Chapter 60: Hard Questions or The What Happens!

"Not the number. The why behind the number. Time? Risk? Exclusivity? Age?" Her eyes tracked over him. "Face?" Then dropped lower. "Your dick or experience?"

His eyes narrowed.

She smiled. "There we go. Finally found a measurable asset."

"Fuck you."

"How many clients can you actually handle in one week? Five? Ten? How long’s an appointment? Clock starts when you meet, or when the clothes do?"

"Celeste."

"I’m serious. She wants dinner first — then what. Six hours — then what. The whole night — then what. She paid for two hours and doesn’t want you to leave — then what."

She leaned in slightly. "She locks the door — then what. She brought security — then what. Her security doesn’t know why you’re there and decides you’re hurting her when she decides if you don’t agree you might as well face some consequences — then what."

His eyes narrowed further at the next one.

"What happened when she actually hurts you?"

He almost scoffed.

"What? Go ahead. You’re eighteen, tall, rich, and clearly very pleased with your gym membership. So women can’t hurt you?"

He shook his head — and the next question killed whatever almost-smile had been sitting under it.

"She can drug you with something’s in your drink and you wake up somewhere you never agreed to be — then what."

His face went still.

Her voice dropped a notch.

"She’s not alone and there’s somebody else already waiting in that room; say her husband likes to watch and nobody told you. Or if he’s not even supposed to be there and shows up anyway — then what. Or if somebody’s filming from the corner and neither of you notices for an hour."

He said nothing.

She held his eyes for the one that actually landed. "What happens if the whole appointment was arranged for the sole purpose of embarrassing a Corvin Viremont — what do you do, Damon?"

That one hit differently, and she clearly knew it the second it left her mouth. "You keep thinking you’re the dangerous secret in this arrangement," she said. "Have you once stopped to ask what kind of secret she might turn out to be?"

He looked at the laptop.

"Let’s say the first client has a genuinely terrible experience. How does she complain — email? Wants her money back and she threatens to expose you, lies about what happened because she’s mortified she paid an eighteen-year-old, she tells her husband you pursued her? Tells him you manipulated her into it?"

His face hardened.

She tapped the MacBook lightly. "What proof do you have. What proof does she have. What are you keeping records of at all — and every record you keep to protect yourself becomes what, exactly?"

He looked at her.

"Another thing that can leak."

She didn’t need to spell that one out. Moved straight to the next crack.

"Your second client knows your first."

He frowned. Her eyebrows climbed. "You know wealthy New York are not infinite and just two women compare notes over lunch. One recognizes the hotel. Your cologne. Your car. Your voice. How many women do you actually think you can sleep with in secret before two of their lives touch somewhere neither of you controls?"

He looked away.

"What if one of them already knows who you’re and Lilith."

His head snapped back up.

Her eyes sharpened. "There it is. Imagine if she’s done business with your mother or she sits on a board with Asmodea? She’s somebody Mara knows socially or she comes to your house for a dinner party six months from now and recognizes the boy who catered a very different kind of evening for her."

The room felt noticeably smaller.

Her voice stayed level. "You recognize her at a family event first. Do you pretend you’ve never seen her naked or does she pretend the same thing? What happens the day one of you doesn’t."

He dragged a hand down his jaw. She’d already found another weak spot.

"And here’s a good one. Why eighteen. You made that the actual product, didn’t you. Young. Very young. Mature women getting the gorgeous eighteen-year-old they’re not supposed to want." She studied him. "So how much of your appeal survives you turning nineteen? Twenty? Twenty-three? Is this a business, Damon, or a novelty item with an expiration date wired directly to your own birthday?"

That got under his skin visibly, and she didn’t let him recover.

"Say it actually works. Say it works too well even more than you imagined it to and you now have too many clients — what did you do? You quit Blackwood? Skip classes? Squeeze appointments in between MATH 121 and accounting? How do you schedule fifty women who all individually require total discretion?"

His expression changed again.

"There it is; so left with no choice you hire someone. Great, but who exactly do you trust with a list of wealthy married women paying Damon Corvin Viremont for sex?"

That question sat there like a dropped brick in a window.

She gave him a beat before the follow-up. "Or you do all of it yourself. Website, applications, scheduling, payments, hotel bookings, security, testing, messages, and somewhere in the leftover hours, presumably, the actual fucking."

He exhaled slowly.

Her eyes drifted back to the laptop. "How many hours did you put into building this?"

He didn’t answer.

She looked at him again. "How many of those hours went to all that what happens when it goes wrong? Say a client dies. Not because of you, necessarily — heart attack, accident, a drug she never told you she’d taken. Doesn’t matter. You’re the last person who saw her alive. What do you tell the police? What do you tell her husband? What do you tell Lilith? After all, somebody did dies because of something you did or was involved in, however small. An accident, a bad reaction, whatever. You still think clicking I agree on a pretty website was ever going to save you from that?"

He finally looked genuinely angry. "I’m not fucking stupid."

"Then why," she said immediately, "did you build this like nothing bad can ever happen?"

That shut him up completely. Her fingers rested flat on the closed MacBook, no longer playing with it at all.

"Who protects the women, Damon. Who protects you. Who verifies anything. Who handles an emergency, a threat, a pregnancy, a husband, the police, your own family?"

He said nothing.

She watched him for several long seconds before her voice finally eased back toward something almost conversational:

"And after all of that, we still haven’t circled back to the first question."

His eyes lifted slowly to hers.

She tapped the laptop once, final, like closing a ledger.

"How does the first woman even find you."

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A/N: Sorry, this took longer than you probably planned, but hey, we had to cover all corners. I hope that doesn’t stop you from giving me or throw a couple of golden tickets, now, does it?

There was a problem in publishing timer, I set the last Chapters to come first for some who he’d already read this before Unwanted Board Member or Clingy Ex, please forgive me this once.