Would Miles answer my questions? I wanted to know what his path was; why he hid who he was under a mask of perfect blandness. His words from yesterday echoed through my head. “Once you take a step on this path, you might not want to return.” I told myself that Miles was just being protective, exaggerating the dangers of the sex club for me so that I would be too afraid to make the move and call the club.
“Why did you give me the business card yesterday?” My voice came out too loud in the quiet of the car. I glanced at the partition between the passenger seats and the driver, but it was raised. The driver couldn’t hear our conversation.
We were moving through the streets of Manhattan, the car inching through traffic. Outside it was daylight and people settled into outdoor patios to fill themselves with food and drink. The weather didn’t fit my mood. It should have been the dark of night; there should have been lightning flashing in the sky and the sounds of crashing thunder. My heart thudded in my chest. I felt like I was walking through an archway and there would be no going back.
His voice was much lower than mine. “I faced a choice,” he replied after a few moments of silence. “And a realization.” His eyes were on my swell of cleavage. “You are no longer the little girl who trailed around after me in Akron. Somewhere, in those intervening years, you grew up.”
He sipped at his own drink, staring into the cut glass crystal as if there was a message there for him. When he didn’t speak and explain further, I asked him another question. “Should I be nervous about tonight?”
My question was met with one of his own. “Do you watch porn, Kelly?”
I tried to hide my surprise at his question. “Do you?” I shot back. “I can’t see that. But of course I do. It’s a myth that women don’t watch porn.”
When he replied, his voice had a thread of sarcasm running through it. “As amusing as it is to indulge your astonishingly incorrect assumptions about my life, yes. On occasion, I do watch some porn.” I opened my mouth to ask him what the point of his line of questioning was, but he lifted his hand to silence me. “Since you do watch porn, let me answer your question about Club Phoenix by drawing a parallel with internet porn.”
“This ought to be interesting,” I commented and his eyes flashed at me dangerously. I shivered instinctively. I would have liked to pretend it was fear that made me tremble but it wasn’t. It was the anticipation of peeling the layers back and exposing Miles’ secret darkness. It was the head-rush that came with placing yourself in the path of oncoming danger and refusing to flinch away from it.
“When I first started watching BDSM porn,” he said, his voice level, “the sight of a woman’s tears were abhorrent to me. In a real-life session, I’m there to monitor a submissive’s well-being and I can judge whether the tears are troubling, or they are just the visible effects of surrendering control. But on the Internet? I couldn’t tell if there was something more sinister going on. I couldn’t tell if the girls were being forced. Since I couldn’t judge whether a session was safe, sane and consensual, I couldn’t derive any real enjoyment from watching it.”
“And now?”
“If you watch more and more porn,” he said, his eyes troubled, “it all becomes old-hat to you. A woman choking on a man’s dick, while a line of impatient men wait for her to service them? No big deal. Been done a thousand times before. When she cries as her asshole is being torn open by a cock, you assume it’s all staged. Nothing is real. No one is human. It all loses its power to shock you.” He gazed at me steadily. “Some things should still have the power to shock, Kelly. It’s too easy to become blasé about sex. It’s not good to strip out the intimacy from the act and just make it about lust. I’ve seen it happen. You start just going through the motions and the result is indifference and numbness.”
I considered his words, but I thought he was being too dire with his warnings. This was just Miles playing the protector, probably regretting giving me the business card. I didn’t want to listen to his cautionary tales. I wanted to dive into the deep end of the pool. “That’s not going to happen to me,” I said confidently. I liked sex too much to ever be indifferent or numb about it.
He surveyed me silently. If he disagreed, he didn’t contradict me.
“Tell me why you hide who you are, Miles.”
“I have to,” he responded. “Too many people work for me. I won’t gamble with people’s lives. As long as I’m the CEO and the public face of St. Clair Biotech, I will play the role. There will be no scandal. I am responsible for more than myself.”
