“Two weeks ago Natasha offered herself to me. I turned her down. She quit the next day.”
Nora nodded, a delaying tactic while she decided how to respond.
“First, can I say I’m impressed you turned her down?”
“Elle.”
“Sorry. But please don’t tell me you’re blaming yourself for this. You have the right to say no if you don’t want to fuck somebody.”
“I did want to fuck her.”
“So you turned her down because...?”
“The usual reason,” he said. And that was all he said and all he needed to say. Three people in Kingsley’s world knew he was a switch. Apparently Mistress Natasha had sensed his proclivities, and instead of succumbing to her advances, he’d rejected her.
“It’s not your fault she got hurt, Kingsley. We all get hurt around here.”
“I know,” he said, slipping tiredly into French. Je sais.
“I know you know. And I also know you know I can’t cancel on my clients. That’s fine for Irina and the subs. They have normal clients. My clients run the world. They’re not going to be happy if I say ‘Sorry, busy,’ without any notice like this.”
“They’ll survive a week or two without you.”
“That’s the problem. They will survive because they’ll find a new Domme. You and I have worked way too hard to build my career. This could kill it.”
“It’s not going to help it, non. But your life is more important than your career.”
“My career is my life.” Nora stared him down hard.
“What would you have me do? I let you keep working and le prêtre will kill me and lock you in a cage.”
“Søren’s not into cage-play.”
“It won’t be for erotic purposes, I promise.”
Nora growled under her breath. She didn’t know what to do but she knew not working wasn’t an option.
“I can’t let the girls think I’m spooked,” she told Kingsley. “If I’m scared, they’ll be terrified. I have to keep working.”
“Then you’ll have a bodyguard with you. C’est ça.”
“Bodyguard? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“It’s either a bodyguard or no work. Your decision.”
“Fucking hell... All right. Whatever. It’s only until they catch the guy, right?”
“Oui.”
“Good. I’ll call Griffin.”
“Not Griffin. You two know each other too well. Far too well.” He gave her a meaningful look.
“So?”
“He’s a personal trainer, not a bodyguard. You need someone with experience.”
“Griffin’s very experienced.”
“Experienced at fucking you. I’ll find someone and send him to your house tomorrow. Someone you haven’t slept with.”
“That narrows our options.”
“Elle.”
“Fine. Bodyguard it is. You’re the boss.”
Kingsley raised a single finger and pointed it right at her.
“No fucking him,” he said, his tone cold and authoritative. “No sex. No kink. This is not playtime. I’ll pay his salary. You leave him alone so he can concentrate on his work.”
“Like I would ever fuck some big dumb muscle-bound no-neck overpaid bouncer. Don’t worry. Not my type.”
“Bon. Now go home, lock your doors, get some sleep. He’ll pick you up tomorrow.”
She stood up and headed to the door. Before she got there, her conscience pricked at her and she turned around.
“King, are you okay?”
He gave a very French sort of shrug.
“I should never have let Natasha leave. If she’d been on my staff, if she’d been in my club...”
“She hit on you and you turned her down. She quit for her own reasons. Brad Wolfe guards those dungeons like a hawk and this happened on his watch. It could have happened on yours, too. Jesus, Natasha could have gotten mugged on the sidewalk or hit by a bus. You can’t blame yourself for every bad thing that happens to every kinky person in New York.”
“I can try.”
“Stop being so damn Catholic. That’s Søren’s job.”
She walked back over to him, dug her fingers into his hair, and gave it a gentle tug the way Kingsley liked.
“Where’s Juliette?”
“Safe,” he said and that was all he said. Kingsley protected Juliette, his private secretary, as if her life meant more to him than his own. Probably because it did.
“Do you need me tonight?” Although alone in the office, she whispered the words. No one but Nora, Juliette and Søren knew about Kingsley’s secret submissive and masochistic side. She’d given a lot of herself to Lance tonight and part of her wanted to race back to the club and see if he’d stayed there. She wanted more time with Lance, but if Kingsley needed her attentions, she would give him whatever she had left and not charge him a cent for it. They fought like brother and sister most of the time, but when he needed her, she was his without question and without mercy.
“Don’t tempt me,” he said, closing his eyes.
