Free Nightbred by Lynn Viehl

to see it when he obviously hated her suite—his suite, she corrected herself—made no difference. He wanted to see the bedroom; she would show it to him. If he wanted her to stand on her head and sing Lady Gaga tunes she’d do that, too. She’d be such a perfect
tresora
that he’d forget about her idiot outburst in the kitchen.
    Focus on the task at hand,
Mr. Burke would say.
Our masters are not interested in our feelings, only in the efficiency of our performance.
    The master bedroom was the only part of the suite that could be closed off by a door panel that slid behind the shoji lighting screen, which Chris demonstrated for Jamys before she passed over the threshold.
    “The bed is an oversize king Savoir, and the sheets are silk.” Black silk, in fact, that she’d ordered because the sample had reminded her of his hair. “Bedroom lights, eighty percent.”
    LED floods set to reflect off the marble walls gradually blended with the glow from the crystalline base of the center bed installation. Chris had found a Canadian artist who created large-scale sculptures in Lucite and steel, and had commissioned him to create the elongated rectangular platform. He had faithfully captured her vision of disheveled stacks of clear, palm-size cubes encasing polished obsidian spheres inlaid with ribbons of silver. Larger, identical spheres flanked the low headboard panel of silver-framed Lucite, although these had been sheared off at the top to provide the flat surfaces necessary to hold the house phone and device-recharging station.
    Chris walked over to a rectangle of lights set into the floor, one of which sent a solid beam of light to a sensor in the ceiling.
    “The master bath is here.” She passed her hand through the beam, breaking the light, and a wide rectangle of onyx stone began to rise from the floor. Water flooded the interior tub, which she had designed to comfortably fit two, and streamed over the sides to fall into the mesh-bottomed catch channel surrounding the stone. “The temperature default is one hundred ten degrees, but you can adjust that and the speed of the whirlpool jets on the control panel.” She nodded toward the opaque shoji screens to one side of the bed. “If you or your guests want more privacy, there’s another, full bath through there. That’s also where all the linens are stored.”
    Jamys walked over to one of the walls to examine one of the framed manuscript pages. “Poetry.”
    Chris had personally framed and hung the pages of poetry purchased from the rare-document auctions she followed; she had carefully selected verses penned by such masters as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and e. e. cummings. Knowing how much Samantha loved poetry, Lucan had thought it a charming touch. Chris hadn’t bothered to tell him that each poem she’d framed contained some word or phrase that reminded her of Jamys Durand.
    Everything in the suite had been chosen for the same reason. She’d designed it for herself, but it was all about him, dreaming of him, waiting for him. The rooms contained everything she couldn’t say, every hope locked inside her heart.
    He bent to touch the gleaming base of the bed, and then straightened, turning around slowly. “No glass.”
    “The suite is too close to the penthouse,” she said, moving to discreetly straighten a fold of the pleated black chiffon duvet. “It’s a safety precaution. When Lord Vader—I mean, the suzerain—loses his temper, all the glass within a hundred yards shatters.”
    He watched her face. “Why ‘Winterheart’?”
    “The climate here is tropical, and most visiting Kyn aren’t accustomed to the heat,” she said, choosing her words carefully so that nothing she said would be an outright lie. “I thought this would provide a sanctuary from the outside world.”
    Her sanctuary, where she could hide for an hour and vent some of her frustrations without worrying Sam or Burke. In the beginning of her training she had come here almost every