“I would never have asked you to sleep with her,” Kingsley said. “I would never have let you.”

“I know,” Sam said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you I was doing it. You would have ordered me not to.”

“I wouldn’t have let her near you.”

“It’s okay, I promise. It wasn’t fun,” she said. “But what’s done is done. And now...I guess we win.”

“We win,” Kingsley said. “And we should celebrate.”

Sam shook her head. “No celebrating. We have to work. The club is opening in November, and we’ve done nothing for it.”

“Not nothing. We have an entire staff ready,” Kingsley said.

“Do we have our two dominatrixes?”

“Felicia and Irina. Check.”

“Male submissive?”

“Justin. Check.”

“Female submissive?”

“Luka. Check.”

“Bouncer and bodyguard?”

“Lachlan. Check.”

“I guess we have everything. Wait. No. Male dominant?”

“Check.”

“Who?”

“Me.” Kingsley pointed at himself.

“You?”

“Why not?” he asked.

“I think it’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”

He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out Sam’s clipboard. He presented it to her like a king awarding a sword to his knight-errant.

With a smile and still shaking hands, she took it from him. With a flourish she made a check mark on the page.

“Check.” She grinned up at him. “Now we just need a name. Any ideas?”

“I’m too tired to think of a name right now. I slept on the priest’s floor last night. We got very drunk.”

“You and the padre got smashed? What was the occasion?”

“Clergy Appreciation Day.”

“That’s a thing?”

“Apparently so. Got drunk with a priest last night. Broke a televangelist’s wrist this morning. My new favorite holiday.”

“I think you did more than break his wrist. Did he get blood on you?”

“Blood? Where?”

Sam pointed at Kingsley’s stomach. A bloodstain the size of a quarter marred his otherwise pristine white shirt.

“That’s not Fuller’s blood,” Kingsley said, lifting up his shirt. “It’s mine.”

“What the hell is that?” Sam dropped to her knees in front of him. “Jesus, you have something carved on your stomach.”

“I do?”

“It looks like an eight inside a circle. Did Mistress Felicia do that?”

Kingsley looked down and saw a small curved line carved into his skin a few inches above his groin.

Kingsley laughed. “That priest—I’ll kill him.”

“What is it?”

“He signed me,” Kingsley said. “I told Søren last night that Felicia doesn’t do blood-play. He must have cut me while I was asleep. How much did I drink that I slept through that?”

A lot. He’d drunk a lot last night.

“Signed you?”

“This is how he signs his name,” Kingsley said, pointing at the shallow cut. “It’s the first two letters of his name. An S with an O around it and a slash through it.”

“Well, it looks like an eight inside a circle.”

An eight and a circle... The image stirred a memory. A rare good one.

“Have you ever read The Divine Comedy?” Kingsley asked. “The poem by Dante?”

“No,” Sam said, coming to her feet. “Any good?”

“We were assigned to read it in school. One night in bed, Søren read to me from the Inferno in the original Italian.” Kingsley had used Søren’s stomach as a pillow while Søren read out loud to him in mellifluous musical Italian. “One of the rare better-than-sex moments of my life.”

“Sounds like it.”

“The eighth circle was where those who abused their power were punished. Simonists specifically.”

“Who were they?”

“Corrupt priests.”

Sam grinned mischievously at him.

She flipped the sheet of paper on her clipboard over, drew a curvy S, put an O around the S, and drew a slash threw it. It looked like an elegant slanted eight inside a circle.

“Wouldn’t this look good on a house collar tag?” Sam asked.

“If we call the club The 8th Circle as a joke on the priest...”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Kingsley said, happier than he’d been in a long time. Happy to have his dream coming true but far happier to have Sam back with him where she belonged. “But I can’t wait to find out.”

40

November

THE RENOVATIONS TOOK thirty-six days and cost one-point-two million dollars. Kingsley handed over the credit card to Sam with his eyes closed and said, “Do what you have to do to make it perfect. Don’t show me the bills.” On opening night, Kingsley took Sam by the hand and kissed the center of her palm. She’d let him outshine her tonight. While she wore a basic three-piece pin-striped suit, Kingsley was dressed in Sam’s favorite of all his new suits—an Edwardian-style formal tuxedo—vest, tails and an open collar. And of course, the boots she’d given him.

“It’s perfect,” he said as they stood at the ledge of the balcony overlooking the empty play pit below. “Parfait. And you did all of it.”