Help Wanted
Chapter Four – The Preliminaries
"You know my name, not my story. You've heard what I've done, but not what I've been through.
— Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Tenten shifted uneasily in her seat, her face reddening as though something like an electric charge had skittered through her. Refusing to let her tautened nerves get the better of her, she spoke, deploring the wretched high-pitched squeak her breaking voice sometimes embarrassed her with. "I would be more than happy to point you in the direction of Konoha's finest morgue—"
Itachi settled his coffee mug aside and pinned her with his black gaze. His lean, strong face was taut with barely concealed impatience and there was an aura of predatory stillness about the honed, whiplash tight, power-packed frame that suggested a tendency to leap on anyone who stepped out of line and tear them apart limb from limb.
His icy black eyes lingered on the pulsing vein at the side of her neck. His handsome face cold and forbidding, his voice composed. "Excuse me?"
A handful.
That was what Tenten had labeled him from the very beginning. Clearly he was accustomed to getting his own way. Someone needed to teach him that life wasn't like that. And irrespective of her confusing sizzle of attraction to the man, she was capable of putting her foot down if circumstances warranted it.
This was definitely one of those circumstances.
Who conjures up a contract dictating how sex was to be done? A man who likes to be in control of every aspect of his life, a voice in her head answered.
Despite his devastating looks, he truly was a bully, she realized. And it was time she stood up for herself—something she had neglected to do her entire life and look at where it got her.
The irony of her situation was laughable—a trafficked runaway who ended up trafficking her own self. If there was ever such a thing as freedom in captivity, then she supposed this was the closet one could come to experiencing it.
"—because it would appear as if you've got a fetish for fucking the dead," Tenten spluttered, snatching a ragged breath because there had been a severe case of miscommunication between her brain and her tongue. She had no intentions of getting her point across so unseemingly.
If he were a lesser man Uchiha Itachi would have choked on his coffee. He probably would have raked his thick black hair with angry fingers too. Instead, he clenched his fist and shoved them deep into his jacket pockets, not willing to show the slightest indication he felt anything other than indifference to the girl's ridiculous barb.
She grimaced.
He lowered his eyes to watch her mouth take on that grimacing tilt. It was only as he watched it settle back into a straight line again that he realized it was actually a quite beautifully shaped mouth. A stray strand of her chestnut hair whipped across her sun-kissed features and trapped between the soft curve of her coral pink lips.
Gripped by an irrational yearning to wipe away the lock, his fingers twitched in his pockets, preparing to move, but she brushed the wisp of hair behind her ear before he had a chance to do it. The long, silky brownness of it fell in a tousled touchable mass to well below her shoulders.
Pretty shoulders, he noted—sleek of skin, warm with tan, partially concealed by the pink halter top that lovingly cradled truly superb, full and shapely breasts. In a moment of uncharacteristic loss of resolve, he imagined that they would fill his hands like ripe, succulent fruits, their tips hardening against the palm of his hand.
He probed her unsteady gaze, suddenly noticing the magnetic pull her eyes had. The rich, dark brown colour was framed with the most gorgeously thick, curling black eyelashes that managed to add an unexpected appeal to her face that he would never have allowed her before.
Internally shuddering, he pulled his mind away, banned it from the path it sought to follow.
Something twisted inside him—not sexual, but an ache of a different kind. Did she know how badly she was trembling? Or how that slender throat of hers worked like crazy each time she swallowed some of the tea?
"These rules are ridiculous Itachi, I may be naïve but I'm certain that's not how people make love," she dealt him a scathing appraisal, flushing but not backing down.
He cringed at her words. He had never made love to a woman. He'd bedded many. The sex had been satisfying. But to make love, he hardly knew where to begin. Yet it was probably a gift she deserved, given that she had been forcibly obliged to offer him something far more valuable than anything he could ever give to her—would ever give her.
