The Queen, Page 25

  “I could never forget Sheridan.” Sheridan was Nora’s favorite client and everyone knew it. And Judge B.’s wife always gave her cookies. A dominatrix did not forget her cookies.

  “Any instructions for your Little Miss?”

  “Tell her to wear pink panties—lacy ones. I want to cut them off with a knife and gag her with them.”

  “Why don’t you ever make me wear pink panties for you anymore?”

  “King?”

  “Quoi?”

  Click.

  Nora dropped the phone and kicked it across the floor. Entirely unnecessary but wonderfully cathartic. She would have gone over to pick the phone up but someone beat her to it.

  “Good morning, Mistress. Did you drop this?”

  Nora smiled at the teenage boy standing in the doorway to her office. He was wearing boxer shorts, leather wrist cuffs and a smile. A sheepish blushing smile.

  “I didn’t drop it. I drop-kicked it, but thank you.” She took the phone back from him. “How are you this morning?”

  Noah, a nineteen-year-old, soon-to-be college sophomore, walked around her desk and leaned against it. She put her legs on the desk, one on each side of his hips.

  “I’m...” He paused, rubbed the back of his neck and laughed. Gorgeous kid, dark reddish-brown hair, newly broad shoulders that were probably rail thin two years ago, hazel eyes that could never hide his pleasure or surprise and lips swollen from kisses and bites—her kisses, her bites. “Good.”

  “Good,” she said. “Would you like me to take those off you?” Nora nodded at his wrist cuffs.

  “I don’t know. I kind of like them.” He stretched out his arms and looked at the leather cuffs on his wrists, turning them this way and that.

  “They look good on you. You wear sub well.” She took his arm in her hands and unbuckled the right leather wrist cuff. Such a good boy. He instinctively knew he wasn’t to take off his own cuffs. That was his Mistress’s job. “Did you have fun last night?”

  “I did.” He nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “Did you?”

  “I woke up sore and smiling,” she said. “Always a good combination.”

  “Never imagined I’d lose my V-card to a...you know...”

  “Woman with a whip collection?”

  “That.”

  “If you never imagined that, then you need to be more imaginative in the future.”

  “I will be. And here I thought you were just a writer who liked extra whip in her coffee.”

  “I like extra whip in my everything.” She unbuckled his left wrist cuff and tossed both cuffs down on her desk. She’d met Noah at her favorite local coffee shop where he worked as a barista and she worked on her books when she needed to get out of the house. He hung out with her on his fifteen-minute breaks and when she asked him yesterday evening if he had a girlfriend, he admitted he’d never had one. College was expensive and his parents didn’t help much. He spent every free hour at work. No time to date. She’d commiserated with him. Having two jobs meant she had no time to date, either. Two hours later Noah was cuffed to her headboard and wasn’t a virgin anymore.

  Sometimes, Nora told Noah, you just have to make the time.

  “Should I...” Noah pointed at the door.

  “You can stay and take a shower with me if you want.”

  “You looked busy.” He nodded at her open computer. “I don’t want to interrupt the muse or whatever.”

  “The muse knows better than to interrupt me when I have company.”

  “Your muse sounds very understanding,” Noah said as Nora slipped her hand into his boxers and started to stroke him gently. He was hard already. Teenage boys—God’s gift to older women. “Very...very...nice muse.”

  “Have you ever fucked anyone on a desk, Noah?”

  “Until last night I hadn’t even fucked anyone in a bed.”

  “Would you like to fuck someone on a desk?”

  “If someone would let me.”

  “Someone might let you. If you ask nicely.”

  Nora stood up, still stroking Noah. He bent his head and kissed her, his eyes closed and his hands nervous and reticent as he reached for her.

  “You can touch me,” she said against his lips. She appreciated his reticence, his desire to do what she told him to do, no more and no less.

  “I don’t want to screw up,” he said, sliding his hand under her little black slip she’d put on when she’d woken up. “I still have no idea what I’m doing.”

  “Me,” she said. “That’s what you’re doing. Now put me on the desk and touch me any way and anywhere you like.”

  Nora could tell he was doing his very best to be strong and suave as he cupped her ass and lifted her onto the desk.

  “If I drop you do we still get to have sex?” Noah asked.

  “Yes, but we’d have to play it as it lays.”

  “I think that’s golf,” Noah said.

  “Same rules apply.”

