RICKI

The truth was I didn’t want to run away. I didn’t want to rush off. I wanted to lie there in Axel Hawke’s arms and forget the whole rest of the world. But I couldn’t. As the glorious sensual heat in my body cooled, my mind began to spin again.

So much to think about. So much I didn’t want to think about. It was much easier to wish for a retreat into the fantasy world where Axel Hawke took care of everything and all I had to do was lie there.

The words “Is Axel even your real name?” came out of my mouth.

“You think I’d name myself after a part of a truck?” he said.

I sat up suddenly. “Be serious.”

He tucked an arm behind his head and I could see the dragon tattoo went all the way around his upper arm. It was hard not to admire the lean, muscular line of his chest. “I am being serious. My mother named me Axel and I’ve stuck with it.”

I hugged my knees. My curiosity about him was suddenly burning. He wanted to talk? Let’s talk. “Are you close to your mother?”

“Pretty close. She raised me on her own after she split from my father.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.” He stretched and cocked his head to look at me, but he didn’t protest all the questions. “Didn’t I tell you this? My dad was military. We moved a lot. I first met Mal in England when I was ten. After they split, my mom was tired of moving around, so we ended up in Massachusetts near my grandparents.”

Right. I remembered him saying he’d lived in Germany and Japan, too. He looked so relaxed right now, no attitude, no act. If anything he was even more devastatingly handsome. “How’d you get into music?”

“Same way most guys do. To meet girls.”

I poked him in the ribs. “That’s why. I asked how.”

“I dunno. I always played instruments and sang. I know it’s a cliché but, when you move to different countries all the time …” He shrugged. “Music is a universal language. It was a quick way to be liked.”

I tried to imagine a young boy, making new friends with his music in all different countries, all different schools. Everything he had said just made my heart softer and sweeter on him by the minute. I wondered if he was eventually going to say something that would burst my bubble. Surely he can’t be that perfect, thought the little voice of denial in my head. I’ll stop being so into him once I find out what a shallow jerk he is. Right? “When did you start the band, though? When you were ten?”

“Ha, no. I got back in touch with Mal when I was about sixteen and had run away from home.”

“You ran away from home?”

“Yeah. Teen rebellion. My mother didn’t like the crowd I was hanging with. I was fronting a band of guys who were all in college, so they were sneaking me into bars to play shows by saying I was eighteen—”

“But even at eighteen you’re still underage.” When he said “bad boy” he really meant it.

“I know. But if you’re working or performing, you can be in bars if you’re eighteen. Just like you can be a waiter in a place that serves alcohol if you’re eighteen. But you can’t be sixteen.”

“And you never got caught?”

“No.” His smile was nostalgic rather than sly. “No one really worries about the band. Besides, we didn’t drink. We were too busy getting high in the van.” Now his grin turned to a smirk and I wondered if he was kidding. “Mom wasn’t too keen on me staying out late for gigs all different nights of the week and failing out of school.”

“You failed out of school?”

“No. That’s the thing. I was doing fine in school. And I tried to explain if she would be supportive and help me out, you know, then I could do it all, keep my grades up, sing in the band, no problem. I always thought that was our contract, you know? My job was to get good grades and if I did that I could do whatever else I wanted. But all of a sudden she wanted me to dress a different way, act a different way. It was like, when I was twelve and we were out of the military, she was fine with me being a rebel and growing my hair. But she felt by the time I was sixteen I should’ve grown out of it. It was time for me to straighten up and fly right.” He shook his head slowly.

“What does she think now?”

“She’s fine with it now. Turns out a lot of that attitude was coming from the guy she was dating at the time.” He shrugged and as his muscles flexed, the dragon around his upper arm moved. I settled close, putting my hand on his chest as he kept talking. “I mean, I knew that, but I really didn’t give a shit about him. He knew better than to waltz in and try to be a father figure to a sixteen-year-old with hair halfway down his back and a nose ring.”

“You had a nose ring?”

