“Would I?” he asked.
“I would if someone did that to me.”
Kingsley smiled at her and her stomach tightened in unwanted wanting. Every night she waited for Kingsley to come to her bedroom like he used to do, but not once had he slipped under her covers and whispered sexual orders to her like he had so many times in the past.
“When we were lovers in high school,” he began and she knew who he meant by we, “it was my job to undress him many nights, but his clothes must be folded neatly, precisely, reverently, and then placed on a chair. No mess, no wrinkles. But he...he would strip me naked and drop all my clothes onto the floor. Then he’d walk on them. Not barefoot, either. With his shoes on most of the time. And you know what?” Kingsley asked as he stepped closer to her, close enough she could kiss him if she wanted to.
“What?”
“I worshipped him for it.” Kingsley smiled at her, a Mona Lisa smile that hinted of secrets but didn’t reveal them. “He would sometimes pretend I wasn’t there when I spoke to him...and I worshipped him for it. He would tell me he didn’t want me anymore and then at the moment I was ready to kill myself in despair, he’d smile to show it was all a joke...and I worshipped him for it. I mocked him once for what happened between him and his sister Elizabeth, and you know what he did?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“He blindfolded me, tied me to the cot and made me say my sister’s name over and over again while he gave me the most intense erotic pleasure of my life with his hands and his mouth. When I stopped speaking he stopped pleasuring me. Then he made me say my own sister’s name when I came. And you know what?”
“You worshipped him for it?”
Kingsley nodded.
Point taken. To show Kingsley how thoroughly she’d absorbed her lesson she walked over to where he stood by the St. Andrew’s Cross, his arms folded over his chest. He wore camel-colored breeches and dark brown Hessian riding boots, a snow-white shirt held together at the throat with a gold pin and a dark brown vest with little gold fleurs-de-lis embroidered on it. Kingsley looked magnificent, like a Regency-era fever dream. If Jane Austen had set eyes on Kingsley, she would never have written her genteel comedies of manner.
She would have written porn.
Elle wiped her sweaty forehead off on his shoulder.
“See?” she asked, smiling up at him. “I can be taught.”
He looked down at the wet smudge she’d left on his pristine shirt and back at her.
“I could have you flogged for that.”
“I’m not a submissive anymore, remember?”
“I’m glad you’re starting to realize that,” he said and then lowered his voice to a whisper. “Finally.”
“I know I’m a dominant. I know I am.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think I’m sure.”
“Then you aren’t sure. Elle, what we’re doing here... I need all of you for it. Your heart, your soul, your strength, your guts. All of you. If you can’t give me all of you, then you are, yet again, wasting everyone’s time. Now tell me...do you want this? Do you want to be my Queen?”
“I want it.”
“It? What is it you want? Money?”
“Yes,” she admitted without shame. She needed a good job that didn’t take up all her time if she were going to do something with her writing.
“Power?”
“Definitely.”
“Me?” he asked.
“You did say you’d be my first client,” she reminded him.
“I will be.”
“You said I won’t be having sex with my clients.”
“Are you asking me if we’re going to have sex again?”
“Yes,” she said without shame or apology. She wanted him. She knew he wanted her. Why hadn’t they fucked yet?
“Would you like to?”
“Yes.”
“Prove it.”
“Prove it? How?”
“By acting like the domme I know you are. Once you are a domme, I will be your client, and you can do anything you want to me.”
“Anything?”
Kingsley met her eyes and whispered, “Anything.”
“You’re going to regret that.”
“I can’t wait to regret it.”
“This is a test, isn’t it? You’re testing me?”
“Of course I am.”
“And if I pass this test, what do I win?”
“Me.”
“Good prize.”
“When I am done with you,” he said, taking her face in his hands, “there will not be a man in the world who wouldn’t take a bullet to lick your boots.”
“It’s not my boots that need licking right now.”
Kingsley smiled at her, a sensual, mysterious smile. It did not bode well.
“I’ll give you a hint about how to win your prize. Do you know a woman by the name of Theresa Berkley?” he asked.
“If I met her I don’t remember.”
“You’ve never met her. She died in the 1830s. But before she died she worked as a dominatrix. I doubt she used that term, but that’s what she was. She invented a sort of standing table she called a chevelet. It was used to torture men on one side of their bodies while another woman could sexually stimulate them on the other side. We have the freestanding St. Andrew’s Cross for that now, but it was quite an ingenious bit of furniture.”
“Sounds like my kind of girl.”
“A client coming to London wrote a letter to her once requesting a session on her chevelet. These were the conditions he offered. He would pay her ‘a pound sterling for the first blood drawn, two pounds sterling if the blood runs down to my heels, three pounds sterling if my heels are bathed in blood, four pounds sterling if the blood reaches the floor, and five pounds sterling if you succeed in making me lose consciousness.’ His words, chérie.”
“Lose consciousness? Jesus.”
“Don’t be vanilla,” he said. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “We masochists love our beatings. But that’s not the moral of this story.”
“Then what is the moral, King?”
“The moral is that if you want my pounds sterling or any other sort of pounds, you’ll have to earn it.”
Kingsley turned his back on her to leave and without thinking she raised the flogger over her head. She threw it across his back hoping to impress him with one hard hit. But Kingsley turned at the last second and caught the tails in his hand. She’d put the handle strap around her wrist thus making it all too easy for him to yank her to him and shove her back against the wall.
“What the fuck was that?” he demanded, squeezing her wrist to the point of pain. “Don’t put the fucking cord of the fucking flogger on your fucking wrist. That’s how you fucking hang the flogger on the fucking wall. And if you fucking put it on your fucking wrist, someone like me can fucking grab you and fucking fuck you up, you fucking