Unraveled by Him (9 page)

I blush scarlet, because he is right.

For as much as I know about submission, I know one thing: a woman who is submissive in bed can be strong and assertive out of it.

“The truth is that from the very first day I met Georgiana, she was submissive to me,” he says, and in his eyes, I see memories so romantic, so passionate that I know I can never compete with them.

“Which is the primary reason I fell in love with Georgiana and married her,” he says.

He might as well have stuck a knife into my heart and twisted it.

Brains, beauty, class, style, elegance, and—to top that—Lady Georgiana was a submissive. I don’t think I can bear it . . .

“Is something wrong? You’re as white as a sheet, Miss Stone,” he says, suddenly gentle and concerned.

I shake my head, then focus with all my might on thanking the waiter, who has brought me my chocolate soufflé.

“As long as you are all right, Miss Stone, I must insist that you stop stalling and answer my question.”

“Your question?”

“Don’t push your luck, Miss Stone. Answer my question! Is
Unraveled
fact or fiction?” he demands.

My stomach is still in a knot after his revelation about Lady Georgiana, and I don’t trust myself to speak.

“Your silence tells me everything, Miss Stone. As did your reaction when I squeezed your hands,” he says.

“Then you have your answer, don’t you, Mr. Hartwell?” I say.

“And that’s all you have to say for yourself?”

“Exactly, Mr. Hartwell,” I say.

He gives me a thunderous look.

I studiously ignore him and concentrate on eating my soufflé.

It’s so succulent that, for a few seconds, I almost forget that Lady Georgiana was a submissive, which to me means that she even has that over me.

We sit in silence for so long that I wonder whether he plans ever to talk to me again, never mind let me ghost his autobiography.

Either way, for whatever reason, I don’t want to part from him on bad terms.

“Mr. Hartwell,” I say, as brightly as possible, “this is the most wonderful restaurant I’ve ever been to. I just don’t understand why it’s empty.”

“Because I issued an order for it to be closed for lunch today,” he says abruptly.

For a moment I don’t grasp what he means.

“For you, Miss Stone,” he says.

Robert Hartwell closed his restaurant just for me?

Suddenly, I’m unable to breathe.

“Eat your soufflé, Miranda,” he says.

It strikes me that if my father had ever cared about me, or what I ate, he might have talked to me like that.

I quickly demolish the rest of the soufflé, while Robert Hartwell watches, almost as if he approves of my appetite for it.

“I apologize if I appear to be hurrying you, Miranda, but my plane departs for Geneva in three hours,” he announces suddenly.

He’s leaving town!

I feel a rush of disappointment snake through me.

“But I’ll tell James to drive to the airport via Hoboken,” he says.

“Hoboken?”

“So that we can pick up your passport,” Robert Hartwell says.

Chapter Four

Everything is happening so fast, my head is spinning, but even though Robert Hartwell is sitting in the back of the Rolls with me, I can’t really understand why.

Did he invite me to fly to Geneva with him because he plans to work on his autobiography with me there?

Or is his invitation a romantic one?

But how could it be, when he’s still in love with Lady Georgiana?

Can he love her and still want to have sex with me?

Whatever the truth, I refuse to make a fool of myself by asking him such leading questions. Besides, Robert Hartwell is so startlingly handsome, so overwhelmingly sexual, that I’d rather luxuriate in being swept off my feet by him, no matter what his motives.

I’ve told my mother, Lindy, and Grandpa that I’m flying to Geneva to start researching his autobiography, but haven’t told them that Robert Hartwell is traveling there with me.

That way, I won’t have to cope with Grandpa’s searching questions.

As it is, his dire warnings still disturb me no end, and I haven’t quite decided yet whether Robert Hartwell is Prince Charming or the devil in disguise.

I guess I’ll soon find out.

In Geneva.

The Rolls glides to a halt outside my apartment.

“Seven minutes,” Robert Hartwell instructs.

So I dash into my apartment, grab my passport, pack my tape recorder and a few clothes, then, as an afterthought, slip my trusty Magic Wand vibrator into my case.

At JFK, a team of liveried officials take our luggage and passports with a lot of bowing and scraping, then show us into the VIP departure lounge, where we are to wait until our plane is ready.

Our plane? I mean Robert Hartwell’s . . .

Robert Hartwell, the man I hardly know, the man who is a total stranger to me but with whom I’m flying to Geneva tonight.

Me and Robert Hartwell?

Robert Hartwell and me?

A fairy tale, a fantasy, and unthinkable.

But then what am I doing here? And what are his plans for me once we arrive in Geneva? For me to start writing his autobiography? Or to be a temporary erotic escape from the pain he still feels at losing Lady Georgiana?

I’m still silently weighing up the possibilities when the VIP team arrives and escorts us onto the tarmac, where Robert Hartwell’s plane is waiting for us.

