Three and a Half Weeks (54 page)

“Shhh,” is all I get in response and the fronds start moving faster, the pattern frenzied and erratic. His hand suddenly grabs me between my legs, rubbing and squeezing me into sensations too big to handle. “Ian, I can’t…”

And… boom. I fail at my task, alas.

His voice slides through my stupor. “Tsk, tsk, tsk, Mrs. Blackmon. One or two simple instructions and you neglect to heed them. What shall we do as a punishment? Hmm, I think I’ve got it.”

It’s not really a punishment; he puts me on my knees and stands in front of me. I love to do this for him but there is one punitive condition: my hands are tied behind my back. That makes it impossible for me to control the situation and it’s a little scary. A little scary is good, though. Exciting.

Soft, hard, smooth, jerky, gentle, rough—all adjectives we used. When he hits his climax, I feel as if I’ve accomplished something important. I love giving my husband pleasure.
After, he flings me on the bed and returns the favor.

Later
, we lie in bed, entwined and peaceful. Ian’s head leaning on mine, he speaks softly. “Would you like to know what else I saw in you, Ella?”

I look up into his face that I adore. “What else?”

“How much time do you have? Your physical beauty attracted me but it was what was underneath that truly ensnared me. I love who you are: your wit, your sense of humor, your taste in music. The way you give just a tiny smirk before you’re about to blow up in anger, and the way your hair blows across your face when we drive in the convertible. You flip it back and flaunt a million-dollar smile as the wind caresses your face. I love the way you wear your clothes, the way you chew your lip when deep in thought, the way you straighten your spine when undertaking a challenge. I love your spirit for adventure, especially when it comes to sex, and the way you meet me dare for dare, never giving ground no matter how much I push. I love how your blue, blue eyes light up from within when you see an adorable child or animal, how you giggle when something strikes your funnybone, how you blush when you’re embarrassed.

“But maybe most of all, Ella, is that I love how you love me. You make me feel that my love for you is something you cherish and will keep from harm. If I make you feel physically safe, as you’ve told me I do, you make me feel emotionally safe, something I’ve never felt before. I will hold that, protected and warm, next to my heart forever and ever, my beautiful wife.

Tears are streaming down my face when he finishes. I never realized how tenderhearted Ian is behind the polished façade he hides behind. My throat hoarse with unshed tears, I can’t manage a response. I am so choked up by his beautiful homage to me. A marriage is a legal procedure, a piece of paper that says two people are united in the eyes of the law. The practical ramifications are important, of course: just ask anyone who’s been denied the right. But tonight we both begin to realize that it’s so much more than practicalities.

A marriage gives mates the emotional security to open up and let another person inside, not just literally, but more importantly, spiritually. Ian and I have been through a lot, not the least of which were two break-ups, one lasting a year, and one just a few hours. Those few hours when I fled to L.A. hurt more, I think, than the whole year apart because I felt betrayed by the man I love. That was when it dawned on me that I’d rather be whipped than abandoned.

While we’re on the topic of whipping, I should add that he’s not all that interested in it anymore. And, perverse creature that I am, I’m more interested in it precisely because of that. I’m not saying I want it, per se, but I’m not saying I don’t, either. Let’s just say those whips wielded by a tall, gorgeous Dominant I know have taken on mythical proportions in my mind… to the point where I might just have to try it again. We’ll see.

Snapping me out of my reverie, Ian’s voice perforates the silence in the small bedroom. “Ella,” he gazes into my eyes, his shaded with emotion so profound it’s easy to see it in the liquid mercury depths, “I love you, Ella, so much. I know it took me a long time to say it… but I’ve been here for a while, maybe even from day one.”

He’s caressing my face, sweetly and gently, his eyes never leaving mine. The emotion of the moment is so intense, I almost can’t bear to look into those light and haunting peepers.

He’s still speaking softly to me. “I promise to give my absolute best to be a good partner to you. Since you’re willing to put up with the… lesser… facets of my personality, I can surely put up with your tiny imperfections.”

Trying to lighten the mood just a bit, I screech, going for indignant. “Imperfections? Name one, buster.”

“Buster?” He smiles. “Getting yourself into trouble is a big one.”

I can’t argue with that assessment, though I’m up for a try anyway. Before I can utter another syllable, though, he speaks up again.

“I’ll help you out of every hole… even while getting into a few of my own—the nice, warm kind.” He winks at me, smiling sweetly and pulls me into his arms, embracing me tightly. “
The difficult I’ll do right now; the impossible will take a little while
.”

