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Chapter 7 – Harlee
The door unhinged and the engines whirred down. Caleb buttoned up; just enough to hide his glorious chest from me, sadly, and asked me to walk with him down. It had been a few hours up in the air, and the gust of fresh wind hitting my face got my knees wobbly.
His sweat and cologne struck my nose as he walked by to the cabin door and knocked twice before talking in hushed tone through the small intercom in the wall. He turned to me, all smiles, and honestly, the most glad blink I had seen on his eyes, and smirked.
“Welcome to your temporary home, Miss Sawyer. I hope you like it as much as I do.”
With that, he disappeared into the mansion. I realized my bag was at my feet, and I didn’t remember hauling it in. Had he grabbed it for me?
While I’m standing there puzzling that out, Jillian, his housekeeper, a middle aged wine enthusiast and an absolutely masterful hand in the kitchen, with the gentlest most unassuming smile, had taken me, most surprisingly, by the hand, and led me, alone, towards Caleb Johnson’s mansion and away from the cooling plane and the mildly mannered Mr. Johnson.
The walk was filled with laughs and small talk that I actually enjoyed. Jill, as she wanted me to call her, told me of how deep the farm’s heritage went, and that despite it all, even with the current quarantine lockdown, how she always felt completely and utterly at home with the Johnson family, ever since Caleb grew his first goatee.
I, by virtue of finding out the most dirt on my boss and the object of my every filthy fantasy, of course, needed to know more.
She just smiled when I asked, however, and I took it as a line not to cross.
The mansion was mostly made of thick wood. On time, she told me that most of the logs had been homegrown, but that the ones that made up the barns and the chicken coups were trucked and ferried here from the Congo forest. She said that Caleb loved exotic bark, and that he was the one, with enough help from his men, who built his house. She poured us each a glass of dry wine when she told me this, and as she talked, she cooked, and made sure I had something in my stomach.
By extension, I understood that she was his family, and that she would know so much more. I was a little worried then, how she felt with me staying in a man who she knew as a son. Was she threatened? Worried about my “intentions?”
I could not tell. All I saw were warm brown eyes and the kind of mature and hidden figure that was surely eye candy back in her day.
We talked and walked around the house for an hour, despite my deepening exhaustion and the late hour. Jill showed me the trophy room, the music room, some of the guest bedrooms, the ballrooms, the barbecue rooms, and finally pointed me, through the kitchen windows, to the horse barn.
“Can we go and see one?” I asked excitedly.
She laughed and shook her head reluctantly. “No. Mr. Johnson squarely requested that he will do that in the morning.”
That was the end of that discussion. And truth be told, I’m not sure I could have kept my head up long enough to make it out to the barn. We walked up the soothing light of the staircase and talked about the pandemic. She said there was not much she could say, and that even if the virus took five years, she would know nothing about it. The ranch was fully stocked, she said, and that there was nothing she wanted out there that she could not get in the ranch. She showed me to my spacious guest bedroom, and shut the door behind her when she left.
I locked the door.
Once I was completely confident that I was along and secure, I drew the curtains first and switched the lights off. There was nothing but black. I turned them back on and walked around the marble floor. The cold between my toes excited me.
I brushed my fingers across the white vases, along the lush carpeting, atop the rough-coated walls, along the lampshades, along the edge of a brown, finely crusted frame that entangled around a photo like a vine. I marveled at the beauty in the design, and gasped at the face looming behind the glass.
And then I realized it wasn’t a photo; it was a mirror. The face looking back was mine, but whether it was a trick of the glass or the light, I looked positively radiant. My lips. My calves. My breasts. My thighs. My arms. I, then and there, wanted to see my body through his mirror.
