Read Online The Bound Heart by Elsa Holland - Free Book Online Page B

hold one range of inexplicable and unimaginable items after another.
    Once you were used to the immediately obvious insertable objects, floggers, whips, and the like, there were things that needed a bit more imagination.
    Olive had never stepped from behind the counter. Evie had been very firm. ‘If you come down here to see me, Olive, you stay behind the counter. Don’t go looking and don’t talk to those who come down here. You’re a nice girl, Olive, and there are things here you just don’t want in your head.’
    But it had strangely become his world.
    She always thought upstairs with the book clamps, glues, and paper was his world. However, after those pictures, she had seen something different.
    The shelves that slipped back into the darkness must contain more, more of the world Jamie was familiar with.
    Olive stood and started to move from behind the counter. A quick peek.
    The door across the room opened; the one that came in from the bookshop above.
    Her heart jumped. What if she had to answer questions?
    Olive looked behind her, no Evie. A man stepped in with the lapels of his coat up, head ducked down. His face shielded as he scanned the room. A nod in her direction, and then he slipped behind the second row of shelving.
    If he came to the counter, she would simply tell him to wait. The basement shop held enough to keep him busy until Evie came back.
    Olive sat back down on the stool behind the counter. Some boxes were under it, and she pulled a large one out. Perhaps there would be more pictures of Jamie or, at least, what he did. Surely, not many people could tie the way he did.
    Olive started to flip through the photos. They were, in their own way, beautiful, some raw. Most were taken from a distance, the ladies’ bits in the more intimate shots somehow shaded with dark shadow so you got the idea, but not all the detail.
    In the middle of the second row, she found another shot.
    Her heart beat faster.
    It had to be him.
    The rope work was of a woman’s back and the inverted heart shape of her bottom as it sat on her feet. The rope came up through the crack of the heart and ran up her spine in a plait, which made the rope look as if it were the woman’s spine, the thing which held her up and gave her shape.
    The other difference she noticed was that this photo was different, far more intimate than the usual ones taken at a distance. This was as if the photographer was the artist. The photograph was very close up with faces cut out just the body and the rope. Viewing the image, you felt like an accomplice to the binder and the woman bound, waiting for you, the viewer to do the next thing.
    Olive turned the photo over; at the bottom was the price, one pound. A fortune. She turned over the next shot in the box, one done in that usual distant style, fifty pence.
    A few shots further down was another one, which again must be Jamie’s. A very close focus, a man with rope all over his face, his torso, and his hands tied across his back. A woman stood in front of him fully dressed, the image stopped at her waist. She held out her hand and the man was licking her palm, his tongue through the rope. The image made the focus sink between her legs, her eyes fixed on the tongue as it licked the woman’s palm doing the strangest things to her.
    “Olive?” Evie stepped through the curtain behind the counter, a line of sweat on her brow.
    “Evie, are you all right?”
    “Here is the address, Olive.”
    The paper crumpled in Olive’s hand as Evie pushed it in her palm. “And here take this.” Evie pushed some money in her coat pocket. “It’s not around here, and I don’t want you walking. Hail a cab.”
    Evie spun her around and propelled her through the curtain she’d just come through into the storeroom.
    “Off you go now. I have things to do.”
    Olive wanted to read the paper, read the address. However, in moments Evie guided her out onto the landing and started her up the stairs.
    “Evie, are you all