Liberate Yourself (The Desires Unlocked Trilogy Part One) (26 page)

‘Here, let me do that for you,’ he says, kneeling down and unbuttoning her boots, delicately pulling them off her stockinged feet.

She places her hands on the top of his head, pushing her fingers through his thick mane of black hair. He looks up at her, and the concentration of their mutual gaze is something tangible, spreading thickly in the air, like honey on her tongue.

He stands up, towering over her, forcing her hands to
drop. He scoops her up and carries her over to the bed, laying her down carefully, as if she is made of glass. She lies there watching him. There is no need for her to seduce this man, or for him to seduce her. No effort is required. She can feel the charge between them, the current of their longing. He comes towards the bed, loosening his tie. He looks at her, lying in her silk chemise, as if he is looking at his heart’s desire.

He leans down. With one hand he pulls her chemise up to her chest, and with the other hand he removes her underwear so that he is looking at her nakedness. She slips her arms out of the straps of her chemise so that now all she is wearing is her black stockings. She reaches up to him, and he bends over her and kisses her. Belle rarely kisses clients. But this man is no client. He is the possessor of her heart. A whisper of doubt occurs to her: maybe he thinks she is only a prostitute. She doesn’t care. She has never been kissed so deeply and with such intensity. It is a kind of kissing that makes her want to give him every single drop of her essence. Their lips and their tongues are speaking to each other, with no words. Eventually he pulls away.

‘Belle Blackbird,’ he whispers. ‘I would very much like to make love to you. Will you allow me?’

‘Yes, Santos Devine. I will.’

He takes his clothes off and she admires his firm, lean body. This is a man who never rests, is always on the go. He doesn’t have an inch of fat on him, unlike her sedentary
husband. No, she will not think of Signor Brzezinski tonight. She knows she is sailing close to the wind. Risking scandal, losing everything, but it is worth it. To experience this intensity of passion, even if it is just this one time.

When Santos pushes into her, she cannot help but gasp in awe. Sex has never felt like this before. It has been pleasurable, exciting and erotic, but this feeling is all of those sensations and more. She is becoming a part of Santos. She can feel his pleasure, his ecstasy, which in turn deepens her own.

She has been found at last by this man. This transient Santos Devine, who she will probably never see again after tonight. He fits in her so perfectly. He moves at the same time as her; his spicy, salty scent is one she has always known; the feel of his skin, surprising soft, and the thickness of his black locks have lived inside her memory since the day she became a woman.

Santos and she are bonded. One minute he is on top of her, the next they roll over and she is on top of him. She feels him inside her, going deeper and deeper; she yearns for him to reach all the way into her soul and fill her up.

Take away my emptiness. Take away my loss
.

And now something is happening to Belle. A sensation she has never felt before. She imagines the tip of him touching the tip of her, and she is hovering, like a sea swallow over the lagoon, wings flapping, faster and faster, beating inside. Oh, this feeling is impossible. So exquisite and yet so unbearable. She opens her eyes and looks at Santos. He is watching her as
her guard drops.
Don’t stop
, her eyes beg him. He puts his hands behind her back and lifts her up, so that she is above him, and he is still thrusting inside her. She gasps, as all self-control is washed away by the power of his touch. She flies. Santos has set her free.

After they climax, they lie side by side on her bed. Without saying a word, Santos picks up her hand and presses her palm to his lips. She turns to him and looks into his eyes. She can see all the places he has been within their golden blue, and she wishes she could be there too in his adventures. She leans forward and kisses his plush lips, which are as soft as baby’s skin, incongruous for such a rugged man. She reaches up and twists the gold ring in his ear, moving her mouth to kiss him on his lobe. He pulls her to him and holds her tight against his naked body. She lifts her legs and wraps them around his waist, then reaches down and touches him. He is hard again. She knows he is. Caressing him until she feels he is full and ready, she guides him into her. Oh, she wants to make love to this man until they disintegrate. Until they are no more in the real world but become moths of desire fluttering around the light of her love. For she really has fallen in love for the first time in her life. Maybe it was even in that first moment of recognition when she passed by him in the piazza, but Belle knows that whatever happens to her now, Santos Devine will be the love of her life. And this night is filled with joy, as she forgets so completely about Signora Louise Brzezinska and
her caged life, as she even forgets about Belle and her clients. She is the young Polish girl before her life in Venice, before she lost her country and her maidenhood. She is Louise in her innocence making love to her true love nine times in one night.

