Diamonds and Toads: A Modern Fairy Tale (4 page)

“
Sexual
commands?”

She twisted her fingers in her lap and
shrugged. “Sometimes.” She took in a deep breath and released it.
“Most times—at the end at least—after.”

“Ohmygod.” He turned his head and glared out
the windshield. A muscle spasmed in his jaw. “Like what?” he said.
His lips had barely moved, so she knew his teeth were clenched.

“It’s not what you think,” she rushed to say.
“There’s no intercourse, no sexual contact at all. It’s just—” She
twisted the crop in her hands. “Afterward—after the session—the
client is provided a tube of-of lubricant and, if they want, they
can m-masturbate themselves.”

The sound of Chas swallowing carried across
the car to her. “Holy Mother of Christ.” He swung around and faced
her full-on. “Are you telling me—You—,” he jabbed a finger at her,
“the sweet, giving, fine, upstanding person I asked to be my wife
this morning, the girl your sister Isadora calls ‘goody-two-shoes’,
is a-a-a
Dominatrix?
For
hire?
”

Hot blood rushed to her face and neck.
Goody-two-shoes.
How many times had she heard that
sarcastic, demeaning term fly from people’s mouths ever since her
sister had given it to her when they were children? Paula had told
her not to let it slide anymore, and this time—especially with
Chas—she wasn’t going to. Delilah threw the crop down and crossed
her arms over her chest. “I
detest
being called that! I am
NOT goody-two-shoes.”

“Clearly.”

“Fuck you.” Delilah’s heart flew into her
throat. Had she really said that?

For a good minute, they sat there in silence.
Delilah figured Chas was too stunned to speak. That was fine with
her. She needed the time to figure out if she’d blown her chance
with him or not. She pushed a cuticle back with her thumbnail.
“Tonight was the last time I was going to do it. Just to let you
know.”

Silence.

She looked at his profile. Tension lines made
grooves around his mouth and eyes. He hated her now. She loved him,
but he—if he ever had loved her—loathed the sight of her now. Her
hands shook as she dragged the gold chain that held his engagement
ring from around her neck. “Here, this is yours, I believe. Don’t
worry, I’ve only told my stepmother about our engagement—and
believe me, she won’t be surprised that you’ve broken it off
already. She didn’t believe you wanted me in the first place.”

* * *

Chas started a little when she thrust the
ring at him. His mind had been whirring from one disjointed thought
to the other, mostly centered around how he was going to keep
Delilah’s dirty little secret just that—a secret—and maintain the
image as the perfect, moral, financially sound couple he’d
envisioned for them while he saved his family’s company from ruin.
“What’s this for? Put it on. I’m not breaking the engagement.”

“You’re not?”

“No.” He watched her slide the ring off the
chain and put it on her finger. “How many others know about
this—this perversion of yours?”

This prejudice really got her goat. Paula was
one of the kindest, giving people Delilah knew, and her clients
were gentlemen and ladies of the highest order. Her eyes spit blue
lightning rods at him. “It’s
not
a perversion. It’s an
alternate, highly creative lifestyle. You should try it sometime,
you might actually enjoy it.” She pulled a black elastic band from
the pocket of her trench coat and dragged her hair into a ponytail.
“A lot of businessmen do, you know. They’re the most frequent
clients.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

She placed her hand over his. It still
gripped the steering wheel, he noticed, so with effort he forced
himself to let go of it and take her hand. “No one knows my
identity, Chas. I’ve been very careful to keep the mask on.”

“You didn’t have it on just now.”

She shrugged. “My friend’s house is also just
a house. The clients come in through a different doorway, usually
around nine o’clock.”

“But that outfit. The neighbors must
know.”

She squeezed his hand. “No they don’t. Yes, I
guess they could have a suspicion, but these are common nightclub
clothes for this part of town, too. Well, except for the back of
the dress—but I wear the coat until I’m inside, so no worries.”

He looked around. There really wasn’t a lot
of activity outside right now. She was probably right. The people
that lived around here were the artsy, bohemian types. More likely
to keep secrets than to expose them. It’s why they moved to this
area in the first place: freedom of expression. For the first time
since discovering her a few minutes ago, he allowed himself to
relax.

