Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle)

by Maren Smith

  She opened wide, closing her eyes to fully savor both the pleasure and the discomfort of his full, deep-gliding slide into the very back of her throat again. He withdrew much faster than she expected him to, and she was just opening her eyes when he suddenly seized her jaw.

  “When I am touching you, you are what?” he demanded.

  “Looking at you, Sir,” she gasped.

  His stare bored into her. His head angled. Coldly, deliberately, he said, “I am going to fuck this ass.”

  His fist was still locked in her hair when he suddenly pushed back off her, rising off her even as he pulled her up off the headboard. He said nothing, but let his fist in her hair issue his orders for him. He dragged her off the pillows, bending her over and forcing her to crawl until she was facing the foot of the bed, and then he pushed her down.

  “I’m sorry, Master Jackson!” she gasped, but she wasn’t. That was a lie. Her body was singing, thrilling at the roughness of his hands.

  He straddled her thighs, grabbing both her bottom cheeks in his hands, squeezing hard and prying them wide apart before abruptly releasing her.

  “Oh my God!” she said first and then shouted it because no sooner had he touched his finger to the puckered rim of her anus, than did he shove up inside her. Just one. One was more than enough. He didn’t even thrust. He simply pressed as deep as he could reach and held himself there.

  His voice when he spoke was a low rumble just behind her ear. “Whose ass is this?”

  “Yours,” she whimpered. “It’s yours. All yours.”

  He shifted and she tensed, every muscle locking in the expectation of what she was sure had to be coming, but he didn’t fuck her. Not with his fingers, not with the jutting length of his swollen cock, twitching and bobbing just above her buttocks, still glistening with her saliva. Bending, he bit her—her shoulder first, then the small of her back, her hip. He shoved the bib of her tunic out of his way and bit first one side of her cringing bottom and then the other, hard enough now to leave the temporary impressions of his teeth, but nowhere near hard enough to bruise or even to hurt. Arousal pulsed through her, hotter and hotter, tighter and tighter, his hands and mouth winding it like the coil of a spring—biting, squeezing, caressing—until there was no such thing as holding still. She moaned, arching her bottom to chase his retreating mouth, aching to feel him sink his teeth into her soft flesh again.

  He slapped her ass, just once, the prelude to a dark chuckle, and the dress box clattered to the floor when he drew up just far enough to pull his fingers from her bottom and flip her sharply onto her back. His hands weren’t gentle; Sara didn’t care if his fingers left bruises. She’d have worn them for him. She’d have worn them like jewelry.

  He gripped her inner thighs, and she opened to him. The look on his face had her bottom lifting, eager to feel his conquering bite there now, too. He was so dark and intense, hungry for her, and she was so fixed and focused on being devoured that at first she didn’t realize what he intended when he caught the bottom hem of her tunic and shoved it up past her waist. With a sharp tug, he had it out from under her and had sat up to pull it all the way off her before she suddenly understood what he wanted and came crashing sharply back to herself.

  He had already seen all the bad parts of her in the dungeon bathroom, and yet just that fast the sexiness of the situation died, leaving behind only tides of dread. Sara clamped her arms to her body, locking under her pits and preventing him from stripping it away.

  Jackson butted up against the block of her elbows twice before he stopped, and that split second look of thwarted desire abruptly shifted into something darker. He looked at her, naked, with wanting on his face and the hard, jutting length of his cock standing high against his belly, and right before her eyes she saw it when he suddenly realized she was doing it deliberately.

  She couldn’t hold his gaze. She tightened her arms around her, curling in on herself as that look in his eyes changed, sharpened, hardened. His head tilted warningly to one side. He tried to tug again, but Sara hugged herself and didn’t move.

  “Mm.” It was all he said, but he didn’t move either. Only his head, turning first one way—looking at the headboard of the bed—and then the other—taking calculating stock of the sparse furniture in the room. Finally, he glanced back over his shoulders at the bondage rings that studded the tall bedposts. He looked at his belt hanging up by the door. Eventually, his dark eyes came crawling back to hers, and she shivered at the coldness she saw staring her down.

  Letting go of her tunic, Jackson pulled his pants up, adjusting himself with visible discomfort twice before grabbing a fistful of her hair and dragging her off the side of the bed. “Get your things,” he ordered, with a not-so-gentle push in the direction of the closet. “Don’t bother dressing. Hurry up. You think you can stop me from taking your tunic off you, just try dragging your feet right now.”

  Sara moved quickly, shakily. She gathered her things, hurriedly stuffing what few things she had already unpacked into the new duffel bag someone—Robert, Jackson, the management? She had no idea—had given her. She glanced back in time to see Jackson irritably adjusting himself behind his fly again. He did not look happy. Not at all.

  He stalked toward her and, hugging her belongings to her chest, Sara backed away. The wall put an abrupt end to her retreat. In the next step, Jackson had her again, by the lobe of her ear this time, a grip that brought her dancing up onto her tiptoes. She hugged her bag even tighter to keep from grabbing at his hand and winced, quickly marching out ahead of him when he pushed her to the door.

