Belle (Unbowed Novels Book 1)

by Liz Meldon

  “Huh.” Penny went back to leaning against the railing, her scotch jostling around inside her glass. “Maybe I shouldn’t have marked you up before your big debut.”

  “It’s fine,” I told her with a grin. “I’ve got lotion at home. Is it…bad?”

  “Bit red,” Penny checked one last time, “but it’ll be gone by the time Dean sees it.”

  Speaking of red; my cheeks burned bright at the implication, and I forced myself to take a breath, fiddling with my straw. In my peripheral, I noticed Penny swirl her drink, head tipped to the side as she studied me.

  “So, big day today,” she said softly. “How are you feeling?”

  Terrified. I bit the inside of my cheek, staring at the ice in my glass like it was the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen. Penny sighed, then downed the entirety of her scotch in a single gulp. Setting the crystal tumbler aside on the flat, dark wood railing, she ducked down to take off her shoes—the same pair as mine, only in black and red instead of white and pink. Seconds later we were the same height again.

  “Belle?”

  “Pen, do you think I’m making a mistake?” I winced. The question had tumbled out before I could stop it.

  “Belle.” She angled herself toward me, leaning an elbow on the railing, and played with one of my curls. “You are about to earn more in two months than what a lot of people, no, the majority of the people in this country make in a year.”

  Two hundred fifty thousand dollars, excluding Candace’s cut.

  Two months of being Dean Donahue’s submissive, six days a week, twenty-four hours a day—and my bank account would increase by almost 250K. I should have been bouncing off the walls. Twenty-three-year-olds everywhere could only dream of that kind of paycheck.

  I had balked at the number initially, back at the first liaison between me, Candace, Dean, and both of their lawyers. When the company lawyer said the number out loud during our first meeting, I had cackled—straight up crazy-witch cackled. It had been mortifying, but after Candace broke down how much work I’d be putting in, the hours, the physicality of it all, I could swallow it better.

  Even now, t-minus nine hours before kickoff time, I was still working on accepting it—the money, the sheer magnitude of what I was about to do.

  Sure, going to an island paradise with a hot guy for two months sounded great in theory—but I wouldn’t belong to myself, except on Sundays. The rest of the time, I belonged to Dean Donahue, hence my steep, carefully negotiated price tag.

  “I know,” I managed, hating that I sounded so weak, so unsure, so—young, “but—”

  “It’s okay to be nervous,” Penny insisted. “This is kind of a hardcore thing—and you’re not really hardcore yet. Which is fine,” she added hastily. “I mean, I was surprised, at first, that Candace even okayed all this, but then I learned it was with Donahue.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Honey, I would have said something if it was anyone else.” She stopped fiddling with my curl, her hand moving to her heavily cinched-in waist. God, her boobs looked great in that corset. Despite my interest in the conversation, I briefly looked down at my cleavage, wondering if it looked as great as hers, then shook my head and refocused as she carried on. “Dean’s a good Dom. He’s been coming to Elysium for the last, what, five years whenever he’s in New York. I’ve played with him in scenes before. He was fantastic with every sub, even the ones who sucked ass. And not literally sucked ass, but just sucked. Like. Awful enough as a submissive that I had Candace move her back to shot girl.”

  When her ruthless smile surfaced, the smile that everyone else balked at but I found endearing, I forced a laugh. Ha-ha—awful submissive. Ha. Never mind that one of my biggest concerns was failing miserably as Dean’s sub. I’d only been a stage submissive for about three weeks before he put in this crazy request for a two-month getaway, and while I’d learned a lot from Penny in the six months that followed, I wasn’t great. Passable. I could follow instructions—but what if I too sucked ass? After all these months of coffee dates and meetings with the lawyers and back-and-forth conversations about our limits… What if I just sucked as his submissive?

  What if I ruined everything? What if, in the end, I wasn’t really what he wanted?

