Unraveled by Her (16 page)

Chapter Eighteen

The early-morning light streams into the cage from a small window high in the wall opposite me.

I've been out almost all night. Eight hours during which I was unconscious and at her mercy.

But now I'm awake, alive and kicking. I open my mouth to scream, but my tongue comes into contact with the hard rubber ball gag stuffed between my teeth.

I start to shake from head to foot with rage. The worst kind of rage: rage against myself.

If only I had told Robert the truth. He would have surrounded me with bodyguards 24/7 and I would be safe and free and with him, instead of chained up inside a cage in a dungeon.

But not in a dungeon familiar to me.

Not one of the dungeons in the basement of Hartwell Castle.

If not there, then where?

Through the window, I hear the hoot of a passing boat.

The South Street Seaport.

Le Château.

She's imprisoned me in a dungeon at Le Château.

Then the door swings open with a flourish, and there in the doorway stands my nemesis, Lady Georgiana Hartwell.

“I'd love to keep you permanently gagged, Miranda, but as I urgently need to talk to you, I'll refrain from doing so,” she says, and glides toward me, a syringe in her hands.

“My best friend, my favorite weapon. One shot, in eight seconds you'll be groggy, in twenty you'll fall into a coma. And after that, you'll be out for the count again, so if I were you . . .” she trails off, and points the gun straight at my mouth.

“I'll take off the gag, but one peep out of you and it's naptime once more,” she says.

I have no doubt that she means it, and nod in silent acquiescence.

She flashes me a triumphant smiles, puts down the gun, then reaches over to a rack of implements, selects a large purple leather paddle with holes in it, and slams it down across a spanking bench a few times so loudly that I jump.

“Just having a little fun, cupcake,” she says, winks, and then places it on top of the cage.

Then she unlocks the cage door, unbuckles my gag, and drags me out of the cage over to a large iron chair. She shackles me to one leg of it, then cups my face in her hands.

I am overcome by the unwelcome sickly scent of Georgiana Royale, and feel like I'm about to puke.

“Now Miranda, think back carefully. Tell me everything, and leave nothing out. What was his first reaction? What did he say? And what do you think he's going to do next?” she says, her eyes wild, her color high.

When I don't answer at once, she grabs the purple paddle.

“Open your fucking mouth and tell me what I want to know,” she says, and slashes the paddle across the cage roof in time with her words.

“I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, Georgiana.”

She throws down the paddle, grabs my shoulders, and shakes me hard.

“My husband, you stupid little bitch! Robert Hartwell. My husband. What did he say when you told him that I'm still alive? Is he looking for me? Has he forgiven me yet? Has he arrived at the correct conclusion that he should want me back?”

I gaze at her in utter amazement.

“For God's sake, Miranda, you're a ghostwriter, you must remember his every word, every expression when you told him that I didn't die, that I'm alive! You just must!” she says, while I cast around for something to say.

But I don't get there fast enough, and the truth dawns on her.

“Oh, Miranda, what a bad girl you are! You didn't tell him! You didn't tell my husband that I'm still alive!” she says with mounting glee.

When in doubt, say nothing.

She moves away from me, suddenly deep in thought, then sits down and takes a sip of champagne.

“I see, I see. This may yet work out to my advantage,” she says.

Then she is quiet for another long moment.

Her eyes light up. “Or shall we call my husband right now and tell him you and I are at Le Château together, and invite him over to come join us for champagne?” My stomach turns over at the very thought of it.

“So Robert genuinely isn't aware yet that I'm still alive? Then he doesn't know that I kidnapped you, either? Might really work to my advantage, don't you think?”

She strolls over to the rack again and selects a thick, leather paddle, which I silently identify as a tawse, a particularly lethal paddle, and toys with it while she is lost in thought.

After a few moments, she brings the tawse down on her own thigh in excitement, and in her elation, doesn't even seem to feel it. “I've got it! We'll spend the next few days working on the central portion of the book, the story of how and why I met Robert at Le Château, then concentrate on the reasons why I was compelled by forces beyond my control to blackmail him, my guilt, and my burning desire to make amends to him,” she says.