I thought of my mother in the nursing home in Akron, of the bi-weekly trips back home to make sure she was as happy and healthy as she could be, though she stared at me blankly and wondered who I was. I thought of the constant, low-level heartache as everything that made her my mother slowly disappeared and a stranger was left. Each time I visited, it was like I was carving another slice of my heart open, yet week after week I flew home. I understood too well what it meant to be responsible for someone other than myself.
His words hadn’t intended to wound; I could tell that. He’d answered the question I had asked honestly. But yet, they had hurt me and I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. Suddenly aware of the way our thighs were almost touching, I inched away from him and curled up against the side of the car.
When he wasn’t trying to conceal his emotions, he was fairly easy to read. I watched him wonder what he’d said that caused me to draw away and then I watched the awareness of what he had thoughtlessly implied come to the fore. He shook his head in denial before he closed his eyes for one long second. When he opened them there was a look of apology in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to imply…”
“I know,” I responded. It wasn’t his fault that his words had hit too close to home.
We each retreated into ourselves and we sought refuge in silence.
Chapter 4
Once the car had made it outside the city, our speed picked up. “Where are we going?” I asked Miles after about an hour, breaking the silence that had fallen.
“West,” he replied. “A little north of Allentown.”
“We are going to Pennsylvania? I’d have thought a billionaire sex club would be in the Hamptons or something.”
He laughed. “Club Phoenix has a rather large estate attached to it,” he responded. “There’s not enough room in the Hamptons for us. Besides, where the club is located, the catchment area consists of Philadelphia, Washington and even Pittsburgh.”
“How often do you go?”
“It depends on what else I have going on in my life,” he replied with an irritating lack of detail. “We’ll be there soon.”
“Do you drive all the time?”
He shook his head. “It’s usually fastest to fly.”
My anger over his unintended insult had faded, but my curiosity still burned brightly. “Is everything in the sex club BDSM themed? Are you a Dominant?”
The roads were empty of traffic and the car ate up the miles with ease. Dusk was starting to fall and the rolling hills looked lush, green and peaceful. I’d never driven this way. Like most people in New York, I didn’t own a car. The few times I rented one, it was to go home and Allentown wasn’t on my way. But highways in America had a drab uniformity about them. Every thirty miles, signs screamed food and fuelling options and a tiny cluster of tightly packed houses appeared, only to disappear just as quickly in the rear view mirror.
Miles chuckled to himself. “You can be whatever you want to be once you are a fully qualified member,” he replied, “but everyone starts out as a submissive unless they were referred by another club.”
I couldn’t see Miles as a Dominant, but I really couldn’t see him as a submissive either. My eyebrows arched. “You have to be kidding.”
His lips twitched and his eyes danced with merriment. “You have to learn to take it before you can dish it out, Kelly.”
I considered that statement in
silence, wishing that I had had a little more time to get prepared for tonight. I knew the basics of dominance and submission of course. I knew about the concepts of safe words. But that was all I knew. Then again, if I had had a lot of time to think, maybe I would have chickened out of the entire experience.
“So there aren’t any parties where scantily clad women are groped by well-dressed men?”
“Not during your qualification period,” he replied. “You won’t meet anyone except the people involved in that evening’s activity.”
Activity. That word sounded so harmless and so innocent. But we were about to walk into the dark sea of desire and one misstep could leave me floundering, or worse, drowning. The vague sense of unease that had permeated my nightmares from last night returned with a vengeance. “Anna said I’d have a Watcher.”
A trace of some emotion flashed in his eyes but I couldn’t interpret it. It vanished too quickly. “Yes, that would make sense.”
“Did you have a Watcher?”
“No.” I had the feeling that I’d made him remember something he wanted to forget. “Ah. Here we are.” I hadn’t even noticed that we’d exited the freeway. The car turned into a tree-lined driveway. “You’ll get your best view of Club Phoenix in a minute.”
“That’s very Harry Potter,” I quipped. “Am I going to see Hogwarts in a moment?”
He laughed and the tension in the car lightened. “Maybe you’ll be fine,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Maybe this isn’t a mistake.”