“I did. It was a pain in the ass, though, so I took it out.”

“And hair halfway down your back?” I tried to picture teen rebel Axel with hair like that.

“Yeah. That was a pain, too, though. I mean, girls absolutely loved it, but when it’s that long it’s always in the way during sex.” He propped himself up on one elbow, folding my hand under his. “The good part about it was it was like a signal to musicians that I wasn’t just some poser. Growing hair that long takes some commitment.”

“So what happened to that band?”

“Well, I ran away from home, remember? And not one of those bastards would take me in, so that pretty much would’ve ended the band right there even if I didn’t take off for England.”

“England?” I lay back and he traced the curves of my sternum with the tip of one finger as if he were painting a picture between my breasts.

“Yeah, because after I’d been on the street for a little while Mal offered to take me in. I spent the summer in Wales. By the end of the summer my mother had come around. She had dumped the strait-laced dude and I think she was afraid maybe I wasn’t coming back. But I went back and finished high school, got into college … and the rest is history.” He shifted then, piling some pillows against the headboard, and urged me to lean back with him. “And now it’s your turn.”

I let out a long sigh. It would’ve been completely unfair of me to try to put off telling him about myself any longer, after he’d just answered all of my questions with no hesitation. “How about we start with what you know already?”

“What do you mean? I confess I Googled you a little after Grammy night but I was so anxious to see you again I could barely absorb what I was reading so I mostly just looked at recent society photos.”

I felt a little bad for having put him through that, but he went on before I could apologize.

“I know you and your sister inherited a fortune and that your grandfather was some kind of media mogul in the old days. Oh, and that you’ve got a dungeon in your basement. That’s it.”

“That’s it?” I frowned. I was skeptical that he hadn’t come across the stuff about my mother and wondered if he was playing dumb.

“Am I supposed to know more? Remember, half my life I didn’t even live in the United States and after we split from my father we didn’t have a television.”

Apparently he really didn’t know. “You didn’t?”

“Nope. We had the Internet and video rental. Who needs actual television? That was my mother’s attitude, anyway. Anyway. Fill me in. What am I supposed to know?”

I let myself lean against him slightly. “I don’t know, I guess. I always assume most people know a lot more than I feel like they should. And that makes me want to tell them even less.”

He cleared his throat in an exaggerated manner. “Ahem. Can we agree I am not ‘most people’?”

“You certainly are not,” I said, thinking both of him stalking down the runway and making women scream, and of his voice making me shiver when he’d said It’s me. I’d never had a lover so attentive. Well, maybe I’d never really had a lover at all. Boyfriends, guys I “dated,” for whom sex was assumed to be part of the package. The same guys I was always saying no to. If any of them had been half the sex god that Axel was, I probably would have said yes more often.

“Just tell me what you want to,” Axel said gently, brushing his hand over my hair. “Don’t feel like there’s anything you have to.”

“Okay, but there are a couple of things that are … kind of known already. My grandfather tried to keep our family life sheltered from the attention of the media. But that got harder and harder to do when my father kept doing things like getting drunk and wrecking cars.”

“He did that a lot?”

“Well, twice, and then they took his license away.”

“Your mother must have loved that.”

He really didn’t know. While that was kind of refreshing, it meant that now I had to be the one to tell him. “Well, the big thing that most people know about me, but that I guess you don’t, is that my mother died when I was four.”

“Oh. Oh, Ricki—”

I bristled reflexively. “Don’t pretend to be sympathetic. It’s not like you knew her.”

“Well, no, but I know you, and I sympathize with your pain.”

“I’m not feeling any pain,” I snapped. “It was twenty years ago. Stop patronizing me!”

That was the point where I burst into tears. Axel held me and I didn’t try to stop him. He rocked me slightly. He was very nice to me. So nice he didn’t even say anything snarky like “not feeling any pain, eh?”

So nice he didn’t even press me to tell him more.

