The King: The Original Sinners Book 6 (20 page)

“Married who?” Søren asked, looking from Sam to Kingsley and then back at Sam.

“I told Sam my sister married a pompous arrogant self-important overeducated pretentious bastard.”

“That would be me,” Søren said, raising his glass.

“Gotcha. Well, I’ll leave you two bros-in-law to catch up. There are women in this room who have never had a multiple orgasm. They need me. I have heard their cries in the night.”

“Go answer the cries,” Kingsley said.

Sam bowed to them both and stalked off.

“What was she going to say?” Søren asked.

“Nothing,” Kingsley said. “Nothing at all.”

Søren watched Sam as she disappeared into the crowd.

“What do you know about her?” he asked.

“Everything I need to,” Kingsley said.

“That’s an excellent nonanswer.”

“Why do you ask? She’s my secretary, not yours.”

“I could spend the next two hours telling you everything I know about my secretary, Diane. I know where she was born, where she grew up, where she went to school, who she’s dating, who her parents are... Can you say the same about Sam?”

“Why do you care?”

“She knows I’m in Connecticut. She knows about your sister. Did you tell her my real name?”

Kingsley stalled by taking a sip of his Syrah.

“Kingsley?”

“She needed to know,” Kingsley said. “If anything happened to me, someone needs to be able to find you.”

“I understand that. And I don’t object to you telling her anything you need to tell her if you have good reason for trusting her so implicitly. If you do have good reason, I have no issue with it. I’m curious
why
you trust her so implicitly when you know so little about her.”

“I told you, I know what I need to know about her.”

“Someone knows quite a bit about the both of us,” Søren reminded him.

“I trust Sam. You can trust her, too.”

“Are you in love with her? Is that why you trust her?”

“I’m not in love with her,” Kingsley said truthfully. What he felt for Sam was different than love. Or maybe it was love but a different sort than what he felt for Søren.

Søren raised his glass of wine to his lips.

“Good.”

“Hello, Father,” Blaise said, appearing out of nowhere. Kingsley had never been so glad to see the girl in his life. She rose up on the tips of her toes to kiss Søren on the cheek. “How’s my favorite kinky Jesuit priest?”

“He’s still kinky,” Kingsley said. “And still a Jesuit. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”

“So I have to ask, what is a Jesuit?” Blaise said.

“We’re an order of priests founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola,” Søren said. “We began as a missionary order.”

“He says missionary. I say military,” Kingsley said with a wide grin. “They did so much political maneuvering in the 1700s, the order was disbanded by the pope.”

“I still haven’t forgiven Pope Clement the Fourteenth over that one.”

“So Jesuits are bad priests?” Blaise asked, seeming pleased by this revelation.

“They are,” Kingsley said. “Naughty priests, then and now.”

“At least we aren’t the Legion of Christ.”

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” Kingsley began. “A man walks up to a Franciscan and a Jesuit and asks, ‘How many novenas must you pray to get a Mercedes-Benz?’”

“I’m stopping you,” Søren said.

“So the Franciscan,” Kingsley continued, “asks the man, ‘What’s a Mercedes-Benz?’ And the Jesuit asks the man...”

Kingsley waited. Blaise looked up at Søren expectantly.

“‘What’s a novena?’” Søren finished, his tone dripping with disdain. “For the record, every Jesuit I know can tell you what a novena is.”

“What is a novena?” Blaise asked.

“Take her upstairs and tell her,” Kingsley said to Søren. “Give her a good hard Catholic schooling.”

“I did spend ten years in seminary,” he said. “It would be a crime to waste all that training.”

“With your permission, monsieur...” Blaise looked at Kingsley with pleading eyes.

“Have a fun scourging,
chouchou
,”
Kingsley said. Blaise kissed him on the cheek. She then took Søren’s hand and led him through the crowd and up the stairs. Kingsley looked into his half-finished glass of wine and fought the urge to take it down in one swallow. Where did Søren get off questioning him about Sam? Sam was none of Søren’s business. And who cared if he didn’t know much about her? He knew what he needed to know. Sam cared about him. She was on his side. Whatever her secrets, that wasn’t one of them.

Irritated with both Søren and whoever the fuck it was sending the tapes, Kingsley left the party behind and headed upstairs to his bedroom, taking the steps two at a time. He’d throw the tape into his wall safe, change clothes and find Dixon. He would beat the man into a bloody coma if he had to, but before this night was over, Kingsley would have answers. As he strode down the hall to his bedroom he heard cries of pleasure and pain emanating from within the rooms he passed. Sometimes pleasure and pain came from the same room. He ignored them. He was a man on a mission.