I smile. He’s reciting the words to one of our wedding songs,
Crazy He Calls Me
. So Ian Blackmon, mogul, Dominant, sexually kinky demi-god, is also a romantic deep down where no one but I can see. I can live with that. I finish the lyrics. “
Crazy, he calls me. Sure, I’m crazy. Crazy in love am I.
”

Ireland and Scotland: what can I say? One might have to be a poet to do them justice but I’ll give it a go: green swaths of hill and dale, sun shimmering on azure blue waters so vibrantly it’s blinding, friendly pink-cheeked people, astoundingly good ale, and fantastically superb sex—oh wait, we supplied that last part.

Then we decided to go to the beach.

Not just any beach, mind you, but a beach in the South of France. Yes, the beaches of France are rather incomparable and we’ve been lying in chaises reading and sipping icy cold cocktails for four days straight. Though we planned to end our trip in Scotland, we decided to stay another week and visit Provence. I’m thinking about Lucien, as I usually do whenever France is on my mind.

I realize that at the time, I wanted to put that whole episode with Lucien behind me as fast as I could… and did. But now removed from it by the distance of time and place, I can more easily reflect. I don’t think Lucien was as blameless as he claimed to be in that whole tawdry affair. I think he participated to some significant extent, and participated with a measure of zeal. It’s my belief that he actually said some of those awful things to me and did touch me inappropriately while I was grossly impaired.

Afterward, he was ashamed and guilty, which is what I’m figuring led him to turn on Natasha and help us out. I suppose we could say he redeemed himself in so doing. Regardless of any redemption, I still want nothing to do with him. He sent us a beautiful piece of art as a wedding gift, a set of four miniature paintings of a street in Paris, each reflecting a different perspective. We discussed what to do and ultimately decided to re-gift the paintings. Neither of us wanted to keep anything from Lucien fucking Phillips. The paintings now hang on the walls of Quentin’s San Francisco Victorian, I believe. No reason to take it out on the art.

As for Natasha? We ultimately decided to let things be. Lucien promised Daniel she was alive and kicking—boy, was she kicking. But her new man is up to the challenge of subduing her, apparently. Am I thrilled by the outcome? Let’s just say the idea is growing on me and it’s certainly a damn sight better than it could have been for her. After all, she started this nasty game with Ian and he finished it. If someone throws down a gauntlet to Ian Blackmon, he or she shouldn’t be surprised if he picks up the glove and accepts the challenge.

I reach for my sunglasses, blowing a kiss to my husband who is lounging next to me, reading some boring business magazine. So, Mr. and Mrs. Blackmon send their regrets to Ms. Natasha Yenin and sincerely hope she is enjoying the sands of Arabia with her new… oh, we’ll just call him husband.

(Loose Ends)

Kiev, Ukraine

In a dreary convalescent hospice room somewhere in Kiev, two brothers sit at a table discussing a patient’s progress with his attendants. A vibrating buzz sounds inside the bigger one’s jacket pocket, alerting him to an incoming call, and he reaches in to pull out a phone.

“Dah?”

“It’s me,” the urgent female voice said in English. “Natasha’s missing.”

“Missing? For how long?”

“Over a week now. I don’t know what to do.”

“Gabriele, what can we do? We cannot return to the States right now. We’re too hot. You have to handle it yourself for now.”

“How?” The woman screeched, the pitch of her voice rising with her panic. “My daughter is missing, maybe dead, and I cannot go to the police. What is my next step?”

“Why don’t you try enlisting that useless ex-husband of yours? It’s only a shame he’s not more like his father.”

“What is he going to do?” she sneered. “He’s only interested in screwing girls young enough to be his daughter and driving fast cars. He’s no help at all.”

Leo looked at his watch and sighed. “Okay. I’ll make some calls. Where was she last seen, do you know?”

“Her neighbor said she saw her a week ago Thursday near the parking lot of her apartment building. The last call I got from her was the night before.”

“I suppose it’s good that no body has turned up. That may mean she’s still alive. Let’s hope our friend in Portland doesn’t have the junk to do anything too permanent.”

“That’s what I’m hoping and praying.”

“We should have handled him long ago. Alright, we’ll look into it and see what can be done.”

He disconnected and tossed the phone on the table, lost in thought. His brother sat patiently across the table from him, watching and waiting. Leo scratched his stubbled chin, his mind across oceans for a swollen minute and then seemed to snap to it, focusing his beady raisin eyes on his brother, shaking his head in disgust. “More crap for us to handle. The first rule of a successful man: never leave unfinished business… and now our pretty little Tasha has gone missing—very likely belly up.”

He looked down at his scuffed Doc Martens, noting the heels needed to be replaced, and then his dead eyes shifted from his shoes up to his brother’s matching lifeless eyes. “From now on we take a scorched-earth policy with our enemies. As for this particular clusterfuck, as soon as possible, we hit Blackmon and hit him hard. Finish it.”

