The Darker Side of Love (A Dark Erotica Boxed Set)

by Tara Crescent

  My darkest desires sometimes frightened me. Miles would be horrified by my fantasies, by the dark recesses of my mind and by what I craved.

  “Smiley Miley,” I muttered into my wine, calling him by the nickname I’d come up for him when I was eight and he was an infinitely older and far cooler thirteen.

  For an instant, his lips twitched with real amusement. “Do you remember what happened when I retaliated?”

  I laughed. Just once when I was twelve, Miles had called me ‘Smelly Kelly’ in response. I must have been driving him crazy, this kid trailing around after seventeen-year old Miles asking him to play with her, repeatedly sing-songing the nickname he detested.

  But I’d just got my period for the first time and I thought he called me that because he could smell the blood. I burst into tears, ran home and poured out my woes to my mother, who tried hard not to laugh and told me not to bother Miles. His own mother was a lot harder on him. When she heard, she’d promptly grounded him for two weeks. He never called me ‘Smelly Kelly’ again.

  “You got into such trouble,” I remembered.

  “That I did,” he confirmed with a twinkle in his eyes. For a moment, there was a brief glimpse of the person he’d been before he moved to New York and became the uptight CEO. Maybe that was why when he asked me what I did last night, instead of being vague as I usually was, I gave him an honest answer. Or maybe I just wanted to shock him. After all, I wasn’t that awkward child anymore.

  “I met some guy at a bar,” I replied, peeking at his expression through my lashes as I sipped my wine. “I was tempted to go home with him but he was a complete stranger. I had to pretend to be interested in him so that he would ask me out again, when I really just want to use him for his body.” I sighed, a loud, exaggerated noise. “You billionaires have it so much easier with your sex clubs. No worrying that the guy might be filming you on his cell phone, no worries that he might turn out to be an axe-murderer.”

  His lips twitched. I had wanted to shock him but he just looked amused. “You are very naïve, Kelly,” he murmured, “if you think the real danger is physical.”

  “What is the real danger then?”

  There was a slight edge in his voice when he spoke next, and the mask Miles wore in public slipped just a little. “Fear for your physical safety — that comes of watching too much TV. Physical violence isn’t the biggest risk.” He leaned forward, pinning me in place with his intent gaze. “The real danger is that once you take a step on this path, you might not want to return.”

  “Please,” I scoffed. Miles was being protective. “I like sex as much as the next person but in the end, it’s just sex.”

  “The next person is me.” His voice was as smooth as dark velvet and his tone spoke directly to some restrained bit of me. I swallowed as sudden unexpected heat ran through my body. Sure, I used to have childish fantasies about Miles when I was thirteen, but as an adult? I’d always assumed he was too vanilla for me. But he was looking at me speculatively right now and the customary politeness was absent.

  He reached for his wallet and fished a business card out of it, handing it to me. It was solid black, matte in finish, and it had no lettering on it. Just a phone number.

  “What is this?” I heard a tremor in my voice.

  His eyes mocked me. “It’s the billionaire sex club,” he said dryly.

  “Bullshit.”

  He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Suit yourself, Kelly,” he said. Our food appeared and we ate the rest of our meal in silence.

  I actually had work to do that afternoon, which tended to be rare on Fridays during the summer. I had bolts of fabric to buy for my employer’s upcoming winter line, so I headed to New York’s fast-disappearing garment district and spent the next four hours touching and stroking fabric and buying sample one-yard cuts of cashmere and wool.

  I would usually have been tempted to buy myself some fabric as well, an unfortunate side-effect of being a fabric addict working in the fashion industry. But today my thoughts were on the piece of cardstock in my wallet and my mind couldn’t stop churning.

  It had to be a joke. I’d lived in New York for five years and in all that time Miles had never given me the impression of being anything other than perfectly vanilla. There was no way he belonged to a private sex club. Most likely this was some kind of carefully constructed practical joke.

