Her grave was covered with flowers. Bright blooms of red roses, blowsy pink peonies, black-eyed purple anemones, and pink and mauve sweet peas. Even six months after her death, the people came every day and laid fresh flowers.

A tall slender man stood at the graveside. He was scruffily dressed in faded torn jeans and a grubby tee shirt. His dark, straight hair needed the attention of a good hairdresser. He'd always worn it in a longer style, now it hung over his face, constantly getting into his eyes. He wasn't making a fashion statement, his disarray was not a deliberate negligence; there was a sense of exhaustion about him, a sense that they had no energy to make an effort with his attire, or anything else. At just thirty years old, Eli was weary of life.

He wanted discontinuance; but suicide was never an option.

Eli closed his eyes. The image of a large Elizabethan manor house flashed into his mind and with the image, the memories. The Coterie and the first time she'd taken him there. It had been autumn time. Jasmine had driven his car, the big Mercedes. He had been blindfolded at the start of the journey. She'd only stopped to remove the blindfold when she'd turned into the long driveway. He was never to know the exact location of the manor house, in all the years they spent together. It had become a kind of game. He playfully guessing where she was taking him, she, laughing her denials.

The gently winding driveway was flanked on either side by tall Lime trees, their bright green leaves just turning to autumn gold. And at last the house came into view. The vista had taken his breath away. There was a sense of history, of age in the fa?ade of the beautiful Elizabethan manor clothed in scarlet Virginia creeper. There was a sense of mystery too, of disturbing, urgent, dark secrets. Things happened here of which no one spoke. Profound things.

Across a field he could see a group of naked men, involved in a rigorous assault course. A Mistress, in shorts and a tee shirt flicked a whip. A profound sense of wonder swept over him, that this could be his life, if he were considered worthy.

Eli had been determined to be considered worthy.

Bees hummed around the flowers on the grave. A bright, red admiral butterfly sipped at the sugary nectar.

He was lean, his legs long and powerful. He moved with the grace of an accomplished athlete, yet in his real life he was a bestselling writer. A reclusive writer. His publisher didn't even have a photograph of him for the book jacket. The publisher had argued, cajoled and flattered; she knew that with his dark, good looks, book sales would soar.

But his lifestyle did not permit celebrity status. He'd refused point blank to go on television for "The Book Show" and refused interviews from the most prestigious of academic journals. Book signings were out of the question. Oxford University had offered him an honorary doctorate. He'd politely declined.

Under Jasmine's Dominance his writing had come alive. Now that she was dead, he couldn't write a word. A barely started manuscript remained, tattered in his old battered leather briefcase back at the derelict cottage that these days he called home.

A song thrush perched on the headstone of the grave, looking at him with his bright eye. The bird caroled a melody of condolence. Eli neither saw, nor heard.

He stood and stared unsmilingly at the headstone. A muscle ticked in his lower cheek just above his jaw. It was a strongly carved face, hard and determined. A balance of angles and sculptured shapes. An intelligent face. It could have been described as beautiful, but for a slightly crooked nose, broken from falling out of a tree, when he was in his teens. A different world, a different life. He was tanned, from living out of doors these past months.

He read the dedication, even though he knew it by heart.

"In Loving Memory, etc. etc."

Eli cursed under his breath. He wanted to kick the white marble headstone, spit on it, with its fucking stupid sentimentality. He wanted to ruin the carefully placed flowers. He wanted to piss on her grave.

He turned his face from the headstone and absently surveyed the English landscape. His face was contorted into an agonised mask. He stretched out his neck. Had anyone been there to see him they would have known that if a wolf or a dog had done this, it would have been about to howl. It was a feral, primal moment. He was locked into a moment of pure ecstatic pain, so sweet that it was almost pleasurable. He felt dizzy, echoes of an orgasm flickered from his anus up his spine. He felt a cleansing; then cold anger washed over him again and with it, anger's old companion, cold despair.

Had anyone been there to see him, they would have been chilled, even on this warm day in June.

If there were five stages to the grieving process, Eli hadn't moved beyond anger. With despair coming a close second.

He shifted his position. He'd been standing there a long time. A tall man. A strong man with well-defined muscles beneath the tight tee shirt. An athletic figure with broad shoulders, narrow waist, strong biceps; a body carved from swimming daily since his youth. After a slicing dive, he would cut through the water with strong, powerful strokes.

These days he still swam, but no longer for pleasure. He swam to exhaust himself. When he pushed his body through the clear waters of the lake, he didn't have to think.

The glaring sunlight on the white marble headstone hurt his eyes. It reminded him of idyllic days spent in Greece, with Jasmine, the love of his life. And she lay buried and rotting six feet beneath the flowers and green turf. And the child that rotted within her. His child. .

He could come back at dead of night, he thought. Like a ghoulish grave robber, he could dig her up. Fuck her corpse. Fuck her hard, till his hard cock split the rotting flesh. He'd made love to her in life; he'd fuck her in death.

Necrophilia. That was a perversion that the Coterie, that exclusive club of Fem/Doms hadn't embraced. At least, not as far as he knew. He'd put it to them, if he ever had any contact with them again.

Jasmine: there had been a time when her name had curled across his tongue. The hint of her fragrance would make his cock hard. Now, her name made him want to spit. She had stated, quite clearly, in her list of final wishes that he was to be given to a Mistress Lucia. Mistress fucking Jasmine had known exactly how to tighten the screws to breaking point. She would have known when she'd signed the document, how he would hate her for it.

She had known that he had loved her; he thought that she had loved him too. That she could do such an evil, calculated thing. And who the hell was Mistress Lucia anyway? Probably some bloody amateur, with an inadequate husband wanting to play a few S&M games.

Well, Mistress Lucia and the whole bloody Coterie could go to hell. Jasmine had been his only Mistress; he would never belong to another.

He lay down on the soft turf and pushing a place between the flowers, he placed his cheek on the grassy mound.