AXEL

It’s sort of a truism that when someone you love is in pain, you want to do anything you can to make them feel better, right? The flip side of that, though, is that when people are in pain, they’re easy to fall in love with. How exactly that fits into the whole sadism-masochism thing I’m not sure, but I’m sure it’s related. Let’s replace the word pain with passion, or with ecstasy. When someone you love is in ecstasy, they’re easy to fall in love with. See? It works.

I was already crazy about Ricki Hamilton before she broke down in tears. I didn’t carry her off from that awards ceremony simply to make trouble, you know. Yes, I wanted her. But since that night I’d wanted to touch her, to spend time with her, to hear her voice, all of those things that aren’t just about sex. And the more I found out about her, and the more time I spent with her, the more I wanted.

Especially when she was having an all-out ugly cry in my arms. When someone’s heart is breaking, your heart breaks a little, too, doesn’t it? And maybe when it heals up, some of the pieces get a little mixed up and cemented together … I should put all that in a song because it sounds so corny but it’s true. Isn’t it?

I’d do anything to make her feel better.

It’s true that I am familiar with one surefire way to make a woman feel good, Ricki in particular, but I wasn’t intending for comfort to turn into sex. I really wasn’t. But somehow rocking and stroking her hair turned into caressing her and murmuring about how beautiful she was, which turned into kissing her, which turned into kissing her all over …

Which turned into her sliding her leg over my hip and pulling me on top of her. I’m not the type to ignore an invitation, even a non-verbal one, but this was almost subconscious, like I barely even realized we’d transitioned all the way to making love. We were rocking back and forth together, her fingers buried in my hair, my mouth on her skin, and the only thing lacking was I wasn’t actually buried inside her.

And then she whined urgently, and her whine changed instantly to a happy moan when I pushed inside her. My beautiful Ricki. That was the moment I was lost, I think, if I had to point to one moment from which there was no going back. But our whole relationship up to that point had been a series of those moments, hadn’t it? If it hadn’t been love at first sight, maybe it had been love at first kiss—or more likely at first penetration. That first time I’d joined our bodies had changed me. And since then each time I’d touched her, held her, or breathed her name I had gone deeper into it. Into loving her, into being in love with her.

My cock inside her had now transformed her sobs to sounds of joyous pleasure. So much better. So much better than crying or feeling pain or sadness. Maybe I couldn’t fill the empty space in Ricki Hamilton’s heart over her lost mother, but at least I could do this.

I made love to her gently, with no hurry until she neared a peak, and then I pushed her forward until she came apart with pleasure, losing herself in it. I watched her eyes close—not clenched in frustration but merely closed in pleasure as the sensation took away her troubles and her pain. My Ricki. I pulled free then and massaged her with my hand, intending to jerk myself off quickly and be done with it, but her hand found my shaft and took over. Her eyes opened as she worked me experimentally at first, getting the feel of me. I gave her a nod of encouragement, leaning on my hip to make it easier for her to please me. Her fingers wrapping around me felt like a new intimacy. I stared into those warm brown eyes, then groaned deeply as she struck upon a rhythm and motion that pulled me suddenly closer to my own peak.

“Mm, Ricki, you—” I threw my head back as she looped her thumb over the slippery tip.

“Is it okay?” she asked, as if worried she was hurting me.

I was too close to orgasm to speak at that point. Too close to explain. Instead I closed my hand around hers and held it in mine while we both pumped my cock to the inevitable result. Having come once already not even an hour before, I didn’t make much of a mess this time. Only a dribble.

Her hand was still around my cock—now mostly soft—when she said, “You don’t trust me.”

“Just being careful,” I murmured, as I found a dry corner on the towel. “An accidental child isn’t something I could deal with right now.” Whether I could even deal with a full-time relationship was another story, but I didn’t really want to bring up that question.

“Sensible.”

“I can be when I really try.” I took her hand in mine. “You feeling better?”

She let out a breath, looking at the ceiling. “I think so. Sorry about that.”

“Ricki, you don’t ever have to apologize for crying.”

