Slow Satisfaction

Book 3: Struck by Lightning

by Cecilia Tan

Genres: Women's Fiction; Billionaires Romance; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

James has finally pushed Karina beyond her limit--not her limit for kinky sex play, but for his extreme secrecy. She has had enough and breaks things off. But James won't give up on Karina and will do whatever it takes to get her back. He's ready to share his deepest, darkest secrets, but is Karina ready to hear them? James offers Karina not only the truth but a place at his side... onstage. He wants Karina to star in his final musical production and enter his life and his world fully and completely. As the two work together, they rekindle the trust and love they'd lost. But James's world is full of deceit. When he is blackmailed by an unscrupulous music industry executive, James must give in to unreasonable demands or risk exposure of his and Karina's secret sex life. Will Karina and James's love be strong enough to withstand the many obstacles being thrown their way? "Seductive fun not to be missed! Cecilia Tan will make all your sexy wishes come true!" -- Lisa Renee Jones "4 1/2 stars! This is the BDSM novel all the other millionaire Dom heroes want to star in." -- RT Book Reviews

Release date: August 26, 2014

Publisher: Forever

Print pages: 326

Sample

Dearest Karina,

I have no idea if you’ll read this. I hope you will. I decided to sit down and write because whenever I try to explain myself to you in person, either my passions get the best of me or my fears do. Perhaps sitting down in a quiet place to compose this, without the distraction of your presence, I can put my feelings into words.

First, an apology. I regret many things, but none more than how much I hurt you. I have no excuse. My past is my past. My baggage is heavy, and perhaps now you can see why I wanted a fresh start with you, as if I had no past, no attachments, no burdens. And you gave me the freedom to be myself and to love you without reservations. I wish I had been able to keep my past and my demons at bay for one more day back in April, and I wish it again now. I’m sorry. I let my fears get the better of me that night at the ball, my suspicions and my paranoias blinding me to what I had right in front of me.

The love of my life.

I’m a fool. Maybe that means I don’t deserve you. Stefan, who has never said a word out of line in all the time he has worked for me, even told me I had made a mistake.

I hope you will let me apologize in person. I have so much more to tell you, so much that I dare not put in a letter. I want to tell you everything. Everything you want to know, anyway. It might take years. But I want to spend years with you. I want to share my life with you. Whatever life I will have going forward from this moment, I can’t imagine it without you.

But I cannot lie: that life is about to get very complicated again.

I thought I had put a whole chapter behind me when we met. I thought my contractual obligations had been fulfilled and I thought the false obligations had been dissipated, but it was not so. I cannot say more in a letter, but please let me tell you in person.

I do not know what will happen from this point. I would disappear completely, into anonymity in some distant country, perhaps, except for you. There is no other woman like you in the world and I was a fool not to love you as you deserve.

Please let me try.

Yours, heart, body, and soul,

James Byron LeStrange

My hands trembled a little as I read the e-mail from James on my phone, while the taxi picked up speed on the highway, hurrying me toward the hospital. Why did I read it then? Why? I should have at least waited until I was alone, but there had been three texts from him on my phone when I had landed, all saying some variation of “I’m sorry” and promising to explain more. And if there was one thing I wanted most from James it was an explanation. When I’d looked into my e-mail to pull up the name of the hospital my sister had sent me, I saw the message from James there, and I’d been unable to resist.

Unable to resist. That was my second beef with James. He seemed to be able to manipulate me too easily. How else could you explain how much I missed him, how much I wanted him, even though I was trembling with rage at him?

He probably thought his message was as apologetic and conciliatory as possible, but it only made me angrier. Any apology was meaningless without an explanation after all the secrets he had kept from me, so an apology that still kept all his secrets intact was as fake as the aliases he used. Did he truly not understand that? After failing to tell me who he was during our affair in New York until I forced it out of him, failing to tell me about the secret BDSM society in England he was a member of, failing to tell me he pushed Damon, a member of that society, to “test” me, and then failing to tell me that he might be married? Failing to tell me anything about what the hell was going on while throwing out phrases like “love of my life” and “love you as you deserve” was insulting.

