Burning Rivalry (Trevor's Harem #2) (9 page)

Trevor smiles. His eyes sparkle. He excuses himself then takes my hand and kisses its back, like something out of a movie.
 

I watch him go. I stay in the main area rather than hiding in my room, but there’s only uneventful chatter about anything but the competition, as if the day’s events are taboo or forgotten. I don’t last long, and neither does anyone else. We got a note to visit one of the video confessional booths off the north hallway, so I dutifully put in my time like I’ve seen on countless reality shows. I don’t want to incriminate myself, so I tell the camera about what’s already public record, even though what’s eating me most is what Brandon must be thinking after today’s call, what Jenny might be doing to cross more streams and uncover more secrets. Whether or not I believe and trust Mr. Daniel Rice.
 

The not-quite-a-confession confessional session leaves me tired. So I go to sleep. And sleep, like dinner and all that followed, is uneventful too.
 

Being here is easier with every passing hour. It’s like being in college, except for the occasional group sex. You can ignore it, like any college party, and go on with your day.
 

Breakfast seems uneventful, but then Jessica sits across from me and says, “So what are you going to do?”
 

“What do you mean, what am I going to do? Right now, I’m going to eat this danish.” I hold up the danish. At first glance, it’s like any other danish, but the longer you look at it, the longer you realize it’s not. It’s like what happens if you put a normal danish on steroids, give it a pedigree, and charge fifty dollars for it. And when you bite into it, you have many small orgasms at once.
 

“Are you really so calm that you can just sit there eating a danish?”
 

“What, you think I’ll get too fat for Trevor’s liking?” I take another bite. A big one. “It’s not like I’m planning to … ”
 

Everyone’s looking at me.
 

And now that I think about it, my entire table has been empty for as long as I’ve been here. There aren’t many spots; it’s one of the mansion’s small rooms. You’d expect a few people to sit just because, but that’s not how it’s happened. I’ve been sitting alone, staring out the window and counting the days until our first big $25K bonus, which this time I’ll actually receive. I’ve been told I put out a vibe, so it’s not strange that nobody came up and said hi, especially here. But the conspicuous lack of company, at my table at all, in this otherwise limited-capacity room, seems strange in retrospect. As did the scurrying way people have grabbed their coffee and left. And how, when I dropped my napkin, Abbie walked right by as if I’d offended her, even though it was right at her feet.
 

“What’s going on, Jess?”
 

“You have a date,” she says.
 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

From the start, I sort of figured this was a reality TV show. Even after it became apparent that it’s not, I’ve been mentally comparing our situation to a dirty version of
The Bachelor.
Or rather,
The Bachelor
with less-inhibited people. Because you know on that show, the girls were constantly hanging on the bachelor’s dong. They just didn’t do it in groups, and the crews were discreet enough not to show it.
 

I guess the comparison wasn’t inapt.

Seeing as the whole point of this thing is supposed to be choosing a bride for the billionaire, it makes sense that he’d slowly get to know us. So far, we’ve been distant but sexual, like a harem. But if a man like Trevor wanted a harem, he could have one. It’s not the sort of thing you interview for. They’d simply pick pretty girls who like to party and don’t mind sharing. If they didn’t come up as having any big venereal diseases, they’d probably pass.
 

But a
wife?
In the traditional arrangement, a man likes to know his wife eventually. Meet her, talk to her, shit like that.
 

I have zero interest in marrying Trevor, so I haven’t given that detail attention, but it’s clearly been on the other girls’ minds. I’ve seen it in their indecision. Since nobody is really telling us what to do and what’s good or bad by their definition — what earns us points versus losing them — the ad-hoc harem has been playing it by ear. Trevor runs a sex empire and likes having girls on his dick, so it makes sense to have a lot of sex and climb onto his cock. But it’s all been done halfway — Jess and I have discussed it. The saying goes that a man wants a woman who’s a lady in the parlor and a whore in the bedroom. Since this mansion is like half parlors, pretty much everyone is defaulting to whore in most places, but there’s always the danger of going too far. Of being
too
loose,
too
willing. Somewhere deep down, if he’s looking for a wife instead of a mistress, Trevor must want that lady half as well.
 

When Jess gave me that explanation yesterday, I laughed at her. Who gives a shit what Trevor wants? Why would she change who she was?
Because he’s hot and loaded, duh.

I know she’s joking. Mostly. But some of these girls are kidding less than others, and I think they’d strangle their own mothers to get their conniving hooks in Trevor’s back.
 

So when Jessica pulls me aside and tells me that I really need to start paying attention because everyone else seems to know I’ve been selected for a date with Trevor, I’m not all that surprised. The time was going to come when we’d need to play at affection, and that’s fine so long as he doesn’t expect me to do shit I don’t want to do.

I am surprised, however, when Jessica tells me that there’s only one date today. Not everyone will have this chance to
ooh
and
aah
over our host and generally grovel for his attention. It’s a group date, just like TV taught me to expect.
 

One billionaire.
 

Three girls.

And somehow, despite doing my best to be invisible, I’m one of them.

Kylie walks by me and accidentally spills hot coffee all over me.
 

I realize she is, too.
 

CHAPTER TWELVE

I return to my room to find that someone — probably someone who’s three years old and hasn’t had her nap yet — has put gum in my hairbrush.
 

Fucking
gum
.
 

I can tell my bag has been rifled through. After a day of leaving it out beside the bed, I decided to make a farce of settling it in and shoved it underneath. It’s peeking out just a bit now, flap open, my toothpaste and ChapStick bag open at one end. The toothpaste is still in there. It was absurd, telling us to pack an overnight bag, seeing as how well everything has been stocked. I haven’t touched my toothpaste because there’s a dispenser built into the bathroom backsplash. I tried to open it once to see what kind of toothpaste they’re giving me. I couldn’t, but I’m sure it probably costs ten bucks a brushing and is pooped out by angels.
 

