by Lila Dubois
She seemed to sag. “But you said it.”
“I was pissed.”
“In the end, I wasn’t submissive—”
“Stop. We’re not talking about our past.”
She twisted to face him, and for a moment he thought she’d argue.
“We’re talking about what you need, right now,” he said slowly.
Vivienne’s eyes widened. “What I need?”
“You need to scene.” He scratched his cheek. “Maybe I’m wrong, but right now you’re giving off I-need-to-scene-or-I’m-going-to-have-a-breakdown vibes.”
Her lips quirked in a smile. “That is a very specific, uh, vibe, as you say.”
She was trying to move their conversation to more neutral ground, but he wasn’t going to let her. “It’s a vibe every good Dom or Master knows.”
Vivienne stared at her knees.
“Am I wrong?” he asked
“Wrong about what? About every good Dom being able to sense when a woman doesn’t just want to scene, but needs it? Yes, you are wrong. I have known many good Doms.”
“And they didn’t give you what you needed,” he said softly. “They couldn’t read you.”
Vivienne shrugged, looking everywhere but at him. “That proves you were right. That I am not really submissive.”
“Enough.” He lowered his voice, added a tone of command to the word.
Vivienne went still, her shoulders relaxing, her fingers, which had been fiddling with the edge of her robe, stationary.
“You need to scene. You need the release.”
“Yes.”
There was a second word to that sentence. She didn’t say it, but it seemed to hover in the air between them.
“You started to say it last night.” His memory was fuzzy thanks to his friend Jack, but bits and pieces were coming back to him. “I had my hands on you, and you started to call me Master, and I pulled back.”
She flinched when he said master.
“Why, Vivi? Why did you use the word?”
“Solomon,” she whispered, “don’t…”
“Habit?” he asked. “We were in a club, so was it just habit? Your sub manners kicking in?”
A strangled sound escaped from between her teeth. “You won, Solomon. You know I don’t hate you. You know that I haven’t really moved on the way you have—”
She thought he’d moved on? Even when in his highest state of denial he’d never managed to convince himself that he’d moved on.
“—but now you want me to admit that with a single touch you can make me submit? Isn’t it enough that we both know it’s true? Do I have to lay myself low?”
The raw emotion in her voice nearly broke him. “I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“Why wouldn’t you? I hurt you.” Her gaze shifted to the corner of his mouth.
“We don’t work.” He gestured at the space between them. “Maybe if things had been different—no, I’m not trying to discuss the past, I’m just saying if they’d been different, maybe we could have made it. But we didn’t.”
“No, we didn’t.” She swiped at her damp cheeks with the back of one hand.
“But we still have chemistry.”
“True.” She turned to look at him, seeming to consider him. “Explosions are chemistry.”
That made him smile. “And we’re a big fuck-off explosion.”
There was a beat of silence while he tried to work out how to say what he wanted to say next. How to phrase the outrageous idea he’d been unsuccessfully ignoring since that moment his brain registered her submissive distress signal.
She wasn’t patient enough to wait for him to speak. “Solomon, are you suggesting…”
“You couldn’t wait for me to say it?”
“Just say it already.”
He growled. “I was going to suggest that we scene tonight at the club, but you’re reminding me what a goddamn pain in the ass you are.”
Vivienne closed her eyes, and Solomon winced. How was it that she, and seemingly only she, could make him crazy like this?
“Yes,” she said.
That hadn’t been what he’d expected. “What?”
“Yes.” Vivienne opened her eyes and looked at him, meeting his gaze. “If last night and this morning hadn’t happened, I would laugh at the suggestion and walk out the door. But you’re right. There is something between us, and part of me still…” She made that clucking sound that was unique to the French, a sort of self-directed admonishment.
Unlike her, he was able to wait patiently for her to continue talking.
“I’ve never been able to submit to another man the way I could for you, and I’ve tried.”
He nodded.
She raised a brow. “Aren’t you going to gloat?”
“I would have if you’d said it last night before we hit shot number three, but today we’re all about truth, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then, truthfully, I’ve never been as connected to a sub as I was to you.” He smiled softly. “How about we say we’re conducting an experiment.”
“Experiment?”
“To see if we’re still good together, as D/s partners.”
“We are different,” she pointed out. “And we weren’t good together at the end.” There was a thread of worry in her voice.
Solomon held up a hand. “No talking about the past. We can’t bring that into a scene.”
She nodded slowly. “We meet tonight as…as strangers?”
He considered that idea. “A bit of roleplay would help us get into it, but this has to be real. That’s the point of the experiment.”
“Not strangers, then.”
“No, not strangers. How about experienced players who’ve worked together before?”
“There’s two more nights of the Paris event.” She looked at him from beneath her lashes.
“I hadn’t planned to stay all weekend. I have a flight out tonight.” He ran his tongue over his teeth. “I’m changing it.”
She inhaled slowly, then said, “Thank you.”
“And if tonight doesn’t work, I’ll help you find someone to play with for the last night.” The very idea of it made him want to throw a chair through the window, but he stayed calm. “That’s what you wanted last night, right?”