Part of me wanted to believe him. Part of me wanted to forgive him immediately and kneel at his feet and wait for him to tell me all about it. Surely he would… If he really loved me… But damn it, he didn’t deserve my devotion or my submission the way things were right now. He was going to have to earn it back.

If I let him.

I considered deleting the e-mail.

But I didn’t. I had other troubles coming at me at the moment. I didn’t know what I was going to find when I got to the hospital. I barely saw the office parks and housing developments roll past as I stared out the window. My mother had fallen down a flight of stairs. The last time Jill and I had talked, they hadn’t yet known the full extent of her injuries, especially the blow to her head. All I knew from Jill’s e-mail was that she had come out of surgery okay and that Jill was worried Mom’s boyfriend might have had something to do with it.

I hoped she was wrong. I hoped that was merely Jill being freaked out over the accident and needing someone to blame. But I couldn’t do anything from thousands of miles away in England, which was why I was here now.

I read James’s e-mail again. If there was one thing James was good at, it was holding back: emotion, information, even his orgasm. Here, he wasn’t holding back the emotion. I could tell he was trying to be sincere. Love of my life. James wouldn’t say, or type, those words if he didn’t absolutely mean them. James had never lied to me directly; he insisted on honesty in everything we said.

But that didn’t cover what was not said. I saw the words “I would disappear completely, into anonymity in some distant country” and felt a spike of anxiety and rage. I know you would, James, because you’ve done it to me once already. How did I know he wouldn’t do it again?

He did say he would explain. In person. But in person he had a way of making me forget myself, of drawing me into his aura of power and desire. Even in public.

I turned off my phone as the taxi exited the highway, the blue signs pointing to the hospital showing it was near.

Pulling my fully stuffed suitcases up to the hospital reception desk was awkward. Thankfully, the nurses on my mother’s ward were very sympathetic that I had come directly from the airport. They took the bags behind the duty desk where they’d be out of the way, and a nurse with a cardigan sweater over her scrubs led me to my mother’s room.

Jill was sitting in a chair outside the room, reading the newspaper. She stood up when she saw me, giving me a bear hug.

“Can we go in? How is she?” I asked.

“She was asleep last I looked.” Jill folded the paper as if trying to keep it from making crinkling noises and then tucked it into the tote bag on the floor next to her chair.

The nurse motioned for us to wait and slipped into the room. When she came out she said, “Yeah, she’s asleep. It’s probably best to let her try to rest as much as possible. It’ll be time for her next meds in an hour. I’ll be back then.”

Jill pulled another chair over from farther down the hall and we sat down together. I finally let out the breath I had been holding. “Well, I made it.”

“I’m glad. It’s been rough here by myself.”

“Have you seen her boyfriend? You said something on the phone about him and in your e-mail.”

She scrubbed her face with her hands. “I haven’t seen him. But I’m suspicious as hell.”

“So you said! You also mentioned some of Mom’s stuff going missing?”

“It’s hard to be sure. It’s nothing so obvious as the place looking ransacked, you know? But I couldn’t find that velvet case with the good silver in it.”

“The silverware she never let us use, you mean?” Some holidays my mother would take the silver out and polish it, but I never once saw her put it out on the dining room table for a holiday meal. I couldn’t understand the point of having a special set of fancy silverware if you never used it, until one day Jill read me a book about dragons and then it started to make sense. The silver wasn’t for using: It was guarded treasure. It was part of Mom’s dragon hoard. “Her hoard?” I asked to see if Jill remembered.

She smiled. “Yeah. Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure some of her jewelry is gone, too. That’s the thing though. It’s only a few items, not all of it. Just most of what I remember us playing with as kids.”

“Could she have pawned it herself?”

“Maybe. I called the bank because I was worried maybe he was emptying out her bank account, too. She doesn’t seem to be hurting for money right now, but who knows? Maybe she sold it years ago and we just don’t know.”

“I take it that means there was no suspicious activity on her account.”

“No. They assured me she doesn’t have a cosigner and the only automatic withdrawals are for the minimum payments on her credit card and a monthly gym membership.”

“Gym membership!”

“I know, right?” Jill couldn’t help but smile at the thought of our mother, who thought sweating was unladylike, going to a gym. “There’s a shiny new place downtown.”

