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Chapter One
I suppose all of us have awakened from a coma-like sleep of the dead to find that their power has been shut off as they peacefully slumbered, and the house around them is already as cold as a tomb.
No? Well, maybe that’s just me.
Earlier in the evening, before I dropped off to sleep, I’d been watching an old Sex and the City episode. The one where Carrie goes to Paris and Big comes after her and they kiss on that bridge over the Seine. I loved that scene—it was so romantic and magical and…cold, though Carrie has that mink muff to keep her warm, not to mention Big’s jacket that he takes off to drape around her. So romantic—I could use a little of that in my life.
Anyway, after I woke up enough for it to register what had happened, I had a brief moment of denial, accompanied by some heartfelt curses, and I got up to make my way to the little storage area off the kitchen and the fuse box.
Clinging to my last forlorn hope that I had blown a fuse, I used the light on my cell phone to look inside the little metal box—like I had any idea what a blown fuse would look like. I was hoping it would be obvious, like a smoking hole where the fuse used to be, but no such luck. And the whole time, I kept telling myself over and over again that there surely was no fucking way the power company would simply turned off my electricity only days before Christmas.
As Carrie might say, au contraire.
The numerous notices of an impending cut-off should have been a major clue, of course. I mean, I knew the power company’s patience was nearing an end, but I thought I’d have at least until after the holidays. Apparently, I’d underestimated their tolerance along with their holiday spirit, because as near as I could tell, no fuses were blown, and the electricity was definitely off. The power company had made good on their demands, and I was well and truly fucked.
A distinct chill, like a bad smell, had already started to permeate the living room through my thin apartment walls when I came back to sit forlornly on the sofa. Or maybe that was just my imagination and fear of impending doom. It could also be because the temperature outside was dropping faster than an evangelical TV preacher’s pants at a strip club. I shivered and pulled my hoodie more tightly around me, zipping it up and putting the hood up over my head, as I contemplated how likely it was that I could survive the night by just getting in bed and piling blankets on top of me for warmth. I didn’t think my chances were all that good, considering I only had one blanket and a throw for the couch. If I didn’t get some fucking heat up in here pretty soon, though, the night was looking grim. It had begun to spit snow and ice pellets outside by that time, a rare occurrence for Atlanta and one that turned the roads into demolition derbies. The weatherman had said earlier that we’d have temperatures in the low single digits by morning.
I did have a fireplace—something I never used, except once, when I’d first moved in and had been trying for a romantic evening. Despite numerous attempts, I never got a damn fire going, and Kyle had to start it for me. Now Kyle was long gone, and I still had no clue how to start a fire. But really, how hard could it be if I really set my mind to it? And maybe if I got it going, I could sleep by it, and it would knock off the worst of the chill.
I had some old firewood by the door out to the deck. I kept it inside, because I kept that door barricaded against any potential intruders. Not that I’d ever had any, but it paid to be careful. The small bundle of firewood had been there for ages—since that night I’d last tried for a romantic dinner with Kyle, and that had been over a year ago. I retrieved the bundle of wood, and for the next twenty minutes or so, I tried desperately to get a fire going. I threw in matches, blew on a few tiny little flames and finally thought about just throwing gasoline on the damn thing and hoping for the best. Except, I didn’t have any of that either.
Why even bother? It occurred to me as I knelt there in front of the fireplace that my immediate future didn’t look so good—the roads were too icy for me to attempt driving anywhere, and I was almost out of gas anyway. Suddenly feeling exhausted and defeated, I stretched out on my back on the floor and just lay there, letting in my darkest thoughts, which were never far away, but hovered just around a corner in my mind ready to sidle in and take over at a moment’s notice. They were whispering to me now that it would be so much easier just to stop fighting. Just stop struggling against the universe, which was definitely aligned against me—or at the very least, totally indifferent to me—and let it all slip away.
It was at that exact moment that a loud, insistent knock came on the door.