Wait a minute. The
back
of the
dress?
A fleeting image of a low-slung dress with an opening
that dipped below the base of the spine to show a tantalizing view
of Delilah’s butt cleavage went through his mind, making his skin
blaze and his cock throb to life again.

“Show me.”

“Wh-what?”

“The back of the dress. Show me. My place, or
yours. You pick.”

* * *

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she’d done it
now.
She pressed her fingertips against the racing pulse
between her breasts and tried to catch her breath.
“My—
ahem
—my place is fine.” She sat back and suppressed a
grin. She was finally going to make love to Chas. After all these
months. Darting a sideways glance at him, she chewed her lip. She
just hoped he couldn’t tell that she was—mortifyingly—a novice.

* * *

Chas was already regretting his lapse in
judgment by the time he swung Delilah’s front door open and ushered
her inside fifteen minutes later. His plan to keep things platonic
between them was quickly becoming a hard sell to his overactive,
recently underutilized libido.

He followed her into her country cottage
style living room and before he could stop her, she slid the coat
off and slung it over the back of a wingback chair.

His lungs stopped working.
Fuck.
It
wasn’t an expletive, it was a barked command from his male psyche.
Gorgeous ass.
How the hell had he missed that bit of
gorgeous gorgeousness these past months? With effort he forced
himself to take a breath. It only went halfway down.

She wandered further across the living room
toward a door leading into what he could see was the kitchen.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” she tossed over her shoulder.

He coughed to open up the constriction in his
throat. “Yes. Thanks.” His voice, embarrassingly, was strained.
Okay, bucko, get a grip. This is as far as it goes. Drink the
wine and get the hell out of here. Pronto.

As he absently listened to the familiar
sounds of movement in the other room, Chas scrubbed the
perspiration from his palms onto his pant legs and sat down on
Delilah’s sofa. He picked up a photo of her and Isadora, set it
back down, got up walked over to the fireplace, looked at more of
her family photos, turned, straightened the shade on her lamp, and
then sat back down again and crossed one leg over the other. He’d
already gotten an eyeful of the healthy set of lungs she sported
and the continually repeating image of burying his face in them had
left his dick at half-mast for the past forty-five minutes. Now
this. The clammy wetness of perspiration under his arms seeped into
his consciousness.

He leapt to his feet and made a dash to the
door.

He swung it open. “I just realized I left an
important document on my desk—I’ll call you later!” he yelled to
her.

He ran out and didn’t look back.

God, he’d nearly ruined everything. He would
not be that much of a cad to her. It was bad enough that he’d asked
her to marry him under false pretenses—even given her his ex’s
ring. But he did have some standards of behavior he wouldn’t break.
And taking sexual advantage of a woman was one of them. Especially
one he liked as well as he liked Delilah.

Better to set a time to talk to her tomorrow,
in the daylight, in neutral territory, about how they would proceed
together after his discovery this evening.

* * *

Delilah stumbled into her kitchen the next
morning and switched the light on over the sink. With a wide yawn
and a stretch of an arm over her head, she used the other to fill
the coffee carafe with water and pour it into the maker.

Chas had called her last night, as he’d
promised, and they were to meet for lunch to discuss plans for an
engagement party later in the week and, she was sure, how she was
to conduct herself now that she was his fiancée. Image was
everything. She knew that—hadn’t her whole family been both the
servants to and the victims of their social image for as long as
she could remember? Wasn’t it her stepmother’s driving reason for
getting up in the morning?

And now it was all just within Delilah’s
grasp to gain it back. As long as she didn’t blow it. And she
supposed, she almost had last night, if Chas hadn’t discovered her
secret.

She twisted her lower lip between her thumb
and forefinger. It hadn’t been a lie—there really was little danger
of anyone discovering who she was. But still. With the engagement,
and the newly earned fortune, she shouldn’t have taken a
chance.

So. She supposed it had been a boon that Chas
had discovered her.

