Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Blurb

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: The Menagerie

Chapter 2: Malcolm

Chapter 3: Wants and Needs

Chapter 4: Two Pieces of a Puzzle

Chapter 5: The Loving Dom

Chapter 6: Mistakes and Promises

Chapter 7: Tongue Tied

Chapter 8: The Shape of You

Chapter 9: Red and Green

Chapter 10: Release

Chapter 11: Choke Me

Epilogue

Keep Reading for an Exclusive Excerpt from If You Let Me by Saria Bryant

About the Author

By J.P. Caruso

Visit Dreamspinner Press

Copyright

The Menagerie

By J.P. Caruso

Rowan Campbell loves his life, finally. He’s happy. He’s happy, but… there’s something missing. Some itch under his skin he can’t quite scratch through his work as a paramedic or hobbies or family gatherings or casual hookups alone. Then one day he responds to a 9-1-1 call at an exclusive BDSM club, the Menagerie, and immediately splurges on a membership. He isn’t expecting much… until he meets the notoriously hard-to-please club veteran, Malcolm Savaryn. Mal is a firecracker of a man: Sharp and witty with a take-no-shit attitude, he fascinates Rowan from the start.

Rowan has a big secret he’s afraid to share, and Mal has walls that seem impenetrable. Both men have dark pasts, and mental health struggles have marred them, leaving them wary of relationships. Their chemistry is immediate and unmatched, though, and they quickly enter into a steamy Dom/sub relationship, meeting weekly at the club. It’s just sex, right? But can they keep things strictly sexual, or will one or both of them develop feelings along the way? And if so will they find the courage to admit them and risk their hearts?

The Menagerie is a compelling exploration of BDSM, trust, and the slow evolution of friendship and love between two complex characters.

Dedication

For everyone who kept me going with kudos and comments

Acknowledgments

I WANT to start off by thanking my amazing boyfriend, Dan, who has been supportive of me throughout the entire creation of this story even though it’s not his cup of literary tea. Thanks, love.

Thank you also to Ginnifer, Elizabeth, Andi, and the entire production team at Dreamspinner for giving this book a chance and for helping me to strengthen it with every revision. It’s been a pleasure working with you all, and I hope to do it again one day soon.

Of course I have to thank all of my readers. Your wonderfully unhinged comments and praise kept me writing and kept me passionate about these characters that we all love so dearly.

Chapter 1: The Menagerie

FOR THE first time in his life, Rowan Campbell has a savings account in the quadruple digits. He has a steady and fulfilling job as a paramedic, a small but clean one-bedroom apartment in Boston’s Back Bay, and a stable dose regimen of meds to keep his depression and PTSD in check.

He loves his life, finally.

He’s happy…

But.

He’s happy, but…

There’s something missing.

Some itch under his skin that he can’t quite scratch through work or hobbies or family gatherings or casual hookups.

It’s a random, ordinary Monday when Rowan finally discovers the something that’s missing in his life.

“CODE SIX-THREE, 241 West Harrington, nearby units please respond,” the tinny voice broadcasts over the ambulance radio.

Rowan shares a glance with his partner, Addison, who nods and picks up the receiver.

“Dispatch, this is Car 47, show us responding. ETA two minutes,” she says as she inputs the location in the GPS.

Rowan flips on the siren, feeling the thrill rush through him that still hasn’t dissipated in his two years as an EMT and three as a paramedic. He’s vaguely familiar with the area, but it never hurts to have the GPS on, especially when a minute or two spent circling around the block could mean life or death.

When they arrive, there’s a small crowd outside a whitewashed brick building. Above the crowd is an overhang with illuminated marquee lights circling a black sign that reads The Menagerie in a neat gold script like something out of a modernized 1930s movie.

They grab their gear and a stretcher from the back before signaling to the crowd to move out of the way. As the crowd parts, a petite blond woman in black business clothes and high heels flags them down.

“He’s in here,” she says, voice serious yet calm, very much unlike most people they deal with.

She ushers them through a heavy cherrywood door and into what looks like a lounge. The interior is dim—both the tiled floors and the walls are black—lit only by blue, purple, and warm white lights that seem to outline all the fixed objects in the room.

Even from the little Rowan can see as his eyes adjust to the dark, he can tell that the décor is chic and modern. It looks as though it would be better suited to the Financial District.

Rowan and Addison make their way up a flight of stairs and into a lounge that is similarly decorated to the one below. Despite the crowd outside, there are still a few people lingering around the edges of the room, huddled together in small groups, whispering to one another. Many of them are in partial states of undress, with robes hastily thrown around themselves.

