Descended (The Red Blindfold Book 2) Read online

  It felt like the ultimate freedom, the biggest risk I’d taken in my life. I wasn’t squeamish and embarrassed, too self-conscious to do anything but lie there. That Sophie was long gone.

  After less than a minute of being pleasured, Marc’s fingers clenched into my scalp and he groaned. He came in pulsating contractions, spurting hot liquid into my throat. I swallowed it all, thrilled at his musky, masculine taste. It was another exhilarating first.

  “Sophie,” he breathed huskily, thrusting his rigid shaft until my lips felt bruised and bee-stung.

  As soon as the last droplet of come trickled onto my tongue, he raised my chin with his knuckle. “Now suck me clean,” he said. “Suck me and kiss every inch.”

  What was one more order after two days of nothing else? I worshipped his still-thick cock with my mouth and then finally stood, sliding the length of my body along his.

  “I’ve never done that before,” I whispered, and kissed him with hot, swollen lips.

  “Did you like it?”

  “I liked it with you.”

  “And only with me.” He pulled me against him, crushing my breasts in a fierce embrace. “You’re mine, is that clear? No other man can have you.”

  “For the week,” I said, giving him a teasing smile.

  His eyes flashed with possessiveness. “We’ll see about that.”

  After a long kiss, he smacked my ass and let me go. As I turned away, he trailed his fingers down my arm and over my wrist.

  “Wait, Sophie.”

  I stopped and turned toward him.

  What’s this?” he asked. He held out his hand palm-up.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It looks like blood.”

  He turned my wrist toward the dim light. I saw deeply scraped skin, a dark red smear, and a swollen blue bruise on the inside of my forearm. There was dried blood on my stomach and thigh.

  “How did that happen?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. The restraint felt tight. Maybe the edge was rough.”

  “I hurt you,” he said, frowning. “I wasn’t careful enough.”

  “No. The metal was sharp, that’s all.”

  He lifted my wrist, looking closely at it. “Jesus,” he said. “We need to take care of that right now.”

  “It’s a scrape.”

  “Sophie, you’re bleeding.”

  He dressed impatiently, yanking up his zipper and shoving his arms into his shirt sleeves. In an instant, his mood had plummeted. His face was almost unrecognizable.

  “There has to be alcohol around here,” he said, flinging open a cabinet. The cabinet door banged against the wall.

  “It can wait until we get back to your apartment,” I said, taking a hand towel from the stack on the counter and pressing it to the wound. “All I need is a Band-Aid.”

  “No alcohol anywhere,” he muttered, shoving aside boxes of condoms and oils. “Unbelievable.”

  “Why are you so upset?” I asked.

  “Let’s go,” he said, handing me my corset. “Put that on. I want to get out of here.”

  “What? We can’t leave because I scraped my wrist. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t give a shit if it makes sense. Get dressed.”

  I struggled to lace the ties. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Sophie,” he said, grabbing my upper arm. “Now.”

  He hustled me out the door and down the hallway to the room where I’d removed my clothes. With a loud rattle of hangers, he found my dress and helped me into it. We said a few hasty goodbyes to the people we passed on our way out and then we were in the street, a nondescript cobblestone lane in a quiet residential area.

  The Eiffel Tower blinked feebly in the distance. I was still adjusting my stockings when Henrik pulled up in the car.

  “Get in,” Marc said, opening my door. He said something to Henrik through the window before climbing in beside me.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, buckling his seatbelt.

  “Completely fine, Marc. Really.”

  Across the back seat, he sat staring out the window with his arms folded. After a minute of silence, I touched his shoulder.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “I wanted to go,” he said.

  “Please talk to me. It was more than that.”

  Sighing, he turned to me with a tortured look. “What was I thinking, bringing you there? Some wretched impulse to see you – a sweet, innocent flower – in a depraved setting, drawing you into my fucked up fantasies. It was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Why do you call it depraved? You started that club, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, back when I thought I could indulge every urge without consequence. It was youthful stupidity. I should tell them to shut it down. I should force them to do it.”

  He was jumping from thought to thought so quickly I could hardly follow him. “Just because you took me there?”

  His jaw was rigid, his eyes so fierce they were black. “I’m guessing that a few hours ago, you’d never seen a man beat a woman on a metal cross. You’d never been paraded around half-naked in front of strangers or fucked senseless in wrist restraints that made you bleed. And now you have, and I’m responsible for that. Every time you think of me, you’ll remember that place and the things I did to you there.”

  “I chose to stay,” I said, reaching for his hand. It was stiff and cold under my fingers.

  “You think you did. You only stayed to please me.”

  “I don’t understand, Marc. Do you want me to be part of this or not?”

  “It’s not that simple. What we do together –” He closed his eyes before speaking again in a quieter voice. “When I’m caught up in it I don’t want anything else. When it’s over I detest myself for what I’ve done to you. It makes me glad you’re leaving in a week.”

  My heart sank. Not again. Not so soon. “Glad?”

  “Think about it, Sophie. Is this really the life you foresaw for yourself? Every day we’re together you’re exposed to something else vile and perverse. By the time it’s done you’ll have changed. You won’t be the same person anymore.”

