Praise (Salacious Players Club, #1)(8)

When love becomes toxic, it’s not love anymore.

And then I went and stayed with Beau for far longer than I should have, three months after I caught him cheating, letting him talk down to me, making me feel like crap, and questioning everything about myself.

So, I can’t exactly blame my sister for wanting to raise a spoon to the breakup.

“You deserve better, Charlie.”

“I know,” I reply, staring at the leftover caramel and chocolate sauce on the plate.

“I think you dated a jerk because you think you deserve a jerk.”

I glance up at her, my brow creased in confusion. “Dude, you’re fourteen! How are you so wise?”

“I read smart books,” she replies with a laugh.

“Oh, then I guess I’ll have to show Mom your e-reader. Let’s see how smart she thinks Mating the Werewolf is.”

“What?” my mom asks, tearing her tipsy attention away from the ice left in her margarita glass.

“You brat!” Sophie screams, tossing her napkin at me. Her cheeks are tinged pink from embarrassment, and I can’t keep my laughter in.





Lying in my pool-house room that night, I can’t stop thinking about what happened today. Before cashing the check, I scrawled his phone number on an old receipt in my purse. I couldn’t seem to part with it yet. It’s held tightly between my fingers, and the tone of his voice rings through my ears like an echo.

Lovely.

There’s no way I could ever call him. That’s insane. I’m sure he was just giving this to me in case I needed help or wanted to keep in contact…because of Beau. It was totally a dad move. So I don’t know why my brain seems to be stuck on this idea that he wants me to call him for any other reason.

I toss the number into my trash bin next to my bed and turn off the light. But instead of drifting off to sleep, I find myself tossing and turning for almost an hour. I keep reliving that moment over and over, where he called me lovely and stroked my face.

Let it go, Charlie.

But I can’t. And a minute later, I’m picking up my phone again. This time instead of googling SPC, I put Emerson Grant into the search bar. I don’t know why I was so afraid of looking him up earlier, but I think I was too nervous. If I knew too much about him, he’d get under my skin, so the less I knew, the better.

But right now, my curiosity won’t let me rest. So I’m going to scratch this itch once and then move on.

Those three letters, SPC, pop up first, just under his photo and the title, CEO.

I click on the link, and it goes to a black screen with a box in the middle, declaring this site Members Only. Well, shit. There’s a place to input a password, but I clearly don’t have one, so I backtrack.

Scrolling down a little farther, I keep digging. There’s information on him and his work history, a lot of vague details about his education, and a few dashing photos of him in his twenties and thirties, mostly in tuxes and at important-looking events. But it’s not until page seven of this never-ending Google search that I find what I’m looking for. Apparently, someone else was curious too, and posted everything I’m dying to know.

Salacious Players’ Club. A dating, escort service, soon-to-be expanding operations to a full-service members-only club in California’s Briar Point district.

He owns a…dating service? And what the hell does a members-only club mean?

Clicking through post after post, I nearly drop my phone when I land on what looks like a soft-core porn site. It’s a blog titled: Madame Kink’s West Coast Escapades. The woman on the screen is wrapped in tight leather, holding a whip and a bone-chilling smile. Words like kink, slave, submission, bondage, and exhibitionism stare back at me on the screen.

“What kind of dating service is this?”

Suddenly, I’m twenty pages deep in a kinky rabbit hole, and I can’t stop clicking. Apparently, Madame Kink has some experience with Emerson’s…club, er, services, or whatever. And she has journaled her way through each interaction.

The SPC is a groundbreaking service in sexual liberation for both men and women. Finally, a place where we can explore our desires in a safe and healthy (and oh-so fulfilling) manner. Mr. Grant and his team are real pioneers, and I hope to see this club’s services spread across the country.

I have to gulp down the ball of nerves lodged in my throat. Am I dreaming right now? Something about all of this tells me this dating service doesn’t pair you up with people who also like to do yoga and take long walks on the beach. According to Madame Kink, people who like to be bound and gagged can easily find other people who like to…bind and gag. Is this really what Beau’s dad does? My brain cannot seem to wrap around any of this, but I’m too far in now to discontinue my search.

Can’t…stop…clicking.

This blog is like a dummy’s guide to kink, and I scroll through a multitude of things I don’t understand. There’s extensively more to it than I ever thought, and there are a lot of things I’m a little too afraid to read about, but my eyes do catch on one thing in particular.

Praise kink.

Against my better judgment, I click on it. A page pops up with a woman on her knees and a man’s hand holding her by the chin. She’s staring up at him as if he’s God himself, and my stomach churns. That’s what I did today, wasn’t it? I let him put me in that position, and I liked it.