Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle) (8 page)

And that right there was a really good reason for why Masters shouldn’t scene while angry.

Jackson’s apartment was located at the end of the first hall, the last door on the right. She wasn’t slipping off his shoulder, but as he paused to fish his keycard from his pocket, he hupped her up a little higher just to hear her gasp and feel her hands catch at him again.

Shoving the door open, he carried her carefully across the threshold, shut and locked it and made no effort at all to put her down straight away. Instead, he carried her past the arching kitchen doorway, past the dining table and hall leading back to the bed and bathroom and into the living room. Unlike most of the other masters, the only specialized furniture Jackson had in the entire place was the bondage rings in the posts of his bed. He wouldn’t have had those either, except that he’d opted to fill his place with Castle furnishings rather than lug his second-hand bachelor stuff up three flights of stairs. Also unlike the other masters, until today he’d never brought either the clientele or other employees back to his place before. Pausing in the middle of his living room, Jackson looked around, seriously regretting that lack of foresight. Right now, a proper spanking bench would have done them both a load of good.

He set her down between the sofa and coffee table. “Take off your clothes. From now on, when you are in my home I want you naked and available to me.”

Without waiting to see if she would comply, he bent to rearrange his furniture, pushing the heavy coffee table up to the wall under the hanging flat-screen and clearing out a decent space in the middle of the area rug. When he glanced at her, she was standing where he’d left her, hugging herself, not moving.

Jackson frowned. “Strip,” he told her again. “Or I’ll strip you down myself.”

Eyeing the space he’d cleared, Sara reluctantly peeled out of her scant tunic. He held out his hand, but she clung to it, trying to cover as much of herself as she could, though not because she was trying to maintain her modesty. Sara was a beautiful woman. Once upon a time when she scened, modesty became like a foreign word in her personal vocabulary; Jackson had liked that. She’d never been afraid to show how much she liked participating at the Shadowbrook Den. She used to get nude at the slightest suggestion, but now that seemed to have changed. Or maybe it only seemed that way, since all the parts of her she seemed intent on hiding were the scarred parts. Perhaps she just didn’t realize yet how much of herself was still exposed, like the full swell of her right breast rounding above her arm, allowing the peak of her dusky areola to show just below the golden wisps of her long blonde hair. It was just past her shoulders now and curly as hell, much curlier than he’d remembered.

It had done a lot of growing in the last three years. There was enough there now to run his fingers through and fist while he fucked her. Pulling hair and slapping ass—they were two of his favorite
pastimes, and he happened to know for a fact that she enjoyed them both every bit as much as he did. He liked that, too, almost as much as he liked the way the limp cloth of her tunic followed the lines of her slim body, giving him the barest shadowy glimpse of the vee of her sex along the lower skirted edge. Waxed, not shaven. Baby smooth. That, he loved.

What he didn’t like, or love, or feel any particular inclination to tolerate, was the way she kept trying to stretch the cloth to hide her damaged side. She was blushing, not from the titillating embarrassment of being made to stand vulnerable before her master, but because she was ashamed.

A woman like Sara should never be ashamed of anything, particularly not the way she looked.

Jackson came back to her. As soon as he was close enough, he took the tunic away, tossing it to the floor behind him and leaving her nothing but her hands to hide behind. She tried as best she could though, clamping one arm tight to her side and cupping her bad shoulder with one hand. When Jackson touched her, she tried to evade him, but she just didn’t have enough arms to cover all the parts she wanted so badly to conceal, and his fingers slipped in past her shield to stroke feather-light down the curve of her scarred hip.

She flinched, stopping just shy of pushing his hand away. Her chest was rising and falling fast and shallow. She didn’t look at him but stared fixedly at the ground, blinking to keep the watery sheen in her eyes from building into tears. He waited until she settled and stood frozen once again, then he caressed a measured path up her waist, over the scars along her ribs, and finally stopped when his fingers came parallel to her breast. She squeezed her arm in tight, trying to stop him from caressing the marred skin he found there just behind the fleshy curve.

