The Long Hot Summer (Billionaire Season Book 1) (3 page)

“Amb
rosia, the food of the gods,” William said, smiling slightly as she sipped the cold wine and a look of satisfaction settled over her delicate features. “I assume you approve of the wine?”

“It’s remarkable, it sort of evaporates in my mouth but I can still taste the distinct flavors. Yes, I like it very much, and I don’t usually care for wine, you know, it’s kind of sour mostly, but this is seriously delicious,” she said, finishing off her glass in a few gulps so that Jaco
b was there in an instant to refill it.

I’ll bet you’re seriously delicious
and I intend to taste every part of you
. William had to literally shake the thought from his head,
what the fuck
? He was not interested in girls who were starry-eyed and barely out of college, it was like the old cliché of letting the small head think for the big head. In this case his cock was fucking dictating, (interesting word, “dick-tating”) nonstop images of Allie naked and in an interesting array of positions.

“Tell me about this internship that’s brought you to New Orleans, I’m interested.” He said, although he didn’t know why
it mattered. Tomorrow she would be his father’s guest for the rest of the summer and other than Tanya, who was the closest thing he had to a best friend, he didn’t ask women about their private lives.

“I’
m here to work for the Southern Gothic Literary Society. I just got my bachelor of arts in American Literature from UC Berkley. In the fall I’ll either go back to Berkley or maybe to Tulane to start on my master’s degree. I’ve been accepted to both schools to do my post-grad work, I’ll have to make that choice before the end of summer. Berkley is my home but it would be conducive to my field of study to be immersed in the culture that influenced so many extraordinary American authors. So, to answer your question, I’m going to be delving into musty files containing notes and secrets about the lives of Southern writers. I could do my graduate thesis on Faulkner or Tennessee Williams, but most likely I’ll choose a female author, either Carson McCullers or Eudora Welty.

A server sat a pewter tray on the damask covered table and it was laden with oysters in their shells nestled into a bed of crushed ice with a sauce that smelled of fresh horseradish and limes.

“How do I do this, can I just swallow it whole? I don’t think I want to bite into it,” Allie said, holding the oyster on a little three-pronged fork and waiting expectantly for William’s instructions as if he knew the answer to every question in the universe.

“Like this,” he sai
d, scooting his chair half way round the table so that he sat next to her. “Squeeze the lime over it, dip it in sauce, savor it on your tongue for a moment, chew and then swallow. If you swallow it without really tasting it then all the locals will say you’re an amateur.” They laughed easily as the wine loosened their inhibitions and he wrapped his fingers around hers to guide her hand and stared into her eyes as she tasted the briny mollusk. They both felt the energy crackle in the space between them as they touched and she closed her eyes and swallowed and then smiled. 

“It’s interesting, unlike anything I’ve ever tried before. I like it,” she smiled and it was a smile that made her eyes sparkle and lit up her face.

William cleared his throat and moved his chair back to its original spot far across the table from Allie. The simplest look or gesture or word from this girl set his blood on fire, it was an experience he’d never known until now and it left him completely off balance. He needed sex… hard, merciless, uninvolved sex and he needed it soon. He intended to have dinner with Alaina, drop her off at his house and then go to The Cathedral. He didn’t need to let his wayward cock have what it was suddenly craving. He absolutely did not need to lead Alaina Darling down the garden path or any other place where he would be forced to push up her flimsy dress and jerk her panties aside and let his fingers bring her to the brink of…

“Aren’t you going
to indulge? I mean you were so insistent, you’re not going to let me go it alone are you? Because I’d hate to finish them off all by myself, come on and join me William, have an oyster.”

A few drops of wine glinted on her bottom lip and he reached out and brushed them away with his thumb
. It sent a shiver of white-hot desire straight to her core. She had the urge to stop his hand before he could take it away, to pop his thumb into her mouth and find out if he tasted as heady and sensual as the oysters. She had the distinct feeling that he would taste like sex and not just the “I guess bad sex is better than no sex” kind she’d was used to. He had already stoked a fire in her belly and in the tender secret depths that her dull but endearing college boyfriend never had.

“What would you like for your main course, Alaina? I hate to rush through dinner but I do have to meet my brother soon. I think you’ll like the grilled
red-snapper topped with fried soft-shell crab, let’s order and I’ll take you home… I’ll see that you’re settled at the townhouse, I meant. Then I really have to take care of some business.”

“I didn’t know you ha
d a brother,” she said and she sounded confused, as if he’d just told her she was boring him to death. Which she most assuredly was not in the slightest bit, sooooo- time to put a stop to their useless flirtation.

