She didn’t look convinced, so I added, “Look, it’s for a good cause, okay? The money’s going to The

Good Samaritan Foundation.”

Izzy Pop still looked bemused, so I added, “It helps kids like me—those who need surgery for accidents

or birth defects. It’s a real organization, promise! Dorian’s on the board, so ask him if you don’t believe

me!”

She rolled her eyes. “What is it with those two and their charities?”

I crossed my arms with irritation. “The Michaels brothers are great guys. The American Cancer Society,

Good Samaritan…how many billionaires do you know give that much of a shit about the rest of us? You

should be proud of them.” I didn’t want to have to play my trump card, but she continued to look dubious.

“Dorian fixed my face, remember. Made me the gorgeous stud I am today. I kind of owe it to them.”

That made Iz roll her eyes. “Isn’t that the point of charity? You don’t expect to be paid back?”

“Maybe. But you know how bad things were for me.”

When I was in my late teens, my mom and I were hit head-on by a bus while driving on the highway. My

mom wasn’t seriously injured, but the impact broke almost every bone in my face. Dr. Dorian Michaels

had put me back together pro bono. After a few years of physical therapy, it was almost like it never

happened. I really did owe them something. Besides, the idea of being auctioned off to a hot, single,

sexually ravenous billionaire? I mean, could I really go wrong?

I said all that to Izzy—more or less—and finally she seemed to calm down.

She took a deep breath and her posture relaxed. “You know this could all go terribly wrong, right?”

“How could it go wrong? It’s a temporary arrangement. According to Devon, I only have to serve as a

courtier for a month. Piece of cake.”

“That’s just it, Stef,” she said somewhat sadly. “You’ll have to be with the same guy for one whole

month.”

I threw my hands up. “Come on. You make me sound like some slut.”

“Stef, you know I love you,” she said as she reached for the door, “which is why I’m saying this. You’re a

great guy, and my best friend in the whole world, but you wouldn’t know monogamy if it fell out of the

sky, landed on that beautiful face of yours, and started to wiggle.”

***

Read an excerpt from The Dollhouse Society: Felix by Eden Myles:

I stood on the fringes of the crowd and watched the gentleman secure his courtesan to the post of the bed.

She was naked excerpt for a feathered owl mask and he was securing her wrists to the bedpost with a

number of long, colorful silk scarves, stopping periodically to run the pads of his fingers up and down her

thighs and whisper intimately in her ear. She moaned and rolled her head back, and he nested one hand

into her long, bright red hair and yanked her head back until the pain made her gasp and her eyes fluttered

with pure, unadulterated lust.

He kissed the back of her neck, moved to the chair where a long, rattan cane waited. He snatched it up and

returned to her side, rubbing the hard wood against her back and ass until she moaned again. She closed

her eyes and hugged the bedpost. She knew what was coming.

The first crack of the cane against her bare ass made me jump almost out of my skin, it was so loud and

unexpected. Jesus, Joseph and Mary…

I was surrounded by more than a hundred well-dressed strangers, all of them focused on the gentleman

and his courtesan’s play, and almost everyone in the room wore masks, myself included. Even so, I was

finding it very difficult to “hide in plain sight,” as it were. I knew the other gentlemen and courtesans and

courtiers gathered around me thought I was with someone—I kept shuffling up beside various men in a

kind of incognito dance of invisibility, and I was sure no one had caught on—but I kept thinking someone

was looking at me, maybe noting that my “gentleman” seemed to keep changing over the course of the

evening. Maybe they noticed, or maybe I was just feeling paranoid.

I had never been undercover before.

Normally, I was good at disappearing in a crowded room—mask or no mask. The baby fat stubbornly

clinging to my curves made me look younger than twenty-two, and with my plain brown bob of hair, grey

eyes, and freckled, girl-next-door looks, I could usually pull off looking like everyone and no one. It was

inevitable I should go into journalism and do this undercover gig. It was either that or the FBI, I figured.

Thwack!

I jumped again and watched the beautiful, elegant courtesan writhe and gasp against the bedpost. She was

gorgeous, glamorous in a way I could never pull off, and she seemed to be enjoying herself. But I had no

idea why men and women would want to subject themselves to this type of public humiliation.

I felt someone large moved up behind me and I grounded myself and fiddled with my black feathered

ostrich mask as the gentleman performing for the crowd landed yet another expertly-delivered blow

against his courtesan’s pert ass, a little bit below the first blow. I swore I could feel the vibration of the

caning in my own flesh, and there was a slickness of the folds between my legs that made me

uncomfortable. The whole great room at the center of the Dollhouse smelled like sex and roses. The

hundreds of portraits and erotic photographs covering the walls seem to look down upon the play with

enormous approval.

The man standing behind me made a sound halfway between a snort and a harrumph. I suddenly thought of

that old Sesame Street song: One of these things is not like the others. Could he sense I was one of those

things? That I didn’t belong here?

It’s just your imagination, Felix, I told myself. Relax. The more relaxed, worldly and faintly bored you

act, the better you’ll fit into this group!

But it was hard to relax in this atmosphere. You would have thought I was behind enemy lines, like

Walter Cronkite covering the Vietnam War. As a journalist—well, okay, a journalist-in-training—I

wasn’t anyone’s courtesan and I sure as hell didn’t belong here tonight, watching this gentleman and his

courtesan play.

The assignment in my journalist class said we were to write an impartial article on a controversial

subject we had no previous knowledge about. We were to research it extensively from the ground up and

that it would decide our grade. The other students had chosen subjects like cloning animals, abortion,

stem cell research, and gay marriage. I, being the overachiever I was, wanted something more esoteric.

I’d heard rumors about the Society all over the college where I was studying journalism. At first, I’d

thought it was one of those urban legends, like losing a kidney after getting a roofie, but since I was

studying to be the type of crack reporter who eventually won the Pulitzer, I knew I had to learn more. I

started digging.

At first, everything I found came up dry bones. Rumors, vague whispers, some ancient documents in the