But my purse is in the bag, so surely the brush-gummer has pawed through that as well.
 

Three guesses who it was.
 

I don’t bother trying to pick the gum out of my brush. It is, in fact,
my
brush — one of the few personal items I brought and decided to use over what Trevor’s establishment has provided — but there’s an even better brush in the vanity. I resent throwing mine away because it feels like the last piece of me in this weird place. But I won’t let Kylie get to me, either.
 

The guest room doors all lock automatically. In a sci-fi twist, there’s a biometric sensor in the handle that recognizes the room’s proper occupant and unlocks the door when we grasp the handles. You don’t even need to lay your palm flat on a scanner or give a thumbprint or anything. The goddamned handle does it all, and there’s no pause while a computer pattern-matches you. Basically, if you’re the proper occupant, you’d never know the door is locked. I can’t imagine how much a system like that must cost, and the fact that Trevor’s blown that much instead of using a twenty-dollar key lock is kind of humbling.

Assuming Kylie did this, someone must have let her in. That makes me more suspicious than I already was, and I find myself mentally running through the possibilities. Maybe Richard, Logan, and Tony have access, but I doubt it. Trevor and Daniel do, but there are all sorts of help and techs we sometimes see scurrying about, trying to stay semi-invisible, including a house manager who’s only discussed in ominous initial caps:
The Manager.
And really, the cleaning staff would require access as well. Any of them could have let Kylie in — she has pussy enough to fuck her way into just about anyone’s good graces.
 

But then I find myself thinking back to Kylie’s little speech the first night. About preparing for all of this in advance because she cracked the website code and looked up who was behind it. The puzzles I’ve seen thus far are so convoluted, I’m not sure if I believe she tricked Trevor’s group or if a deliberate loophole was left for her to discover what she needed, provided she was clever enough. The distinction hardly matters. Kylie cracked the code. She sniffed around and uncovered hidden information, just as I’m betting she’s done now.

Somehow, she’s been in my room.

Which, of course, presupposes she was motivated enough to do it.
 

I think back to what Daniel said about Roxy: that technically speaking, she’s a sociopath. There’s a library down one of the long hallways, and while bored yesterday and avoiding one fuckfest or another, I perused it. I found a dictionary then decided to find out whether my fellow contestant was dangerous. But it turns out that sociopathy is characterized by lack of empathy and normal social understanding, not serial killing. Some of what’s been said has led me to believe there are a few other oddities here as well, like they’ve taken a sampler from the overarching girl spectrum. We have international girls, local girls, girls like Kylie who can nose their way into places and get computers doing the tango, and
holy shit
does Jessica have a memory for art. She keeps telling me about paintings I haven’t noticed, then reciting their artist, creation date, and the amount they were last sold for as if from an internal whiteboard. How anyone would even
find
that information if they thought to want it, I can’t imagine. But Jessica acts like it’s no big deal.
 

So maybe Kylie has something special between her ears, too. She could be a hacker for all I know.
 

I think back to what Kylie confessed to overhearing between Daniel and Trevor, when they were training shirtless in the upstairs gym. About me and Linda, how she was in trouble. Abusive trouble. And now, thinking about the computer lock that someone breached to put gum in my hairbrush, I wonder if that’s how Kylie heard about my situation after all — or if instead, she’s been snooping like a digital sleuth.
 

I look at my gummed hairbrush, sitting in the bottom of a garbage can that seems far too fancy for trash. The can liner is probably made of unicorn foreskin. And I think of how I want to take Kylie’s genius-scheme-to-do-something-really-fucking-immature and answer it by punching her vagina hard enough to make the bitch prolapse.
 

I’m such a lady.
 

I pick up a new brush from the vanity and start working my hair, noticing the brush’s warmth in my hand. I’ve heard of fancy brushes like this; you’re supposed to use them with a dryer to flatten hair without the extra step of a straightener. But unless I’m mistaken, those fancy brushes didn’t have enough heat without being plugged into the wall.
 

I finish up and set the brush down — a normal-looking brush, with no cord.
 

This place is such a mindfuck.
 

And now I have a date with one rich guy and two girls. Lucky me.
 

I close myself in the walk-in closet, certain there are cameras hidden in here too, but at least decreasing the number of lenses capturing my every movement.
 

Preparing for the date will be tricky because I know nothing about it. On purpose, I’m sure. We might be dancing in some ballroom I’ve yet to discover, swimming, or organizing a bunch of tired-looking accountants to do Trevor’s taxes. I tried getting more information about where we’re going and what we’re doing — as did Kylie and Kat, our sharp and icy third — on the basis of needing to choose my clothing. I’d have appealed to Daniel, but he was absent yet again. I found a man named Eric, whom I’d literally never seen. Given the electronic door handle and nuclear hairbrush, Trevor strikes me as a man rich enough to have single-serving help, like this guy. I figure Eric shows up once for a defined purpose and is then disposed of.
 

But Eric just told the three of us, “Choosing your clothing is part of the date.”
 

Duh. Thanks, Eric. Really using that single serving of yours to the max, aren’t we?
 

I could probably have pushed, but decided to save preserve my dignity. I may not be a ninja like Kylie or a freak like Roxy, but I’m smart enough to see the patterns. I’ve had a life filled with duplicity and people who say one thing while doing another, so in a weird way I’ve been primed to recognize intentional mind games when I see them. Everything that’s happened here has been about misdirection and sham. Yesterday’s tests — setting one group up to run through nonsense while both groups were observed to learn something else — was the most obvious example. And to think, it’s women who get the reputation of not just saying what the hell they mean and holding hidden agendas.