Master's Flame (24 page)

“Three projects,” he finally said in exasperation. “That’s the absolute limit. You can have the corner by the window in the living room. Only the corner.”

He did it to be kind. He knew she would have come anyway, spent another month with only a sketchbook if that’s what it took to be in his home, staring up at him from her knees. She threw her arms around his neck. “Okay, only the corner, I promise. Thank you.”

Later that night, after he locked her in the cage, Mr. Lemaitre went to the contract wall with his big marker and scratched over the previous dates. He added
for two hours a night, not including Sundays
. No ending date. She stared at him from behind the bars, wondering if he really grinned before he left the room, or if it was only a trick of the light.

It happened slowly, all the little encroachments.

First it was an extra, brightly colored coffee cup in the drainer beside his.

Then it was her art, spilling from her corner in his living room onto side tables and windows, and even his blank, neutral walls. He kept his home uncluttered because he liked his mind uncluttered. She couldn’t seem to grasp this concept, not even after repeated lectures and punishments in the attic, pinned by her nipples to the spanking bench. One day he found paint drips on his carpet. He put her in the dildo chair for two hours and tormented her until she screamed that she would respect his personal space and his home’s pristine decor. Then the very next day he found a silk plant shorn of leaves, sacrificed for collage parts.

He ought to have been glad. She was proving that she could be his slave and still remain her true self, an impulsive, creative bundle of trouble. But this didn’t soothe him. It threatened him. If she could be his slave sometimes, his abject, unresisting slave, and still remain Valentina in all her uncontrolled beauty...

Damn her. She was stripping his peace of mind as efficiently as she’d stripped his designer silk plant.

Sara insisted he was in love with Valentina but it wasn’t love Michel felt. It was lust mixed with irritation. Somehow Valentina managed to be two very different things: a slave whom he owned and controlled, and a mystical creature he could never own or control. If she was one or the other he could resist her, but when she was both, she defeated him. She was elusive, complex, infuriating, all the things that made it impossible for him to send her away, although he really wanted to.

Then, on Sunday nights, he was forced to fulfill her nightmarish cuddling requirement. She curled up beside him in his bed where no one ever, ever slept and stayed there all night pressed right against him, smelling of sex and life and flowers and warmth. The deliberately muted design of his large white bed, accented with calming steels, blacks, and grays, was shot to hell by the garish red-orange hues of her hair.

He had to allow it—he had promised—but he didn’t have to enjoy it or become used to it. The first Sunday he lay awake all night, just as he had when he spent the night at her dormitory. The second Sunday he slept off and on, but still woke too early, tangled up in Valentina’s tentacle-like arms and legs. The third Sunday he took out his frustration in endless fucking. He woke her up three or four times during the night, even assfucked her once, and still she curled up next to him and sighed like this cuddling was the greatest thing on earth.

As he dealt with these encroachments, Cirque du Monde entered the final production stages of
Élémental
. They closed
Tsilaosa
the second week of March, tore down that set and started building the new one with state-of-the-art upgrades that were equal parts headache and wonder. The directors made final decisions about the order of the acts and the skits in between, and Michel sat in on hours of meetings and consultations. He had to watch Valentina do her terrifying hand-to-hand act three, sometimes four times a week. She never made a mistake, not once, but afterward he would find himself with the beginnings of a migraine from all the tension in his shoulders and neck.

Jason would probably have noticed and mocked him if he wasn’t so caught up with Sara in the planning of their May nuptials, to take place at Michel’s Marseille villa. In her corner of Michel’s living room, Valentina worked on a wedding gift for the couple. She’d adapted her portrait of Jason into a portrait of both of them, embellished with all manner of shiny and colorful things. Jason’s heart was still a key, and Sara’s a tiny, gilded lock. Michel watched her work on the magnificent thing with injured pride. So far, she’d made no artistic renderings of him aside from the rough, scratched-out disasters in her sketchbook.

