Chapter Four
For the next two days, Luna threw herself into her work. After all, now that she had blown the opportunity with Tucker, that meant that she had to go find real work, didn't it? She canvassed at her favorite local jewelry shops, which were usually happy to send work her way, but things were apparently going through a dry spell. Two days of looking for work turned up absolutely nothing, and Luna's demons came back.
Of course she was never going to amount to anything. Of course she was never going to find herself the career that she wanted. She was going to have to go back to waiting tables, and then she would look up one day and see that all of her visions had gone dark and sad...
She woke up on day three of the job hunt to an unidentified call coming in on her cell phone.
"Hello, yes, this is Luna Madrigal," she said, trying to make sure that the excited and desperate quiver stayed out of her voice.
"Hello, Miss Madrigal," said a voice she didn't recognize. "This is Forward Edge, and we are requesting a second interview with you. Will you be available today?"
She blinked.
"I... I assumed after the way the first one went..."
"All I know, Miss Madrigal, is that you are on the chart for the second round of interviews. At the end of this interview, you will be awarded two thousand dollars for your time, no matter what the result."
"Two thousand..." she said, her mind reeling from the number. That was rent and groceries and the ability to stay afloat a little longer, to keep her dream alive just a little bit longer. What was she willing to do to make sure that happened?
"Surely that's a mistake, though?" Luna protested weakly. "I was told that it was only one thousand..."
"I am not aware of the details of the offer, I am sorry, but I do see very clearly here that you are meant to be offered two thousand dollars at the completion of the interview."
"I... I see. So when do you want to see me?"
"Are you available to come back to the office around three this afternoon?"
"Um, yes, yes, that should be fine," she said, her mind reeling a little. The person on the other end of the line thanked her for her time and ended the call, leaving Luna stunned.
She tried to stop her mind from venturing towards her first meeting with Forward Edge. She tried not to think about Tucker Keene and those dangerous amber eyes of his. She tried to focus on what an extra two thousand dollars would do, but it already felt as if her body was warming at the thought of his hands and his mouth working over hers again.
He probably wouldn't even be there, she told herself. This was probably just some kind of exit procedure before they let her go from the process. That was all it was.
Despite it all, Luna couldn't help going to her meager closet to find out what kind of outfit she could cobble together. She had shown up the first time in jeans and a hoodie. Maybe things would go a little better this time if she was dressed well...
***
Tucker wished that he had some popcorn. The small dark room behind the one-way mirror had a dozen seats, tiered and upholstered in red velvet. It gave the observation room the look of an old-fashioned movie theater, though Tucker certainly could not remember the last time he had ventured into a movie theater.
The shadowed glass of the window revealed the brightly lit room next door, which looked like a standard empty conference room. On the other side stood one of his staff members, Jordy, he thought. Jordy was wearing a tiny, nearly invisible earpiece, and Tucker toyed with the microphone.
"Testing, testing, can you hear me?" Tucker asked, and Jordy glanced at the window, giving him a slight nod.
Perfect. This was exactly what he had pictured when he had done his planning. Now all that was required was the girl herself, and on the stroke of three, an attractive assistant guided her into the room.
Tucker had remembered Luna being a good-looking woman in jeans and a hoodie, but now his jaw dropped.
She had exchanged the hoodie and the jeans for a dress, but what a dress it was. It was a soft lilac gray, a shade that somehow made her dark red hair glow and her green eyes look enormous and vivid. It clung to her figure, revealing a surprisingly tiny waist and wide hips that made his hands itch to grab. It gave her skin a creamy glow, and he had to shake his head to clear it of the sudden urge he had to simply walk through the door and take her in his arms again.
Then he settled back into his chair, listening carefully to the initial words that were being spoken in the room as Jordy greeted her and told her that this was standard protocol before she was given her due.
He could tell that Luna looked nervous, tugging on the sleeve of her dress, her smile a touch uncertain. There was something endearing about it that made him feel protective and predatory all at once, and he settled back in to watch her.