Kingsley threw open the door to his bedroom. A woman stood by the foot of his bed. She was dark-skinned, thin and regal. Her boots, corset, skirt and opera gloves—all leather. Her shoulders were bare, and ample cleavage spilled out over the top of the corset. She wore a lace choker around her neck, and her thick braided hair was coiffed in an elegant knot, and behind her right ear she wore a pale pink rose.

In her hand she held something long, black and thin. He recognized it immediately.

A riding crop.

Kingsley waited in silence, waited for the domme to speak.

“I received your lovely messages,” the woman began in a posh English accent. “And the flowers.”

Kingsley’s eyes widened.

He’d sent only one woman flowers lately. Twelve dozen red, white and pink roses in the hopes she would take his interest in seeing her seriously. Apparently it had worked.

“Mistress Felicia,” he said at last.

“I do have a fondness for flowers from men who aren’t afraid to beg.”

Mistress Felicia Tryst had been all over the newspapers when he first came to the city. She’d been named as the offending party in a divorce between a business magnate and his socialite wife. The story had been a bloodbath, a feeding frenzy. Salacious reporters couldn’t get enough of the white American billionaire who was sexually enslaved to a black British dominatrix. Mistress Felicia had risen above the fray and refused to testify on the grounds she never spoke about her clients. She’d languished in prison and kept her vow of silence until the parties settled out of court. He’d once seen her photograph in the
Post
, but it did not do this dark beauty justice.

“To what do I owe the honor?” Kingsley asked.

“You wanted to speak to me about working in your new club, yes?” she asked.

“Yes. Is that why you’re here?” he asked. They could have had this conversation in his office. Why was Mistress Felicia in his bedroom?

“I’ll admit to an ulterior motive.”

“Ulterior motives. Care to enlighten me?”

“I saw you downstairs. And as soon as I saw you, I knew I wanted to beat you and fuck you. How is that for an ulterior motive?”

Kingsley’s groin tightened at the sight of the beautiful woman and her riding crop. And everyone who knew anything about kink knew this woman was the most notorious sadist in the city. She could likely give Søren a run for his money.

“Well?” Mistress Felicia asked.

The tape could wait.

His cock couldn’t.

22

“HOW DO YOU
know I would let you beat me?” Kingsley asked.

“You might not let me. You might be nothing but a dominant after all, and the thought of submitting to a woman may hold no appeal.” She strolled toward him, the riding crop swishing behind her like a tiger’s tail. “Then again, it might.”

“Did anyone see you come in here,
Maîtresse
?”

“No one was in the hallway before I came in.”

Kingsley sighed with relief. “Good,” he said. “Please, don’t be offended—”

“I have many clients who would prefer not to have their proclivities announced to the world. You don’t have to explain. I am nothing if not discreet.”

“Your discretion is the stuff of legend,
Maîtresse
.”

She raised her eyebrow at him. “I was warned about your accent. They were right.”

Kingsley desperately wanted this woman, but he’d rather die than have the whole city know about the other side of his sexual proclivities—the submissive masochistic side.

Mistress Felicia walked to him, walked slowly, taking her sweet time, making every step toward him a lesson in patience.

“I compliment his accent and he stops speaking. Typical switch. Can’t stop playing mind games for a second, can you?”

“Tell me what to say, and I’ll say it,” Kingsley said.

“Tell me you want me to beat you and fuck you, Kingsley.”

Yes. God, yes. Yes, he wanted her to do everything to him. But...

“I would like that,” he said. “But, you see, I—”

She laid her palm on his chest.

“Your heart is racing,” she said. “Are you scared?”

“I have a problem,” he said.

“I can see you’re burdened by something. Tell me your burdens. Tell me how I can ease them,” she said, touching his face, his forehead, his lips. She smelled like roses, like an English garden.

“I was shot,” he said, focusing on the delicious scent of her instead of the memories. “Last year. I was with a dominant recently. I had a flashback.”

“What triggered it?” she asked, apparently not the least bothered by his revelation.

“Someone touched my throat with a whip.”

“Your throat,” she repeated, looking at him but also into him.

“I was choked once.”

“I see,” she said, her voice quiet and serene. “I won’t touch your throat. And I’m not afraid of your flashbacks. If you have one, you have one. If you don’t, then...well, more time to play then, isn’t it?”

Mistress Felicia ran a gloved hand through his hair. She grabbed a fistful of it at the nape of his neck, forcing his head back.

Kingsley didn’t speak.

“I will hurt you the way you like being hurt tonight,” Mistress Felicia said. “And in no other way. Tell me what you like.”

“I will,
Maîtresse
.”

“Do you like this?” she asked, tugging harder on his hair. “Do you like being treated like property?”

“Oui, Maîtresse,”
he said.

“Do you like pain?”

“More than anything.”

“How much pain?”

“All the pain,” he said.

“You’re a masochist?”

“You could call me that.”

“What don’t you want?”