“I don’t know. This week is the twentieth anniversary of her death. You’d think I’d be over it by now. I mean, I certainly thought I was over it.”

“You seem pretty wound up, though.”

She nodded unhappily. “That’s true. Because of the anniversary The Tinseltown Tab has an article coming out tomorrow about it and I’m dreading what it might say.”

I brushed her hair off her forehead. “Can I ask? How did she die?”

“I have a lot of questions about that, too.” She hesitated before going on. “All they told me when I was a child was that she had an accident. I heard it was on a film set. But my grandfather eventually told me more. My parents had flown to Italy to hang out on the set of some art film no one cared about and somehow her death involved ropes, possibly some kind of bondage scene. I suspect it was my father’s fault. He’s been drinking himself into a stupor ever since.”

She said all that almost emotionlessly. I supposed she was all cried out. If anything, once she was done giving me the explanation, she seemed relieved. I smiled at her and a tiny half-smile flickered onto her face in answer.

I shifted a little more onto my back and draped her arm across my chest. “Wow. No wonder.”

“No wonder what?”

“No wonder you’re so skittish about BDSM.”

“Tsk. I’m not skittish about BDSM. I’m just … not that into it.”

I managed to keep from laughing out loud. She wasn’t joking. She really believed she wasn’t kinky. I refrained from pointing out that me tying her wrists had practically sent her instantly into orgasm that time in the limo. “Ricki. Just what exactly is it you are into, then?”

She rolled over and draped her chin on my chest instead. “You, you insufferable bastard.”

“Uh-huh. So you only get off on being bossed around, humiliated, and taken to the point of surrender because I’m into it? If so, you deserve an Oscar for great acting.”

“It’s complicated,” she admitted.

“It always is, which is why it’s fun.” I petted her hair. “I’m glad you’re not running away now. Hard-to-get isn’t one of my fetishes.”

“Yeah, well, who am I kidding? It wasn’t you I was running away from. It was … all the crap in my head.”

I asked as casually as I could. “What are you really afraid of?”

“Well, for one thing, how much longer are we going to be able to keep the dungeon a secret? It was easy in the fifties when there were only three TV stations and no Internet and no cell phone cameras. Now? I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“What happens if people find out, though? They titter about it for a while and then what? It’s not like you pay an actual shame tax. How does it actually hurt you?”

“Maybe it’s different when you’re a male rock star and everyone expects you to fuck everything that moves,” she said with a little wistful smile at me. “But when you’re a woman, and you’re in the entertainment business, getting tagged with the ‘slut’ label instantly invalidates you as a person. You become a second-class citizen.”

“If you care about what other people think, yeah.”

She gave me a be serious look. “I have to care about what other people think. Because what they think is important for my career. When I go into a development meeting I need people to listen to me, not be thinking, why is the slut talking? Or worse, stealing my ideas because they think they’re morally superior and so it’s okay to do that to me.”

“Well, okay, but why do you work at Blue Star, anyway? Ricki, if there’s a movie you want to make, don’t you have the money to bankroll anything you want? Or am I wrong about how much your family’s worth?”

She pressed a kiss against my pec. “I don’t trust you enough yet to tell you.”

“Touché, that’s fair. You know I’ve been sworn to silence about the dungeon, though. That lawyer of yours, man, he’s scary.”

“Scary in what way?”

“It was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that crossing him means ruin. When he says, ‘you’ll never work in this town again’ he can make it happen.”

“Schmitt is a total pain in my ass, too.” She gave another of those heavy sighs. “The terms of my grandfather’s will are pretty strict.”

“Please tell me they don’t prohibit letting horny rock stars tie you up and torture you,” I joked.

“Nope. In fact—” She paused as one of our cell phones rang. “That’s my ringtone.”

“Mine, too.” I grudgingly got up and determined it was my phone in the pocket of my jeans on the floor. Christina calling. I answered. “Yep.”