HOW DO SHE AND LEONARDO START? HOW DO THEY GO
from exchanging pleasantries to playing this very serious game of dominant and submissive?

It was so much easier with Theo. Their first language was with their bodies. It was so seamless, so very natural the way she and Theo came together. She didn’t expect it to last, and yet the beginning of their affair flowed without effort. It was heady, and exciting, all those unexpected, anonymous appointments in the hotels. She had never felt so alive as those first few weeks with Theo.

Valentina takes a breath and tries to shove thoughts of the Theo she first met out of her head. Things changed, remember, when he moved in with her. Now he wants to possess her, just like her mother warned. He is playing mind games with her, getting some kind of revenge for her lack of commitment. She is not the girl Theo wants her to be. The kind of girl who is eager to meet the parents. With a sinking
heart she realises she is just like her mother.

Leonardo pours them both a big glass of red wine, and Valentina wonders if he is nervous too. They are sitting in his office. He is at his desk, and she is opposite him. He hands her a piece of typed A4 paper.

‘I just need you to sign this disclaimer,’ he says. ‘That you consent to whatever is going to happen tonight.’

She sits up with a jolt, her expression a question.

‘A disclaimer?’ she asks incredulously. ‘But we’ve already had sex. . .’

He picks up a pen and sucks on the end of it, looking pensive.

‘I am sorry to be so formal,’ he says. ‘It was remiss of me not to get you to sign it the other night . . . but then the whole point was that you had to act spontaneously.’

She frowns. He makes it sound as if she has been manipulated. She looks at his hands as he passes her the pen. Is she really going to submit herself to this man? Her hand shakes uncontrollably as she signs her name.

‘I just want to reassure you,’ Leonardo says matter-offactly, as if he is outlining a normal event rather than a night of wild sex, ‘that we practise safe sex here in my club. So you don’t have to worry about that side of things.’

His baldness makes her blanch.

‘It goes without saying that I will be using condoms if we do end up having intercourse, just like I did on Saturday.’

If
? Haven’t they just agreed that that’s what they are going to do?

Leonardo has his glasses on, and as he speaks, Valentina can see herself reflected in them. She tries not to look at herself. She wants to be as far removed as she can be from what is about to happen. Is she really going to do this? Isn’t it treachery? Only a week apart from Theo, and she is entering into a sexual liaison with another man, without his involvement or knowledge. She can’t help it. She wants to understand another side of her sexuality. Ever since her night with Rosa and Celia, something has changed within her. She is not just curious to find out about sadomasochism; deep down inside her, she has this need, this longing to experience being dominated. It is hard to admit this truth about herself. Yet it is the truth. She needs to explore it outside the perimeters of her and Theo, with an expert so to speak, someone like Leonardo who knows what he is doing.

‘So.’ Leonardo has his elbows on his desk, his fingers knotted and his chin resting on them. ‘Is there anything you want to ask me first?’

‘When did you know that you were into . . . this?’ she stumbles. ‘I mean, how did you find out?’

‘I have always known,’ Leonardo says simply. ‘Since I was a child. I was six, and playing with a girl a couple of years older than me. You know, according to Freud, all children have these sadomasochistic tendencies.’

‘That’s a very politically incorrect thing to say,’ Valentina
comments, feeling her hackles rise.
Keep children out of it
.

‘I know.’ Leonardo nods. ‘But I think it is true. It doesn’t mean that children aren’t innocent or vulnerable.’

