Читать книгу: «The Prince», страница 2

NORTH
The Present

The fear had been his favorite part. The fear that followed him like the footsteps through the woods where he’d fled for sanctuary and found something better than safety. The footsteps … how his heart had raced as they grew louder, drew nearer. He’d been too afraid to run anymore, afraid that if he ran he would get away. He ran to be caught. That was the only reason.

Kingsley remembered his sudden intake of air as a viciously strong hand clamped down onto his neck … the bark of the tree trunk burning his back … the smell of the evergreens around him, so potent that even thirty years later he still grew aroused whenever he inhaled the scent of pine. And after, when he woke up on the forest floor, a new scent graced his skin—blood, his own … and winter.

Three decades later he could never uncouple sex from fear. The two were linked inextricably, eternally and unrepentantly in his heart. He’d learned the potency of fear that day, the power of it, even the pleasure, and now thirty years later, fear had become Kingsley’s forte.

Unfortunately, at this moment his Juliette was not afraid.

He could change that.

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?

After she’d gotten over the shock of seeing Wesley again, she’d tried talking him into staying with her in her house in Connecticut. But he’d been unusually insistent.

“Kentucky,” he’d said.

“Please,” he’d said.

“I lived in your world. Come live in mine for a while,” he’d said.

She’d finally acquiesced, unable and unwilling to ever again see sadness in those big brown eyes of Wesley’s. But at her insistence they’d driven in separate cars—he in his Mustang, she in the Aston Martin Griffin had delivered to her. After all, Nora never went into any situation without an escape plan. She’d learned that lesson well back in her days as a professional Dominatrix. She hadn’t commanded her exorbitant fees by simply being more beautiful or more vicious than other pros. She did what few others of her kind did. Instead of working from a guarded, well-staffed dungeon, she went to her clients’ houses, their hotel rooms, wherever they paid her to go. Back then she’d joked her motto was Have Riding Crop, Will Travel. And travel she had. From New York to New Orleans, from Midtown to the Middle East, she went wherever Kingsley sent her. And for her own safety she relied on two things—her notoriety as the most dangerous Domme in the world, and Kingsley’s reputation as the last man in America anyone wanted to cross. She had only to say her name or his and the Underworld toed the line.

Now Nora prayed that where she went no one would have heard of her. Especially Wesley’s parents. Surely, as conservative as Wesley painted them, they’d never even been in the erotica section of a bookstore, much less heard the name Nora Sutherlin.

But it didn’t hurt to ask. She fished her cell phone out of her bag and called Wesley.

“Yes, we’re almost there,” he answered before she even said hello. Every hour on the hour she’d called to him to ask, “Are we there yet?”

“That’s not why I’m phoning this time.”

“Sure about that?”

“Nope. So you never told me what your parents think about me coming to visit.” Nora turned on her blinker as they veered onto exit 81.

“They’re fine with me having visitors. A lot of my college friends came by over the summer.”

Nora pursed her lips. She would have stared Wesley down had he not been in the yellow Shelby Mustang two cars ahead of her.

“Nice nonanswer there, kid.”

“It’s fine.” He laughed and Nora couldn’t help but smile. God, she’d missed that boy’s laugh in the fifteen months they hadn’t seen each other, hadn’t spoken. Wesley’s absence from her life had been a void no amount of sex or money or kink or fame had been able to fill.

“Seriously, Nor. My parents are nice people. They like all my friends.”

“Friends. Good. Let’s go with friends for introductions. Let’s practice. You’ll say, ‘Ma, Paw—’“

“You’re getting my family confused with the Waltons again.”

“Hush, John-Boy, we’re practicing. You say to them, ‘Mother, Father—this is my friend Nora. I used to work for her back at Yorke. She’s come to visit and not cause any trouble.’“

“Not going to be able to say that with a straight face.”

“Which is why we’re practicing, Your Highness.”

Wesley groaned, and now it was Nora’s turn to laugh at him.

“You’re never going to drop that, are you?”

Nora could easily envision him rubbing his forehead in amused frustration.

“I kind of like it—the Prince of Kentucky. Very sexy title.”

“One stupid reporter called me that three years ago in one article—”

“Yeah, in an article about you hanging out with Prince Harry at the Kentucky Derby. Crazy that he’s turned into the sexy one now. Can you get me his number?”

“We didn’t stay in touch.”

“So, if you’re the Prince of Kentucky,” Nora continued, unwilling to drop a thread of conversation that made Wesley so delightfully uncomfortable, “who’s the Princess? Are you supposed to marry the governor’s daughter or something?”

“God, I hope not.”

“What? She a dog?”

“She’s a very cute nine-year-old girl,” Wesley said as the first of the stars showed themselves at the edge of the southern sky. At the pace they were going, they’d be at Wesley’s house within the hour. “She also happens to be my cousin.”

Now Nora had to groan. Of course Wesley couldn’t just be the son of rich horse farmers. He had to be related to the governor, as well. Her poor little intern … She’d once thought had no money, no connections, no nothing … What else didn’t she know about him?

“Well, hey. You know what they say about Kentucky …”

“You’re disgusting.”

“True. But I’m also winning.” Nora hit the gas and passed Wesley’s Mustang. He apparently didn’t take kindly to her doing so on his home territory. Nora glanced in her rearview mirror and saw his car speed up. “Don’t worry, kid. I have no idea where I’m going. You’re gonna win this … oh, holy shit. Was that a castle?”

Nora craned her neck to look at the turreted building they passed.