“Where in the heck are you?” She always said it that way: “in the heck.”

“Um, nowhere. Where are you? Was I supposed to be somewhere?”

“You disappeared without saying good-bye!”

“Sorry about that, Chris. The thing went good, though, didn’t it? Did you make lots of money?”

“Yes, but—”

“Great. Call me tomorrow.”

“Don’t forget that thing at the Capitol Records building is tomorrow!”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be there. Gotta go now, bye.” I hung up before I could get sucked into any more.

But Ricki had looked at her own phone and was now texting madly with someone. It seemed talk and cuddle time was over.

RICKI

I told him. I told him and it didn’t kill me. That was the thought going through my head as I scrolled through about a million increasingly frantic texts from Gwen. I’d been dreading talking about it for so long, and all that happened was … I found out what a loving and caring guy Axel could be. My phone buzzed in my hand: another one. Paul this time, with an urgent question. I texted him back quickly while looking for my shoes.

I met Axel’s eyes. “I need to go.”

“I know.” He hadn’t put his clothes back on yet and held his phone in his hand against his bare thigh. He stood up and slipped a hand around my waist as if he didn’t want to let me go until he really had to.

“We’re still on for Saturday?” I asked.

He brightened immediately, his brilliant smile making me want to kiss the upturned corners of his mouth. “You bet.”

I kissed the upturned corners of his mouth, said “See you then,” and then hurried out before I could be tempted to stay. The real world was starting to press in on me again and the longer I waited to catch up with all the people who had chosen the moments while I was alone with Axel to text me, call me, e-mail me, and so on, the worse it would get. I got into my car and plugged in my phone so I could control it from the steering wheel.

The first person I called, before I even got the car moving, was Gwen.

“Ricki!” She picked up on the first ring. “Where did you run off to? Or should I say with whom?”

“Oh no, was it that obvious?” I checked for hickeys in the rearview mirror and found none visible. Good. I eased the car to the exit of the parking lot.

“No, silly, only to me and Sakura, since I was looking for you and she was looking for Axel. I take it you guys made up.”

“What do you mean, made up? We were never fighting.” Me telling him to get lost was not the same thing as fighting, after all.

Gwen wasn’t buying it. “Riiiight.”

“Axel is great. And I have a date for him to come over Saturday for tea.”

“Tea.”

“We have a lot to talk about,” I insisted. I found myself in downtown traffic and looked for the entrance to the freeway. “Anyway. Your text said you heard from Schmitt?”

“He has the worst timing. You know how he keeps putting off meeting with us?”

“Yes.”

“He sent a message saying that tonight was his only chance this week, when he knew perfectly well we would both be at this fundraiser. It’s frankly a lame attempt to make it look like it’s our fault we haven’t had this meeting yet when he’s the one dodging us.”

“I agree. What do we do about it?”

“Well, here’s the thing, I told him we could video conference as soon as you get home. But if you’re still in town maybe you could pull over at a coffee shop or a hotel and get on their Wi-Fi or something like that. Do you have your tablet with you?”

“No, why would I bring my tablet to a fashion show?”

“I brought mine!”

“Why?”

“In case I needed it,” Gwen said primly. My sister did like her high tech toys.

“Gwen, I don’t think it’s such a good idea for me to be talking about sensitive subjects on Skype in a Starbucks.”

“Hm, true.”

“Besides, if I’m going to do it from my phone I don’t need Wi-Fi.” I pulled onto the freeway, where the traffic was very thick but moving along at a moderate crawl. That was better than a dead standstill, anyway. “Look, tell him we need to see him for breakfast first thing in the morning tomorrow, no excuses. Not about the club, about family business.”

“Oh shoot, that’s him calling now on the other line. Hang on.”

“Great. Tell him now.”

He works for us, dammit, I thought, not the other way around. I was already looking forward to putting the The Rough CD into the car stereo and cranking it up to eleven. I had my finger poised on the play button, waiting to say good-bye to her, when the next thing I heard was Schmitt coughing through my car stereo speakers. She must have conferenced him in instead of telling him to buzz off. Sigh.

