After two days of Luca shacking up with us, I started to see how close Jake and he were. They didn’t need me to be entertained and it kind of frustrated me, not being the center of attention. I was tired of feeling like the third wheel of their rather bizarre friendship. Bizarre because neither one of them really liked people, but they liked me. And apparently, each other. They were in the garage tearing down the motor of the bike.
Yes, the mafioso and hitman.
I knew. Believe me, I knew.
The crate sat untouched in the foyer. There was no way I could lift the stock by myself. Looking around, I spotted the pry bar and started working at loosening the boards on one side to pull it from the crate. I worked for over an hour until it gave way. I never saw hide nor hair of either of them.
I wiggled the heavy wooden piece out onto the wooden floor and drug it inch by inch to the bedroom. At the time, we had minimal furniture—a bed and two nightstands—in our room, so there was plenty of space. Not that it was huge, but well…
We’d need room to play.
Sweaty from my wrestling adventure, I took a shower, dried, and curled my hair. I applied makeup like I wore at L’Académie defining but accentuating without masking my emotions. I slipped into black stockings with a garter belt and bra, topped with the short plaid skirt, and white blouse from the same night. I hadn’t put them on in years. I shoved the high-heeled Victorian boots on my feet.
The feel of the outfit reminded me of who I was. I carefully loosened the wooden piece on the stock and bent over, inserting my head and hands. I didn’t think I could lock it, but that wasn’t the point. I waited. And waited.
For four goddamned hours…
Hearing their ruckus in the kitchen, I waited through beers popping and music being turned on and no doubt several smokes. Jake slammed open the door, slightly inebriated and bellowed, “Oh, hell…”
Of course, Luca overheard and came running. “Holy fuck!”
Keeping my composure, I said nothing as they studied my body within the confines of the stock. They were both shirtless and in stained up jeans with greasy, grubby hands. I didn’t flinch. They were not the gardeners. Nor were they Sir Dane and Sir Jake together.
They were Master Jake and Master Luca.
Without hesitation, Jake pulled his belt loose as my gaze drifted to Luca. With wide eyes and gaping mouth, he was awestruck and silent, much the same way I had been the first time I walked into Les Pétales.
Jake’s hand smoothed the skirt up onto my backside. The first pop of the belt to my ass came on sudden and hard as Luca jumped. I peered down, attempting to hide from Luca.
A successive strike forced the drool from my mouth as my starved body reacted on cue. Jake impacted my skin with his palm as he muttered, “Say it, Luca.”
Leaning against the wall, he growled low with that accent, “Get your head up. I want to see your face.”
I broke with a giggle. “I hate you sometimes.”
“I like to see the stars in your eyes,” Luca confessed, stepping closer. He unzipped the denim and rubbed his cock against my lips as Jake continued to whip my ass with the belt. I tasted the sweet saltiness of him and wanted more. I was a woman on a dedicated mission to have Luca as much as possible. If that meant in front Jake, I didn't care. My tunnel vision started and ended with one. “And I love your mouth around my dick.”
His hands gripped onto my long hair as he held it back and watched me. I never knew two men could love me like this. I never knew two men could worship me like this. Jake dropped the belt and smacked my ass once more with his hand. “I need inside of your ass, baby girl.”
“Not here,” Luca muttered, pulling out and lifting the wood. His hands were all over my skin as he took off my clothes. “There.”
Denim dropped, and Luca flopped onto the bed. With uncertainty, I glanced to Jake. He sensually kissed my lips and whispered, “Let’s make love, Anna.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life,” Jake vowed as he led me to the bed. I smiled at Luca as his hands skimmed against my hips and I straddled over him. I felt his hand guiding his cock to my wetness, and I knew this love—this one beautiful love—would never happen again. Luca thrust up into me slow as Jake mumbled, “Dear god, that is hot…”
I rocked slowly as my hair swayed against my ass. Jake knelt behind me and swooshed my hair off my shoulder. Immediately, Luca went to play with the curls as his mouth wrapped around my nipples.