He ordered the food while she stared down at her pale hands
and then he excused himself, stepped outside and dialed Miss Hawkins number. “Hawk, how the hell can you be off tonight? I need you. My father has left me with the girl from California and I don’t have the slightest fucking idea what to do with her.”

“Uh-oh! Calm down William, I’
m here, I’m available. Ginny poked her head in my front door and said she feared for the poor girl’s safety with you eyeing her like a wolf. Where are you and what have you done to that girl?” Beth Hawkins laughed hearing the alarm in William’s voice, it was a sound she hadn’t heard from him since she’d caught him masturbating as a teenager. Her mother had gone to work as governess for William and his brother shortly before Beth married and left home. Later Beth had worked part time for William, but then she was widowed early on without children to fill her days so she agreed to run his household full time. He had remodeled the carriage house on his property to her specifications and she was happy there in what she considered her cozy little jewel box in the middle of the old city.

“We’re having dinner but I’m bringing her home and you can deal with her. Shit, what was my father thinking bringing a… beautiful… young… innocent
… woman into our world for the summer? He’s losing his mind, you realize that, right? My father had better be prepared to take her off my hands tomorrow by God. Hawk, are you still there? Don’t move, don’t leave the house, I’m dumping her into your care in fifteen minutes.”

“My, my, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard William Warfield the fourth sound
quite so unhinged. Interesting to say the least. I’ll be waiting,” she said and he could her laughing steadily as she hung up the phone and he wondered,
why do the women I trust the most find my predicaments so amusing
?

Chapter Three

William took a cab to the edge of the warehouse district and walked the last few shadowy blocks to The Cathedral. A pair of drugged-out hol
low-eyed thugs stepped out of a narrow alleyway and blocked his path, both of them shaking and with nervous grins.

“Fuck off,” Wil
liam growled, facing them with a menacing glare that transformed his handsome features.

He reached into his jacket and the two men backed up and
ran off down the reeking alley and William sighed and kept walking. He pulled a red keycard from his pocket and swiped it when he reached a heavily carved door and then he entered The Cathedral. Inside the air glowed with a reddish hue from hundreds of pink bulbs in dimly lit chandeliers and wall sconces. They hung in the many wood paneled rooms that radiated like the spokes of a wheel from the main salon. On the outside the building was a nondescript mid-nineteenth century shipping warehouse but inside it was something else entirely. Warfield shipping owned more than a dozen historic buildings scattered over several blocks near the river and Walden Warfield had claimed the largest and most imposing of the lot. Over the past year, with his sanity mostly intact, Walden had transformed a crumbling brick warehouse into a highly elite and decorously private club he called a ‘sexual sanctuary’.

Abigail
, the club’s Director, appeared as soon as William closed the heavy cypress door, and she offered him an inlaid silver box but William shook his head. She smiled and stepped through an ornate wrought iron gate, placed the silver box on a shelf lined in black suede and then she locked the gate and joined William in the grand entry hall. She took his hand and pressed her lips to his palm and then he followed her through a maze of narrow hallways to an antique brass cage-like elevator.

Abigail was twenty-three years old, loyal and in love with Walden, and she was the only person he trusted to keep his secrets as well as the keys to the iron gate. For members to enter the salons within The Cathedral they first came under Abigail’s scrutiny. If she detected the slightest hint of drunkenness, an irritable attitude or an angry demeanor, they were told to return when they were in a more suitable frame of mind.

She wore
a short Grecian style dress sewn from the sheerest gauze-like fabric and on her small feet were pale pink ballet slippers that tied at the ankles with silk ribbons. Silken cords of the same pale pink crisscrossed and bound her small waste. Her bare little pussy was visible through the thin fabric and she smiled up at William and spoke quietly.

“You don’t want your mask
tonight or a red jacket?” she asked, her lilting creole accent was heavy and very beautiful William had always thought. She was Tanya’s younger sister, both of them were native New Orleanians, their lineage was an exquisite mix of cultures going back to city’s very beginnings. Abigail and Tanya were two of the most strikingly beautiful women William had ever known, their exotic looks defined by their African, French, Spanish and Caribbean ancestors.

“No, I’m only going
to see Walden,” he said as the ancient elevator rose slowly to the top floor. “Well, I suppose you could send the jacket and mask up to me just in case,” he said cocking an eyebrow as he smiled down at the petite young woman.

