Slow Surrender (22 page)

Surely he’d have the perfect answers to her questions, like he did for everything. I had never looked forward to bringing a man home before. It had always felt like a necessary step in a relationship, a kind of obligation to fulfill. But I wanted him to come home with me, not because I thought my mother would like him but because, for once, I didn’t care if she did.

Not that I was likely to bring him home anytime soon. We still had a lot to learn about each other, but I couldn’t help thinking about it.

“Tell me what this party will be like,” I said, a little sleepily. “Is it really a secret society?”

“
Secret
is a relative term. Many of them are very rich, meaning they are well placed in society. But they’re also quite kinky, which means identities need to be protected. Some keep their sex lives secret from their families, others from their business associates. You’ll hear people called by many names and titles tonight. Most of them are not real.”

“Like Baroness Babelicious?” I asked with a snort.

“What?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Who?”

“Oh, nothing. Turns out my roommate has an LL fan club name. Always two words, both starting with the same letter, to match with Lord Lightning. Somehow during a drinking binge a couple of weeks ago she got tagged with
Baroness Babelicious
.”

He chuckled, almost nervously. “And I take it this is a somewhat inappropriate name for her? She seemed pretty enough.”

“Oh, it’s so funny because she was this total nerdy mouse who never left the house for anything but class and studying at the library. She’s got a whole closet full of punk and goth clothes, but she never wore them anywhere. So, you remember the night we met? She’s this huge Lord Lightning fan and she finally got up the courage to go out and meet some other fans. She’s totally come out of her shell!”

“That’s fascinating,” he said.

A short while later we exited the highway and soon were pulling into the circular driveway of what looked more like a castle than a house. We joined the line leading up to the main walkway.

“What will Stefan do while we’re enjoying ourselves inside?” I asked.

“I think Stefan reads a lot of e-books these days,” he said seriously. “Also, the drivers get together and play cards and eat cake.”

“Cake?”

“The catering staff brings it to them through the kitchens. Cake and coffee so they can stay awake, of course. Here we are now, be careful of your dress.”

Someone opened his door for him and he leapt out, while Stefan got out and opened my door. James was there to offer his hand to me and I carefully put one silver-slippered foot out the door, then the other, before I stood.

The night had turned chilly, and we walked up to the main doors together, one of his arms around my shoulders, which had only the lace jacket over them.

The doorman seemed to know him, addressing him as Mr. Jasper, and when he asked who I was, he gave my alias as Ashley.

“I have her to thank for all this,” I said as we made our way through a grand entrance hall.

“Who?”

“Ashley,” I said. “She was the one who called in sick at the last minute, so I took her name tag and her shift at the bar the night we met. Do I look like an Ashley to you?”

“Not particularly,” he said. “But it works for our needs, plus the name bears the same meaning as a favorite character of yours.”

“Character?”

“Cinder-ella,” he said.

“Wow, so it is.” That hadn’t occurred to me before. “And I’m to call you Mr. Jasper tonight?”

“Just Jasper, if you need to use a name when we are with others, though you might hear me called by other nicknames as well.”

“Even more?”

“I used to do a lot of role-playing in the past, as you might have guessed.”

I was about to ask him what else I might hear when a woman stopped us in our tracks. She was neck to ankle in a sleeveless sheath of perfect silvery satin, slit up to the thigh, with elbow-length gloves to match and a pillbox hat with netting over her eyes. She was already a tall woman, and with her feet in strappy, towering heels plus the hat, she was taller than he was.

“Lucinda,” he said with a slight nod.

She returned the nod without addressing him, all her attention focused on me. After a few awkward moments, her perfect lips split into a smile. “So this is what the cat dragged in,” she said.

Was she talking about me? This had to be the Lucinda his assistant had been warning him about at the doctor’s office.

“If you’re going to be unpleasant—” he began.

“Oh, but it’s unpleasantness that has made my presence necessary, isn’t it? Point the man out to me and I will be sure to take care of the matter.”

