Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle) (19 page)

“I know Sam wants me, Jackson,” Hannah said sadly, “but what if he doesn’t
want
want me? There’s so many beautiful women here—big, skinny, curvy, plain, pretty, gorgeous…sub-frenzied brats, scene hogs and pain sluts…Master Marshall sends one to see him at least once a day.” She turned her head, trying to hide now the way she swiped at one cheek but not before he saw the glitter of a tear. “And he plays with all of them,” she admitted. “He’s a great admirer of pretty things. He told me that once. It doesn’t matter what they look like, he finds something pretty in all of them.”

“Do you think that somehow detracts from what he finds in you?”

“No, of course not.” But her eyes betrayed that for a lie. She faked a smile—amazing how alike they were—she even laughed a little, but those high, tinkling notes couldn’t hide how she really felt. “But…but how can I compete with that? Last night, he had a girl in a private room and I was helping him. I saw his face as he played with her. I saw his eyes. He went into a deep, deep place with her and he did things he never does with me. I don’t think I
could
do those things! So if I can’t do that for him, Jackson…how can I compete?”

There it was again, that same exact look that Sara had once given him. No, not once, he suddenly realized. It wasn’t just in the hospital. She had looked at him that way back at the Shadowbrook Den, not just the night they’d played together but every time afterward when he would approach her and she would claim her dance card already full. And it was this same exact look that she’d given him two days ago, crumpled on the men’s room floor with tears on her face and urine soaked into her torn dress.

Struck, Jackson turned around, searching across the crowded room until he found Sara, standing at the cross just as he’d told her to be, still fully clothed (definitely not as he’d told her to be), staring back at him…and Hannah. She quickly looked away fixing on something else, but not before he recognized that exact same look and the understanding that followed that recognition hit Jackson like a fist to the gut.

“Do you want more than just those?” Hannah asked, gesturing at the twin floggers hanging forgotten from his hand. His talk obviously hadn’t helped her. She wasn’t crying, but she still looked depressed.

Jackson shook his head. He started to walk away but came back after only a few steps and reached across the counter to catch the back of her neck. He pulled her close enough to kiss the top of her head.

“Thank you, Hannah,” he said, and ruffled her hair. He headed back to Sara then, but as he walked away he snapped his finger back at her and called out, “He loves you to pieces, you know. Whether he’ll say it or not.”

Blushing furiously, Hannah glanced around at everyone close enough to hear that and interested enough to turn and look at her, quickly ducking back down behind her counter to hide until her wave of embarrassment passed. For Jackson, nothing and no one else mattered in that moment but getting back to Sara.

He wrapped his arms around her, letting his embrace reassure her as to whom in this place he wanted. The tails of the suede flogger trailed her stomach and brushed her mons as he pressed a tender kiss upon the soft bare skin of her neck. Her body melted against him. When she turned to gaze up at him, he took a rogue’s advantage of her availability and kissed her like he owned her, like he couldn’t get enough of her, like a man who’d been in love for a very long time without any way to express it.

He loved her. He’d never thought of it in those terms before, but that revelation was hardly a surprise. He’d loved her long before she waltzed back into his life, and he suspected now he always would. She was inside him, an aphrodisiac he hadn’t been able to shake for three long and lonely years. He thought he’d moved past it, but she’d only been back for two days, and she was so deep inside him now that he knew there could be no moving past this. He was a big man, a powerful man. As humbling and as corny as it was to admit, he could more easily move mountains with a teaspoon and a bucket than get over her a second time.

He touched her face, letting her feel his fingers and smell the leather, and knew when she left tomorrow, as all clients had to, there was no way he’d be able to let her go without some way to keep contact between them. He could get her address and phone number from Marshall’s office. He could get her email address from her online application. He’d message her every day, call when he could, and do whatever he had to
do to find a way to allay whatever stupid little fears she was harboring in that beautiful head of hers. And eventually, somehow, he’d bring her back again. She’d be a lady of the Castle, just like Hannah and Kaylee were. Only Sara would be his, the beacon that would draw him home every night, the soft welcoming flesh that he would pour his needs into until they were both too exhausted and sated to move.