Biting down on her thumbnail, she leaned
against the kitchen counter.
How had he found her, anyway?
The coffee made its final burbling noises and she took a mug from
the shelf above it.

A crash sounded in the living room.

Delilah dropped the mug and whirled around.
It clattered to the tile floor and broke.

While her heart rocketed about in her chest,
she grabbed her cell phone from the counter, slid the chef’s knife
out of the wood block, and tiptoed on shaky legs across the
kitchen. Her thumb firmly over the panic button on her cell, she
peeked into the living room.

“We-e-e-lll, hello, Lila, dear.”

It was Endora. Endora from
Bewitched.
Bright red hair, purple high-necked gown with  lime-green cape
and all. A tipped-over antique wire hat stand lay on the wood floor
next to where she sat. In hopes the hallucination would fade,
Delilah opened and closed her eyes several times.

It didn’t work.

“Wh-what’s going on?” She looked around, but
everything was fuzzy. “Where—? How—?”

“Falderal and fiddle-de-dee. No need to get
into such a dither. It’s only me, dear. Your  friendly family
fairy flitting in to fix your folly.”

Endora—or whatever her name was—unfurled the
leg she’d tucked under her on Delilah’s mauve and blue pinstriped
sofa and swept her long silver-nailed finger in the direction of
the chair next to her. “Have a seat, dear. You look a bit piqued.
And do put that knife away before you slice off a finger, will
you?”

This is not really happening. It can’t
be.
Delilah moved forward on numb limbs and placed the knife on
the end table next to the chair before collapsing into the seat.
The phone, she tucked safely into her lap. She couldn’t take her
eyes off the spectre in front of her. “I know what this is,” she
mumbled to herself, “I ate chocolate cake with wine before I went
to sleep. I’m actually in some kind of sugar and alcohol induced
nightmare,”—she swung her glance around the room and slapped her
cheek—“I must be.”

“Don’t be silly, dear, and I see no reason to
abuse yourself in such a manner. Sit still and I shall finish this
business and be off on my next assignment.”

Delilah’s eyes narrowed. “Okay, if this isn’t
a dream, why do you look like a television character from the last
show I remember watching?”

The fairy laughed. It was full-throated, yet
gentle. “Why, dear,” she said, “is it not plain? Because it
amuses
me to do so!” She lifted both hands and snapped her
fingers three times, her thin silver bangles clinking with each new
movement. “Now, listen closely, or all will fall to muck and mire:
Under no circumstances are you to release control of your fortune
to your fiancé.”

Delilah’s spine stiffened. “Bu—”

The fairy waved her finger at her.
“Tut-tut.”

“But Chas is a financial genius—”

“Yes, dear, but if you give over control, the
fortune will—,” snapping her fingers again, a puff of
patchouli-scented purple smoke burst forth and just as quickly
dissipated, “vanish. Just like that the moment he tries to use
it.”

“But why?”

The fairy gave a Gallic shrug. “It is the way
of the magic: It is for you and you alone.” She tapped her finger
on her fuchsia-lined lips. “Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Well, there is one way to prevent that
outcome: You must find the key.”

“The key?”

“Why, yes, dear. The key to your heart’s
desire, of course.”

“But, I already know what my heart’s desire
is—Chas.”

“Precisely. See? You’re already halfway
there!”

“I—I don’t understand.”

The fairy patted her lacquered bouffant hair.
“I’m confident you will in time.”

“How am I supposed to do this?”

“I cannot say, dear. As the charm is yours,
so is the task of unlocking it.” She stood and moved a couple of
paces away. “Well, I’m off again. Do not forget what I’ve told you,
dear. Ta-ta.”

In a blink, she was gone.

* * *

“So you see, Delilah, it’s probably a good
idea if I try and invest at least, oh, I’d say maybe five million
to start. I’ll just need you to sign over the rights for me to
manage it,” Chas said. He could feel the perspiration under his
arms and made a show of wiping his mouth with his napkin to get the
sweat off his upper lip before she could see it. He slid the legal
documents and the Mont Blanc fountain pen across the white-linen
tablecloth until it bumped her left hand.