With a generous stroke of lube on my puckered hole, Jake gently sank into my ass as we skyrocketed beyond the cosmos to a far away, fairytale land where nothing could ever touch us again.
“You owe him an answer,” Luca sexily whispered. “You owe me an answer.”
I leaned back to Jake, and he kissed my lips. “Don’t be scared. I won’t let you fall and neither will Luca. Go see your lover.” He tenderly pushed me away as tears blossomed in my eyes. “Maintenant, s'il te plaît.”
Now. Please.
Luca’s strong arms welcomed me as I fell to his chest. With Luca in my soaking pussy and Jake in my tight ass, my Little Butterfly soared like never before. I trusted them to hold me in their hands and not crush me. Awakening and profound, I found love and talked to God as they danced and used my submission for their own pleasure.
We were beautiful.
We were magic.
We were meant to be.
Hours later and full of their come, I laid between the boys as we sat eating ice cream. Jake was smoking the marijuana from the other crate Cinco delivered to the garage, and Luca was sipping on his favorite Italian red wine. Wiggling my toes, I took a spoonful of ice cream and announced, “I think I’ll name this place Scarlet House.”
Ultimate LOVE
CHAPTER 17
The next few years changed everything.
I had visions of opening the school in 1969 because—what kind of fetishist wouldn’t?
Faulty wiring, water lines, drain pipes, leaking roofs, crumbling foundations all slowed our progress to a snail’s pace, but quite possibly our worst opponent was our relatively remote location. We were a half-hour to forty-five minutes outside of Austin, tucked away in the boonies. Back then, that meant a lot of delays.
Bringing in the trucks proved almost impossible on our less than perfect driveway, so although we planned on handling exterior items last—some of them ended up being first.
The renovation was issue after issue, but the trio of us handled all of it with care.
Just when I thought we were getting ahead, another bad thing happened. My grandparents—we guessed by the contractor’s assessment of materials used—had many a shoddy repair done. Theoretically, by the age of the whole place, we imagined it was right as my great-grandparents resided there until their passing.
Jake and I built the dream from my book as Luca returned to his criminal underworld. We never had another threesome, but Luca and Jake talked often. I tended to keep the blocks of silence in place to distance myself from him. Luca and I were too close to the edge. Serving his role as our guardian angel to reunite our broken wings I let go to survive.
At Luca’s insistence, Jake quit running jobs for him so that he could act the role of foreman for the restoration. I continued at my father’s business but relocated the central office from San Antonio to Houston with a branch office in Austin for me. I moved Cattleya and a few other vital employees closer as well.
Everything was promising and moving forward.
Of course, that was a precursor to some of the worst years of my life.
As I predicted, Jake and Chance started fighting. They never really had a problem until Jake was home—all of the time. With their war of words escalating, things eventually turned physical on both sides. We ended up with screaming matches between father and son and the only one feeling bad was me. It was terrible, so I did what I always did.
I called Luca out of the blue.
I didn’t want them
fighting—hating—one another as they did, but I I also knew I was getting closer to my breaking point. By the time Chance turned eight, he was acting out—being intentionally destructive by starting fires and mutilating the walls of the school I fought so hard for. With no other choice, we enrolled him into a private military school.
He was so much like me.
He was so much like him.
And it was an absolutely terrible combination in a child.
Perhaps it was selfish on my part, but there was a limit. I wasn’t going to watch my dreams go up in flames or lose either one of them. I suffered through enough losses by not being able to have Luca. I told myself it was tough love. Dusted myself off and carried on.
With the stress of Chance gone, Jake’s Dominance coupled with my submission became something special with a trusting and open relationship. We were in love, making headway with the school, and reconnecting to who we once were.
We reached our stride in 1971, and then we received the absolute worst news imaginable. Jake had a spot on his lung.
