Dark Secret Love (21 page)

When the after-dinner drinks arrived, Jack put his hand on the side of my neck, his fingertips stroking my bare skin. “The bathrooms are upstairs. Go on up. I’m sure he’ll follow you.”

“Jack?”

“Get him to kiss you.”

“Come on, Jack …”

“Get him to kiss you up there. That’s all. Nothing more than that. Only a kiss. Then come back to the table and have your drink as if nothing ever happened.”

I felt shaky as I made my way through the restaurant and up the tiny stairs to the landing. There was a pay phone next to a mirrored wall, several prints by Toulouse Lautrec, and two bathroom doors. I hesitated in front of the mirror, fixing my hair, when the waiter came upstairs.

I turned to face him, and he looked at me in the same suggestive way as he had all evening. I smiled, shocked at how right Jack had been. The man started to speak, and I somehow knew what he was going to say before I heard the words.

“So sexy …”

I shook my head and took a step forward. It was all I had to do. He took over, pressing me back against the mirrored wall and kissing me. I could feel how hard he was through his black slacks, could smell his aftershave, could feel the start of his evening beard scrape my cheek. He tried to bring his hands up to my breasts, but I
grabbed onto them instead and held them at his sides.

Jack said to kiss. That was all.

The feel of this stranger’s mouth on mine sent a powerful shock through me. He kissed so differently from Jack. Soft and slow at first, then gradually growing more passionate. I let the pleasure build within me, and then I pulled back and smiled at him. “I can’t,” I said, “I can’t do any more,” and I turned and hurried into the ladies’ room, intent on fixing my hair, my smudged lipstick. I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and didn’t recognize myself. There was a strange look to my eyes. Sadness? Perhaps. But more of the thrill of the hunt.

Jack was waiting impatiently when I came back downstairs. The table was cleared; the bill was gone. We took a cab back to the hotel and he didn’t speak a word the whole ride.

I wondered if I had failed. If the test had not been my obedience in this case, but my refusal. Fear flickered through me, and I felt lost until Jack gripped my wrist and led me to the elevators. And suddenly I understood. I had done what he said. To the very last degree. And now he was going to punish me for it.

“What did it feel like?” Jack asked me.

“I was nervous.”

“Sure, but what did the kiss feel like?”

I closed my eyes, trying to recreate every detail in my mind. “His lips were soft,” I started, “and I could tell that he was a smoker, because he had that dark flavor of tobacco.” This isn’t a bad thing to me. One of my most intense memories is the way Brock’s kisses sometimes tasted silver like smoke.

Jack took my wrists in his hands and gently clicked the cool cuffs into place. I was bound face up on the hotel bed, with my ankles spread and attached to the metal frame under the mattress.

“More,” he said, pressing me. “Tell me more.”

“I could hear the patrons downstairs,” I told him, “and I thought about you sipping your drink and waiting for me …”

“You know, I don’t believe you kissed him.” Jack now
held a flogger in one hand, and he traced the many fine ends along my ribs, tickling me. “I think you pretended to make a call, that you stayed with your back to him, that you didn’t even look in his direction. I think you’re making all this up to please me.”

I took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to prove myself. “He was wearing some spicy cologne,” I started, trying again. “His lips were soft and he pressed them firmly to mine, and then slowly parted them and touched my tongue with his.”

Jack changed tactics surprisingly, “How do I know you didn’t fuck him?”

He’d gone from disbelief that I’d engaged in a simple kiss to certainty that I’d taken off my panties. And I panicked. “I didn’t, Jack. God, of course I didn’t.” What could I say? “You can tell. Touch me there. Come on. You could tell if I’d been with another man.”

“Keep describing what happened.”

I was off-center now, and desperate. “I gripped his hands and held them to his sides when he tried to touch my breasts. I kissed him, Jack. That was all. Like you told me.”

The flogger danced along my body, landing once, sharply, between my legs, but I didn’t beg. Didn’t cry out.

“I promise, Jack,” I said, my eyes wide. “It was only a kiss.”

Jack was in motion now, the weapon graceful in his grip, crisscrossing the blows over that most tender skin. I could feel the strokes as they built in intensity. He started strong, yet worked gradually in force until my hips were squirming on the mattress. There was almost no give in the way he’d bound me, but I could raise and lower my body, could beg with the motions of my hips.

I understood why he was punishing me. This time it was for obeying him. I’d never done anything like this before—kissing another man at the request of my boyfriend. Yeah, I’d cheated on Byron, but obviously not with his permission. I thought about the pleasure I’d gotten by meeting my lovers on the sly—by kissing them, by fucking them—and then returning home to Byron. This was nothing like that emotion. I’d kissed the waiter only because Jack had told me to. I would never have looked in the man’s direction if not at the request of my boyfriend.

“Would you have fucked him?” The flogger was gone, on the floor, and Jack was bent by my feet, undoing the bindings.

“No, Jack, no!”

“If I’d told you to go upstairs and take off your panties and wait for him, would you have obeyed me?”

Ah, Jesus. It was a trap. I’d fallen in. I’d failed.

“No, Jack …” He was turning me now, arranging me face down on the bed. My pussy throbbed from the flogging, but I knew that pain had been a mere wake-up call to whatever he had planned next.

“You’d have disobeyed me?”

A trick. A cruel Dom trick.

“I don’t want to fuck anyone else, Jack.”