“No. Sort of. It’s a hotel now. But it is a castle. Some lunatic built it for his wife years ago. Was her dream to live in a castle. She never got to do so.”

Nora frowned. “That’s sad. She died before they finished it?”

“Nope. Divorced.”

Laughing, Nora glanced back one more time at the strange sight of a castle situated in the middle of Kentucky bluegrass.

“Women. Just can’t please them sometimes. I think I’d stay married to a guy who built me a castle. Especially one that pretty.”

Nora heard Wesley laughing softly on the other end of the line. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him laugh like that before—sort of throaty, kind of arrogant and undeniably sexy.

“Wait until you see my castle.”

“Are we there yet?” she asked as they hung up their cell phones.

Nora followed Wesley’s taillights all the way to a town called Versailles, which he mispronounced as “Ver-sales.” They turned onto a dark winding road and had to slow down considerably. The entire way there Nora tried to will herself to be calm. It would be fine. Everything would be fine. She had Wesley back again.

Over the summer, she’d come to accept that she’d have to live without Wesley, that she couldn’t be Søren’s property and Wesley’s … whatever at the same time. Life with Søren seemed like a beautiful prison most days, a prison she chose, a prison she would never leave. Only Wesley’s absence had made it feel like a punishment and not a palace….

“Oh, holy shit,” Nora breathed. “That’s a fucking palace.”

Ahead of her, lit up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, was the biggest goddamn house she’d ever seen in her life. Kingsley’s three-story town house, Griffin’s estate, even Søren’s father’s New Hampshire mansion … all of them looked like suburban ranch homes in comparison to the stately sprawling ivory box before her. She counted no less than twenty-eight windows on the front of the house alone. Windows, doors, balconies … she’d seen smaller palaces nestled in the Rhine Valley of Europe, palaces that housed real European aristocracy and not just old American money.

Wesley pulled into the circular cobblestone drive and turned off his engine. Nora followed suit. She hoped it was late enough no one would be out and about to witness her wide-eyed, jaw-on-the-ground reaction to Wesley’s house.

Stepping out of her car, she nearly tripped on a crack in the cobblestone. Wesley caught her and pulled her close.

“I only tripped so you’d catch me,” she lied, wrapping her arms around him.

“I only put that crack there so you’d trip.” He smiled down at her and her breath caught in her throat.

Wesley raised a hand and mussed her hair with such easy familiarity that the past year and a half they’d spent apart vanished, as if all the longing and loneliness were merely the residue of a nightmare from which she’d just awoken. In the dream, she’d lost her best friend in a labyrinth and no path she took could bring her any closer to him. But now she’d screamed herself awake and found him right next to her in bed. And when she looked up at him, at those big brown eyes and that too-sweet smile, and asked him, “So what now?” she couldn’t even begin to care what the answer was. She had her Wesley back. Maybe for only a day or a week or a month … but they were together now and she’d go anywhere as long as he went with her.

“What now? We go in the house and grab some food—”

“Grand idea. Totally starving.”

“Then we’ll go to my house—”

“Wait. What? Whoa, you have your own house? Is there a house inside this house that’s your house?”

“Guesthouse. In the back. No food in it, though, right now. We can fix that tomorrow.” Wesley took her by the hand and led her toward the front door of his palace.

“And then?” Nora prompted, eager to figure out exactly what he expected of her. Would it be like old times? Them living under the same roof and trying not to fall into bed together? Or did he want more from her?

Wesley grinned down at her and her heart knotted up in her chest. God damn, she had missed this kid—so fucking much that being back with him hurt almost as much as letting him go had.

“Then …” Wesley said as he ran his hands up her arms, and Nora shivered with a need she thought she’d long buried, a need for hands on her that were always gentle. She shook off the thought and the need. Surely after they’d been a year and a half apart, Wesley’s feelings for her had changed. She couldn’t quite believe how much he had changed. He seemed taller now. His Southern accent had gotten a little thicker. His longer hair made him look older. Now he looked like a man, not the boy she’d known and loved and teased and tortured.

The suspense was more than Nora could handle. Fuck it. She’d kiss the kid and see what happened. Rising up on her toes, she gripped Wesley by the back of the neck and brought his mouth to hers. He didn’t protest.

The front door of Wesley’s castle opened and a man’s voice called out to them. “John Wesley! You know you’re allowed to kiss Bridget in the house.”

Wesley took a step back and turned toward the voice. Nora saw a man standing in the front doorway who looked like every handsome rich white Southerner she’d ever seen on television or movies. Salt-and-pepper hair, broad shoulders, a broader smile … or it had been a broad smile until he got a good look at Nora and saw she wasn’t Bridget.

Nora smiled in a manner she hoped appeared friendly and nonthreatening, as opposed to her usual smiles, which tended to be described as “seductive” and “dangerous.”

“Hey, Dad.” Wesley grabbed Nora’s hand and half escorted, half dragged her forward.

Wesley’s father narrowed his eyes at her. “Who’s your friend, J.W.?”

Nora looked at Wesley and mouthed “J.W.?”

Wesley mouthed back “Eleanor.”

“Dad, this is my girlfriend, Nora Sutherlin.”

Nora’s eyes went even wider than they had at the first sight of the house. Girlfriend? Who? Her?

Wiping the look of shock off her face, she purposefully widened her smile at Wesley’s handsome father.

At that smile, Wesley’s handsome father gave her a look of deep, abiding, profound and unremitting disgust.

“Oh, yeah.” She sighed, as her one and only prayer about this trip went unanswered. “He’s heard of me.”