“Girls, girls, I do hope we can have this discussion at a convenient time—”

I was tired of his bullshit. Without knowing what Gwen would say, but hoping that she would back me up, I cut him off and said, “There is no better time.” I decided I wasn’t going to wait until morning, either. “We’ve been trying to buttonhole you for a reason, Conrad. I’m revoking your license to invite members to the club.”

“What? Rickanna, surely you didn’t just say what it sounded like. It sounded like you said you do not want me to recruit new members?”

“That is exactly it. We’ve already disagreed on the subject of Grant Randolph.”

“Well, that is absurd. His father, Milford, was a member before you were born.”

“And membership in the club is not a hereditary right! You know what is a hereditary right? Me getting to decide who sets foot in my own house. Randolph was completely inappropriate. Not only did he make an utter fool of himself in front of me and the media on Grammy night, he is also in the management chain above me at Blue Star!”

Gwen put in what she thought was a supportive word. “No one wants to see their boss’s hairy ass.”

Schmitt cleared his throat, which was a completely disgusting, wet sound when heard in stereo through my car’s subwoofer. “I do apologize then, for overstepping my bounds. But you must realize, ladies, that I am accustomed to quite a bit of leeway in the club’s operation.”

“Get unaccustomed,” I growled.

“Surely you realize Randolph cannot simply be un-invited.”

“I do realize that, which is all the more reason to stop you before you make another irrevocable mistake.”

“My dear, I think perhaps you have forgotten the terms of your grandfather’s will. It’s necessary for you to keep the club in operation.”

“I’m well aware of that.”

“You don’t sincerely expect to maintain it without my help?”

“Are you saying you’ll quit if we don’t let you invite whoever you want?”

“No, no, of course not. I merely am saying …” He cleared his throat again. “You are correct; I do need to become accustomed to working with a three-person management team. In the future I will vet any future candidates through you both before extending an invitation. I apologize for my outburst: I thought you were saying you wished to be rid of me.”

I do wish to be rid of you, I thought, but of course now that he had caved so politely I felt conciliatory. “No, no, Conrad, that isn’t what I meant at all. Is that what I said?”

Gwen piped up again. “You actually said ‘I’m revoking your license to invite members to the club.’ That was all.”

“Again, my apologies, ladies. Was that the only matter you wished to discuss?”

“Yes.” I again poised my finger to hang up.

But Schmitt had other ideas. “Well, there was one matter I wish to bring up to you two.”

“Sure,” chirped Gwen.

“But it is a rather sensitive matter. Rather. Sensitive.”

More sensitive than what we just talked about? I wondered.

“Perhaps I should come by the house for us to continue this conversation.”

“Tonight?” I tried not to sound like a petulant schoolgirl being asked to do extra homework. After all, I’d just asserted myself like the adult head of household that I was: I didn’t want to dent that reputation so soon.

“Yes. I’m only a half hour away after all.”

“I’m probably forty-five minutes away,” I said.

“It won’t take but a few minutes, I believe.”

“Fine. Gwen?”

“Come on over, Mr. Schmitt.”

“See you soon,” I said, and hung up before either of them could say anything more. I cranked up the music as loud as it would go. What the hell could Schmitt want now?

* * *

I was going to insist we meet in the office because I wanted to sit behind Grandpa Cy’s desk and impress on Schmitt that I was in charge now. But he had apparently already insisted on the office himself and by the time I got there he and Gwen were already ensconced by the fireplace in chairs. Mina was just bringing in a rolling tray with tea and cookies on it.

Fine, so I wouldn’t sit behind the desk. Not right away, anyway.

I realized as I looked at the plate of cookies that I’d had Axel instead of dinner.

