The Wonders Read Online Free Page A

hot flush of lust, the guerrilla erection, the schoolbag draped across the groin. At thirty-one years old, he should have had at least a touch more control, but no. Clenched between his thighs and crushing his balls down into an impossible squeeze, his semihard cock pulsed each time the image of that pink cleft flitted through his mind.
    Rhona picked up a folder and tapped it against the arm of her chair. “We have tentative bookings starting in summer and I haven’t done a bit of promotion yet. It’s word of mouth. The rumors are flying. I’ve given you a paper copy and an electronic copy of what we’ll be doing up until the launch. What I want you to do is check whether there’s anything you aren’t comfortable about. I think you’ll be fine but—”
    â€œComfortable, that’s what I need, sure. I could wear a nappy. That would be different. Sexy sheep chick in nappy. Oh yes, that’s right. With a dummy. And a comforter. Oh, kinky.”
    Rhona waited for Kathryn to finish speaking before going on as if she had heard nothing. To prepare the group for performance, she said, media training would begin immediately: posture, facial control, body language, pacing answers, deflection and targeting, voice modulation. Learning how to deal with questions and the “rubes who think you’re a toy.” The coming weeks would be intensive and intense. Back to school. Leon hadlearned little the first time around. Perhaps this would give him some of the social skills everyone else seemed to have absorbed naturally.
    â€œLife is short,” Rhona said. “Fashions change, tastes change, laws change. Let’s get you out there before they make us illegal.”

I N THE WARMTH of the limousine after the airplane ride to Vermont, Kathryn fell into a deep sleep, her head tucked into her shoulder and her face half-covered by the high collar of her velvet cape. Christos and Rhona talked in low tones that stopped and started like the rumble of a faulty engine while Leon stared out the window at the snow-covered fields and the spindly trees. It was spring. Although the trees seemed bare, they had a greenish haze in the sunlight that must have been the beginning of new leaves. Having never traveled farther than Sydney, Leon had only ever experienced this kind of landscape as the backdrop to a movie. And here he was, a character in the movie. In this new surreal existence, Santa might come riding over the hill in his red uniform and sleigh.
    Rhona reached across the divide between the limousine seats and tapped Kathryn’s knee.
    â€œWake up, honey, we’re home. Boys, welcome to Overington.”
    Leon swiveled to face the front as the driver pressed a button on the leather dashboard of the car, and the steel and timber gates in front of the car swung open, only to reveal another pair of steel and timber gates. A wall of thick cypress hedge, six feet high, grown up and around metal posts and rails, formed the outer fence. Curls of rusty razor wire crowned the inner fence of cyclone wire. Between the two fences was a no-man’s-land of melting gray snow and stony ground, and beyond the fences stood a copse of pine and spruce. Farther to the west, a long tiled roofline with upturned corners, reminiscent of a Japanese temple, rose above banks of white snow.
    The second gate began to open as soon as the first had closed.
    â€œThe double perimeter is for the animals.” Rhona nodded to the two men patrolling the inner fence. “I told you I give sanctuary to retired circus animals?”
    â€œThey never try to escape though, do they.” Kathryn was looking at the razor wire.
    How did she feel being part prey animal, part predator? Leon wondered. Surely she would smell different from other animals. Not human, not sheep, but something in between. How did the circus animals behave when they scented her?
    â€œThey might,” Rhona said. She made a mock tigerish