I shut the entire project down in less than an hour.
“Why don’t we go visit L’Académie one last time?” he mentioned in bed one night. I cringed at his use of “one last time” as I turned off the light and tucked myself in. The renovations had sat untouched for two months. He wrapped his arms around me and said, “Baby girl?”
“You want me to go to France when you are supposed to have surgery and treatments and…” It was all too much as I broke down. I curled into his chest, and he rolled on top of me.
Within seconds, he thrust his cock deep inside of me. We were making love and holding on to all of the minutes. “Jake,” I whispered, closing my eyes. “Don’t you leave me now.”
“I’m going to be fine,” he assured as moans of pleasure trailed from my lips. Pinning my wrists to the bed, he tethered my heart to his. I couldn’t imagine my life without him. I didn’t want to run away anymore. I tried to tell him no; we could not just go running away to France.
Perhaps I should’ve, but I knew he wouldn’t have listened. Part of his work with Luca had been doing things to keep me happy; he wasn’t going to change his mission in life now. Jake watched over me.
He loved me even when he knew I loved another. And it wasn’t that I didn’t love Jake, but we had inflicted so much pain, it was hard to find pleasure. The sacrifices we made in an ugly love triangle all to survive.
His job was protecting Luca’s mistress.
My tears trickled to the pillow as I said, “Tell me we will get through this…”
“I want to go to France, and I want to go tomorrow. Let me take you away from this and back to the place you learned to surrender. Les Pétales is our home away from home. Maybe it will inspire you again.”
“Fine,” I reluctantly agreed.
The next two days were a hazy blur of layovers and delays amid the inclement weather of winter. In New York, we were staying overnight and met Luca for dinner. Jake told him about the decisions I made without even consulting him. His investment—his laundry—was at a complete and utter standstill until I rekindled my kinky magic.
I expected Luca to be angry as we sat in silence. I didn’t touch my dinner, but nibbled on the crustella he brought from Boston. Our passing glances spoke tomes that night about love and loss and where we should go from here.
When Jake excused himself to the restroom, Luca leaned across the table and whispered, “How are you?” Almost catatonic, I stared at his plate, his glass, the candles on the table. He snapped his fingers in front of me. “Eyes on me, Anna. Answer me.”
“I’m as you would expect, Luca.”
The truth was I feared losing the Master who had kept me for over fifteen years of my life. Despite our ups and downs—the lies and betrayal—I loved Jake, and the diagnosis hit me like a ton of bricks. He never quit smoking. And shortly after his first visit to the surgeon, I busted every cancer stick in the box. He welted my ass so hard that I couldn’t sit for three days.
“I will take care of you,” Luca vowed with a squeeze to my fingers. We hugged, and he kissed my lips, not passionately—but like old friends. We arrived in France the next day, and for the first time in years, I truly missed Luca. His laugh. His smile. His accent. His cock. His absolute confident control of every situation.
My Dominant was dying.
And I was craving my lover.
I slipped into a dark depression when we finally arrived in Europe. I cried on the bathroom floor, in the kitchen, and to Sir Dane of all people. He was engaged to a student named Desirée. She was precisely the kind of woman I expected him to be with — tall, statuesque, model beautiful.
I was happy for them. I was jealous of them. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t have the dangerous man I desired. The girl who never wanted to marry longed to be Anna Raniero, but life was unfair. Life was unkind and cruel.
His wife was expendable; his mistress was not.
And I cried some more.
Barefoot and dressed, I stalked the hallways of Les Pétales like a zombie. The school formed my submission, but nothing felt the same. Everything was contrived, distant, and aloof as I held onto my one truth in the backseat of a car in a dank alleyway in Boston.
All I had were my memories.
I spent hours in the library crying as naked students—men and women—brought coffee and croissants and smiles. Stuck with my misery, I ignored them all. I only wanted to remember our beginnings.
The showgirl. The young mobster.
