by Chloe Cox
Table of Contents
Epilogue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Her Once And Future Dom (Club Volare 11)
Chloe Cox
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
1
Theoretically, Simone Delavigne’s day could get worse in a lot of ways. Her mind was creative enough to summon a thousand unlikely scenarios involving alien invasions, giant robots, and/or meteors crashing into Earth where she stood.
Luckily none of that was going to happen.
Realistically, she was still late and covered in coffee.
“Nooooo,” Simone whispered in a teeny-weeny voice, teeth clenched, knees pressed together hard enough that she hoped muscle strength and force of will would keep the coffee from reaching her new car’s upholstery.
The warm wetness she felt seeping through her white linen business suit confirmed that willpower still wasn’t stronger than gravity. And this was her “hell yeah, I’m taking back my life; white pants, take a chance!” outfit, carefully chosen for her first day on the job as Club Volare NOLA’s new publicist. And because the city’s most exclusive and safest BDSM club only needed a publicist because of rumors about Simone’s own very public screw-ups, she had picked the white linen stunner to make her feel both invincible and amazing.
In retrospect, she probably should have gone for something that actually was invincible. Like a suit of armor. A coffee-colored suit of armor.
The guy in the Miata who had rear-ended her was long gone, too. He hadn’t even gotten out of the car. He’d just backed up, swerved into the oncoming lane, and blown past Simone and through the red light in front of her. While giving her the finger.
“He was just an absolute peach,” she said to herself, and looked down to assess the damage.
Yeah, complete coffee-related annihilation. She looked like she’d tried to hug a wet, dirty dog before it jumped in her lap for a cuddle. She’d pulled over to pull herself together, even though Club Volare was only a few blocks away, but this was going to require more than just a quick shirt swap. Good thing she always kept an extra outfit in the trunk of her car. She could pull in to the Club Volare drive, sneak into the bathroom off the foyer, and be changed and ready to go in…
Well, maybe she’d only be twenty minutes late.
Being on time and kicking ass and looking invincible while doing it were all important for a few reasons: one, it was her first day on the PR job that would redeem her past mistakes and prove that she was both sober and had her shit together, and two, because that job would involve seeing the man—the Dom—who broke her heart.
Holt Manning. The best Dom she’d ever had. The only man she’d ever dreamed of a future with. And the guy who had probably saved her life by dumping her almost a year ago.
The short version was this: Simone had stopped drinking as a prerequisite to join Club Volare, but she hadn’t really gotten a handle on the things that made her want to drink in the first place. She’d met Holt. They’d fallen in love, and he’d made it clear sobriety was a hard line for him. He wouldn’t be with her if she drank. And then things with her family had gotten crazy, Simone had fallen off the wagon and ended up in the hospital, and as a result she’d lost Holt, forever, and she’d gotten the club in the newspapers for all the wrong reasons—but she’d gotten sober afterwards. She’d gotten her ass to rehab, she’d leaned on her Club Volare friends and family, and she’d put her life back together. She’d even started her own public relations company. It had taken almost a year.
And now she was going back to the club where she and Holt used to play, where Holt was still a member, where she would have to see him with other subs, and she would have to try to do her job while pretending she didn’t still want him.
You don’t want to be with him, she reminded herself as she waited for the gate to Club Volare’s garden district mansion grounds to swing open. You know being with him didn’t work.
Simone had had lots of time to think about everything in rehab—that was, like, all they let you do in rehab—and, well, she and Holt had always been just too different. They had a physical connection that even Simone didn’t understand, but Holt was a straight-arrow investigator for the US Attorney’s office. The kind of guy who was always in control, who always knew what he wanted. Who saw everything in black and white and always—always—did the right thing. Meanwhile, Simone was a mostly cheerful mess who lived her life firmly in the gray areas.
So being with him had meant living under the ever-increasing pressure of expectations. Not that Holt ever said anything like that. But Simone could feel it. And eventually, she’d failed to live up to those expectations in a rather spectacular manner by making a bunch of mistakes and then nearly drinking herself to death to try to forget about those mistakes. The one saving grace about that night was that no one in her life, not even Holt, knew about the worst of it. No one except for one person Simone would rather forget all about. The Asshole.
So no, she didn’t want to be with Holt again. Not after all of that. Not with the memory of how much it had hurt to disappoint him.
But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t always love him a little bit, even if she’d worked really hard not to be in love with him anymore. Or that she wouldn’t want to climb him like a tree the first time she saw him.
