by Wendy Leigh
Heartened by her reaction, I started to relax with her again. Until, in Le Salon des Fragrances, as I watched her go through the process of trying to select her own personal fragrance, she suffered an anxiety attack.
The reason still isn’t clear to me. Her guilt, I now realize, of course, informed her every waking moment, her every reaction, but why she had the attack in Le Salon des Fragrances is still a mystery to me. Unless, of course, she caught a sniff of Georgiana Royale when we were there. But that was categorically impossible—after Georgiana’s death, I had bought up every single bottle of the fragrance, because I didn’t want to smell it on another woman, even in passing, for fear that the scent would inevitably evoke her memory and bring her back to me.
Bring Georgiana back to me? Little did I know she was already back . . . Miranda, of course, knew only too well.
The worst scenario for me would be if she already knew that Georgiana was still alive when she and I were in Hawaii together, having a romantic interlude, a sensual fantasy so perfect that I almost changed my mind and arranged for us to be married then and there on Waikiki Beach.
If I had married her in Hawaii, I would have also presented her with her wedding presents, the deeds to which I had taken to Hawaii with me, just in case.
Ten wedding gifts.
A chalet in St Anton, complete with swimming pool, tennis court, and gym.
A penthouse on South Beach.
A castle overlooking Monte Carlo.
A Regency house on London’s Park Lane.
A mansion on the Île-de-France.
A riverside triplex in Manhattan.
A Malibu beach house.
A Bel Air villa.
An estate in St Barths.
A loft in SoHo, New York.
The truth is that even if I establish conclusively that Miranda did betray me, as I fear she did, in recognition of the brief yet blissful happiness she did give me before she destroyed my dreams and our future together through her duplicity and dishonesty, I shall still give her the deeds to all those properties. They were purchased for her, as love nests for the two of us, but if she is a betrayer, and not the true and gentle submissive I thought she was, then I will never set foot in any of them. She can have them and I won’t give them, or her, another thought.
In Hawaii, of course, we became engaged, and I met her mother, Clare, who was beautiful and charming (just like Miranda), and her stepfather, Alex, who was intellectual and erudite.
I could sense, though, that Clare was shocked by Miranda’s pale and frail appearance, but as she didn’t voice her concerns, I didn’t have to explain. Or try to.
We leafed through the photo albums of Miranda as a child, a teenager, a young woman. Although my detectives had managed to secure copies of most of them for me, I pretended to see them for the first time, and inside felt guilty as hell. Naturally, I didn’t exhibit any signs of my guilt. Proficient as always at hiding my emotions, I just can’t stomach the thought that Miranda was equally able to do the same.
For some strange reason, her mask did momentarily slip when we sat in the hotel bar, listening to “When You Wish Upon a Star.” She blushed scarlet, but even now that I am starting to suspect the degree of her deception, I still have no idea what it was about the song that caused that reaction in her.
Clearly, I was missing something. Perhaps because I was so excited that she had been so blatant about her longing to walk on the wild side of BDSM with me once more, my excitement temporarily eclipsed my powers of analysis.
Not that I lost it altogether. I knew exactly how to rein in my own emotions and to bide my time until the submissive was ready to relinquish all control and put herself in my hands completely.
But although Miranda was never a pushy submissive (if she had been, she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with me), she still managed to slyly make it clear that she was longing to submit to me once more. And while I was flattered, aroused, and excited, I thought long and hard about what exactly I should do with her and how.
In the end, I restricted her return to BDSM to a short scene with a shoehorn, then a hard fucking on the plane back to New York, but that was enough to satisfy both of us and make us happy. As happy as Miranda was able to be, those days.
Back in Hartwell Castle, her mood turned black once more, and as much as I employed all the skills I’d learned in journalism to coax a subject to open up, to me, she remained resolutely silent about everything that had happened to her in the mausoleum, and about her kidnapper—or kidnappers.