And the intruder.
The intruder was in a room—depleted and sleeping. We tried several times to have a scene, but he was exhausted, his health rapidly declining. I decided to leave after three weeks. And he wasn’t strong enough to fight me on it.
The only available flight went through London and had a layover for several hours. I called Wilma and kindly asked her to meet Jake and me at the airport.
She did with her new submissive, Gregory Mullins. He was a young, strapping lad with scraggly blonde hair from the states. Oklahoma to be precise. He had a hick-like accent that bode well with my own Texas twang. We got along marvelously.
And out of the blue, Wilma Manley offered me a job.
“You want me to what?” I asked Wil the next morning in her office. Jake insisted I stay to see what Highlandale Hawthorne had to offer me.
From behind her desk, she repeated the words, “I want you to train pony girls for competitive dressage. I want you to be the Lead Submissive Handler.”
Hearing the dream-like words spilling from her tongue, I sat dumbfounded and knew I couldn’t resist. But of course, I was Anna Ford, and she was Wilma Manley, and if there was no tension, strife, and a couple of good strikes of her ruler to my derrière, we were not on the same page. “… What makes you think I can do that?”
“Let me explain a few things, Miss Ford,” she respectfully said with a smirk. “Pony girls are a different breed of submissive. They’re slightly high-strung, love performance, and servitude. They thrive on the attention with their grace and poise, much like a…”
“… Showgirl,” I whispered with a twinkle in my eyes as I imagined the possibilities. “And you are turning the entire school into a pony training ground?” It sounded outlandish. It also sounded like Luca would kick my ass if he knew Highlandale would now no longer be our biggest competition.
L’Académie maintained its rigorous structure with the classic style—the old foreboding French chateau—Les Pétales. Prior to Wil’s information, Highlandale Hawthorne was the only disciplinary school of it’s kind. Wilma Manley’s shift in focus opened the door for the Old Ford House in Sugargrove, Texas. The business opportunity was ripe for the taking.
I probably should’ve jumped on a plane right then, but I ended up staying for three years and training pony girls. I ran my father’s business from abroad with Cattleya’s diligence and loyalty. I rarely talked to Luca, but spoke to Jake almost daily. Some days we talked for h
ours. Other days, we said nothing.
I didn’t have to ask who was picking up the phone bill because I knew. Not that I couldn’t have afforded it myself, but Luca—my loving secret admirer—was a man of great principle. Every holiday and every birthday, flowers and gifts would arrive from the states.
In 1974, Jake called and told me to come home. It was time. I understood he kept me away to protect me from his slow, painful departure, but there were other reasons.
His name was Luca.
Our love affair we held so dearly.
Jake couldn’t handle the passion in Luca and me, so he encouraged my staying with Wil. He didn’t need to watch me running to the arms of his boss and best friend while dying, like pouring the salt into the hemorrhaging wound.
If I had returned home earlier, it would’ve been an unfair move on my part and what occurred wouldn’t have been my fault. The restrained love neither Luca nor I could ever sway. We were magnetic in our attraction. But Jake and I had hurt one another enough, so I agreed to the truce of staying across the pond because if I was stateside, we all knew what would happen.
Luca would seize control of his crying girl.
The pony girls were two weeks away from their first international exhibition performance in Japan when I went home to Texas and stood vigil over Jake’s final days.
“Are you calling Luca?” he asked, holding my hand. “He asks about you every day.”
Knowing how they both loved me, I lightly giggled. “No, I’m going to Japan.”
“You do it,” Jake softly muttered. “You go do it all, baby girl.”
Two days later, the intruder—my former kidnapper and my biggest fan— passed away holding my hand. Three hours later, I ran away, but not before I called Luca and broke down.
With tears streaming down my cheeks, I boarded a plane bound for Tokyo. I didn’t stay for the funeral.
Or Luca’s arrival.
Bad Girl: Les Pétales Page 17