Valentina remembers something. She has tried to suppress it, but a vague, shadowy memory is emerging from her subconscious. A time when she was about eight years old. Something she saw. Her mother was such a free spirit that after Valentina’s father left, she had a succession of boyfriends. There was always this atmosphere of new demonstrative love, until her mother blew her new man out. This one time Valentina saw something. A glimpse of her mother in her bedroom, tied to a chair. The image is quite clear. Her mother facing the back of the chair, wearing a bra and petticoat, her hands tied behind her back, her feet tied to the chair and her mouth gagged. Yet Valentina wasn’t scared or horrified. In fact a few weeks later she played a game with one of the boys in her class in which she asked him to tie her to a chair and kiss her. The boy not only obliged but also pulled her skirt up over her head to look at her knickers.

So that was how this desire was planted inside her? It was from her mother. The other day Leonardo said that a submissive often had narcissistic tendencies. That would certainly describe her mother, and if she was honest, probably herself.

‘You know,’ Leonardo is saying to her, ‘sadomasochism can be cathartic. The experience of being exposed and humiliated can actually be a way of reconnecting with a part of your personality you have put aside and repressed.’

Valentina licks her lips.

‘I don’t like pain,’ she whispers.

‘We’ll see about that,’ he says, polishing off his glass of wine. ‘Okay.’ He stands up, speaking briskly. ‘Are you ready?’

Valentina follows him down the marble staircase. At the bottom he turns to her. Already she feels something different about him, as if he has almost grown a few inches taller.

‘From here on in, you are subject to my will, Valentina. That means that you must do everything I tell you, exactly, and if not, there will be consequences. I will remind you one last time that if you want me to stop doing anything at all, you have to let me know. Is that clear? All you need say, loud and clear, is STOP. If you want me to tone it down a little, you can say PAUSE. Okay?’

Part of her wants to rebel, but another part of her is listening, silently in thrall.

‘Yes.’ Her voice is almost a whisper.

‘I have decided that I would like you to submit to me first of all in the Velvet Underworld. I want you to go into the room and undress, so that you are in your underwear. I want you to kneel by the side of the bed, with your back to the door. When I come in, you are
not
to turn around and look at me. You must not look me in the face unless I tell you that you can. You must at all times keep your eyes averted. Is that clear?’

She nods. Her heart is beating furiously, and the palms of her hands are hot and sticky as she clenches her fists. Her
logical brain is screaming at her to walk right out of here and never come back, but another part of her is pulsing with curiosity. She thought Leonardo was not her type, and yet what he is offering her attracts her. This experience of delving into a part of herself she has yet to explore. This venture into the unknown is exciting, and frankly sexy.

Leonardo turns on his heel and stalks off down the dark corridor. She is on her own. She unclenches her fists, and puts her hand on the door handle.

Inside the Velvet Underground, it feels like she has entered a warm, throbbing womb. The room no longer feels sinister, as it did when she was in here witnessing Anna the dominatrix and her slave Nicky. Nor does it seem as vast as last Saturday, when the four of them were on the bed. She looks around the room. What if Leonardo straps her to that cross thing and puts pincers on her nipples? She feels sick with fear. She tries to swallow it. Leonardo said that she can stop him at any time. He said that whatever she is subjected to is through her consent, and she has the choice to break the spell of their game. They are in this together. It is a kind of complicity. A trust of sorts.

How strange we humans are, Valentina thinks, as she unzips her little black dress and leaves it draped across the chair by the door. She wonders if he meant she should keep her stockings on and decides that they count as underwear. She pads over to the bed, and kneels down in her new black
silk corset and black stockings. As she waits, she feels like a child kneeling by her bed about to say her prayers. An incongruous feeling. She begins to shiver, although the room isn’t cold. She realises that she is terrified.

She hears the door open. Her instinct is to turn around and see who it is, although of course she knows it must be Leonardo. It takes all of her will not to look behind her. Leonardo does not even acknowledge her. She can see his dark figure walking around lighting candles in every corner and turning off the electric lights so that the room grows darker and more atmospheric, long shadows being thrown from some of the paraphernalia. Her knees are beginning to hurt, but she stays as still as possible. She certainly doesn’t want to invite any punishment from her dominator. The suspense is almost unbearable, yet it is exciting her. What is he going to do to her? She is completely in his hands.