Even though my own guilt with regard to Robert is like a mushroom in comparison to her Mount Everest, I kind of understand her emotions. But there's no point in me empathizing with her. I have to come up with a strategy for my escape.

For a few moments, she paces backward and forward, forward and backward, up and down the dungeon, fingering the tawse as she does.

“Here's the plan,” she says, finally. “You write the book. Robert gets it, reads it, discovers the truth about me, comes to understand me in every single facet, and at the very end meets with the wonderful surprise that I didn't die after all, I'm still alive and well and even more beautiful than before, and I want him back,” she says, and my blood chills at just how crazy she really is.

“Fasten your seat belt, because I'm about to take you on a wild ride through a dark and dangerous world, starting in this very dungeon where Robert and I first met, the romantic setting where our love affair first blossomed,” she says.

Jealousy starts to simmer within me, but I suppress it before it takes hold over me and clouds my judgment of the life-and-death situation in which I now find myself.

She has another sip of champagne, closes her eyes, then makes a call.

“Sorry to wake you this early, Angel, but at nine sharp I need you to contact all the girls and warn them not to come in today. And to stay away until I tell them otherwise. But reassure them and tell them not to worry, as I intend to pay each of them a per diem for every day they aren't working here. Then come straight in and start calling the tricks and inform them that there will be no sessions today or in the foreseeable future.”

There is a silence while Angel must be asking her further questions.

“I'll be training a new sub in the dungeons. She isn't of your caliber, of course, but once I've trained her up to my standards, and put her through her paces, then she can take over all the cheaper tricks who don't tip, and you can move on to the more upmarket ones, who do,” she says.

A few more minutes, and more questions.

“No, Angel, my little poppet. I could never replace you no matter what. You are irreplaceable, and we both know it. I just need you here right now to hold down the fort until I've broken her in, and then it will be back to business as usual.”

And for a second it strikes me that I'm probably lucky that Georgiana has taken me here, because maybe, just maybe, Robert will think of Le Château because of Tamara, and conclude that one of her bereaved and disgruntled former associates has kidnapped me and imprisoned me here.

Then I'll be safe, because he'll be here to rescue me.

At the same time, he will finally learn the dreadful wrong I've done him. I've deprived him not only of the truth about what happened to me, but also of his right to make a choice. A choice between me and Georgiana.

When I hear the pitiful sobs coming from nearby, they sound so alien that at first I don't recognize that they're emanating from me.

“Stop sobbing, Miranda, and look on the bright side. Isn't it perfect for us to do the interviews at Le Château, where it all began for me and Robert?” she says.

I sob harder.

But then I wise up and tell myself that if I don't manage to get out of here today, I might as well attempt to solve all the fucking mysteries that have been puzzling me for so long.

Chapter Nineteen

“Georgiana, Robert told me all about how the man who owned you made you work at Le Château for one night,” I say, and force myself not to think about the true identity of William Masters and what he did to me all those years ago.

“Sweetie, there's no point in me beating about the bush. While you were in Geneva on your romantic interlude with my husband, Gigi alerted me and Tammy that he had suddenly and inexplicably fallen in thrall to you and that your budding love affair needed to be curtailed. Together we arranged for Hartwell Castle to be bugged in readiness for your return. Consequently, we were able to listen to the story Robert told you about the circumstances of our first meeting, how he lost me and was reunited with me. But I'm sorry to disillusion you; the entire saga that he relayed to you is a complete and utter fabrication.”

“I don't believe you, Georgiana. Robert isn't a liar! But you are. The biggest liar that ever lived!”

“That may be so, Miranda, but this once, I am telling you the truth. And I swear it on the life of my daughter,” she says, and while I digest the words “my daughter,” she goes on, her voice suddenly husky with emotion. “And I want you to convey exactly what I tell you to Robert via my book, so that he will finally understand the trials and tribulations I endured and how everything between us really unfolded.”

I bite my tongue.