  “I mean, you already went over all your hard and soft limits,” Penny said, seeming not to notice that my mind had gone elsewhere as she examined her manicured black French tips, perfectly plucked brows slightly furrowed. “You have a rundown of most of the big play sessions, which, personally, I think kind of takes some of the fun out of it—knowing exactly what he wants to do.”

  I bit the insides of both cheeks this time to hide the burn. Yup, I knew exactly what Dean Donahue wanted to do to me—and knowing hadn’t taken the pressure off in the slightest.

  Nor did it turn me on any less, no matter how many times I read over the dossier his and Candace’s legal team had put together.

  “You’ve got the contract,” Penny sighed, still fussing over her nails, “and you have your daily check-ins with the office, and you have safety procedures in place. I’m not really sure what else there is to worry about.”

  “Yeah,” I said weakly. “Right. I don’t know what I’m freaking out about.”

  Not only was it stipulated in my contract that I needed to call the home office daily at a specific time to confirm that Dean hadn’t murdered me, but Candace would have a two-man team stationed on Saint Thomas just in case I needed to get out of there in a hurry. Sure, they’d still have to take a boat to reach Dean’s island, but it did make me breathe a little easier knowing I had people in the region.

  “Hey.” One of those French-manicured fingers lifted my chin, forcing me to meet Penny’s gaze. “It’s okay to be nervous.”

  “You said that already.”

  “I think it’s worth repeating,” she told me with a grin. Then, in a very un-Penny-like fashion, she pulled me into a hug, our hiked-up boobs crushed against one another beneath our rigid corsets. “You’re going to be fine, Belle,” she whispered in my ear, and I squeezed her just a little tighter, my eyes prickling with tears. “Seriously. I’m a phone call away if you need to talk.”

  We broke apart at the sound of other associates meandering toward the employee lounge door, and I wiped under my eyes with a sniffle, refusing to let a single tear fall. Still, I couldn’t help but feel touched: Penny didn’t Mama Bear anyone here but me. In fact, her reputation around Elysium was that she had been here forever and suffered no fools. I had been, and still was, a fool when it came to our job, but she had been ceaselessly patient with me—right from the moment I’d sat down next to her at a human sexuality seminar my final year at NYU.

  Fat load of good my honors specialization in psychology was doing me now, but it was thanks to Penny, the dominatrix extraordinaire who had lured me into the darkness, that my student loans had been paid in full just one year later. Being debt-free courtesy of kink was pretty awesome, and, given I had exactly zero idea of what I wanted to do as a Real Adult, I figured another year or two at Elysium would give me more than enough financial cushion while I eventually figured it out.

  “Okay, well…” I trailed off at the point-and-whispers of the others as they breezed by Pen and me. By now, I ought to be used to it. A lot of the more experienced associates in the bondage and discipline arena would have killed to be Dean Donahue’s girl for the next two months. They’d been talking about me ever since negotiations first started.

  Penny stared a few down for me, her glare withering enough to send the peanut gallery scampering.

  “I should change and probably try to get some sleep before…everything,” I finished lamely. Honestly, I was looking forward to the adventure, to the prospect of a tropical paradise in the middle of this awful east coast winter. Why did I feel so petrified—and just how obvious did it read on my face?

  “I’ll come with,” Penny said without missing a beat. She linked our arms together and pulled me away from the edge of the balcony.
“We can undo each other’s corsets.”

  My wry grin bloomed into a full-blown smile, paired with outraged laughter, when she smacked my butt.

  Only at Elysium.

  House Rule #4

  Belle will refer to Dean Donahue as Sir at all times.

  2

  Dean

  Was there anyone else on the fucking planet more pathetic than me right now?

  There I was, sitting in a six-thousand-dollar suit, in the back of a stretch limo. Engine running. Heat on. Inside, while bundled-up pedestrians shuffled by on a bitterly cold February morning in Manhattan. Bathed in Lady Fortune’s good graces, waiting for the most stunning creature on this whole damn island to join me, with two blissful months of clear blue waters, unfettered sunshine, idyllic solitude, and daily games of dominance and submission ahead of us—and I couldn’t stop thinking about plane crash statistics.

