Open Doors (Suncoast Society #27)(19)

“We’ve got that handled. We’re now a private membership club. Everyone has to pay an annual membership fee, and then there will be door fees after that. It’s totally legit, and that will help with a cash flow bump. We’ll be open every weekend, and have a steady membership. And, even better, it gives us a legal basis to exclude people without worrying about asshats trying to get in. They have to apply to join. Kaden even found that the USDOJ has a sex offenders registry that’s free to check. There’s one specifically for the state of Florida, too. We’ll run everyone through them before they can become a member.”

She sank into one of the chairs in front of his desk. “Derrick, what have you gotten us into? We have a full-time job! This place! Which, FY-f*cking-I, it pays our goddamned bills!”

“We’ll have volunteers,” he continued, explaining it the same way Kaden had laid it out to him when he picked up all the paperwork from him Sunday morning at brunch while their women had gone out to some farmer’s market.

The man was a genius.

“We’ll have listed rules,” he continued, “which everyone who signs the liability waiver has to agree to. No drugs, no alcohol, no sex. Remember how you were worried about rape claims and stuff? Problem solved. We can’t allow it. No sex.”

“Who is going to come to a damn BDSM party where they can’t have any sex at all? Probably half our friends do orgasm play. And, hellooo, so do we!”

“Orgasm play would still be allowed. But no sex. They prohibit it at the fetish nights at bars all the time. Other BDSM clubs have that rule, too.”

“Yeah, and they can drink at bars and some of those BDSM clubs, which are actually swingers clubs.”

“Ah, but they can’t be naked at the bars.” These had been the same arguments he’d tossed at Kaden, and the genius answers Kaden had lobbed right back at him.

She stared at him, looking totally confused. “What?”

Which he’d expected, because that had been his exact response to Kaden.

“They can’t be naked at a fetish night at a bar,” Derrick said. “No alcohol being served means full nudity. That’s how the other BDSM clubs handle it, from what Kaden found out. I don’t know how some of the swingers clubs handle it, and I don’t care. No sex, no booze, no problem. Also, reduced liability and paperwork for us. There is nothing against the law about people in a private club, who are not having sex, being naked. It’s not a public space. There aren’t any minors present. It’s perfectly legal.”

She didn’t look convinced. “Again, I ask, is Kaden going to pay our bills if we get sued and lose everything?”

“See, that’s the beauty of this. The worst that can happen is that we get closed down and someone takes whatever is inside the place. That’s it.”

“No, the worst that can happen is someone calls the cops one night, and everyone gets perp-walked out in full fetish gear in front of TV cameras.”

“Nope. That was settled down in Miami. They tried doing that down there, and the judge threw it out.”

“That doesn’t help us during the actual perp walk.”

“We verified it with the sheriff’s office.” He ticked off each point on his hand. “If we are a private membership club, and we’re not selling alcohol or allowing it on the premises, and we’re not allowing sex or drugs, we’re good. We’re better off than some of the dang vanilla membership halls that serve beer and wine at their places and hold bingo nights.”

He saw he still had some convincing to do from the doubt painted on her face.

“What about the health department?” she asked. “For the food.”

“We’re not doing food prep, and we’re not selling prepared food. Pot lucks are excluded.”

She closed her eyes and tipped her head back. “Fuck,” she whispered. “We can’t run a second business. We don’t have enough free time as it is.”

“You said it yourself, you don’t need to be here five days a week. You take Fridays off.”

“Great, and work half the damn night at the club instead. Terrific.”

“We’ll get volunteers.”

“How do we make sure they don’t rob us blind?”

“We have to trust someone. And we can accept credit cards now, because of the bank account. Kaden ordered us one of those credit card readers, and we’ll hook it to a tablet.”

“A tablet?”

“Okay, Kaden’s donating that to the club. He bought an Android tablet for us to use.”

She glared at him. “Go on.”

“Kaden and Leah have offered to help run the front office at least one weekend a month, at first. Tony, Kel, Scrye, and several others have volunteered to be DMs and house staff. So we just have to work on office volunteers.”

“This is soooo wrong.”

He got up and rounded the desk, dropping to his knees in front of her.

Fuck anyone who said Masters didn’t grovel. They did when they realized they’d pushed their wives well past the point any rational human being would agree to and were trying to save their f*cking marriage.

“Babe,” he softly said, “remember when Tom died? Remember how we had to have a vanilla kind of memorial for him at the damn beach? People couldn’t even freely dress how they wanted to respect him. We had nearly a hundred people there that day. Remember how everyone said we wished we had a place of our own? Remember how Dave dropped off the house party host list because an hour after he got the last person out of there at the last one he hosted, a sheriff’s deputy showed up investigating a noise complaint because he didn’t pay attention and let someone get drunk and start spanking someone in his freaking backyard? Okay, totally his own fault, but still.”