The King

by Tiffany Reisz

  said… I don’t know. Something about a building.

  Those were his words, ‘All this bullshit over a fucking building.’” “See? That wasn’t so hard.” Kingsley raised his eyebrows and tapped her under the chin.

  Phoebe crossed her arms over her chest and glared.

  “I don’t know who you pissed on, but they’re talking to everyone you know. Someone’s going to break.”

  “Someone did,” he said with a cold smile. “Now are you going to be a good girl and stop causing me trouble?”

  “I didn’t appreciate talking to your secretary.”

  “You have my sincerest apologies. It will not happen again.”

  “Good. Thank you.” She walked toward him and put her hands on his chest. “So…if I forgive you and you forgive me, maybe we can go make up in my bedroom?”

  He gently grasped her wrists and kissed the back of each hand.

  “I would rather go to prison labeled as a sex offender than spend one more second in your company.”

  Phoebe slapped him.

  Kingsley laughed. “If I knew you had this side to you…” he said. “No, I still wouldn’t want to fuck you ever again.”

  He turned and strolled from her house and walked back to his. He needed Sam and he needed her now. Phoebe might be crowing that she’d scored some sort of victory against him, but Kingsley saw it differently.

  If Fuller had put someone on Kingsley’s trail, knew who his friends were, knew who his contacts were, knew who he was fucking…that meant they were on to something. Kingsley scared Fuller and Fuller was fighting back. He and Sam needed to get to work right now digging as deep as they could. One of them—either him or Sam—was getting closer to the truth. No backing down now. It was the two of them up against Fuller and his massive army of Christian fundamentalists. He liked those odds.

  Hopefully Sam had spent the night at his house. She’d promised that she alone would be his valet, putting his boots on for him. On the off chance she was up and about, he went in search of her.

  On the second f loor he heard her voice, and he followed it to a bedroom. The door stood ajar, and he glanced inside.

  And there he saw Sam giving someone a kiss. She was dressed. The person she kissed was dressed. But the sheets were wild, which told him her night had been wild. And it should have been nothing seeing them kiss. He shouldn’t have cared. He shouldn’t have seen it, but it shouldn’t have mattered. But it did matter. And he did look, and he couldn’t look away. Although it hurt to look. God, it hurt to look.

  Because Sam was kissing a man. And that man wasn’t him.

  25

  July THE SUN HAD SET AN HOUR EARLIER, BUT THE CITY still smoldered in the summer heat. Reluctantly Kingsley abandoned Felicia’s Bedford cottage. The two-bedroom house was hidden behind a veil of trees and offered the sort of privacy only money could buy. For the past month, it had become Kingsley’s second home as he and Felicia owned each other’s bodies night and day. But as good as the kink and the sex had been, Kingsley knew the main reason he stayed with her was his desire to avoid seeing Sam. But Felicia had to leave him to see a client in London, Blaise had gone to Washington and Kingsley knew he couldn’t hide forever.

  Back at his town house he found Sam in his office, sitting behind his desk with a stack of invoices. She looked up from her work and smiled at him.

  “Look at what the pussy dragged in,” she said. “Have a good night? And day? And night? And week? And month?”

  “I need you to reschedule my appointment with Anita,” he said.

  Sam glared at him. “Again? This is the second time you’ve rescheduled. I’ve never known anybody to cancel a massage. I mean…it’s a massage.”

  “Reschedule it,” he said. He owed her no explanations, none at all. “I’m going to bed. You should go home, too.”

  “Soon as this is finished.”

  “You won’t see me much tomorrow,” he said on his way out of the office.

  “Getting used to that,” she said half under her breath, half audibly.

  Kingsley turned around in the doorway.

  “You have something to say to me?” he asked, trying to keep his voice even.

  Sam sat back in his desk chair. “I said I was getting used to not seeing you. You’ve been a ghost for the past month, which would be fine if you were busy and happy. But you don’t seem happy, and something tells me you’re avoiding me. It’s a little hard to be an assistant when you have no one to assist.”

  “I don’t need assisting right now.”

  “Don’t need assisting? You have this grand plan to open an S and M kingdom before the end of the year, and we don’t own a building for it yet. We don’t have renovation plans yet. We don’t even have a fucking name for it yet. And you’re telling me you don’t need assisting?”

  “What’s with the ‘we’?” he asked. “It’s my club, not our club. There is no ‘we’ here.”

  “Your club is never going to exist if you don’t start doing some work on it.”

  “I’ll do what I want when I want to do it. And I don’t have to explain myself. To you or anyone.”