  How many there had been this year already.

  How many there had been last year.

  The year before that.

  How many survivors.

  How many fatalities.

  How many died on impact—how many died hours later in the water. Hypothermia. Sharks. Exhaustion. Drowning.

  Once, eons ago, a therapist had told me to face my fears: research the actual statistics. Immersion therapy. Drown myself in numbers. Well, all that quack had managed to do was feed the beast. Now, every time I prepared to board my private jet, I had facts and stats racing through my head. No matter how long the flight. No matter where I was headed.

  How many died. How many survived. How often. Causes, risk factors—pilot error.

  Really. What a fucking nightmare.

  I could have popped open one of the champagne bottles in the cooler, maybe even dipped into the whiskey, but I’d learned many nuggets of information these last few months on our coffee dates—and Belle wasn’t much of a drinker. Not unless she had to for a private function, and even then, she nursed a single glass of champagne all night. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, nor did the thought of our first real interaction as Dominant and submissive being tainted by the scent of booze sit well with me. So, the limo’s little bar remained untouched. Bottles unopened—though tempting.

  My doctor had prescribed me exceptional knockout pills for some of my longer flights. The nonstop flight from New York to Saint Thomas would only take us four hours, maybe a touch over, depending on wind speed. I had no intention of being a groggy, incoherent twat for the duration of that either—not when I had something special planned for Belle midflight.

  I was just going to have to get over this. Someday. Terrified of flying; I was the family joke come vacation season and had been since childhood.

  Taking a deep breath, I sat up straighter, locking my phone and slipping it in the pocket of my suit jacket. You are Dean fucking Donahue. I had built a name for myself outside of my family’s reputation—I could get on my own private jet with my submissive, for fuck’s sake.

  A quick check of my Breguet wristwatch told me she ought to be strolling along—now. In the corner of my eye, the door to her building swung open, and my driver hopped out, hurrying around the front of the car, sliding a little on the icy pavement, to deal with her luggage. I smoothed a hand over my hair, checking my teeth in the tinted window’s reflection, then scooted along the back bench of the limo to the door.

  “Thank you,” I heard her saying as both my driver and the building’s doorman struggled with her enormous pink suitcases. Door open, I sat there for a moment, only mildly intimidated at the thought of juggling those and my own bags after the flight; once we reached Saint Thomas, the hired help was gone. Beyond a weekly grocery delivery straight to my island and a biweekly house cleaning, I had no intention of sullying the vacation I had been lusting after—literally drooling over—for the last six months by spoiling the mood with outsiders.

  With people who didn’t understand what we were doing—what I wanted. Needed. Craved.

  I got enough of that in my personal life.

  And after six of the most miserable months of my professional career, I had a right to vacation my way.

  “They aren’t too heavy, are they?” Belle asked, still hovering by the doorway, her full mouth dipped in a concerned frown. Christ, those mammoth Chanel suitcases looked heavy as fuck—but I’d carry them like they were nothing when we were alone.

  Because that was what a good Dom did. He carried the weight, the burden, the baggage of his submissive like it was nothing.

  And he never complained—a notion utterly lost on wannabes. I honestly couldn’t count the number of whiny, self-indulgent Neanderthals I’d met over the years desperate to become Doms just so they could take their emotional shit out on someone else. Pathetic.

  The gift of submission…

  Well, wannabes would never understand it.

  “Not to worry, Belle,” I insisted as I climbed out of the limo, pleased to find the sidewalk curb cleared of snow. “I’m sure they’re just fine—right, boys?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Donahue,” my driver remarked. The suitcase thudded noisily as it clunked from curb to street, and I noticed him wince before looking to me. I lifted an eyebrow. Don’t damage anything. Oh, and good luck getting those in the trunk.

