EXCERPT FROM ‘THE RETURN: SEQUEL TO THE CHATEAU’
When Kingsley had been whipped within an inch of his life, and the sex after had nearly taken the other inch, he lay across Søren’s stomach, ready to greet Death with a smile.
“Move,” Søren ordered.
“I can’t. You killed me.”
Kingsley’s head rose and fell like driftwood on an ocean wave with the force of Søren’s sigh.
“Why is it always my stomach?” Søren asked. His tone was rhetorical...and disgusted. “There are organs in there. Delicate organs. Namely the diaphragm which controls breathing. Your head on my diaphragm makes it more than slightly difficult to breathe.”
“You have a sexy stomach. Not my fault.” Kingsley turned his head and kissed said sexy stomach which inspired another disgusted, yet resigned, sigh on Søren’s part. Another ocean wave. An icy winter ocean.
“Eleanor at least has the common decency to wallow around on my chest where there is a ribcage to keep me from dying of slow suffocation. You have to lay ten pounds of French cranium onto my stomach. Where’s a guillotine when I need it?”
“Decapitation is my hard limit.”
“So he finally finds a hard limit,” Søren said. “Only took a few decades.”
Smiling, Kingsley kissed Søren’s stomach again...kissed that pale smooth hard stomach and the firm elegant curve of ribcage...and his sternum, hard as iron, and up and down the center of his chest and then, finally, one kiss over the heart, if there was a heart in there. Sometimes Kingsley still wondered...
But Kingsley did feel the slow steady thrum of something heart-like in there. After the sustained, back-lacerating whipping Kingsley had just endured, he had a feeling it was a clock there. A ticking clock attached to a brick of C-4 explosives.
“Are you about to blow?” Kingsley asked.
“You? Or in general?”
“Me.”
“Try asking nicely for once in your heathen life.”
“Will you please blow me, Sir?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I asked nicely.”
“I told you to try asking nicely. I never promised it would work.”
“Bastard.”
“You came twice. Don’t be so greedy.”
Kingsley was greedy though. He’d had a perfect day and when that wasn’t enough, he’d demanded a perfect night as well. And it had been a perfect day. They lived in New Orleans now, all of them. Kingsley, his lover Juliette, their daughter Céleste. Søren, too, and his lover Nora. They’d come to give Céleste a better, happier childhood than they could have given her in Manhattan. And they had. Earlier that day, he and Juliette had taken Céleste to the nature reserve where she’d marveled at the playing otters and lumbering alligators, giggled madly at the flittering blue butterflies and flat-footed penguins.
A perfect day. Strangers complimented Kingsley on his beautiful family, on Céleste’s sweet temper and infectious laugh. Another family with a daughter of about twelve asked Kingsley to take their photograph in front of the flamingos. And he had as if he were a normal husband and father and not one of the more notorious men in the BDSM communities of New York and New Orleans.
Happiness had swollen in his chest like a red balloon, about to burst. Home again that afternoon, he put Céleste down for her nap, and found Juliette in the kitchen, baking bread for their dinner.
“I think today was one of the best days of my life,” Kingsley told her as he held her from behind, hands on her stomach, lips at her ear. “Top ten, at least. Who knew being vanilla could be so fun?”
“Céleste wants a girls night tonight so we can do our hair and nails. You should call Søren.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?” Kingsley had teased her, though he’d had the thought himself.
“I’m trying to save you from yourself before you really do turn vanilla,” she said. “If you buy a grill and start wearing boat shoes, mon roi et mon amour, I will leave you and never look back.”
“What’s wrong with boat shoes?” Kingsley asked.
She swatted him with a spatula.
“Call Søren right now.”
So Kingsley had called Søren. It required humbling himself. Well, whoring himself really, which he was more than willing to do. But it had been such a good day and every gambler knew to ride a hot hand. And had anyone ever said they were “too happy”? Was there such a thing?
Søren had made it more difficult, of course.