He had never so much as kissed an innocent, and now he'd be taking one to bed—initiating her into a world where he's thought to be an absolute monster. He was torn between immense guilt at the realization that he would have to take her virginity, and a building rage at the thought that his own contract contrived to trap him. There was no backing out now, especially not when he had spend such a hefty sum to acquire her as his surrogate in the first place. His gut twisted, and guilt overrode the anger.
The girl made absolutely no sense to him. She didn't come across as being naïve or sheltered in any way. That she had agreed to enter into such an arrangement with him—not that he'd given her any other choice—without experience just added another piece to her personal puzzle.
He prided himself on being able to read people. His gut feeling had never failed him before. He had good intuition. But he was no closer to figuring her out, or her motives, than when he'd first discovered she'd come to him as a fraud.
What was her story? He wondered, not able to shake the image of a young girl going up against a world that had stolen her idealism and her emotional innocence. He didn't wish to be a part of that—part of that ugly world. And now he'd irrevocably be a part of it—would take that last piece of innocence—her physical innocence—for himself. He didn't plan on using it against her, but he had nothing to offer her either.
She was to bear his children, nothing more.
One of the reasons he'd so carefully avoided women with no experience was because they thought of love and sex as two things inextricably linked, and he honestly didn't have any of that kind of love available. Not anymore.
"Babies are the only things we'll be making Tenten," he corrected her, his voice edged. He despised the bluntness of his words, but he would not give her time to entertain fantasies of something beyond their arrangement.
The simple words of acknowledgement and grudging acceptance rocked through her like an atomic bomb. She put her hands instinctively on her flat belly. A shuddering breath shook her small shoulders.
"I know that," she bit out through a clenched jaw, and wished that she didn't feel the way she did—that she wasn't enslaved by whatever dark magic he wielded over her.
His scowled darkened. As a hint, it seriously raised his annoyance threshold. "So what is the problem?"
Tenten shook her head in disbelief and expelled her breath in a slow hiss. She was struggling to master a temper that was threatening to overwhelm her. She glanced down at the sheaf of paper before her. "You honestly don't see a problem?"
Itachi studied her with brooding dark ferocity, but he said nothing. In the humming quiet, she stared out the window at the garden and waited in vain for his response.
"Agalmatophilia is a paraphilia concerned with sexual attraction to a statue doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object," she explained, sending him an enervated look. "I'm not a mannequin Itachi—"
He frowned, dark eyes unlit by gold, narrowing in a piercing scrutiny that made her uncomfortable.
"—I'm not a mute either, and therefore cannot adhere to the terms you laid out in this contract," she delivered stiffly, her face going pink. Her mouth felt numb and peculiar. She really should have fought the nervous tension that had led her to swallow the hot tea like that. "I will not sign this."
For several nerve-wracking seconds he stared at her. His face remained grim. Her challenge wasn't working. She wasn't reaching him.
"There's a clause in the first contract that binds you to conceive solely on my terms, so it doesn't matter whether or not you sign that." Itachi shot at her with dark eyes that flashed as golden as the heart of a fire. "Just consider it a heads-up."
As an incendiary response leapt onto Tenten's tongue she swallowed it back and welded her lips closed, determined not to say anything before she had thought it through. But sheer shock was ricocheting through her in wave after wave. What had she gotten herself into?
She was shamefully conscious that a craving for money had reduced her to her present predicament. She had always heard the saying that money was the root of all evil. And, looking back to the twisted, reckless decision she had made, Tenten knew that in her case that pronouncement had proved all too true.
Because she had run away from a situation which had become untenable, knowing even then that she would be followed and eventually traced...
As the ever-present threat of being found and called to account for her behaviour assailed Tenten, her skin turned clammy with fear. And in her mind's eye then, when she was at her weakest, she would see his face, dark, devastating and dangerous.
She had gone the extra mile to escape the cruel fate that had awaited her. But she had gone that extra mile in entirely the wrong direction, she acknowledged wretchedly. How could she ever have believed that entering into such a deal with Itachi would do anything but add to her list of problems?
How could she ever have imagined that she could surrender all rights, hand over her own flesh and blood and agree never, ever to try and see her own child?