  He walked away from her toward his bedroom. He should have fired her. Why hadn’t he fired her? He had every reason to fire her. No, he had no reason to fire her, which is why he hadn’t. She’d told him a comforting fiction when she’d said if she would be with any man it would be him. How many times had he whispered those sorts of seductive nothings into a woman’s ear before? You’re the best lover I’ve had…the most beautiful woman I’ve been with…if I could stay with you I would stay with you… He had no reason to be this angry still even after a month. And yet he was.

  Alone in his bedroom he undressed and crawled into bed. He hated sleeping alone, but his exhaustion was profound. He ached all over from lack of sleep. He’d sought refuge in the pain Felicia gave him from the pain Sam had given him. What hurt worse than anything—worse than Sam’s lie and worse than Felicia’s erotic brutality—was the simple terrible fact that Søren had been right. Kingsley didn’t know anything about Sam. He’d been too quick to trust her. And now he regretted it.

  He fell asleep the second his head hit the pillow, but terrible dreams poisoned his rest. In one dream he was a prisoner in his own bed, and it burned all around him. In a second dream some faceless enemy had Søren trapped in a labyrinthine prison, and Kingsley had sixty seconds to find him and save him before he was shot. The dream morphed a final time, now he was the prisoner, and a man stood before him with a chain in his hand. He wrapped the chain around Kingsley’s throat, tightening it until he couldn’t speak, couldn’t fight, couldn’t breathe.

  He woke with a cough that wrenched his lungs and his stomach. He gasped for air and couldn’t get enough of it. Finally the coughing fit ended, and on shaking legs he got out of bed. It was midnight according to his clock. He’d slept an hour and a half, and yet it seemed like days as his nightmares had been so vivid and brutal. The images stayed with him even as he dragged on his pants. He tried to banish them with other thoughts, but the panic stayed with him. He almost called Søren to reassure himself the dream of Søren’s captivity and imminent death had been nothing but a dream.

  Alcohol. That’s what he needed. He hadn’t had more than a glass of wine or two a day since meeting Felicia. He’d been drunk on her body and her pain for a month. But he should drink now—heavily.

  He pulled on a shirt but didn’t bother buttoning it. He walked down the back servants’ staircase to the wine cellar behind the kitchen. Wine might not be strong enough tonight, but he discovered all the hard liquor in the house had disappeared. Søren’s doing? Or Sam’s? Both of them treated him like a fucking child these days. He wouldn’t put it past either of them to hide the liquor. Fine. He’d drink wine. A bottle of pinot would put him to sleep and subdue his restless mind.

  With the bottle in his hand he headed back through the dark kitchen. He f linched when light suddenly infiltrated the room.

&nbs
p; “Ah, merde,” he said, raising a hand to his eyes. “Who is it?”

  “Me,” Sam said. She quickly came into focus. “I heard footsteps and… Oh, my God.”

  Fuck. Kingsley sat the bottle on the kitchen table and started to button his shirt. But it was too late. Sam had already seen him, seen the bruises and welts Felicia had left on him.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “What are you still doing here?”

  “It’s not nothing. Who the hell did that to you?”

  Sam reached for his shirt, and he caught her wrist in his hand. His head had cleared completely now, and he saw the look of fear on Sam’s face. Fear? Of him? Or for him?

  “Nobody,” he said. “And you didn’t answer me. What are you doing here?”

  “Still working,” she said. “I got the financials from your friend The Barber. I’ve been digging.”

  “Find anything?”

  “I’m not having this conversation with you until you tell me why you look like someone beat the shit out of you,” Sam demanded. She looked tired, too, as tired as he probably looked.

  “Non,” he said. “Forget you saw anything.”

  “Okay, maybe you’ll answer this—where have you been for the past month?”

  “Staying with Blaise,” he said.

  “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “Nothing is interesting.” He took his wine bottle and pushed past her.

  “It’s very interesting because Blaise has been in DC for the past two weeks with the NOW,” Sam said, following him out of the kitchen and down the hall. “You want to tell me another lie?”

  “You accuse me of lying?” Kingsley asked as he started up the stairs. “Very amusing accusation coming from you.”

  “What the fuck do you mean, coming from me?” She took two stairs at a time to keep up with him. “I have never lied to you. Do I want to talk about my past? No. But not talking about something isn’t the same as lying about it. Don’t you dare call me a liar when you can look me in the face and tell me you were with Blaise when we both know you weren’t.”

  On the second landing, Kingsley turned to face her so fast she took a step back from him.

  “You want to talk about lying to someone’s face. You told me the night of the party that if you were going to be with any man it would be me.”

  “Yeah, I said that. So what?”

  “So what? So I went to find you the morning after the party, and I saw you with a man. You were kissing, the bed was a wreck, and I saw it all.”

