“Storms can hurt us, too. There’s no sin in a storm.” For good measure he added, “Mistress.”

  Nora’s heart clenched. She sighed. God, did she have good taste in lovers or what?

  “I really should be ashamed of myself for sleeping with you,” she said. “I should be. But I’m not.”

  With that, she untied his blindfold. He blinked his beautiful pale green eyes. For a moment she didn’t say anything nor did he. She let him look at her and she let herself look at him looking at her. His eyes were bright with hunger and worship. No one looked upon his mistress the way a submissive man did. Like he was afraid to look and more afraid to look away…

  “Do you think you’ve earned my cunt?”

  “If you say I have, I have,” he said.

  She smiled. “You have.”

  She raised her hands and uncuffed him. His arms fell to his sides, then reached for her.

  He was shockingly strong. She’d forgotten how strong he was. Or maybe she’d never known because he’d never used his strength on her. But when he did, she was powerless. In an instant she was on her back, on the lotus, and Nico was over her, straddling her. His knees forced her thighs apart. His hand went between her legs and stroked her pubic lips, then he pushed his fingers inside her. Her head fell back in a burst of pleasure. Her vagina was wet and open but still he opened her wider, spreading his fingers. Nora moaned at the back of her throat as he moved on top of her. His arm went around her lower back, lifting her. His hand pushed her skirt up to her hips. With a rough thrust he speared her, and she cried out. She grasped his shoulders, not caring that she was hurting him, and writhed under him as he fucked her. She lay back on the rug, her legs as wide as they’d ever been in her life, her vagina slick and open, her cunt throbbing as he worked his cock deep into her. She was overpowered, undone. Her orgasm shook her to the core.

  Spent, she laid back on the floor, eyes open, vagina making little gasps around his cock. Above them on the ceiling were the mirrored tiles and she watched herself being fucked, watched Nico’s broken back arch and bow with every thrust, saw his body shimmer with his sweat, his head come up as he worked himself deeper. His eyes were closed. His lips parted. And then she remembered who was in charge here.

  He was out of his mind fucking her. Easy enough to wrap her legs around his back, shift her weight quickly, push him down…his freshly-whipped and wounded back on the rough, rough rug.

  Nico cried out in pain and pleasure as she clenched her cunt around him. The shock of the sudden pain made him come. His head and shoulders came all the way off the ground as he released his semen into her in a final series of quick rough thrusts.

  After he came, he lay back in surrender, arms over his head. She could stay there all night straddling him, his cock soft inside her vagina, his sperm on her thighs, his mouth at her ear, his breaths tickling her neck.

  “I’m still not sorry,” he said.

  “And that’s why I love you.”

  After a few minutes, he stirred and pulled her down to him, kissed her face, her mouth, her forehead, her neck. He freed her breasts from her corset and sucked her nipples until they were sore. He grew hard and pushed her gently onto her back, started to fuck her again. Nora watched it all on the ceiling…her beautiful French brat who would rather take another whipping than stay another minute out of her cunt.

  Best show in town.

  Søren walked over to the bed, stood in front of him. Kingsley looked up at him. This was his favorite view of Søren.

  “Are you sure?” Søren asked.

  “I wouldn’t have given that to you if I wasn’t.” He was speaking French again although they were alone, and there was no chance of being overheard. It was easier to lie in French.

  Søren touched Kingsley’s face lightly. Fingertips across his cheek, then to his ear, and then his fingers—those beautiful pianist’s fingers—threaded into his hair. The grip was firm, possessive. Søren forced Kingsley’s head back. Once it was back, Søren caressed his bared throat, held it lightly with his hand until Kingsley began to relax into the large palm pressed against his Adam’s apple.

  Then Søren ran a single fingernail slowly across Kingsley’s throat as if slitting it. Every muscle in Kingsley’s body knotted up. He couldn’t help himself. It was pure instinct, like a cat’s back raising at the sight of a snake.