“I don’t want a collar,” he said. “I hate them.”

Mistress Felicia laughed and pulled harder on his hair. His eyes watered from the pain. She was good, very good.

“I won’t put a collar on you. Nothing on your throat. Nothing but my kisses.” She brought her lips to his neck and bit the skin over his jugular vein. The bite turned into a kiss and back into another bite. “Your neck is too delicious to cover it up with anything but my mouth. And besides, there are other ways to enslave men that don’t require collars.”

She tossed her riding crop onto the bed and took him by the wrist, bringing his hand between her legs. She wore nothing beneath her leather skirt. He cupped her there, the base of his hand against her clitoris.

“One finger,” she whispered. “One.”

He slipped one finger between her folds and inside her. So warm, so wet. He closed his eyes.

“You like it inside me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he breathed.

“If you survive the pain I’m going to inflict on you, I’ll let you inside me again. I might let you put your cock in me. If you take everything I give you.”

“I promise,
Maîtresse
, I can take it.”

“What’s your safe word?” she asked as Kingsley continued to stroke inside her body with one finger.

“I don’t have one.”

“Choose one.”

“I don’t need one.”

“You have flashbacks from recent trauma. You need one.”

“If I have a flashback, consider that my safe word.”

Mistress Felicia laughed, and Kingsley felt her muscles gripping his finger. Two weeks... He was dying to be inside her. The wait would almost kill him. But for all that, he wanted the pain she had to offer even more than the sex. It had been so long since he’d let himself have the type of pain Søren had given him when they were teenagers. He hadn’t planned on submitting to anyone tonight. But now that Mistress Felicia was here, he realized submission was what he most wanted.

Kingsley nearly groaned aloud in disappointment when she took his wrist again and moved his hand from her. But then she opened his pants.

“Don’t get hard,” she ordered.

“It would help if you left the room,
Maîtresse
.”

“You’re a big boy. You have self-control. Use it.”

Kingsley focused his mind on things unlikely to arouse him—politics, airplane crashes, a bad case of the shingles, vanilla sex.

“Good boy,” she said, slipping two fingers between her breasts and from her corset producing a leather strap.

“Fuck.” He sighed.

“Eventually,” she said, and wrapped the strap around his testicles and the base of his penis. Cock ring. Pleasure and torture all in one.

“You have a beautiful cock,” she said, massaging it with both hands. The leather of her gloves abraded, and he quickly grew hard from the bite of the seams against his most sensitive skin. She grasped his cock by the base and slid her hands up and down the shaft. Fluid appeared on the tip and dripped onto her gloves.

“Eager, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t had sex in two weeks,” he confessed. “Eager is an understatement.”

“It’s such an impressive erection, I’d hate for you to lose it before I had time to enjoy it.”

“You’ll enjoy it,” he promised, as she traced the edges of the leather strap. Blood pooled and pumped into the shaft, and he closed his eyes tight.

“Does it hurt?”

“A little,” he said.

“Good.” She grinned at him. “It’s a start anyway. Now stand there, don’t move. I’m going to take your clothes off. I’ve heard rumors that Kingsley Edge had one of the better male bodies in the city. Time I find out for myself.”

She pulled his jacket off his shoulders and pushed it down his arms. When she had it off, she walked to the armchair and laid it carefully over the back. He knew better than to think she was showing respect for him by showing respect for his clothes. No, he had a cock ring on and a painful erection. She would undress him as slowly as possible, dragging the process out until he was in agony.

“When was the first time you submitted to erotic pain?” she asked as she unbuttoned his vest.

“Eleven years ago.”

“You’re so young,” she said. “How old were you when you started doing kink?”

“Sixteen.”

“Domme?”

“Sadist,” he said. “Male.”

“Sixteen’s awfully young to be submitting to a sadist.”

“He was seventeen,
Maîtresse
.”

Mistress Felicia laughed. “I wish I had gone to your high school instead of mine.”

“You couldn’t have. It was an all-boys Catholic school.”

“Catholic,” she said as she removed his shirt. She didn’t flinch at the sight of the scars on his chest. She’d likely seen worse in her work. “I should send the pope a check. I get half my clients from his church.”

Lifting his feet to let her tug his boots off sent pain shooting into his stomach. He hated cock rings. He could keep his erection without one. But the pain did what pain always did to him—cleared his mind, pulled him out of the past, obliterated the future. There was nothing but now, right now, and the pain that held him in place, unable to think, unable to dream, unable to want anything but more pain.

Mistress Felicia tugged his pants down, folded them neatly and laid them across a chair with his other clothes. He appreciated that she treated his clothes with respect, unlike Søren who’d taken perverse pleasure in dropping them on the floor and traipsing over them.

Kingsley focused on her face as she moved. A lovely woman in her late thirties, she had an imperious air to her, a proud set to her face and no mercy in her eyes. In that regard she reminded him very much of Søren.