  Sam turned her back to him. Her shoulders shook. Then she laughed—a big, loud, shocked laugh that filled the whole house.

  “What? You think this is funny?”

  “Hilarious,” she said, turning back around. “Hysterical. So that’s why you’re so pissed at me? Why you’ve been avoiding me for a month? You think I had a sex with a man?”

  “I know you did.” He turned and strode up the last set of steps to the third f loor. “And Søren was right about you.”

  “Wait one fucking second here.” Sam raced after him. “What do you mean Søren was right about me? What’s he got to do with this?”

  “He told me not to trust you. I should have listened to him.”

  “I have given you no reason not to trust me.”

  “Here’s a reason. You pretend I mean something to you when…” Pain choked him with unforgiving hands. He wanted to the throw the wine bottle against the wall and watch the red liquid f low like blood. “When I don’t.”

  Sam followed him all the way down the hall.

  “Kingsley, stop. Please, stop. I have to tell you something.”

  He stopped outside his bedroom door.

  “What?” he asked, ready to be done with this conversation.

  “Yes, I had sex with someone the night of the party. But no, it wasn’t a man.”

  “I saw him.” Even now, a month later, the feeling of foolishness hadn’t dissipated one jot. He made a practice of trusting no one except himself and Søren, and yet for some stupid sentimental misguided reason, he’d trusted Sam. “Don’t tell me I didn’t see what I saw.”

  Sam put her hand to her forehead.

  “It’s hard to explain,” Sam said.

  “Try me.”

  “The man you saw me with is named Alex. Four years ago, Alex was Allison, and Allison was my girlfriend. Allison told me one day she was a man trapped in a woman’s body, and she couldn’t live like that anymore. Now she’s gotten hormone therapy, has a five-o’clock shadow and a voice two octaves deeper. Alex or Allison didn’t really matter to me that night. I just missed her. I mean, him. Alex-son.”

  Kingsley narrowed his eyes at her.

  “So, Alex…?”

  “Right,” Sam said. “Let me rephrase my promise to you. I’ve never been with a dick, Kingsley. But if I’m ever going to be with a dick, you’ll be the dick.”

  Kingsley let out a breath that he’d been holding in for an entire month. The breath turned into a groan.

  “I am such a dick.” Kingsley sighed.

  “You are,” Sam said. “But I forgive you.”

  “I thought the man you were kissing was a little on the short side. And thin.”

  “I like my men the way like I like my women—with vaginas.”

  “You can slap me if you want. I deserve it.” He pointed at his cheek and waited.

  Sam raised her eyebrow. “Looks like someone beat me to the beating. Now that you know I’m not a lying liar, are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on and who the fuck beat you up and where the fuck you’ve been and why the fuck you’re drinking wine in the middle of the night and why the fuck I can’t stop saying fuck?”

  Her words were light, but her eyes were shadowed with concern.

  He exhaled heavily. This was not a conversation he wanted to have tonight. Or ever. But he’d been such an idiot, been so cold to her for the past month that he knew he owed her.

  “Come in,” he said. “I’m not going to talk about this in the hallway.”

  He let her in the bedroom and set the wine bottle by the bed.

  “Damn,” she said, looking at his bed. “You get in a wrestling match with your covers?”

  “I have nightmares sometimes,” he admitted. “I had them tonight.”

  “Is that what the wine’s for?”

  “It helps me sleep.”

  Sam leaned across the bed and straightened his wild sheets.

  “What sort of nightmares?” She f luffed a pillow and laid it back on the bed.

  “The sort you have when you used to have the job I had. The sort of nightmares you have when you’ve been shot four times.”

  “So your nightmares aren’t the showing-up-naked-atschool type?”

  “I have dreams where I’m naked at St. Ignatius. They aren’t nightmares.”

  Sam laughed, and the laugh turned into a sigh, and the sigh turned into her wrapping her arms around his shoulders and holding him close. He hesitated before returning the embrace. He buried his face in the crook of her shoulder and inhaled her scent, sandalwood and cedar. She was the only woman he knew who wore men’s cologne. And yet, against her soft skin it smelled utterly feminine and alluring.

  “I’m sorry you had bad dreams,” she said.

  “All my nightmares are of my own making.”

  “Do you have them every night?”

  “If I have someone in bed with me, I usually don’t dream.”

  “And here I thought you fucked someone every single night because you were a nympho.”

  “That, too,” he said.

  Sam laughed and rubbed her forehead.

  “Okay,” she finally said.

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, get into bed. You give me the answers to my questions, and I’ll give you someone to sleep with tonight so you won’t have any more bad dreams.”

  She walked to the bedroom door and locked it.

  “You’re sleeping with me?”