Mina caught me looking, gave me a little raise of the eyebrow, and then swept out. I hoped that little look meant she would be back with some real food. I took the seat directly under the looming oaken eagle sculpture. It had to have come from a movie set. The iron claws were outstretched like it was swooping on some prey and it had an iron band over its shoulders with a ring hanging from the center. Had it been a tasteless lamp at some point?

“Okay, Schmitt. Say what you have to say,” I said, taking a cookie and nibbling on it to keep from wolfing the whole thing down. It was chocolate-dipped and deserved to be savored and I didn’t want to look like a heathen in front of Schmitt. It was obvious to me he’d insisted this meeting be at a time of his choosing specifically because he was trying to assert his control over us. I didn’t want to give him any ammunition he could use against us.

“Well, girls, I should begin by asking if you have read the club’s bylaws.”

Gwen let me take the lead. “Of course we have. But remind me again why a super-secret club where almost nothing is written down has bylaws.” In fact, it was in the bylaws that only the bylaws could be written down.

“Because we are not a criminal underground,” Schmitt said, as if he’d answered that question a million times before. I wondered suddenly whether Cy had been for or against having bylaws. “Now. Everything is in coded language of course, but the members certainly abide by the interpretation that we have given them.”

By we he meant himself, of course. I wondered when he was going to get to the point.

“At any rate, one of the tenets, as you may remember, regards—ahem—minimum participation.”

“If this is about Grant, are you saying there’s a loophole we could use to get rid of him?” I could be such an optimist sometimes.

Schmitt chuckled and picked up the teapot. “This has nothing to do with Grant Randolph.” He fussed about with the tea things and I realized watching him, that he hadn’t poured any actual tea into his cup. So his fussing was all for show …? A delaying tactic while he made us wait to hear what he had to say?

He even made a show of tasting the tea, then adding cream and two lumps of sugar and tasting it again. Unbelievable. At least he actually poured the cream and I heard the sugar cubes go plop.

“You may not realize how important the participation rule is, since you are both still so new to participating in the world of bondage and domination. Watching one another is of course part of the allure. Otherwise people would merely stay at home to do it. But one must be on guard against voyeurs, those who are not true members of the lifestyle and who simply want to watch. They cannot be trusted, for they do not risk themselves, and it is the shared risk that forms a strong bond of trust.”

I poured myself some tea while waiting for him to get to the point.

“At any rate this is one of the deep tenets of the group and one of our safeguards of the security of all concerned.”

“Of course,” Gwen said, holding her teacup in both hands and leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, as if she were rapt by his tale. Gwen was a much better actor than Schmitt, though.

“I did not want to bring this up until I had gauged your reactions at the previous gathering, of course.” He sipped his sweetened cream while we hung on his words. “The fact of the matter is that neither of you is exempt from the participation rules.”

Gwen tittered nervously and covered her mouth with her hand.

Schmitt cleared his throat noisily. At least this time I wasn’t hearing it in stereo. “Technically the minimum participation rule, to be met, gives each member a full year between public displays, but I would not wait a year to establish yourselves or the members may become restless and distrustful. And we all know what is at stake.”

“How public does it have to be?” I asked, since we were talking technicalities.

“We have never had the issue raised, but I would say at least one other guest should witness the scene, or at least the door should be open even if no one bothers to look.”

So my impromptu scene with Axel probably didn’t count.

“Well, Madison and Chita can put me on the Catherine Wheel anytime,” Gwen said with another laugh. “Oh, I know! It’s my birthday next month! They can give me my birthday spankings!”

Schmitt’s eyes crinkled up as Gwen’s enthusiasm amused him and he let out a wheezing laugh. “Yes, that would do nicely.” Then his attention moved to me. When I offered no suggestions for myself, he moved on. “Well. I just wanted you to be aware of the necessity. Overall I felt the party went very well last time around.”

There was a knock at the door then. I went to see who it was, hoping it was Mina with a sandwich.

It was. “You read my mind,” I said, as I took the covered plate from her gratefully.

“No problem, Ricki,” she said. “Leave the dish on the tray and I’ll take care of it after you’re done in here.”