  I thought of the woman I’d been just a few weeks ago – ignorant of her own body, closed-off – and she was a stranger to me.

  “And if I’m not the same, so what? What are you afraid of?”

  Hs gaze was like shattered glass. “That I’ll destroy you and you’ll hate me for it. Don’t you see? Indulging this craving doesn’t satisfy it, it only makes it stronger. Today I committed three million Euros to a mobile ad company and I can hardly remember their presentation. My focus is shot. This firm has been my life for nine years, but to see you submit to me, your vulnerability – nothing else compares. But that doesn’t mean it’s right, or good for either of us.”

  I stared at him. All he could think about today was me? While I’d tottered miserably in my high heels through the city, convinced he didn’t want me?

  It showed how little I really knew him, and how skilled he was at hiding his feelings.

  “There were a lot of other people there tonight,” I said. “They weren’t all destroying each other, were they?”

  “You can’t see into someone’s soul at a place like that,” he argued. “Is Louis at peace deceiving his wife and flogging his mistress? The poor girl couldn’t have been more than twenty-four.”

  “She looked like she was in love with him.”

  He snorted. “The attention makes her feel important. She’s too young to know she’s being used.”

  I squeezed his cool fingers. “But remember what you said to me at dinner the other night? It doesn’t matter what we think. It’s about what makes them happy.”

  “As long as they both know how all-consuming it can be, and I doubt she does. Not everybody can handle this kind of life. Remember – I saw a woman driven crazy by it.”

  Just when I thought we were done with his ex, she was back with a vengeance. “You mean Lydia?” I said, almost c
hoking on her name. “Why does that still bother you so much?”

  He looked at me intently and shook his head.

  “What is it, Marc?”

  “Please,” he said. “I’d rather not revisit something that ended eight years ago. Suffice it to say…I’ll never forgive myself for my part in it, and I can’t make the same mistakes with you.”

  “What are you saying? You want to stop?”

  He sighed. “That’s the last thing I want. But there’s fallout from living this life. I have to protect you from it.”

  “I scraped my arm,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “I know. But sometimes things are more than they appear to be.”

  Henrik pulled up in front of Marc’s apartment building, forcing us to leave the conversation unfinished. When we got upstairs, Marc washed and dressed my cut, still wearing his suit, his expression somber.

  I watched him dab on antibiotic ointment, unwrap the bandage, and apply it to my wound with a quiet tenderness. There was nothing he could have done to me, no kiss or caress, that could have made me feel as cared for as I did right then.

  “Thank you,” I said when he was finished.

  He kissed the back of my hand. “Come to bed with me,” he said.

  First he took off my clothes, then his. Under the sheets, he held me against him as if afraid I might vanish.

  Though he was hard against my bare stomach, he didn’t try to make love to me. When I asked why, he squeezed me very tightly.

  “But we are,” he whispered. “That’s exactly what we’re doing right now.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was barely light outside when Marc kissed me awake. Smiling a sexy half-smile, he brushed my hair back from my forehead and watched me wake up.

  I blinked at him, amazed that he wasn’t a gorgeous image from a dream. Over a blue suit he wore a Burberry scarf and a black trench coat that turned his eyes the color of storm clouds.

  “How’s your wrist?” he whispered.

  I stretched out my arm. The bandage was still firmly in place two inches above my hand. “It’s fine. I don’t feel a thing.”

  “Good.” He stroked my cheek with the back of his finger. “I’m sorry I overreacted last night. Can we just forget it?”

  I pretended to think hard. “What happened last night?” I said, and smiled.

  Leaning over me, he kissed my nose. “I was so hot for you this morning, I almost woke you up. If you didn’t look so beautiful sleeping, I would have.”

  A deliciously slow tingle ran down my side and settled between my legs. “You can’t come back to bed?” I asked. “It’s only seven.”

  “I have a partners meeting in half an hour, but I’ll be back by six. Why don’t we have dinner in? I don’t want to see anyone tonight but you.”

  “I’d love that,” I said.

  He smiled. “What are you doing today?”

  “Lunch at another restaurant. Tough life.”

  “Pure torture.”

  I shook his arm gently. “Could you meet me around 12:30? I’m going to a place called Bistro Midi. It just opened last month.”

  He traced my ear with his finger. “I’d love to, but I’ll be lucky to eat lunch at my desk,” he said. “So much for la belle vie in France. We’re starting to take after you workaholic Americans.”

  I sat up and wrapped my arms around his neck. The sheet dropped from my bare chest into my lap. “We’re infectious, didn’t you know?”

  “I do now,” he said, sliding cool hands around my breasts and squeezing gently. “I think I have a fatal case of you, actually. Completely terminal.”

  “There is a cure, but it requires taking off your clothes and getting into bed with me.”

  “Interesting. We’ll have to try it when I get home from the office.”

  “Speaking of the office,” I said, trying to sound stern, “if I enter your mind today you have to banish me immediately. No thinking about anything but business.”

  He kissed me, teasing his tongue along the edges of my lips. “Not much chance of that,” he said.