Especially since she hadn’t found another Dom since Holt.
Especially since she hadn’t even had sex since Holt.
“No! No thinking about sex!” she said, out loud, to herself, in her Camry.
Then she looked out the window as she slowed to a stop in Club Volare’s drive. She was about to walk into Club Volare, the hottest, most exclusive BDSM club in New Orleans, and she wasn’t supposed to think about sex?
There wasn’t a single corner of that place where she didn’t have a memory of Holt. Of his fingers sliding up her thighs, of his big hands on her bare bottom, of his…
“Goddammit,” she muttered.
Simone threw open her door and got out of the car as gracefully as she could, her eyes scanning the property. Club Volare New Orleans really was beautiful. The founding partne
r of the NOLA chapter, Gavin Colson, was an old family friend, and the man knew how to run a BDSM club. He’d bought and refurbished a stately Garden District mansion with extensive grounds and total, utter privacy. He’d turned the entire property in an oasis of kinky fun, and Simone knew from personal experience where every set of restraints and spanking bench was located. Somehow, she thought with nearly a year without going to any play parties, the memories would fade.
She was one hundred percent totally wrong about that. Simone took a deep breath, her lungs filling with the sweet scent of honeysuckle azaleas, and she could almost feel the leather on her wrists.
On her thighs.
On her…
“Nope!” she said, out loud, again. She looked hard around the drive area, and into the open door of the covered carport, searching for any sign of Holt’s mud-battered truck or his government car.
Nothing. There was a mysterious silver minivan that screamed “Mom-mobile,” but there was literally zero chance that that belonged to Holt. Simone gave a big ol’ sigh of relief, and then got a move on.
She gathered her purse and walked around to open the trunk, where she kept the change of clothes, and did an inventory. Publicity campaign proposal, research summaries, even mock-ups. All there.
And her phone.
Her phone that was blinking one steady, unsettling alert at her. It was just a tiny red dot, but with the amount of fear it inspired in her, it might as well have been a five-alarm klaxon.
That was the thing that had really screwed up her day. More than the hit-and-run, more than the coffee, more than being late. Hell, maybe it was why she’d been such a mess all morning in the first place. She’d woken up to another text from an unknown number, which meant it was a text from a burner phone that she hadn’t blocked yet, purchased by the one truly terrible human being Simone had ever encountered, and the one person who had truly seen her rock bottom on the night she messed up her life. The Asshole.
Alan Crennel.
Alan Crennel was the kind of guy whose entrance into a silent movie would have been heralded by dramatic piano and mustache twirling. He was the ruthlessly competitive owner of the shadiest BDSM club in existence, Sinsations, and he was the man who had repeatedly tried to close down Club Volare. He was the person responsible for the rumors that Simone’s trip to the hospital had been Club Volare’s responsibility. That was the whole reason the club needed a PR campaign. And as much as Simone tried to forget about that she’d ever met him, Alan Crennel wouldn’t let her.
Simone tossed her phone next to the emergency backpack she always had on hand, then shed her blazer. No replacement for that, but she did have a clean camisole in the backpack, and another skirt. She tucked them under her arm and grabbed the briefcase with her files.
Her phone buzzed, dancing across her trunk. Another one. “2 New Unread Text Messages.” This time she couldn’t help but see the preview.
“Talk to me or else…”
She slammed the trunk shut. She didn’t need the phone in the meeting. She might not need it ever again.
Sure, that seemed reasonable.
Shaking her head, Simone blinked the moisture out of her eyes as she headed towards the steps up to the front porch. She might have complicated feelings about this stately old place, strewn with creepers and old antiques and flowers, but it was a safe space, especially for submissives. If there was anywhere on the planet to have a minor breakdown before a big meeting, this was it.
Which was good, because that was now the plan. No matter how supportive everyone at the club had been, Simone knew she still needed to prove that she was worthy of that support. She was not going to screw this up, and she was not going to freak out in the middle of a meeting. She was especially not going to freak out in the middle of a meeting because of Alan “the Asshole” Crennel, both as a point of pride, and because that was not something she ever planned to explain to anyone, ever. She was going to lock herself in the bathroom, have a good cry, change her clothes, and then she was going to pull it all together and go get shit done.
Simone walked up the beautiful old steps, heaved the old wooden door open, and strode across the foyer in all the coffee-splattered grandeur she could muster. She slipped into the bathroom and tried to lock the door, only to find that it was busted again. Whatever—it’s not like anyone would be here this early. She could tell Luke about it later, and he’d fix it. She dropped her briefcase on the fainting couch, turned to face herself in the huge gilded mirror, and laughed out loud.