“Maybe it’s the hot place to meet guys,” I said, not joking at all. “Okay, but, Jill, back up for a second. You haven’t actually told me anything that points at what’s-his-name.”

“Phil. Okay, I admit, the missing silver could have been Mom’s own doing. But her engagement ring? The one Dad gave her? She’s not wearing it and I couldn’t find it anywhere. It used to be in a special ring box of its own.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Really? We used to play with it. Here, look at this. Do you remember this?” She dug into her bag to pull out a family photo album. She flipped a few pages, and there we were in dress-up clothes, clearly playing “wedding.” From the look of the napkin on my head, I was the bride. Jill must have been playing the part of the priest, and the whole wedding party, including the groom, was made up of teddy bears and stuffed animals. Many of them were wearing bow ties.

“Am I wearing her engagement ring here?” I squinted at the picture. I couldn’t have been older than four.

“I think you are. I remember the ring clearly, and it’s definitely not in her stuff now. Neither is the string of pearls she told me Dad bought her on their honeymoon.”

“And what are the chances that one day she got fed up with the stuff from Dad and sold it in a fit of pique?”

“It’s possible, but not likely. I think she really liked those keepsakes of him.” Jill sighed.

“You still haven’t told me a good reason to suspect Phil. Not all men are jerks, Jill.”

“You think I don’t know that!” She started to raise her voice, then hushed herself before a nurse could come scold us.

“I’m just saying don’t jump to conclusions. I don’t exactly have great examples of men treating me well in my past, so trust me, I’m inclined to jump on the boy-bashing bandwagon right now. But let’s try to be calm about it and think it through. I know we’re both upset about Mom. I’m just saying let’s not take that out on some poor guy who may be sitting at home worried half to death that his girlfriend is seriously injured.”

Jill took a deep breath. “Okay, let me tell you the rest of what I know, which will explain why I’m so suspicious of him. Did I tell you yet about her car?”

“No. What happened to her car?”

“When I got here yesterday, I went to the house thinking, stupidly, that I’d use her car. So I go into the garage and find it completely dead. Not a click. At first I think that’s weird, I wonder if she left her lights on and totally drained the battery or what? I didn’t have time to wait around for a jump start, so I took a taxi. Later, I went back to the house to sleep, and that’s when I started to think things were missing.”

“So you said.”

“So it could have been the boyfriend, or it could have been someone who heard about her being out of commission who broke in. Either way, I didn’t feel safe in the house, so I spent the night with the Rosemonts next door. And they told me the car’s been out of commission for six months and that Phil drives her everywhere.”

“Okay, that’s weird.”

“I think he convinced her not to get it fixed in order to make her depend on him. ‘Oh, honey, it’ll be so expensive. Why don’t you just let me drive you?’ Meanwhile, Mary Rosemont says she hasn’t spoken to Mom in months, either. She’s cut off all her friends and even stopped going to church.”

“Well, is that because the real reason she went to church was to try to meet men?” I asked.

“Karina!” Jill’s voice was sharp.

“Seriously, Jill. I’m not joking around. She found a guy and then she didn’t have to go anymore.”

“I think it’s more likely he’s the kind of abuser who cuts a woman off from her friends and family and makes sure she’s completely dependent on him with nowhere else to turn.”

The word abuser made my throat tighten up. “And you think he attacked her?”

“I don’t know. Plenty of abusers don’t use force, though. Sometimes the manipulation is more emotional and psychological. They just have to feel like they’re in control all the time and like the woman doesn’t have any autonomy.” She rubbed her face and sighed. “When I did that domestic violence training course, I never thought I’d be applying what I learned to my own mother.”

“What domestic violence training course?”

“You remember. When I was volunteering at that shelter. There was a whole orientation course. Chilling stuff.”

“I can imagine.” I swallowed, wondering what Jill would think if she knew I’d spent the summer messing around with a bunch of rich bondage nuts in England. Probably that I was nuts. And what would she think about a guy who made me agree to being spanked or fondled before he would do it? Wasn’t that what my own abusive professor tried to do? Get me to agree to his terms before sexually using me? How was Renault different from Damon, or James? What if James wasn’t any different from Phil?

