by Maren Smith
Someone eavesdropping a little further down the line laughed, instantly attracting the cook’s eagle-eyed attention.
“Hey,” she barked. “My girls may be lazy and they may be bitches, but they’re all mine! You show them proper respect or you can eat in town!”
“Connie.” As softly as Jackson said it, the cook still heard it. She snapped her brown eyes back to him. They were guarded now and harder to read. “I’m pretty sure he was laughing at me.” Jackson smiled and leaned a little closer as he said, soft and seductive for her ears alone, his smile growing when that hitch in the rise of her ample breasts betrayed the catch in her breath, “You and I. The Supper and Show at seven o’clock on Friday night. Don’t be late,” he warned. “You don’t want me to have to come and find you. And don’t you worry about your lazy bitches. I’ll make sure Master Marshall sends someone capable to cover for you. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Connie?”
He knew he was holding up the line, but those around him didn’t seem to mind. They stood silent and watching as twin spots of color rose to stain the testy cook’s cheeks. Her breath abandoned her only to catch in her throat again on the next shaky inhale. Oh yeah, she was very close.
Jackson’s smile softened with practiced ease. “Your dominant half gets all the attention these days, doesn’t it? Your poor, sweet little submissive hasn’t been allowed to come out and play for far too long. Well, don’t you worry, sweetheart. When I’m through with you, you won’t be able to sit down without sobbing for days. I promise it’ll be enough to keep your submissive in hiding for another year at least.”
Snagging two garlic rolls out of the nearly empty breadbasket, he licked the buttery taste off his thumb, cast the still staring Connie a wink, and then headed off into the crowd in search of Sara.
Behind him, Connie’s softly uttered, “Oh…oh crap….” followed him. It was little moans like that that could really put a bounce in a dominant man’s step.
And it was moments like this—he stopped mid-step when he spotted Sara, standing at a freshly vacated table next to a man Jackson at first didn’t recognize, but then did—that could suck that bounce right back out of him.
It was the dickwad, AKA Sara’s newly ex-boyfriend, AKA Robert. He was talking to Sara. He had his hand on her shoulder and seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she was hugging herself, trying to hide the scars her corset revealed. He’d taken her dress and her chemise away because she wouldn’t stop doing that. Now it was his turn to tsk, clicking his tongue against his teeth, every muscle in his body flexing as he started toward them. If he had to strip her naked to keep her from hiding herself, he would. Even if that meant showing her to every eye inclined to steal a peek. Although, considering how two of those eyes would belong to Dickwad, maybe he ought to find a full-bodied Eskimo parka to put her in.
He crossed the dining room, weaving his way through the crowd, never taking his eyes off Robert. The man seemed to be trying to convince Sara to do something. She looked reluctant. She looked miserable. That made him feel better. Of course, the fact that Dickwad was trying to do it with his hand on Sara’s shoulder made him feel damn near murderous.
And she wasn’t telling him no.
They were going to have a talk about that later. And if she wasn’t very, very careful, her part of that conversation was going to happen with her nose two inches from the castle floor and his hand painting a wild tattoo all over her bare, beautiful backside.
Jackson quickened his step, and he was really very proud of himself when he quite deliberately made his first order of business upon reaching them to put the food tray down on the table instead of down straight over the top of Robert the Dickwad’s head. No, a good Dom was a man accustomed to restraint, and Jackson showed some now. He didn’t take a swing. He didn’t even make a fist. All he did, once he got close enough, was look at the man. He must have done that extremely well, too. Robert not only stepped back, but he took his hand off Sara’s arm.
“I do believe I told you to be very careful not to let me see you again,” Jackson began.
Sara startled, snapping around to look up at him.
Robert backed up another step. “I was just talking to her.”
“Now you’re just leaving.”
Irritation pulled at the other man’s features. When it looked like he was about to argue, catching Sara by the arm, Jackson pulled her bodily out from between them. She tried to catch his wrist in turn, but he pulled free. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d ever been forced to hit a paying client—not wrestle them up against the wall or pin them down until the passion of the moment had passed and common sense reasserted itself, but really, truly hit them—and if he could get away with it, he wouldn’t hit this one either…although he suspected it might feel incredibly good to, oh say, feed the man one or two of his own teeth.
