Ashley spent the rest of the day completely nude, and the rest of us did our best to act as it was no big deal at all. I wasn’t sure if that amounted to encouraging her or to giving her safe space to express herself, but the net result is that we wound up with, as Mia put it, ‘a skinny naked chick’ running around the house, showing no intention of putting anything on at all.

  “Do you think Ashley will put on clothes tomorrow?” Emmy asked that night as we relaxed in the tub before bed.

  “Outside of the house, yes. Inside, no,” I predicted. “If we go out for a run, or maybe we all go out for lunch or whatever, she’ll put on clothes. Around the house? Naked.”

  “How do you feel about that?” Emmy asked.

  “Honestly, I guess I’m mostly amused,” I answered.

  “I must confess that I have been enjoying it,” Emmy admitted. “She is pretty and I find myself enjoying looking at her, but I also find myself amused as well by the… chaos she brings. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah, it does,” I agreed.

  “Would you…” Emmy started to ask as I lathered up her fine white hair.

  “Yes?” I prompted.

  Emmy let out a breath. “Would you be O.K. with me encouraging Ashley to continue this behavior?”

  “You want to talk her into running around the house naked as a jaybird for the rest of her time here?” I asked, just to clarify.

  “I do,” Emmy admitted. “And I would also like to encourage her to spend more time here, if she does not need to return immediately to Virginia.”

  I thought about it for a bit as Emmy leaned her head back into the water so I could give her a rinse. When she sat up and I squeezed the water from her now shoulder-length hair, I asked, “Em, If you want to… Well, if you find her sexually attractive and want to, well, take her to bed, I guess I’d have to be a real hypocrite to say no. I’d just caution you to think about the emotional ramifications. Ashley really, really wants to be our little sex toy, so if you do take her to bed- which, like I said, I’m O.K. with in one sense- just think about the long term. I don’t want you to create expectations that we won’t be able to continue to meet.” Sighing, I said, “But I’m sure you’ve thought about all this. You’re much better at understanding people and planning accordingly than I am.”

  Emmy turned herself around in our big tub to face me. She took my hands in her own and said, “I do think Ashley is sexually attractive. If there were no attachments, yes, I would enjoy spending a night with her. As you say, there is a lot more to consider with her than a simple physical attraction. I feel that if we opened our bedroom door to her, it could not be for only one night. She would expect that it would be an ongoing thing. While I have been enjoying her stay with us, I cannot imagine her traveling to Los Angeles with us to continue to be our sex toy. As you said about Katrina, we have our lives, and she has hers.”

  “I’ll let you take the lead on this,” I said. “You go ahead and do whatever you think is right, and whatever you want.”

  “For tonight, I want you,” Emmy said. “I have been aroused all day, and I would like you to satisfy me as only you can. I want to be so sore tomorrow that standing will be uncomfortable, but sitting will be more so. I want to feed the beast.”

  “I think I can make that happen,” I agreed with a smile. “In fact, I look forward to it.”

  Ashley slept in the next morning, so I ran the Central Park loop by myself, pleased to have the alone time. Early Sunday mornings are the best time for that route, since traffic is low and there aren’t many people on the sidewalks getting to the park and back.

  The park itself is surprisingly busy, with quite a few cyclists, runners, dog walkers and so on, even at what’s essentially the crack of dawn.

  I never minded the other park users, since there were some unspoken rules about traffic flow that everybody followed, keeping potential conflicts from happening.

  Back at the townhouse by seven, I found Jeremy in the gym, working on the range of movement exercises I’d shown him. Sitting down on the bench, I watched for a few minutes, pleased to see that Tiny’s form looked good. I asked about his injuries and he told me that he doesn’t even feel them anymore, so we agreed that it might be time to get him working with a coach and doing some sparring. I told him that we’d get him set up at Clancy’s Fight Gym when we got back to Los Angeles, and he seemed to like that idea.

  “When are we going back?” he asked, taking a break.

  “We need to be back by the end of the month, since Cecy will be coming up to start school on the third of September. I figure we’re here for two, maybe two and a half weeks, then we head back to civilization.”

  “What about your friend Teddy? I thought you said you were going to work with him,” Jeremy asked, toweling off his face.

  “He’d better get here soon, or be willing to come back to Los Angeles,” I said with a shrug. “He knew that my help was entirely based on whether we could make it work or not.”

  “Will you be finished with your work at the compound by the end of the month?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” I replied. “The new office is getting its legs under itself and won’t need my hand-holding for much longer, and the other stuff… That’s mostly not me, anyhow.”

  “When it comes time to move, there in Istanbul, will you need me?”

