He hugged her. “Did any of them hurt you?”
She wrinkled her nose. “There were no permanent injuries. Soft tissue heals quickly. For me, more so than others. You also know that hurting me does not mean that I didn’t have a good time.”
“It is one of your more worrying and endearing qualities.” He chuckled and stroked her hair. “You look good dressed for work. If you add a baton to the ensemble, I will request it for the next time.”
She swallowed. “You can still change it.”
“No, I want to see you in all your glory, my empress.”
“But, eleven hours?”
“You need contact, and I want contact, and I want to hold you when you wake.”
She exhaled slowly. “Fine. Have you chosen your hotel?”
“The Zephr. I will send you the room number when I have checked in. I will expect you at seven.”
He set her on her feet, stroked her back, and walked into the boardroom without her. She checked the time and groaned. It wasn’t even noon yet.
Chapter Three
Dr. Miliken looked at her as she ran her numbers. “So, you and Torun...”
“He’s a client. The service was his idea when he and I first got together. There hadn’t been any specifically scheduled relief for quite some time, and no one was recruiting for this branch of service. So, Blind Date was created, and he was the first, second, and third client before the others started asking him about why he was relaxed and more even-tempered and more powerful. From there, it expanded, and I ended up with my little roster of program students and one professor.”
The doctor asked, “Really?”
“Two of the team members have maturity interests, so I had to go recruiting.” She chuckled. “And that is the last of the gossip regarding the Blind Date Corporation.”
“But, you know all this stuff.”
“I do.”
“And you and your escorts are not considered a threat?”
“The folk who work for me have the same vague memories as their clients. The masks interfere with the electronics around them. It is a frequency of my own discovery.” She smiled. “I own the patent on the projector.”
“The program doesn’t own it?”
“No. I created it when I was sixteen. Dr. Yamel helped me file the patent.” She continued to check the data with the location triangulation. She compared all of the date data and came up with one annoying conclusion. Mentor was using a portal, and she hadn’t even noticed. “Well, fuck.”
She had been so fixated on keeping an eye on Susa that she hadn’t bothered to check if Mentor was using volatile technology that could have ripped them apart. She frowned. It wasn’t like her to miss that.
Zera was frowning over the data when her com chimed an alarm. “Aw, hell. Right. I am going for the day. Notify me if anything changes in Susa’s condition. I might not answer immediately, but I will be checking in every few hours.”
“Where are you going?”
“First, I am kissing Susa goodnight, and then, I am going home.” She locked down her terminal and got up.
“I thought you had more research to do.”
“There is always more research to do. Now, I have to uphold my obligations.”
“You don’t mean...”
“Don’t wait up.”
She headed to Susara’s room, checked her monitors, her vitals, and then pressed a soft kiss to her forehead. “Behave. I will be back in the morning with stories to tell if you want to listen, just like old times. Tonight’s client asked for the full empress, so you know how much work that is going to be. You always hated doing that one.”
She smoothed the pale hair back and got up. She said she was heading home, but in reality, she was going to the offices of Blind Date Corporation. That is where all of the equipment was to fulfill the requests of the clients and where all dates began and ended.
The empress was an intricate costume born of the history of Torun’s people. There was apparently an empress who would get ready for her lovers and challenge them to please her or die. The costume was tricky and meant she would have to remove all hair from the chin down and do some serious grooming to her eyebrows. The enema was pretty standard by this point.
The stand-up hair remover did the entire job in under five minutes.
It was time to get pretty.
After the layers of scraped skin, makeup, and intricate designs, she had a quick snack before putting on the gauzy silk layers that only concealed in the same way cobwebs were concealing. There were two other escorts getting ready, and when they heard what she was gearing up for, they expressed their sympathies at her prep routine.
Twelve was going to visit a businessman for a scenario that involved a little hunting and chasing. Three was off for an evening of a private concert and some straightforward sex with another non-team client.
One had to go and put on ten pounds of jewels, her customized mask for this costume, and a headdress that fit over the mask. When she was done, the bots wrapped her in the cloak and she stepped onto the footpads that would ease her walk. She had listened to the news while she got ready, and Torun’s team had been seen landing at a nearby base.
Her maintenance bot and guard bot accompanied her to the transport. Through the mask, she looked out at the people on the street going on dates, dances, and heading out for dinner. She was doing one of those things, but the difference in her night was that it was guaranteed to end in sex unless the client changed their minds. In the six years of the company, only one client had changed their mind, and it was because they were summoned to attend an emergency. They rescheduled as soon as they were able, and Susa had had a very
