Open Doors (Suncoast Society #27)(36)

“But he’s alive because Cris left her.”

“I know. I think that’s the only reason he didn’t send Cris packing and opted to do this. Because he wants Tilly and Cris to have each other again. To try to right this perceived wrong he feels he triggered. I get it. I don’t agree with it, but I get it.”

“Crazy.” Marcia sipped her tea. “Just when I think I’ve seen it all—and remember, we see Gilo in here a damn lot—something even weirder happens and blows the bell curve to hell again.”

When they were riding home that night, Marcia stared out the windshield and tried to process everything. “Promise me something, please?”

“I’ll do my best,” Derrick said. “What is it?”

She turned to him. “Promise me that if, for whatever reason, you decide you don’t want to be married to me anymore, that you’ll face me like a man and not just up and disappear with a stupid note.”

In the lights from the dashboard, she saw storm clouds form in his expression. He reached across the seat and took her hand in his, bringing it up to his lips and kissing it without taking his eyes off the road. “I swear to you, unless I’m abducted or otherwise killed, I will never up and leave you. Ever.”

“Don’t promise you’ll never leave me. I won’t make you do that.”

“But I mean it.” At the next light, he looked at her. “I’m not about to throw the better part of twenty years away. You’re the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. Why do you think I don’t play with anyone else, even though I probably could if I wanted to? I don’t want to. I don’t need to. I don’t fault those who do, but I’m happy.”

Her heart fluttered the way it always did when he got like this. The way it always had from the first date they’d gone on after meeting at a munch.

The only man who’d done that to her.

“I love you, too.”

He smiled. “Good, because you’re stuck with me. I’m not going anywhere unless it’s in a box. And don’t joke that it can easily be arranged, because yes, I’m well aware of how many friends we have and that they’d take your side over mine if I screwed up epically like Cris did.”

She grinned. “I wouldn’t let them kill you. Maim you, maybe. But not kill.”

“Such a romantic slave you are, baby.”

“And you’re stuck with me.”

“In all the good ways.”





Chapter Fifteen


Shayla, the magazine journalist Tony had taken under his wing to train as a submissive, was doing research for a series of articles for the Sarasota magazine she worked for.

Marcia had worried about it at first, but Ross and Loren had thought it was a great idea, talking Derrick and Tony into it.

Now, the first article was live. With more than a little trepidation, Marcia pulled up the article on her iPad. Since it was her own personal iPad, it wasn’t like she was worried about someone accidentally seeing what she was reading. Besides, it was their accounting firm.

And she was, technically, tech support for their company. IT, office manager, and chief coffee pot washer because she was apparently the only one worried about catching a disease from the damn thing if it went unwashed for too long.

As she read, she relaxed. Obviously, Shayla had done her research well. The article was written fairly, objectively. It wasn’t salacious, and it certainly didn’t portray them as sex-crazed freaks.

It actually normalized them.

She relaxed a little more.

Then she pulled up the club’s e-mail account on her iPad—

And her heart nearly stopped.

She had twenty-five new e-mails. Hell, they were lucky to get five a week in that account, not counting spam, and automated bank notices when deposits hit.

And these weren’t spam.

They were all from their website contact form.

She tapped the first one to open it.

Hi, I read the magazine article. I never realized people did this in real life, much less locally. How can I take a class in this? I have felt like this all my life and thought there was something wrong with me…

And they pretty much all read along that vein. She responded to all of them with assurances that they weren’t alone, broken, freaks, damaged, or any other negative descriptor.

She also wrote a sticky note to herself to schedule another Newbies 101 class before the one the following month.

Except for the last e-mail in the batch.

YOU SHULD BE ASHAMED OF URSELFS! ITS AN ABOMINATIN AGINST GOD! READ UR BIBLE!

Okay, so that one she sent to her pending folder, to save for later to trace the IP address. If it could be isolated, she’d block the asshat from accessing the site.

At least my grammar and spelling aren’t an “abominatin aginst god.”





By lunchtime, Marcia had received another forty or so e-mails in the club’s account, all but six of them legitimate inquiries via the website, two creepers looking for pay-to-play, one pro-Domme and probably fake spammer looking to work at the club, and three mental midget religious whackadoodles who apparently flunked the same English 101 class in high school as the composer of the earlier e-mail.

And who all had the same fondness for caps lock.

Caps lock. The true “abominatin.”