My stomach made a queasy flip as I entertained the thought. What was the difference between James and a creep like Phil or the abusers Jill learned about? Maybe I was too sucked in and blind to be able to see that there wasn’t one.

The truth was, I missed James. The whole flight from England, even though I was burning with anger, my arms had ached with emptiness. I missed his scent, and even now I kept thinking I could hear his voice coming from somewhere down the hall. Was I deluded? Was it like being addicted to a drug that felt good but was ultimately the worst possible thing for me?

I tried that thought on for size, but it didn’t fit. James might be bad for me, but it wasn’t abuse. I couldn’t quite put together why at that moment, but I felt there was a difference. I still had massive issues with him, but abuse wasn’t one of them.

I wondered if Jill would agree, but this felt like the wrong time to bring it up… I jerked upright, realizing that I had nodded off right there in front of her.

She glanced at her watch. “Let’s go see if she’s awake.”

“Okay.”

We tiptoed into the room in case she wasn’t.

My first sight of her took my breath away. Her face was drawn and pale, making the bruise on her forehead look even darker and more lurid than it actually was. A bandage was wrapped around her head. There was an IV in her arm, and other tubes and monitor wires disappeared under the beige blanket. The bed was arranged so she was reclining sitting partway up, but her eyes were closed as if she were sleeping. Her left hand was bandaged and in a splint, too.

I crept closer, until I stood at the railing next to her outstretched IV arm.

Her eyes flew open then, and she whispered, “Karina!” Then she cleared her throat and said in a more normal tone of voice, “My baby girl, I’m so glad you came to see me!”

I leaned down to kiss her on the cheek, trying not to get tangled on any of the wires or tubes. “I’m so happy to see you, too.”

“Oh, I’ve missed you missed you missed you missed you,” she crooned. “Did it take you a long time to get here?”

“Well, I was working in London for the summer, so I had to fly back, but it’s fine. My assignment was over anyway. Are you okay, though, Mom? The doctor said you had a fall.”

“Oh, I’m sure I will be fine very soon, honey. Don’t worry about that. London, you say? You mean England?”

“Um, yeah. At one of the big art museums. It was only an internship, though.”

“Oh, when are you going back to Oberlin, dear?”

Oberlin? I had graduated from Oberlin five years ago. I tried to laugh it off. “Oh, Mom, I think you forgot. I’m in grad school now. In New York.”

“Oh, oh, that’s right. I have so much on my mind these days,” she said, patting me on my arm with her free hand, but frowning. “There’s so much to worry about with your brother being in trouble.”

She went on to describe what Troy had been up to around the time I was graduating from college. I let her go on for a while, nodding and agreeing that he was really a pain in the rear.

Then she looked from me to Jill. “But, Karina, you’re being so rude. Who’s your friend?”

At that point Jill stormed out of the room. I couldn’t say I blamed her. I didn’t know what to say, either. I made up an excuse. “Um, I think I hear the nurses calling us! I’ll go check, okay, Mom?”

“Okay, darling.”

I hurried out into the hall and found Jill sitting in her chair against the wall, her forehead resting in the palm of her hand. The nurse we’d spoken to before swept past us into the room.

Jill looked up. “That was hard.”

“Well, she’s kind of out of it, but…”

“She doesn’t recognize me, Kar.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “Jill, seriously. She’s on painkillers and doesn’t have her glasses…”

“So why did she recognize you right away?”

“Well, she mistook me for a younger version of myself. Five or six years ago? All that stuff about Oberlin?”

Jill sighed. “I don’t know. She sounded more coherent than last time she was awake, but… wow.”

I remembered something then. “Remember how you cut your hair for my graduation?”

“What?”

“It was just like it is now, super short and butch. Mom hated it.”

“You think she doesn’t recognize me because of my hair?”

“That or it’s that thing she always does where she pretends something isn’t the way it is, just because she doesn’t like it. You know, like she still orders things in restaurants that they took off the menu ten years before, as if she doesn’t know perfectly well they don’t make it anymore.”

“You’re right. That is exactly what she does. It’s a particularly annoying form of denial.” Jill shook her head the way she did at aggravating customers in the restaurant when she knew they couldn’t see her.

