In His Grip: His #5 (A Billionaire Domination Serial)

IN HIS GRIP: HIS #5

(A BILLIONAIRE DOMINATION SERIAL)

by

Erika Masten

KINDLE EDITION

Copyright © 2012 Erika Masten

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Erika Masten

[email protected]

http://erikamasten.com

http://erikamasten.blogspot.com

Published by Sticky Sweet Books. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored on, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual persons or events are purely coincidental.

Warning: Explicit content. Intended for mature readers only. All characters depicted herein are 18 years or older, and all sexual activities are of a consensual nature.

This is a work of erotic fantasy. In real life, please protect yourself and your lover by always practicing safe sex.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

In His Grip: His #5

Excerpt From

My Two
Doms
: Hot Hard Ménage #3

Excerpt From

Bridled: Bitter Creek
Doms
#1

IN HIS GRIP: HIS #5

“He’s the one you wouldn’t tell me about.”

It wasn’t a question. In the diffused light of stone lanterns sitting atop the thick posts edging the patio, I sat hunched over my knees at the end of the chaise beside the sapphire blue villa pool. My face hidden in my hands, I peered through the space between my fingers to read Adrian’s expression. The sequins of my black cocktail dress scratched at the points of my elbows. A cool evening breeze, aiding my recovery from almost fainting during dinner at the resort, chilled my bare shoulders. Still, that wasn’t the reason I was shivering so slightly and tucking my arms tight to my body.

Chloe, what have you done to yourself?

I had fled four thousand miles from bad memories of an absentee father and an unfaithful lover. From a hole in my life that was the loss of my impetuous, overly emotional, but sublimely inspiring mother. And from my ambivalence about what my career as an environmental lawyer had become. As hard and as suddenly as Adrian Knight had aroused and gripped my passions, from the first day I met him, I had seized the opportunity to take control of my heart and my sexuality by denying one and totally relinquishing the other to the control of this sensual, exasperating, enigmatic billionaire. Three months on Knight’s private resort island of Ilha de Flor as his sexual submissive… Thirteen weeks managing the villa and the personal affairs as well as the dark passions of the British Dom with sable brown hair and silvery brown eyes…

And tonight it had all begun to come apart, crumbling as I realized my professed detachment from Knight was a lie, collapsing as I found myself staring at Penn Ellison for the first time since I’d left him over his public indiscretions. Penn was here, of all the places and all the times, trying to buy Ilha de Flor. He was here shaking me from the waking dream that I somehow belonged with Adrian Knight.

Facing the two men over dinner had been so much of an unexpected shock, such an unbearable pressure, that I’d almost fainted for the first time in my life. It had been Adrian’s resort chef and surrogate mother, Manuela, who had seen me wavering under the intense, prying gazes of the two men and hurried me away from them. Hugging me tight to her side, the elegant, black-haired beauty had walked me back to the villa. She’d settled me by the pool in the cool air until Adrian had appeared on the patio and bent his head to whisper to her before wishing her goodnight and sending her away.

Now he stood sideways to me, facing the pool, silently studying the vague ripples along the dark surface of the water. His tuxedo jacket discarded over the back of another chaise, his tie loose under his collar, his hands buried deep in his pockets... His full, lightly tanned lips bowed downward, and the darkness along his high cheekbones and the taut lines of his jaw seemed deeper than the well-trimmed five o’clock shadow or the dusky hues of evening would dictate.

It was still fresh in my memory, that moment back at the resort when Penn had asked me what I was doing on the island and I had lied. When I had hidden—denied—the intimate nature of my association with Adrian, even to a man who had no right to ask that I justify myself. When Adrian’s hand had let go of mine…

I dragged my hands away from my flustered cheeks, tucked the willful strands of my long brown hair behind one ear, and turned my face toward the man I couldn’t help feeling I’d betrayed—despite our clear understanding that this arrangement had never been about love. “Penn and I were together for a couple of years. Not anymore.”

A deeper frown crooked one corner of Adrian’s mouth, and he nodded slightly. “He was the one who introduced you to being dominated. Made you crawl for him.”

And cheated on me.And renewed the ever-deepening well of my mistrust of men in general, especially men of wealth, men surrounded by temptation and swathed in privilege. Men like Knight, or who Knight should have been. Now Adrian knew what I’d done with…
and for
Penn, and I felt more naked than Knight kept me in the privacy of his home.

“Yes,” I breathed out.

Adrian pivoted toward the villa, the soles of his vintage black dress shoes grinding bits of grit against the stone tiles of the patio. Against the rustle of the breeze through tropical leaves and the far off roar of ocean waves, the sound was a high, sharp scratch and a bristle up my back. I braced myself for a confrontation.

Adrian would demand to know more about my relationship with Penn, how the charismatic blond playboy had come to command such loyalty that he could be unfaithful to me and I would still balk at letting him know that I had become involved with someone else. I would have to apologize for or justify the lie that I was just Adrian’s assistant. But would I have to see it again, that almost wounded look of startled disappointment that had broken across Adrian’s handsome face in that instant he had untangled his fingers from mine?

With his head inclined enough to avoid looking at me, Adrian muttered low, his faint London accent lost in the depths of his solemn tone. “We missed dinner again. Manuela could send something over from the kitchen for you.”