  After he left, I lay in bed trying to hold onto my optimism. I tried to believe that last night was just a blip, and this morning a sign that Marc had put his fears behind him. Though I tried believing it until my alarm went off and it was time to get up, I was no closer to convincing myself it was true.

  Hazily aware of a dark impulse lurking at the back of my mind, I had fruit and coffee and took a shower. But when I sat down with my laptop to work, I couldn’t suppress it anymore.

  “Don’t do it, Sophie,” I whispered, but I was powerless to fight it. Fingers trembling, I brought up Google and began to type.

  Lydia Forster, Paris, France.

  So much for working. So much for forgetting last night.

  If I could just talk to her. If she could just tell me what had happened with Marc, maybe I could understand what haunted him and what it all meant. I had a week to discover if I had a future with him. Figuring it out would mean using everything at my disposal.

  My intentions were good. My methods – those were another story.

  Two Lydia Forsters lived in Paris. One was a sixty year-old expatriate from California with a food blog, and the other owned a boutique in a Boho-chic part of the city.

  Just because I was typing the store’s address into my phone, it didn’t mean I would go there or try to find her. I could erase it and never look at it again. I just wouldn’t do it yet.

  I dressed in the outfit Marc had left for me in two sleek silver boxes – sky-high patent slingbacks, skimpy black lace panties with a frilled edge, and a stretchy, knee-length dress with ruched sides. The sleeves easily covered my bandage, making me wonder if he’d chosen the dress for that reason.

  Though I felt much too sexy to go out in public, I followed Marc’s unspoken order and went to lunch. I took notes on everything from the china pattern to the fashionable clientele, but in my imagination I was five Metro stops away, at the store that may or may not have been owned by Marc’s ex-lover.

  A second glass of wine made a brief detour across town seem like a perfectly reasonable idea. I’d go for a glimpse of her, to see if I had the right person. And because I was going crazy wondering who she was, and why she still had so much power over Marc.

  I paid the bill and got on the Metro, almost boarding the wrong train but getting to my stop with the help of an Australian tourist. Back above ground, every street looked the same – narrow, picturesque, and lined with elegant stores and cafés. I walked in circles for ten minutes before spotting a shop with a fluttering awning and a marble bench beside the door.

  Across the front window was a single word etched in cursive – Désir. I had to smile.

  I lingered on the sidewalk feigning interest in the display, a couple of antique dressmaker mannequins dressed in funnel-collar sweaters. Finally, heart thrashing against my ribs, I walked inside.

  At the counter stood a woman in her early twenties with bobbed red hair. She seemed to be the only person in the store. After we exchanged bonjours I sifted through a rack of blouses, feeling ridiculous and out of place.

  I was stalking my dominant lover’s crazy ex-girlfriend and she wasn’t even here. Meanwhile, I had loads of work stacking up and an editor who wanted it all in her inbox yesterday. What the hell was I doing? When had I become so pathetic?

  I glanced up just as a pretty, model-thin woman emerged from a back room. Her oval face was all red lips and wide green eyes, with a slender, aristocratic nose. She wore a black silk blouse with ruffled cuffs and a gray skirt cinched at the waist by a wide belt. Her light brown hair was pulled into a fashionably loose ponytail that fell to mid-back.

  We looked nothing alike – I was at least three inches shorter and curved where she was straight – but there was something about her quiet manner that reminded me of myself.

  “Claire,” I heard her say. “I have to leave early tomorrow. Can you stay until closing?”

  I st
udied the price tag on a sequin top. She was British. She was about Marc’s age. It had to be her.

  I drifted toward a table of carefully-folded t-shirts. The woman I assumed was Lydia began folding scarves on a shelf a few feet away.

  “Excuse me,” I said before I could stop myself. “You speak English?”

  Her mouth turned up in a good imitation of a smile. “Yes. Can I help you find something?”

  “I – I’m not sure. A fitted blazer? Wool?”

  “Certainly,” she said. “Right over here.”

  I followed her to a rack and stood beside her as she pulled out a few pieces. “This color would look fabulous with your hair,” she said, holding up a cobalt blue collarless jacket.

  “It’s very pretty,” I said.

  “Are you on holiday in Paris?”

  My heart picked up speed. “I write for a travel website called Wanderlust. I’m working on a story about the Marquis de Sade.”

  Nothing changed on her face except her eyes, an unmistakable shift in awareness. There was no doubt now. It was her.

  “You’re visiting historical sites?” she asked, her tone falsely chirpy.

  “And talking to his descendants. I’ve been doing interviews and looking at old documents.”

  She raked hangers back and forth. “He has living relatives?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated, my mouth dry. “But uh…maybe you knew that already.”

  She drew a breath and let it out in a quick huff. “I did, in fact. I know – I should say, I knew one of them.”

  “Oh? Who?”

  “His name is Marc. Many years ago we were…friends.”

  I suddenly wanted to turn and run. There was nothing I could say without giving everything away.

  “Have you interviewed him?” she asked, a strange, frantic note in her voice.

  “Yes.” I cleared my throat and glanced up. She stared at me intently.

  “And how –” she began, but stopped as the realization came to her. For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

  “I found a note,” I said. “A handwritten note. Do you know anything about it?”