A sub hiding something major from a dom? A reversal of roles, if ever I’ve heard of one, as an experienced dominant was generally adept at hiding his passion for a submissive from her, and certainly didn’t rush to reveal it, because if he did that too fast, he would lose his power over her. And power had to be the very essence of dominance.
I’ve always believed that many dominants are passionate, emotional men who permanently wear armor and protect their innermost selves behind high walls and impenetrable screens. The reason for the high walls and the impenetrable screens? The burning, high-octane emotions that the majority of dominants harbor for their submissives but won’t allow themselves to reveal, lest the revelation result in their being viewed as less than dominant.
So when Miranda made it clear to me that she was dying to go back in the dungeons again, out of habit I disguised my delight, my enthusiasm, yet secretly formulated my plans with great relish.
After a great deal of reflection, I decided to start in Dungeon 2 and to put her through a vanilla scene with undertones of BDSM. So I made her get on top of me—a vanilla convention, having a woman fuck you from on top, but one that I knew would embarrass her because of her big breasts. And the journey from embarrassment to sexual humiliation is a short one. The desire to submit to sexual humiliation drives many a submissive, and Miranda had shown every sign of being that type of sub.
So I had her sit on top of me and fuck me in that position, so that she was unable to escape the image of her breasts bouncing up and down, which she was forced to view in the mirror. Strangely enough, she rarely ever looked at herself in the mirror. Unlike Georgiana, who even wore a gold and amethyst mirror on a chain around her neck so that she could admire herself constantly.
Miranda only wanted to look at me, and not herself. In the process she proved to me that she was the classic submissive who is dedicated to her dominant.
After I fucked her, I tied her to the Falcon Chair (an iconic design that conveniently happens to have two large silver rings attached to the seat, and two to the back), not just because I loved seeing her immobilized, helpless, and in my power, but because I planned to start educating her regarding the use of everyday items in BDSM to enhance my pleasure, and hers: a flyswatter spied in the windows of a hardware store, a slatted wooden spoon in a kitchen shop, a skirt hanger with rubber-ended clips in a hotel room, a bottle opener that can be hung from the chain between cloverleaf nipple clamps so as to increase the weight. I wanted her to become aware of all the possibilities, so that she could point more out to me and, in effect, make a habit of colluding in her own training/punishment.
And then I told her about the Pit and watched while she paled—yet at the same time she was also visibly turned on, a testament to the addictive tension which can be so exciting for both the dominant and the submissive.
We were on our way, I was convinced, to forming the basis of our life as dominant and submissive, and so it would have continued had I not had to fly up to Montreal for a meeting and leave her alone at the castle all day.
Why didn’t I take her with me?
Why didn’t I leave her under the protection of a bodyguard?
Because I genuinely believed that she was no longer in danger. After all, Tamara was dead, so why would she have been?
The nightmare started to unfold when I arrived home from my meeti
ngs in Montreal, bringing with me on the plane a wardrobe of fur coats I thought Miranda might like (mostly red fox, as I thought that would complement her hair), and I discovered that she’d disappeared again and, just like before, had left no trace, not even a note.
All the security cameras showed was Miranda climbing into a white stretch Mercedes driven by a blond man in a white suit and dark glasses. Naturally, we immediately ran the license number, but the plates, of course, turned out to be false. Her trail went cold, and I went crazy.
Then Mary Ellen put a call through to me from Angel, the professional submissive I remembered from Le Château.
My first thought was: How the hell did she make the association between Mr. Blake, the dominant client to whom she catered at Le Château more than once, and me, Robert Hartwell?
I had no idea. And now Angel was clearly about to demand money in exchange for her silence regarding my visits to Le Château all those years ago.
But I was wrong.
“I’ve got a message for you, Mr. Hartwell. Miranda Stone said to tell you that she’s being held prisoner in Le Château,” she said.
My heart stopped.
Then, through an enormous act of will, I managed to recover for a second. “Who has her, Angel, who has her?” I said.
