Unraveled Together (6 page)

Miranda looked up at me with those beautiful big blue eyes, threw me a weak smile, and said nothing.

During the days that followed, after she was released from the hospital, she still remained confused, almost delirious, tossing and turning through the night, talking in her sleep of Tamara and, of course, Georgiana, always Georgiana.

“Georgiana must be on your mind because you were imprisoned so close to the casket in which she is buried,” was one of my oh-so-helpful interpretations.

And Miranda said nothing.

Meanwhile, when I saw how disturbed, pale, and wan she was, my worries about her health escalated. At the same time, I kept telling myself that her state of mind, her bad health, was understandable after everything she'd gone through.

It's only now that I can face the facts and confront the truth: she wasn't in that state because of everything she had gone through but because of everything she was going through right then and there. The guilt of lying to me by omission, the guilt of knowing that Georgiana was still alive and of hiding the truth from me.

Back then, though, all I wanted was to soothe Miranda, erase all her pain, all her trauma, and to wrap her up in swaddling and never leave her again, not even for a second.

I knew I had meetings, I knew I had conferences, I knew I had to bid thirty million dollars for yet another publishing company (and in person, for that matter), but I didn't care about all that; I just wanted to keep Miranda by my side, and safe.

So I canceled all my meetings and planned a special day for us in the city.

And as I sat opposite her in Serendipity and watched her delight at the chocolate confection served to her, the hope began to rise in me that perhaps she was getting back to her old self again; perhaps she would soon be well and happy once more.

At one point, I suggested that I hypnotize her again to help her recall the trauma of her time in the mausoleum, so that she could perhaps face up to it and eradicate it altogether. She refused so sweetly, so prettily, and only now do I realize the devious and deceptive motives behind her refusal; she knew only too well that if I hypnotized her, she might tell me the truth: that Georgiana was still alive.

At the time, though, I attributed her refusal to some kind of shyness or to her unwillingness to put me to the trouble of hypnotizing her.

In retrospect, it all seems so obvious, so crystal clear to me. I can't believe how blind I was at the time, how blind.

After Serendipity, when we were in the department store together, I took a gamble and instead of staying in step with her somber mood, her unusual lack of emotion, I teased her into buying me a gift, and was so pleased when she actually got into the spirit of the moment. When I told her to select a leather belt for me, she squirmed with an adorable combination of embarrassment and erotic excitement. As I tested the belt for flexibility, we both knew exactly how I would, in the future, be using it, and what for, and exchanged hot secret stares with each other.

Heartened by her reaction, I started to relax with her again. Until, in Le Salon des Fragrances, as I watched her go through the process of trying to select her own personal fragrance, she suffered an anxiety attack.

The reason still isn't clear to me. Her guilt, I now realize, of course, informed her every waking moment, her every reaction, but why she had the attack in Le Salon des Fragrances is still a mystery to me. Unless, of course, she caught a sniff of Georgiana Royale when we were there. But that was categorically impossible—after Georgiana's death, I had bought up every single bottle of the fragrance, because I didn't want to smell it on another woman, even in passing, for fear that the scent would inevitably evoke her memory and bring her back to me.

Bring Georgiana back to me? Little did I know she was already back . . . Miranda, of course, knew only too well.

The worst scenario for me would be if she already knew that Georgiana was still alive when she and I were in Hawaii together, having a romantic interlude, a sensual fantasy so perfect that I almost changed my mind and arranged for us to be married then and there on Waikiki Beach.

If I had married her in Hawaii, I would have also presented her with her wedding presents, the deeds to which I had taken to Hawaii with me, just in case.

Ten wedding gifts.

A chalet in St Anton, complete with swimming pool, tennis court, and gym.

A penthouse on South Beach.

A castle overlooking Monte Carlo.

A Regency house on London's Park Lane.

A mansion on the Île-de-France.

A riverside triplex in Manhattan.

A Malibu beach house.

A Bel Air villa.

An estate in St Barths.

A loft in SoHo, New York.

The truth is that even if I establish conclusively that Miranda did betray me, as I fear she did, in recognition of the brief yet blissful happiness she did give me before she destroyed my dreams and our future together through her duplicity and dishonesty, I shall still give her the deeds to all those properties. They were purchased for her, as love nests for the two of us, but if she is a betrayer, and not the true and gentle submissive I thought she was, then I will never set foot in any of them. She can have them and I won't give them, or her, another thought.