“I have to,” she whispered, her fingers tracing the strong line of his jaw. “It’s my job.”
He raised his lips to hers for a kiss. She kissed him longer and deeper than she’d intended to, but such things happened around Kingsley. He pulled back from the kiss and gave her a tired smile.
“Go home and sleep, Maîtresse. I’ll call as soon as I hear anything.”
“Oui, Monsieur.” She dropped another kiss on his cheek and whispered a quick and true “Je t’adore, mon roi” in his ear. Kingsley had money, power and respect, but with all that came enormous responsibility. He ran a dangerous business and had the safety of all his staff weighing on his heart. Some days it was good to be the king. Days like this it sucked ass, and not in the fun way.
Nora caught a cab back to the club and tried to find Lance. Max, the bartender, said she saw him leave not long after Nora had skipped out with Søren and Simone. Goddammit. She wondered if she’d ever see him again, or if this craziness had scared him off for good. She hadn’t gotten his last name, his phone number...nothing. He’d given her one of the best evenings of her life since leaving Søren, and now he was gone. Fuck. She could ask Kingsley for his information, but she’d feel a little pathetic and desperate trying hunt the man down. If he wanted to see her again, he knew where to find her.
C’est la guerre, as Kingsley would say. It was for the best, anyway. She liked him and she didn’t like that she liked him. Like led to love and love led to nasty complications. Although with Lance at least there were no foreseeable nasty complications that involved the Vatican. One more check in the plus column for that guy.
Exhausted by a night of great kink and terrible news, Nora drove home to her house in Connecticut. She stripped naked and crawled into her big, empty bed. She put her private and work cell phones on her pillow in the event Kingsley or Søren called with any updates on Natasha.
At ten the next morning she woke up and ate breakfast. Her first appointment was at noon that day, so she dressed in her kinky best. At 10:45 she heard a brisk knock on her door followed by the ringing of her doorbell and another round of knocking.
“Jesus H. Christ, I’m coming,” she said as she headed to her door. She threw it open ready to chew out her new no-neck overpaid bouncer bodyguard for excessive door knocking. “Dude, seriously, holy shit.”
Lance stood outside her door on her front porch wearing an awkward smile on a face made even more handsome by daylight.
“Hello, Mistress. Shall we?”
Nora remembered Kingsley’s words from last night—no sex, no kink.
“God-fucking-dammit.”
Ten minutes later they were in her car heading to the city. She’d insisted on driving.
“Any reason why you lied when I mentioned Kingsley last night?” Lance asked as Nora turned south toward Manhattan.
“I’ve been trained to disavow all knowledge of Kingsley Edge. You get my name, rank and serial number only.”
“If I had known you were Kingsley’s top Dominatrix, I might have checked with the boss first before going to bed with you.” Lance put on a pair of dark sunglasses, which annoyed the hell out of her. First, it made it harder to read his eyes. Second, they looked so damn sexy on him she wanted to pull over and fuck him right on the side of the road.
“Under normal circumstances he doesn’t care who I sleep with.”
“Maybe,” Lance said, “but this hardly constitutes normal circumstances.”
“Did you tell him we fucked last night?”
Lance’s answer to that was to give her a look that suggested she might have just asked him the most insulting question he’d ever been asked in his life.
“So that’s a no,” she said.
“Yes, it’s a no.”
Nora groaned loudly, loud enough Lance pushed his sunglasses down to give her a “What the fuck?” look.
“Sorry,” she said. “I had an amazing time last night.”
“Yeah, well, so did I.”
“And now you’ve gone and fucked it up by getting hired as my bodyguard.”
“This is my fault?”
“Yes. You know King will kill us both if we sleep together while you’re working as my bodyguard.”
“Worse. He told me if I laid a hand on you while I’m supposed to be guarding you, I’d be fired completely—from the bodyguard job and my real job running security. And if you laid a hand on me—”
“What? He’ll fire me? I don’t get fired.”
“No,” Lance said, turning his head to gaze out the window. “He’ll fire me for that, too.”
Nora winced. “That man needs to be flogged. He’s only doing this to piss me off.”
“And maybe so I won’t get distracted while I’m supposed to be protecting you?”