He stroked her cheek, first with his hand and then with the soft flogger. Leather had always held a special place for Sara, and so he took her into the zone. He let the smell of worn leather fill her with every breath, and he let the touch of the tails glide down her body—first, the suede, and then the kangaroo hide. Both held their own seductive appeal and she was already responding, standing so silent and still under the slithering caress of the tails while her small hands touched him, grounding herself in the moment simply by laying her hands upon his chest.

He brought the softer suede flogger up her body, letting her feel the tails stroking up through the valley between her breasts until he cupped her throat. He held her, rocking her, letting her absorb the textural seduction of each flogger whispering their individual strands across her skin, while her breathing slowly changed and her nipples grew taut against the stiff fabric of her corset. Her hands on his arms had fallen still. They gripped him now, tense and tight, the way she would grip the wrist straps on the A-frame. Her body against his felt finely attuned, ready, supple, moving as he moved, as he wrapped his arm around her. One flogger lightly tapped her sex and between her legs. His other hand still cupped around her throat, he walked her into place against the frame.

The padding here was leather, too. The scent was inescapable now, tainting every breath she took and filling her with the subtle scent she loved. He saw her close her eyes and lean in to press her forehead, and then her cheek, to the cool cushioning.

“Where shall I take you, baby?” he murmured in her ear, his voice as smooth as silk. “Are you aching for heaven or hell?”

Her eyes closed. She arched, sinuous against him “Either. Anywhere you please, Master.”

The tremble that shivered her, rippled through him next. She’d just called him Master. Not Master Jackson or Jackson, but Master.

“That’s my girl,” he breathed, the touch of her, the smell of the leather, the pulse and beat of the dungeon music and that one little word, they all dug into him, pulling him into a powerful and energizing place. “Yeah, that’s my good, good girl.”

This was going to be nothing but pure heaven for them both.

Sara shivered uncontrollably but not because she was cold. Her nose was mere centimeters from the black leather padding. It was all she could smell as she breathed, and all that she could feel was the touch of Jackson’s hands as he lifted each of her arms and bound her to the cross. She could have slipped her wrists into each of the straps and simply held on for whatever duration he chose to keep her here, but he wanted her to feel captive to him, and there was no denying how the sensation of those wide leather cuffs buckled securely around her wrists made her pussy clench. Moisture trickled down through the folds, liquid proof of the need that each fastening buckle only amplified.

Once her wrists were bound to the frame just above her head, Jackson paused to kiss her shoulder. His hands wandered her, touching all that he could reach, caressing up her arms and down to her ribs, curving around to cup her breasts and squeeze. He rolled her nipples between his fingers, plucking until she could hear echoes of the sensation catching in her own shaky breaths. Then down his fingers wandered, circling her navel once before venturing on to cup and squeeze her sex next. Her panties were already soaked. She could both feel it and hear it as he stroked her and then gripped.

“Whose pussy is this?” he asked.

“Yours.” No other answer felt half as honest as that one did. He did own her—her sex, her breasts and her breath, her lips…every part of her felt branded by his proprietary hold. She liked it. She liked it when he shoved his fingers up inside her, restricted as he was from penetrating too deeply because he didn’t bother to get his hand under her panties first. He rubbed her, palming and massaging her clit with the ball of his thumb even as he thrashed his fingers wildly back and forth until, even above the crowd, the talking, the music, the swish and crack of more than a dozen implements impacting bare flesh, the moans, the cries of orgasms and of pain, she could hear the wet, slick sounds of her own arousal.

He arched her onto her toes against the padded A-frame and brought her head crashing back against his shoulder as the first of many
keening cries rushed from her trembling lips.