“The Countess Suzanne von Stern,” she said, then hung up.
Of course! Von Stern must be one of Le Château’s dominatrixes out to get revenge on me for what happened to her buddy Tamara, cofounder of Le Château, so she kidnapped Miranda.
But when I burst through the doors of Le Château, primed to find Miranda held at gunpoint by a six-foot-tall leather-clad dominatrix, I instead found Murray, and the puzzle fell into place once and for all.
Murray was not dead and was set on getting revenge for what had happened to Tamara, and this Countess von Stern was clearly his accomplice.
And so the nightmare unfolded, and my trust in Miranda plummeted.
Chapter Five
Miranda, the Present
St. George Ferry Terminal, Staten Island
After Robert strode out of Le Château and left me standing there, alone, bereft, and speechless, my heart broken, I found myself on the banks of the East River, torn between life and death.
And although I chose life, I remained so distraught that, without even intending to, I drifted farther downtown, no destination in mind, until I ended up at the Whitehall Terminal, South Ferry.
Since then, I’ve made the journey between Manhattan and Staten Island and back again, over and over, as if I were pulled there by a magnet I am unable to resist. Each time the ferry arrives at the terminal, I follow the crowds into the waiting room until I can board the next one en route for Manhattan.
During each and every trip, my despair intensifies. Yet I keep making the same twenty-five-minute journey because somehow, somewhere, deep in the heart of me, I have a sense that the very repetitive nature of my journey will help me escape from the hell in which I now find myself.
Don’t brood, Miranda. Think of the good times, otherwise you won’t be able to stand this..
But the truth is that no matter how many good times Robert and I have in our past together, after what I did he walked out on me and probably isn’t in love with me anymore, and never will be again. And because of that, I’ll never be happy or complete again, either.
If only he were here with me, I could explain, I could make him understand. But he isn’t, and I don’t know what to do next, except to board the Andrew J. Barberi, yet again, bound for Manhattan. As the ferry pulls away from the dock, ahead of us in the distance the sunlight shimmers over HGM Towers, the New York headquarters of Hartwell Global Media. Even seeing the name Hartwell from so far away, and in such an impersonal context, hurts me more than I can express. So I turn away from HGM Towers and, instead, fix on the far horizon.
A helicopter whirs above the ferry and for a second—a wild, passionate, joyful second—my heart skips a beat; Robert! He hasn’t left me after all, he hasn’t abandoned me, he’s forgiven me for failing to tell him the truth about Lady Georgiana, that she is alive and wants him back.
But as the helicopter moves closer to the ferry, no matter how passionately I long for Robert to be in it, I can see that someone else is piloting it solo, and that Robert is not there. So I have to face the fact that he is probably already ensconced in Hartwell Castle, steaming with anger at me and at my betrayal.
Or, even worse, he is still in Manhattan, ministering to Georgiana in countless ways—and the thought makes me sick to my stomach.
If only he were really in the helicopter, about to land on the deck of the ferry, scoop me up in his mighty arms, and whisk me away with him—somewhere, anywhere, just as long as I’m with him. For a moment, I flash to an advertisement I remember seeing on TV when I was a child: a helicopter, and a rope ladder down which a heart-stoppingly handsome man shimmies. Not onto a ferry but down a mountain, over lakes, oceans, to the ends of the earth, and all because the lady in his life wants a particular box of chocolates and he is determined to bring it to her, come hell or high water. A romantic hero, if ever there was one . . .
Just a few hours ago, although it now seems like a lifetime, I believed that Robert Hartwell was my romantic hero, and I his ultimate romantic heroine. But that was before he and his men burst into Le Château’s dungeon determined to rescue me from my kidnapper, only to be faced with Georgiana, her face smashed and bloodied, alive and not interred on Hartwell Island, not dead and buried, as he and the entire world had been led to believe. As I had led him to believe.
“Darling, darling Robert, I’m back,” Georgiana had announced.
