CHAPTER FOUR

The Bugs were Sprawling

Things felt normal when I sat down to dinner with Christian. He gave Mable the night off and took me to a polished restaurant. He sat on the other side of the table wearing a navy suit jacket and a white collared shirt. I wore a dress that was worth a small fortune, with the idiotic notion that if he saw me in the right dress, our relationship would change. It wasn’t working. No matter what I was wearing, I still felt fourteen years old again.

“I don’t like Charles,” I said after we ordered.

“Should I let him go?” Christian asked, turning his eyes on me.

I looked at him very closely. He was wearing contact lenses, but they looked clear. Naturally, Christian would not condescend to wear some cheesy colored lenses where you could see the pixels. His eyes were probably naturally hazel I decided as I picked up my water glass.

“It’s a pity it hasn’t worked as well as I envisioned,” Christian continued. “I thought you might have a memorable summer with him. That was why I asked Brandon to invite him up. Have you met Brandon yet?”

With my worst fears confirmed, all I could mutter was a quiet, “No.”

“Well, hold onto your heart. Brandon is a surprise.”

I frowned. “Why are you setting me up with these guys?”

“Beth, I’m not setting you up with anyone. I know you don’t like your family, and I can’t be your family in the future. The only thing to do is to make a new family for you. I’m not telling you to fall in love with Charles or Brandon any more than I’m telling you to fall in love with Hilary or Mable.”

“Who’s Hilary?”

“The housekeeper, Mrs. MacGavin. Ha! She didn’t even tell you her first name? She’s a cold one. In any case, I can’t have you jumping around from house to house, so make friends with these people. Although if you want me to, I will dismiss Charles.”

I leaned back in my chair and felt the poison swirling on my pallet. “You must really want me out of your life.”

He instantly retreated. “It’s not that, Beth. You must know why I can’t be around.”

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “I wish you would tell me clearly rather than make me guess.”

His hand came across the table and he placed it slowly over mine. “My brave girl. I'm sure you have been able to come up with a very good guess.”

With his hand on mine, I ventured to say, “My best guess is something so wonderful, not even I am foolish enough to believe it.”

He took his hand from mine. It was a gesture meant to keep my hopes down.

“I did not choose these people by pulling their names out of a hat. I chose them specifically. Please understand, I am giving you people rather than a place. People make homes.”

“All right. Did Charles explain what happened this afternoon? Did he say why he was going to drop me in the pool?”

“I asked him. He said it was a mild flirtation and he thought you were having as good a time as he was.”

I shook my head in disgust. “Did you believe him?”

“You didn’t look like the feeling was mutual when I came in. I’ve thrown you into pools before, but you always seem to like it. I sent him home. You’re the one I wanted to talk to.”

“He heard me talking on the phone,” I admitted. “I was talking to Trinity. He listened in on our conversation. You can’t know how surprised I was to meet the real Charles Lewis when I came here. I had to come up with a weird story to cover up all our lies. He heard everything. What I said to Trinity made sense in the end, but for Charles to hear it… He thinks I came here in the first place because I wanted to… be his girlfriend, hang out with him, s-something.” I was breathless and stuttering by the end.

Christian glanced sideways at me, a chuckle on his lips. “Do you want me to give you a chance to clean it up, or do you want me to send him away?”

I didn’t like it, but that sealed it. I rolled my eyes. “I’ll fix it then.”

That daredevil, let’s-go-play, expression lit up his features. His eyebrows bounced once and matched the smug set of his mouth. “That’s my girl.”

I felt stupid. I was doing what he wanted again. I needed to make a bigger effort to go against him.

When we left the restaurant, Christian’s hand lingered on my waist as he led me out. He was still touching me when we reached the car. For just those few seconds, it felt like he might be rewarding me for trying to play his game.

***

That night, I slept in the room Christian renovated for me. It wasn’t as bad as I originally imagined. He had thoughtfully put little comfort items all over the room. For instance, there was a picture of the two of us at a restaurant in San Francisco. Aside from the books he had purchased for me in the library, there were editions of my favorite books lined up in a row. There was a jewelry box on the dresser with a collection of new pieces for me. He was really kind. I just hadn’t been able to appreciate it, because in my heart I wanted so much more.

That night, I slipped out of bed and tapped on his bedroom door. When there was no answer, I peeked inside. The bed was empty. Where was he?

I padded down the hallway and all the way to the bottom of the stairs. I found him in the library. All the lights were on and there was music playing from a stereo system in the corner. Christian was on a ladder that was attached to the bookshelf to help someone reach the higher books. He was dressed for bed, wearing a pair of sweatpants and a black sleeveless undershirt. Even though he was listening to music over the speakers, he had earphones over his ears. His mouth was moving softly to the music as he moved an electronic wand over his books.

“What are you doing?” I asked, pulling my dressing-gown closer around me.

He looked at me and pulled his headset off. “Did I wake you?”

“No,” I said, peering up at him curiously. “What are you doing?”

Christian shook his head to show he wouldn’t answer me and put a finger to his lips to show that maybe I shouldn’t ask too many questions either. “The music is a little quiet, isn’t it? Why don’t you turn up the volume?”