When he invited me to fly to Geneva on his plane, I imagined the kind of smallish plane on which I flew to Atlantic City with Grandpa for one of my birthdays a few years ago.

But this isn’t that kind of plane. This plane isn’t small. This plane is massive. This plane has “787 Dreamliner” scrolled on its body.

“One hundred and eighty thousand tons of fuel to get us to Geneva, Miranda,” Robert Hartwell says by way of an explanation, and although I know he means well, the authority in his deep, gravelly voice again brings to mind my school principal, and for a moment, I feel uncomfortably small.

I force myself to shake off the feeling and follow him up the airplane gangway, half-surprised that he hasn’t offered me his arm.

In fact, since the moment when he squeezed my hand so hard that I thought he might crush it, he hasn’t touched me at all.

So although I can’t wait to feel his heavy, muscular hands take possession of me, I’m still somehow afraid, both of him and of what he has in store for me.

At the same time, I can’t believe how lithe he is, with what pantherlike grace he moves for such a big man, and the thought of his size and grandeur makes me shiver with lust and longing.

At the top of the gangway, a pretty blue-eyed blonde greets me with a warm, toothy smile.

“Miranda, I’m so glad!” she says, as if we are old friends. “I’m Mary Ellen.”

Mary Ellen Mead, Robert Hartwell’s personal secretary, who was so kind to me when I made that first call to his office.

I’m glad to meet her, but I also wonder what she’s doing on Robert’s plane flying to Geneva with us.

Holy Moses! Is Robert Hartwell planning to hit me with a mile-high threesome?

“Mary Ellen is hitching a ride with us so she can enjoy a few days with her aunt in Geneva,” Robert Hartwell explains, reading my mind in that infuriating way of his.

For a moment, I debate whether or not I should get Mary Ellen’s aunt’s address before takeoff, just in case I need an escape route, but then I decide that there’ll be time for that during our eight-hour flight to Geneva.

Robert and I board the plane and enter a high-ceilinged lobby straight out of a superluxury hotel, far more glamorous than any on the average plane.and in keeping with a flying palace.

A series of Monets, similar to the one I saw in the Hartwell Castle anteroom where the horrendous Mrs. Hatch left me waiting, hang on the walls.

On the floor, a plush, bright blue carpet.

“Aubusson,” Robert Hartwell says, watching me shoot an appreciative glance at the rich, highly colored carpet.

Infuriating! Does nothing I think or feel ever escape this man?

Noticing a glimmering pot of crimson orchids on the slinky cocktail bar, I find myself unaccountably glad that they aren’t violets.

Mary Ellen turns left at the spiral staircase, but Robert Hartwell climbs up the stairs.

I throw Mary Ellen an embarrassed smile and follow him.

At the top, we go through a double door, which he locks behind us.

We are now in a vast cabin with thirty large freestanding leather armchairs dotted around it, instead of regular airplane seats.

I follow Robert (as I’ve decided I ought to call him, now that we are sharing a plane together) through the cabin.

On either side of the corridor are private, train-style compartments, with glass doors, each engraved with pictures of naked cherubs. Past the compartments, another door leads to a casino, then another door, which leads to a room with black walls, and in the center, a pink marble Jacuzzi.

Finally, a massive bedroom with gold walls, a hot-pink heart-shaped bed, a gilt chandelier hanging from a mirrored ceiling, a giant TV screen on the wall, and a rose-pink leather couch in one corner.

As I survey his sex palace of a bedroom, a sentence from the documentary pops into my mind: “Robert Hartwell hasn’t been seen with another woman since the tragedy.”

For a moment, I wonder whether the real reason he hasn’t been seen with another woman is that he keeps his women stashed away here, on his private plane, the perfect setting for threesomes and even orgies.

“Not my taste, Miranda,” he says, indicating the decor, then adds, “And certainly not my wife’s.”

At the sound of the word
wife
, I give a visible start.

“Lady Georgiana?” I hear myself let slip; then I hold my breath, expecting him to be devastated by my daring to utter her sacred name out loud within earshot.

Instead, he goes on: “Just a new toy from Dubai.” Then, to my surprise, he adds, “Perhaps you’ve got some ideas on how it should be redecorated.”

Me? Ideas on decorating a private plane? Not in this lifetime.

“Unimportant for the moment. Time for takeoff,” he says, and indicates that I should sit next to him on the couch.

Now that we are sitting next to each other, he leans across me and fastens my seat belt, and I thrill to the woody, musky scent of his masculine aftershave, and to the heat exuding from his body.

There is a sudden knock on the door.

He is gone for a few minutes, then comes back, a frown on his handsome face.

“Temporary delay,” he says, then sits down next to me again and, with no warning, takes a pair of gold dice out of his pocket.

“Evens you win, odds you lose!” he says.

“Lose what? Win what?” I say, taken completely by surprise.