“
But of course, chere, ooh la la!” She said, using the French endearment “chere” with a Cajun twang that sounded like “
shar
”. She tapped lightly on the office door, “He’s not well, I worry for him,” she said and then she twirled around and disappeared back into the caged elevator.

“Wills, come in! Fuck, why don’t I give all this up and settle down with Abigail, right? Someday, someday, bro.
Fuck, I’m in love with her, but it comes and goes so who knows! What’s up what’s shakin’ where the fuck have you been? Man I’ve been calling you, I need to talk, like
TALK,
William, talk!” Walden hugged his brother as if he hadn’t seen him in years and then he sank back into a black leather desk chair and covered his face with his hands.

“Walden, look at
me,” William said, kneeling in front of his brother and prying his hands away so he could study his eyes. “Are you off your meds? Tell me the truth, I need to know what you’re on. It’s not something you can fuck around with, Walden. You have to take your medication as prescribed and you can’t be mixing it with street drugs and whiskey.”

“I’m not, I’m not,
I swear I’m not taking that fucking drain cleaner rot-gut rat poison they sell on the streets. I don’t even take the shit the girls offer me, either. And man, they have everything, these little society chicks, whoa,
fuck me!
They have oxy and Vicodin and this one chick whose married to… shit I don’t know, the coach of the Saints or some pro golfer or whatever the fuck… What was I saying? Oh yeah—she can still get fucking Quaaludes! I’m talking ‘ludes man, and anything else you want, you fucking name it. Look at this place Wills, it’s fucking rockin’ and the girls, the women, they’re freaks, man I’m in heaven. I’ve got the fucking mayor’s daughter strapped face down on a metal table right now, fuck, I forgot about her, I need to get in there and give her what she wants… I’m kinda messed up tonight, Wills, will you take care of her? She likes it hard and deep and dirty,” he said, looking up at William with a silent plea screaming in his eyes.

They were so alike in looks, the same chiseled f
eatures, same dark hair and chocolate-brown eyes, both of them six foot three, broad-shouldered and slim hipped. The resemblance ended there, Walden was a wild card, a renegade and most of the time a runaway train wreck. William valued control in all situations both private and personal and only allowed himself a modicum of freedom where sex was concerned. There was little more than a year’s difference in their ages, Walden was exactly thirteen months younger. Unlucky thirteen William had ruminated for most of their lives. His younger brother attracted misfortune, he was accident prone and had suffered broken bones, stitches, several concussions, a ruptured appendix and even a poisonous snakebite. And then sadly there was the main event, the defining moment of Walden’s star-crossed life, the abduction and their mother’s subsequent death that had shaped his psychosis.

“Walden,” William said
, finally settling into a low baroque chair near his brother’s desk. “I want you to go back to Lausanne for a few months, just until the end of summer possibly. Lake Geneva is incredible at this time of year, you can go sailing and sort things out in your head. You’re thoughts and emotions are getting away from you right now, Dr. Selig can help you put all the pieces back in place. Where do you keep your meds, let me see the bottles, this isn’t a game, you can’t play games with your mind and your health.”

“No,
you’re right, I should be more careful,” he said, unlocking a desk drawer and tossing a half dozen pill bottles into William’s lap. “Lithium, Seroquel, Risperdal, Xanax, etcetera, etcetera, fucking bullshit placebos. But no need for Viagra, thank you very much, my dick stays so hard a cat couldn’t scratch it,” he laughed at that and at the look of worry on William’s face. “I’m okay, Wills, I’ll make it through. I’ll never get over it, that’s all. I dream about Mother, she’s a ghost now and she’s haunting me and she’s so… hateful and cold. I hate ghosts and she won’t stay away so I just live with it and every once in a while the punishment gets out of hand.”

“Please don’t call me Wills, I’m not our father and I’ll nev
er be over it either. Mother died, we didn’t, and so we go on. Everyone has their cross to bear, didn’t you pay attention in Sunday school?” William looked through the pill bottles and it was obvious that Walden hadn’t been taking the anti-psychotics. That was bad news and when William realized his brother was no longer babbling he looked up and was shocked. Walden had removed the black shirt he wore and his chest and stomach were covered with angry red slash marks that had broken the skin and were caked with dried blood. “Walden, what have you done?”