“What’s going on here?” The master of the Masters, Marshall came out of the crowd with a lunch tray in his hands and his courtly lady, Kaylee, trailing along in his wake.
Great. The one time he sort of, half-assed started a confrontation with a client and who should show up to watch the situation unfold but the big dog himself.
“Apparently, we’re just talking,” Jackson replied. He tried to keep his tone every bit as light as Marshall, but he knew that blue-eyed devil saw right through it. He saw everything. The submissives loved him for that.
Angel blue eyes slid from Jackson to Robert. “I see,” Marshall said and set his tray on the table. When he held out his hand, Kaylee took it and let herself be guided to the chair he pulled out for her. “It seems a very serious conversation.”
When those unnerving eyes slid back to him, it was all Jackson could do not to roll his. There was a warning lurking in those blue depths that was as easy to read as any book in the master library: Don’t make me have to give out a free vacation.
“I haven’t hit him yet,” Jackson said, squaring his shoulders in irritation.
“What’s going on here?”
It was a damn Master convention, spontaneously taking place right here in the middle of the dining hall. Both Jackson and Marshall turned to see Master Sam, meal tray held shoulder-high, weaving his way between the occupied tables and those guests standing up either to leave or head back to the buffet line. A true sadist, the one the pain sluts and scene hogs both loved and dreaded, Sam looked past Jackson, his dark gaze settling briefly on Sara before he walked around her and neatly insinuated himself between Jackson and Robert.
He smiled, but it was his devouring smile. It was all teeth. “Consider me your rescue,” he told Robert. “Run along, little man. Run along.”
“We were just talking.” Robert backed up defensively, shooting Sara a frustrated look that ended when Jackson stepped between them again. “I was negotiating a scene with my girlfriend.”
Sam more dropped than set his lunch on the table and quickly planted a restraining hand in the middle of Jackson’s chest, shoving him back just enough to keep him from getting his hands on Dickwad. No longer smiling, Sam thrust an accusing finger back at Robert. “Leave,” both he and Marshall said at the same time.
“You don’t negotiate anything with my submissive!” Jackson barked, but Robert had already taken the Master’s suggestion and was across the room, slamming out the door just as fast as his long legs could take him. “Nervy, fucking bast—” But Jackson stopped, abruptly biting back the word when he turned and he suddenly saw Sara. She stared back at Jackson, her eyes watery, hugging herself, her left arm pinned in close to her side, her right hand clamped tight to hide as much of the scar on her shoulder and neck as she could. Crap.
A Little Maid came bouncing through the crowd, her lacy-mobcap slightly askew and her long brown hair bouncing against her back. “Woo hoo!” She held aloft two pudding cups as she squeezed her slender frame in between two occupied chairs and came to a triumphant stop next to Sam. “I had to beat off two subbies with a stick, but I got two of the chocol
ate Jell—oh.” She paused, looking from one somber face to the next, to Sara and then finally turned to Sam. “What’d I miss?”
Once upon a time, if forced to describe Hannah, Jackson would have called her mousy. Hard to believe looking at her now, but she’d blossomed and it wasn’t hard to figure out whom she’d blossomed for.
Confrontation over, Sam patted Jackson’s shoulder twice and then let him go. “Come here, Hannah,” he said, pulling two chairs out from the table they’d commandeered. He snapped his fingers imperiously at one of the seats. “Sit your butt down while you still can.”
She made a face. “What did I do?”
He snapped his fingers again and she glared, but she also sat. So did Kaylee, quietly accepting the chair Marshall still held for her. Sara pulled away from all of them, still hugging herself, still trying to hide herself in that way that drove Jackson absolutely crazy, though not in a good way.
“Come here,” Jackson told her, dropping to sit in the only chair left. He pointed to his knee and waited to see if she would sit or make him chase after her first.
Right now, she was looking very chase-able, but he didn’t think he could trust himself to catch her without kissing her or throttling her or grabbing her ass and throwing her down on the nearest table, clearing away all the people and their lunches with a sweep of his arm, ripping through the necessary layers of clothes and just fucking the hell out of her, because that was the only way either of them it seemed could get past all the minutiae and bullshit and just connect, the way two lovers should. The way he needed to be with her, if she would just let him.