“It’s a school night,” Søren said when Kingsley had asked to see him.
So Kingsley had replied, “School me, then.”
“Eight o’clock. Your apartment.”
Eight o’clock came.
And so had Kingsley.
Twice.
Kingsley’s “apartment” didn’t really deserve that name. It wasn’t much more than a grand bedroom suite with a bathroom on the second floor of the house he’d purchased for the sole purpose of building a friendly little BDSM society in town. And because he did not lack a sense of irony or sense of history, his new place was in the French Quarter.
The Marquis Club was intimate, elegant, and exclusive—so very exclusive most people in New Orleans wouldn’t know it existed even if they tried looking for such a place, which is exactly how Kingsley wanted it.
As much as he’d loved The 8th Circle in New York, he vastly preferred The Marquis Club. A double gallery historic home with six bedrooms—now converted to dungeons—it had once served as a New Orleans brothel. The back balconies overlooked a courtyard shielded by a high wall for private parties. And downstairs one would find an exquisitely-appointed reception room where the well-heeled perverts of Louisiana came to mingle before slipping off to a private playroom. In a gilded frame on a wall in that reception room hung a portrait of Donatien Alphonse François, AKA the Marquis de Sade.
Even now as he dozed on his lover’s stomach, Kingsley could hear the murmur of voices below them in the drawing room and the gentle din of the jazz trio that played at The Marquis Club every Friday and Saturday night. Juliette’s idea...make The Marquis Club appear to be nothing more than another jazz club. To which the infamous dominatrix Mistress Nora had to add, “Brilliant—hide your jizz club inside your jazz club.”
Kingsley hadn’t laughed but only because he was pissed he hadn’t thought of the joke first.
“Are you asleep?” Kingsley asked Søren when several minutes of silence had passed.
Kingsley had simply been marinating in his good fortune. God only knew what went on in Søren’s mind when quietly ruminating.
“Awake,” Søren said. “Not easy to sleep when I have a human skull compressing my lungs.”
Kingsley lifted his head from Søren’s stomach.
“Thank God.” Søren took a deep melodramatic breath.
“Does it really hurt that much?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Søren, without warning, lightly chopped Kingsley in the diaphragm with the side of his hand.
Two minutes later Kingsley took a deep breath for the first time in two minutes.
“I don’t know what’s more humiliating,” Kingsley said as he took another breath. “That I didn’t see that coming or that I enjoyed it.”
“You are the whore of whores. Whores who have spent the past twenty years on their backs look at you and say, ‘Have some dignity, man, for God’s sake. You’re making us all look bad.’”
Kingsley laughed though it hurt. Or perhaps...because it hurt.
“The sadist of sadists has no room to talk. Even my Madame would tell you, ‘Pace yourself, boy. No use beating a dead whore.’”
Kingsley expected a reaction to that. One of his better plays on words that evening. A laugh? A smile? Søren didn’t even blink.
Unforgivably rude.
Søren left the bed and walked naked across the floor to the chair that held his clothes. He wore his naked body like other men wore tailored Armani suits, with the casual confidence of someone who knew he was the best-dressed man in the room.
Kingsley forgave Søren. Ah, puns were the lowest form of humor.
He watched his lover dress with nearly the same pleasure he’d watched him undress. The flex of long legs and steely quads, the taut tensing of biceps, the stretch and flash of back muscle...best show in town.
Now dressed apart from socks and shoes, Søren returned to the bed. He stood over Kingsley who lay on his back, still naked, hands clasped behind his head.
“Speaking of Madame,” Søren said. “I have to tell you something.”
“What?” Kingsley instantly sat up.
“I don’t know if you’ll want to know this, but I admit I couldn’t help myself. Curiosity got the better of me,” Søren said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Søren took a folded sheet of paper from the pocket of his black jeans and held it out to Kingsley who only stared at it.
“I believe I found your château.”
THE STORY CONTINUES IN ‘THE RETURN: SEQUEL TO THE CHATEAU’….