Paris Promise: Paris Trilogy: Part Three Read online

Solomon hadn’t missed the bite of anger in her words when she said, “as was made so clear to me.” He looked over at her, ready to argue, but she kept speaking.

  “Solomon and I agreed to a final scene for closure. We did that last night. What we had is gone.”

  No, it wasn’t. He still loved her. He’d never really not loved her. He’d just learned how to live without the one he loved by his side, his hard outer shell, his armor, made of anger.

  “If that’s true,” Nerio said, “why do you look so sad, and why does Solomon look heartbroken?”

  Solomon whipped around to glare at Nerio at the same time that Vivienne twirled on the balls of her feet to stare at him. Solomon took a half step toward the other man but stopped when Vivienne put a hand on his forearm. “Solomon?”

  He didn’t want to look at her. He didn’t want to see pity in her gaze. Anger. That was always safe.

  You self-destructive ass.

  “You were going to leave without saying goodbye,” he accused, finally glancing at Vivienne.

  “Last night was goodbye.”

  “No, last night was, according to you, closure. This morning should have been goodbye, but you decided to sneak out.”

  “You are angry at me for leaving?”

  “Ah, yes,” Nerio said. “Well done, and continue. I’ll leave you to it. If you need anything, go through that door.” He pointed to the door directly opposite where he stood. “Best of luck.”

  “No wait! You can’t keep us here,” Vivienne said.

  Solomon didn’t bother with words but raced the few steps across the room, needing to take some of his anger out on the other man.

  He hadn’t been standing that far from the door, but it was far enough that Nerio was able to easily step back into the hall and pull the door closed. Solomon listened for the sound of a lock but didn’t hear one. He grabbed for the handle…

  … and realized why there was no lock. There was no handle on the inside of the door.

  He slammed his fists against the wood. “Nerio, you fuck, open this door.”

  “Talk to each other!” their kidnapper yelled in reply. “And if that doesn’t work, touch each other!”

  “You sadistic son of a bitch,” Solomon snarled.

  “Of course I am. Aren’t you?”

  Solomon could faintly hear the sound of footsteps receding.

  “We’re locked in?” Vivienne asked.

  “Sort of.” He stepped back so she could see the door. “I don’t think it’s locked, but there’s no handle on this side.” Closed, the door blended in, the inside paneled with the same wood as the walls.

  “We’re stuck here?”

  Vivienne wrapped her arms around her waist. It wasn’t from the cold, though the room was a tad chilly.

  “Let’s find the phone. I’ll call Jalen, see if he can find us without having to alert anyone official.”

  Solomon stalked over to the wall where small brass latches secured the hidden and built in compartments. Vivienne straightened her shoulders and joined him at the wall, beginning to open and close the various doors and drawers.

  He found empty drawers, a small closet cabinet with a double bar and elegant wood hangers. He found a booklet with emergency information including the location of the closest life raft.

  Vivienne chimed, “Eureka!” as she lowered a large panel that folded down to form a desk. In the space behind were a variety of office supplies including stationery, fountain tip pens, a book of world maps, an ocean atlas, and several controllers with neatly printed labels on the back.

  Solomon and Vivienne bent in unison, peering into the dark recesses of the desk space.

  “There’s no phone,” Solomon growled.

  Vivienne picked up one of the controllers. “Maybe this is… no, it says lights.” She checked the other four. “Television, stereo, and this one seems to be for a video conference.”

  Solomon grabbed the video conference one. “Maybe this has a line out feature.”

  Vivienne took the lights controller and started pressing buttons. The recessed lights in the ceiling clicked off a moment before ambient light at the top of the walls, masked by crown molding, clicked on. As she pressed buttons, the light went from blue to green to red and pale daylight yellow.

  Another click and yet more hidden lights illuminated. These were pin prick spotlights concealed in the bedposts. They lit up the bed like it was a stage.

