He reached over without particular ceremony and put his hand on Marga's ass.
Not subtle. Not the way you'd touch someone privately. The full, open, proprietary grip of a man demonstrating ownership to an audience, his fingers pressing into the flesh of her through the wet bikini bottom, his thumb pressing against the curve of her hip.
Marga didn't flinch. She'd been here before. She smiled at the clients with her professional smile and let him.
The executives laughed.
Not unkindly — the male laughter of a shared joke, of a world in which this was simply what happened, a confirmation that Alexander was their kind of man after all.
"She's available?" one of them — the younger one, Hendrikson's son, barely thirty — said.
He was smiling. Half-joking. Testing.
Alexander's hand stayed on Marga's ass. His smile shifted slightly — not angry, but precise. Defining territory without drama.