“When did you start dominating people,
Maîtresse
?” he asked, curious what else she and Søren had in common.

“I’m going to punish you for speaking out of turn.”

“As you should.”

“But to answer your question,” she said, standing in front of him, “I was eight when I started bossing around all the boys in my neighborhood, fifteen when I tied my first boyfriend up and nineteen when I took on my first client. He was my college chemistry professor.”

“You had good chemistry, then?”

“I was going to be gentle with you,” Mistress Felicia said. “Because of that joke, I’m afraid now I’ll have to destroy you.”

Kingsley’s heart galloped in his chest. The cock ring had made him hard. The threat of pain made him harder.

“Good.”

Mistress Felicia bent down and from a long leather bag produced two sets of leather cuffs.

“You haven’t had sex in two weeks?” she asked.

“The two longest weeks of my life.”

“I’m going to leave two weeks’ worth of bruises on every inch of your body. It’ll take them that long to heal, which will give you two choices. You can either not have sex for another two weeks until they’re gone, or you can come to me every day and serve at my pleasure until they’re gone. And then, if you beg nicely, I’ll give you more.”

Two weeks as the property of Mistress Felicia? It was June, wasn’t it? Had Christmas come early?

“I’ll take the second option,” he said.

Mistress Felicia took a step forward and grabbed him roughly by the right forearm, pressing his hand to her chest. She strapped the cuff on his wrist and buckled it.

She released his right arm, and buckled his left. From her bag she produced a long metal clip. She ordered him to raise both arms. As soon as they were up, she cuffed his wrists over the top bar of the bed canopy. Once cuffed into place, he could do nothing but wait, not moving, and want her.

Mistress Felicia stood so close to him now that he could count her eyelashes. She had the tiniest beauty mark under her right eye. He longed to kiss it. He longed to kiss her, to taste her full lips, her skin, her body inside and out.

“You want to kiss me, don’t you?” she asked.

“So much,
Maîtresse
.”

“Your mouth has to earn it.” She raised her riding crop and slipped it between his teeth. He bit it and held it in place. “I’m going to bruise the front of your body first. You keep the crop in your mouth the entire time, and you’ll get your kiss.”

He nodded his understanding and clamped his teeth even tighter on the crop. As sadistic as this task was, he appreciated the consideration. With the crop in his mouth, he wouldn’t be tempted to cry out. And the last thing he wanted was for anyone in the house to know what he was doing right now. He needed this city to fear him. If they saw him like this—tied up, naked, vulnerable—he would never be seen the same way again.

From her bag she produced a cane—two feet long and made of rattan.

She raised her arms and brought them high. With a quick and vicious flick, she struck Kingsley’s forearm two inches under the cuff. She hadn’t been kidding. She intended to bruise his entire body from his wrists to his ankles.

Down his right arm she worked, striking him in even intervals, one inch and then lower an inch, and then lower an inch. The pain surprised him every time. Sharp, stinging and deep... He knew he’d have red welts for a day from the cane and bruises for at least a week if not longer.

From his right arm she moved to his left, hitting him again with controlled but brutal strikes. Søren had never hit him or struck him on this part of his body before, on the smooth skin from his elbow to armpit. But he’d cut him there one night, short shallow slices with a razor blade on the inside of his upper arms and inner thighs. They’d fucked afterward, face to face, chest to chest...it was one of the few times Søren hadn’t tied him up before sex. Kingsley remembered wrapping his arms around Søren’s shoulders, his legs around his back. Blood had covered them both. When it was over Søren even had a streak of it on his face. He’d looked primal as a wild animal with the slash of crimson across his cheek and the firelight glowing behind him—a wolf in a cave unafraid of fire. In that heated, sacred hour, with his eyes nothing but pupils, his hair slick with sweat, Søren had appeared to him like a beast, a demon, or a god. Kingsley hadn’t cared which as long as he could worship at the altar of the blood-stained being who’d made a sacrifice of him.

“You do love pain, don’t you?” Mistress Felicia asked, her voice low and sensual. As he had the crop in his mouth he couldn’t answer in words. His ragged breathing and erection surely told her all she needed to know. “I can tell. You lose yourself in the pain.”

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes as she ran her fingers over the welts on his arms, renewing the pain.

“Lose yourself, then,” Mistress Felicia said. “Go wherever the pain wants to take you—into your mind, into your past, into your darkest dreams. Go as far away as you need to. I’ll come for you, and I’ll find you and bring you back.”

If he could have spoken he would have thanked her. They were the words he most needed to hear, especially now as she worked his chest over, striking even the scar tissue left by the bullet wounds. She had no fear of the damage done to him by the violence of other men, and for that he would have kissed her feet could he have reached them.