She justhad to be patient. Eventually, she knew, she'd work her way down to thelast layer, peel it off, and there would be the vulnerable, frightenedl...ttle thing willing to do her bidding and anyone else's she assigned."Well, I figure there's three options for you, darling, if you don'twish to comply. The door's one... You can live on the streets. Second,your sister and her husband just had a baby; maybe you can hire out astheir nanny. The third, however, seems to me the most likely: You can. Ryan’s house had been the first project she’d undertaken as an interior designer, and it had taken her a year to plan every single detail of it. It had been hard work but well worth it, after all, they had been best friends since the tender age of thirteen. After slipping into Ryan’s favourite old T-shirts, which hit her mid-thigh and was therefore, she reasoned, decent, she began cooking breakfast. The smell of a fry up reached the bedroom door, which she’d left slightly open and Ryan woke up. "I reluctantly took my pajama off and stand there wearing only a whitepanty. I tried to hide my embarrassment. Despite my embarrassment,Cindy seemed to care none about me being naked."Impressive. You have a relatively hairless body for a former boy,"she said "But you still need to shave!" She dragged me to thebathroom and instructed me to shave all my body hair, everythingbelow eyebrows. Firstly I protested, but she argued that I will losethe hair anyway. It took me an hour to shave everywhere.. She’d be about seven months pregnant by then, and as she put it, “I want to make sure the baby bump shows in all my wedding photos.” She had such a positive attitude about everything. Her parents were still trying to get used to the mores of our family, and the wedding with continued relations with us just flummoxed them.Cindy got pregnant too. We didn’t worry too much about paternity, but she thought it might be Matt, Ryan, or me, since the timing would have been about right. She wasn’t due.