  “That depends on Emmy. If she really does want to be involved, then I’ll need you to stick to her like glue. You’ll be her personal protection, above all else.” Thinking about it for a moment, I added, “Well, that’s true in any case. If she decides to stay here in the US, then you’ll stay with her and like I said, stick to her like glue. If she comes to Istanbul, you’ll stay with her. In no case will I need you for the actual raids- that’s not your task.”

  “Got it,” he said. “I figured that would be the way you’d want it, but I just wanted to make sure.”

  “Jeremy, you aren’t one of my hitters. Their training is very different than yours. Your job is to keep the family safe. Right now that means Emmy, but soon it’ll include Cecy, too, and then our baby, when she’s born. It’s a lot to ask of one person, but you’re much bigger than most people, so I’m sure you’ll be able to handle it.”

  Chuckling, Tiny said, “You have more confidence in me than I have.”

  “We’re gonna get you there,” I said. “After Marfan is taken care of, we’ll start your training programs like we’ve been talking about. The driving, the threat assessment, all that. You’ll be really busy for a while.”

  “I gotta admit, I’m looking forward to it and dreading it all at the same time,” Jeremy admitted.

  “At least you won’t get stuffed in any car trunks,” I said with a laugh. “You’re just too big.”

  “Car trunks?”

  “Ask Emmy sometime,” I said, standing up to let him get back to his workout.

  Checking my phone after I showered and got dressed, I saw that I’d missed a couple of interesting texts. The first was from Teddy Bear, saying that he’d gotten in the night before and wanted to know if he could come over. The second was from James Atherton, who said that the co-op that he and Imogen had been trying to buy finally cleared and they now owned a classic Fifth Avenue penthouse. They just got into town, and were hoping to have a get-together to celebrate.

  “Hey, babe?” I said, shaking Emmy’s shoulder. At her mumbled response, I said, “Imogen and James are here in New York. They finally got the keys to that apartment and they want to get together today to celebrate. Also, Teddy Bear is in town and wants to come over.”

  “O.K.,” Emmy mumbled.

  “O.K. what?” I asked. “O.K. to getting together with the Athertons, or O.K. to TB coming over?”

  “O.K. to both,” she replied, finally sitting up. “I would like to spend time with James and Imogen, and I very much want to see their new apartment. Of course Teddy Bear is welcome any time- he is one of your very best friends, after all.”

  “Can I tell him to come over for lunch?”

  “Bien s?r,” Emmy said, rubbing her face. “What time is it now? It is still too early for people to get out of bed.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Seven thirty,” I said, glancing at the TAG Heuer Carrera on my wrist. “You can go back to sleep. Sorry for waking you.”

  “Kiss?” she asked, so I leaned down and gave her one. It wasn’t some sort of long, passionate thing involving lots of tongue, but just an ‘I love you, and I’m happy you’re my life partner’ type of kiss. The kind of kiss you give your wife because simple reminders of love matter.

  Wally was talking to Mia and Grant when I went down to the kitchen for a bite. He’d brought fresh bagels, so I loaded one up with cream cheese and poured myself some coffee before I sat down at the big old farmhouse table.

  “Hey, did Mia warn you there’s a skinny naked chick running around the house?” I asked.

  “Your friend Ashley, right?” Grant asked. “Mia said she was doing the nudist thing yesterday.”

  “Well, don’t be surprised if she does it again today,” I said, enjoying the taste of the bagel’s raisins.

  “Miss Ashley is a nudist?“ Wally asked.

  “It’s a long story, but the part that matters is that somehow I’ve given her a safe space to explore that side of herself. So yeah, she may well decide to not put any clothes on today when she gets up. All I ask is that you guys respect the whole ‘safe space’ thing and don’t make it uncomfortable for her.”

  “Why would I complain about naked women parading around?” Grant asked. “Mia said she’s good to look at.”

  “She is, and I think she wants to be looked at, so don’t worry about that,” I confirmed.

  It wasn’t five minutes later when Ashley joined us, wearing every bit of nothing, same as the day before. She blinked in surprise to see two new male faces at the table, but rallied quickly.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr Henry,” Ashley said with a smile after I’d introduced him. “Wally, Emmy said that you bring bagels sometimes? These are them, right?” she asked, looking in the large bag. “Are there any with jalape?os?”

  “No, I’m afraid not, Miss Ashley,” he said, doing a commendable job of not gawking. “Onion is probably the closest to that.”

  “I guess that’ll do,” she said, pulling what looked like an onion bagel from the bag. She sniffed it to make sure she’d correctly identified it, then cut it in half and spread cream cheese in a thick layer on both sides.

  We all watched her during this whole process, for no doubt exactly the same reason- her cute little bubble butt and lean runner’s physique were definitely on display.

