“Wow,” Emily says.
I tap the tip of her nose with my notebook. “Wow, what?”
“This is so cool. It’s just like Magnum PI”
Grinning, I shake my head at her and banish her to the bathroom before Chrisjean Olsen shows up.
* * *
In her four-inch black stilettos, Chrisjean Olsen is taller than I am. Her crested Afro gives her another two inches and I run my hand over my crew-cut a little self-consciously after I shake her hand and show her into the suite, not used to dealing with women I have to look up to.
She sits across from me on the couch, which at least eliminates her height advantage, declines coffee, tea, or water, and spreads her knees. She’s not showing me anything other than the inseam of her dark blue capri pants, but the pose catches at me. It’s a very masculine position. After being around Emily, who automatically goes into submissive postures when she’s with me, it’s jarring.
Not much else about Chrisjean Olsen is masculine, though. She’s got a fantastic rack, a double-D cup at a guess, that she carries well on her long, lean frame. Her bare arms swell with muscle at the shoulders. She’s not above showing off her assets, and her sleeveless, wrap top emphasizes each dip and curve. She doesn’t shove her tits under my nose, which gains her points, but I’m glad Emily isn’t in the room.
Olsen purses her full lips, glistening a vibrant purple, before she says, “I know you’ve spoken with Reggie and Jay. Did they tell you Bill and I were lovers? Because we weren’t.”
“No?” I ask neutrally.
“No. Check with the cruise company. We had separate cabins. We weren’t sleeping together.”
Emily and I have separate cabins and we’re damn sure sleeping together, but I nod.
“Are you married?” I ask. She’s wearing a couple of rings, including a silver band on her left ring finger, but that might not mean anything.
“Civil union,” she says.
Ah, Black was the wrong gender for her to sleep with. “I understand you have a daughter with diabetes who became ill while you were on the cruise, which was why you had to leave early. I hope she’s okay.”
Olsen tips her head. “She is, thank you. Did Jay tell you Bill threatened to fire me if I left? He did. Bill threatened to fire me about once a month. It didn’t mean anything. That was just Bill’s way of venting. He was very happy with me.” Her black eyes flicker. “With my job performance.”
With more than her job performance, obviously, but they weren’t lovers. Despite her bulldog approach, I don’t think Olsen’s lying. “I understand you and Bill pitched to several telecommunication companies while you were in Mexico. How did those go?”
She leans forward and clasps her hands between her knees. “Why? Are you looking to poach our clients?”
“No.”
“Hmm.” Her dark pink tongue flicks out between those bright purple lips. “They went pretty well. Of the three Bill and I pitched together, we won two. Those bastards from KornFerry beat us out on the other one. Jay’s still waiting to hear on the pitch that he and Bill did together. I think that one’s iffy, personally.”
“Uh-huh. Mrs. Black mentioned that you went on this cruise with Mr. Black because you had contacts with the Mexican telecommunications companies. Is that right?”
“Is that what she said?” Olsen sits back and crosses her legs, right ankle over left knee.
“Is she wrong?”
“No, Central America’s my market. But if you’re working for Pink Pearl, then you know that’s not why I was on that cruise, Mr. Logan.”
She stares straight at me. An alpha stare. And I realize that I’ve made the mistake I told Emily not to make. I didn’t come into this interview with a blank slate. I came into it with a fundamental assumption: that Bill Black was a top.
But looking at the woman across from me, I realize he wasn’t.
“You were Black’s top,” I say.
She nods. “For the last two years.”
“But you weren’t lovers,” I phrase it as a statement, but one she needs to confirm.
“No. I told you.”
She did, but not having sex with your bottom is still a tough concept for me. Still, unlike Reggie Black, she’s not behaving in any way like a widow, which makes it more feasible they weren’t romantically involved. “Without sticking my nose where it’s not wanted, if you told Mrs. Black that, it might give her some relief. She’s grieving not just because she lost her husband, but because she thinks he was cheating on her.”
“Your nose isn’t wanted there. What Bill and I did outside work hours was nobody’s business but ours. Bill never cheated on his wife that I know of, but if she thinks that little of the man she was married to, that’s her problem.”
That sounds like a justification to me, and I’m sure the dynamics of being Black’s top, when both were married to other people, and when they were employer and employee, must have required a lot of justification. But she’s right, it’s none of my business. “Getting back to the cruise, were you and Bill active on the boat?”
“Active? Do you mean, did we scene?”
“Yes.”
“We did,” she confirms.
“Were the scenes public?”
“No. I don’t know if you know anything about the ship, but there are public and private dungeons.”
I nod. I’ve studied the boat’s layout.
“We used private dungeons several nights. The nights we didn’t have pitches the next day. Doing scenes was exhausting for Bill. He did it to release tension after a pitch, not when we were getting ready for one. When we were prepping, he was all business.”
“What scenes did you do?”
“How does that have one damn thing to do with Bill getting food poisoning?”
I scratch under my chin with my pen. “I’m not convinced he got food poisoning. I’m investigating a number of avenues.”
“Such as?”
“Can we continue going through your time on the cruise? I don’t want to color your recollections.”
“Okay,