She had been wickedly and savagely deceived into signing that contract, Tenten reminded herself. How was she to know that her forged place of employment was actually involved with trading young girls?
A wave of disgust washed through Tenten and she pushed it down along with bitter memories. That Itachi would engage in commercial activity with such an unscrupulous organization both baffled and repulsed her.
She asked abruptly, "Why is it so important to have sex rules?" she felt dirty just saying the word.
His mouth thinned. His eyes flashed at her persistence, but he answered tightly, "To keep things professional."
Shock, disbelief and cold horror slammed into Tenten. He might as well have substituted 'professional' with 'impersonal' because it was blatantly obvious from his contract.
Her mouth opened for a moment but nothing emerged. She couldn't articulate, but finally managed a strangled, "Professional?" Words failed her and she closed her mouth helplessly.
His mouth twisted.
Tenten tried to make sense of his words, an awful stomach-churning red mist of anger gripped her. "That's something you'd say to a prostitute—"
Itachi could see injured pride straighten her spine, the shock on her face.
"—and even they are expected to make noises and fidget," she said tapping on the paper before her. When the words that left her mouth impinged on Tenten's consciousness, she felt her cheeks go hot.
She did not just say that.
Silence lengthened and tautened between them. Electric awareness quivered in the air and Itachi shook his head slowly, a smirk curving his lips.
She flushed even hotter, mortified heat drenching her in an upward sweep. Much to her utter humiliation she knew it wasn't all mortification. Some of it was pure…thrill. This man was doing nothing short of creating a nuclear reaction within her, comprehensively threatening everything she'd protected herself with for years.
He ran quick eyes over her, making her squirm inwardly before quirking a brow and saying mockingly, "You're not a prostitute are you?"
His cool voice cut through her like a knife. She gritted her jaw, giving him a stricken look of condemnation. "You know damn well that I'm not."
His gaze glittered and darkened. He leant forward too and asked softly, "Then why should we add theatrics to a simple act of exchange?"
She cringed at his choice of words.
They caused little short of an explosion of hurt within her. She tried desperately to block it out—the realization that even then—her brain froze at that implication. Her hands clenched tight on the table and she hid them on her lap.
"Look," Tenten began awkwardly but found that words failed her once more. She couldn't exactly tell him that he was frightening her.
He shrugged one broad shoulder nonchalantly, his gaze on hers not wavering for a second. "When the time comes, you'll have no other choice than to submit." His mouth tightened.
His gaze dropped to where she could feel her breast rising and falling with her breath.
He looked back up and her heart stopped. "And not because it's your job, but because of the inordinate amount of frustration I'm causing you."
She looked at him in shock. His face wasn't creased in hilarity, it was stone cold sober.
"I can smell it from here," he told her, sending a trail of reaction down her taut spinal cord.
Between Tenten's thighs she felt indecently damp. She coloured even more hotly. Could he really smell that? Did desire have a smell? The thought made her squirm, but also made her feel weak and achy. She scrambled out of her seat. Even whilst his bluntness caused her to lose her appetite it was whetting another—of a more potent kind.
She wanted him with a hunger that she'd always intellectualized as something she'd never experience. Except now she was. And it was ten million times worse than anything she could have ever imagined.
She felt sickened with self-disgust.
As she pushed past his chair he snaked out a hand and caught her wrist. She looked down, and he was looking right up at her, trapping her. "Sit down Tenten, we've got quite a few things to discuss," he shoved aside his plate and pulled her onto his lap, earning a startled gasp from the brunette.
She bit her lip, her belly clenching, her eyes widening. She could feel the stroke of each breath he took on the nape of her neck, making tingles run up and down her spine.
He grabbed his tablet, started it up and then scrolled through several pages to get to his list.
Tenten stared at the screen. He had divided his list into several main topics: Pre-pregnancy and Pregnancy. Post-pregnancy. She gave him points for taking an organized approach to life, but this was a bit much.
"I would like to go over the current issues that concern you and me," he informed her.