“I…ah, yes, now I remember saying that.”
There was an expression on her face he couldn’t read, and that made him feel a little uneasy. That unease was making him want to pull back, to walk away from this whole situation.
But that want was not nearly as strong as his desire to touch this woman again.
And maybe, just maybe, two nights would be enough to purge her from his system. He hadn’t known he needed to until he saw her again.
“Two nights,” she said. “One, if it goes badly.”
“Two nights,” he agreed. “And we don’t talk about our past. Deal?” He held out his hand.
Vivienne slid her palm against his. They exchanged a firm, businesslike shake, which was completely at odds with their current situation—nearly naked and hungover in his hotel room.
“Nous avons un accord.”
Solomon rose. “I’ll get dressed and go downstairs for a few hours. You have the room for as long as you need.”
Vivienne reached for the phone. “I will vacate as soon as I’m able.”
Solomon nodded once, then grabbed some clothes from the closet and slipped into the bathroom. Five minutes later he walked out, politely ignoring Vivienne’s phone conversation, and then eased out of the room.
He hadn’t come to Paris to scene. He’d come to talk to James.
Everything had changed the moment he saw Vivienne, and now that it had, he needed to prepare.
Chapter 7
Just before sunset, Vivienne looked up from her desk. The balcony door was open, letting in a light breeze. Her four-bedroom penthouse apartment on Boulevard Maurice Barres sat on the north border of Bois de Boulogne. She’d chosen this small room for
her home office because of the lovely view out over the park that had once been royal hunting grounds. Boulevard Maurice Barres was not the most ostentatious address in Paris, but she liked the residential feel of the neighborhood, despite its proximity to major museums and other cultural landmarks.
She rose from her all-glass desk and walked out onto the narrow balcony, leaning on the railing. Paris was never quiet, but she found the constant murmur of the city reassuring. It was a reminder that the world never stopped. That there was always somewhere she could go if she wanted to see or do something.
Vivienne watched a young woman pushing a double buggy hustling across the street. The sunshade was drawn back and she could see the toddler seated in the front compartment kicking his feet. A baby was asleep in the rear compartment, happily snoozing despite the angry honks coming from the nearby intersection where the massive Boulevard Périphérique and Avenue de Neuilly crossed, the former going under the latter.
The woman—most likely a nanny, bringing her charges home after an afternoon spent playing in the Jardin d’Acclimatation amusement park—disappeared down a side street. Vivienne wondered if those children’s mother knew how lucky she was.
She stepped inside, sliding the heavy double-paned glass door closed. It eliminated most of the street noise, and was one of the many modern upgrades to the building. The penthouse wasn’t showy by the standards of the uber-wealthy, but it was livable, and it was hers.
Technically she had another residence on the Avenue Hoche, a five-story 1910 Parisian mansion called Maison Delphine. Her neighbors there were the Japanese ambassador and the Paris offices of one of the world’s most prestigious law firms. With the Place Charles de Gaule at one end and Parc Monceau at the other of the relatively short Avenue Hoche, the address carried all the pomp and circumstance that was expected when she entertained. After all, as the CEO of CRD Beauvalot, a company formed six years ago by the merging of two powerful French luxury brands—the Château Rossolina Deschamps beverage company and Beauvalot Fashion House—any party she threw had to have the best wine, most stylishly dressed people, and a location grand enough to serve as a backdrop for both.
Vivienne had bought this building two weeks after Solomon had walked out of her life, moving into the penthouse shortly after, and hadn’t slept another night at Maison Delphine.
She sat back in her ugly but ergonomically sound desk chair and reviewed the timeline of meetings she and her cousin Victor had planned. Victor was the COO of Beauvalot Fashion House. She wasn’t close with him the way she was with his brother Edmund, but Victor was far easier to deal with than their mother, Tempeste, or father Gerard Normandy.
It had taken a few years, but Victor had come around to her idea of modernizing the supply chain and contract process for the various arms of Beauvalot. Their fragrance and makeup lines were carried in department stores worldwide, while bags were available only at select retailers, and the high-end designer clothing could only be purchased at a handful of boutiques. The manufacture and supply chain processes for each line were completely different; there was little to no input by the sales department as to what would be produced for the next season, even where that would have made sense, such as in handbags and fragrance, and remarkably the inefficiencies weren’t even the same for each division. She knew what efficiency looked like, because the production and shipping processes for the wine produced by Château Rossolina Deschamps were tight and clean. They never had to destroy unsold bottles of wine the way Beauvalot’s handbag division had destroyed hundreds of unsold clutches last year. That wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Rumor had it that one of her competitors had destroyed ten thousand unsold bags last quarter.
Beauvalot wasn’t the largest or most powerful of the French fashion houses, but in a way that worked in their favor, because like a sailboat compared to a cruise liner, they had more maneuverability.
Her goal was to design a hardware and software combination that, in addition to several state-of-the-art warehouses she was poised to build once she had proof of concept, would use real-time sales information, in addition to the trend reporting she’d already implemented, to make ongoing adjustments to ordering and scheduling, and track everything from source materials through production until the final product hit the shelves.