Down a short corridor, they’re led into a small, sparsely decorated room. Rowan barely has time to register the variety of crops and ropes and leather toys mounted to the wall opposite the door when he sees a man on the floor, naked, skin pale, and eyes closed. A woman, also naked, is kneeling over him, fingertips pressed against the pulse point on his neck, eyebrows scrunched in concern.

“What happened?” Addison asks the woman, gently ushering her away from the man.

“We were—I was ch-choking him and… and he… he passed out! He never sa-safeworded, so I thought…. He seemed fine, and then he just… passed out,” she stammers.

Rowan kneels down next to the man and grabs his wrist to feel for his pulse. It’s weak, but there.

“Did he ever stop breathing after he passed out?” Rowan asks her.

“Yeah. Shit, yeah, he did. I was so fucking scared, but I did CPR on him for maybe a minute? Maybe less? I don’t know, it all happened so fast and—”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Addison soothes. “You did good. He’s breathing now, okay?”

The woman nods, covering her breasts with her arms and shrinking in on herself as if only now realizing she is nude.

“Did he fall or hit his head when he passed out?” Rowan asks, doing a once-over to check for physical injuries.

“No. We were already on the floor, and he fell forward into me. I laid him down.”

“That’s good,” Rowan says. “Oxygen.”

Addison grabs the emergency oxygen cylinder from her kit and fits the mask over their patient’s face, then turns on the flow. The man’s eyelids flutter at the rush of oxygen. A promising sign, but he’s still not out of the woods. They’ll need to get him in the ambulance and to the nearest hospital to find out if there’s any lasting damage from the lack of oxygen.

“Has he had any alcohol or drugs tonight that you’re aware of?” Addison asks.

The woman shakes her head, then adds, “Well, we had a couple drinks before this, but I think he only had two glasses of whisky. No drugs, but I guess he could’ve taken something before we met. I don’t know.”

Rowan lifts his eyelids and shines a flashlight on his eyes to check his pupil response. Still intact—another good sign. It looks like he’s going to be okay, but they still need to get him to a doctor.

“They don’t allow it here,” the woman says, almost to herself. “Choking. But he said he’d done it before and knew how much… how much he could handle, and….”

“We’re gonna help him,” Rowan promises, setting up the stretcher next to the man and grasping his legs. “Move on three. One, two, three.”

They quickly shift the man onto the stretcher and cover him in a wool blanket from their kit before strapping him in.

“Do you want to come, ma’am?” Addison asks the woman as she and Rowan raise the stretcher.

She shakes her head. “I only met him a few hours ago. I don’t even know his real name….”

The thought of hurting someone—a stranger—and leaving them alone makes Rowan’s stomach churn, but he holds his tongue. Anything he wants to say to the woman wouldn’t do anyone any good and would just cost their patient valuable time.

They wheel the man out of the room, down the elevator that the hostess points out, and back through the club to load him into the ambulance. Rowan drives and radios the nearest hospital while Addison monitors the man’s vitals in the back. All things considered, the call could have gone much worse. They could be driving back without sirens on right now.

But even with the close call, Rowan can’t help but think about that wall of toys and equipment. About the darkness of the club and the low, bassy music. About the tingling under his skin and the goose bumps on the back of his neck.

IT SHOULD be a red flag that the first time Rowan hears about the Menagerie is due to a near-life-threatening emergency, but it isn’t. His nerves are eased knowing that the man they’d had to bring to the hospital had acted outside of the club’s rules, and that even though that was the case, the management made sure he was taken care of.

He barely makes it the full day on Tuesday before he’s typing the menagerie boston into Google, eyes glued to his laptop screen like he might miss something in the millisecond it takes the page to load.

The first link seems to be what he’s looking for. He clicks through to a simple splash screen asking if he’s over eighteen. He clicks on “I am 18+” and is brought to a modern, elegant-looking website with a black background and white-and-gold text and an image of a sultry-looking woman’s eyes partially covered in a black mask. A golden script reading The Menagerie lies directly in the center of the homepage, and underneath: Boston’s Most Exclusive BDSM Dungeon & Club.

Rowan’s heart rate spikes.

He’d assumed the club was of the NSFW variety from the hastily covered patrons and the fact that the man he’d helped had passed out from erotic asphyxiation, but seeing it written plainly on the screen makes it that much more real. And he can’t deny that being in the club, even in an official capacity, had done a little something for him.

