“Yeah,” he grumbled. “And are you going to handle my divorce for free when Marcia kills me for spending that much money on what’s supposed to be a hobby?”
Ed grinned. “If you’re dead, she’ll be a widow. Kaden and I will handle her probate and murder trial for gratis. It’ll be great free promo for the firm. And for the club.”
“Gee, thanks.” Derrick sipped his coffee.
“Seriously. FYI, Kaden agreed with me that you need to do this the right way.”
“Spoken like my attorneys.”
“Spoken like your friends. The last thing I want to see you do is lose your business or your house or your marriage—or even your freedom, depending on what happens—over all of this. It’s not worth it. The peace of mind alone should make it worth your while.”
Derrick sat back, mulling it over. In the back of his mind, he’d suspected he’d get an ass-chewing from Kaden over it once his friend got home, but thought he might at least have a few days until that happened. “So how long will this take to do? And what do we tell people for the next party?”
“The truth. You e-mail the new rules in the next invite and tell them your attorney came down on you for it. They all know Kaden, if not me. Anyone who’s not okay with the new rules? Well, they don’t get to come to the party. Eventually, they’ll have to decide if they really want to miss out on the fun when they keep hearing about what everyone’s doing. They want sex, they can do it at home. Of everyone there, only about five of them had ‘sex’ that would have triggered an arrest. And most of the people who came to the party don’t have a St. Andrew’s cross in their living room.”
“True.” Derrick turned his coffee cup around in circles in front of him. “I hate being a hard-ass.”
“You’re not being a hard-ass, you’re being a smart businessman. Kaden and I, we’re the ones being the hard-asses. Look, it’s going to be a lot easier to do this for the second party than go several parties, risking liability and arrest, and then drop the boom. Everyone knows that things will change as a result of what you learned from the first party.”
“Fine.”
“You know I’m right.”
“Yeah, but Marcia’s going to kill me when she sees the legal bill.”
“So I can go ahead and tell Kaden we can get started?”
Derrick took a sip of coffee. “Yes,” he mumbled into his cup.
* * * *
Monday afternoon, Derrick was a little surprised to see Marcia’s car parked outside the club—and he was already thinking of it as the club—when he arrived. He thought she’d left the office nearly an hour earlier and had headed home. He’d stopped by to make sure they hadn’t forgotten to do any clean-up—yes, including the bathrooms—and to pick up their personal coolers so he could take them home and fill them with ice before the next party.
He added another item to his mental checklist.
Install icemaker kit on fridge.
He wondered how hard the shit would hit the fan if she knew he’d authorized Kaden and Ed to get started on incorporating “Sarasota Venture Venue, LLC” and getting it insured.
For those purposes, it would be listed as a private membership club for performance art, where they also conducted educational seminars and photo shoots.
Kaden theorized that in the future they could rent the space out to riggers and photographers. And they would be holding classes, eventually. Even allow local kinky community groups to meet there.
Inside, Derrick found Marcia on her hands and knees with a measuring tape, and drawing chalk lines on the floor around the front door area.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Planning the office.”
“I thought we were going to wait a couple of months before we build out the office?”
“We were.”
She sat back and examined her work. She also had an old rag next to her, and he realized there were a couple of faint chalk lines she’d obviously rubbed out with the rag. Along with this, a pad of graph paper, a mechanical pencil, and an eraser.
Apparently, that was all she was going to say.
“So why are you doing this now? What changed?”
“I’m trying to decide on the layout now that I know how the party went. Once I decide on the layout, I can plan it and see how it would function at the next party. Once I have it laid out the way I want, I can draw up the plans and we can buy the lumber, drywall, all of that.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder. “I’ll start mapping out the changing room alcoves and upstairs loft areas next.”
“You are really getting into this, aren’t you?”
She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “You don’t get it, do you? We need to plan in advance for expenses like this. I had a ton of people volunteer to get supplies or buy things or hell, even outright donate money and manpower to help build it right. But we can’t count on that. I’m still not sure how we should handle the income. I guess we can run it through the accounting firm as miscellaneous income, for now. Of course, dealing with cash, we can just pay for expenses in cash, and then it’s an even wash that doesn’t get us in trouble with the IRS. We can buy stuff with our business cards and deduct it as an expense and then pay ourselves back with cash.”
He didn’t mention what Ed had hammered home to him at breakfast. “We’ll figure it out. Right now, I want to go home, have dinner, and collapse.”
“Yeah, there’s plenty of leftovers from dinner last night,” she said, once again enthralled in her work. “You can nuke something.”
He briefly thought about playing the Master card.
Only briefly.
He suspected that would go over about as well as a pound of raw beef in a starving lion’s den.
And he’d end up ripped to shreds just the same. He was already walking on paper-thin ice in terms of concealing what was going on with the business back-end stuff from her.
“Can I help you do this?” he finally decided on as the smartest answer.
“No thanks, I’m good. I’ll be home soon. I’m going to finish this while I still have good light. But thanks for offering.”
“Okay.”
He walked to the back to grab the coolers.
“Derrick?”