  “Where are we going?” she finally worked up the nerve to ask.

  “Where I should have taken you three years ago, before you ever had a chance to run.” Jerking the door open, Jackson shoved her out into the hall. “I’m taking you home.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sara made no protest when he directed her up the stairs, but climbing each step behind her gave him a singular perspective: her ass was amazing. It had always been amazing, frankly, but now it was impossible to take his eyes from. The desire to kiss, suck and bite those wobbly nates watered in his mouth. The need to slap, spank, grip and caress made his hands both itch. Somehow, Jackson managed to keep himself under tight control. All he had to do was wait a few minutes more and then he would have her in the confines of his apartment. And then…oh, and then that gorgeous little ass of hers would be all his.

  They were still six steps from the second floor landing when he suddenly noticed she was limping. He settled a hand on her hip, ignoring the way she jumped at first contact, and felt the knots of scarred muscle bunch and tighten under the bib of her tunic skirt. “Does your leg hurt?”

  She tried to brush his hand away. “I’m okay.”

  “Then why are you limping?” Annoyed, he caught her elbow and pulled her around far enough to grab the duffel bag out of her arms.

  “Stop.” This time, she caught his wrist when he tried to touch her, and the look that crawled across her face as she backed up to evade his reach did something that no submissive in the history of all his years at the Castle could lay equal claim to—it pissed him off. What the hell did she have to be embarrassed about? Did she think she was ugly or weak? Did she think he would take one look at that twist of scar tissue and suddenly, magically forget all the times in the last three years that he’d dreamed of having her walk back into his life again? As if he’d never stroked himself to sleep imagining how she had felt when he’d had her laughing, moaning, gasping, confident, sexy, undulating, sighing, pleading, begging, submitting self beneath him. What did she think, that he only saw her skin when he looked at her? That she wasn’t worth his time somehow?

  Who the hell did she think she was? Who did she think he was?

  Jackson stood opposite of her, two steps lower down, and glared, on the verge of the kind of colossal eruption no dominant worth his leathers would ever have surrendered to on a public staircase. He was a Master, in control of himself f
irst and her second. And rather than lose his shit right there in the middle of a steady flow of ascending and descending Castle clientele, he chose to wait from one slow-bleeding second to the next, until she dragged those dream-haunting blue eyes back to him. And then he knocked that look right off her face.

  He didn’t slap her, not really. The backs of two fingers only just made contact with the curve of her cheek. It didn’t sting or pinken her skin. Hell, it barely made a sound and would have qualified better as a caress. Jackson just couldn’t bring himself to hit her any harder than that, not on the face. Some submissives craved that, but he wasn’t sure if Sara did. Some Doms enjoyed it, but he wasn’t one of them. It tasted too much like disrespect, especially when he was angry. And of all the things he felt for Sara right at this moment—anger most certainly included—disrespect wasn’t among them.

  Still, that one touch, soft as it was, startled her. Her eyes widened, her soft mouth fell open, but that look of unhappy embarrassment didn’t go far. It was still there, lurking right under the surface of her surprise, and not trusting himself to slap her again, Jackson did the next best thing. He ducked and hooked his arm across the backs of her knees and this time succeeded in knocking that look off her in the only other way he could think of.

  “No! Jackson!” She probably thought he was going to drop her headfirst down the stairs. He slung her over his shoulder instead, just another unwieldy piece of cumbersome baggage, and then picked up her bag. He continued on to the second floor while her soft hands fluttered across his back, wanting to grab onto something stable, but unsure of what and where.

  There was a third-floor wing above the nursery and schoolgirl dorm for employees, but the Masters had another, private section for their living arrangements and that’s where Jackson took Sara. The staircase was hidden behind a key-card protected doorway, located just off the main hall past the conference rooms and tucked around the corner in a short corridor just out of sight of the passing public. He set her bag down long enough to unlock the door, then propped it open with his foot while he bent to retrieve it.

  “Watch your head,” he said, giving the spring-loaded door a kick to get it open wide. He was very careful to make sure no part of her bumped against the frame as he carried her through and began to climb the wide straight staircase on the other side.

  “Wh-where are you taking me?” Sara’s small hands gripped worriedly at the waist of his pants as she pushed timidly to lift herself far enough to see where they were going. Those meager efforts stilled entirely when he flipped that tiny bib of a skirt up off her bottom, baring it to the cool whisper of air flowing down from the A/C ceiling vents as they passed under them. He didn’t spank her; he didn’t have to. She reacted to being bared as if that in and of itself were a punishment and there wasn’t anyone else in the hall with them.

  He was going to break her of that. He didn’t know how, but at the moment he was just irritated enough to think making her walk naked through every corner of this castle might just be a good place to start.

  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 tu
rn 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.