She had no way to reply with the gag in her mouth.
“If I play here, you’ll eventually lose it,” he murmured, his whole intent clear.
The more his fingers probed inside the channel to where the melted ice cubes remained, the more her body answered, trying to open. Then, there was a trickle of water down her leg. She’d lost the battle there was no way she could have won.
Will stood back and eyed the dark shape of his wife’s just caned derriere and laid the last promised twelve on top of the others.
As Alex thrashed inside the rope bondage, she felt each caustic cut heap on more pain, until she feared she’d pass out. Counting helped her hold on to some bit of sanity.
At twelve he stopped, just as he said he would, and having finished, there was a puddle of water at her feet, chilling her toes.
When he released her arms from above he roped them awkwardly against her cunt so that she couldn’t move them, though she couldn’t play with herself. On her knees on the wet tiles, the gag was removed and she took his cock until it bathed her in the sour liquid that shot across her face.
A phone was ringing somewhere in the distance, the sound rising out of a muddy, thoughtless fog. At first she thought it was a sound from another apartment, then she realized that it was the land line in her bedroom. Ten, eleven, twelve rings, it didn’t stop. Alex heard the noise as though the telephone was right next to her, dragging her with each shrill ring further from subspace, eventually instilling an agitating fear somewhere in her gut. The caller must be frantic.
Will finally left her to answer it, then returned a few moments later. Pulled to her feet, the ropes undone, the caller had to wait sometime for her to pick up.
“Hello,” she said, standing by the bed, ropes dangling around her.
“Alex?” She heard the familiar voice.
“Jocelyn?” she exclaimed in surprise.
Alex sat on the bed, ignoring the painful ache in her behind. Hanging up the receiver she sat for some time without moving and then stared up at Will’s face.
“She’s in jail, in Paris.”
“Jocelyn? Really? On what charge?” He almost looked amused at first, though his expression abruptly changed when he heard her recite the allegations.
“And what does she want from you?” he asked.
“To arrange for a money wire. She needs to hire an attorney.”
“She wouldn’t call Reggie?” Will asked.
“No. She said not to tell him.”
“That’s a reasonable decision. I suppose if you need to, you can take care of it in the morning.” He walked away from her seemingly indifferent. Going into the bathroom Alex flicked on the light so she could see the pale pink tiles and the wet puddle on the floor, and recall for just an instant how she’d spent the last hour dangling there. Only then did the ache in her behind crawl into her conscious thoughts. Between that ache and Jocelyn’s frightened voice, she figured she wouldn’t sleep much that night. Even so, Will held her close to him for a long time as he drifted off, the warmth of his body a soothing comfort.
***
In the morning, Alex found Reggie at his office at eight o’clock.
“He is in, isn’t he?” she asked the secretary.
The woman looked at her doubtfully. “Mrs. Kozak, he’s preparing for a meeting that should be starting in about 60 seconds.”
“This is a matter of some urgency,” Alex said.
The eternally professional woman wasn’t easily swayed, even by someone as close to Reggie Harold as Alexandra Kozak.
“It’s about his wife,” Alex added seeing the woman hesitate.
“Jocelyn?”
“Yes.”
“Humph.” There was clearly judgment in her reply. “I’ll see what I can do.”
When Reggie looked up at the lovely blonde, he was typically cool but not annoyed.
“So early?” he asked. “How kind of you to grace me with your beautiful presence. I hope the cure’s still working.”
“The matter’s important,” she replied.
“Things going all right with Will?”
“Yes, very,” she answered. Her own state of grace or disgrace wasn’t of concern to her. Her night had ended thinking solely of Jocelyn and what had become a worse debacle than the one that caused her best friend’s departure months before. “But that’s not why I’m here,” she said. “You do still love Jocelyn?”
“Jocelyn?” He was startled hearing her name. “Love? I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“I got a call from her last night, Reg.”
“Really? Nice of her to surface. If you can give me an address my attorneys can take care of the legalities.” His manner had turned painfully cold.
“Yes, I’m sure that would be a help,” Alex returned. “Don’t worry, she won’t be hard to find and she won’t be going anywhere soon. She’s been arrested. She’s in a Paris jail. The man she’s been with has been accused of theft, extortion, smuggling and drug dealing. Jocelyn’s being held as an accessory.”
For an instant there was no response. Then there was an ashen look about his refined features, a twist in his expression that suggested a wince. Reggie being Reggie didn’t give off much more in body language.
“I wired her some money for an attorney early this morning. Though she told me not to tell you, I thought you should know.”
Chapter Sixteen
Even in nondescript clothes without a trace of make-up Jocelyn Killian was a stunning woman. The firebrand spirit of rebellion and seductiveness bewitched him still. While she stared into the vacant spaces of the bare interrogation room, her back to him, he could for a moment wonder how their marriage had unwittingly disintegrated, even when they were conscious of the fact and trying hard to prevent that. He still loved her. He knew that because of the pain that burned on the surface of his beating heart and then deep within.
Trying to substitute the pain with another woman only caused that other woman hurt. Gwen, a little sparkling jewel of submission, had done her best to win his heart, but Alex’s appearance at his office the day before only reminded him how impossible it would be to replace the woman that owned his heart.
