Cardinal's Rule (6 page)

It couldn’t be undone.

He’d severed his ties, left her set up financially, and prayed Ross and Loren would help her emotionally pick up the pieces.

Prayed she was strong enough to make it through her grief, as he suspected she was.

He’d scoured the local papers online for weeks after, the obituaries, praying he didn’t find her name. He didn’t dare risk contacting her, afraid it would only make things worse for her…or make him turn around and abandon his Master to return to her. A long, drawn-out good-bye would have been worse for her. Not to mention Ross and Loren would likely want to kill him, and he didn’t need their anger at him to detract from them caring for Tilly.

So he kept his focus on his Master’s recovery, rounds of surgery and treatment and doctors

visits, and focused on fighting to save his life and not think about her. After a while, the only time he allowed himself to take his focus off his Master was looking at her pictures on occasion. That, and praying she healed and lived a good life without him.

Praying every day she would one day forgive him, even if she despised him.

He never stopped loving her, or missing her.

“And how do you think it made me feel, hmm?” he continued. “Just some charity case. You

didn’t respect me enough as a person, much less as your Master, to let me know the truth. Were you expecting me to die and hoping to inherit it all?”

“No, Master. I just wanted to take care of you.”

“You felt sorry for me, though, didn’t you?”

“They said you might be dying. I didn’t want you to be alone.”

“But it was okay to abandon her and leave her alone? What gave you the right to decide that for her, Master or not? How does it feel being relegated to nothing more than a piece of meat? Do you like it? Because I want you to feel what you’ve done to the people in your life, slave. I want you to walk a mile in their shoes. I want you to totally comprehend how badly you fucked up by making assumptions and decisions for people without their input. Every action has a consequence.” He stared at him. “Go get dressed. Jeans, button-up shirt. Keep your collar on.”

Before the revelation, Master never made him wear his formal collar in public in vanilla

settings. Now, it remained on him all the time except in the shower or when they went to the office.

Before, they tended to have a give-and-take relationship, even as Master and slave. Landry was always fair and consistent.

Before.

Now, Master treated him in a way he’d never treated him before, either during their first time together or since their reunion. Now the slave was little more than a piece of fuckable meat, there solely for his Master’s service and pleasure.

The slave felt he deserved it.

* * * *

Tilly hung up with Loren. Her friend assured her she hadn’t had a fight with Ross, but still,

there was something going on that Tilly couldn’t put her finger on. Ever since the other night at the club, her friends had acted on edge.

Loren was always her safe call for new clients. Clients she’d had for a while, she trusted. Just in case, Loren had access to her private online Google calendar with full contact details and descriptions of her clients.

All clients were told this up front.

Just in case.

Landry would arrive with his slave in twenty minutes. She’d already had two other sessions that morning, regulars, nothing tiring for her. The first, a middle-aged, overweight sissy who enjoyed being made to walk around in high heels and a French maid uniform while he cleaned her house with a butt plug up his ass. The other enjoyed being pelted with humiliating comments about his small cock, which in reality was fairly average, while she used him as a human footrest or coffee table.

Booooring.

She staggered her pain slut clients throughout the week after she’d once tried to do three in one day and nearly threw out her shoulder using a riding crop on the last one.

Landry told her he wanted her to go full-out, assured her that slave’s pain tolerance was high even though not a pain pig. “He’s trained to take it,” Landry said. “I would not call him a no-limits slave, because I do have limits. I don’t wish to damage my property. He’ll take whatever you see fit within the confines of our agreed-upon boundaries.”

That could be interesting. Her evening before with Bob had been a nice change of pace,

especially since it hadn’t ended with her using a riding crop on his ass just to make him take it.

Some of her clients wanted the pain. Some of them despised pain but wanted the obedience.

Bob was the latter.

And tonight…

She smiled. She felt like laughing. It’d been too damn long since she’d looked forward to

anything.

The last thing she’d looked forward to…

She ended that thought.

It would be nice to have vanilla interactions with someone other than Loren and Ross.

There came that pesky hope again. God, she hated that.

For today’s initial evaluation she’d opted for a mix of comfort versus form. Jeans, because she could move in them and they offered her a greater layer of protection than a skirt in case something went bad. Four-inch ankle boots. Comfortable, yet adding to her height, and the heels were sturdy enough she could kick with them and use them as a weapon of self-defense. She could also run in them, if needed. Push-up bra, tank top, topped by an oversized, long-sleeved, black button-up shirt, open, with the cuffs rolled to her elbows. The shirt’s hem hung past her ass and concealed the stun gun she kept clipped to her waistband in the small of her back.

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.

Taken during the years we were apart, the last several taken mere weeks before he returned to me.

“When he returned home from work that night, I asked him about the pictures out of curiosity. I wasn’t particularly concerned about them because he had returned to me. As I said, none of the pictures were recent. I assumed a break-up and more perfect timing on the part of Fate to reunite us. Imagine my shock when he refused to talk about her.”

He stood, circled the couch, then walked to the sliding glass doors where he stood, staring out them. “The first time in our relationship he ever balked at one of my commands—besides when he left me, of course. I ordered him to tell me about her and he finally did.” His voice softened. “Confessed what he’d done.”