Free French Kiss (Decadence Nights Book 2) by Maddie Taylor Page A

devastating. Suddenly, she was faced with an empty nest and a bleak glimpse into an even emptier future.
    She rolled onto her back. The rub of the sheets on her tender behind a stinging reminder of last night and the behavior she’d exhibited monthly for the past year.
    After Derek died, she’d gone numb, the horrific car accident taking so much more from her than a husband and father to her children. Going through the motions for her kids’ sake, it was as if she’d donned a mask, and not a very good one she found out later, but that was all she could manage at the time, and for a long while after. She’d gotten stuck in shock, not progressing through any of the other stages of grief she’d learned about in college, in basic Psych 101. Anger would have been good, or bargaining as any normal person would, but she hadn’t broken out of the fog that had overtaken her for more than a year. When she did finally begin to move again, she bypassed stages two and three and found herself immersed into the worst one of all, depression, and she’d taken up residence there ever since.
    Her mother worried, having been through something similar when Mari’s dad had passed from a heart attack at only fifty-one, as did her older sister, Renee. A physician in private practice on the east coast, she’d flown in at her mother’s urging and convinced Mari to begin grief counseling. Not that it had done much good. But time passed and as everyone moved on with their own lives, especially her kids who were growing up, Mari didn’t.
    No wonder they hadn’t wanted to stay close to home after high school. With an emotionally obtunded mother casting a gloom over their lives, who could blame them for taking the opportunity to get out, and running away from her like their hair was on fire?
    Oh, she hadn’t totally checked out. She’d still done the PTA thing, the booster fundraisers, and attended all their sporting and extra-curricular events, but she’d done so as if a pall had been cast over her, which it had. If she’d shown up in widow’s weeds, with unrelieved black from head to toe, a lace veil covering her face, no one would have been surprised in the least.
    They didn’t understand. They couldn’t. She and Derek had hidden their relationship from them all: her children, both of their families, and all of their friends. But when a submissive loses her master of eighteen years, it is more than devastating, it is catastrophic.
    Intellectually, she knew what was wrong. She’d lost more than an ordinary man; she’d lost the center of her universe. He was as big as the sun, and she and her children the planets orbiting his brightness and warmth. Derek was the head of the family and the provider, in death he had continued with the latter, leaving her and the children well off in such a way that none of them would ever want for anything. But money couldn’t hug her when she needed it, or make a decision when she couldn’t, or give her the things that she craved that no one could ever know about: control, dominance, erotic pain.
    The children grieved the loss of their larger than life father, but as children often did, they bounced back, and quickly proving their resilience, had moved on. Relying on friends for support, they moved seamlessly through the stages unlike their mother.
    The first counselor she saw deemed their marriage co-dependent and unhealthy. Mari hadn’t returned for the next session. She’d gone to another and found her judgmental. After the third called her deviant, referring to her and Derek’s dynamic as paraphilic—he being the sadist to her masochist—Mari had given up. And so she remained to this day, stuck in grief and depression.
    But as she thought about last night, she wondered for the first time if the therapists weren’t right. Surely it wasn’t normal for a woman to seek out men, virtual strangers for nothing other than kink and a climax, to not want to bond in any way other than through the