  He laughed, which was exactly what she wanted him to do. He relaxed and kissed her now with enthusiasm, all nervousness gone. His hands wandered under her slip, massaged her thighs, pushed them wider. He penetrated her with one finger and rubbed inside her. Last night she’d given him a thorough introduction to locating the clitoris and the G-spot and what to do when he found himself in contact with one or the other. The lessons seemed to have stuck because she was soon very, very wet and he was very, very hard and if they didn’t fuck very, very soon she would be very, very put out.

  She pushed his boxers down his hips until they pooled at his ankles where they belonged, grasped his cock and guided him inside her. He lifted her slip up and off her and Nora lay back on her desk, naked and happy. When he bent over her to kiss her breasts she twined her hands into his hair, holding him right where she wanted him, pumping her hips against him as he pushed into her.

  “This is so much more fun than writing,” she said. “I should tell my muse to fuck off more often.”

  Noah laughed as he glanced over at her still-open laptop.

  “What were you writing?” he asked, taking her breasts in his hands.

  Nora turned her head and glanced at her screen, the blinking cursor, the highlighted text.

  You can be Nora with everyone else as long as you are Eleanor, my Little One, with me.

  She slammed her laptop closed.

  “Fiction.”

  23

  Theology

  NORA GRACIOUSLY ALLOWED Noah to join her in the shower. She also graciously allowed him to wash her body inside and out with his bare hands. Afterward Nora put on her black silk bathrobe and kissed him goodbye at the front door. She didn’t mind if the neighbors saw them. They seemed like nice people and she enjoyed giving them something to talk about at dinner.

  He turned to leave but turned back around again.

  “This was a one-night thing, right?” he asked.

  Nora cupped his face. No scruff. No five-o’clock shadow. Not even a two-o’clock shadow.

  “And one morning.”

  “So I guess I shouldn’t call you later?”

  “It’s sweet of you to offer. If I weren’t me, and you weren’t so young...”

  “I’m not that young. I’ll be a sophomore at Yorke this year.”

  “You’re young. My life is complicated enough without adding a very sweet, very handsome, very young complication to it. Plus...we have to work, remember?”

  “I get it.” He gave her a shy smile in return. “See you at the coffee shop sometime?”

  “You’re the only one who gets my order right.”

  “Extra whip,” he said.

  “Story of my life.”

  Noah kissed her one last time and walked out her front door to his car. He hadn’t been the first male virgin she’d deflowered since becoming a dominatrix, and she knew he wouldn’t be her last. Since she was making something of a habit of it, she’d developed a personal philosophy regarding her encounters with inexperienced younger men. She would show them
the world of sex had more flavors to it than vanilla, and say goodbye the next morning leaving her boys better off than when she found them. Wiser, more experienced and grinning like idiots.

  But Noah hadn’t been grinning like an idiot when he left. Neither had she. She nearly called him back. A terrible idea, of course. He was nineteen. She was thirty. He was sweet and innocent. Nora was, well... Nora.

  And yet...it might be nice to have someone in her life who didn’t come to her house just for the kink and sex and leave after the shower. Who was she kidding? She worked two jobs. She was rarely at home. Last thing she had time for was a pet.

  Nora watched Noah drive away. Maybe she should find a new coffee shop. For Noah’s sake, of course. Not hers. She was fine.

  With less enthusiasm than usual, Nora put her day together. She packed clothes for her various clients—Sheridan wanted suits, Judge B loved her stiletto heels, and Rabbi Friedman couldn’t care less what she wore as long as she used the stock whip on him until he had to crawl from her dungeon—literally. Once dressed and packed, Nora headed into the city. She blamed her lassitude on the August heat. The city sweltered at the melting point. She could imagine the sidewalks bubbling like molten lava. The sun beat down on her as if it had something to prove. She couldn’t get into the air-conditioned car fast enough.

  On the way to the city her hotline phone rang again.

  “King, I’m busy here. I have three sessions today. I don’t have time to give the mayor’s baby brother an OTK spanking. Again.”

  She heard a laugh on the other end. Juliette’s laugh, warm and honeyed and endlessly amused by her lover’s top domme.

  “Sorry, Juliette. I thought it was King.”

  “What does OTK mean?”

  “Over the knee.”

  “Ah, I’m learning all the terms. Monsieur asked me to call you. His hands are full.”

  “I don’t want to know what his hands are full of, do I?”

  “He’s giving Max a bath. The puppy got out and played in the garbage before we could catch him.”

  Nora heard the plaintive cry of a miserable beast in the background, a full-grown Rottweiler that only Juliette would call a “puppy.” She heard something else, too—it sounded like every swear word in the French language coming out in one long, blue sentence.