I wondered what she could possibly be talking about. James’s world of secrets suddenly seemed to loom dark and large.

“Thank you.” He cleared his throat. “I shall.”

She stepped aside, and he swept me past her without attempting introductions. By the time we reached the entrance to the actual ballroom, she had gone into a side parlor and I could no longer see her when I looked back.

I was the one to give him the inquisitive eyebrow for once.

“A bitter ex,” he said, as if no other explanation was necessary. And it wasn’t, except for the bit about taking care of unpleasantness. Maybe I could grill Stefan later about it. Before I could mull it over further, we were in the ballroom, and my eyes were captivated by the sight of about a dozen couples, all in formal wear of various kinds, waltzing. It was like a time-travelers ball almost, with couples in elaborate tailcoats and gowns—Victorian, Renaissance—and one couple in formal kimonos.

He led me on a circuit of the room, waving off the waiter carrying the tray of champagne flutes. We paused to exchange meaningless pleasantries with a few other couples, who seemed to recognize him without having anything of substance to say. Well, what could they say if they didn’t really know who he was? You couldn’t inquire about anyone’s family or business. We had exactly two conversations that went beyond “how are you,” and one was about an art exhibit that we and another couple had seen.

The other was about the party itself, in which we joined two men in discussion.

“Jules, Jules,” one of them said, snagging my partner by the sleeve. “Did you see that terrible film? Arnold, I tell you, you never should have brought Kubrick here.”

“He’d already been to a party in London.” Arnold shook his head. “The whole film was supposed to be set in London in the 1960s, you know. That’s why it makes no sense. Don’t you agree, Jules?”

“I never saw the film, I’m afraid,” James said.

“I do agree the premise was ridiculous, though, certainly,” Arnold continued. “There are kinky nightclubs downtown that openly advertise in the newspaper. One needn’t join a secret society to get one’s ass spanked.”

“Arnold. Language,” the first man said with a nod toward me.

Arnold’s eyes crinkled with laughter suddenly. “I find it likely the word
ass
is less offensive to the young lady than seeing yours will be,” he said.

“Bah.” They moved off together, the first one still trying to argue and the second one waving good-bye to us with a merry twinkle in his eye.

“Jules?” I asked.

“An old nickname,” he said.

“For Julian?”

“For what I wore.” He ran his finger along the twining vine of my necklace and then leaned over to kiss me softly on the temple.

“
Oh. Jewels.
” I tried to imagine him wearing something other than a distinguished suit and couldn’t. “Diamonds and sapphires?”

“Diamonds,” he said with a smile. “And jasper and bloodstone. Are you ready for some dancing?”

“With you? Anytime.”

A very small orchestra was playing the music live. They were finishing a piece when he led me toward the middle of the floor. The ballroom was not as huge as I imagined it would be, but there was room easily for twenty couples to dance. The ceiling was high enough that there were balconies that opened from brightly lit second-floor rooms.

“Done this before?”

“My mother forced me to take six weeks of ballroom dance before my cousin’s wedding when I was sixteen,” I said.

“That counts,” he said with a little smile as he took my hand. “Did you dance at the wedding?”

“With my not-so-little brother, who had gotten out of the dance lessons by virtue of being a boy, I think. So you can imagine what a disaster that was. He couldn’t lead, stepped on my feet, ugh. Although, better him than my grabby cousin.”

While I spoke, he led me easily into a turn, and we were dancing. It was another waltz, which we fell into easily, as he was a good leader. We didn’t talk for a while, just moved to the swaying tune. Dancing requires you to be in the moment in a way that talking or doing a lot of other things doesn’t. You see and feel your partner, the other people in the room, the music, your own feet, your own breathing. His eyes looked like greenish agates in this light. Or maybe jaspers.

Eventually we fell into conversation. “Those men were saying there’s a society like this in England, too?”

“It won’t surprise you to know that rich people have always come up with ways to indulge their eccentricities,” he said.

“Even their perverted ones?”