  When Ashley sat at the table with the rest of us, I said, “Hey, my friend Teddy Bear is coming over for lunch. I was thinking maybe we could get take-out from the Japanese place on 51st.”

  “Ooh! I love their katsu-don!” Mia said.

  “Sounds good, but I gotta go back to the compound in a few,” Grant said.

  “Miss Leah, will you need me today?” Wally asked.

  “I don’t think so, but I’ll let you know when Emmy gets up if she has anything planned. We might go out tonight with some friends, but I don’t know of anything else.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll go home and wait for your text, then,” he said.

  “No, that’s fine,” I assured him. “I think it’s going to be a quiet day.”

  After the two guys left, Mia asked, “You really have a friend named Teddy Bear? Seriously?”

  “You know who he is,” Ashley said. “He’s that actor, Theodore Behr. He’s got that cop show on Netflix?”

  “Seriously? I loved him in ‘Death Before Dying’!” Mia said, excited.

  “Someday I’m gonna have to watch some of his movies,” I admitted.

  “We can totally do that tonight!” Ashley said, enthusiastic.

  “We don’t have a TV,” I objected.

  “What,” Ashley said, dumfounded.

  “I’ve got one in my room,” Mia said. “You can come up and we can snuggle on the couch and make it a pajama-less party.”

  Ashley laughed at Mia’s exaggerated leer. “Yeah, no. Thanks for the invite, but I’m gonna have to pass.”

  “Your loss,” Mia said with a shrug.

  Turning back to me, Ashley asked about going out later.

  “You remember my friend James and his wife Imogen, right? They just bought an apartment over by Central Park and want to do something to celebrate,” I explained.

  “I like them,” Ashley announced. “Do you think it’d be O.K. if I came?”

  Ignoring Mia’s chuckles at Ashley’s phrasing, I said, “I can ask. I don’t know what it is they actually have planned, or even if they have any real plans at all.”

  “It’d be cool to see them again,” Ashley said, leaving it at that.

  Apparently Ashley had no plans on getting dressed for lunch, since she was still bare-assed naked when Teddy Bear and I found her sunbathing on the top deck when I gave him the tour of the house.

  “Do your friends really call you ‘Teddy Bear’?” she asked when I introduced the two of them.

  “They really do,” he said, amused.

  “That’s cool,” she said, settling back on her chaise and opening her paperback.

  “So, is this the nudity deck?” Teddy Bear asked as we looked out over the East River and off to Long Island City. “The one where you posed and all those people came out and found you naked?”

  “Yeah, this is that very same place,” I confirmed.

  “Seems to be a trend,” Teddy Bear chuckled as we walked back inside.

  “Well, maybe not as much as you might think,” I replied. “Ashley hasn’t worn a stitch of clothing since yesterday morning. She’s fully embracing the nudist lifestyle on her visit here.”

  “I wouldn’t complain too much,” he said, waggling his eyebrows lasciviously for comic effect.

  “O.K., Jimmy was right. After this action movie you need to get a comedy role. Not something over the top, but you’ve never done comedy before, right? You need to show off your sense of humor,” I told him.

  We stepped into the little production booth to watch Emmy for a few minutes as she played and sang that same song as when Ashley had gotten her tour.

  “Is that the Night Children language? It kinda sounds like Arabic or something, but not exactly.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I can’t understand more than a few words- I never learned it as a kid,” I said, cognizant of the fact that I’d told Teddy Bear that I was, in fact, a Night Child myself.

  “It still seems so surreal, even though I know it’s all true,” Teddy Bear said, shaking his head as we took the short hallway to my office. “How are the ninjas doing, anyway? How did those six months go?”

  “They’re still here. They like New York and want to stay here. Old Man Kanawa has officially handed off his dojo in Japan to his oldest son, and plans to continue training my people for a while longer. I’ve promised to build him a dojo here once he decides where he wants it, and to provide all the students he can handle.”

  “How about, um, Middle Son?” Teddy Bear asked as he settled into my leather chair behind the desk. Thinking about it for a moment, he jumped up out of the seat and indicated I should sit.

  “Hoshi is doing well,” I said. “He’s training hard with my guys, and taking English classes every night. He doesn’t want to go back to Japan, either.”

  “O.K., just sit there like you would normally,” Teddy Bear encouraged. “Open up your laptop, but just, like, look at me. Not like I’m your friend, but like you would if it was some sort of business meeting.”

  “So, we’re straight into the character development?” I asked, amused.

  “Time is short,” Teddy Bear said, looking at me closely. He took out his phone and took a photo of me, then an additional close-up of my face. We switched places and he did his best to mirror the expression and posture he’d seen me take, and had me take pictures with his phone so he could compare them later. We did this for a little bit, then resumed our tour.