She was a mess.
It was such a shock that Simone was down to her bra and panties by the time she remembered the last time she’d looked at herself in that mirror.
It was while Holt had her bent over the basin. He’d had her watch as he fucked her to orgasm and back again. She’d never done that with anyone else before. Watched herself. In fact, she’d always been sort of shy, for a sub, until Holt.
That had been a year ago. Before Simone had ruined everything. Before she’d lost Holt, her dignity, her public reputation, and her old job. Before the Asshole. She wanted it to all be in the past. She wanted to be moving toward the future, toward a new life. She had worked so hard for this. And just when she felt like she might have a shot, on the day she’d planned to start over, she had a car accident, a coffee accident, and two unread texts from the Asshole threatening to drag her back into that all darkness.
On the other hand, Simone thought as she stood in her bra and panties while tears began to prick at the corners of her eyes, it’s probably not going to get any worse.
It was just then that the door opened behind her.
Holt Manning didn’t have much on his mind when he opened that bathroom door. But he did once he saw what was on the other side.
Simone Delavigne.
The love of his life.
Without any damn clothes on.
2
Holt was at the club first thing in the morning for one reason, and one reason only: to convince Gavin to make a formal complaint about Alan Crennel and get Holt the leverage he needed to open an official investigation with his boss, the US Attorney. Unofficially, Holt planned to nail that son of a bitch to the wall with or without the official sanction of law enforcement. But it always helped.
In any event, he definitely wasn’t there to walk in on his former sub half naked and in need of assistance. But life was what happened while you were making other plans. And there she was.
He didn’t say anything. Neither did she. They didn’t have to.
Automatically, Holt took Simone in. He only had a few moments to feel the wave of heat wash over him, the pain of missing her like a stab to his heart and the desire for her body like a jolt of adrenaline to his cock at the same time, before he saw that something was wrong. He saw the flush of heat spread across her bare skin. He saw the shallow, rapid movement of her ribcage as she struggled to breathe. Most of all, he saw the twin drops of tears, glinting at the corners of her eyes.
Simone was on the verge of a panic attack. She was sober as a judge, but she was freaking out.
In the fraction of a second it took Holt to make a decision, he ran through all the reasons this might be happening. He’d been keeping tabs on her, quietly, discreetly. He knew today would be the first day of the new job as the club’s publicist. He knew she’d be fighting the rumors about her trip to the hospital spread by Alan fucking Crennel himself. And most of all, he knew there was the pressure Simone would put on herself. The pressure of proving herself all over again.
Simone had had a few of these panic attacks when they were together. When she was overwhelmed. Holt remembered. He remembered that she told him she used to deal with it by drinking. But when they were together, they found another way.
So he knew what to do.
Holt took control.
“Assume the position,” he ordered.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Simone stood up straight, her chest out and her shoulders back, her eyes on t
he floor. A beat. And then she looked up at him with startled, pissed-off, and grateful eyes.
“Good girl,” he said.
And then he looked at her.
The love of his goddamn life was standing in front of him in her underwear, and she’d just obeyed an order so sweetly it was like they hadn’t missed a day. Holt’s cock swelled and his balls ached and only someone who knew him would know he needed a moment to control himself. To keep himself from pushing that bra down over her nipples, wrapping his hands around the backs of her thighs, lifting her on to that basin. Tearing off those panties. And burying himself inside her, where he belonged.
Simone knew him.
Didn’t matter. He had a job to do. Carefully, he closed the door behind him, and then turned to look back at Simone Delavigne.
Time to go to work.
Was this real?
Simone let her gaze trail up Holt’s muscular legs, obvious even in slacks, to his narrow hips where she knew his abs met in a delicious V, up his strong chest and over his broad shoulders, to his rough, handsome face and molten gray eyes, and shuddered to her core. Oh, it was real. It was very, very real.
It was also the worst possible thing she could imagine happening at that particular moment. Practically naked, covered in coffee, and on the verge of actual tears was not traditionally the best time to see your ex for the first time.
And then he’d said that.
Simone was surprised she could hear anything at all over the sound of her own heartbeat, but apparently she was still attuned to the sound of Holt’s voice like a freaking tuning fork. He spoke, she moved. He commanded, she obeyed. He looked at her, and she melted.
