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...Okay, fine, I was still drunk. After my encounter with Waters and my subsequent shameful display in his elevator, I'd knocked around my little studio apartment, feeling dazed and useless. I even went on a cleaning binge to try to make myself feel better, but when I realized I'd moved the same dirty plate back and forth from my futon to the low coffee table where I ate five times without even skirting my tiny kitchen area, I gave up.
Sitting down, I'd opened up the contract and begun to read, and made it about ten minutes before I cracked open a beer to go with it. I'm very mature when it comes to handling my problems. During my meeting with Anton Waters, my father had left me eight voicemails on my phone and I'd deleted all of them. I knew what he was going to say. Had I accepted Waters' proposal? Had I? Had I? Had I?
I'd downed a six pack in short order—way more than I usually did—and as a consequence I woke up with nacho cheese in my hair, a new sculpture of a goat tied up and blindfolded, and a browsing history on my computer full of websites about kinky sex.
Yeah.
That's why I was at a lawyer's office. I wanted to see if this was actually... well, binding. Should I choose to sign it.
Which I wasn't. Because, come on.
Don't get me wrong, I like a little spanking now and then, but the things codified in Waters' contract—and my god, he had to have ice water running through his veins to dictate that sort of shit to a lawyer, and the lawyer who drew it up had to be stone-cold to have typed it up without renouncing his license and retreating to a mountaintop to seek a cleansing of his defiled soul—were definitely out of my realms of experience. I'd had to look a few of them up, just to make sure they were what they sounded like.
I shifted in my chair, staring at the contract in my lap and trying not to think about what was in it. There was no way it was legal. I was, like... ninety-five percent sure. He couldn't actually take me to court if I didn't "play the submissive" for at least seventy-five percent of our sexual encounters. Could he? And was he going to be keeping track? A vision of Waters bending me over a table and fucking me while entering it into the record or ticking off a bead on the Sex Abacus first gave me a fit of the giggles, then set my cheeks aflame as I remembered that he had told me to beg him to fuck me in exactly that way.
And I had.
Shit.
I rubbed my face vigorously. I was so glad the lawyer I was consulting was a woman. I needed to come up with some demands of my own.
Not that I was thinking about doing this. That would be ridiculous. Haha.
And yet the knowledge that my mother was now another twenty-four hours without treatment was a rock in my gut.
Shit.
"Miss Dare?"
My head shot up, and I saw a handsome young paralegal standing in the doorway. "Yes?" I said.
"Ms. Gray will see you now."
I stood hastily, throwing my purse over my shoulder and clutching the contract like a shield. On unsteady feet, I tottered through the door.
I was never very comfortable around lawyers. I had friends that had gone to law school, but they weren't lawyers, they were friends who had studied law. And most of them weren't lucky enough to get jobs in law and ended up baristas instead of barristers. My father, however, loved to have lawyers around, provided they were on his side, of course. I had even liked some of them when I was younger, before most of them started hitting on me when I turned sixteen. And I knew for a fact that my father had used the law to screw people over, people who couldn't afford it, people whose only crime was ignorance or need or just being poor.
So it was with trepidation that I stepped into Ms. Gray's office, and when the kindly old lady in a tweed business suit rose from her seat at her desk and strode forward with a warm smile to shake my hand, I had to make a concerted effort to smile while my brain screamed at me: It's a trap!
"Hello, Ms. Dare, how are you this morning?" she said in a chipper voice. She looked like a librarian more than a lawyer. Iron-colored hair streaked with white was pulled back into an elaborate coiffure at the back of her head, and her bright dark eyes shone in her face.
I paused to think. "Been better," I said truthfully.
"But have you been worse?" she asked.
I had to think about that, too. "Yes."
"Then it's a good day," she said. "Now what can I do for you?"
Wordlessly I held out the contract. "I need you to look over this for me. It's a contract. Or a prenuptial agreement. I'm not sure."
If she had worn glasses, I'm sure she would have given me a sharp look over the top of them. "You don't?"
I shrugged. "That's why you're the lawyer and I'm not," I said.
"Your fiance didn't tell you which it was?"
"He's not my fiance yet. He's just this guy that wants to marry me."