I went to the receiver and found the volume dial. We were alone in the house, so I kept turning it up as Christian indicated until it was louder than I thought was necessary.

He dropped the wand in his hand like he was caught in the act, so he may as well fess up. “I’m looking for bugs.”

“Normally, don’t the maids just use a vacuum?” I quipped.

“Okay… I’m looking for tiny audio recording devices. This is why I don’t like staying in the same place all the time. Fresh hotel rooms are almost always clean.”

“Have you found any?”

He pointed to the sofa table with his chin. He had a gavel there with a sound block, and he had pounded a few of the tiny devices to nothing but broken parts. I picked up a few of them and pulled on the red wires.

He slid down the ladder and stood beside me. “Still want to call this place your home? Any place I am will always have these disadvantages.”

“You don’t want to pull me into this?”

“Obviously not.”

I glanced at the wand. “How does that thing work?”

“It’s simple,” he said, pulling the headphones off and placing them on my head.

They were still warm from the contact they’d had with his skin. I loved it, but like always, I couldn’t let him see that I loved it.

“Turn it on, and point it to the place you want to examine. If it lights up and beeps then you’ve got a hit and you’ve got something to find. This room is enormous and I got three off that wall. Why don’t you start by checking the furniture and the lamps?”

The machine clicked softly through the headset as I ran the black wand over a side table. The machine beeped just as Christian said it would. I bent down and felt the underside of the table. I couldn’t feel anything.

“Sometimes, you have to get really involved to find it. I often turn the furniture upside down when I’m doing this.”

I got on my back and stuck my head under the table. Setting the wand down, I felt the rough wood with my fingers. Once I did that, the bug was easy to find. It was stuck to the middle of the table with a glob of adhesive. With effort, I pulled it free. When I saw it in the light, it had taken a small part of the table with it.

“Good job,” Christian said with an easy smile. “You’re a natural.”

“Stop it,” I said with a good-humored grin. He always complimented everything I did, even though he said at the beginning that using the wand was easy.

“Sometimes, they hide the bugs in the furniture in such a way that you can’t find them unless you rip the joints apart. When I realize that’s what has happened, I put the piece of furniture up for auction. It’s worse when they hide them under carpets or floorboards. That’s when all of this gets really discouraging. I have gone through rooms smaller than this and found twenty pieces of surveillance equipment. They think that you’ll have a pile of ten of them and think that there’s no more. What we’re seeing now is a rush job. Someone did this recently and on the fly. Do you want to break it with the gavel?”

I said yes and he placed it on the sound block for me. I expected it to make more noise than it did. If I had been hammering the gavel it should have sounded like a judge in court. Instead, it was just the sound of the plastic and metal changing shape and breaking. That was why I hadn’t heard him breaking the other bugs when I was upstairs.

It was funny though. I had seen the gavel in the room many times and it never occurred to me that it was anything other than decorative.

“Seriously, Christian. Who could have done this?”

He pulled a face. “It’s best not to think about it. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but you could drive yourself crazy trying to figure out who in your circle is betraying you when someone was breaking in and replacing the devices daily. In my experience, being a gentleman is a better tactic.”

“Why?”

“In being kind to the person betraying you, they start to question what they’re doing. Sometimes, I’ve pulled bugs out of offices every day for a month. Then, after a sincere conversation with the lady who cleans the toilets, there are no more bugs. On the other hand, ruthless people will find a way no matter how nice you are or how tight your security is. Try to feel secure. I’ve known Brandon, Mable and Hilary for a long time and I feel safe having them totter around the house while you’re here.”

My head jerked up. “You mean, they’re here for security?”

He tapped my forehead with his finger. “What do you think ‘safety in numbers’ means? What do you think family means? Just that those around you are familiar? No.”

“Sorry, I didn’t understand,” I mumbled.

He flicked up the music playing on the speaker, so the sound filled the whole house. “Now that you’ve seen what I’m doing, we’re going to quit this room and do your bedroom.”

“Why?”

“Because that was the room I had renovated, thus it is the most likely to be littered in bugs and cameras. I had planned to do it before you arrived, but something got in the way. Normally, I don’t have to do this because we’re in a fresh, clean room in Jamaica or something.” He picked up his gear and I followed him out of the library.

There was something special about walking behind him up the stairs. When Christian walked, he walked with purpose. I didn’t walk like that. Never. I rushed, but I never considered myself a force for change.

He took the wand and did the closet. Soon he came back with a device. “This has a camera as well as a microphone,” he said drably.

My eyes opened wide on the implication.

“Change your clothes by the closet?” he asked in a hesitant voice.

Someone had been recording me as I changed my clothes?

“I should have been here ahead of time. I should have cleaned this out,” Christian said, dropping it on the floor. Then he placed a hard-cover book over it and jumped on it until it snapped.

“It’s not your fault,” I muttered, scanning the room like I could see the cameras if I looked hard enough. “I wanted a home with you. This is part of that, isn’t it?”

He frowned. “I didn’t want this for you, Beth.” Angry sweat was forming at the base of his neck.

