The Prince

Kingsley watched her out of the corner of his eye while he sipped his wine. Standing next to Griffin and young Michael, she smiled in turns at each of them while they bent her exquisite ears with the tale of how Nora Sutherlin had brought them together. For one single solitary day without hearing about the amazing Nora Sutherlin, he would cash out half his fortune, lay it on a pyre in the middle of Fifth Avenue, set it afire and watch it turn to ashes. If only it were that easy to kill the monster he’d created.

No, he corrected himself. The monster they had created.

Juliette glanced his way and gave him a secret smile, a smile that needed no translation. But he would wait, bide his time, let her think he wasn’t in the mood tonight. He’d let her anticipation build first before replacing it with fear. How beautifully Juliette wore fear, how it shimmered in her bistre eyes, how it shivered across her ebony skin, how it caught in her throat like the scream he’d hold inside her mouth with his hand….

Kingsley’s groin tightened; his heart began to race. Setting his wineglass down, he strode from the bar through the back room and into the hallways of The 8th Circle. Right outside the door to the bar, his foot connected with something lying on the floor. Curious, he bent down. Shoes. A pair of shoes. He picked them up. White patent-leather stilettos … size six.

Shoes last seen on the feet of Nora Sutherlin.

Staring at the shoes, Kingsley pondered how and why they’d ended up in the hallway outside the bar. Nora could do almost anything in her high heels. He’d seen her top some of the most hardened masochists in them. She’d beaten them, whipped them, flogged them, kicked them…. She could stand on a man’s neck in high heels, walk on his bruised back, balance on one leg while her other foot was being worshipped. He knew of only one activity she couldn’t do in her towering high heels—run.

He carried the shoes down to the bottommost floor, where he and a few of the other VIPs kept their own private dungeons. At the last door on the left, he paused, but didn’t knock, before entering.

A man, blond and tall and deep in thought, stood by the bed, his arms crossed, his brow furrowed.

“Have you ever heard of knocking?” Søren uncrossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against the bedpost. Kingsley clenched his jaw.

“I’ve heard rumors of knocking. I never believed them.” Kingsley stepped into the room. No one’s dungeon at the Circle exemplified the concept of minimalism better than Søren’s. It held nothing more than a four-poster wrought-iron bed tucked into an alcove, a Saint Andrew’s cross front and center, and a single trunk filled with various implements of torture. Søren’s sadistic side was the stuff of legend at The 8th Circle and throughout the Underground. He didn’t need a thousand types of floggers and single-tails and dozens of canes and tawse and toys. Such a piece of work was Søren—he could break a submissive with a word, a look, with his penetrating insight, his calm, cold dominance that left even the strongest quaking at his feet. He cowed them with the beauty of his exterior first, and second, with the beast that was his heart.

“I brought you a gift.”

Kingsley held out the shoes by the straps. Søren raised an eyebrow.

“Not really my size, are they?”

“Your pet’s.” Kingsley dropped them on the bed. “As you know. You must have walked past them as you left the bar.”

“I left them there so she would find them when she came back for them.”

Kingsley gave a small, mirthless laugh.

“Didn’t I overhear you telling her that if she had any mercy in that dark heart of hers, she wouldn’t run from you to her Wesley?”

Søren didn’t answer. He merely stared at Kingsley with his eyes of steel. Kingsley resisted the urge to grin. Schadenfreude … such an unbecoming emotion. He kept it to himself for as long as he could. Then, turning on his heel, he swept out of the room, quoting an old poem as he left Søren in his dungeon, with only Nora’s shoes on the bed for company.

“I saw pale kings and princes, too,

pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

they cried—’La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thy thrall.’“

Kingsley returned to his own dungeon and paced as he waited. His bed sat in the very center of the room, unlike the priest’s at the end of the hall. For Søren, pain was sex. He could possibly be what the church demanded him to be—a celibate priest—if it weren’t for Nora, for his Eleanor, who needed the flesh as much as Kingsley needed the fear. He could only imagine the tantrum she would throw if her owner decided to cut her off sexually. But Søren would never do that. He inflicted pain for his release, and the sex that followed was mere afterglow. And who didn’t enjoy the afterglow?

Kingsley paused midstep as he heard the floor creak in the hallway outside his chamber. Silently, he moved to stand by the door and waited. He’d spent two years in the French Foreign Legion after leaving school, and five years pretending to still be in the French Foreign Legion while he served his country in other quieter ways. He’d learned the lessons of a spy well. See everything but never be seen. Hear everything but never be heard. When Juliette slipped through his door, he knew she expected to find him in bed, waiting for her. When his hand shot out and captured her by the arm, she gasped in fear.