  Solomon looked at the bed and the lights, and a suspicion as to what exactly this boat might be used for flared to life.

  “Vivi,” he said softly. “When I saw you on the helicopter, you were tied up, with bondage restraints.”

  She set the remotes down, once more wrapping her arms around her stomach. He wanted to hug her, to kiss her hair and tell her everything would be okay.

  But she’d said goodbye. She was done with him. She wouldn’t welcome his touch.

  Solomon paced to the other side of the room. “Did he have those or did he take them out of your bag?”

  “I was not carrying cuffs and a muzzle with me.”

  “I didn’t think so but I needed to ask.”

  She regarded him quizzically, then glanced warily around the room. “What are you thinking?”

  He looked once again at the illuminated bed. “You told me that because I’m a hammer, everything looks like a nail to me.”

  “I was rather proud of that. I read it somewhere.”

  “You hit the nail on the head with that one—see what I did there?”

  Vivienne snorted out a laugh. That’s what he’d been hoping for—to make her laugh. And that the laughter would banish that hollow-eyed look of fear she’d had a moment ago.

  Her mirth dissipated. “Why do you ask?”

  “It just seems odd for those particular items to be what he was carrying.”

  “I thought that too. I was worried for moment he…” Vivienne shook her head, as if to dispel the thought. “But when he said he’d seen us in Paris, that he was a member of the Orchid Club, I realized it was a matter of convenience.”

  She’d been worried for a moment… Solomon cursed himself, imagining exactly what she might have been thinking—rape, human trafficking.

  He started towards her, but Vivienne had turned back to the desk. She set the lights back to the way they’d been, then closed up the desk compartment. Solomon stopped short of touching her.

  She cleared her throat. “You were saying?”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’ll come back to it. Are you all right?”

  She tried to smile but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Besides being trapped in the middle of the ocean?”

  “We got kidnapped. I was terrified when I saw them grab you. You fought and were in that helicopter for longer than I was. You were tied down. Muzzled. That had to be…” He didn’t want to put words in her mouth. “Maybe I’m projecting. Sorry.”

  “You’re trying to say that the experience was more…intense…for me, than it was for you.”

  “I guess I just want to make sure you’re okay. I want to—”

  Hold you. Run my hands over you. Check every inch of your perfect, treasured flesh. I want to kiss your wrists and your ankles and your lips and take away the feeling of the restraints that were forcibly used on you.

  Vivienne pressed one hand hard over her mouth, her fingers digging into her cheek. Her chest spasmed, and he realized she was trying not to sob.

  Solomon wrapped his arms around her, lifting her up against his bare chest. Vivienne dug her forehead into the crook of his neck, and he could feel the dampness of her cheek on his chest and jaw.

  “Let it out, Vivi baby.”

  “I was so scared, so scared.”

  With nowhere else to go, he sat on the foot of the bed, her knees on either side of his hips.

  “I was too,” he murmured. “I was too.”

  “I agreed to it. I put the cuffs on myself.” Her whole body was starting to tremble.

  He was going to
murder Nerio.

  “Okay, okay, it’s okay,” he murmured. She wasn’t making a ton of sense, and it was hard to hear her muffled words.

  “No, it’s not. I’m so stupid.” She lifted her head, pressing her cheek to his, her lips now close enough to his ear that he could hear her frantic, whispered words.

  “He showed me the cuffs and I should have run, but you were coming and I didn’t want him to hurt you so I said I’d submit.” Her voice caught on the word. “I put them on, because he promised we’d leave before you got there. You’d be safe. But then he strapped me down and we didn’t leave. I’m so stupid because I trusted him.”

  Solomon was abruptly lightheaded from a rushing mix of emotions. Mingled awe and panic that she’d sacrifice herself for him. Terrified frustration and a deep need to shake some sense into her, force her to promise to never do anything like that again.

  “If I’d tried to get away, I could have warned you. You wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be here with me. Instead I just…did what he said. Gave in. Let other people dictate my life.”