“He’s no pussy and he’s got resources—it’s possible he’ll finish us first.”

“So be it. Then we crash and burn trying.”

“Yeah, well, it will be hard to hit him from across the North Atlantic. We dare show our pretty faces in the States and we’re dog food. It’s dangerous enough to be here now and you know it. No. We forget Blackmon and focus on what’s important: making money.”

Leo’s fist smashed into the table, splintering the thin wood. “Our son has more money than he’ll ever know what to do with. At this point it’s no longer revenge but a matter of honor. If Blackmon hurt our Tasha, he’s going down, that’s for sure.” Spittle was flying from his mouth as his anger escalated through his words.

“We can try to find Tasha but we give up on Blackmon.”
Lukas looked his brother in the eyes. “It’s over.”

He picked up his phone again and punched in a number. “It’s me. Natasha Yenin, last seen in Portland, Oregon, a week ago Thursday. Blond, blue-eyed American, Russian ethnic, 28 years of age, 5’9” and fucking gorgeous. And my niece. Find her: I’ll pay whatever. Just find her, alive or dead, preferably alive. I’ll be waiting.”

Paris, France

Lucien rubbed his red-rimmed eyes with the heels of his hands. He was still on New York time and his body screamed for rest but he had meetings all week, starting with late this afternoon.

He arrived early this morning and as soon as he left the airport, he met with Aziz’s people. Michel
Rimbaud arranged the meeting and assured him that all was going well in Saudi Arabia and that Aziz was highly satisfied with his purchase. What Lucien really wanted to know was how Natasha felt about being that purchase, but he really couldn’t ask.

He’d betrayed her in the most massive way possible. But she had gotten in the first licks, using him as a pawn in her game to get Blackmon.
Ella was the one who got hurt the most and Lucien truly liked Ella though he wasn’t exactly sure why. But there was something bright and shiny about that woman and it made him feel all the more rotten about his part in her abduction.

He often wondered if he’d been
successful in convincing Ella that she hallucinated the whole thing. Soon after he administered the drug to her, he could see she was having problems and most definitely hallucinating. That gave him the idea once he changed his mind about participating and realized he wanted to extricate himself, put distance between himself and the whole sordid affair.

What were the odds that both her boyfriend as well as her employer slash colleague would be involved in BDSM? He’d been intending to do bad things to her—Natasha had convinced him that
Ella wrote her book to publicly humiliate him… but fortunately Lucien had his doubts followed by his attack of conscience before doing anything irrevocable. Blackmon would not have rested until he wiped Lucien from the earth if anything had happened to his Ella. In the end, however, the one who suffered most was the one who should have suffered most: Natasha.

He’d be lying to himself if he said he didn’t feel regret. He did. Imagination was often much worse than reality but Lucien knew firsthand what a man could do to a captive woman—his ex-girlfriends could attest to that, even his ex-fiancée Eliza to some extent
, although he went easy on her. He wondered what the Arab was doing to the blond beauty. Lucien was madly in love with Natasha not all that long ago and abhorred the thought of her beautiful body being marked up permanently, by a Bedouin no less.

But she belonged to Aziz now… and Lucien had the funds in his bank account to prove it.

Not that he needed the money; he didn’t. Lucien had so much money, in fact, that he could never spend it in ten lifetimes. It really didn’t buy happiness.

But it bought everything else.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

She opened her eyes and saw nothing but profound darkness. Where was she? Her back ached from lying too long in the same position so she tried to shift over to her other side and found her progress impeded.

Why?

Icy cold fingers of panic skimmed down her spine. She put her hands out in front of her in that inky black space and they almost instantly touched something solid. Now the panic swelled thick in her throat, gagging her.

Buried alive?

Calm down, she told herself. If there’s limited oxygen, panting and gasping will deplete it faster. She ran her hands down whatever impediment was inches away from her face. It felt relatively soft but not satiny and padded like a coffin. It wasn’t hard enough to be a pine box or anything like that. It felt familiar, like… cardboard.

Then she moved her hands to each side and both hit the same solid wall immediately: she was in a box, a cardboard box. She decided to press the sides: if she were buried in the ground, she wouldn’t feel any give.
Or didn’t she want to know? Holding her breath while her heart performed an Olympic meter race, she gently pushed with both hands… and felt the cardboard give a little outward.

Her huge sigh of relief added to the roar of blood rushing past her eardrums. So she was in a cardboard box but it wasn’t buried underground, thank God. So… where was she?

The last thing she remembered was leaving her condo in the early morning. She’d been walking to her car… there was a rustle in the bushes that lined the walk… and that’s it, that’s the last thing. She must have been grabbed and taken somewhere. But where? And by whom?

