the apartment door. Kingston squatted down and undid the zipper, pulling things out of the front pocket. Raleigh hurried over to look. He didn’t approve of searching her belongings, but he did want to see what they told him about her.
A beanie, a scarf and mittens, a small notebook with a pen pushed down inside the spiral wire, and a cell phone with no credit and a flat battery.
Kingston put them back in the pocket and opened the main part of the backpack. A pile of used clothing, most of it quite dirty, as if she had been hiking in it for days, clean underwear and socks in a plastic bag, and a toothbrush, toothpaste, a hairbrush, and a half empty box of matches in a small Ziploc bag. Another Ziploc bag held a wallet. Inside was a driver’s license in the name of Andorra Yasbit, age twenty-five, some other pieces of identification, and a single five-dollar note. There were also less than two dollars in change, and no credit cards.
Raleigh unrolled her bedding then folded it up again before pulling the backpack toward him and rummaging through it again. “There’s no charger or cable for the cell phone,” he said.
“So what?”
“She has no credit card and no change on her phone to call for money. She was taking this seriously even if she wasn’t telling the truth. Apart from that her two water bottles are empty, she has a fishing net, a cooking pot, a bowl, a spoon, and a fork, and she definitely hasn’t got any food with her,” added Raleigh holding up a couple of empty plastic shopping bags.
Kingston put her things back in the backpack. “It doesn’t prove anything, I suppose, except that if she has any money it’s in the pockets of the jeans she’s wearing right now.”
“She isn’t wearing a money belt. I watched her get undressed.”
“Yeah, I saw her get dressed after I caught her in the hot spring. She didn’t put a money belt on then, either, or transfer anything from the pockets of her dirty jeans to the pockets of her clean ones, but she could have done that later in private.
“Which brings us back to the question, ‘What next?’”
“We feed her then put her in the plainest guest room. And tomorrow we play an intense dungeon scene. Something that will test her through and through and show us her character.
* * * *
A group of men was watching a baseball game very noisily, so Andorra tucked herself away in the back corner of the communal living room in a comfortable chair and let her body relax. Her ass was burning despite the gel Master Kingston had put in it, and her belly was starting to cramp with hunger. She reminded it she’d had a meal when she first arrived here, but that seemed like a long time ago. She tried to calculate the time. It had been afternoon, maybe mid-afternoon, she supposed, and now it was what she’d categorize as getting close to bedtime. So perhaps six hours. Not a big drama at all. The last two days coming up the mountain she hadn’t caught any fish and her oatmeal had run out. She’d managed then and she’d deal with the situation now. She could cope without food. She’d get a nice big drink of water before she went to bed. Andorra reminded herself that people on strict diets welcomed the feeling of emptiness in their belly. It was a sign of success, that they were doing something right.