My comparison to Hogwarts was spot on - Club Phoenix was an honest-to-goodness castle. I openly gaped before I turned to Miles. “How much room does a sex club need?”
He grinned. “On Yelp, this is a spa. And it’s actually a very good one. The sex club is the underground part of the business.” That explained some things. Even in the middle-of-nowhere, there had to be someone curious about a castle.
“The home was built at the turn of the century by one of Philadelphia’s robber barons as a retreat,” he added. “It lay vacant for many years until the club purchased it sometime after World War Two. It started out as a gentlemen’s retreat, but has evolved as time has gone on.”
“How long has it been a sex club?”
“Probably since the start,” Miles said. “I’m assuming ‘gentlemen’s retreat’ was a polite euphemism. But you’ll have to ask the Chairman for more details.” He flashed me an amused look. “I got a full tour and history lesson once my qualification period was complete, but I wasn’t paying full attention. I was waiting for the scantily clad women.” He winked at me, gently mocking my words from earlier.
I punched his arm lightly. “Jerk.”
The car ground to a halt outside the castle and the driver hopped out to open my door. I stepped out and glanced at Miles who had come around to my side. “What time is it?” My voice sounded nervous.
“Eight forty five,” he replied. “Not too delayed by traffic. Come. I’ll show you where to go.”
Should I be nervous?, I wanted to ask him again. Instead, I grabbed his hand, holding on to him for reassurance. “Kelly,” he soothed. “I’d tell you to relax, but that’s not going to help. Instead, a piece of advice.”
I looked at him and his bottle-green eyes bored into mine. “Always remember who you are.” His fingers traced the outline of my jaw lightly. “The Kelly Mitchell I know likes to laugh and tease. She loves her family so fiercely that she will cause herself any amount of pain to prevent theirs. She is insanely talented. She worries about when she’s going to set up her own fashion line. She’s thinking of applying for a job at Zac Posen. If it wasn’t for her organizational skills, Nina Germain’s business would have fallen apart years ago.”
I gaped at him. We met up often enough, on the plane when he gave me a ride home and at lunch every two weeks, but this was a display of disconcerting attention. When I spoke, Miles had been listening. And it seemed that at almost every turn, I’d underestimated Miles St. Clair.
“The Kelly Mitchell I know is a woman who lights up a room when she walks in.” He squeezed my hand. “The darkness is seductive…”
“And you think I should leave now.” My heart sank in my chest. I didn’t know what his warnings were about. Either he was just being overprotective or he displaying some kind of male double-standard, but in either case, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to explore.
“Stop interrupting Kelly, and stop jumping to conclusions.” He shot me an irritated look. “We have something in common, you and I. The darkness is seductive and always within us. And it has a place but so does everything else. In this quest to explore your darkness, don’t forget that there’s so much more to you. You are more than your sexual desires. What you crave in the darkness of the night does not define you.”
I remembered my dreams last night of being tied up and taken. Of being whipped until tears of pain dripped down my cheeks. Of kneeling on my haunches and sucking cock, of crawling on my hands and knees on command. These were my dark desires and I was about to get a chance to explore them. For the moment, Miles’s warnings were kind but my nervousness was overlaid with excitement and I wasn’t listening too closely.
The doors to the castle were open and we entered. My mouth dropped as I walked into a massive foyer. Marble tile was inlaid into the floor; a multi-tiered chandelier hung from the ceiling. A dark mahogany table contained an ornate crystal vase that held armloads of fresh flowers. Everything exuded a sense of understated luxury.
My high heels clicked on the floor as I walked in and I automatically arched my calves so that I’d be quieter. If there were other people in the club, there was no indication of it in the foyer. It was so quiet that I would have heard the sound of a pin drop.
“Mr. St. Clair.” A man appeared out of nowhere, making me yelp and jump. He turned towards me with an apologetic smile. “Ms. Mitchell, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
I blushed as Miles snickered quietly next to me. “My name is James,” the man continued. “Please follow me. The Chairman wishes to meet you.”