Then she goes on, “This is not to say that I didn't adore the way in which Robert characterized our first meeting to you, and the way in which we lost each other and found each other again, because he really is a masterful storyteller, don't you think?”

Speechless, I just nod.

“In my opinion, Robert ought to know how to tell a good story, don't you agree, cupcake?” she says.

Before I can come up with a suitable reaction, she just sails on. “After all, he once wrote for his own newspapers on a regular basis. And he is, indeed, a spellbinding storyteller, just as he is a spellbinding dominant, don't you think?”

I can feel myself turn white.

“Switch off the tape recorder,” she says abruptly. “Apologies, cupcake, but neither of us can deny that Robert is spectacular in bed. The greatest lover I've ever had. And he writes such touching and evocative love letters, doesn't he? I still have every single one of them in my possession. Which, of course, is why I was able to forge his handwriting so accurately in the note that summoned you to the Carlyle,” she says.

And I sit there, sick to my stomach that he wrote her love letters but never wrote one to me.

I want to kill her for that, and for rubbing in my face that she and I have both been his lovers. And that she was once his wife.
Is
his wife. But despite that, and despite whatever happens next, I know in my heart that I'll always be the woman he loves above all others. Especially Georgiana, my jailer, the woman who trapped, then blackmailed, him.

But when I force myself to face the fact that Robert made passionate and sincere love to her, not once but many times, and even wrote her love letters, I can't endure it. Tears spring to my eyes. But then, with an almighty effort, I choke them back because I don't want to give Georgiana the satisfaction of knowing that she has scored a bull's-eye straight into the ventricles of my heart.

She retouches her lipstick, switches the tape recorder on again, and continues, “You see, Miranda, Robert didn't knowingly lie to you at all. He told you the story of our relationship exactly as he experienced and understood it. But his version is far from the real truth. A truth I am about to share with you, so that you can then enlighten him via my book,” she says, then pauses for dramatic effect.

But there is no need for that, as she already has my full attention.

“Let me rip away the first of my seven veils, Miranda, and tell you the true story of how Robert and I really came to meet—not the fanciful yarn spun to him with great panache by Murray,” she says, and my stomach lurches at the thought of Robert ensnared in some kind of plot conceived by the sinister co-owner of Le Château.

“After everything I went through—the loss of my family's fortune, which left me penniless, disgraced, and alone; the rape; the birth of my child—I found myself friendless in Manhattan, desperate to survive, to support my daughter, to make sure she was safe, happy, and cared for,” she says, and for once she seems sincere.

“So here I was, Lady Georgiana Lacely, alone in a foreign land, with a young child with severe health problems, and unable to support myself and her,” she says, then stuns me by lighting the first cigarette I've ever seen her smoke, a Russian cigarette almost the same color as her eyes.

“I may not have told you this already, Miranda, but as Robert knows only too well, and as I intend you to stress in my book, I've always been an adventuress with a rich fantasy life, a passion for any and every kind of sexual permutation, and it was only natural that I dreamed of exploring the far side of dominance and submission.

“I was virtually penniless, without a green card, and unable to work at even the most menial job, so imagine my excitement when Tammy confessed her secret to me that right after she left Les Orchidées, she had become a professional dominatrix, and was now the co-owner of a Manhattan S&M fantasy parlor: Le Château.

“From that time on, my dreams and my fantasies were filled with nothing but erotic thoughts about Le Château, where she worked, and consumed by fevered imaginings about what life there must be like.

“Tammy, of course, knew the extent of my obsession and nurtured it. But I can't blame her for what I did next, and nor should Robert. I did what I did because I was broke, and desperate to help my beloved little daughter. At the same time, my dire situation also enabled me to use my very destitution as an excuse to plumb the depths of my sexuality,” she says.

“But now on to the story of my romantic first meeting with Robert. A meeting as romantic as that between the two lovers of
And Now My Love.
I'm quite sure that you remember that movie and its potent message in every single detail . . .”

It's all I can do to steel myself against her inevitable gush of passion for Robert and—much as I am loath to admit it—his for her, which she is about to impart to me with so much glee. And I hate her for it.