Who the hell was knocking at this time of night? If it was the ghost of Christmas Past, I wasn’t interested. I went to the door anyway and pulled it slightly ajar, leaving the security chains on. There were three of them, because a person can’t be too security conscious. And there, on the front step, or what I could see of it through the narrow gap in the door, stood a tall, devastatingly handsome man wearing one of those long, expensive overcoats that billionaire businessmen downtown wore over their two-thousand-dollar suits. He had a Burberry scarf wrapped around his neck and a snow was falling on his black hair and dusting the shoulders of his fancy coat.
I wondered for just a fraction of a second if I could be dreaming, because he was also holding a beautifully wrapped blue package in his hands with an enormous pale blue bow that was the exact shade of blue of his extraordinary eyes. Whatever he was selling, I could use a few. I blinked at him a few times, but the vision remained. And it sounded irritated.
“I said, I’m looking for Connor Floyd.” Had he already said something? Apparently, I hadn’t heard him and had been just staring at him in a daze. “Are you Connor?”
As I tried to gather my thoughts, he tried again. “Hello? Are you a hearing person, or should I jot something down on a piece of paper and hold it up for you? Wait—you do read, don’t you?”
“Oh. Uh, n-no. I mean, yeah, I read. And I heard you. I’m just… Wait a second, please.” I fumbled for a moment with the chains and finally got them all undone and pulled the door open to present myself—such as I was. The wind was blowing so hard outside, it tried to rip the door from my grasp. His gaze traveled over me, from my now wind-blown hair to my rumpled sweatpants and slightly stained t-shirt and on down to my bare, freezing feet. I think it would be safe to say he was not impressed. He stared at me long enough for it to get a little awkward before he cleared his throat and held out the package he was holding.
“If you’re Connor, then this is for you.”
I looked down at it like it was a honey badger or a live grenade. “For me? But why?”
He looked a little unsure for a fraction of a second, but then he seemed to decide, oh, what the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound and sighed. “You entered a contest? A sort of drawing. Online?”
“I did?”
He lifted his eyes heavenward ever so slightly, and with an attempt at patience that I could tell he didn’t really have, he tried again. “I’m the owner of Lucifer’s Den—we’re sponsoring a gift giveaway for Christmas. Young men were invited to sign up if they didn’t expect to have a great Christmas this year, or even if they were simply interested in coming to our party for more information about the club. There was a drawing of names of all the ones who entered and yours was one of the ones chosen. Is any of this ringing a bell?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, the lightbulb finally firing off in my brain. “That was a few weeks ago, though, wasn’t it? I forgot all about it. The Daddy Club!”
One night a few weeks ago, I’d been scrolling aimlessly through the porn on the internet. I’d clicked on various BDSM sites and started looking at websites for local clubs in the area. I’d seen pictures of one I really liked and clicked on it to find they were running a Christmas contest. The club was men only—a definite plus for me—and was in Atlanta, where I also just so happened to be. It actually listed itself in one place as a “gentlemen’s club.” I was thinking that I’d never met an actual gentleman and I thought they might be like unicorns—rumored to exist, but no one had ever actually seen one.
The contest was for a Christmas gift and an invitation to a party thrown by some of the members. Winners to be drawn at random. What’s the worst that can happen anyway? I thought to myself. I get lucky and they draw my name for a nice gift? That sounded good to me.
So I filled out the form and sent it in. Afterward, I’d kept on looking at the website and clicking on things and discovered that the club, called Lucifer’s Den, was one of those upscale males-only BDSM clubs in midtown, but there was a section of the club that was just for littles.
I had no idea what that was, but when I looked that up, the idea of me being one of them was kind of funny. There was no clear way to withdraw my application, so I just let it ride. Hell, I figured I had almost no chance of my name being drawn anyway. Again, it was amusing at the time.
It didn’t seem quite so funny now.
The handsome man in front of me got a pained look on his face. “Daddy Club? That’s...no, that’s not a real name. The club is called Lucifer’s Den, and the littles group is only one part of it.”