"It’s okay,” I said, sliding my hand into his. “I’m not a regular teenager. Do you know how many people saw my body when I was in the hospital all those years ago? If we made a list of everyone who has seen my breasts, it would be a pretty long list.”

He grasped my hand and suddenly kissed the back of my knuckles. For a second, I thought he might have wanted to do more, touch me more, kiss me more, but that was all he did. “You are such a resilient girl,” he said, casting his eyes about the room wearily rather than look in my face.

After that, he returned to his own room and retrieved a second set of tools. He placed the headphones on my head and put the black wand in my hand. “This is my back-up set. Do this with me,” he said, not like it was a request. “The work will go faster with two, and if you still want to have a home with me, this is the price of admission.”

I flipped the switch to turn it on and we got started.

***

My room turned out to have the most surveillance equipment in it, which I thought was odd. Shouldn’t his room have had more?

All of the bugs and cameras were in fairly superficial locations, so he didn’t think the builders he used for my renovations were to blame.

“They could have done it in such a way that we would have had to saw your room into swiss cheese to find them.”

“Do you think the house is clean now?” I asked as we consolidated our piles of broken devices into one box.

“I don’t know. The main point now is to continue checking the rooms daily. Noticing when a new piece shows up will be crucial to discovering who is planting them.”

“Why don’t we set up a camera?” I suggested. It seemed like the obvious solution.

“Their camera? Our camera? There is no difference. They can get information from our camera just as easily as we can. In my opinion, cameras make people stupid. Something looks one way on the camera's footage, so it must be true. Besides, I don’t want either of us to turn into the sort of people who spend their day sorting through video footage.”

***

He left Sunday night with a promise that he would visit the next weekend. He said I could invite Trinity over in August and made arrangements for Charles Lewis to be elsewhere during her visit, so at least I could enjoy my time with her. He said smoothing things over with Charles was up to me.

On Monday morning, I slept in Christian’s bed until noon. He hadn’t given me permission, but he also hadn’t locked the door. Mable found me in his room and brought me lunch in bed since breakfast was untouched.

“I wish I were Christian’s daughter,” I heard her whisper under her breath as she left the room.

On Monday afternoon, I met Mr. Brandon. His name was Henry Brandon, but just Brandon seemed to work just fine for him, so I called him that. Everyone had been right about him. He was a total show stopper. He was a full-grown man with dark hair, thick eyebrows, stubble on his chin and a bone structure designed to make girls melt. To top it off, he had the one devastating charm Christian had to leave out of his long list of male attributes—an intoxicating Scottish accent.

It was much nicer having him around rather than Charles. When I came around to meet him, he gave me a little lesson on how to care for the plants.

The first day I asked him, “Why are you telling me this?”

“Well, hen, someday I might not be here and it would be better if someone knew. These gardens are fussy for a house no one lives in. Two conservatories? If I were Henderson, I’d have chucked all the plants outside ages ago and replaced them with silk ones. But then again, if he didn’t need a gardener all year long, where would I be?”

“Is this your only job?”

“Not all the time, but sometimes it is.” He winked at me.

I blushed. Really, the guys I knew were nothing like him. “Are you really busy right now? With other gardens, I mean?”

“Next week, I’ll be doing some landscaping elsewhere. Charles will take care of the plants here.”

I groaned. “Really, I don’t mind learning. Why don’t you teach me how to take care of the house plants so that he doesn’t have to come?”

Brandon’s eyebrows popped up. “Is there a reason you don’t want him to get paid?”

“Okay, I didn’t mean to deprive him of a paycheck. Can’t he get paid while I do the work?”

“What have you got against him anyway? He told me about the tiff you two had. Something about the swimming pool?” Brandon stood expectantly, waiting for me to fill in the blank.

“I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life,” I managed to spit after a minute.

“Really? He didn’t even get you in the pool from what I heard. Charmed life,” he commented and went back to his work.

I watched him cart a wheelbarrow full of additions to the compost heap. His clothes were shabby. Both the knees in his trousers were patched and his cuffs were frayed. His boots looked ancient, like someone had once worn them to war, and his shirt had more stains than I could count.

I liked him.

***

I didn't get out Christian's bug detector until after everyone had gone for the night. It was time to check to see if any replacement bugs had been planted. I went around the house and made sure all the doors and windows were locked with their curtains pulled closed. Then I started by scanning Christian's bedroom. It was empty. I scanned the room twice, just to make sure, but it had stayed clean.

In my second solitary sweep of the house, I found a few devices Christian and I hadn’t found on the first night we went looking.

Then, because I had grown suspicious of Charles, I checked the conservatories. Christian had not named him when he spoke of the people he trusted. Well, I didn’t trust Charles, and he was always in the conservatories.

I looked carefully, but there was nothing new. Even so, I didn’t think that meant Charles wasn’t spying on Christian and I. He was in and out of the house so often, he didn't need electronic eyes and ears to observe what was going on.

After I smashed the devices on the sound block, I went up to Christian’s room. From his bed, I made a map of the house and listed the exact location of every bug and camera Christian and I had found.

I fell asleep breathing in the scent he left on his pillow. I thought it made it feel softer.