Introduction
I gave the manuscript to my first book to Deidre on my thirty fifth birthday, Sunday. We were on my boat sailing the lake with my daughters and Elizabeth, Deidre's daughter. Elizabeth's birthday the day before had been exhausting with the hotel going for a birthday celebratory weekend for Friday and Saturday that had seen us all running and a culmination of Elizabeth playing Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto with an orchestra of musicians the conductor of my hotel's chamber orchestra had brought together. The black tie function had gone on longer than wanted and we were all just taking it easy.
Deidre paged through the book and lifted her eyebrows. There weren't tables of statistics, pictures of academic interest in what ideas looked like, process diagrams, or anything else to show a well researched academic work as she probably expected. Instead there was dialog and descriptive paragraphs.
"A novel! It's unexpected, I thought you would write a text book about infiltration or interrogation."
"There are in fact lots of those. Most are classified, the very good ones protected as well as the Vatican Archives. You would be lucky to sell five copies per year. It is about infiltration though. It's a novel based on my last assignment."
This got the attention of my two daughters. I had never said a word about my job for the government in more than sixteen years and now there was a book called No Need to Stress. They perked up but were lazing in the sun and it was going to take a lot for them to get up. Elizabeth was on the cabin roof driving every red blooded male with a pair of binoculars wild in her bikini, with B cup breasts, flat tummy, Barbie doll legs, pitch black hair. She was being shaded by the sail and yardarm which helped show her pale skin and a body toned from months of ballroom dancing with my daughters and me as her partner. She rolled over to look down at Deidre and I.
"Pops, what is the story about?"
"It's about the modern slave trade. How they pick their victims; how the industry works. And then about a guy who went into the industry to get one victim out. I wrote it as a warning."
"I thought Abraham Lincoln ended slaves." Nicole said.
She was turning thirteen in a few months and had a thirteen year old's view of history despite Deidre being a college professor in exactly that. That she had made a comment showed she in fact deeply interested that her older sister Cathy had not made a comment showed interest there too.
"Oh, Abraham Lincoln made owning slaves illegal but he did not stop it. He was not the first to try. Efforts to end slavery can go back to Cyrus the Great of Persia. In fact the USA was one of the last countries to outlaw the slave trade in the nineteenth century." Deidre said.
"Remember girls for every law there is a crime and somebody prepared to commit it." I said.
"Yeah, how many have you committed pops?"
"A fair share. In fact that novel could be considered part of a crime."
"Really?"
"In a way Beth. This is the first part of a dowry payment for Nick to marry you, if it gets published." Deidre said.
That got reaction! Elizabeth took a leap off the cabin roof into my arms without seeming to get up. Cathy and Nicole sat up with their mouths hanging open. They knew that Deidre and I were lovers. Deidre had explained it very accurately, she was my private whore. Marrying Elizabeth was a strange thing to do, even for me.
I had not bargained on Elizabeth actually approving, she was generally sensible and level headed. Having her mother arrange who she married and liking it was a surprise. She grabbed the manuscript and looked at the title page then she read the author's note: Names changed to protect the guilty.
"Shouldn't it be to protect the innocent?" Elizabeth asked.
"No, why do the innocent need to hide and be protected? The guilty... now they need protection all the time."
"So who are the guilty people to be protected dad?" Cathy asked.
"Me for a start."
Chapter 1
Elizabeth had not cared about anything much except having my hand inside her bikini top while Deidre read the terms of our prenuptial agreement and dowry. She put my hand there but she was stiff and nervous while I toyed with her nipple. I figured it was probably a first for her.
Then I explained why I was one of the guilty and how that could be a deal breaker.
In rescuing three American college students of a slave market in Ghana I had needed to buy two slaves. Unexpectedly one of the two was an American citizen, the other Austrian. They were now asking Uncle Sam to unite them with their owner. Ordinarily this was not a problem, the military had facilities for people like that.
The trouble was that the girl was Anne Hanson, daughter of Congressman James Hanson. The Austrian was Dieter Gimesi, brother of Heinrich Gimesi who was a Very High profile journalist with a huge audience. He mostly wrote about geopolitics and international trade. Both were starting to make unhappy noises about their family members and it was only a matter of time before they made uncomfortable facts public knowledge. It was only a matter of time before the two wannabe slaves recognized me because they were at the Hanson family residence with access to news. My current business profile was too high and I would become a known public figure if my business trajectory continued.
Additionally the DOD had another problem, they were in possession of ninety rescued slaves. They were too many to keep quiet and it was only a matter of time before somebody else asked an embarrassing question in an oversight hearing. Thus the DOD had decided to front foot it in their way. They ordered me to use Anne and Dieter to find a publicly acceptable solution. That I did not say.
Deidre being the adjudicator of the situation pointed out that there was an additional partners clause in the prenuptial agreement that she had insisted on. As such it did not violate the agreement as I was not hiding it from my future wife and Elizabeth was delighted.
My daughters had a problem though. They were not going to accept Elizabeth being their step mother because they were already friends and basically sisters. They had no problem with me sleeping with Elizabeth or even marrying her but she was not going to be their mom. They didn't say that but it was clear there were going to be issues if Elizabeth tried to get parental.
"Daddy? Why don't you make Dee your slave and she can be our mom." Nicole asked.
Elizabeth was Deidre's second child. Her oldest had been conceived by her pimp when she was a hooker in New York. That child had died soon after being born from her pimp kicking Deidre for going into labor instead of turning a trick. She had raised Elizabeth on her own after getting pregnant by her sociology professor at Cornell. He had got her through their doctorate program fast and arranged a job at the college where she was now the dean of the faculty. He had shitted her off and stayed far away for fear of the divorce his wife would put him through. All this meant that Deidre was extremely afraid to have more children, I wasn't going to put her through that.
