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I didn't like her tone. "What?"
She pursed her lips. "Just, sometimes when he doesn't do something you expect, it's worse when he does. Like he's been saving up."
And with that jolly thought, we ran back to her mansion to spend the day getting ready for dinner and Chloe spent the day drawing farther away from me.
That was okay. I spent the day withdrawing from her, too. Even if I thought she was my friend and even if in real life she was and I was making a mistake in not trusting her - I wouldn't be staying anyway.
It was time to make some kind of move for myself in my own life.
If only I knew what that was, and had the courage to do it.
33
Cole
Less than a month since Annie arrived at the house Claude and Chloe shared, this was my idea. Probably I could stop it by simply stating I was taking her back to the compound with me.
There'd been reasons to send her here. Remember that.
Chloe herself opened the door. She wore a deep blue evening dress that made her pale, nearly white blonde hair stand out like a halo. It clung like a second skin, outlining breasts and nipples, slim waist and almost outlining her mons. It was at once elegant and slutty. "Cole! Darling. Where have you been keeping yourself?"
It's a complicated relationship. Claude can order Chloe to be submissive to me. Left to our own devices, she's Chloe.
She went up on tiptoes and kissed my cheek, then pried the wine from my fingers like a small, greedy child.
"That's meant for the man of the house," I admonished her, stepping over the threshold.
"I'll see that he gets it," she said. "You don't happen to have a corkscrew on you?"
I breathed in. "Screw, maybe."
She rolled her eyes. Shut the door behind me. Waved me into the living room.
I looked around. "Where's Annie?" The cold feeling that hit me from every angle was surely nothing more than leftover fear from Vincent taking her. I wasn't scared. I was hoping this could be an actual evening, as close to vanilla as our lot ever got.
I wanted to see Annie as Annie, not strung up in some fashion. Until this minute I hadn't been thinking about how Claude could get.
To my relief, Annie was sitting on the couch in the living room beside Claude. Unfettered. Unafraid. She wore a dress of a similar cut to Chloe's, but a deep green that set off her auburn curls. When she'd been brought back from France I'd almost buzzed her hair off completely. It was growing back into a mop of curls that made her look even younger than her usual twenty-four-looking-seventeen.
Just seeing her there was relief. I missed her. It wasn't anything I wanted to admit.
She looked up when I came in, contrary to what I had told her to do, and took in my face as if taking inventory. The expression that crossed her features was complicated. It was longing and anger, hatred and something I didn't want to think too closely about. It was something else, too. Something that looked surprisingly like pity.
The idea of taking her back to the compound fell away. She wasn't ready.
There was something surreal about the evening. The first time Annie had met Claude and Chloe had been at the compound for a dinner party, one of the charity events. She'd liked them both then and after the party at which Kie had hurt her, I'd let her stay the night under my roof but in one of the guest beds with both of them.
Now she watched Claude with an expression of distrust and near loathing. Interesting. But there was a marked change in her, as well. She sat up straight, she ate what she was given (not that she was given anything she disliked from what I could tell.) She and Chloe held a quiet conversation between themselves and when called upon between salad and main course to strip naked and resume their seats, they did so.
It wasn't anything I wouldn't have done but I hadn't done it and that made it strange.
"You read about the latest outbreak in Africa?"
"What is it this time?"
"Master, do we have to discuss such things?"
"Put the food in your mouth and otherwise keep it closed."
