Author: Tiffany Reisz

“Yes. A lot more of them than I originally thought.”

“Then I shall see you again soon. Good day to you.”

With a polite nod he left her to join a group of men who had apparently been waiting to speak to him as well. Suzanne followed him with her eyes as he walked away. That had not gone as planned. Not even close.

Trailing behind a boisterous family of five or six children arguing over where to eat dinner, Suzanne made her way to the parking lot. Once inside Patrick’s car she pulled out her notepad again.

Extremely intelligent, she wrote.  And ridiculously handsome. He was expecting me.

At the bottom of the page she scrawled, I  don’t trust him, and underlined it three times.

* * *

Nora sorted through her luggage, separating her clothes from her toys. At times like this she missed having her own dungeon. Back in her dominatrix days, she had a palatial dungeon, if such a thing could exist, in the VIP wing of The 8th Circle. Søren still had his own personal quarters there, of course. As did Kingsley and Griffin. But once she returned to Søren as his submissive, she’d had to give up her dungeon to her replacement—Mistress V. However, she’d kept most of her gear for those occasions when Søren gave her permission to top someone. Some of the kinksters in their community frowned on her playing switch while in the possession of their alpha dom. But Søren loved her and understood her. And he knew better than to put his foot down in this area. She loved topping women and even a certain secretly switch-hitting Frenchman of their acquaintance. The jealous haters could have her spreader bars and her signature red riding crop when they pried them out of her cold, dead hands.

Nora’d bought a collar for Michael, a black one to match his hair. She had no intention of collaring him permanently, but he needed to get used to wearing one if he planned on joining the Underground with her and Søren. She dug to the very bottom of her bag. Whips and chains, a Wartenberg wheel, two sets of handcuffs—rope and metal—bondage cuffs, snap hooks…all ended up in an impressive array on the floor. Nora dove once more into her luggage and laughed at what she pulled out. How did her duckie pajamas get in with her kink gear? She remembered she’d been on the phone arguing with Zach, her editor, while packing. Obviously Zach had distracted her a little.

Nora stared at her pajamas, at the little baby ducks printed on the blue flannel. Pajamas had been the cause of her first fight with Wesley right after he moved in. No one would ever call her an exhibitionist—she knew too many real exhibitionists to even make a claim on that title—but she had a good body and didn’t care who saw it. So the first morning after Wesley moved in she came down to the kitchen in her usual sleepwear—a little nearly transparent black camisole and panties. Half-asleep still, she’d entered the kitchen, patted Wesley on the top of his blond head, grabbed a croissant and a cup of coffee, and headed for her office. A few minutes later a visibly troubled Wesley came into her office and stood with his back to her.

“Yes, Wesley, those jeans do make your ass look fabulous,” she’d said, glancing over at his tall, lean and way-too-sexy-to-belong-to-a-virgin body.

“That is not why I have my back to you. You have no clothes on, Nora,” he’d said, sounding royally perturbed.

“I do have clothes on. I have on my pajamas.”

“You’re wearing saran wrap and nothing else.”

“That is not true. I’ve worn saran wrap before and it looks nothing like this. This is La Perla.”

“It’s La Transparent. Pajamas have substance to them. They are made of cotton or equally opaque fabrics. If I’m going to live with you without losing my mind—”

“Or your virginity,” she teased.

“You need to wear real pajamas around me. That’s final.”

He’d gone off to school in a huff that day. When he came home she surprised him with a little pajama fashion show. First the sock monkeys, then the penguins, then the baby ducks wearing galoshes on their little feet.

“Better?” she’d asked.

Wesley had grinned at her as he reached out and buttoned the topmost button of her baby-duck pj’s. She’d feigned choking although she felt quite comfortable with a tight collar around her neck. Wesley had undone the button again, and for a moment their eyes had met and she wanted nothing more in the world than for him to keep going. His fingers shook enough that she knew he’d been tempted to do just that.

Wesley had smiled at her and whispered, “Perfect.”

“He’s perfect, Nora.”

The words pulled her out of the past. Turning around she saw Griffin coming into the guest bedroom he’d given her, the room right next to his, naturally, looking both annoyed and aroused.

“Nobody’s perfect, Griffin,” Nora said, throwing her duckies into a drawer. “Except Søren.”

“Søren’s not perfect.”

Nora stared at Griffin. “Bastard priest lied to me.”

Griffin rolled his eyes. “Michael’s perfect. He’s my dream man…boy. Whatever. Holy shit, Nora.” Griffin threw himself across her bed. He picked up a pair of handcuffs and laid them on his face like a giant pair of glasses.

“Very fetching.” Nora removed the handcuffs from Griffin’s face and put them in her bondage-gear pile on the end of the bed. “Did you finish his checklist?”

“Yeah. Junior’s a freak. I’m in love.”

Nora threw her thigh-high boots in the closet.

“You aren’t in love.”

“Would you buy ‘love with honorable intentions’?”

“Nope.”

Griffin glared at her.

“Griffin Fiske, you know as well as I do you’ve never had a relationship that lasted longer than three weeks. And that was when you were cheating on your girlfriend with her stepbrother. You just met Michael.”