Though perplexed at this hesitation before our inevitable argument, I just shook my head and slumped lower over my lap to balance my chin on my balled fingers. “Not hungry.” My stomach was sour, burning.

He still didn’t look at me, damn it, just nodded. “Then perhaps you should go to bed, Miss Bloom,” he said before walking with slow, measured steps back inside the villa. Leaving me alone in the dull hush of the evening and the sudden chill.

Perhaps Adrian was right, about me needing to go to bed. Not just because of the emotional turmoil—the mental exhaustion—I felt facing Adrian and Penn at once, or because I’d nearly passed out. I had lost hours of sleep in the wee hours of the morning, at Adrian’s feet, serving his desires. There had been moments when we didn’t seem like Dom and submissive so much as lovers. But now…

The somber reverberations of Albinoni’s Adagio sounded abruptly through the gaping wooden shutters that made up the wall between the living room and the patio. I caught my breath, whisked back in an instant to the sickening, sinking feeling of being six, eight, eleven… Of sitting on the bare floor hugging my knees in the dark hallway outside my bedroom as my mother played this song low in the living room of our apartment, either on her battered upright piano or from The Doors album she’d had since she was a teenager. It was “the going away song” that meant my father had left her again—left us. After everything she’d given up for him: her education at Juilliard, her family, all the security and opportunity that she’d been born to in a wealthy household.

Her childhood memories had been filled with European boarding schools and world travel, riding lessons and extravagant parties, glamour and a carefree joie de vivre that stemmed from knowing that everything she wanted was ever at her fingertips. Mine…gloomy rooms and threadbare furniture, thrift store clothes that never quite fit, and that old piano playing out the scenes of heartbreak, bittersweet reunion, and heartbreak again. Over and over. She had been the only source of light, the sun in that dingy apartment, that dingy life. With her warm smile and unwarranted optimism, her passions and hopes and anguishes wrought upon ivory keys. And now I was hearing that song from Adrian’s fingers, when I was the cause.

Fifteen days… For the first time in more than two weeks, I slipped into the bedroom by way of the patio shutter to avoid walking through the living room and slid into Adrian’s oversized canopy bed without him beside me. I slept like I ceased to exist, never moving, not dreaming, and certainly not resting.

In the morning, with the golden sunlight that seemed so particular to Brazil sifting through the wooden slats of the shutter wall, I found Adrian’s side of the bed still bare, the cream-colored sheets unwrinkled. I sucked my bottom lip to keep it from trembling and wondered where he’d slept. Had it really been so easy to shatter the tenuous balance we’d found with one another over the past several days? One glance at Penn Ellison. One ill-conceived moment of cowardice. One lie, about who I was to Adrian Knight, about what he meant to me.

My limbs felt leaden as I shuffled along the luxurious wooly rugs and textured concrete floor into the bathroom and stumbled gracelessly into the shower. With the water coursing over my face and clearing my head, I replayed the scene from the night before in my mind. That moment when Penn’s luminous blue eyes had met Adrian’s… The way the dashing blond heir’s expression had brightened decidedly, so unexpectedly, at the sight of me… And the way the two men had spoken to one another, sparing behind a thin veil of civility.

Alexander. Penn had said Adrian
Alexander
, not Knight. Where had I heard that name before? I sifted mentally through more uncomfortable details from the unexpected collision of the double lives I’d been leading, and then it came to me. Alexander Engineering & Construction. It was a British company—no, an
empire
based on commercial development, large scale project management, and contracts covering everything from oilfield services to emergency military support, all delivered with a mixture of stunning success and questionable business practices that bordered on criminal.

I hesitated where I stood under the rushing stream of warm water and thought back over everything Adrian had said about his father’s family. Very bad men with too much money they put to no good use. I knew from industry articles in newspapers and journals that AEC or one or another of its subsidiaries had run into legal problems every couple of years. The allegations included everything from the abuse of substantial contracts for providing emergency support to military units stationed all over Eastern Europe and the Middle East, to the use of shell companies in the Caribbean, to outright bribery of government officials worldwide.

Dread settled over me, spreading along the back of my scalp and running down my neck and spine as surely as the water from the shower. Those were the people Adrian came from? Exactly the sort I resisted taking on as clients back at the firm, even to the detriment of my career? My mind buzzed with a whirl of chaotic flashes covering the last two weeks. All my questions about the island eco park project… Adrian’s evasions… Christ, even the incident with the investigator from IBAMA, the Brazilian environmental police. Vaz had been fishing for a bribe, it was true, and had even mistaken me as a negotiation incentive, which Adrian made him regret. But what about his allegations that the park permits and environmental documentation were out of sorts?

“No,” I whispered aloud. I had told myself I wasn’t going to do this to Adrian again. No more jumping to conclusions based less upon his actions than on my biases from previous experiences with men of privilege and power. I had challenged him over sabotaging his project manager’s efforts to hire on with someone else, only to learn Adrian had been protecting him from taking a position that would have derailed or tainted his career forever after. I had made assumptions about Adrian’s relationship with Nina Talbot, and I had been wrong then, too. And about Luiz…