Her nerves jangled and her heart jolted uneasily against her ribcage. Something deeply ingrained within her kept her from moving a muscle, but it made her voice husky. "What about you and me?"
His voice was curt. "I think I need to clarify our duties and responsibilities to each other."
She felt like a trapped insect, flat on its back and helpless in the face of a looming predator. Determined to negate her disturbing reaction, she tried to focus on the tablet and asked crisply, "Duties and responsibilities?"
Leave it up to Itachi to explain sex using bullet points.
"Yes," he said. "That's the key to understanding our roles. We're collaborating towards achieving a tangible goal and we have guidelines and milestones to meet."
"I'm not going to sit through a long slide presentation that explains how to have sex," she cleared her throat purposefully but her voice came out strangled. The man was absolutely unbelievable.
"This isn't about the how," he drawled in deep honeyed tones. "It's more about the why and the when."
Tenten swallowed carefully, stifling a retort. She gazed down at the screen, a mixture of dread and excitement licked through her. Before she could argue, Itachi slid his finger across the surface to reveal the first slide. Her eyes were inexorably drawn to the screen.
He had come up with a full-bore bullet point agenda covering her duties and responsibilities, right down to her diet preferences and clothing choices. It was terribly eye-opening. There were estrogen hormone levels to be tested and she would have to monitor her temperature. And then there was something called the luteal phase, which caused a little chill to run up her spine. The very word sounded vaguely sinister and she wished she had paid more attention in biology class.
Itachi knew an awful deal about the female anatomy; it led her to cower at his experience.
It was all strangely mesmerizing. Gruesome and shocking, but she couldn't look away. The last page was a month-by-month production schedule. Itachi gave her a moment to review it, then said, "Base on what the doctor said, you're scheduled to start ovulating in the next five to seven days."
By this time, Tenten was shaking. She could feel the colour washing out of her face, only to be swiftly replaced by mortified heat.
"I've already rearranged my schedule and decided to work from home."
Knowing that she had nothing to lose—other than what she signed over to him in that contract—she didn't curb her tongue, but her voice was still slightly strangled when it came. "It s-says he-here that we sho-should have s-sex Wednesday night and…and…oh, my," she stammered.
"Continue through to the following Monday night, with Friday and Saturday being the most optimum days." He finished off easily, setting the tablet aside casually.
Tenten shivered slightly despite the treacherous heat curling down low in her abdomen. She had seen enough. More than enough. Her eyes were practically bleeding.
She flushed to the roots of her hair, "It's smart to cover all the bases," she swallowed, intensely conscious of the fact that she was still seated in his lap. "But I think you're going about this too rigidly."
The silence lay still and impenetrable as glass.
"Are you forgetting that we're still not on common ground where the how is concerned?" Tenten felt her breasts swell with languorous heaviness. Her nipples pinched tight, as if a current of fire had touched them. She folded her arms over herself in mortified discomfiture. "And frankly, all of this is making me nervous."
"Nerves are never good—" he said thoughtfully, absently skimming this thumb along the soft skin of her arm. "—which is why I've scheduled preliminaries for tonight."
Breathless and trembling, she turned her head and looked at him, lost herself in the brilliance of his shimmering dark eyes. A tide of something terrifying swept over her in a stormy wave. "Preliminaries?"
"To take some of the pressure off," he explained with infuriating cool. "I can't have you seizing up when it counts most."
She couldn't get breath into her lungs. Soft lips parting, she snatched in tiny little pants, drowning against her volition in the power of those compelling dark eyes.
"Tonight?" Tenten protested painfully.
"Tonight," he confirmed without hesitation.
A/N: Thank you so much for the reviews, follows and favourites. I still cannot believe the overwhelming response to this story. It means a lot to me :)
I'm sorry if this chapter was uneventful. I promise upcoming ones won't be =^.^= And yes Itachi is a very thorough person xD Questions, comments, concerns?
Please Review to keep me motivated.
In response to an anonymous review regarding the cover art. I actually found it while browsing Itaten on google LOL xD