“What else?”
“Daltrey didn’t approve of them. He tried to warn Dante off Shay. Daltrey even tried to get Dante away from this place altogether.”
“What?” My heart started pumping.
I didn’t know if it was rage or shock I was experiencing. Why hadn’t Dante told me all this?
He nodded. “Daltrey was the golden boy. He escaped.”
“Why didn’t Dante escape?”
Teddy gestured we sit down on the bench once more and he seemed open to confessions, sitting much more relaxed now, his hands making big gestures.
“I don’t think he could see himself surviving without Lord Barlow’s money. Bad news was though, there was a condition. Someone had to take over the family business.”
“Did his uncle really run it, even though he was gay?”
“Yes. You catch on quick.”
“I’d rather not catch on to this family’s ins and outs at all, but whatever…”
“Ah, she doesn’t approve.”
“She doesn’t know all the facts yet,” I warned, giving him daggers.
“You think you’ve changed him, don’t you?” He laughed, covering his mouth with a hand. “Oh, how perfect. The girl thinks she’s performed a magic trick, when really the subterfuge is all his.”
“See, he said you’d try to mess with me.”
I’d spent enough time with Dante to know that I knew him. Our love was strong enough to combat all this rubbish, I felt sure of it.
“Yes, the reverse psychology is perfect, isn’t it?”
I blew out a dramatic, impatient breath and waited for him to elucidate.
“If Dante hasn’t already used you, he will. Even if he has used you, you’ve probably confused it with love, because that’s what he wants you to think. He’s the perfect man for what he does, Ciara. So handsome, so wild, so free… such betrayal, surely not. Looking into his green, green eyes, how could anyone ever imagine him being totally treacherous beneath?”
He is mine and he loves me, I know it. I concealed my private thoughts and appeared angry when I demanded, “Tell me why Sexton didn’t recognise the spa house when we came?”
He laughed. “That is the female entrance, darling. The male one is about a mile and a half the other way. Another house we use to tunnel into this one.”
I nodded because that made sense, actually. Which was nonsensical in itself…
“You’re slimey,” I accused him, “and I don’t like you.”
“All the better my dear, all the better.”
He removed his black robe and laid himself belly down on the concrete slab in the centre of the room.
“If you would, dear,” he asked.
I hoisted my shoe onto the table and spat, “Lick it first, bitch.”
“With pleasure.”
He slurped a long, slow lick along the tip of my high heel and I thrashed him with the bullwhip the moment I saw pleasure in his eyes from getting to touch even a tiny corner of my being.
“Vile, disgusting pig.”
“YES!” he cried, when I thrashed him again, the bull having a tendency to be more accurate than any other weapon, if used accordingly.
“BEG!”
“PLEASE, MORE!”
I slaughtered his back with strikes that were only superficial and would be gone by morning. I knew he enjoyed the humiliation more as I picked out an array of unsavoury nicknames for him, the best one being Titular Teddy.
(Yuck!)
When it was all over, my arm ached and I felt a dire need to drink vodka up in my room.
Panting as he lifted himself off the concrete slab, I noticed his latex shorts were full of hard cock. He smirked, studying me. “You could become legendary with those skills. Just perfect. He taught you so well. What a delightful fuck my wife will get when I get home. Thanks to you I’ll be hard the whole drive back.”
“She knows you come here?” I asked, as I wrapped the whip back around my arm.
“She knows.”
“Well, if you want to keep going back home to wifey as hard as the Maypole, you’ll have to do a little something for me.”
“Yes, what?”
“Find out what happened to his team.”
He shook his head. “If he doesn’t know anything, I sure as hell won’t find out anything more than he already has.”
“Just try, for me. Will you?”
He nodded briskly. “I’ll try but you should know, he’s the best… after all, he captured you, didn’t he?”
“Whatever. Promise you’ll do what you can.”
“I will.”
“Good.”
I left the room and met Shay in the corridor, loitering around.
“Don’t bother trying to wake me for breakfast tomorrow. I have a date with a notebook tonight.”
I had yet to admit it hurt that there were things about Dante I despised.
Twenty-Three
2012
A SATURDAY NIGHT IN PARIS. Cohésion. I had done this lots of times: gone with him to the club, dressed in latex or leather, or both. Maybe lace. Maybe I carried a whip. A cane. Maybe I carried nothing. In many respects, an ordinary night. In others, very different.
In the main orgy room we had placed ourselves as usual, me in a chair and him kneeling on all fours beside me like the perfect pet.
Wearing the corset he’d given me for my twenty-first birthday, I felt sexy for the first time in my life. Really sexy. I fancied I felt this way because it was a gift from a man, an intimate gift, a wondrous gift. I loved the smell and the feel of the soft cups holding my breasts, my nipples occasionally rubbing up against the brushed material inside them.
“Are you okay, pet?”
“Very well.”
He was quiet that night and I had half a mind wondering why. Quiet was an understatement in fact – he was silent.
“You normally at least ask to know what is happening?”
His head bowed, he’d need me to tell him – like always – what was going on if he wanted to know. He always wanted to know.