He realized it was petty and pompous to expect an
objet d’art
from his devoted little slave, but he did. What would he even do with it once he had it? He’d put Valentina’s portrait in his closet, in an archival-quality box carefully sealed so the candy bits wouldn’t attract pests. She never asked about it but he felt ashamed for not displaying it. The self-portrait had so much life, it felt like keeping Valentina herself in a box, suffocated beneath layers of acid-free tissue paper, but to display it would result in its eventual disintegration, and he couldn’t bear that.

Sometimes after he locked Valentina away for the night in her cage, he stared at the portrait of Jason and Sara with its beautiful colors, and lock and key, and seethed with jealousy.
Do me next. Me, Valentina!
A painting of him wouldn’t have colors and locks and keys... What would it have? How did he seem through her eyes?

He should have been glad she didn’t make art about him. He worked hard to keep their relationship appropriately distant, to keep their power differential in place. Valentina seemed addicted to the act of falling in love. When he didn’t keep her busy enough, she read romantic novels and watched classic movies about couples, sobbing and talking to the characters on the screen. She marveled about things like rainbows and glitter and the magical innocence of children.
You’re a child yourself
, he wanted to snap at her.
You act like one.
He was careful not to give her the least reason to go swooning and falling in love with him.

And yet, despite all his efforts, she was taking over more and more of his life. Even his daughter! To his chagrin, Sara and Valentina had become something like friends. He saw them talking to each other at work with greater and greater frequency. They weren’t comfortable friends, at least he didn’t think so. Their body language didn’t suggest girlish confidences and gossip or whatever it was women did. Still, they talked and knew each other, and it seemed like one more area of his life where Valentina had barged in and made herself at home. Valentina knew the time when Sara and Jason would leave for California, even though Michel hadn’t told her. She asked if they could go to the Citadel now that his daughter wouldn’t be there for a few days.

Jesus, he supposed they should. Michel wanted to go—he missed the place—but he was conflicted about it. He still remembered Valentina hanging from that noose, and before that, he remembered her weeping outside the door to his back room, crying
Oh please! Why won’t you do that to me?
He remembered other things too, so many nights spent in his back room doing vicious things to begging, groveling slaves for their pleasure, and his. Was he losing his nerve?

He would see other slaves at the Citadel, past partners he’d never cared much about, and he’d feel compelled to compare them to Valentina, about whom he had come to care an alarming amount.

Then again, maybe he needed to take her there and place her among his other slaves, in the gritty, dark, alternative side of his life. Maybe it would be good for them both.

*** *** ***

Valentina suspected Mr. Lemaitre was coming to love her. She couldn’t be one hundred percent sure, because he still acted the same way. Stern, demanding, distant.

But he allowed her to do things and see sides of himself he’d kept hidden before. He smiled at her sometimes now when he unlocked her cage in the morning, and sometimes he even stayed to have breakfast with her before he hurried off to work. Over dinner he talked to her about business decisions he had to make, or ideas he had, or even sometimes his hopes for the future. This was a great change from before, when he’d mainly just lectured her on etiquette and occasionally fucked her bent over the table. Maybe it was the whole difference of letting her wear clothes, since dinnertime didn’t fall within her two slave-hours.

Mr. Lemaitre stuck to his word about only demanding two hours of service a night, and it was always after dinner, not during, or before. He paced their scenes so they ended on time, with just a little time at the end to give her aftercare. A hug, a few words, some questions to be sure she was okay. That was pretty much all she got but it was enough to reassure her that she meant something to him, that she was more to him than a willing body.

And oh, she was willing.

She’d been unsure if their new arrangement would soften things so much that their encounters would lose their thrill, but the opposite happened. When he was in charge of her all the time, his mastery became an ongoing, diluted thing. When he had only two hours, his mastery became sharp and cutting as a knife. For those two hours he would consume her, and then, just as quickly as he took over her and turned her inside out, he would set her free. It was a roller coaster ride of ups and downs, of danger and then sudden safety that left her reeling and hungry to do it all over again.