“Does this hurt?” he asked, letting his fingers move over her, showing without words that he just didn’t care. She was still beautiful to him and always would be, but she still flinched even as she shook her head. No matter how he touched her, she kept trying to twist away, as if she couldn’t bear to have the bad parts of her touched.

“Be still, Sara.” He caught her chin when she tried to turn all the way around. With gentle force, he brought her eyes back to his, refusing to let her look away. “No, I want you to look at me. Look at your master.”

A flash of what might have been anger moved through her eyes, but she swallowed it back. She didn’t say,
“You’re not my master” again, but it was lurking there, right behind the painstakingly neutral mask she was struggling to assume. He didn’t know what annoyed him more—this defiance of modesty that did not become her or the lie of her neutrality.

He was standing directly in front of her now, with barely two feet of empty space between them. He waited until she raised her eyes to his before he robbed her of that space, taking a purposeful step forward. If she hadn’t fallen back a startled step, he’d have bumped chests with her, but it worked. The unexpected closeness robbed her of both her defiance and her mask. She stared at him now, her reluctance and uncertainty all that he could read.

He took another step forward and she promptly retreated, saying nothing, her eyes growing silently wider as, step after step, he walked her across the room. Her retreat ended when she bumped up against the edge of his dining table. With no place left to go, she had to stop.

“Put your hands on your head.”

She hesitated so long he thought he might have to force her compliance, but after only a second more, she raised her arms and laced her fingers behind her neck.

“You can do better than this,” he told her softly. “You’d better start trying, because I don’t think your little bottom can take all the reminders you’re trying to earn.”

He cupped her breast, softening his rebuke with a light tweak to her nipple. It was already standing for him, budding into a tense little peak that begged to be nibbled.

All in good time.

Leaving her standing there, Jackson walked down the short hallway to his bedroom. He stopped just across the threshold, quickly gathering his thoughts as he looked around. Damn. The place wasn’t exactly “company ready.” He tackled the unmade bed first, grabbing the rumpled bedding, giving the sheets a whiff and judging them still okay on that front before throwing the blankets and pillows into a semblance of order. Fortunately, he wasn’t a complete pig. The rest of his room was halfway clean. He grabbed the lone sock from under one corner of the bed and the cast-off jacket from the chair in the corner and threw both into the hamper in the bathroom, along with that morning’s towel. A quick sweep of the counter around the sink, and everything apart from a bar of soap and a fresh washcloth were unceremoniously dumped into a side-cabinet drawer.

Back in his bedroom, he dug through his closet until he found his tool kit. Well, he liked to call it a tool kit. In reality, it looked like an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, the leather worn but still serviceable. For all he knew, it might actually have been one once. He’d found it at a local thrift shop back in his college and ramen noodle days. Most of the ladies he’d visited had liked his attention to detail and discretion whenever Dr. Love—
yeah, that self-appointed moniker still made him wince—came a-calling with his tools of trade neatly packed in this bag. Back then, the sum and total of his “tools” amounted to little more than nipple clamps, a speculum, a double bardex nozzle, a worn length of horse harness that had taught more than one young lady the wisdom of holding still for the “doctor” and a pocketful of pre-lubed, ribbed-for-her-pleasure condoms.

He’d done a lot of growing up since then—in technique, toys and (he hoped) sophistication.

Dragging the bag out onto the foot of his bed, he opened it. He hadn’t used this since his last vacation over a year ago. He quickly went through the toys, pulling out everything not in unopened packaging and depositing it all in the garbage under the bathroom sink. Castle rules dictated every Master keep a mandatory toy chest, whether they played with clients or not. There was always an off-chance that Master Marshall might summon him with a teary-eyed submissive in one hand and a written request. In the last three years, Jackson had received maybe ten such summonses and had volunteered for a handful of others. Not once had he ever brought a client back to his apartment. Have bag, will travel; he always went to them. Still, rules were rules and right now Jackson was grateful for them.

