Another precaution with new clients. So far, she’d never needed it. Well, not defensively, at least. She had two clients that begged her to use it on them on a regular basis.
No jewelry today, especially no dangly earrings that could get caught or pulled.
She checked herself in the mirror one last time as she heard a car in the drive. Landry rang her doorbell one minute before five.
Maybe he figured he’d better not push the being really early thing.
She opened the door and studied Landry. His slave stood behind him, head hung, brown, shoulder-length hair obscuring his face. She led them into the foyer.
“Glad to see you didn’t change your mind, Mr. LaCroux. One thousand cash. Payable now.”
He smiled, never taking his green eyes off her, and handed her a bank envelope. She opened it and counted it in front of him, ten one hundred dollar bills that appeared to be genuine, then returned it to the envelope, folded it in half, and tucked it in her back pocket. “Thank you, Mr. LaCroux.”
“Don’t thank me yet, Mistress Cardinal. You haven’t worked with slave yet. And please, call me Landry.”
She ignored that last part. “Does slave have a name?”
“Slave.” He smiled. “It’s the only name he deserves.”
She led them inside and pointed to the couch. Then she turned, walked around the coffee table, and sat in a chair on the other side. As she did, slave had already dropped to his knees on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, forehead touching the carpet, facing his Master.
Landry looked down at him with unmistakable disgust on his face. “I never said you could touch me,” he told the other man.
Slave scooted back a few inches.
She had yet to glimpse his face.
Ooookay. She almost felt sorry for the guy, but she knew darn well that sometimes what looked bad to outsiders was part of a beloved kink for the individual players.
She returned her attention to Landry. “I know you made the dog training analogy, but you and I both know there’s a lot more to it. I need to know exactly what you expect to get out of this and what he expects to get out of this. Remember, if he doesn’t want to make changes, nothing I teach him will matter.”
“I know. Perhaps it will help if I give you a little background. I first met slave when he was nineteen. I was twenty-eight and his first serious relationship.” He paused, staring at his hands. “I was also very young, stupid, and egotistical. I told you, I attended college here in the States. I felt very full of myself. I’d embraced my sexuality, as clichéd as that might sound, and enjoyed discovering the BDSM scene. I wanted it all.
“I met slave through a professor friend of mine. Slave was one of his students. I saw an opportunity to have my very own slave. I’m afraid at the time that I truly didn’t take the time to get to know him perhaps as well and in the ways I should have.”
“Vanilla ways?” she asked.
He nodded. “Exactly. Not to blame slave, because he was young and impressionable and eager to please. He came from a dysfunctional family. Because I was older, he saw me in many roles I not only failed to recognize, but failed to live up to.” He sighed. “We were together nearly six years when I decided in my egotistical Dominant mind that I needed more. I thought slave wasn’t enough for me. I informed him I wanted to be poly, and he would accept it or leave.”
“He left?” During Landry’s entire soliloquy, slave never moved, never made a single noise. He could have been a piece of furniture.
He nodded. “Rightfully so. I spent the next several years angry at myself for letting him go. I realized I loved him, that he truly was my soul mate, and I had let my ego get in the way.” His face softened. “I swore if I ever had a second chance with him, I would do anything, whatever it took, to try to talk him back and I wouldn’t repeat my mistake. I felt empty without him. He had loved me, truly loved me, and I was too foolish to see it until after I lost him.”
Tilly didn’t interrupt. She felt Landry’s sincerity, his regret.
He cast a contemptible glance at the man on the floor. “Five years ago, Fate played a rather nasty trick on me. Except for my employees and a few old friends I had managed not to run off with my anger, I was alone. Then I nearly died in a car accident. When they performed emergency surgery, they discovered my cancer. Only two people showed up at the hospital to stand vigil for me, my oldest friends. One of them tracked slave down and sent him an email about my condition. The doctors had told them I would likely die without cancer treatment.”
He looked at slave again, this time his contempt tempered with love. “Imagine my shock when I awoke in the ICU. I couldn’t speak, I had a tube in my throat. The doctors told me about my condition, that I might not make it. I needed to continue treatment for the cancer to have any hope of beating it.
There, standing by my bed and holding my hand, was my angel. I thought I dreamed him until he squeezed my hand and started talking to the doctors about our next steps.”
He closed his eyes. “Our. I wanted to cry. I might have cried. I don’t remember. I later learned that when slave showed up and found out I was alone, he immediately stepped in and took over. As poorly as I had treated him before he still forgave me and insisted on coming back. He quit his job, returned to L.A. to be with me, took over my business. He had worked for me before we broke up, had been my second in command, had helped build my company. My success was due, in no small part, to his hard work.
“When they finally took the breathing tube out, my first words were, ‘I’m so sorry.’ My second words were, ‘I love you.’ He smiled his beautiful smile and told me he still loved me, too. Eventually, as you know, I beat the cancer. I’ll be honest with you, if it hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t have tried.
But then I had something, someone to fight for. He wanted me, and I wanted him. I suddenly wanted to live again. I didn’t want to get him back just to lose him because of my death.”
He glanced away for a moment, staring out her sliding glass doors, which looked upon her backyard garden. When he next spoke, his voice sounded soft and sad. “I asked him about his life. I couldn’t believe he was single. His job, all of it. He told me he would not leave me again as long as he would be the only one in my life. Of course in my condition I was more than willing to agree to that.
He asked we not talk about his life since he’d left me, told me all he wanted to do was focus on my healing.” He turned back to her. “And that’s what I did.”
“So what changed?” She didn’t like the sudden chill creeping over her that had nothing to do with the A/C kicking on.
“I’d sensed a deep sadness in him since his return, but I had agreed not to talk about his life. I did ask if he had children, and he assured me he didn’t. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I took him away from children. Still, I knew there was something. Jump forward five years to nearly a month ago, while I worked from home and my laptop died. Slave had gone to work at our office and left his laptop at home, so I used it. I have our company VPN portal bookmarked on my computer and couldn’t remember the exact web address off the top of my head. I knew it was in the history in his computer and so I looked there. That’s when I discovered he made regular visits to an online photo storage site.
Out of curiosity, I followed the link. His login was the same as for everything else he uses, per my instructions.
“Imagine my surprise when I found pictures of him with a woman. I knew slave was bisexual when we first met. That wasn’t shocking. What shocked me was the time-date stamp on the pictures.