He ripped the corset in his haste to get the laces loose enough. He stripped her, pushed and shoved at her clothes until he got them down past her waist, then hips and finally, he dropped them into a puddle of forgotten cloth around her ankles. Corset first, then panties, followed quickly by the nobleman’s shirt he wore, and now they were skin to skin. His pants were still a barrier between them, but his chest felt like a furnace at her back and his strong arms were bands of steel holding her against him. He gripped her pussy, his strong fingers alternately rubbing and invading and rubbing again.

He began to kiss his way down her back, pausing to nip here and there—at her shoulder blade, along her spine, the upper curve of each of her buttocks, and back up along her scarred side, leaving no inch of her uncaressed, unlicked, unkissed. He rubbed her back and then, in soft, rhythmic motions, began to pat it. Across her shoulders, back and forth; around and around. He kissed her constantly, now and then pausing to suckle, to raise flushed red marks, to decorate her body like rubies.

She lost herself in the pulsing pull of his mouth and the rhythmic pat of his hand. It fell in perfect time to the deep bass of the music. Led Zeppelin: music to be spanked to.
Jackson fell right into the beat, letting it move them both. All the rest of the room just melted away, and they became a world unto themselves.

His hands fell from her back to grip her buttocks instead. Jackson squeezed, prying them apart as he laid one last kiss on the side of her neck, and then he let her go and stepped away.

A whisper of movement passed behind her. She braced herself, thinking at any second she would feel the first soft blow, but instead his hand returned to her bottom, caressing and tracing up and down along the valley between her cheeks. She sighed when his fingers pushed down between her legs to cover her molten sex from behind. His fingers dipped into slick heat and parted her folds, two thick digits invading inside her without a single word of warning. She clenched in tight around him, holding him, wanting to pull him deeper, but he withdrew almost immediately, and a second later the cool metallic sphere of a pleasure ball was pushing in deep in his place. Jackson used his fingers to shove the sphere as far up as he could reach and it wasn’t until he withdrew, leaving her to grip and hold it, that she realized the ball was weighted. A ball within a ball; when the inner one rocked, each tap sent a shock of pure pleasure vibrating all through her.

“Oh!” She locked her muscles, but with every motion the inner ball rattled against the outer and the vibrations made her sex spasm in orgasm-like waves.

“Oh! Oh no!” She rolled her lips to keep back her protests when she felt his hand push back between her legs and another object was inserted. Smaller than the pleasure ball, more oblong than round, without seeing it, she had no way to identify what he’d put inside her. The second pleasure ball that followed it, however, sandwiching the unknown object between the two weighted spheres, was easier to figure out.

“Don’t let them drop,” Jackson warned, his breath hot against her ear.

“Yes, Master.” She concentrated on tightening her vaginal muscles and brought her legs in tight together in an effort to keep the balls where he’d put them.

Another soft whisper, this time of leather tails swinging free
, was the only sound that betrayed that otherwise silent moment when Jackson picked up the suede flogger with intent. Sara breathed in slowly, closing her eyes, bracing herself all over again. Once upon a time she had lived for this. She had never missed a munch or play-party, hungrily seeking out this moment. They called submissives like her either scene hogs or scene whores by those who both admired their stamina and sought to partner with them. She couldn’t remember half of their faces now, but she did remember this thrill, this insatiable hunger to be taken, conquered, made to
feel
.

The suede flogger struck, a whisper of force that slapped her buttocks with barely any force and yet it jolted her hips and rocked the pleasure balls deep inside of her, sending those delicate spasms racing up through the walls of her sex. Sara gasped, heaving up on her arms as if to get away from the sensation, which only made the spasms worse. She tightened her muscles and her thighs, fighting herself not to move, praying for the balls to be still inside her, but that never happened. Jackson struck again, and the pleasure rocketed through her, like nothing she had ever known
, and yet it felt so much like coming home. Foreign, yet familiar. Comforting in a way that barely even stung.