Page 23 of Lair

The ferocious thwop, thwop, thwop of the rotor blades jolts me down to my toes, chattering my teeth. The pilot glances over at me, at the glassiness threatening to spill down my cheeks, but I fix my eyes on the azure incandescence of the Mediterranean spread before us and after a while he turns back to his controls. I wonder if I scream whether it will be lost in the deafening noise or not. And then I want to laugh. At one time this experience, this undreamt-of luxury, would have been thrilling. But that is gone. Now? It’s like being flown to my own execution. To a place I’ve known I would always go. That voice wakens in me, that voice that is always there, that in depressive episodes is like a siren’s call, dragging me disbelieving onto the rocks. You do not matter, it says. You never mattered. You thought there was something there? There is nothing there. Women like her will always get what they want. Women like you? Well. This is what happens to them. Packed off, sent off, sent on errands, like a dog. This is what they deserve. This is what you deserve. You were never good enough.

My old, damaged self, unpacked and waiting for me, asking wherever did I go.

Porto Cervo is like a birthday cake: all white and candy-pink stucco buildings with terracotta roofs, a delirious playground for the rich summoned up on the Sardinian coast. I march into Hermès in a daze. The few patrons—a gaggle of women who look like fixtures on the Chanel runway—stop and stare at me in my polo and deck shoes as if I were a dog turd on the sidewalk. Great. More models. Just what I wanted.

But it doesn’t stop there. The saleswoman behind the front case is also a vertically affluent fashionista, and makes no effort to disguise her own disgust. She actually wrinkles her nose as she looks me over.

“Can I help you?”

“Yeah,” I say, and lift my chin. “I’m here to pick up a purchase for Adrian Voper.”

The saleswoman blinks. “Oh.”

Minutes later, another clerk glides out from the back holding no less than eight shopping bags. I gape as they’re hung on my arms. Seriously? And then the receipt: over $40,000.

My face is a mask of dead-eyed fury as I’m choppered back to the yacht. The pilot knows better than to try to get my attention now.

The long, humiliating walk to Emmie’s VIP suite. My arms are burning by the time I stand before the door. I take a breath, lift a hand and knock. Emmie’s excited footsteps are loud and immediate. The door swings in and those puffy, plumped lips part in delighted scorn as she takes in the extravagant shopping spree dangling from my arms. She arches a shoulder girlishly. “Baby, you shouldn’t have!” she squeals, and painted nails reach out—

“I didn’t,” says a lazy voice behind her. Voper appears—my eyes instantly check for signs of his clothes being rumpled, and find none—and he puts his hands in his pockets. “Did I say those were for you?”

Emmie freezes, her breath coming out as an uncomfortable, tittering laugh. “What do you mean?”

He inclines his head and explains it as if to a child. “Those are for Aurora.”

I blink, the words echoing nonsensically in my ears: Those are for Aurora. What did that mean? That surely did not mean—

But Emmie grasps it before I do. The horror on her face is exquisite. “You must be joking.”

And Voper looks straight at me. “A country girl deserves a little sophistication here and there, doesn’t she?” I can only stare back, feeling as if all the air has been sucked out of me. Is it true, then? Could he possibly—do those crinkled eyes actually mean he—

And he dips a hand into one of the bags stuffed with crinkly wrapping tissue and lifts out a familiar, diamond-encrusted Stuart Weitzman pump. “I trust this will satisfy any more curious urges?” he says. Is this a rebuke? Before I can answer he drops the pump back into the bag and slips past, hands in pockets, a grin or scowl on his face, I can’t tell which. “I’ll be in the sauna.”

His footsteps fade, and Emmie and I are left staring at each other. Thrumming silence. Then her face contorts into a harpy’s and she slams the cabin door. An enraged scream comes from behind it. Then a crashing, the sound of furniture being overturned, porcelain shattering against a wall. I blink, turn and find Mrs. Colding standing rigid in the passageway. She eyes me up and down, the Hermès bags on my arms. The door. “What is...” she begins, and I shake my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening right now.”

She draws herself up, suddenly peremptory. “Stow those in the other VIP suite, and then go down to the sauna to see if Mr. Voper needs anything.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I mumble and scurry away. I don’t need to be told twice.

When I look back Mrs. Colding is standing in front of the cabin door, hands calmly clasped before her, as if waiting on a friend drunk in the restroom at the club.

Much sooner than I’m ready for, I’m walking down the passageway on the lower deck to the sauna. My hands twist at themselves. I feel hot and flushed. I know I should be worried about Emmie; there’s no way she’s not going to make the rest of this trip a living nightmare for me. But nevertheless, it persists: an undercurrent of excitement, of exquisite delight, impossible to ignore.

He bought the clothes for me.

And more than that, almost too much to bear—he said it. He said my first name, savoring it in that perfect mouth of his as if it were a delicacy.

Those are for Aurora.

My hands are shaking when I peek through the glass door of the sauna.

But no one’s inside, just billowings of steam and sweating cedar boards. Empty.

He must be in the snow room, then. I open the outer glass door, but pause before the heavy inner one. Do I really need to check on him while he’s in there? It somehow seems more private. But Mrs. Colding said...

I sigh, shaking my head, and pull the huge wooden door wide.

A blast of icy cold hits me, setting my teeth chattering, and I blink through vapors at the beards of snow hanging from the slabs of black stone inside. No one there. “Hello?” I hazard. “Mr. Voper?” I creep forward, peering around the corner in the L-shaped winter cavern, and there he is. He sits on a stone perch with his back to the wall, eyes shut, hands in lap. He is completely naked. I stiffen, breath held. Snow dusts his brambled black hair, his broad, bulky shoulders, his arms, his knees, but does not melt. No shivering from him, he does not even have a towel. He seems as if he has been there forever, a strange arctic effigy. A naked effigy. How does he not have hypothermia?

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