Bound in Moonlight Read Online Free PDF

“It is unthinkable.”
    I asked him how old he was.
    â€œEighteen.”
    â€œYou're young,” I said. “Perhaps, by the time you're ready to marry and have children, you'll have outgrown this, this attraction to other—”
    â€œNo,” he said bleakly. “I won't have.”
    I assured him that I would keep his secret, whereupon he returned to the carriage house and I continued on to the château. It was raining harder by the time I entered the courtyard, but I could make out six or seven naked people of both sexes cavorting in the pool of a large central fountain. One, a young woman, was dancing around with arms outstretched, her face turned to the sky. A tall man knelt behind a woman who was bent over the pool's stone rim, his hands around her waist. His dark blond hair was so long that I would have taken him for a swish had I not seen his hips pumping and realized, with a fair degree of shock, that they were fornicating—and in a manner I'd thought to be the exclusive domain of animals. More curious still was that, as he coupled with the one woman, he was kissing another, one with black hair who knelt in the water next to him, lightly stroking his back.
    A man with dark, curly hair stood on the base of the fountain's central column (which supported a sculpture of a couple going at it, by the way), one hand gripping a bottle, the other the head of the woman who stood before him. The rain made it difficult to see exactly what was going on, but it was clear that her face was at the level of his private parts, the implications of which I didn't want to ponder. Another man stood behind her, hips churning. A dark tail-like object seemed to be sticking out of his rear end. It was hard to make it out, given the rain and my utter stupefaction. So these were the “indecorous goings-on” that Kit had warned me about, I thought, marveling at his typically British knack for understatement.
    I took this all in with a curious sense of detachment, almost as if it were one of those dreams where you know you're dreaming, so you become more or less an observer of the surreal. I'd been in a slightly off-kilter state of mind ever since I parked the car. I remember thinking,
Maybe Eugène was right about the magnetic force in this valley.
    The dark-haired man on the column saw me as he took a swig from the bottle, and gave me a delightfully boyish smile, the first of many that he would direct my way, for this was Inigo.
“Ah, une beauté! Joignez-vous donc à nous!”
    With a frantic shake of my head, I turned and scurried into the castle through the nearest doorway, the invitation to join them echoing in my mind.
    I found myself in a great hall that looked like something out of a painting. It was cavernous and opulent, with Renaissance tapestries hanging above carved oak wainscoting. Such halls usually have a rather forbidding quality, Sunny's cartoonishly regal Blenheim Palace being a case in point, but this one felt warm and appealing. Perhaps it was the comfortably modern furnishings, but it was quite an inviting room—or it would have been were it not for the gagged and blindfolded woman (naked, of course) dangling from the ceiling by means of chains attached to the fleece-lined leather straps around her wrists and ankles. She was hanging faceup at about the height of the little table next to her, with legs widespread to display her oilsheened gash. On the table sat a fat, unlit candle, a black marble statuette, a carrot, a squash . . . You get the idea. Around her neck was a sign that read FUCK ME or FRIG ME .
    â€œMy God!” Pulling down the gag and blindfold, I said, “I'll get you down from there.”
    â€œThe hell you will,” she said in a refined British accent. “Do you realize how long it took them to get me like this?”
    â€œYou
want
this?”
    She stared at me incredulously. “What
is
that bloody thing on your head?”
    I patted