Okay, a lot of something for him. It’s been years since he frequented spaces like that, and he wasn’t exactly in the best headspace when he did, but he misses it.

Misses the way the booze and the drugs and the men made him feel. Alive. Sexy. Desired. Like they’d wanted to eat him up when they thought he was a bottom, then submitting with little coaxing when Rowan would pull out his dick and flip them over.

Powerful.

He needs to know more.

Clicking through a few of the pages—About Us, BDSM, FAQ, Gallery, Blog—he learns that the Menagerie is a members-only club that allows its patrons to use their facility and equipment and even book sessions with on staff dominants or submissives.

The gallery shows him the wide variety of rooms available to rent in the club, including a classroom, medieval dungeon, doctor’s office, and other themed rooms in addition to multiple standard ones like the one he’d been in yesterday.

Finally, he clicks on the Contact page. The address, hours of operation, and social media handles are all there, along with various pride flags and the words Safe Space for All, but what really catches Rowan’s eye is the blank contact form.

Drop us a line.

Rowan doesn’t think twice before filling out his name and email address and typing a quick message.

Hi,

I’m interested in becoming a member. Can you send more info, please?

Thanks,

Rowan C.

He hits Send before he can think better of it. Takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, mentally going through his emotional checklist to make sure the impulsive decision isn’t a sign of an impending depressive episode. And he isn’t irritated, isn’t antsy, isn’t out of his mind horny—he’s okay. His eyes flick to the pill box on his nightstand, Tuesday a.m. and p.m. boxes both empty.

He’s okay.

He clicks through a few more pages on the website, reading the latest blog entry and looking at the extensive BDSM educational references. By the time he finds himself reading an article on the best kinds of knots to use for a full-body shibari rig, it’s well past midnight.

Fuck.

He has to work in the morning. He closes his laptop, climbs into bed, and tries not to think too hard about how long he’ll have to wait for a reply.

But as he’s lying there, staring up at the blackness of his ceiling, lit in stripes by the faint blue moonlight shining around the edges of his curtains, he’s reminded of the lights in the club and feels the familiar trickle of heat low in his belly.

Feels his cock start to harden as images of strong thighs and sinfully curving spines race through his mind. His legs spread on their own, hips hitching up a fraction of an inch to get any amount of friction on his cock.

He wills himself to calm down because he has to be up in less than five hours, but he’s never been good at denying himself pleasure.

More thoughts flood his mind, each making him breathe a little faster, a little shallower. Sweat-slicked skin. Ragged breaths. A warm mouth. A clenching hole. A hand around a throat.

And all at once he’s going down, down, down the rabbit hole of memories of dark clubs and back alleys and bathroom stalls and hotel rooms far too nice for what they were being used for. Of pushing his body to the limit and his mind well past it. But he’s in a good place. He’s okay. He can handle it. The thoughts no longer make him spiral into shame and self-loathing—now they make him throb with need.

The phantom taste of a pill on his tongue and a buzzing under his skin is all it takes for his hand to follow his thoughts, down, down, down his torso to slip into his briefs.

The first contact of his cool hand on his hot cock makes him gasp in the quiet. He wants to tease himself, play with his balls and trail his fingertips down the length of his shaft, slide his thumb over the head and draw out the pleasure until he’s aching and desperate.

But he’s too far gone already, too turned on, too aware that he finally has his shit together and can’t risk fucking it all up again by getting sucked back into fantasies.

So he spreads the precome around the head, enough to slick his hand and ease his movements as he strokes himself. He tightens his grip, twisting his hand on each upstroke and flicking his index finger over the head on the downstroke.

In no time at all, he feels his thighs start to tense, then tremble, then quake as he works himself faster. But the friction that he’d loved a few minutes ago is too much, too intense. He wrenches his hand off his cock and spits into it, still a poor substitute for actual lube but far better than precome alone.

The pleasure doubles instantly as he grips himself tighter, hips bucking up into his fist, heat spreading to his limbs. He roves his free hand over his chest, skirting over his nipples and imagining it’s someone else, someone grasping at him while he fucks into them faster, faster, faster—

Rowan climaxes with a low groan, coating his fingers and the inside of his briefs in ropes of come, stroking himself through it as his body trembles with the flood of endorphins. Sweat from his hairline trickles down the side of his face, but it does little to cool the heat of his skin.