  He rested his head on her shoulder and she held on tight. She was no longer talking about this morning’s kidnapping.

  “You made the best decisions you could, with the information you had.” He ran a hand soothingly up and down her back.

  “They were still bad decisions. Bad decisions that cost me…”

  He waited, but she didn’t finish. “Cost you what, Vivi?”

  Say “me.” That your decisions cost you me and that you’ve changed your mind. That you’ll abandon your responsibilities and family and come live with me on a little island in the middle of the sea.

  And if she agreed to that she wouldn’t be Vivienne.

  She sat back, her butt on his knees, and wiped her face. When she glanced up, it was with a rueful smile. “I needed to let that out.”

  Solomon hid his—very selfish, he was aware enough to know it was selfish—disappointment that she hadn’t said what he’d hoped.

  “Some part of me did wonder, when I saw the restraints, if I wasn’t being kidnapped because I’m a submissive.”

  He peered at her. “You know that it would still be rape, right?”

  “Yes, I know. Intellectually. But I’m not quite emotionally healthy enough to not feel some strings of ‘I asked for it’ or ‘I deserve it’.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “As I said, intellectually I know that. If it were done to someone else, I wouldn’t hesitate to use the word.” She shrugged.

  Solomon stared at her. “Vivi, have you been using BDSM to…to punish yourself?”

  She didn’t look at him. “Isn’t that what we’re all doing?”

  “No.” He stopped. “Maybe. But that isn’t… Last night…” He was stammering like a moron.

  “No,” she said softly as she climbed off his lap. “With you, it was never punishment. It was release.”

  Solomon felt like he’d been put through the wringer. Twice. He braced his elbows on his knees, head in his hands. “Jesus Christ, we did a number on each other.”

  To his surprise, Vivienne sat beside him. “We did. But we’ve acknowledged it. That’s healthy. We told each other how we felt, five years too late, but we did it.”

  He sighed. “Now that sounds like goodbye.”

  He thought he felt her hand on his hair, but maybe he imagined it, because a moment later she stood. “We need to get off this boat.”

  Solomon swallowed hard, as if that physical action could stuff down everything he was feeling. He too rose. “Yeah, step one is get the hell out of here.”

  “That door, he said?” She pointed to the door opposite from where they’d entered.

  “Yeah.”

  Vivienne walked over to the door—which was clearly a door, with a handle and everything—and opened it. Solomon wanted to race over and open it first, throw his body in front of hers if the place were boobytrapped like an Indiana Jones movie.

  He didn’t. He gave her the space she needed. The space he needed.

  Vivienne was still for a moment, looking out. Then she began to curse, the resigned sadness that had been in her voice melting away in favor of anger. That was enough to snap him out of it, and Solomon walked over to stand behind her, looking into the massive room beyond.

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he snarled, though it was more from disgust at having his hunch confirmed than actual surprise.

  “A dungeon,” Vivienne snapped. “This stupid boat is a BDSM dungeon.”

  Chapter 3

  The yacht dungeon was both striking and imposing, done in creamy dove gray, with accents of blood red and glossy black. He took a step deeper into the dungeon and caught sight of the double black lacquer doors he’d seen at the bottom of the steps, confirming his suspicion that this massive chamber took up most of the square footage of this deck of the boat.

  “Come on, let’s go find this fucker,” he said to Vivienne.

  She pushed the door of room number four closed, then pointed at it. “It wasn’t a sleeping room. It’s an aftercare room.”

  Solomon snorted. “He locked us in an aftercare room. Asshole.”

  The door they just exited bore the same small plaque—with the number four on it—that they’d seen on the entrance off the hall.

  “I bet the door we came in is supposed to just be for cleaning staff,” Solomon commented. “That’s why there’s no handle on the inside. Normally you have to get in and out of the rooms via the dungeon.”

  Vivienne was looking around, and he couldn’t tell from her body language what she was thinking or feeling.