“Don’t give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s a sadist. This is the sort of shit he pulls on me. Probably payback for the time I started a rumor Kingsley wore a toupee. He was really confused by all the women who wanted to suddenly play with his hair.”
“You two have an odd relationship.”
“Welcome to the Underground,” Nora said. “I’m seriously going to beat the hell out of him for telling me who I can and can’t fuck.”
“Yeah, let’s not do that. Sorry, Mistress, but I need this job. And more importantly, I need you to be safe. If some lunatic out there is stalking Dominatrixes—”
“One Dominatrix. He hurt one of us. Everyone’s overreacting. We have no proof he’s coming after any of the rest of us.”
“We have no proof he isn’t, either.”
“Stop being rational when I’m horny,” she demanded.
“I’m sorry, Mistress,” he said with far more amusement than contrition.
Nora exhaled and shook her head.
“Lance, if we’re working together and not fucking, you have to stop calling me ‘Mistress.’ It’s too much of a turn-on. My name is Nora,” she reminded him.
“Is it?”
“It is and you know it.”
“Then why did that eight feet tall blond guy call you ‘Eleanor’ last night?”
“He’s only six-four. He only seems eight feet tall because his ego is eight feet tall.”
“Who is he?”
“That’s Søren, the priest I told you about.”
“The best sadist in the world? That guy?”
“Him.”
“He’s too pretty. I don’t like pretty boys.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t think he liked you much, either.” Nora tried not to smile but she couldn’t help but enjoy a glimpse of Lance’s possessive streak. Male subs could get very possessive of their Dommes. She knew quite a few male submissive/female Dominant couples that were actually monogamous. Horrifying thought.
“Why did he call you Eleanor?”
“The same reason I call him Blondie and/or Asshole sometimes—because it’s annoying.”
“So Eleanor isn’t your real name?”
“Oh, it is. My friend Griffin told me years ago that he thought ‘Eleanor’ sounded too prissy. He started calling me Nor or Nora. When I became a Dominatrix we used that as my Domme name. Very few of the pros use their real names. Kingsley doesn’t use his real last name. I don’t. None of the subs do, either. Easier to keep a line between the real world and the kink world. Even Søren is not Søren’s legal American name.”
“What is his legal American name?”
Nora ran a finger over her lips as if zipping them and tossed the invisible key out the window.
“I see...” Lance said.
“Sorry. Blondie is eight feet of arrogant and annoying, but he’s also pretty important to—” She almost said “me” before catching herself. “Us. The Underground, I mean. Only about three of us know his legal name, the name he pastors under. Helps keep him safe from scandal.”
“A priest fucking a bunch of girls in a kink club probably should cause a scandal.”
“Yes, because the people he ministers to while they’re dying really care who he fucks in his free time.”
“Did I just hit a sore spot?” Lance asked.
“I’m Catholic,” Nora said. “The entire church is a sore spot with me. But, for the record, he doesn’t fuck a bunch of girls in kink clubs. He’s a sadist who plays with masochists but he never has sex with any of them.”
“None of them?”
“Well...” she said. “One of them.”
“Isn’t that against the church’s rules or something?”
“Isn’t it against the Navy’s rules to have gay Navy SEALs?”
“It is.”
“Did you serve with any?”
“Several.”
“Were they bad SEALs?”
“No. They were excellent SEALs and honorable men.”
“You didn’t turn them in to the Navy brass?”
“I see where you’re going with this. I’m not Catholic. I don’t care who he fucks as long as it’s legal and consensual.”
“No one should. He’s the best man on earth. He should be able to sleep with whoever he wants, get married, have kids if he wants them...”
“Do you like kids?” he asked.
“In small doses,” she said. “Why?”
“No reason,” Lance said and she heard a strange note in his voice. “So what’s your agenda for the day?”
Nora sensed he was attempting to change the subject. She let him.
“My agenda is not pissing off my clients. I see very wealthy and important men.”
“Kingsley told me that.”
“Yes, and they like their privacy. They aren’t going to be happy to have some man they’ve never met before or heard of hanging around. Let me do the talking. You act mute.”
“My lips are sealed, Mistress...I mean, Nora.”