  Except I’d brought up the topic, not him. Besides, Miles had never been the kind for practical jokes.

  Could Miles belong to a private sex club? I’d never seen him photographed in the society pages. There had never been any gossip about him and a date. Occasionally, I’d tell him bits and pieces about my sex life, mostly for the purposes of shocking him, but he’d never revealed anything in turn about his private doings.

  But Smiley Miley in a sex club? My mind couldn’t wrap around that concept, no matter how hard I tried. It can’t be a sex club, I told myself.

  What if it is? another part of me countered.

  There was a desire for darkness in me. I’d hinted at it to Miles today, though I hadn’t quite said those exact words. A secret, hidden, taboo yearning to be used by men; to be treated as an object for their pleasure and nothing more. To be taken hard and without concern for my own needs. I’d never really explored this part of my personality, always keeping it firmly in check. The reality of ensuring my own safety had so far won over my filthy longings.

  But what if it were real? What if I could explore my needs safely?

  Again and again, my mind came back to the central sticking point. I couldn’t see Miles St. Clair at a sex club. I couldn’t imagine him letting go and giving in to his needs. If he ever had a dark side, he had buried it so deep that it would never see the light of day.

  That night I dialed the number.

  Chapter 2

  Of course it went to voicemail. A beep followed by a woman’s voice bid me to leave a message.

  Feeling utterly ridiculous, I left one. “Hello,” I spoke into the void. “My name is Kelly Mitchell. Miles St. Clair gave me this number to call.” I thought about what to say next and realized there was nothing I couldn’t say without sounding like a fool. I left my phone number and hung up.

  Less than five minutes later the phone rang. “Could I speak to Kelly Mitchell please?” It was a woman’s voice, polite and cultured.

  “This is she,” I replied, glancing at the number on the display. It was the same number that Miles had given me.

  “My name is Anna,” she said. “I’m in charge of recruitment at Club Phoenix. Miles St. Clair said you might be calling.”

  I still wasn’t sure if this was an elaborate hoax and if Anna was just a friend of Miles. “Okay?” I said cautiously.

  “You left us a message?”

  “I did,” I replied. “Can you tell me what Club Phoenix is?”

  “Club Phoenix is a very exclusive private sex club,” she replied readily. “Like I said, I’m in charge of recruitment. Miles St. Clair has vouched for your discretion but that’s just the start. If you are interested in becoming a member, then I’ll need to assess your skills, willingness and fit.”

  I probed, figuring that if it were a hoax she’d be revealed if I continued my line of questioning. “What does that involve?”

  “For starters, we’ll meet and you can fill out a questionnaire where I can determine what kind of sexual experience you have. Then we’ll talk about willingness to partake in sexual activity, things you are interested in, things you have no interest in trying, that kind of thing.”

  “For starters?”

  “Yes,” she said patiently. I was asking a lot of questions but maybe she was used to that. “There’ll be live auditions as well.”

  Live auditions. I will have to do live auditions. “That’s sex? In front of a crowd? And if I’m good enough I’ll be allowed in?”

  Her laughter was light and amused. “Not quite,” she clarified. “There is rarely a crowd unless you’d like there to be. Thi
s is just a way for us to determine what you would like and what you wouldn’t. If you aren’t a good fit, you’ll be the first person to see that. We’ve never needed to ask someone to leave the club for that reason.”

  Okay. If she was fake, she was very good at ad-libbing answers to my questions. “You said we would meet?”

  “Tomorrow if you are free?” she queried politely. “We can meet for lunch.” She named a trendy eatery in the Meat Packing district and I arranged to meet her at one in the afternoon.

  I dreamed that night of darkness and of light. Of a twisting road that split into two pathways and I was lost and I didn’t know which way to go.

  I dreamed of men taking me hard. My cries of pleasure and pain filled the night and I couldn’t tell them apart. I dreamed of kneeling at the feet of a man with shoulder-length hair in shades of caramel and honey and chocolate. His gaze, with those intent green-glass eyes penetrated my soul, but if he learned secrets from his glimpse into my innermost self, he kept them to himself.

