Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 74
When the companion showed up half an hour later and precisely on time, she sent Cuthbert downstairs to the lobby to escort him up to her floor. She knew he would have been able to do his check in the lobby, where it would have made more sense from a security standpoint anyway, but she also knew that his job was mostly to serve as a status indicator, and doing the check in front of her door was part of the appearance. She watched on the door’s observation screen as Cuthbert scanned the companion with the sensors in his comtab and then did a manual pat-down. Finally, he was satisfied that his performance had delivered the expected optics, and he tapped the door chime.
“Your guest is here, Miss Solveig.”
She noticed that he had switched to her first name, which he usually didn’t do, and realized that it was part of the discretion protocol. She had always wondered why Acheron had always seemed such a desirable assignment for business trips among the executives. Now she suspected she had at least part of the answer.
The companion introduced himself as Yejun. He was almost unreasonably fit and handsome, a slender face with a sharply chiseled jawline and stunning green eyes. Under other circumstances, she would have at least considered employing him for the purpose Cuthbert would think she had in mind.
“Thank you, Cuthbert. Be back to pick up my visitor in an hour, please, and delay all my incoming comms requests with my apologies. Absolutely no disturbances, please. Unless the hotel is burning down around us.”
“Of course, Miss Solveig,” Cuthbert said and withdrew after one last glance at the companion. She could tell that he wasn’t bothered by the fact that she had hired an attractive distraction, just surprised that she had done it.
You weren’t expecting that, were you? she thought. He’d be reporting the encounter to her father by way of Marten, of course, and she knew that Papa would look at it as a rite of passage. Part of her suspected that he actually expected and maybe even preferred that she service her urges with high-quality hired work rather than entangle herself in regular relationships. It was certainly a more efficient way to get the sex when you didn’t have the time or will to deal with the emotions.
She walked Yejun back to the living room of the suite and gestured at the lounge chairs in front of the panoramic window.
“Sit, please,” she said in Acheroni, which he rewarded with a smile.
“Gladly,” he replied in fluent Gretian that didn’t have a trace of an accent. “Would you tell me what kind of enjoyment you had in mind this afternoon?”
He sat down and looked at her expectantly. She had picked him from his holo image on the agency listing, but even the image hadn’t done him justice. On her personal list of encounters, he was easily among the top three most attractive people she had ever met.
The sacrifices I make for family, she thought.
“I would like to purchase your discretion for an hour, Yejun.”
“You already secured that when you requested me.”
“That’s not quite what I mean. I would like for you to sit here and have a drink or three while you look at the scenery for an hour. Or do whatever else comes to mind. As long as it doesn’t involve answering the door or leaving this suite.”
He smiled and gave her a puzzled look.
“I need my security officer to think that I am busy in here with you while I step out behind his back. I will make sure that you get twice the asked fee if I get back here in an hour unnoticed.”
Yejun smiled again and shook his head lightly.
“There is no need for that. I will do as you request if that’s what would please you most this afternoon.”
“It would,” she said. But only by a hair, she thought with another glance at the obvious topography of abdominal muscles under Yejun’s tightly fitted silk shirt.
“If anyone finds out I am gone, you can tell them I stepped out for a bit. There is no danger to you. This is just some corporate subterfuge. Mixed in with regrettable family issues.”
“Believe me, I’ve had to entertain far more complicated requests,” the companion said.
Cuthbert had retreated to his own room down the skyway and just around the next corner. Solveig closed the screen she had been using to monitor the space on the other side of her suite’s door. Then she put her company compad and her personal device on the little table by the side of the circular bed in the suite’s sleeping section.
Might as well play the charade all the way, she thought. Maybe I should get a proper background sound, just for fun. Punch up some sexy entertainment on the Mnemosyne and play it on low volume. In case he’s smart enough to know how to tap into my company device.
Now she only carried her burner comtab, the one she would have to discard and replace after meeting with Aden today. Through a long string of authorizations and data scrubbings that were the digital equivalent of wiping the floor behind herself after every step she took, she had enabled it to allow her access back into the hotel and onto the floor for the next sixty minutes. What little evidence of her absence remained would be wiped clean when she deactivated the node and destroyed the hardware.
Back at the old game, she thought as she opened her door and looked around in the breezeway outside. Stealing ice cream from the service kitchen in the middle of the night. Piece of cake once you get busted a time or two and learn enough from your screwups.
The floor had four skylift banks and half a dozen emergency stairwells. She walked to the side of the building