Such tears Gwen had shed. How she tried to hold them inside.
“I had a feeling she’d walk back into your life, Reg,” she’d said. “And when she did I’d be out on a limb with it getting sawed off right behind me.”
“I’m not good at this, Gwen,” he’d told her. “And I’m sorry about that. Usually I don’t bother dealing with things of the heart, but with you…”
“I know. I know if all the stars had been right in the sky, and moon was in the south in its second phase, and the winds were blowing from the west, and hell was about to freeze, there’d be a chance that this would work. But I’ve been living in the shadow of her…and the other one.”
“The other one?”
She tried to smile. “Someone told me at that party a few weeks back that I looked just like Alex Kozak? When I met her a few days ago, I thought I’d suddenly gained a sister I never knew I had.”
“Oh, but there are a lot of stunning differences,” Reggie reminded her.
“But that really doesn’t matter. You’re not in love with Alex, and you’re not in love with me.”
“I guess I don’t have that big a heart,” he conceded.
“But you tried.”
“I did.”
“If Jocelyn had only stayed away longer,” Gwen mused.
“If only.”
He didn’t know he had the power to break a heart having figured he’d always been far too aloof from his own. But he could see Gwen’s falling apart despite her efforts to keep it tacked together. He was genuinely sad.
That conversation was only hours ago. Reggie remembered it in the split seconds before Jocelyn realized that he was in the room. Approaching her quietly, so she didn’t hear him until he was right on her, he wasn’t surprised that she cried tears when she first turned to see his face.
&nbs
p; “Oh Reg…” She was as white as a pale ghost in the ugly florescent lights.
Her body rose from the wooden chair as though it could barely move inside the rough jail clothes. She fell into him sobbing. She was shivering at first, but warmed inside his embrace. They were locked heart to heart and groin to groin as minutes ticked by. When he finally let her go and sat her back on the chair, her body temperature was noticeably heated.
“I have my international attorney working on your release,” he told her. “Whatever bond necessary will be posted. I’m not sure of the international ramifications. But I read your statement and have involved the State Dept. We’ll see if they’ll intervene. I’m not sure how well all that will fly, since you spent so much time with the man. But we’re going to give that a try.” From warm to expedient and judicious, Reggie’s cool returned.
As Jocelyn gazed into his steely eyes, the shivers resumed, a new flood of fear to join the powerhouse of concern she’d nursed since the arrest. She imagined herself languishing for years in a foreign prison for crimes she had no knowledge of.
“I think testifying against him will be your best course, but we’ll consult with the attorneys when they show up this afternoon.”
“I can’t testify,” Jocelyn protested meekly.
Reggie’s eyes flashed anger.
“Don’t turn virtuous all of a sudden, Jocelyn,” he snapped. “You’ve got your ass in a ringer and it’s about to get squeezed.”
“But I don’t know anything,” she replied honestly. “For a smart woman, I haven’t been very smart these last few months. I never once connected Ian’s weird habits with anything illegal.”
“Maybe so. But you’ll figure out enough to make the gendarmes happy.” That was nothing less than an order.
Neither spoke for several minutes, each scrutinizing the other, both realizing how strange it felt to be reunited under these conditions.
“Reg?” she was the first to speak.
“Yes.”
“We are still married, aren’t we?” she asked.
“Only because I couldn’t find you to serve the papers.”
Her heart sank.
“The fact is I’ve been unofficially engaged to another women for the past couple of weeks.”
“You what!” she exclaimed, breathless.
“Gwen and I are compatible in a lot of ways, especially sexually. I was hoping to find you so I could end our relationship properly.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“You seriously left me,” he reminded her.
“But that’s not you,” Jocelyn objected, more tears beginning.
“What’s not?”
“You, you Reggie Harold falling in love so quickly.”
“I surprised a lot of people. And I suppose myself.”
“But when you first came in…” she was thinking back to the hug. “That means you’re only here to…”
Reggie let her linger in that bittersweet moment, suspended between the present and the future while Jocelyn’s heart determined that her unexpected reason for joy just the moment before was now a reason to grieve.
“No. My plans have changed,” he admitted at last.
“In what way?”
“We’re going to work this out, Jocelyn,” he said, sounding like a stern father and a concerned husband.
“We are?”
“Do you still love me?” he asked.
“Oh, my yes I do!”
“Then we’ll work it out,” he repeated. He paced the room with hands in pockets, pensive, then sat down opposite her, the table between them. “I never knew what it was like to hurt someone until yesterday when I broke off the engagement with Gwen. Of course, I never knew what it was like to be hurt until you left. I’d always stayed out of that game, remaining happily aloof. I fought off dozens of women. Good god, I fought off Alexandra. But you? You I couldn’t resist. You made me join that game of love and war. You made me love, you made me hurt and you made me love again. And as long as I’ve made a commitment to you, we’re going to see it out. You’re going to see it out,” he emphasized. “We still have a marriage by the skin of our teeth. It’s still a binding contract, and we will not throw it away easily. You may have shown your willingness to toss our marriage out with all your other problems, and I may have been too proud to set you straight. But there is still love, and you will be repenting, and if I can take a lesson from an old friend…” He recalled Will’s determination to forgive Alex. “…there is nothing so serious that cannot, with a little forgiveness and ingenuity, be resolved in a relationship built on love. We just need to begin being honest.”