I don’t know how I expected him to react, what I expected him to do when confronted by the wife he had once loved so much, and then grew to hate so much, reincarnated once more and here in living color, in front of him. To my everlasting relief, despite the shock and horror he must have felt, he steadfastly ignored her and pulled me toward him so close that I could hardly breathe, kissed me so passionately, and acted as if we were the only two people in the room, and she didn’t exist at all.
His actions, of course, spoke volumes about his love and passion for me, and inevitably aroused Georgiana’s ire. Spitting venom, she went straight for the kill: “Replace me with her? With little Miss Liar here? She knew I was alive all along, but she didn’t tell you!” And with those oh-so-carefully chosen words, she condemned me to a lifetime of loss and longing as surely as if she were an omnipotent ruler and had just signed my death warrant.
Or rather—to be more accurate—a warrant for the death of Robert’s love for me, his trust in me, and for the breathtakingly beautiful future we had once envisioned having together.
Robert turned to me, the expression on his face stony and impassive, his eyes cold and dark with a hundred accusations.
“Miranda?”
Suddenly I was four years old again, and caught with my fingers in the cookie jar. Seven and shamed because I told a white lie and was found out. Twelve and humiliated because I promised to go to summer camp but then tried to renege on my promise.
“Miranda?” My name, plain and simple, yet bringing with it a subtext so mortifying, so shameful, so humiliating that there was nothing for me to do but to confess everything and take the consequences, no matter how harsh, how hurtful, how irreversible they might be.
And so I bit the bullet and told the truth at last.
“I’m sorry, Robert, I did know. I didn’t tell you because I was petrified you would want her back,” I said.
Then I held my breath, but he remained silent. Despite my desperation, my terror, a wave of courage suddenly came to my rescue and I met his eyes without flinching.
They were the eyes of a stranger.
I opened my mouth to say something, anything, except not beg, except not plead, but he turned his back on me and strode out
of the dungeon.
And from there, most likely to the hospital and to Georgiana’s bedside.
For, knowing Robert as I know him, I at once understood that even though Georgiana had deceived him (almost as grievously as I have done by not letting him know that she was still alive), one look at her battered and ruined face and he would have forgiven her all her transgressions against him.
“A knight in shining armor who rescues a damsel in distress.” I’d described Robert thusly in more innocent, carefree days when Lindy and I together watched a documentary on the legendary Robert Hartwell.
And as Georgiana was to later confess, the entire plot to divest Robert of his fortune—which was masterminded by Murray, the boss of Le Château—was launched only because Murray had intuited that chivalry was the deepest, most essential part of Robert’s innermost nature. The more distressed the damsel, the more likely it was that Robert would ride to her rescue.
For a wild and crazy millisecond, I catch myself wondering whether Georgiana—who engineered so much, has engineered even this—arranged for Murray to batter her face and destroy her beauty, just so that Robert would ride in on his white charger, rescue her, forgive her, and love her once more.
Then I remember all her justifications for what she did to him: “My family lost their entire fortune, I was penniless and alone in Manhattan, I had a mentally disabled child and was desperate to place her in an institution where she would be loved and taken care of, but couldn’t afford it. Besides, if I hadn’t agreed to do what I did to Robert, Mafia thugs would have murdered me.”
No, Georgiana didn’t need to have her face destroyed in order for Robert to love her once more. All she had to do was turn those legendary violet eyes on him, tell him her heartrendingly tragic life story, and he would forgive her and take her back.
As I confront the truth, I feel like I might throw up. Then the ferry passes right by the statue of Lady Liberty, and I am catapulted back to the past again, my past, a happier, more romantic past with Robert, full of promise, joy, and contentment; the day when we tossed a coin to see whether I had to read him a chapter of my erotic novel, and I picked heads—Lady Liberty—and I lost. But in reality, of course, I won, because when I read him the chapter, he became mine, and I his. For just a short time, that is.