He turned to find her sitting back on her heels again. “Yeah, sweetie?”
“I’ve been thinking about something.”
He headed over to her and sat down next to her. “What?”
“I mean, I know it’s anything goes at the house parties. Not much someone can really do about that, legally. You can’t arrest people for allowing other people to have sex in your house. But what if there’s a consent violation, real or alleged? Maybe we should specify what is and isn’t allowed when we send out the next round of invites.”
He felt a little relief creep in. “That’s one of the things Ed wanted to talk about at breakfast this morning. They’re going to work up a new liability waiver.”
“Okay.”
“So in the next round of invites, we’ll suggest that it’s better to keep things keyed back a little.”
“How do we word that?”
“I’ll think of something. I’m sure Kaden and Ed will have suggestions.”
Boy, would they.
“It’s just Saturday night felt so…real. I know that sounds stupid, but it wasn’t like a few people at a house party. It felt almost like a club vibe. In a good way.”
“I know.” He went quiet as he glanced at her clipboard. He pointed. “Can I see that?”
“Sure.” She handed it over.
Hell, the quality of the plans she’d sketched out was damn good. “Where’d you learn to do this?”
“Duh, I told you. I picked up a lot of this on job sites. My step-dad. If you hadn’t convinced me to work with you, I probably would have gone for my contractor’s license.”
“Maybe we should still let you go for your contractor’s license.”
“Uh, yeeeaaah, no. One more job. Noo
o, thank you.” She took back the clipboard. “I have my hands full with our business and now this place. Like I said, I’m just glad you’re not working for Dad anymore.”
They’d met after Derrick had gone to work for her father at his accounting firm. He’d worked there for a couple of years before they opened their own office, Marcia coming to work with him.
“Yeah, that might have made things tricky,” Derrick admitted.
She snorted. “Not just tricky, but impossible. He would have been all over us about this.”
Her father had just retired last year, turning all his clients and employees over to Derrick and Marcia. He and his wife now had an RV and toured the country with their two dogs.
He got up and retrieved their coolers, loaded them in his car, and returned. “You want me to stay with you?”
She didn’t look up from her sketches. “Nope, I’m good. I’ll be out of here well before dark.”
“Okay.”
As he drove home, he realized maybe he’d created a monster. Marcia was just as tenacious as he was. Now that she’d thrown herself into being involved with the club, she seemed to be all in.
Whether or not she’d murder him in his sleep when she saw the tab from Kaden and Ed remained to be seen. Hopefully, it wouldn’t stifle her enthusiasm for the club.
Because he damn sure knew he really needed her help with it. The club wouldn’t support hiring paid employees, and he needed her keen eye for detail and organizational skills.
I hope this wasn’t a big mistake.
Chapter Nine
The next Monday afternoon, Marcia walked into Derrick’s office, closed the door, then slammed the papers in her hand down onto his desk.
Considering there were only three pieces of paper, he considered that quite the feat.
“What the fuck is this shit?” she scrispered.
That was what he’d dubbed her “screaming whisper,” the tone of voice she used when she wanted to dress him out for something but not have the entire office hear it.
“Um, papers?” he innocently suggested.
“Why did we get an invoice from Ed Payne and Kaden Erikkson for legal and incorporation services?”
He felt his balls shrivel.
Oh, fuck.
He’d meant to tell Ed to send that to the club’s mailbox over at the industrial complex. “I love yo—”
“Oooh no. Don’t.” She jabbed a finger at him, still scrispering at him. “Do not even. Eight thousand dollars? Are you shitting me? I could have done it online at one of those legal sites for like a hundred dollars!”
“Hey, I got the friends and family discount—”
She held the finger up at him. “No. No. We talked about this, and said we weren’t going to sink our own money into this.”
“No, technically, that’s not what—”
“Derrick!” she shrieked.
He imagined the whole outer office probably froze and went silent for a moment, listening, before getting back to work.
She lowered her voice. “Eight thousand dollars?”
He raised his hands to placate her. “It’s okay. Look, seriously, you were worried about liability. This fixes everything so no one can pierce the corporate veil.”
She stared at him. “Eight thousand dollars?”
“Kaden set up an offshore corporation in the Caymans for us. It owns the LLC that has signed the new lease with Kel, and for the new bank account and stuff. It’s tricky now with all the Homeland Security bullshit because they’re looking for drug traffickers and stuff and—”
“Eight. Thousand. Dollars!”
“Part of it was the bank account we needed to create. Kaden got everything set up, including the insurance. There’s even a business license, state sales tax certificate, EIN for the IRS—the whole thing. It’s its own self-contained entity that is completely untraceable back to us personally for the sake of liability.”
She stared at him for several long, uncomfortably silent minutes. Finally, “Give me one damn reason why I shouldn’t divorce your ass right now? Derrick, eight thousand dollars? Eight hundred? Okay, I would have given you stink-eye over that, but no problem. Eight thousand? Do you have any idea how much we’ll have to make, or how long it’ll take to make it back, in addition to operating expenses holding parties once or twice a month?”
“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-fucking-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 fucking 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.”