In Hawaii, of course, we became engaged, and I met her mother, Clare, who was beautiful and charming (just like Miranda), and her stepfather, Alex, who was intellectual and erudite.

I could sense, though, that Clare was shocked by Miranda's pale and frail appearance, but as she didn't voice her concerns, I didn't have to explain. Or try to.

We leafed through the photo albums of Miranda as a child, a teenager, a young woman. Although my detectives had managed to secure copies of most of them for me, I pretended to see them for the first time, and inside felt guilty as hell. Naturally, I didn't exhibit any signs of my guilt. Proficient as always at hiding my emotions, I just can't stomach the thought that Miranda was equally able to do the same.

For some strange reason, her mask did momentarily slip when we sat in the hotel bar, listening to “When You Wish Upon a Star.” She blushed scarlet, but even now that I am starting to suspect the degree of her deception, I still have no idea what it was about the song that caused that reaction in her.

Clearly, I was missing something. Perhaps because I was so excited that she had been so blatant about her longing to walk on the wild side of BDSM with me once more, my excitement temporarily eclipsed my powers of analysis.

Not that I lost it altogether. I knew exactly how to rein in my own emotions and to bide my time until the submissive was ready to relinquish all control and put herself in my hands completely.

But although Miranda was never a pushy submissive (if she had been, she wouldn't have lasted five minutes with me), she still managed to slyly make it clear that she was longing to submit to me once more. And while I was flattered, aroused, and excited, I thought long and hard about what exactly I should do with her and how.

In the end, I restricted her return to BDSM to a short scene with a shoehorn, then a hard fucking on the plane back to New York, but that was enough to satisfy both of us and make us happy. As happy as Miranda was able to be, those days.

Back in Hartwell Castle, her mood turned black once more, and as much as I employed all the skills I'd learned in journalism to coax a subject to open up, to me, she remained resolutely silent about everything that had happened to her in the mausoleum, and about her kidnapper—or kidnappers.

A sub hiding something major from a dom? A reversal of roles, if ever I've heard of one, as an experienced dominant was generally adept at hiding his passion for a submissive from her, and certainly didn't rush to reveal it, because if he did that too fast, he would lose his power over her. And power had to be the very essence of dominance.

I've always believed that many dominants are passionate, emotional men who permanently wear armor and protect their innermost selves behind high walls and impenetrable screens. The reason for the high walls and the impenetrable screens? The burning, high-octane emotions that the majority of dominants harbor for their submissives but won't allow themselves to reveal, lest the revelation result in their being viewed as less than dominant.

So when Miranda made it clear to me that she was dying to go back in the dungeons again, out of habit I disguised my delight, my enthusiasm, yet secretly formulated my plans with great relish.

After a great deal of reflection, I decided to start in Dungeon 2 and to put her through a vanilla scene with undertones of BDSM. So I made her get on top of me—a vanilla convention, having a woman fuck you from on top, but one that I knew would embarrass her because of her big breasts. And the journey from embarrassment to sexual humiliation is a short one. The desire to submit to sexual humiliation drives many a submissive, and Miranda had shown every sign of being that type of sub.

So I had her sit on top of me and fuck me in that position, so that she was unable to escape the image of her breasts bouncing up and down, which she was forced to view in the mirror. Strangely enough, she rarely ever looked at herself in the mirror. Unlike Georgiana, who even wore a gold and amethyst mirror on a chain around her neck so that she could admire herself constantly.

Miranda only wanted to look at me, and not herself. In the process she proved to me that she was the classic submissive who is dedicated to her dominant.

After I fucked her, I tied her to the Falcon Chair (an iconic design that conveniently happens to have two large silver rings attached to the seat, and two to the back), not just because I loved seeing her immobilized, helpless, and in my power, but because I planned to start educating her regarding the use of everyday items in BDSM to enhance my pleasure, and hers: a flyswatter spied in the windows of a hardware store, a slatted wooden spoon in a kitchen shop, a skirt hanger with rubber-ended clips in a hotel room, a bottle opener that can be hung from the chain between cloverleaf nipple clamps so as to increase the weight. I wanted her to become aware of all the possibilities, so that she could point more out to me and, in effect, make a habit of colluding in her own training/punishment.