***
When Jordy greeted her and Tucker was nowhere in sight, Luna felt a rush of relief. This felt more like a normal interview, albeit still an interview for a strange job that she did not totally understand. She still felt as if there were a conversation going on over her head, as if there was some clue that she was missing, but the questions that Jordy was asking were simple enough. She had answered them before, but confirmation never hurt, and as long as they gave her the cash that they had promised at the end, it would all be worth it, no matter how many times she answered the questions about her family's history.
It was all going so well, and then, for a single strange moment, Jordy seemed almost to look through her, as if he were focusing on something that wasn't there. Before she could get too unnerved, he smiled at her again.
"Can you state whether you prefer showers or baths?" he asked, and she blinked.
There was something strange about that question, and though she studied his face cautiously, Jordy's face gave nothing away.
"Um, I guess I generally take showers in the morning, but if I had my way, I would take baths all the time."
"What do you like about them?"
"I... Baths? I like the fact that the warmth seems to really soak into you, and that it gets some of the worst parts of the day out, I guess. I like to bathe at night, if that helps."
"Of course it does," Jordy said smoothly, and then he was asking that question about her family's cancer history again, making her wonder if she had just imagined it all after all.
"Have you ever kissed another woman?"
The question made her gape, and she stared at the man. Jordy, for his part, stared back with completely blank curiosity, and she swallowed hard, narrowing her eyes.
"Can you tell me exactly how this relates to whatever it is that Forward Edge wants me to do?" she asked, and there was that strange pause again, as if he were looking not at her but through her.
"Never mind that, Miss Madrigal," Jordy said. "We are just trying to get a good baseline for your experiences, to make sure that we know what we need to know. So if you will simply answer the question?"
Luna glared at him, deciding that she did not care for him at all. There was a fluttery feeling of anxiety in her chest, but she quashed it down to stare at him as haughtily as she could.
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have never done anything... anything sexual or romantic with another woman," she said, and to her relief, Jordy simply made a tick on the paper in front of him and continued.
This time she was not lulled into a false sense of security, and when he twitched again, she knew that something was going on.
"All right, Miss Madrigal, we are almost done. Now can you describe how you pleasure yourself?"
She froze at the sheer absurdity of the question. Surely he didn't mean...
""Excuse me?" Her voice didn't feel as if it quite belonged to her. It trembled, and then on the last syllable, it hissed. She could feel the rage inside her coil up like a serpent, ready to rear back, ready to strike.
"The question is quite clear, Miss Madrigal," said Jordy, who managed to sound disapproving without creasing a single muscle on his face. "Simply explain, in as much detail as possible, how you pleasure yourself."
Luna sat in silence for a moment, and she felt as if she were frozen in time. A dozen possibilities spread out in front of her regarding how she could respond to this. She could storm out, she could burst into tears, she could simply start swearing at the top of her lungs. That all sounded very good. Then she decided that the best response was a direct one, and with a low growl, she lunged across the table.
Jordy flinched back as if she was going to strike him. Given the nature of the questions that he had been asking her, that was a legitimate thing to worry about. However, though her hand darted for his head, she was not trying to slap him. Instead her fingers, trained from long hours on the jewelry bench, shot out, pincer-like, and in the space of a second, she had retrieved the item she thought she had glimpsed in his ear.
It was, as she had begun to suspect, a tiny speaker that allowed him to receive messages from someone he couldn't see. However, just because the person speaking couldn't be seen didn't mean that he couldn't see them. Her eyes shot to the one-way mirror, and with a snarl on her face, she strode to the door that led to that room.
Now Jordy was shouting after her that she was certainly not allowed in there, but she had no time to care about the fact that he seemed to have suddenly grown a personality.
Instead, Luna threw the door open, ready to give whoever was behind the glass a piece of her mind. She was so full of her own rage that she barely noticed that there was someone in front of her before she barreled straight into them. One moment, she was charging ahead full of righteous rage, and the next moment, she was running head first into a solid mass of muscle. The arms that wrapped around her felt incredibly safe and warm and familiar, but she fought against it. This was no place for things that felt safe and warm and familiar, was it?
Then Luna pulled back and gazed up into a pair of bright amber eyes and a triumphant grin that made her somehow weak at the knees.
"Well," he said, his voice soft and sleek as velvet. "I guess I've found the mother of my child."
WHAT?