“Tonight, I don’t need to know.”
“Why?”
“I don’t answer questions if I don’t want to,” the real Dante spoke, not the one pretending to be a submissive.
It was a snap decision but I took the weapon I was carrying that night – my flogger – and smashed it across his back without giving him any warning.
He flinched and puffed on air hard, visibly shuddering.
I sat in shock, wondering how I’d become this. I’d lashed out. It wasn’t part of the game.
I wanted to physically harm him because he’d done this to me – always winding me like a coiled spring so that sometimes, I actually craved the imprint I knew I could make on him.
He’d made me someone else, someone I didn’t know.
Somehow this had gotten very personal.
And dangerous.
More silence followed.
He said nothing as his back turned a rainbow of reds, pinks and purples. I’d really clattered him hard.
When we left the club, he said nothing.
In the car, he said nothing.
At the apartment, he said nothing.
I didn’t speak because I couldn’t. I held back my words like I held back my sobs. I’d save them for myself, for later, when the soft snores that signified him sleeping echoed around the house we stayed in while in Paris.
I dressed for bed and crawled under the covers, waiting for him to sleep.
I heard his shower.
His toilet flush.
His electric toothbrush.
The clock said 1.31 a.m.
I waited for a long time.
The snores never came.
3.15 a.m.
No sleep.
I padded to the kitchen for a glass of water and while I drank, I watched out of the quaint wooden windows as birds began to swoop through the air. The land and its creatures waking, night was already giving way to day.
A large silver birch sat in the middle of a small courtyard below shared by all the residents of the building and a hive of life lived in that tree.
Life, it was something I was missing.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked.
I didn’t turn to look at him. I could barely even process he was present at a time when I really, really needed my own company. I did need to be alone. Just this once.
“I’m–” I began to say something, not sure what it was, but I stopped myself.
My hands clammy, my stomach churning, I’d barely eaten yesterday.
Barely eaten since he gave me that corset.
Since I tried to flee.
Since he caught me.
Since I realised… I had signed my life away that day we signed the contract.
I knew that now.
“I want to understand something,” I finally said, courage returning to me. Maybe aqua courage, if there was such a thing. Usually it was vodka in my glass and Dante had often commented that he didn’t like my drinking habits. He said I should drink red wine for my heart and vodka to numb my mind, if ever I needed to do such a thing.
“Go on.”
“Are you a submissive? Really?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Earlier… when I… you didn’t rebuke me for it when we got home.”
“It was just a tap.”
“It wasn’t. My wrist still hurts from the way I did it without thinking.”
Putting my glass down on the sideboard, I rubbed my aching wrist subconsciously.
“People not versed in our culture only ever imagine that the person at risk in a BDSM dynamic is a sub.”
I turned and stared at him. He wore just pyjama trousers, his whole torso bare. He always went shirtless at the club and in the dungeon and I’d seen his arms and chest naked, a million times, but never before had I seen him like this. In his eyes, I saw pain and worry, of the non-physical sort.
“The dominant can get hurt, too?”
“Yes.”
When he said the word, it was just a word. A three-character word. Tiny word. Insignificant word really. People use the word “yes” a billion times a year, if not more.
That one word made me sob into my own hands. Something came over me.
After a few moments, I felt his arms come around me in a protective hug. I sobbed into the centre of his chest and held the shoulders I’d long wanted to hold, just like this.
He really held me while I cried.
When my sobs abated, he picked me up and carried me to bed. Wearing my cotton nightdress which fell below the knee, I felt his strong hands through the thin material and committed the feeling of his imprint on me to memory.
He put me back to bed, pulling down the covers, tucking me up tight.
He laid down behind me on top of the covers, one hand resting on my shoulder.
Playing with my hair, he sang to me as we both watched the sun begin to fly higher than the tall apartment buildings all around us.
I smiled, listening to The Who’s ‘Behind Blue Eyes’.
It was the most intimate moment of my entire life and when he finished the song, he asked me one thing.
“When I try to sing to you again, will you stop me next time?”
“Never.”
“That’s my girl.”
He left the bed but never left my thrashing heart.
Sleep eluded me entirely that night, the lyrics telling me everything I needed to know.
I was in his life for a reason and patience would reward me. I had time and faith. I also felt like I already had him.
Twenty-Four
2016
WHEN I WOKE AT PUSSY Palace, I found the notebook clutched to my bosom, the pen still in my hand. I’d fallen asleep singing The Who to myself like he had done that night four years ago. Except when I sung it, I merely sang the chorus on repeat with ‘blue eyes’ replaced by ‘green eyes’.
I didn’t bother to look at the clock. I felt overwhelmed by some unease which had settled deep in my stomach. I couldn’t get rid of it.
Part of me didn’t care… part of me did.
Dante owned Pussy Palace. He’d owned it all this time… and I hadn’t known. I hadn’t even known it existed. I’d been naïve to imagine places like this didn’t exist! Let alone that they were owned by people I knew – nay – a man I loved, even.