  I dreamed of being slapped and choked, being whipped and flogged. In the flickers of images in my mind I moaned with longing and I offered myself up for more. Cocks were thrust down my throat till I gagged. I licked ropes of semen off the floor. I barked like a dog in heat when ordered.

  There were needles and blood. Ropes and chains. There was a fist in my cunt and a ring gag in my mouth, holding me open for the line of men who wanted my throat. My eyes were wild and staring. My body heaved and flailed. Was what I felt arousal? I couldn’t tell.

  A voice spoke to me. Dream of forgetting. Dream of remembering. Dream of oblivion, my pet.

  In my dream a top was spinning, spinning. And bottle-green eyes watched everything.

  When I woke, I opened my eyes with the conviction that my dream was no mere dream but a warning of the many myriad paths that lay in front of me. When I walked the road, I would need to choose the fork I took with care.

  “I’m meeting someone,” I told the concierge as I walked up to the restaurant Anna had told me to meet her at. It was a beautiful summer day. There was absolutely no humidity in the air, which was rare for New York. The sun shone down and a slight breeze in the air caressed my skin. The nerves I had felt this morning as I’d dressed for lunch felt very unnecessary.

  The place Anna had picked seemed to be hopping with people. On the front, there were a couple of tables with festive checked tablecloths. Very Parisian. A blackboard advertised brunch and my stomach growled. I’d been guzzling coffee by the gallon all morning and I was starving.

  “What’s the name of your party Ma’am?” the woman at the desk asked me with a polite smile. She was dressed completely in black, as was the rest of the wait staff. It made for an incongruous contrast to the romantic French music piping in through the speakers. Edith Piaf warbled out something mournful about the love of her life, but her voice was almost buried by the clinking of silverware, the pitter-patter of high heels on wooden floors and the hum of conversation.

  “Anna? Sorry, I don’t know her last name.” I wondered if the concierge thought I was on a blind date.

  “Ms. Smith is already at her booth,” she replied pleasantly. “This way please.”

  Ms. Smith. Could that be any more obvious of an assumed name? She should have just called herself Jane Doe. I snickered a little as I followed the concierge through the noisy front part of the restaurant to the significantly quieter back, where there were four booths, three of them empty. Which was slightly odd given the busy front, but then I noticed the sliding glass doors that lead to the bustling back patio. Every single person was taking advantage of the fantastic weather to eat outside and Anna Smith, if that was indeed her name, was using the quiet to her advantage.

  “Kelly,” the woman seated in the booth greeted me with a friendly smile. I guess there was some part of me that had thought that Anna would look like a Dominatrix. You know, jet black hair slicked back into a ponytail, tight clothing, knee high boots. Because we were meeting for lunch, she wouldn’t be wearing a corset, of course. But I’d imagined I’d see glints of leather in her apparel.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. Anna was blonde and in her late thirties. Her shoulder-length hair was worn in loose waves around her face, and she wore a pink linen sundress that made her look fresh and wholesome. I recognized the dress. It was Bottega Venata from a few seasons ago, the dress that had made people outside the industry notice them for being more than just a handbag company.

  “Nice dress,” I said, sliding in.

  She grinned. “Ah, yes. You work in fashion, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “How in-depth is my dossier?” I asked wryly. It was a sex club for billionaires. They’d have to be insane to even let me near the place without making sure I was thoroughly investigated.

  “I like how matter of fact you are,” she responded. “It’s very tiresome dealing with faux-outrage. To answer your question, your dossier, as you call it, is as detailed as we can make it in sixteen hours. But that’s not really relevant.”

  That was subtly done. She was really telling me that there was nothing in the information they had gathered about me that was a problem. Had there been anything, my lunch appointment would have been cancelled.

