by Dubois, Lila
San Francisco Longing
San Francisco Trilogy: Part One
Lila Dubois
Copyright
Published by:
Farm Boy Press,
Sacramento, California, United States of America.
First electronic edition: January 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Lila Dubois, all rights reserved.
Cover design by Lila Dubois
Book formatted by Farm Boy Press
ISBN: 978-1-941641-36-1
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owners and the above publisher of this book, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Publisher’s note:
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Synopsis
San Francisco Longing
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Explore the San Francisco Trilogy
Also by Lila Dubois
About the Author
Synopsis
San Francisco Longing
She never meant to lie to him, let alone submit to him.
When Christiana discovered the secret BDSM club she threw caution to the wind and snuck in, hoping only to watch the things she’d been fantasizing about.
Until James.
Dominant and charming, he’s everything she never knew she needed.
And he wants her.
Three amazing nights together, but then the party’s over. He thinks he’ll see her again. Christiana knows this is the end.
But how can she say goodbye to the man who claimed her, body and soul?
San Francisco Longing
Prologue
She’d weighed her fear of rejection and pain—quite literal pain because she was sure he would punish her—against her fear of regret. Regret for what she’d done to him. Regret for not mustering her courage and telling him the truth about who she was and who she wasn’t. She didn’t want to look back on her life and be anguished at her own cowardice. If she’d known what would happen, she wouldn’t have lied. Wouldn’t have pretended to be someone she wasn’t.
It had started out as an adventure. She’d been a stranger in a strange land, an anthropologist studying a foreign culture.
She was still a stranger to him, and to his world. She was a quiet, quirky engineer while he was a rich, powerful, and worldly prince.
A literal prince.
Her body was still bruised and aching from the beating last night. What would he say if he knew in her desperation to get over him she’d tried to find another Dom? It had been a mistake, leaving her body and soul battered and bruised.
He’d come for her. He’d found her. That meant he knew who she was.
“I don’t fully understand why you lied. Why you pretended to be a member of the Orchid Club.” James Nolen’s elegantly accented voice was carefully neutral.
“I told you, I felt like—”
“Alice through the looking glass,” he cut in. “But it’s more than that, isn’t it? You recognized the St. Andrew’s Cross.”
She couldn’t deny it. “Yes, I did.”
“That means you’re interested in BDSM. Knowledgeable.” He stepped closer. “You wanted to see Masters and submissives play.”
Her breath was coming faster and she felt flushed. “Yes.”
“Because it’s something that fascinates you. Is submission what you fantasize about at night?”
“I was just going to look, just that first night,” she whispered. “I wasn’t going to do anything.”
“But you did. With me.” His dark gaze bore into her. “You submitted to me.”
Christiana shivered at the need, the aching desire, his simple words aroused within her.
She wanted him. Needed him. Especially after the mistakes she’d made last night.
“I’m so sorry, James.”
I want you. I need you.
Forgive me
Chapter 1
There was beauty in the well-worn and aged, something reassuring about the resolute nature of a building that stood strong against the ocean, wind, and rain. Though it showed the trials of time’s passage, it remained. It was strong, despite the fact that it didn’t fit in, that it was a mismatch for everything around it. Like the woman who stood in the dying afternoon light, alone in the hulking shell.
“Sorry, girl. You have to make way for bigger and better things.” Christiana shook her small can of spray paint and marked the worn concrete exterior wall with a neon orange X. Rust from the window bars had stained the concrete, and to her the variations of copper and gray were lovely.
She pulled out her personal phone and took a picture of the bit of wall that was the most interesting. A burst of embarrassment stole over her—why did she always have to be so weird? Who took pictures of a stained concrete wall in a soon-to-be-demolished warehouse?
But there was no one here to judge her, and Christiana shook off the feeling. Pulling a pen from behind her ear, she noted the wall she’d just “X”ed on the plan on her clipboard and turned to finish her inspection.
The whole building had an otherworldly feel. Admittedly, the floor was covered in bits of shattered windows, rotting wood that had once been shelving, and slithery patches of mold that weren’t the most appealing looking floor covering.
The salt water and damp environment of the small island had taken its toll on this once bustling building. Remnants of its past were there—such as a large sign that said Ogle Canning leaning against the wall.