Then she would patent the software and sell it to other luxury brands, and CRD Beauvalot would move into the world of tech and intellectual property.
She and Victor were meeting with several manufacturing and tech companies over the course of the next month. There had been some speculation as to why she’d called the meetings, but she’d managed to maintain some secrecy by keeping the details limited to herself, Victor, and their assistants. She scanned the plans one last time, made a few notes, and sent everything back to Victor. It was Friday afternoon, so he most likely wouldn’t look at it tonight. Hopefully he wouldn’t look at it until Sunday or even Monday, which meant she wouldn’t have to reply to any comments he had, and could enjoy her weekend.
Vivienne closed her laptop and rose, stretching. She usually worked out of her home office on Fridays. It was good both for her own sanity and for the morale of those at the CRD Beauvalot main offices. She knew that when she didn’t come in, there was a more relaxed atmosphere, more casual attire, and most employees were gone shortly after their probably long lunches.
She didn’t begrudge them that, but she also didn’t tell anyone she knew. So she stayed home on Fridays and worked in her pajamas with her hair in a messy braid.
It also had the advantage of allowing her to occasionally travel to attend Orchid Club events, which took place over the course of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings. The last one she’d been to was months ago in Hong Kong, and she’d had to take off a half day on Thursday to accommodate the travel, since she hadn’t managed to find a business excuse to go to Hong Kong. She’d so been looking forward to having an event take place right here in Paris so she wouldn’t have to spend time traveling.
And then she’d seen Solomon.
Vivienne limped across the room and turned off the lights in her small office. She closed the door, leaning back against it for a moment. She needed to leave work behind, use the closing of the door as way to transition both physically and mentally away from work.
The pressure she’d been under when she’d become CEO of CRD Beauvalot had been tremendous, and cost her immensely. She’d lost friends, lost years of her youth.
She’d lost Solomon.
Strange how she’d managed to go so long without thinking or talking about him, and now that he was here it was as if the years had melted away, and everything made her think of him and of what they’d had.
No, they weren’t going to talk about the past. He’d said that, and she’d respect his wishes. Thinking back to that time would only make her heart hurt.
She didn’t want to hurt, at least not like that.
Vivienne started to smile as she walked into her large bathroom. She turned on the tap to the Roman-style soaking tub, then poured in salts and a few drops of jojoba oil, some kokum butter bath fizzies. Humming to herself, she stripped out of the loose shirt and capri leggings she wore, and wound her braid into a bun on the top of her head, securing it with a wooden hair stick.
Naked, she stood in front of the full-length mirror and looked herself over. She wasn’t twenty any longer, and though her careful diet and regular visits from a personal trainer kept her fit and trim—after all, she had to be able to fit into Beauvalot clothing, which had a very limited size range—her skin was no longer taut with youth. Her breasts sat lower on her chest than they had, and there was cellulite on the outsides of her thighs.
Her body wasn’t what it once had been, but it was hers, and she was happy with it. If Solomon expected her to look the way she had when they first met, then he was a fool. After all, she’d seen plenty of him this morning, and he’d changed.
She took the bandage off her foot. The cut still hurt, but she’d call
ed her personal physician, and a nurse had come over and sealed it for her with medical glue, and given her antibiotics.
She climbed into the tub, sliding into the hot water and settling back, her head on a rolled towel.
Tonight she was going to scene, and not just scene, but submit to Solomon.
Unconsciously, her hands went to her breasts and her knees fell open. Hot water flowed against her pussy and she moaned, squeezing her breasts. The best sex of her life, both vanilla and BDSM, had been with Solomon Carter.
Maybe it had been youth—he’d been the first man she’d loved.
Maybe it was novelty—he’d introduced her to BDSM.
If the quality of the sex had been based on either youth or novelty, she was doomed for disappointment tonight.
But last night he’d touched her, once on the shoulder. Something casual, and her body had lit up with desire.
Then he’d slid his hand under her hair. A simple touch, but a familiar one. He’d always done that, cupping her neck, thumb under her chin to tilt her face up for a kiss. It was at once romantic and possessive. He touched her as if he had every right to, and more importantly knew exactly how to please her. There was an arrogance men who were good lovers possessed that made them more assertive and sure of themselves, which in turn made them even more attractive. Solomon possessed that arrogance in spades.
Maybe the reason Solomon was the best she’d ever had was chemistry. There was simply something between them that neither physical nor behavioral science could adequately explain.
They’d discussed as much this morning, and as she lay in the warm bathwater, resisting the urge to let her fingers float down to her sex, she knew that even in their hangover-addled state they’d been right. They hadn’t made it as a couple, but that didn’t mean they weren’t an exceptionally well-matched D/s pair.
But tonight wasn’t about the past, which meant that though he’d once been able to send her to her knees with a nothing more than a look, tonight he would have to earn her submission.
Vivienne smiled and plucked the sea sponge from the edge of the tub, dunking it in the water and beginning her bath in earnest.
