The Chateau (Original Sinners #9) by Tiffany Reisz

On-Sale Date: June 5, 2018 (Worldwide)

Genre: Erotica / Romantic Suspense

Page Count: 284 pages

Buy links:  Amazon | Amazon Australia | Amazon UK | Amazon Canada | Barnes & Noble| iBooks | iBooks Australia | iBooks UK | iBooks Canada | Kobo

Goodreads Link: Goodreads

Blurb

As the Jack-of-All-Wicked-Trades for a secretive French military intelligence agency, 24-year-old Lieutenant Kingsley Boissonneault has done it all—spied, lied, and killed under orders. But his latest assignment is quite out of the ordinary. His commanding officer's nephew has disappeared inside a sex cult, and Kingsley has been tasked with bringing him home to safety. 

The cult’s holy book is Story of O, the infamous French novel of extreme sado-masochism. Their château is a looking-glass world where women reign and men are their willing slaves. Or are they willing? It’s Kingsley’s mission to find out.

Once inside the château, however, Kingsley quickly falls under the erotic spell cast by the enigmatic Madame, a woman of wisdom, power, and beauty. She offers Kingsley the one thing he’s always wanted. But the price? Giving up forever the only person he’s ever loved.

The Chateau is a new standalone Original Sinners novel from international bestseller Tiffany Reisz, author of The Siren and The Lucky Ones.

Excerpt

The dream always begins the same way. In the winter. In the woods. 

Kingsley stands in snow surrounded by shadows. None of the shadows are his because he’s not really there. He leaves no footprints as he walks. He does not see his steaming breath as he breathes. He is a ghost in this white forest, but he is not the only ghost here.

Before him stands a door. 

It’s an arched wooden door alone in the woods. It belongs to an old chapel, but there is no church here, no chapel, no house. Only a door. Kingsley can walk around the door, but nothing will happen. Nothing will happen at all until he steps through it. The iron latch is cold enough to bite his bare fingers, but he doesn’t feel this either. He lifts it and passes through the door, because that is where the boy in white waits for him.

The moon is full and high, and the snow is bright, and he can see the young man so clearly it’s almost as if it were daytime, almost as if it weren’t a dream at all.

The boy in the clearing is beautiful, his hair so blond it looks almost white. His hair is white and his clothes are white, not snow white but a purer white, a baptismal white. 

Kingsley speaks a word—either the boy’s name or “sir.” When he wakes he can never remember what word he says. 

The boy, luminous in his pure white clothing, stands next to a table made of rough stone and on the stone table is a chess board made of ice. 

Even though it is a dream, and no one has spoken but him, Kingsley knows he is supposed to sit and stay and play the game. It’s the rules. If he doesn’t play, he’ll wake up, and the last thing he wants is to wake up now, to wake up ever. 

He sits opposite the young man with the white-blond hair. The chess board is between them. Everything is between them.

Kingsley moves his pawn.

“You’re not really here,” Kingsley says to the boy with the snowy hair and the silver eyes. The boy’s beauty renders the dream a nightmare because Kingsley knows when morning comes, the boy will be gone and nowhere does such beauty exist among his waking hours. Not anymore.  

“How do you know?” the boy asks, moving his king.

“You look eighteen,” Kingsley says, moving another pawn. “You’re twenty-five now. I’m twenty-four.”

The boy moves his king again. “In your memory I’m eighteen.” 

“That isn’t how you play,” Kingsley says. “You can’t move the king like that.”

“It’s my game,” the boy in white says. “I move my king however I want. Don’t you remember? 

Don’t you remember the way I moved my King anywhere and everywhere I wanted him to go?”

Even in the snow and the cold, Kingsley grows warm. 

“I remember.”

Kingsley moves his bishop.

The boy in white moves his king again.

“I don’t know how to win this game,” Kingsley says. “How can I win if I don’t know the rules?” 

The boy in white narrows his silver eyes at him. “You’ve already won.”

“I have?”

“To play is to win, if you’re playing with me. Isn’t that true?” the boy asks with an arrogant smile in his eyes. 

Kingsley knows this is true though it galls him to admit it. He doesn’t care who wins the game as long as the game between them goes on forever. He moves another pawn and the boy in white captures it.  

To be the pawn captured in that boy’s hand…

“How do you keep finding me?” Kingsley asks.

“You came to me,” the boy says. “I’m always here.”

“I lost you,” Kingsley says. “Seven years ago. I lost you.”

“No,” the boy says, smiling for the first time. His face is like Michelangelo’s David, passive and powerful and carved from pale marble. His eyes are granite and if Kingsley had a chisel he knows he could chip away at the boy’s chest until he uncovered an iron and copper wire heart beating inside a steel ribcage.