“Oh shit, fuck man, it’s hot in here isn’t it?
I’m fucking burning up and I itch like a son of a bitch. My skin, yeah I have trouble with it, well, I had trouble with this girl, you know I attract these crazies like a fucking magnet. It was what she wanted and she was down in one of the lounges and she started in on one of the S&M dudes with this leather cane. Long story short, he was new to the club and he freaked so I stepped in and took his place. I took her to my private room, the confessional is what they call it, and she was
way
too fucking into it. No blood, no harmful pain here at The Cathedral, those rules are set in stone. Have you seen them? They’re carved into the stone mantle in the foyer, no blood… no harm…. It’s about pleasure, Wills, it’s an escape.”

William picked up the
receiver of the vintage black phone on the desk and held it to his ear. Abigail answered and he told her to come upstairs right away and bring a first aid kit.

“Ah, chere! What have
you done to yourself?” she said, crossing herself and murmuring a silent prayer as soon as she had a look at Walden’s tortured body. “Come on, come with me you crazy pretty bastard, you’re dripping blood all over the floor. I will take you to your room and put you in the shower and then I will fix you up with stinging ointment. That way you can remember and stop doing these bad things to yourself, you hear me, chere?” She rambled on and Walden rolled his eyes at William and followed her along the upper gallery that had a perfect view into the rooms below.

“I need to speak with you, are you in the club?” William held his cell phone to his ear and waited for Tanya to reply.

“I am, I’m rather busy at the moment, what do you need?” she asked, she was out of breath and trying hard to sound businesslike.

“Sorry to interrupt but I need a doctor ASAP. I’m upstairs with Walden, he has some fairly deep cuts on his torso but mostly he needs a strong sedative. I want him knocked out so I can drive him to Greenlea tonight and decide on a course of action. He’s pretty well out of it. See if there’s a physician in the club right now, if not get hold of Jim Bishop, he’s a member so he won’t be telling tales to the general public.”

“Dr. Bishop’s here, I’d recognize his red devil mask anywhere, the man’s a walking cliché. We’ll be right up,” Tanya said and he heard her telling someone they would have to finish their interaction later.

The cream of New Orleans society had embraced Walden’s bizarre private c
lub. Walden hand-picked each person he deemed suitable to become a member. There was no other way to gain entrance, one had to receive a handwritten invitation from Walden Warfield and the membership fee was practically a king’s ransom. They all came, not a single invitation had gone unanswered and they paid willingly to live out their most secret sexual fantasies. Bondage, sadism, masochism, voyeurism, ménage a trois, group sex, the perversities of the human libido were limitless indeed. There were mandatory rules for membership of course, no person under twenty-one was accepted, no bestiality, no unsolicited forceful acts. No weapons real or fake were allowed inside the club, no drug use was permitted and only two cocktails were served per person in the course of a gathering. Also there was the ‘no actual bodily harm’ rule which was strictly enforced by a musclebound security force.

And there was what was described as
the ‘limit reached’ word. One had only to say “
mercy
” and any activity they were engaged in would stop immediately. Walden had masterminded The Cathedral and made it happen in one of his more rational periods. The club was a huge success although, of course, no one spoke of it out of fear for their reputations and due to an ironclad nondisclosure agreement each member signed. The Cathedral was unknown outside the haven of the old shipping warehouse whose interior Walden had spent a fortune to have fashioned into the likeness of grand nineteenth century Russian manor house. It was indeed a utopian sanctuary dedicated to hedonism.

*

“What on earth are you doing here in the middle of the night, William? Who’s with you, are you in any danger, son?” William the third stood on the upstairs veranda of the Greek revival plantation house with a shotgun aimed at the shadowy figures who climbed his front steps balancing Walden between them.

William
told his father to put his shotgun away and have a guestroom made ready. Walden and Dr. Bishop were with him, he said, and Walden was in a bad way.

Later on in the wee small hours before dawn William
left his brother there, so heavily sedated he was sure he might sleep for two days. The single issue his father had been concerned with was the whereabouts of Liza’s daughter. Alaina was the last thing William wanted to think about but she was also the
only
thing he could think about. That and the fact that it was past five in the morning pissed him off and put him in a bad, bad mood. Walden needed to be in the private psychiatric hospital in Switzerland under the gentle yet determined care of Dr. Eleanor Selig. He would have to give her a call and make the arrangements, he had instructed Tanya to turn her attention to The Cathedral and along with Abigail they could manage the place in Walden’s absence. He also intended to have central air conditioning installed in his father’s house immediately no matter how loud and long his father bitched about it or the strings he had to pull to get it done. A severe weariness crept into his brain and his bones. He was tired of being his brother’s keeper and catering to his father’s every whim and now there was the girl. Liza’s daughter was occupying far too many of his thoughts.