Everything he needed was right here in his bedroom. In the bag, he had his restraints, lube, heating oils, Loopy Johnny, a hairbrush-sized heart-shaped paddle, his specialty "fun-ishment" gloves and a blindfold, among other things. From his toy chest (his top dresser drawer), he selected the rest: nipple and clitoral clamps, clip strings, two sizes of anal plugs, a progressive string of vibrating beads, fresh batteries, fingertip massager and a chastity device. He debated on that last one for a long, long time, but in the end he took it out of the drawer, cut the packaging open and quietly packed his bag.

It had been a long time since he had felt this kind of…anticipation. He was almost giddy with it. Patience, he told himself. He closed his eyes, brought in a deep and (hopefully) calming breath, and adjusted himself in his pants. She did this to him. Had done this for three very long years. If he could keep his head in the game, Sara was going to find out just how sexually frustrating payback could be.

And yet, once more at the foot of his bed, on the verge of closing up his bag and heading back out to the living room, Jackson hesitated. Six slow steps took him back to his dresser. He closed the top drawer and then eased open the next drawer down. He found the picture stuffed down under his stash of socks. Plain dark frame. Wal-Mart special. The only photo ever taken of the two of them together and it was awful—her in her hospital bed, swollen from all the IV fluids, burns and bandages, bald as bald could be; he, half perched on the side of her bed, his arm around the pillows behind her because there was no place he could touch her then that wouldn’t have hurt. His own head was freshly-shaven—solidarity, that was him, all the way—and tipped toward hers. She’d been in a lot of pain that day, but she’d still managed a smile for the nurse who’d snapped this shot. All the nurses had thought they’d made a cute pair.

So had he.

He could still remember how stupid he’d looked and felt the morning he’d shown up to take her home only to find she’d already gone. Without a word or a note. No sorry. No goodbye. No
“Dear Jackson, please get stuffed, love Sara.” No nothing.

He brushed his thumb across her two-dimensional face. It was hard to count the number of times he’d tried to throw this picture away. He never could make himself do it.
Harder than getting rid of it, though, was standing here looking at it. Turning the frame over, he stuffed it down deep under a loose pile of clean socks until it scraped the bottom of the drawer and his hand bumped what he’d really come for.

The collar was a simple leather band, decorated all around with a single line of small crimson hearts and three D rings evenly spaced along the front. He wondered if she would remember wearing it for him the one and only time they’d scened together. He closed his fist around it, feeling the cold of the D rings and the stiff edge of the leather biting into his palm. Unsure he wanted to explain why he still had it, he debated putting it back. In the end, however, he stuffed it down into his doctor’s bag and headed back down the hall to the living room.

Although still standing at the table where he’d left her, Sara had not obeyed him. She was staring down at nothing in particular, holding the nipple he had lightly pinched while the fingers of her other hand explored her side. She was pressing in at herself as if she were trying to echo the places he had touched.

Jackson dropped his bag on the table behind her with a whump of sound that was loud enough to make her jump. She dropped her hands, abruptly tucking the one in against her left side, hiding those damn scars all over again. He had no idea how to make her believe he couldn’t have cared less about them. He had no idea if he ought even to try.

He looked down at her; she stared straight at the floor, and for a long time neither of them moved. More than anything, he wished he could take a moment to hold and reassure her, but every instinct inside him was screaming that softness now wasn’t what she needed. He forced himself to harden instead—his heart, his gut, his expression. “What did I tell you to do before I left the room, Sara?”

She shook her head. The soft sheen of tears flooded her eyes, turning them watery and too bright. “I can’t…”

“You can and you will.” Jackson caught her arm when she tried to shy away. He swung her around, putting her back up against the table, and gave her a single, firm shake. As far as reprimands went, it was the gentlest that he ever gave and yet it sent the first of her tears spilling past her lashes and rolling down her cheek. His thumb itched to caress it away. He caught himself barely in time. “You’re better than this,” he told her, but she was already shaking her head again.