  Maybe, like him, she was trying hard not to feel anything. Since the moment he’d woken up, he’d been ping-ponging from one strong emotion to the other. No, it was more than that. It had started last night, during their scene, built to a crescendo in those hours he’d sat beside her in bed, realizing that she was more than a lover, more than his beloved, that she was his home.

  Then to wake and find she was leaving him. Then the terror when he saw her being taken. Then—

  He was jerked from that downward spiraling thought pattern by the sight of Vivienne running her fingers over a pale gray whip hanging from the wall. It was a six foot single tail whip, a barbarically cruel implement when wielded incorrectly or to purposefully cut and scar the skin. A deliciously cruel impact tool when wielded correctly.

  “Did you ever learn to use one of these?” Vivienne asked softly.

  Solomon forced himself to stay still. To not walk up behind her, crowd into her personal space, and slide his hand under her hair to cup the back of her neck. “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Did you like it? Like using it?” Vivienne kept her back to him as she asked the questions.

  “It takes focus. If I fuck up, I could really hurt a sub.”

  She nodded, dark hair shifting around her shoulders. “Of course. But that’s not really an answer to my question.”

  “Why are you asking?” Solomon demanded.

  “I… I really don’t know. Masochism?”

  Vivienne stepped away from the whip, weaving her way around freestanding St. Andrew’s crosses, spanking benches, stocks, pommel horses, and various styles of chairs, from the ever useful ladder-back wooden chair, to a glossy black vinyl club chair.

  Solomon watched her, aware that she was in a strange mood. He was too. How could they not be?

  But they were in this together, and they had to get out of it together. If she was feeling masochistic—emotionally masochistic—the faster they got off this godforsaken boat the better.

  “Come here,” he commanded, lowering the tone of his voice and sinking some authority into it.

  Vivienne stopped as if she’d reached the end of a leash. For a moment Solomon thought he’d miscalculated. He’d thought she needed him to take control and break her out of the strange mental space she was in. However it was possible he’d read the s
ituation all wrong, and now she was simply pissed.

  With her back still to him, Vivienne reached up, gathering her hair and pulling it forward over her right shoulder, where she twisted it into a thick rope.

  His heart ached. It was such a familiar sight. She used to do that while she was studying. Sometimes she’d sit there and braid and unbraid her hair while reading.

  She turned, gliding elegantly around and through the various pieces of dungeon equipment until she stood in front of him.

  “Vivi baby, I need you to talk to me,” he commanded softly. “I need to know what’s going through your head.”

  “How can I tell you when I’m not even sure?” Her gaze slid to the door of aftercare room number four, and then to the St. Andrew’s cross beside him. “I’m feeling too many things to name, but I also feel hollow.” She shook her head, some of her hair sliding back behind her shoulder. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maybe not, but I understand.”

  “You always did understand me.”

  “But you’re done.” He tried to say the words as neutrally as possible. He didn’t want to accuse her, didn’t want to lash out. He also didn’t want to sound whiny or pathetic.

  She folded her arms below her breasts, chin down, gaze on the floor. “Are there things we both still need to say?”

  “There are things I want to say.” He wanted to tell her that she was his home. He wanted to tell her that he was going to come back to Paris, that he’d like to live with her but if she was uncomfortable with that, he’d get his own place not far from her. He was going to confess that he was desperate enough to settle for taking whatever scraps of her time and attention her family left.

  He was formulating a way to start this conversation, when she jerked her face up, eyes narrowed as she looked at him. “Wait a moment. You said I was done… but you’re done too.” She inhaled audibly, almost but not quite a gasp. “Aren’t you?”

  The double doors of the dungeon opened, the hinges squeaking. Solomon and Vivienne both turned to look.

  Coward that he was, Solomon felt a little bit like he just been saved by the bell, despite the fact that he did want to talk to her about the future of them, however fucked-up and pathetic that future might be.