But change was the only constant, and this building was marked to be demolished to make way for some new development on the small island in San Francisco Bay.
The time to save the building was long past, and though people might have appreciated having the building converted rather than knocked down, salt water and time had done their job. Christiana wasn’t the executioner—that would be the crew with the wrecking ball that would arrive next week. She was the governor who signed the death warrant. As a civil engineer, inspecting buildings and deciding what could be saved, what couldn’t, and which wall had to go first hadn’t exactly been her dream work scenario. But her job working for the State of California was a good one. It was safe. She got to travel a bit—mostly within fifty miles of Oakland—but that was still traveling. And she got to be alone—just her, a hardhat, and a clipboard—in her work truck.
Alone was easy.
She moved from wall to wall, mark
ing which walls had to come down first, indicating the load-bearing and critical structures. And if she stopped to take pictures of a beautiful slat of broken wood, or a rusted bit of scrolled ironwork, there was no one to see her do it.
She reached the far side of the warehouse, and the fourth exterior wall. This one had no windows, and the brick here looked new. Christiana frowned at it. Perhaps this wall had been protected by its position away from the rocky shoreline of the island.
She was losing the light, and she still had to do the second floor, so she pulled her florescent pink can out of the pouch she wore on her belt, and marked it as a load-bearing wall. Once she was done inside, she’d check it from the outside.
Weaving her way back through the room on the first floor, she found the stairs and cautiously made her way up, testing each wrought iron step before she put her weight on it.
The second floor was easier, since most of the walls got the same markings as their counterparts downstairs. The light that came in the broken windows was golden, so she indulged herself in a few more pictures. There was some tagging on the walls here, and a pile of cardboard and trash that made her think someone had been squatting here at some point. She made a note to order the demo crew to do a detailed walkthrough to check for people before they started. It should be standard practice, but she’d known crews who got a bit giddy with excitement to start smashing stuff.
She worked her way around to the inland exterior wall. Again, the brick looked nearly untouched by the ravages of time.
“What’s your story?” Christiana pulled off her heavy glove and laid her hand on the brick.
It wasn’t cold. It was cool, but not cold. Brick held onto the cold, and it should have been nearly icy against her skin. Her eyes went wide.
Christiana looked around the second floor, which had fewer internal walls than the ground floor. She closed her eyes and pictured the building from the outside—a large rectangular two-story warehouse, the outer walls faced in corrugated metal siding to protect the brick that showed on the inside. There were evenly spaced windows on the long walls, the openings protected by metal grates and bars. A one-story addition had been added to the shoreline-facing short wall, and that was where the entrance was. A small gravel parking area and large turnaround had allowed trucks to pick up the canned fish before snaking up the hill to the access road that fed onto the freeway. The dock had long since rotted away, and the trees and greenery that would have been cut back when this was an active business had crowded the warehouse, making it clear that this building had been abandoned by humans, giving nature a chance to reclaim the stolen terrain.
The footprint of the main building was big, nearly three-quarters the size of a football field. Christiana opened her eyes, calculating the square footage she could see. She frowned, then went to the long wall and paced it off. She did some quick mental math and turned in a circle.
The second floor wasn’t as big as it should be.
Christiana’s heartbeat started to thud in her chest. She pulled her glove on, then tucked her clipboard into her backpack and took out the heavy black flashlight that could double as a weapon. The interior square footage didn’t match what was on the blueprints filed with the city planner. This was as close to dramatic as her job ever got.
Still, usually it was the other way around—the building was actually bigger than on the plans. Christiana walked back to the suspect wall.
She tapped the top of her hardhat, making sure it was firmly in place, though she was practical enough to acknowledge that if this building came down on top of her she wouldn’t survive. Flashlight in hand, she walked along the brick wall, rapping it with her free hand. It sounded hollow. Brick shouldn’t sound hollow. Hollow sounds, plus irregular temperature for the supposed material.
It was a false wall.
She reached the corner, where the troubling wall met the long exterior wall. Christiana walked to the nearest window. The glass was long since gone, and she was lucky that her heavy jacket, stitched with the name of her agency and striped by reflective tape, kept her warm against the ocean-cold winds.
Christiana examined the metal grate mounted to the inside of the window. It was coppery brown with rust. Wrapping her gloved hands around the bars she pulled. The grate groaned. Planting one booted foot just under the sill, she gritted her teeth and yanked. The grate gave way, and Christiana had to dance back out of the way as it fell.