“Don’t worry about me, James. I know where to go,” Miles interjected.
“Yes Sir,” James responded. “The Chairman has left a note for you in his office.”
Miles nodded. “Thank you.” He leaned in to me and kissed me briefly on the lips. He’d never kissed me before and I almost jumped again in shock, but desire rose in my blood at his nearness and at the heat emanating from his body. In that moment, at the threshold of discovering something about myself, I was more attracted to Miles St. Clair than I’d ever been before.
I didn’t want to let go of my grip on Miles’s hand. Yet I did want to explore. There was a dichotomy in me that I didn’t fully understand. I think Miles sensed how I felt because he gently disentangled our hands and gave me an encouraging smile. “Rafael’s not as scary as he appears,” he said. “Don’t let him give you any grief, Kells.”
My lips twitched at the nickname that he hadn’t used in so many years. Cheered, I nodded at Miles, and mouthed ‘thank you.’ I followed James through a small door to one side of the foyer, down a narrow, spiralling stone staircase, and then we made our way in silence down a long corridor.
The walls were made of stone and the lighting was dim. As I walked after James, I wondered what I was getting myself into. When he pushed open a door at the end of the corridor, it was with distinct trepidation that I entered.
“Ms. Mitchell, Sir.”
“Thank you, James.” The man who spoke had a distinctive accent. Something European. Spanish, maybe? He looked Spanish with his jet black hair slicked into a ponytail and a neat goatee. “Kelly, right?” His voice was friendly. “My name is Rafael Garcia.”
He was standing in front of an unlit fireplace. I walked towards him, taking his outstretched hand and shaking it. “The Chairman?” I asked him, looking around the room with some curiosity, but if I’d hoped to learn something about what was in store for me, I wasn’t going to learn it
from the décor in this room. There were two comfortable armchairs positioned near the fireplace but the room was otherwise devoid of ornament.
“A bit of a pretentious title,” he said with a shrug. “Still, we like our formalities here at Club Phoenix.”
My lips twitched. “You certainly seem to,” I noted dryly. It was all very Eyes Wide Shut.
He laughed. “I like to meet all the new recruits personally,” he confided, waving me towards one armchair and settling down into the other. I took a seat and waited for him to continue. “Now, Anna has given you some indication of what to expect, yes? And Miles as well?”
“Actually,” I corrected him, “they’ve both been quite mysterious.”
He smiled again but I could see how he could be intimidating. He looked like he could easily cloak his personality with a European hauteur, transforming into someone much cooler and darker. Or perhaps this friendly persona was the mask and the real Chairman would make me quail. In either case, for the moment, Rafael’s goal seemed to be to lull me into relaxation. “We do like to be somewhat secretive,” he acknowledged. “Partly, that has to do with the very real need for privacy for many of our members and our employees.”
It worked as a significant point in his favour that he mentioned that his employees deserved privacy as well, especially given they were the ones that would probably be much more in a position to be hurt if their private lives became public. After all, if it became gossip fodder that Miles St. Clair visited a sex club, St. Clair Biotech stock might dip a little but it would recover. Miles would still be a billionaire. But the men and women who worked here didn’t have the luxury of a stuffed bank account to insulate them.
“But,” he continued. “Here you are. I can answer any questions you have but I will also start by telling you what the qualification process is about, yes?”
“Please,” I replied, keeping my innate sarcasm hidden for the moment. How nice of them to finally tell me what was in store for me.
He steepled his fingers. The light glinted off his Rolex, confirming my impression that whoever he was, Rafael wasn’t exactly hurting for money. “The qualification process is designed for you to understand your sexual desires,” he started. “We will expose you to a variety of scenarios. Some will be quite vanilla. Most will be intense. Your role is to be honest in the discovery of your desires and to be open about what your own limits are.” He gave me a steady look. “We will push you during this stage but it is your responsibility to push back. To let us know what is too much to endure.”
The Watcher (A Dark Romance) Page 4