  He took a breath, laughed at himself.

  “Flirt,” Kingsley said.

  “I have never felt you tense so hard as you did just now. I thought you were going to jump out of your skin.”

  “I might have pissed myself.”

  “It is a fantasy of mine to terrify you enough to make you do that.”

  “You got close that time.”

  Søren released his hair, moved his hand to Kingsley’s mouth, ran his thumb across the bottom lip. “I like it when I scare you. I shouldn’t, but I do.”

  “I like that you like it.”

  Søren said nothing after that, only stroked Kingsley’s hair, his cheek, his mouth. The air was electric with waiting. He sensed a decision was being made, options considered and weighed, discarded, then reconsidered.

  “No,” Søren said.

  “What?” Kingsley wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

  “Not tonight. Maybe someday but not yet.”

  “Why not?” He couldn’t decide if he was disappointed or relieved.

  Søren held up his hand for Kingsley to see. It was shaking slightly.

  “It’s usually me doing the shaking around you,” Kingsley said.

  “When I want something too much, I can’t trust myself to have it. I think I might hurt you more than I should tonight.”

  He wasn’t joking. Kingsley knew when Søren was playing the role of the wicked sadist and when he was being himself, a very concerned and careful sadist.

  “You can, though.”

  Søren laughs softly. “Of course I can. I can do anything I want to you. But you were right about the gift—I want it, but I don’t want it.” He went to the mantel, picked up the box, and put the lid back on it. “But we’ll save it for another time. And know that one of these days…”

  He let the threat hang in the air. Kingsley knew what he wasn’t saying—one of these days, he would slice Kingsley up like a Christmas turkey.

  “What do we do then?” Kingsley asked.

  “I can think of something,” Søren said.

  “You already have, haven’t you?”

  Søren’s only reply was, “Stand up.”

  Slowly Kingsley stood up.

  “You said I made you wish you had gone to college,” Søren said. “Tonight, you can be my student.”

  “Student? I didn’t go to college for a reason.”

  Søren lifted his chin, looked down at him, and said, “Recite.”

  God. Kingsley almost groaned aloud. He was really going to do this to him? Make him play the role of the bad student?

  He’d object, but his cock was already hard, and it wasn’t easy to put up much of a fight with a painful erection.

  “Recite what?”

  “The work you memorized. It’s ten lashes with the strap if you haven’t memorized your work.”

  Kingsley’s brain raced. What did he have memorized? Bible verses? No. Except for “Jesus wept,” which he didn’t think would satisfy Søren. Any great speeches? Four score and what? No. Everything had fled his brain. Everything except for one line of one poem bubbled up along with a memory of a girl reading it to him in bed after a lonely Christmas in Paris. He was twenty and angry and heartbroken. Everything he saw and touched and tasted made him remember Søren.

  “You’ve forgotten your assignment?” Søren said. “I’ll get the strap.”

  “I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair—”

  Søren didn’t have the decency to hide his look of surprise that Kingsley might actually have memorized a work of poetry.

  “Go on,” Søren said.

  What was the next line? He remembered reciting the poem in his head as he walked through the cold and winding winter streets of the Latin Quarter, feeling hungry, feeling starved, no matter how much he ate.

  “Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. / Bread does not nourish me, / dawn disrupts me, all day / I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.”

  “Pablo Neruda,” Søren said. “Excellent choice. Go on.”

  Kingsley took a long breath, summoned the rest of the poem from the deep lizard part of his brain where his darkest hungers mingled with his most potent memories…twenty-one years old, the night he’d gone to bed with a tall blond man he’d met in a bar just to pretend Søren was fucking him again…how the man had put a knife to Kingsley’s throat…the look of shock on his face when Kingsley had only laughed. As if that was the first time a lover had ever put a knife to him. The man had smiled, punched him across the face, and Kingsley let him finish inside of him.

  “I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, / hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails. / I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.”