“But you did want to kiss him?”

I turned my head, looking up at him over my shoulder. I felt helpless, and timid, a rabbit caught in a snare. “Please—”

“Please, what, baby?” He was right next to me, his mouth so close. “Please kiss you? Like you kissed him?”

I was fucked. I got that now. If I’d disobeyed in the restaurant, he would have undoubtedly spanked me right there, in public, as he had threatened to do in the past. I’d
had that image in my mind, the thought of him raising my skirt and lowering my panties so that everyone in the restaurant could see my ass, see it get tanned. So I had done what he’d told me. But if he had ordered me to fuck the waiter, I would not have obeyed. I’d have begged him, pleaded. I would have done whatever he had said in order to please him in a different manner. There was a line I was unwilling to cross. Jack was illuminating that line for me.

“Slut,” Jack said under his breath, standing once more. I watched him undo his belt. I waited for him to strike. Instead, he brought the cold metal buckle up to my lips. He waited for me to kiss it. The concept of kissing now felt tainted. “I’m not going to give you the gag tonight,” Jack said sadly. “You’re going to have to keep yourself quiet.”

He took his time. The buckle caught my skin every few blows, and I knew those bruises were going to last. They would be the ones to turn dark blue and purple. The ones to hurt when I sat. I cried, tears streaking my face, wetting the pillow. But I did not scream. I did not fight.

I had failed him.

By obeying, I had failed.

I deserved whatever he had to give me.

I was sure he would leave me tied all night. That he wouldn’t fuck me. That he might even leave the room, leave me alone in my misery. I prepared myself for that concept, hoping that I would behave in a manner that would please him. That I would not let him down twice in one night. So when he stripped off his clothes, I was surprised.

Jack left me tied. I had that part right. And he spit on his fingertips and worked that wetness around my hole. He fucked me as hard as he’d whipped me, taking my ass with an almost frightening intensity.

When he was done, he still kept me tied, but he didn’t leave the room. He wrapped his body around mine and held me like that, his warmth embracing me, soothing me.

“You can’t always win,” he whispered.

I stayed silent.

“There was no way tonight for you to win. It was a losing proposition from the start.” He lifted my dark hair off my neck and blew his breath against me.

I thought of my college roommate’s print of The Kiss on the wall of my college dorm. I thought of Deena cooing about the sexiness of the image, how it would be so divine to have a man kiss you like that. And I turned my head and met Jack’s ice-blue eyes as he finally kissed me for the first time that night. Really kissed me.

Divine.

I met with my publisher the next day. And although I remember what I wore—yes, it was all black—and how well I was received, the meeting itself has become a blur. The publisher treated me extremely graciously. As a first-time author, I was in awe. I wish I could describe our conversation, or tell you how witty I was, but all I know is that I turned in my manuscript, shook the hand of my editor, and at some point found myself back out on the street.

My next appointment was with the managing editor at another sex magazine, and I remember this one much more clearly. My editor was luscious, perfectly suited for the lighthearted environment. She had a tiny office filled with an assortment of hilariously vulgar sex toys (the Tongue!), pin-up pictures of bare-chested men, sparkling rhinestone tiaras, dried flowers, and other girly items. She was loud and funny and introduced me around the office as if I were a celebrity.

And then she did something totally unexpected. She took me to another floor in the same building to have me meet the publisher of a line of erotic books. The book line was owned by the same company as the magazine, and she thought I might find a nice niche here.

I will say honestly that the publisher—I’ll call him JR—was less than interested. He thought that if I wrote for her magazine, I’d be far too soft-core for his world. I told him about my upcoming book, and after listening to me describe a few of the more S/M-style scenes, he agreed to give me a try. I was to sketch an outline for a Victorian-themed novel, and send it to him when I got back home. (I didn’t have an exclusive contract with my first publishing house.)

By the end of the day, I felt shell-shocked. But more importantly, I felt like a writer. A real writer.

Jack didn’t care how I felt. I don’t think he’d have treated me any differently if I were a popcorn girl or a truck-stop waitress. Jack didn’t really care what I did. He only cared about who I was. Kindly, he let me crash on the bed for a few minutes while he shaved. During the afternoon, he’d bought several different bottles of liquor, and they stood on the windowsill.

I was sipping a glass of whiskey, my shoes off, pillows piled behind my head, when Jack re-entered the room. He stood there for a moment, looking at me. He had on a pair of slacks but no shirt, and I gazed back at him, admiring his flat stomach and the taut muscles of his arms.

“Take off your clothes.”

I’d been waiting for him to pay attention to me, and I was more than ready to obey. I slid off the short black skirt and black silky T-shirt, then pulled off my tights.

“Bra and panties, too.”

These were both black as well, and I took them off and tossed them into the corner. Jack left me alone for a minute, then came toward the bed with his razor, cream, and a cup of water. He sat the implements on the bedside table, then returned to the bathroom, re-emerging with one of the hotel’s folded fluffy white towels.

“Lift your hips.”

He placed the towel beneath me, and then started to spread the shaving cream over my pussy lips. I keep myself neat and trim at all times, but Jack spread the cream all over the entire region of my sex, and I understood that he was going to shave me bare.

Jack worked quickly, without any apparent fear. He slicked the razor over my skin, then dipped the blade in the glass of warm water. He moved my legs wider apart when he needed to and used his fingers to pinch my lips, maneuvering me exactly how he wanted.