“Especially their perverted ones,” he said with a low laugh. “But yes, this group is something of an offshoot of a group there. The group’s been there since the 1920s. This one, since about 1980 or so, I believe.”

“How does one become a member?”

“You have to be recruited by another member.”

“How did it start?”

“A handful of people from here had either been as guests or were members of the UK group. You must attend two parties as a guest before you can submit your name for membership.”

“And it’s made up of all wealthy people?”

“That’s not the main criterion, but it does somewhat work out that way. In England it’s a matter of class and influence more than net worth. Here, it’s a bit more complicated. It’s a matter of who’s found worthy of membership.”

“Influential, you mean like politicians?”

“We don’t get many politicians, actually. They are too afraid of being exposed or blackmailed. We used to wear masks, but they really didn’t actually hide most people’s identities. It was more of a tradition and no better than a false sense of security and anonymity. It’s a curious dance we do here, of course, because although the membership committee needs to vet each applicant, and therefore needs to know their real names, many prefer to interact anonymously when they’re here. But anonymity never lasts. People get close, they form affinities…eventually that becomes business alliances and other real-life connections. That’s human nature. People join a group to connect, after all, and that desire to connect drives them.”

“If it’s not politicians, then, is it mostly Wall Street types?”

“In this room are more than a few captains of industry, some high-ranking scholars. Some actors and other entertainers and artists.”

“Artists? Visual artists?”

“All kinds. Painters, musicians, sculptors, playwrights. Artists are always considered interesting by the nonartists, always looking at the world in different ways from the rest of society. Artists are always outsiders.”

“How do you get outsiders to join a group, then?”

His laugh was private, just for me, as he murmured in my ear, “They like the sex.”

I was expecting that at some point a bell would ring and everyone would start stripping their clothes off and having a massive orgy, like something from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. But it wasn’t like that at all.

Gradually people began to drift out of the ballroom, and then a woman’s squeal from up above made my head turn. On the balcony, a woman was bent over the railing and completely naked except for her improbably tall shoes and her jewelry. Her hair was in an updo, but her partner, a woman in a gray tuxedo, pulled the pins free and her hair cascaded over the balcony.

The woman in the tuxedo held something up that looked like the pull rod to a set of Venetian blinds—long, slender, and plastic. Then she pulled it back like a tennis racquet and swatted her partner on the rear with a forehand. The woman bent over the railing squealed with what sounded much more like glee than pain. The one who had hit her grinned crookedly, an unlit cigar in the corner of her mouth, and did it again.

My partner slid his arms around me. When had he shifted behind me? We were at the edge of the dance floor now, looking up at the women.

“They look like they’re having fun,” I said.

“I’m certain they are,” he answered. “One of them is a fashion designer. The other is an editor at a fashion magazine.”

“Sounds like a perfect match.”

“Oh, it’s quite funny. They ran into each other here some years ago and were quite antagonistic toward each other. Until they finally had it out. They’ve been together ever since.”

“Had it out?”

“I think it involved some form of naked oil wrestling. The winner got to lead the loser around by a leash the rest of the night.”

“Which one of them won?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t here that night. They appear to take turns on top.”

“Really?”

“Is that such a surprising concept?”

“Well, all the BDSM sites online make it sound like people are either dominant or submissive, no in-between and no switching.”

“You know you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet,” he said with a chuckle. “Come on, let’s see what’s going on around the house.”

He led me back into the hallway, and we could hear the sounds of sex and spankings coming through the parlor doorways. At the foot of the stairs a woman in a gorgeous red ball gown was being attended by a man who knelt and kissed her ring. She then very slowly lifted the edge of her voluminous skirt, showing the pointed toe of her daintily slippered foot. He lowered himself on all fours to kiss it as well, and then she moved to put her foot on his neck. He reminded me of a puppy, lying down before an alpha dog.

We moved on toward the gardens. “In the summer, much happens out there on the patio and in the courtyard,” he said. “Not much to see there on a chilly spring night like tonight, though.”