Page 291 of The Skeikh's Games

He smiled up at her, taking in her naked breasts above him. “Happy anniversary,” said April.

“You can say that again,” he said, cupping her buttocks with his hands, aiding her gentle rhythm.

She moved her hips in slow figure of eights, just the way she knew he loved until her slow rhythm became too much for him to bear and he flipped her onto her back to take charge. His strong hands, stroked and teased, while his powerful thrusts elicited uncontrollable moans of ecstasy from her. He had learned to play her body like a master musician plays an instrument and within seconds, she reached her first glorious climax of the morning.

One year. One incredible year she had spent with this man and even now, when their eyes met, the world seemed to disappear and leave only the two of them.

One year and she could still think of nowhere else she would rather be than with him.

They spent that morning of their first anniversary, in a lust-drunk rhythm of ecstasy, wishing that they could spend forever just like that, him inside her, closer than any two people could physically be, staring into eyes that went on forever and ever and ever.

THE END

Making it Raine

The Scheme

Somewhere in the cosmos, God is laughing his ass off, thought Jane Lewellyn, and not for the first time. She was the last one to arrive at the meeting, which was held in the auditorium of a local elementary school. She’d only been a member of Eco Energy for three months, but the irony was still as fresh as it’d been the first night she’d attended the lecture that they’d sponsored, about how advances in solar technology were making it possible to harvest “ungodly” amounts of energy from the sun. She’d sat in the audience, taking notes about it for her boss, Mr. Gregory, but by the time the lecture had finished she’d been completely converted: the professor, one Frank Tyson, was eloquent, rational, backing up everything he said with years of substantive research, to the point where the only thing anybody with a rational mind could say was, “Yep, solar is the future.”

Of course she couldn’t admit it to Mr. Gregory right then and there. But on their way back to the headquarters of Rigel Investments, Inc., she realized that everything that he was spewing against the Dr. Tyson was unsubstantiated, a conjecture that the professor had spent five minutes carefully debunking, something that directly contradicted what he’d said earlier. She kept her mouth shut, though: a girl had to eat and her job at Rigel paid well enough to do so.

Adding to the sensation of irony was that one of Rigel’s biggest clients was Malcolm Raine’s Stone Bridge Oil Company, the largest and arguably most powerful oil conglomerate in the world. As her red-tounged Louboutins clacked across the floor, and she sat down in her pencil skirt and ethereal blouse, she could feel the eyes of the other members of Eco Energy staring at her: Janet, who didn’t shave her legs and was a hardcore vegan; Lindsay, who wore crystal pendants (she didn’t actually believe that they healed, they just suited her); Fred, a silversmith who made custom jewelry and only ever wore Birkenstocks.

But for all their wariness they knew an ally when they found one. “Why do you want to do this?” Bill Wheaton, the head of Eco Energy, had asked when she’d approached him.

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” she’d said.

It was a little more complicated than that. There might also have been the fact that her ex-boyfriend, Reid Asher, had also been her manager and their breakup was acrimonious, to say the least. She’d requested and received a transfer to the research department so she wouldn’t have to deal with him, but the need to take revenge on the cheating bastard was too strong to put aside. Joining an environmental group hell-bent on taking down Reid Asher’s biggest source of commission fit into her vague plans as well as anything else.

And there was the lingering guilt she’d suppressed about her job, in general: in college she’d been a hardcore environmentalist, handing out pamphlets at the cafeteria for Meatless Mondays and going to Washington to protest the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She’d been part of the campuswide anti-litter group. But when she graduated, she quickly discovered that living in an apartment meant paying rent, which meant working a job, and that job was called “account manager” at Rigel, Inc. She’d only intended to work there until she had enough money saved up to join the Peace Corps, except that between rent, business attire, a gym memberhip, visits to the salon, her car, not to mention things like eating and drinking and nights at the movies, it always seemed like she’d never have enough.

None of which she could articulate at the time, though. But what she did understand, at a level that no other member of Eco Energy did, was how corporations worked and got shit done. In the three months that she’d been on the board at Eco Energy she’d managed put together a script for their volunteers in order to convince people to switch to clean energy that actually worked, and she’d put in several grant applications so that they could do more community outreach. One of them had just come through last week, and now they were hiring people to go out and gather information before they sent out their next offensive for clean energy. It felt good to change things around.

And yet she still felt like a fraud as she sat down at the meeting. “Hi” and “How’re you?” went around the room like discombobulated moths, until Bill Wheaton finally came in.

Bill was a mixed bag; his eyes were mismatched and his hair was cut in a surfer’s shag which might have looked all right if he’d dye out the gray streaks in it. But either he was clueless about this or too lazy to do it. His nose was a fraction too large and his eyes were a fraction too narrow and his jaw was just pointed enough not to be masculine—he would have been handsome if his body had just gone that little extra step, and his eyes would have been charming rather than uncomfortably odd. But he was a passionate activist, well-versed in the language of viral videos and stirring people’s blood, and as he sat down the small-talk died and all eyes focused on him, and Jane could feel their devotion and earnestness in the air.

“Right,” Bill said. “I called this meeting because it turns out that several well-known oil lobbyists will be schmoozing with members of Congress next week. I mean, there are always lobbyists, as we know, but next week Congress gets to vote on the Matrix.”

The Matrix was a set of pipelines that would criss-cross the Midwest, ensuring that nobody, anywhere would ever be without oil. The scale was both impressive and horrifying—the horrifying part from the fact that the plans contained no redundancies in case of a leak and the builders objected to any oversight into the project, arguing that checks for accountability would only slow them down. “Well, if they’re going to be spending a quarter of a billion dollars on it over ten years, then Congress ought to be able to spare a few hundred thousand to make sure it’ll be finished when it’s supposed to be,” Bill had snorted when he’d found out.

“So basically,” he said, now, “I need someone to take a few vacation days to wine and dine, schmooze and booze, platter and flatter some key members of Congress.”

“We tried that two years ago,” said Janet. “That was a big waste of time and money.”

“It’s true, it’ll be harder,” Bill said, “but last year was mid-term election, and twenty seats in the House changed sides—albeit not for environmental reasons. These are the twenty seats we’ll need to target.”

He was looking at her as he spoke, and Jane knew what he was hoping not to have to ask: whether she could use her corporate chops to help them wheedle a few more votes against the Matrix. She glanced through her calender. Now that she worked in research there were entire weeks when she didn’t have client meetings to attend to; all her manager expected of her was a weekly report every Friday. An incredibly-detailed, annoying-to-write report, but that was it.

She did a little math in her head—she had a week’s worth of vacation days that she needed to use before April, otherwise it would vanish with the end of the fiscal year, and it’d been two years since she’d last used more than three days. “I can do it,” she said, looking up from her phone. “But I’ll need an excuse to be in Washington.”

“I have just the thing,” Bill said, grinning. He handed her a flyer. It was for a business writing seminar. “You could probably even expense this,” he added.

“I suppose I could okay this with my boss,” she said, wondering if her boss would take the bait. “Assuming that he doesn’t actually demand proof that I went.”

“He won’t,” Bill said. “At least, he probably won’t. But you should probably pick up the badge and post a few selfies at the dinner just to be sure.”

She had to smile at that. The thought would have never occurred to her. In Reid’s words, she was “too innocent”. “You gotta learn how to game the system,” he’d told her when they were still dating. Gaming the system was one thing. Getting away with it was another.

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