When he’s fully spent and his cock begins to soften, he wipes his hand on his briefs, flinging the comforter and sheets off his upper half to avoid getting them dirty. And he has every intention of getting up and changing into fresh underwear, washing his hands and face, but his eyes won’t stay open as his body sinks deeper into the mattress and he drifts off to sleep.

DESPITE THE late night, Rowan wakes the next morning before his alarm goes off. To his surprise, when he checks the time on his phone, he sees an email icon. After swiping open the app, he gawks at the reply from the club, sent an hour after he’d sent his email.

Good evening, Rowan,

Thank you for your interest in The Menagerie! We are always accepting new members. Attached you will find our info sheet, club rules, and application form. If you are interested in applying, simply fill out the PDF application and email it back.

Please know that if accepted, we require all members to submit a driver’s license, a credit card to keep on file, and monthly negative STI test results from a physician’s office or clinic. While positive results do not preclude membership, there are additional steps we require to keep all of our members safe.

Please reach out with any questions you may have and we’ll be happy to answer!

Best,

Clover Monroe

Membership Coordinator

The Menagerie

He’s about to download the attachments, but as he stretches out his legs, he remembers he’d come in his underwear last night like a teenager. His lower half is a mess, dried come and spit clinging to the fabric of his briefs. He hops out of bed and showers quickly, despite having more time than usual to get ready this morning.

Freshly changed in record time, he downloads the attachments and opens the info sheet first. Because the one thing that he hadn’t learned from the website was the cost of becoming a member. And really, that’s going to be the determining factor of whether he fills out the application or not. He skims down the page, heart beating perhaps a little too fast for 6:00 a.m. as Boston’s Most Exclusive BDSM Dungeon & Club rattles around in his head. The word exclusive is almost always synonymous with expensive.

But when he finds the membership fees several pages down, it’s not as bad as he was imagining, though it certainly isn’t cheap.

Silver Membership: $100/month

• Allows admittance 4 times per month

• One complimentary alcoholic drink per visit (excludes gratuity)

• Invitation to special events once per month

Gold Membership: $200/month

• Allows admittance 8 times per month

• One complimentary alcoholic drink per visit (excludes gratuity)

• Invitation to special events 2 times per month

Platinum Membership: $300/month

• Allows unlimited admittance

• One complimentary alcoholic drink per visit, all other drinks 50% off (excludes gratuity)

• Invitation to all standard plus additional exclusive special events

• Priority room booking

Rowan swallows as he reads the perks of each membership tier. The thing is, he could afford any of them, which is making his head spin a bit. The higher tiers would majorly eat into his savings, but he could swing it if he really wanted to. Only in the past year or so has he started to relax on penny-pinching, something that everyone from the South End is familiar with even if they’ve long since moved out. But with his steady and decently paying job, manageable bills, and an almost unbelievably padded savings account, he’s started to take better care of himself.

Started buying nicer clothes that fit his body better and last longer than a dozen washes. Better skincare and haircare products rather than the dish soap he used to use to scrub the grime off his body. More fresh fruits and vegetables than he’s ever had in his life. The occasional latte or album or new pair of sneakers to treat himself, for fuck’s sake.

The higher tiers are still a little too expensive for him to justify, especially since he might not even like the place, but he can spare $100 for one month to test the waters. Besides, four visits per month seems like a reasonable amount. While he’d like nothing more than to have hot, kinky sex every night like he used to, that’s not practical for him anymore outside of a relationship. And he wouldn’t be going anytime other than the weekends anyway.

He reads through some of the other FAQs, which range from Is sex allowed at the club?—Yes—to Is there a dress code?—No, but our members tend to dress in cocktail attire if not participating in a scene.

Next, he scrolls through the club rules.

There are some that are obvious: All equipment must be disinfected with provided cleaner after each use; no sexual acts in the bathrooms or locker rooms; no outside food or beverages. And some that aren’t—No scenes exceeding 4 hours; no bloodplay or cutting; no breath play. Rowan thinks back to the man they’d helped who had broken this exact rule. He shakes his head. He’s done it a few times with partners and gotten off to it more times than he can count, but he never lost sight of how dangerous it can be if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Members will receive two recorded strikes for breaking minor rules before membership is terminated. Membership may be terminated immediately depending on the severity of the rule(s) broken (i.e., if the safety of other members is compromised). Termination of membership is permanent.

Jesus. It’s pretty harsh, but Rowan knows that BDSM is all about trust and safety, and that members likely wouldn’t be able to fully enjoy themselves if they knew other members were breaking rules left and right with no consequences.

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