“Yeah, so? How long did it take for you to fall in love with the Pope?”

Nora smiled to herself. “Two to three seconds. But that lasted about one week before I decided I hated him.”

“It is pretty impressive how long you two have lasted.” She heard the grudging respect in Griffin’s tone. Griffin had scores of lovers and approximately zero serious relationships under his belt. “What’s your secret?”

“Well, Søren has great staying power. And it does help I’m still in love with him. Helps even more that I still hate him,” she said, suddenly not wanting to talk about Søren. It hurt too much knowing it could be two months or more before she saw him again. “So what’s up with Michael’s checklist? Anything I need to know?”

Griffin flipped over and dug the papers out of his back pocket. Nora made the bad decision to join him on the bed. It took all of two seconds before she landed flat on her back with Griffin slapping the handcuffs from her bondage pile onto her wrists.

“That reminds me,” Nora said, relaxing into the grip of the cuffs, “I need to call my editor.”

“You can call him after I fuck you.”

“Can you fuck me after we talk about Michael’s checklist?”

Griffin collapsed next to her and left her lying on her stomach still cuffed. Groaning in frustration, Nora used her shoulder to flip herself onto her side.

“Checklist first, then fucking. What’s up with junior?”

“Sex stuff? Fives across the board. Horny little twerp.”

“He’s seventeen.”

“Point taken.”

“What else?” Nora asked.

“No big fetishes. No watersports or anything.”

“Good,” Nora said, “I have a shy bladder.”

“The usual kink works for him,” Griffin continued. “Bondage is good, all kinds. Pain is good, all kinds. This was weird though,” Griffin said as he flipped to the last page.

“What?”

“He wants pain and domination. All fours and fives in that area. But when I asked about cutting, he gave it a big number one. Weird, huh?”

Nora’s mind immediately went to the scars on Michael’s wrists. Didn’t seem weird to her at all—he’d had more than enough cutting in his life already.

“I hate bastinado,” Nora said, trying to deflect Griffin’s attention. If Michael wanted Griffin to know about his suicide attempt, she’d let Michael tell him. “Do whatever you want to me but don’t beat my feet. I’m ticklish.”

Griffin raised an eyebrow at her. “Duly noted. Oh, he doesn’t like yelling, either.”

Nora sighed. That probably came from Michael’s asshole father.

“I was never a fan of yelling at my clients. Hard on the throat. Plus a really good dominant can put the fear of God into a sub with a whisper. Søren certainly can.”

“Søren can put the fear of God into a sub by just showing up,” Griffin said with barely concealed envy.

“I know. I love that man,” Nora said, smiling with pride. In their huge underground kinky community, no one commanded more respect or fear than Søren. Sometimes she thanked God Søren had gone into the church and not the military. He’d be a dictator for sure.

“One final thing about Mick,” Griffin said, folding the checklist back up.

“Mick?”

“That’s what I’m calling him. Michael has too many syllables.”

“Okay, what’s the final thing about Mick?”

Griffin rolled onto his side and met Nora eye to eye. He reached out and freed her hair from her black hair clip and caressed her face and neck. Bad, Nora thought. It had to be bad news if Griffin was buttering her up.

“It’s just, and don’t freak out,” Griffin said, opening her shirt, pulling the strap of her bra down and taking one of her nipples into his warm mouth.

“Freaked out is not why I’m feeling now,” she said, leaning back to give him better access to her breasts. “Tell me the freak-out part while I’m turned on.”

Griffin slid his hand under her skirt between her thighs; he slipped a finger under her panties and inside her.

“It’s just, the thing about Mick is,” Griffin said as he pressed a second finger into her wet warmth, “he’s bi.”

8

Alone in the room Nora and Griffin had given him, Michael unpacked his duffel bag. His skateboard, wheels up, he’d packed on top of his things and that came out first. Now that he held it in his hands, he almost regretted bringing it. Nora knew he was a skater, but Griffin didn’t. Surely someone like Griffin would find skateboarding childish. Michael sat the board on the floor and rolled it under the bed.

He unpacked his clothes—jeans and T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks, the usual—and tucked them in the empty dresser. Putting his rather ratty clothes inside furniture that probably cost more than his mom’s car felt a little wrong. Digging once more in his bag, Michael found his most precious possession and pulled it out.

Right after he’d moved with his parents to Wakefield and started attending Sacred Heart, Michael heard rumors that the writer Nora Sutherlin attended that same church years before she’d become the Nora Sutherlin. One day at the mall he’d snuck off to the Borders store and found a copy of her book The  Red. The cover had a picture of a woman’s wrists tied with a bloodred silk ribbon. He remembered staring at the picture for so long without blinking that his eyes had started to water. But there was no way they’d let a thirteen-year-old buy a book like that. He thought about stealing it, but even the idea of shoplifting made his stomach churn with guilt. He found a fantasy novel about kings and unicorns that was the same price and size as The Red and he switched the covers. He didn’t need the cover. The image of the tied wrists had burned into his retinas. When he looked at it, looked at those tied wrists and pale hands, he couldn’t help but imagine his own wrists and own hands. It spoke to him, that image. It whispered to him. Love, he thought, when he first gazed on the image, looked just like that.