Did he really always love me? How could he stand not touching me for so many years? Wanting him for so long had been the most torturous form of foreplay imaginable.
In my mind’s eye I saw Paris… I saw it before we were together, and afterwards. It had always been our retreat, our escape, and we’d shared times there we never had in London. It was like he was two different beasts in two different cities.
Since we’d visited Paris as lovers, our weekends there had been more than memorable, they’d been exquisite. Breakfast in the nude. Lunch and sometimes dinner, too. Dancing on the terrace while he hummed or sang. He loved Billy Joel, Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Barry White… etc. He cooked, he cleaned. Sometimes wearing just an apron. He fawned on me, begged for me. Slept with me, held me. Loved me, completely.
All this beauty, all this happiness had become mine since we started sleeping together, but still unease made my stomach flip, like a sherbet fountain doing the fandango with a bottle of lemonade in there. He’d kept me at arm’s length for so, so long.
“Why, why?” I constantly asked the room.
My mind chased back to unhappier times, to times when I was miserable…
Back at the Knightsbridge house, I even sometimes contemplated really hurting myself, just so I could go to hospital and tell one of the nurses I was being held hostage. The one thing that had always brought me back from the brink was the thought that Dante could be saved – and that one day he would capture me in his arms and never let go.
Leaving me at the Pussy Palace made me feel like he had already let go. The other day he said he wouldn’t leave me if I couldn’t take care of myself. Now I knew, I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t stay a moment longer.
A rap on the door signalled a visitor so I quickly sat up in bed and arranged the sheets so I was decent.
“Come in.”
Dante walked through the door and the moment he stepped into the room, I flung myself towards him and he gathered me tight in his arms. I cried desperately into his shirt and he held me for a long time as I wailed. I didn’t know why I was crying.
“My darling, come on. You can’t keep upsetting yourself like this.”
He climbed onto the bed with me, wearing his shirt, trousers and smart shoes, holding me close. When I was quieter, he whispered, “If it’s not Teddy, who is it?”
“How–”
“The cameras, darling. I have cameras everywhere, remember? For security.”
Yeah, for security… what rot.
“With microphones?”
“Oh yes.”
“I want to leave.”
“You can’t leave. If it’s not Teddy, the killer is still out there.”
I blinked tears from my eyes and pleaded, “Please god, please. I can’t stay here! Please don’t make me.”
He frowned. “God Ciara, he’s really rattled you!”
“I’ve rattled myself… I don’t know, but I can’t stand living without you! I can’t think or breathe without you.”
He smothered my cries with his lips and gave me a delicious, sensuous kiss.
“Tell me you love me,” I begged, my hands like pincers around his wrists, my eyes desperately searching Dante’s.
He clutched my hair in his hands and zeroed in on my eyes. “I love you.”
“Then get me out of here, by any means necessary. I swear I’ll die trapped in this place without you. I swear it.”
“Then I’ll do better… I’ll stay here with you.”
“THANK YOU!”
He buried his face in my belly, hugging my hips tight in his arms.
; “I can’t be without you either, Ciara.”
He looked up into my eyes, only briefly, but I saw encroaching tears.
“Please don’t, Dante.”
“I’m in love with you, Ciara. Don’t ever doubt it.”
“Show me then, just show me.”
He ripped the bedcovers off me and lifted up my nightdress in a hurry. Licking into my slit, the tip of his tongue made me forget what it was I’d even been crying about.
***
Dante
SHE slept in my arms in the attic room. She’d cried herself to sleep after I licked her to orgasm, lord knew why. I’d basked naïvely in her sexy cries as I licked her but when I tried to get inside her, it became all too much and all her emotions poured out of her. I gave up trying for my own pleasure and accepted she was in no state to love me. She’d obviously had a shock after hearing from Teddy that my house of ill-repute was used for stealing secrets, too.
Laid next to her, I watched her sleep and my thoughts turned backwards. I didn’t know when exactly I fell in love with her, not the precise moment anyway. It seemed like it must have been forever ago, though. I remembered the night I realised it could only be love that I felt for her; it was the first night she tried to run from me, when she was just twenty-one years old… I knew then. She was very cross that night and I was seriously close to pulling her to me, smothering her in kisses and getting her beneath my body. Since Daltrey died, I’d known that if ever I possessed anything of value, I could lose that too. Anyone could lose anything, but I’d never realised until he was so cruelly taken from this world.
Ciara ran upstairs to her room like a child that night and I found her calm, just her serene self once more, but then for some reason we quarrelled again and she threatened to leave and when she started crying, her tears were like scissors to my soul. Those were the first tears of hers I ever witnessed. I couldn’t handle it when she cried. I couldn’t take it. Something overcame me that night and I had to admit it to myself if to nobody else… I loved her with all my heart.
I wanted to quell those tears, smash them in fact; ransack her sadness with kisses and whispers of my love. I wanted her so badly, but at the same time, I couldn’t risk her ever finding out I loved her dearly – in case she loved me too and then got hurt, because of me.
The Contract (Nightlong #1) Page 25