  “Shall we get to it?” she asked after we both ordered food. “I want to make sure I give you plenty of time to ask any questions.” Her face softened into a smile. “This can sometimes feel intimidating.”

  One issue was uppermost on my mind, so I thought I’d get it out of the way right at the start. “What does this cost?” I asked her tentatively. “Miles is the billionaire. I’m the assistant to a small fashion designer in New York.”

  She nodded. “It doesn’t cost anything during your evaluation,” she replied. “After, there are opportunities to have your membership fees waived.”

  I wanted to ask her how it was possible to waive fees, but I didn’t. I knew the answer; I wasn’t naïve. My body and my ability to be discreet would pay for my membership. I didn’t know how I felt about that, but I reasoned that that was a long time away. There was an evaluation that needed to happen first.

  Our food appeared in front of us. I dug into my plate of eggs, bacon and toast, and Anna took a bite of the egg-white omelette that she’d requested. “How long is the evaluation period?” I asked as we ate.

  Her shoulders lifted in a shrug. “As long as it needs to be,” she replied.

  “Is it to make sure I do as I’m told?” I probed. Her answer had been unsatisfyingly vague.

  There was a faint smile on her face as she shook her head. “It’s to make sure we can trust you to play safely.”

  I was puzzled. “I’m not dominant,” I said, wondering if she hadn’t picked that up about me. “Surely playing safely is the Dominant’s responsibility.”

  “You have a lot to learn about BDSM,” she shot back with a displeased look. “I’ll give you some reference resources before I leave. No, safety is a shared responsibility between the Dominants and the submissives.”

  I thought about that as I chewed on my meal. The eggs and bacon were excellent, my scrambled eggs perfectly fluffy and seasoned. Too many New York restaurants were crowded just because they were good at courting the press and the food bloggers. This particular restaurant had the food to match.

  “Shall we get to the questionnaire?” she asked me. “This one is about prior sexual experience.”

  “I’ve done it,” I quipped.

  She laughed out aloud. “Let’s define it,” she said, “I’m assuming that’s yes for vaginal intercourse.”

  I nodded. “How many partners?” she continued.

  I flushed. I knew she wasn’t judging me and that it was her job to ask me these questions. But saying the number would still make me feel judged. She must have noticed it in my expression, because she hastily added, “I just need a range. Under five, between five and ten, between ten and twenty-five and over twenty-five.”

  “Between ten and twenty-five,”
I replied, my cheeks flushed. I’d managed to stay in that range only by the barest whisker.

  She pushed away her empty plate and pulled a piece of paper and a pen from her tote-bag. “We don’t use technology,” she explained as she checked a box. “We are very old-school.”

  “Hackers?” I guessed.

  “The threat of them,” she responded. She rolled her eyes. “Too many resident billionaires, all twitchy about being in the press.”

  I liked her. She seemed very matter-of-fact about the billionaires she worked for. Which reminded me, she hadn’t mentioned Miles, the person responsible for handing me the key to this particular rabbit hole. “I can see Miles being twitchy about being in the press,” I started. “Miles St. Clair in a sex club.” I rolled my eyes. “Will wonders never cease?”

  She didn’t take the bait. “I’m sorry,” she said politely. “I can’t discuss other members. Back to the questionnaire, have you had anal sex before?”

  Ah, I could definitely see Anna as a Domme now. My line of questioning had been shut down quite firmly, but she had remained friendly. It was very well done. “Yes,” I replied to her question about anal sex. “Also between ten and twenty-five.”

  She wrote that down. “Multiple partners?” she queried.

  My cheeks were red as I remembered one night shortly after I’d moved to New York. Two hot guys in a nightclub and I hadn’t even got their names. It had been my only ménage experience. “Two guys, just once.”

  “And the reason you haven’t repeated the experience?” she queried, her hand poised over her sheet of paper. “Opportunity or not interested?”

  I laughed shortly. “Oh, I’m definitely interested,” I responded. “Just a lack of opportunity.” Her lips twitched as she noted down that bit of trivia.