  Age twenty-two, a week’s leave from the F.F.L., spent in Barcelona. In a crowd, he saw a blond head catch the morning sunlight. Kingsley followed the boy for blocks until he turned and saw the face didn’t belong to Søren, but a Spanish university student, only eighteen. He seduced him anyway. Kingsley had beaten him with his belt at the boy’s grandfather’s villa, pretending to punish Søren for not being there to punish him. The boy had loved it, loved him. Kingsley left four days later, full of promises they would meet again. They never did.

  “I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, / the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes.”

  His twenty-sixth birthday was spent tied to the bed of a man twice his age because he was tall and Danish and had eyelashes like Søren’s.

  “And I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, / hunting for you, for your hot heart, / like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.”

  As Kingsley recited, Søren had listened, eyes on his, his face again unreadable.

  Anything could happen now that he’d finished the poem.

  “Very nice,” Søren said. “Now again, in Spanish.”

  “I never learned it in Spanish.”

  Søren sounded almost apologetic, though Kingsley knew he wasn’t when he said, “Lazy students get the strap.”

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to Pablo Neruda. Now take off your clothes.”

  Ah, this was the part Kingsley had been waiting for. The pain. The humiliation. The baring of bodies. The baring of souls. His soul. Only his soul as Søren would keep his own modestly covered, as always. But that was fine. Kingsley wanted it that way, to be the one broken, and for Søren to do the breaking.

  Kingsley unbuttoned his shirt quickly. He wanted it too much to go slow, to tease. Shirt off. Shoes kicked off. Jeans down and off along with the socks—the ones Nora had given him for Christmas. Worn on purpose. He stood naked, hard, hot heart racing.

  “Here,” Søren said and nodded toward a leather-padded bench, tall and wide and sturdy enough to hold the weight of a grown man.

  “You want me bent over that, don’t you?”

  “You’re a quicker study than you look.”

  The bench sat near the corner of the room by the fireplace. Kingsley went to it, the floor cold on the soles of his naked feet. And as he bent over it and let his hips and stomach press against the cool, slick leather, he tensed just as hard as he had when Søren had pretended to cut his throat. There was no more vulnerable position than this. And of course, Søren would find a way to make it even worse.

  Søren knelt in front of the bench. There were leather straps that could be cuffed around the wrists at the base, and Søren used them to secure Kingsley in that defenseless position. He was trapped. He couldn’t escape. He was there until someone freed him. It really was like being back in school.

  However, he could turn his head, and he did, watching as Søren opened the closet door and pulled a red cord to turn on the light. A large walk-in closet, it was where Kingsley kept all his instruments of torture. Floggers and whips, cuffs and chains, all hanging on hooks in neat lines and rows.

  “This is,” Søren said, “the most magnificent closet I’ve ever been inside. I could sleep in here.”

  “Sometimes, when we’re eating dinner with my family, I forget you’re a madman. Thank you for reminding me.”

  “You’re the one who said he wanted to eat my eyelashes.” Søren seemed to be examining every strap and belt and flogger in the closet.

  “I didn’t say that. Neruda said that.”

  “Whoever said it, I’m sure I’ll be in your mouth before this night is over.”

  “Do you make your Little One suck your cock as much as you make me do it?”

  “No, actually, I don’t.”

  “Because I’m better at it?”

  “Because I don’t feel nearly as guilty when I make you gag.”

  Kingsley moaned and put his head down. He should learn to never ask questions.

  “Are you ever going to come out?” Kingsley heard the distinct sounds of a man inspecting the hardware from inside the closet.

  “I’m looking for your branding iron.”

  Kingsley laughed. “That I’m not one-hundred-percent certain you’re joking is half the reason I love you.”

  “That you’re not one-hundred-percent certain you want me to be joking is half the reason I love you.”

