The Country Mouse Collection by Amy Lane;Aleksandr Voinov

Author:Amy Lane;Aleksandr Voinov [Voinov, Amy Lane;Aleksandr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2013-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

This place looked decidedly dodgy. It wasn’t quite the kind of neighborhood where Malcolm expected to be knifed for his BlackBerry (did anybody steal those anymore?), but he left it in his pocket anyway.

The building was old, run-down brick from a time when this might have been a respectable place—oh, when the Romans had still been around—or maybe a Victorian workhouse where the plebs did something useful and were tightly controlled, which, to Malcolm’s mind, just showed that the old Victorians hadn’t messed around with ASBOs and similar soft-handed nonsense.

The place was big enough to house ten businesses, and apparently they had all co-opped to hire their very own IT guy: Owen.

Who was currently trotting up the decrepit staircase, mysterious black messenger bag over his shoulder, without having noticed Malcolm.

“Can I help you?”

Malcolm looked up to see a receptionist in the tiny foyer, standing behind what looked like a booth for a carnival ticket taker. Some of the original wallpaper was preserved behind her, burgundy with black velveteen leaves set in relief, and was just baroque enough for Malcolm to reassess the original use of this building after all. It had obviously been a brothel.

“Uhm,” he said, looking at her hesitantly. If this place had been a brothel, she could have applied for that particular job. She was young—as young as Owen, which was saying something—and had wide brown eyes with thick brown lashes. She was wearing a bright pink sundress, since it was unseasonably warm for September, and her enormous breasts were in danger of adding vast acres of orange-colored flesh to the pink landscape.

She probably had an IQ of two-hundred-and-fifty, but he wasn’t going to notice any of that, now was he? All he was going to notice were those inviting breasts, and the fact that Owen was quite cheerfully bi, when Malcolm had lied about that to the world just like he’d lied about always wanting to fucking top.

“Are you looking for something?” she prodded, and he swallowed hard on his irritation (jealousy) and pissed in his corner.

“Yes, uhm,” he looked at the nameplate on the ancient wooden partition desk, “Wendy, I’m here to see my boyfriend—you just hired him, he’s—”

“Owen!” she lit up joyfully. “And you must be Malcolm. Oh, he’s told us all about you. Yes, he just went upstairs to the adoption agency.” She lowered her head conspiratorially. “They actually need his services more than anyone else in the place, you know. But they’re such lovely people, the rest of the co-op pitched in some of their share. And he’s such a sweetie. He’s already revamped my entire system here, just this morning. I can keep track of my calls, and which business needs what, and play solitaire without nobody seeing me—he’s lovely.”

Malcolm struggled for a moment against an acid retort, and then struggled against smacking her hand and telling her to keep her fingers off his man, and then struggled to remember what he was going to say in the first place.

“He is,” he stammered.

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