Parfait.

His hand over her mouth killed her scream as Kingsley shoved her into the wall. He kicked the door closed even as Juliette attempted to wrest herself from his grasp. And although at five-ten, his willowy Juliette could not match his strength—no woman could—that didn’t stop her from trying, from digging her heels into the hardwood floor as he dragged her toward the bed. Twisting in his arms, she cried out against his hand. My God, she was as good at this game as he was. Even racked with desire as potent as his, she could still put up the most impressive fight, even when he knew she wanted him as much or more than he needed her.

He loosened his grip on her wrists long enough to turn her. He wanted her facedown tonight, bent over the bed, impotent in her struggles. The spreader bars, cuffs, shackles and ropes hung unwanted, unneeded on the walls all about them. He’d rather hold her down with his own body than employ any tools.

“Monsieur …” she panted, her eyes wide with fear as he shoved her forward and she fell across the bed. The scent of fear and sweat graced her skin like the most drugging of perfumes. “Non … s’il vous plaît …”

Her voice broke at the end of her plea and Kingsley almost laughed. Anyone who’d ever chanted “no means no” had never met his Juliette. This wasn’t only his favorite of their games. It was hers.

Kingsley gripped her by the back of the neck and pressed her face into the sheets to silence her. With his free hand, he wrenched the back of her dress up, tearing it in the process. She did look so lovely in white. How it glowed against her dark skin. He’d found her on a beach in Haiti years ago … when she’d been eighteen, barely more than a child. But she’d suffered the miseries of a thousand lifetimes in those years. He’d brought her back with him, made her his property. And in the unlikely event she ever forgot who owned her now, this was how he refreshed her memory.

With his knees he pried her thighs apart as he opened his pants. When he shoved himself inside her, she let out a scream that anyone in the hall would have heard. But it didn’t matter. No one would come to her aid.

He rode her hard with brutal thrusts. Breathing deeply, Kingsley willed his pounding heart to slow. He wished to savor this moment, savor her fear. He never imbibed her fear right away. He’d always let it breathe first, decanted it, before pouring it out and drinking it deep.

At times Juliette forgot it was him, her Kingsley, and got lost in the memory of the man who’d done this to her out of hatred and not love. Kingsley knew when her body went stiff underneath him, when she stopped struggling, that her fear had reached its peak.

He lived for those moments.

Her grunts and cries of pain and fear were the sweetest sounds he could imagine. Only they could silence the music in his ears that he heard from the time he woke until he fell asleep and into blissful oblivion again. One piano concerto thirty years ago … and still he couldn’t unhear it.

Juliette’s breathing quickened. She made a last valiant attempt at escape, but Kingsley merely dragged her arms behind her back and held her immobile. He thrust again, thrust hard, and with a shudder he came inside her, as her inner muscles clenched around him with the orgasm she’d fought against until finally surrendering to him.

He lingered inside her and simply enjoyed the bliss of the moment, the emptiness of it. His people were so right to call orgasm le petite morte … the little death. He died while inside her and he cherished that death, that freedom, those few seconds when he was released from the spell of the only man in the Underground who wore a collar but belonged to no one.

Juliette’s laughter jarred him from his musings. He couldn’t help but join her in her postcoital amusement. Releasing her hands, he pulled out of her, and relaxed onto the bed as she straightened her clothes before draping herself over his chest.

“You scared me, monsieur. I thought you were still with le père.”

“I meant to scare you. And no, he’s praying, je pense.”

“Praying for what?” Juliette turned her eyes up to Kingsley and he stroked her cheek. His beautiful Juliette, his Jules, his jewel. He treasured her above all others. Only one person had he ever loved more. But the one he loved more, he hated with equal passion. He wished that the mathematics of the world were like the mathematics of the heart—then his equal love and hate would mean he felt nothing instead of double.

“For his lost pet to come back to him someday, I’m sure.”

Juliette sighed and relaxed against him.

“But she is not lost.” Juliette kissed his chest. “She’s just off her leash.”

Kingsley laughed.

“It’s much worse than that, mon amour. His pet’s run off, and this time, she hasn’t got her collar.”

SOUTH

As long as Wesley’s parents hadn’t heard of her, everything would be okay. And surely they hadn’t heard of her. Why would they have heard of her, a BDSM erotica writer from New York? Did they even sell her books in Kentucky? Ludicrous thought. Of course they hadn’t heard of her. And everything would be a-fucking-okay.

Nora sighed as they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line at Hagerstown, Maryland, and entered the South. Her stomach clenched hours later when they crossed the state line into Kentucky.

What the holy hell was she doing in Kentucky?