“You should go home,” I said. “You shouldn’t be here this late.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s not like you’re paying me by the hour.” She shooed me back into the room.

I returned to my seat under the eagle. The sandwich was a pressed baguette with melted cheese. I bit into the crisp crust and felt better immediately.

Gwen and Schmitt went over some upcoming dates for the monthly parties and I mostly just nodded in agreement while eating. Paul would check it against my calendar.

And then the meeting was thankfully over. Gwen stood and thanked Schmitt for coming. “See you at breakfast, Rick’? I’ve got that audition early in the morning.”

“Yep. See you in the morning, Gwen.”

She flounced off and I brushed the crumbs from my hands over the tray. “Will you see yourself out?” I said to Schmitt.

Schmitt stood also and set down his empty teacup. “Rickanna, I did want to say one more thing.”

“Oh?” Where I was standing the wings of the eagle loomed over me and I moved to the desk, pretending to look for something in the small stack of papers and things on the blotter.

“Yes. I know it can be quite intimidating to have one’s first BDSM experience in public, so I wanted to extend the offer to you.” He coughed noisily. “The offer, that is, of my services. Perhaps something as simple as a spanking? I am quite experienced in these matters. I would be happy to enact the scene in private if you so wished.”

So that’s what all his jockeying for time and trying to have a meeting with me alone was about: propositioning me. What I felt most at that moment was disappointment. I wasn’t afraid of Schmitt. I wasn’t even particularly disgusted at the come-on. Men can be like that. I suppose what disappointed me most was that Grandpa Cy had mostly associated himself with good people, trustworthy people. Schmitt had been his closest associate of all, and when I was little he’d been almost like an uncle or a second grandfather. So although I expected men to be pigs and hit on me inappropriately—this was hardly the first time it had happened to me—I’d hoped Schmitt was better than that.

But, no. Just a filthy pig in the end. I broke out of my frozen deadpan and forced myself to laugh a gentle yet dismissive laugh. The don’t-be-silly laugh. “Oh, Conrad, you’re always thinking of my well-being. But you know I think of you like an uncle.” I hoped an incest implication was enough to deter him.

“I do care for you dearly, Ricki,” he said, and I wasn’t sure my message of “no” was getting through.

“Thank you for the kind offer,” I said, “but I’ve got this one covered.”

“You needn’t even be unclothed for a spanking, you know,” he said, and I wondered just how much “no” it was going to take to get him to give up. Had he even heard what I said? “You could simply … bend over … right now.”

Sigh. Very disappointed. I folded my hands and gave him what I called my “skeptical schoolmarm” look, complete with headshake and clucking of my tongue. “And you could simply walk out that door and never, ever mention this conversation again.”

He opened his mouth to protest but something must have started to sink in because nothing came out.

For emphasis I twirled one finger in a circle and pointed it at the door.

“Perhaps I’ve been mistaken,” he said gruffly, blinking almost in surprise. “If so my apologies. My sincere apologies.” I think I know why they call it backpedaling now. He practically walked backward out of the room, repeating the apologies a couple of times on the way, vacillating between looking at me and looking at where he was going. Pathetic, really.

I waited until he had shut the door behind him. Then I e-mailed Paul asking him to take care of booking a locksmith to come sometime when I could be present to change the lock on the office door and to redo the combination on the safe.

And then I texted Sakura.

What the fuck is wrong with men? Why is it always guys who are making utterly inappropriate come-ons who can’t take a hint?

She wrote back: Because they live in a fantasy world and reality doesn’t intrude. A fantasy world where you lust after them as much as they lust after you.

Hah, I replied. I think it’s just that once their dicks get hard there’s no blood left for their tiny brains.

This isn’t about Axel, is it??

No. Not about Axel. Not at all. If anything the incident made it painfully obvious to me how well Axel did listen to me. I think me and Axel are getting along just fine now.

I still had to figure out how the heck I was going to keep us out of the papers, but … one thing at a time.