“The winner decides. The loser doesn’t,” he says.

“Decides what?”

“The penalty for losing,” he says.

This is starting to sound risky . . .

“Are you afraid of taking a risk, then, Miranda?” he asks.

He is even more infuriating than I originally thought he was!

“Just try me!” I say.

He gives me a smile so confident that I feel like slapping it off his face—except that I have the strong suspicion that he would immediately slap me right back.

“Evens, then,” I say, and keep my fingers crossed that this time I’ll get the better of him.

He throws the dice, and I don’t.

“To the victor go the spoils,” he says, and I feel even more like slapping him than before.

Then I remind myself that he’s a foot taller than I am, stronger than Hercules. Besides, it would be a pity to bruise that handsome face.

“So what exactly do you want from me, Robert?” I say, and my heart pounds in anticipation.

“Many things, Miranda. First and most important, I’d like a direct answer to my question as to whether the erotic scene you read to me was autobiographical, or simply a work of the imagination,” he says, and hands me a bar of Lindt salted caramel chocolate.

I relax slightly.

Trust him to know that about me!

I take a big bite of chocolate.

“Autobiographical,” I say.

“I was counting on it,” he says, his voice low and husky.

“So is the victor satisfied with the spoils?”

“Dream on,” he says, and I want to shake him.

“I don’t intend to make this easy for you, Miranda,” he goes on.

“Just being optimistic,” I say.

“An admirable trait. Now, tell me about the first time you discovered that you were sexually submissive.”

“Do I have to tell you?”

“Of course,” he says in a matter-of-fact voice.

And suddenly, assertive as I think I am, and self-willed, I capitulate to the sheer dominance of the man, to his breathtaking power.

“I was sixteen, going on seventeen, and had never been kissed, Robert. But before I tell you the whole story, you need to picture me then: short, plump, with frizzy hair, and far from pretty.”

“Very hard for me to imagine,” he says, and I am flattered.

“Anyway, my father was marrying an actress half his age, and I was invited to the wedding. Grandpa and my mother both said I shouldn’t go, but something in me felt that I ought to.

“So there I was, wearing a pale-blue caftan, my fat face framed by frizzy hair barely held in place by my black velvet headband.”

“And you had no idea that pretty soon you would be transformed into a beautiful swan?” he says.

“Thank you, Robert. Anyway, I was feeling fat, ugly, and uncomfortable when all of a sudden, there was my father’s best man, his friend Warren Courtney. I’d heard of him, but we’d never met before. Tall, with long legs, sparkling white teeth, and flashing blue eyes; to an unsophisticated sixteen-year-old like me, he was the Marlboro Man come to life.

“Oh, and he was wearing a black leather jacket. He was dashing, arrogant, and . . . I guess a little like you,” I add, with a blush.

“He was how old?” Robert asks, ignoring my comment.

“Forty, but I didn’t care. And when he offered me a lift to the wedding reception in his red Corvette, I almost fainted.

“I was so flustered that as I got into the car, I dropped my corsage. He picked it up, handed it to me, and said, ‘Just like a woman.’ Well, no one had ever called me a woman before, and I was lost.”

“You must have been so adorable,” Robert says.

“You haven’t heard the rest of the story,” I say darkly.

He offers me another piece of chocolate, and I go on.

“His miniature dachshund, Polly, was in the car, obviously cold and hungry. I asked why he hadn’t fed her. And he laughed.

“ ‘I believe in keeping dogs and women hungry,’ ” he said, and pinched my thigh hard.

“I should have gotten out of the car then and there, and never seen him again. But I didn’t. He was everything I shouldn’t have had in a man, yet everything I wanted. And that was it,” I say, then wince at the memory.

Robert leans over and strokes my cheek.

“Tell me as much or as little as you are comfortable with, Miranda,” he says, and I feel a stab of pleasure at his unexpected gentleness.

So I go on: “I spent a month with Warren in his penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, where he kept a bullwhip on display above the fireplace. Fortunately, he didn’t use it on me.”

Robert gives a start, stunned.

“But then what did he . . . ?” he says finally.

“Almost everything else. Bondage, discipline, pain, humiliation, you name it, Warren subjected me to all of it.”

“And how did you feel about it all?” he says.

Nothing to do but to bite the bullet.

“I hated the pain. But I loved being made to take it. But more than that, I loved him with my whole being,” I say.

“And during your month with him, what did you learn, Miranda?”

“That there is nothing more exciting than seeing an urbane, courteous, civilized gentleman transformed into a savage dominant simply because he is consumed by lust for you.”

“And what else?” Robert asks, a glimmer of excitement in his eyes.

“That it isn’t enough for a submissive to obey her Master and to take pain, humiliation, punishment, or whatever he wants to give her; she has to take what he gives her in
exactly the way
in which he tells her to take it.”