I didn’t like feeling stuck between her and Mom, but there wasn’t much of a choice at the moment. “I know it hurts being denied you’re you, sis, but maybe that’s all it is. Between the blow to the head, the medications, and being disoriented, she falls back to being that way.”

Jill rubbed her forehead again. “Maybe. Thanks for saying it to make me feel better even if it’s wacked, KayKay.”

She hadn’t used that nickname for me since back when we’d both lived here. For a second she looked worried I was offended by it. I gave her a hug. This was tough enough without me being a prima donna. “It’s going to be all right,” I said. “You’ll see.”

The nurse came out of the room then. “I gave her her pain meds. She’s going right back to sleep now, girls. Why don’t you two go down to the hospital cafeteria for a while?”

“Or we could grab a bite down the street,” Jill suggested.

“All right. If we’re going to drive, though, would it be too much trouble to drop my bags off at the house?”

“That’s not a bad idea. Come on.”

We had a quick bite to eat, and Jill finally filled me in on the rest of the medical details. The surgery had been for her broken left wrist. Her ankle was sprained but not broken. And there was the blow to the head, but there was only so much they could do for that.

I was droopy-eyed throughout the meal, so Jill suggested instead of dropping my luggage at home, she leave me there with it. When we pulled into the driveway, she opened the automatic garage door using the remote, but warned me as I got out of the car, “Be sure to lock the inside door. I’m sure Phil has the other door opener in his car.”

“I will.” I didn’t point out that if he was Mom’s boyfriend, he probably had a key also. No reason to make her worry more than she already was.

I dragged my bags through the back hall and then up the stairs to what had been my bedroom. In a lot of ways, it still was. My mother had redecorated after I’d gone to college, taking down my old teen idol posters and pictures, but the furniture was the same, and she’d left the bookshelf pretty much untouched. Books about horses mingled on the shelf with the ones about the magic punk girl in “Shangri-L.A.” Silly teen books, but I’d loved them and read them again and again. I perused the titles.

A spiral-bound book was thrust in among them, its narrow white wire coil protruding from the rest of the spines. I pulled it out, wondering what it was.

I sat down on the bed when I recognized my week-by-week calendar from junior high. Someone had given it to me as a gift for my birthday or Christmas because I’d said I liked art. Each spread had a color photo of a different piece of famous art, faced with spaces for Monday, Tuesday, et cetera. I opened it and found the expected Michelangelo and Da Vinci and Picasso in the pages. But I had forgotten the rest. Two different pages held details from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. I must have looked at those pictures a lot, I realized, judging by the amount of doodling on the pages opposite. The Bosches showed tiny nude figures being tortured in hell. I remembered being fascinated, but I had no memory now of what I had thought of the images at twelve years old. Was I even thinking about sex yet?

I flipped through the book some more. Was it my imagination or was there a lot of kinky imagery? A painting of Saint Sebastian being martyred where the rope bondage looked surprisingly sophisticated. A Pompeian fresco of a woman showing her bare back to another who appeared to be raising a flogger. A very dominant Jupiter with a very submissive-looking Thetis, nude, on her knees in front of him. Was the curator who picked all this art into kink? Or was there simply so much out there that I hadn’t noticed until now? When I was twelve and poring over the details in the paintings, especially the kinky ones, I don’t think I was even aware of what fascinated me so much. The adults in my life had all approved. “Art is smart,” one of my mother’s boyfriends had said, possibly the one who gave me the calendar. And suitable for a girl to study, my mother had thought.

I startled at the sound of the garage door going up again, and quickly stashed the book under my pillow. Had Jill forgotten something? No. Out the window I could see a Cadillac I didn’t recognize pulling into the driveway.

I hadn’t locked the downstairs door from the garage yet. Stupid.

I fired off a quick text to Jill: I think Phil just showed up.

Moments later I heard a male voice call from downstairs, “Hello? Is someone here?”

I kept my phone in my hand as I treaded lightly down the stairs. “Hello?” I called in response, trying to sound innocent and clueless.

He was taking his Windbreaker off in the entryway to the kitchen. Except for the bags under his eyes, Phil Betancourt was a young-looking fifty-something, and I wondered if the color of his hair had come out of a bottle. He was respectably dressed, like he’d just walked out of a country club, a gold watch on his wrist and his . . .