“No?”

“You lost you,” the boy says. The smile is gone and it has begun to snow again. When it snows, Kingsley knows the dream is almost over. All he wants to do is stay asleep a little longer. All he wants to do is stay asleep forever.

“How do I find you again?” Kingsley asks. “Please, tell me before I wake.”

“You don’t find me,” the boy says. “I find you.”

“Find me then.”

“When it’s time.”

“When will it be time?” 

The boy in white moves his hands over the board and Kingsley looks down. The ice king lays on the board broken in two pieces. 

“When?” Kingsley asks. He is a child again, asking a thousand questions in the quest for a single answer. The snow is falling harder now, heavy as rain and hot as tears. “Tell me when, please…” 

The boy leans across the board as if to kiss him, but instead of a kiss, Kingsley is given an answer. 

“When you find you.” 

Between the kiss and the answer, Kingsley would have picked the kiss.

Review

“Where she was taking him, the women ruled the men. Considering every wound on his body, heart, and soul had been inflicted by a man—the deepest by a boy— Kingsley couldn’t get to her chateau fast enough.”

Nobody who has read my blog before will be surprised when I say that I adore Tiffany Reisz and her books. And while all her titles are fabulous, the Original Sinners series holds a very special place in my heart. So, when I discovered there was going to be a new story, featuring a young Kingsley, I may have squealed. The press release describes the book as follows:

“It’s James Bond with blow jobs, BDSM, and an angst-ridden bisexual hero still in love with his ex-boyfriend.”

And that is exactly what this book is, a thrilling combination of angst, eroticism, tension, and mystery. It is also the reader’s opportunity to discover exactly how, why, and where Kingsley learned his tricks of the trade. Because the Kingsley we encounter in this book is not yet the man we’ve got to know and love in the first eight Original Sinners stories. Sure, the seeds are already there, but it is in The Chateau that those seeds find fertile ground and take proper root.

It was funny to discover I actually have something in common with Kingsley Edge.

“He’d first read the book when he was a boy, sneaking it from his parent’s bedroom shelf when they were out.”

I stumbled across that book at more or less the same age as Kingsley and in exactly the same location. And I have to admit that I was as fascinated with the story as he was. Therefore it was a pure delight to read The Chateau and to be transported to a place where O’s world has been turned on its head and it is women who control and ‘use’ men.

If Søren fascinated you in the earlier books, you’ll find, Madame, his female counter-part equally mesmerizing. Both of them have a cruel streak that knows no bounds. Then again, both of them are self-confessed sadists, so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.

“I like seeing men naked. Nothing strips a man more naked than the things that cause him pain and the things that make him afraid.”

And, without giving anything away, I have to admit that Madame takes cruel to a level I’m sure Søren would have approved of, maybe even envied. But, just like her male counter-part, Madame operates by an ethical code. It may be one foreign to most of us, but both of them have their limits. Even if both Søren and Madame stretch those limits to their fullest extent. I do have to admit that at one point, my heart shattered for Kingsley.

It’s what you’ll allow me to do to you. If your willingness to suffer is infinite, then my capacity to hurt you is bottomless. Do you understand?”

I could rave about this book for another thousand words or more. Since this already is a very long post, I’ll try to curtail my enthusiasm. Suffice to say that The Chateau captivated me. I read it from start to finish in one afternoon completely lost in Kingsley’s adventures and pain. If there is such a thing as the perfect combination of sexy, thrilling, touching, and intriguing, this book may well be where I found it.

For me this was the book that fully fleshed out Kingsley, and as such a wonderful addition to the Original Sinners series. If you haven’t read any of the earlier books, this may well be the book that pulls you into the unique and addictive world Tiffany Reisz has created. Either way, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

And finally, I have to admit that I’m having a hard time containing my excitement because the next stand-alone Original Sinners title has already been announced. The title is Picture Perfect Cowboy and will be released in October 2018. For the first time in probably forever, I almost find myself wishing summer away. J

The Author

Tiffany Reisz is the USA Today bestselling author of the Original Sinners series for Mira Books and Mills & Boon, including the RT Book Reviews Best Erotic Romance 2012 winner The Siren and the LAMBDA Literary Award-winning The King. Her novel The Saint won the Romance Writers of America RITA® for best Erotic Romance in 2015.

Follow Tiffany on Social Media: Facebook • Twitter • Instagram

About 8th Circle Press

8th Circle Press is a Lexington, Kentucky-based publisher of literary friction. For more information, visit our website at www.8thCirclePress.com.