  As he and the doorman wrestled with the logistics of fitting all our baggage in one place, I smoothed a hand down my suit jacket. Belle stood fiddling with her fingers, brow still creased with worry as she watched her suitcases. Her distraction allowed me a moment to take her in, to peruse her figure from bottom to top in that lazy, possessive sort of way that always made her blush.

  Brown leather boots clung to her slim yet firm legs, stopping at the knee. Beige stockings carried on from there, guiding my gaze up to the ballerina skirt, which stopped mid-thigh. I swallowed hard; I would very much like to see her twirl in that skirt.

  While not suitable for a New York winter, her thin grey jacket would do her just fine until we reached the jet, though when I noticed her starting to shiver a little, I sprang into action.

  “Belle,” I said, striding toward her—noticing the way she flinched and immediately faced me. Her frown vanished, and by the time I swooped down to press a quick peck to her rosy cheek, she wore the smile that had first caught my eye on Candace Clemonte’s extensive registry. Belle had such a beautiful smile. Warm. Natural. What I liked most was that it didn’t try to sell me anything—it was so very genuine.

  Logic that I realized was flawed. Escorts were never one hundred percent authentic with their clients. I wasn’t foolish enough to think she put no effort into the way she looked at me, into the way we looked at each other. Still, I had a decent understanding of who she was as a person, beneath the pink gloss and warm smile. She was too new to the game to craft a convincing persona; it was one of the reasons, one of the many, why I’d chosen her.

  Fought for her.

  Candace hadn’t wanted to let her go. The owner of Elysium and every escort working within it had wanted to take more time—train her better. I wanted her just as she was: perky, bubbly, sweet, authentic.

  “Come along.” I motioned toward the open back door of the limo. “Let’s get you out of the cold.”

  She moved without hesitation, not shying away when my hand fell to the small of her back as I escorted her across the six feet of sidewalk. Her ponytail bounced with each step, and I imagined how it would move with my fist wrapped around its base. I inhaled sharply: she had tied a pink satin bow there. Belle seemed preferential to pink—to girly outfits and soft aesthetics. I had told her to dress herself accordingly, that I enjoyed the look on her.

  Good. She was listening already. I noticed that she had gone light with the makeup too, following another one of my, well, suggestions. I wanted her to be comfortable, yes, but I much preferred my submissives barefaced and fresh. Few women in my experience were willing to go to such lengths, particularly women who did this sort of thing professionally, yet Belle had opted for nothing more than a coa
t of mascara on her upper lashes, and perhaps a hint of concealer elsewhere. The colour on her lip was neutral. Another plus. I so despised spending an eternity in the bathroom cleaning red lipstick off my lips, my cheek, my cock.

  Much to my delight, she accepted my proffered hand to help her into the limo, still beaming up at me with that damn infectious smile. Even her eyes seemed to sparkle, despite the day’s dreary overcast. Royal blue. They suited her. Women who favoured pink and femininity were easy to dismiss for some—yet the depth of her eyes gave Belle substance.

  I so enjoyed a woman with substance.

  It had been quite some time since I found myself in the company of one outside of my friends and family.

  Quite some time.

  As I helped her into the car, ensuring that she didn’t stumble into the back seat, I realized that much of my anxiety had disappeared. Well, perhaps not disappeared. Ebbed. Temporarily. Slipping into my Dom shoes again, adopting a casual control over something as ordinary as crossing the sidewalk and getting into a car—it soothed me. Made me feel more myself.

  A quick check round the back of the limo told me the boys were still wrestling with our suitcases, so I grazed a hand down my jacket, catching the buttons on the way, and climbed in after Belle. She shuffled over a little to make space for me, seating herself at the far corner of the back bench as I slammed the door. With her pink Chanel purse on her lap, Belle fiddled with the gold chain, her gorgeous blues jumping everywhere—except to me.

  Perhaps I wasn’t the only one with nerves today.

  Still, I had fully prepared for her nerves. I accepted them. As far as I understood it, Belle hadn’t been escorting for long; she didn’t see clients outside of Elysium, and she had only done performances as a submissive. I’d be the first Dom to have her.