  It never got old, hearing Søren say, “I love you.” How many years had he wondered if Søren ever actually loved him? Or even remembered him? He would have sold his soul to hear those words when he was eighteen, nineteen, twenty-four, twenty-five. Sold his literal soul to the literal devil for them. And now here they were, given not just freely but free, as if they cost nothing, as if Kingsley could have them anytime he wanted.

  Who knew? Maybe he had sold his soul to the devil to hear those words.

  Maybe Søren was the devil.

  Finally, Søren chose something from the closet and brought it back to the bench where Kingsley waited breathlessly, sweating fear and want.

  Around his wrist was looped a long nasty-looking black strap. Leather, thin—the demonic love child of a paddle and a crop. Only a cane would hurt worse.

  “Are you the devil?” Kingsley asked.

  “No,” Søren said, “but I do admire his methods.” He touched Kingsley’s back lightly. It felt like a threat. Kingsley tensed again, swallowed.

  “Every muscle in your back just clenched,” Søren said. He stroked Kingsley’s spine from neck to hip and back again. “Do it again.”

  “Are you going to fuck me like this?”

  “Do you want me to fuck you like this?” Søren laid the strap on his back, along his spine as if Kingsley were a mere shelf. He took his shirt off. Kingsley saw the black fabric land on the floor by his head.

  “I haven’t decided. Mostly I just wanted to hear you say ‘fuck’ again.”

  “Kingsley?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  He picked up the strap and brought it down, hard, onto the back of Kingsley’s thigh. The sound of the slap echoed through the entire room, bouncing off the walls, loud as a gunshot in a library.

  “I like that sound,” Søren said.

  “What?” Kingsley asked. “The report, or me screaming?”

  “Both.”

  Kingsley didn’t scream. He was too good at this to scream. But he couldn’t stop himself from releasing soft cries and hard breaths. And swearing, obviously. Every hit on his back, his ass, his thighs brought forth a torrent of profanity. He even called Søren an evil bitch once. The man did not disagree.

  It went on and on, not endlessly, but it almost felt like it. Kingsley would be hearing the sound of that strap against his bare skin in his dreams. If people on the sidewalk going past the house heard it, he wouldn’t be surprised.

  A rush of pain wiped Kingsley out. He went limp, relaxing in his bonds like a dead man floating in a pool.

  Søren said quietly, “Are you all right?”

  Kingsley’s eyes were closed, his head hung down, his wrists were turning red in the leather cuffs. They would probably be bruised tomorrow. He wanted them to be bruised. He didn’t want them to be bruised.

  “I used to follow blond men through crowded streets in foreign cities,” Kingsley said between breaths. “In case they were you. Or even looked like you. Even a little like you. One almost killed me, and it was still worth it. I would have cut off my right hand to be able to touch you with my left in those days.”

  “Kingsley,” Søren said. He sounded almost wounded.

  “And now I have you,” he said. “And it’s perfect with us. Except sometimes when you’re beating me, I think…God, how will I explain this to my daughter someday? What will I tell her when she sees the bruises?” Then Kingsley said the thing he hadn’t wanted to say. “And when I think about that, I almost wish you’d never come back to me.”

  “You’re vicious tonight,” Nico said. Nora smiled as she lay back against his chest. Hot water lapped around their naked bodies as they soaked themselves in her clawfoot bathtub. Christmas jazz wafted from the tiny speaker on the bathroom counter—Vince Guaraldi, Geri Allen, and Louis Armstrong. Nora had never been much of a jazz aficionado but moving to New Orleans had given her a new appreciation for it.

  She laughed softly. “I’m vicious every night.”

  “Not with me.”

  Nora lifted her head, met his eyes. “I’ve been too easy on you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She’d said it like she was joking, just making dirty threats while they lazed together in her bathtub. But the tone of his question was serious, curious…Somehow he knew she wasn’t really joking.

  “I don’t want to forget what I am with you,” she said.

  “Vicious?”

  “In charge. You really, really shouldn’t be here.”

  “You could have told me no.”