Heart hammering in her chest, Christiana leapt over the grate and stuck her head out of the window opening. A gust of wind nearly took her hardhat off, and a few pieces of hair pulled free of her braid.
The exterior wall extended from her window at least forty feet to the corner of the building, yet on the inside it was only five feet from where she stood to the wall. Thirty-five feet of space were missing.
“Son of a bitch.” Christiana yanked her head in and glared at the fake brick wall. It was almost like someone had created a false duplicate of the exterior wall. Who would bother to do that? This building hadn’t been used in years.
Christiana made her way back to the brick, debris crunching under her feet. She pursed her lips as she looked at the puzzle. Her heart was still pounding, but the trickle of unease that slid through her was nothing compared to the burn of curiosity.
There was a delicate way to investigate this. She could go outside, pace it out. Maybe try and enter the walled off area via one of the doors on the bottom floor, though all the doors except the one she’d come in were supposedly chained shut from the inside, as well as locked.
That was the delicate way.
Christiana flipped the flashlight and smashed the heel of it into the brick.
Plaster crumbled. As she’d suspected, the “brick” was a molded and painted plaster facade.
Christiana grinned, once more glad she was alone, so no one would see her being unprofessional as she gleefully smashed a hole in the wall about the size of a manhole cover.
Flipping the now dusty flashlight back around, she turned it on, shining it through the hole. She could see the edges of two-by-four studs that supported the facade. In theory there should be something mounted to the other side of the studs—drywall, more plaster—but when the light hit the hole she saw fabric.
Christiana cautiously reached out, tapping the fabric with the flashlight. It moved, confirming that it was, in fact, fabric. Heavy. Black. And perfectly intact.
“What is going on?” Christiana’s voice echoed slightly.
This false wall, with its plaster-brick on one side and fabric on the other, was new. The two-by-four supports smelled like fresh wood, and any fabric that had been here for any length of time would have been destroyed by the salt air, which meant the fabric had probably been added at the same time as the wood.
Christiana took a step back and considered her options. She was faced with a mystery. Not the sort of mystery she normally came up against. Those were usually the “how is this building still standing?” and “who in their right mind approved these plans?” sort of mysteries.
This was a real mystery.
The smart thing to do would be to back out, call the office, and come back in the morning with another inspector. Maybe with the police. Whomever had done this was trespassing—even the building owner wasn’t supposed to be on-site.
Christiana put her hand on her work phone, clipped to her belt.
Be smart, or be adventurous.
She lifted her hand off her phone. There was no one here to see her make a bad choice. She was going to be bad. Christiana was many things, but bad was never one of them. In her darker moments, when she slogged into her apartment covered in dirt and dust, with nothing to look forward to beyond some frozen food and TV, she regretted her painfully boring life. She hadn’t set out to be this way. Who would plan to be boring?
Christiana’s secret self, the person she thought of herself as, was adventurous and bold. That person just didn’t have a lot of opportunity to come out—she’d gone fro
m college into an internship, at the end of which she’d been offered a job. She’d worked hard, harder than most people had to. She was a woman in a male-dominated field, and she’d had to adopt an all business manner and prove herself over and over again.
Year after year, bit by bit, that wild adventurer she’d seen herself as had retreated deep inside, coming to life only when Christiana watched movies or listened to audiobooks as she drove.
A smile curled the corners of her mouth. The universe was giving her a gift. A mystery, and adventure. All she had to do was decide to take the opportunity. To be bad.
Christiana tucked the flashlight away and lifted her boot. Holding onto the vertical supports she’d exposed with her improvised flashlight-hammer, she used the steel toe of her boot to break down more of the false wall.
When she was done, she had a hole roughly three feet wide by four feet tall, the lower edge nearly touching the floor.
Pulling out the flashlight once more, Christiana crouched and turned it on, then sandwiched it between her jaw and shoulder so both hands were free. She reached for the bottom of the fabric. There must have been weights in the hem, because it was heavy. She gathered it, lifting it inch by inch, her light trained on the gap, so she’d be able to see whatever was on the other side and, if needed, run for it.
Her heart was pounding so loudly that all she could hear was the thud, thud, thud of its beat.