  “Can I take you and Em out to dinner tonight?” Teddy Bear offered as we waited for the elevator.

  “We’re gonna do something with our friends James and Imogen tonight,” I replied. “You remember James from the track, right? He’s the one that sold me the Spyder, and bought my GT-R.”

  “Of course,” Teddy Bear agreed. “They’re here in New York? I thought they lived up in the Bay Area?”

  “They do, but they just bought a Fifth Avenue co-op and want to celebrate. They’re both from the East Coast originally,” I explained. “She grew up here in Manhattan, but her folks live in Stamford now.”

  “I kinda hate to be a- well, a fifth wheel, I guess, but I wouldn’t mind seeing them again,” Teddy Bear said. “If you think that’d be cool with them.”

  “Sixth, I guess,” I said. “Ashley invited herself, too.”

  “Hopefully she’ll wear a little more,” Teddy Bear laughed.

  We stopped at the master bedroom floor and I showed him the home gym first, which he admired, then our bedroom.

  “That’s the portrait,” I said, indicating the painting that Luisa had done of me.

  “Man, that’s amazing,” Teddy Bear said, admiring it. “You said it was your housekeeper that painted that?”

  “‘Housekeeper’ implies that she just does the cleaning, but Luisa does a lot more than that. She runs this house for us. Sure, she does some cleaning, but that’s only a small part of her job. We’ve been calling her our house manager, which seems like a better job title.”

  “And you say she teaches art?” Teddy Bear asked, finally looking away from the painting to take in the room. “Leah, I gotta say, as much as I love your place in Los Angeles, this house just oozes class. It’s a dream home. Seriously. This place could feature in magazines.”

  “Our designer wanted to get it professionally photographed so it could be published, but we’ve told her we aren’t interested,” I said, leading Teddy Bear out onto our bedroom’s terrace, which we really never used. When I said as much, Teddy Bear shook his head in dismay.

  “Screened by the trees like this, this is totally private. I’d have breakfast here every day, if this was my house,” he said. “Well, at least when the weather is nice enough. But you’ve even got heaters and a fan set up, so nice enough would be most of the time.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I admitted, taking another look at the space. He was right- it was really charming, and with the vibrant wall of green provided by the trees, it was its own little world. You could barely hear the traffic on FDR Parkway down below us- it was just a light background white noise, if anything.

  We eventually wound up down in the wine cellar, and when I related the story about how it had been a happy, unexpected discovery, Teddy Bear laughed out loud.

  “So, the relatives didn’t want to deal with Grandma’s old junk, and it lost them a million bucks?” he asked.

  “Well, there’s more to the family drama side of the story, from what little I’ve learned,” I told him as we sat in the cold room and drank some Cokes. “I guess when the owner died, she left a couple of wills, and so there were legal disputes and that sort of thing. The house was listed, but nobody wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole until all the legal questions were resolved, right? So it just sat empty for a while- six years or something like that- until all the lawsuits were sorted out, and it went back on the market. By then everybody was so tired of the whole mess they just wanted it gone, so when we made an offer they jumped on it.”

  “Well, it’s a really- I mean really nice place,” Teddy Bear said. “Somehow you guys have managed to make it look vintage classy, but not stuffy, if you understand what I mean.”

  “The modern art helps a lot in that regard,” I agreed.

  “I’m not even going to ask if that was an original Warhol I saw, or that Haring,” Teddy Bear said.

  “We actually have two Warhol lithos,” I corrected. “The Marilyn on the third floor gallery, and a Black Rhino in my office.”

  “I didn’t see the rhino,” Teddy Bear mused.

  “You were too busy trying to imitate me,” I said with a laugh. “Hey, let’s see what everybody wants from the Japanese place around the corner,” I suggested, standing up to lead him out through the new secret stairway into the library.

  “O.K., that is cool,” Teddy Bear said when I shut the secret door in the bookcase behind us. “Really cool.”

  After we called in everybody’s lunch orders, Teddy Bear and I walked the three blocks to the little Japanese restaurant. It certainly wasn’t the only Japanese place within easy walking distance, but it had become our favorite.

  Teddy Bear made a point of trying to imitate the way I walked, which I found amusing, but went along with. That was the whole point of me helping him with the character, after all.

  We ate lunch in the kitchen, and Teddy Bear did a fantastic job of acting as if Ashley’s nudity was an everyday, normal occurrence and not worth noticing. Then again, he was an actor, after all. Nudity in awkward situations surrounded by people was part of the job on occasion.

  After lunch he produced two copies of the script for us to read through, so we went up to the parlor. I mixed us up a couple of Negronis and we settled down to work through his scenes.