Now, tonight, he was taking her to his famous back room at the Citadel to play. He hadn’t been to his back room in weeks and so no one else had been there either. At work, word had gotten around that he was returning to the Citadel since his daughter was away. People caught Valentina in the corridors or backstage at the theater and asked her,
Is it true? He’s coming back again? Are you excited? Scared? Can I come?

But she had no control over who could come or not come, or what might happen in her Master’s back room. No one had control but Mr. Lemaitre. That was what was so exciting about the whole thing. That, and that she was going to be there as his primary slave.

Last time she’d been in his back room, she’d had to watch him with his other slaves, and she’d been so jealous. She’d marveled at their self-discipline and the way they suffered to please him. Now, she knew she could match them in self-discipline and sacrifice, and that made her proud.

As Valentina waited in her Master’s cavernous bathroom, she ran a finger up and down one of the ribs of her black velvet corset. He’d given it to her at dinner, turned it over and shown her the copper-orange thread outlining the boning, thread chosen because it matched her hair. It was impossible to see the thread from the outside because the velvet was so plush, but Valentina loved the secret of it inside, right against her skin. He’d also had her name stitched along the side seam, not Valentina, but
La Vampa
, her circus persona. She’d almost cried when he showed her. She’d taken it and crushed it against her heart and told him she would keep his gift forever. The corset had hooks for wide black garters, six of them, and he’d given her black silk stockings to wear with seams up the back. He laced her so tight she felt squeezed and hugged by the garment, so tight that he had to do the garter hooks for her, kneeling at her feet.

I love you
, she thought, looking down at his thick black wavy hair.
I love you. I love you.

She wished she could say it out loud. Her Master had put on one of his favorite Handel concertos, turning up the volume on his fancy, whole-home audio system that made it sound like the orchestra was right there, whatever room you were in. In his granite-walled bathroom, the music echoed and seemed to dance in the air. Her Master hummed along at parts, tilting his head back as he shaved.

I love you.
The phrase repeated in her head to the accompaniment of the music. His body was so strong and sexy. His hands, his brows, his lips, his ass, his cock flaccid and resting on a thatch of dark hair. Every single thing about her Master was fetish-worthy. She’d been with a lot of men—a
lot
of men—but none of them had ever affected her as he did. None of them had ever made her feel breathless and excited like this. Just being near him, being in the same bathroom with him as he dressed...

“
Une image dure plus longtemps
,” he said.

She blinked at him when he turned to her. She’d learned a lot of French, but found herself too distracted to translate at the moment.

“Take a picture, it lasts longer,” he repeated in English. When she continued to gape at him, he smiled and said, “You’re staring.”

“I can’t help it.” Her insides felt as warm as her face. He picked up a white towel from the counter and wiped away the last traces of shaving cream, and applied the sandalwood-scented lotion that permeated her dreams. What was it about a man grooming? She watched his chest and arm muscles contract as he put away his razor and straightened his lotions and bottles. The music in the background swelled, notes chasing one another and then blending into a resonant harmony.

“This is so perfect,” she blurted out.

He turned away from her to go into his dressing room. “What’s perfect?”

“This,” she called. “This moment. This music and my corset and stockings and...and you.”

He came out wearing a pair of black leather pants that clung to him in all the most compelling places. “You’re excited about
le Citadel
?”

She sucked in a breath, staring at his hard chest, his abs, the trail of dark hair disappearing down the front of his low-waisted pants. “It’s not...no. That’s not what I mean. I mean this moment feels perfect. So many times when I’m with you, everything feels perfect.”

His eyes narrowed the slightest bit. “Sometimes when I’m with you, things feel perfect. Other times I want to strangle you. This is life, I suppose.”

She didn’t know what gave her the bravery to speak. Perhaps it was the intimacy of being invited into his bathroom to watch him shower and shave, or the intimacy of watching him dress, or those damn leather pants. “I wish we could stay like this forever,” she cried in a rush. “I feel most perfect when I’m with you. I don’t want to be your slave for a month, and then another month, as if it’s the dates that matter. I want to be yours, all yours, forever and ever my whole life.”