She
prayed to a God she’d long ago scorned, that no matter how unlikely, it would be Ian’s handsome, angular face she would see when the box was opened, and not those of dead-eyed professional assassins. He’d warned her and she hadn’t listened. She didn’t think he had it in him.

Apparently he did.

She had no sense of time: it could have been minutes or hours before she began to hear noises outside her box. Things being moved, metal things, sliding things. Then her box was lifted and she could see the perforations in the cardboard now. For air. In the dark, they were invisible.

She listened carefully to the sounds being made, deciding they were unloading a vehicle of some sort, a truck or even a boat possibly. Where had they taken her?

A door opened and closed. The box stopped moving. Minutes later, she heard a boxcutter, slicing into the box and prayed it wouldn’t cut her. When the flaps were finally lifted, she was staring into four pairs of dark eyes.

They were all men,
and mean-looking. Assassins. Shit. She said nothing; they said nothing. Then she heard one of them say words, quickly, furiously. In a foreign language. Something guttural.

Arabic, maybe?

The voice was answered by a calm, commanding baritone, speaking Arabic, too, but making it sound much nicer. As soon as the second voice spoke, the four men put their hands under her, lifting her out of the box and standing her up. Her legs were wobbly. She was wearing the clothes they took her in—a cropped white tee shirt and a short black skirt— but was barefoot. Where were her shoes? She looked up when one yanked on her hair.

He was tall and so dark
: hair, skin, eyes.
Black
eyes
. His hair was longish and straight, brushed back away from a noble looking face. He wore Western garb, exceedingly upscale; if pressed to guess, she’d wager the suit was Italian. Versace probably. But those eyes.

She couldn’t tear hers away from them. They were as black as Satan’s soul… but they didn’t look mean. No, they looked… fascinated.

His eyes never leaving hers, he said something else and the men began ripping her clothes from her body. She tried resisting but was quickly slapped across the face twice by one of the men who shouted the English word
no
at her. In seconds she stood before the man stark naked, with the others holding her arms down to prevent her from covering her body.

He appraised her up and down for a long time and then spun his finger in a circle and they turned her around for him to check her over completely. When he was done, he simply nodded at the men. They lifted her up, one grabbing her wrists
from behind and another her ankles and carried her down a hall to a room, handcuffed her wrists behind her back, and shoved her inside.

She looked around. The room was painted with pale pink and white and there was a deep garnet red Persian carpet covering most of the wood floor. In one corner were two women staring at her. They were both dark, as everyone else she saw was dark. While she stood there trembling, one of the women walked over to her, grasped her elbow—neither gently nor roughly—and began leading her to a smaller room. Inside was a giant bathtub filled with scented water. The woman pointed to it and she stepped into it.

“Down.” The second woman said in English. She obeyed. The water was hot, with steam rising above it, but it felt good to Natasha. The two women proceeded to bathe her and wash her hair. The scented soaps they used smelled like sandalwood and revived her senses somewhat after being sensory deprived in that box. After, they dried her thoroughly, they removed her cuffs, placed her on a table, and proceeded to wax off all of her body hair, every single part of her. When that torture was over, they brushed her teeth and her hair, sprayed her with scented oils, trimmed her fingernails to a very short length and buffed them. They put kohl on her eyes and gloss on her lips. Finally, they clipped soft leather cuffs on her wrists and ankles. Their final attention was to buckle a large leather collar around her throat, a collar attached to a chain leash. Like a dog.

When they were done with her, they led her out of the room and up a wrought iron staircase, the steps made of white marble, icy to her bare feet. The women wore what looked like ballet slippers and had on strange garments, like something out of ancient Rome—toga-like outfits. They took her inside a door, to a luxuriously appointed room. In the center of the room was a huge bed. The bed had four posters; from each of which dangled a chain. Each wrist was clipped to a chain so that she sat in the cen
ter of the bed, her arms raised; her legs were left unrestrained. When she tried resisting, the larger woman pinched her viciously on her hip. A blindfold was slipped over her eyes. The last thing she heard before the door closed again was the strains of some kind of strange music beginning in every corner of the room.

Her ears discerned a door open and close gently, followed by the click of his shoes moving across the hardwood floor before landing on the plush carpet. Abruptly, the volume of the music dropped, and a man’s deep, smooth voice spoke, directly in front of her.

“Will you willingly obey your new master?” The words were spoken in clear, nearly unaccented English, it was the cultured voice from before, the man in authority.

Hearing a civilized voice lulled her into a false sense of security, and feeling more empowered in the situation than she othe
rwise might have or should have, she licked her lips and got a mouthful of flavored gloss. “I do not have a master,” she responded.