  “King knows he can pay people to give his dogs baths, right?”

  “He’s having too much fun to delegate.”

  “What, pray tell, does His Royal Dog Groomer want from me now?”

  “Your Sheridan called. She can’t make her appointment tonight. Her agent called her in for an audition. She’d like to reschedule for tomorrow at nine.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Also, I needed to know if you had room in your schedule tonight for a session with a new client.”

  “New client? Tonight?”

  “He wants your earliest appointment.”

  Nora dug her red leather appointment book out of her bag.

  “Thursday afternoon,” Nora said. “I have Troy at two. Put him at 3:30.”

  “Done. Merci.”

  “No problem. Who’s the new guy anyway?”

  “He’s—”

  Nora heard a “Merde!” followed by the sound of wet feet running rampant.

  “I have to go,” Juliette said.

  “Let me guess—Max ran away from King and is running around the entire house dripping water?”

  “One of them will not survive this day,” Juliette said. “Both, j’espère.”

  “Bonne chance,” Nora said and hung up the phone.

  She had a lovely session with Judge B, a brutal session with Rabbi Friedman. She had dinner in the city with Griffin before heading back home. But when she arrived back at her house that evening, Nora couldn’t bring herself to open the front door of her house. Once the key was in the lock, she realized the last place she wanted to be was alone in her own house with her own thoughts and her empty bed. Instead of going home, she walked across the street and down the block.

  When she stepped through the side door of St. Luke’s she almost stumbled from pure sensory overload. She could smell the faint memory of incense in the air, a scent she’d recognize anywhere. And there was no light quite like the light of evening through stained-glass saints and angels and no sound quite like the sound of high heels on church floors. She climbed up the choir loft steps and took a seat in one of the pews. Inside her day planner she jotted down her appointment for Thursday. Usually she wrote down the initials of her client so she could better prepare for the scene but she didn’t know who it was. Not that it mattered much. She’d beaten every sort of masochist there was. Whatever he wanted, she could give it to him.

  When she’d finished updating her schedule, she pulled her laptop out of her bag. She should have been thinking of Noah. She’d spent the night with him, and the morning. But as always it was Søren who consumed her thoughts. She started writing a memory simply to have some mastery over it. When she put Søren on paper he became hers again. If only for a little while.

  * * *

  He sat at the table in the bar of the club drinking a glass of red wine with their king. They spoke in French too rapidly for her to understand more than a few words here and there. It didn’t matter what they spoke of, however. Nothing mattered except His thigh under her chin and His left hand on the back of her neck, caressing the tender skin under her collar. She sat on the floor at His feet, a white pillow between her knees and the floor.

  He didn’t speak to her, but He did tap her under the chin. She lifted her head and met His eyes. He dipped two fingers into His red wine and brought them to her lips, and she drank the wine off His hand.

  Their king said something followed by the word “parfait.” Perfect. He was speaking of her, their king was, speaking of her submission to Him. A perfect submissive. Not true although she was flattered. It was not she who was perfect, but Him. Don’t call the painting perfect even if you see it that way. The painting didn’t create itself. Call the artist perfect. If she was perfect it was only because He was perfect first.

  He rose to His feet and she waited. She would not rise until He bid her to rise. She would stay there all night if she must waiting for the order.

  “Come, Little One,” He said, brushing her cheek with His fingertips.

  He didn’t tell her where they were going, because it didn’t matter. As long as she never lost sight of Him, she would never lose her way.

  She followed Him to His dungeon, which was a terrible word to describe a beautiful room. In the olden days, prisoners were kept and tortured in dungeons. But long before that the word held a different meaning. It came from Latin, from the word “dominus,” which meant lord or master. The master’s keep, that’s what a dungeon was. The place where the castle’s lord kept his precious things, not a dank, dark hole for prisoners.

  He was the master, and she was that which He kept.

  Once safely inside His keep He kissed her with a claiming kiss, a conquering kiss, a master’s kiss. He called her by name and the name He called her was “Mine.” He stripped her of her white shoes, her white dress, her white stockings, until she wore nothing for Him but her white collar. He ran a bath of warm water and set her into it. As she sat in the water He rolled up the sleeves of His black shirt, revealing strong forearms, strong wrists, a pale dusting of hair and a small white scar left by His father.

  “Don’t look at the scar, Little One,” He said, lathering his hands with gentle soap.

  “I hate to think of you hurt, sir. I wish I could have been there for you.”

  He pushed her onto her hands and knees. Her nipples hardened as the water kissed them.