The fact that Reggie Harold could make such a passionate speech about love and forgiveness brought a fresh burst of tears to Jocelyn’s eyes.
Chapter Seventeen
Reggie paid for two rooms in a small though very elegant Paris hotel, hardly like anything Jocelyn had stayed in with Ian. The two rooms were a deliberate choice. Reggie wasn’t ready to fuck her, let alone make love. At least until he knew everything.
Once she was released to him on bond, they spent their days with lawyers trying to undo the vast legal entanglement knotted around her. When they weren’t with lawyers and Reggie wasn’t trying to conduct his business via phone, fax and the Internet, they took silent walks around Paris streets and parks to breathe fresh air. When there was nothing else to occupy their time, Reggie listened to her tell him of her months away with Ian Pennywhistle.
It was common for him to sit at a small table in her room, nursing a cup of coffee, maintaining a remote attitude, the best way for him to take in all the painstaking details. Occasionally he asked questions and demanded answers, especially when Jocelyn was afraid to go on; but mostly he listened because Jocelyn needed to talk.
“…We were on the beach in France, Ian planning to fuck me when Andre joined us… Andre took me to a club later and I was with him all night. But when Ian found us about dawn, he was furious. He spanked me hard with a belt, then took my ass, even when I told him I was sore because Andre had used me there. When he was finished screwing me, he scrubbed me down like I had the plague…
Reggie heard the details with a dispassionate cool, and said nothing despite the difficulty of her confession. It was painful pulling herself from the past to the present, but with feet dragging, heart heavy and labored breathing, she continued.
“We stayed in a German bordello. Ian told me it was just a hotel but here were too many single women there for me to believe that. The owner’s daughter Dagne came to me one morning and seduced me, or maybe I seduced her. She was as good as ice cream melting in my mouth. Once I smelled her, I had to taste her. We groped each other in my bed before I finally fucked her …with my fist…and she practically put hers in my ass.”
“Did Ian watch?” Reggie asked.
“No. At least not until the very end. But he’d set up the scenario. He’d deliberately marked Dagne’s breasts and caned her ass to see if that would arouse me.”
“And did it?”
“You know it would.”
“I know only what you tell me,” Reggie replied curtly.
“Yes, it did arouse me. I was thinking of you.”
“How sweet.” His dry wit was accompanied by the trace of a smirk.
“Ian realized that it turned me on.”
“He’d never dominated you before, when you were younger?”
“Not the way you have.”
“How did he dominate you then?”
“Then it was all mental. I was young and just moved with him thoughtlessly like an unbridled kid, until he finally got a little too crazy and I tried to pull away from him. When he resisted, I had to just split in the middle of the night.”
“Kind of like it was this time, only you didn’t have the chance to split?”
She bit her lip and replied, pained to admit it, “Yes.”
“Go on.”
“Ian wasn’t right…the way he jumped around from one mood
to next without warning. It was like the past, but I didn’t remember that until we’d been together for two months. I never guessed it was drugs. He never offered me any.”
“You never took anything from him that was suspicious?”
“No.”
“You didn’t know a thing about this business dealings?”
“No, I didn’t know.” She’d already explained this a dozen times to lawyers and the police, but she’d repeat it again a hundred times, if that’s what Reggie wanted.
“If you’d known there were drugs would you have taken them?”
“I might have,” she replied.
“You might?”
“I would have,” she corrected herself. “I didn’t have much restraint.”
One afternoon, Reggie asked her to remove her clothes while he was in the middle of the interview. The light in the room was yellow from the sun coming in through gold tapestry drapes. Jocelyn’s body glowed for him as he watched her disrobe, each article of clothing pulled back showing off a little more skin. It was the first time he’d seen her naked since he watched her being strip-searched one day. She’d returned to court and the act was required for a woman still charged with serious crimes. In the gray light of that gray building her body lacked the luster that her pampered skin revealed within the refined beauty of the private hotel room. In that sensuous glow her hair billowed like sails around her shoulders, ringlets of bright auburn curls floating on the slight currents in the room.
“Turn around,” Reggie ordered. “What kind of activity left these bruises?” he asked, pressing the tips of his fingers to several places where just the faintest signs of her whipping in the German club remained. Though it had been two weeks, the pesky wounds had not completely healed. Experienced with the results of a flogging applied to delicate female flesh, Reggie could tell almost to the day how long ago these had been inflicted. He could guess the intensity and the nature of the implement used. Perhaps because he could visualize the session clearly in his mind, he knew exactly how his wife had been humiliated and rendered into a mass of shaking, quivering anguish by the most severe means. What he noticed on her behind, he did not fail to see on her breasts, her thighs and her belly. All Jocelyn had to do was fill in the mere details.
The Alexandra Series Page 72