Frustration crashed against him like ocean waves on cliff-side rocks. “Sara,” he snapped. “Come here.”
The look she gave him was still watery, still supremely unhappy, and now resentful, too. “We were just talking. You didn’t have to be so rude.”
“You know better.” Jackson knew better, too, but he still stole a page from Sam’s book and snapped his fingers, pointing sternly at his lap. “Sit down.”
Apparently, what worked for Sam and Hannah didn’t fly at all with Sara. “I am not your dog,” she said hotly.
“Mind yourself,” Marshall warned, and Jackson was about to take exception to his tone until he realized the Master of the Castle was talking to his Lady. Kaylee stared down at her plate, her lips rolled tight together as she no doubt fought to keep from intervening. It likely would not be on his behalf, either.
This wasn’t a conversation Jackson wanted to have in public, let alone in a crowded dining hall in front of his friends and colleagues or the clients trying so hard not to stare as they eavesdropped. He could all but feel them grading him against that imaginary Dom-ideal that existed nowhere except in the fertile vale of their imaginations and works of complete fiction.
Fighting back temper and frustration, Jackson attempted a calming breath. “I said sit down, Sara.” He patted his knee a second time.
“I’m not hungry.” Snapping about, Sara would have walked away, but for the minor eruption that jacked him out of his chair so violently he knocked the chair over. The wooden back clattered against the floor, echoing sharply in a suddenly near-perfectly quiet dining hall.
He was doing this all wrong and he knew it, even as he grabbed her arm. “You have not been excused.”
“I am not your submissive, either!” She yanked to free herself from his grip, but he was years beyond being able to let her go.
“Are you his? Is that whose submissive you are?” And just like that, not only was he having this fight in a very public place, but he was yelling damn near face-to-face and toe-to-toe with her, with absolutely no regard to who was watching or listening or grading.
And she was so beautiful, with that flush of temper washing up through her face to shine alongside the tears in her eyes.
And he had absolutely no perspective and no ability to keep his frustration in check or his temper from shaking in his hands. He was Sampson and she was Delilah, and he was weakening so damn fast, and how was it after all of this that she could still—on any level, even the smallest one—want Robert? “That jackass isn’t worth the fucking ground you stand on! He doesn’t want you! You know he doesn’t! How the fuck could he?”
She recoiled as if struck, her lips parting as she let out a shaking breath and drew it sharply back in again. He saw her swallow hard many long seconds before she said, “Because the only reason a man like Robert would want someone like me is when he needs a third for his scene, right?”
“What?” Jackson stared at her, stunned. “That’s not what I said.”
“Yes, it is.” She shook off his hand, twisting and yanking free when he too late tried to tighten his grip. “I can see what you’re thinking every time you look at me!”
“You can see what I think?” Jackson echoed, incredulously at first, and then with the kind of hot-blooded anger that rocketed up through the back of his head, drilling in through his temples to cast everything in that suddenly too small dining hall in multi-shades of throbbing red. “Baby girl, you see what you think when I look at you!”
Head down, she tried to walk away. She got all of three steps before he had her again.
“Let go!” she shouted, her voice breaking and the first of many tears starting to fall. “Get off me!”
Getting off would imply he was on her in the first place, and in that heart-pounding, blood-boiling half-second of ill-thought-out consequences, in her was exactly where he knew they both needed him to be. The entire dining hall fell away. He lost track of the crowds, the other Doms and submissives, and his friends sitting at the table. He lost track of everything except the way her eyes first narrowed when he grabbed her shoulders and then rounded when he yanked her right back up against him. She tried to bite him, but he kissed her anyway, furiously. Passionately. With everything in him that he was too damned clumsy to say.
“Stop it!” she hissed, squirming to break away the instant his lips unlocked from hers. “Don’t! Jackson—Ah!”
Her squeak became a shout when he ducked down, grabbing the backs of her thighs and tossing her up over his shoulder.
“Jackson!” She thumped her fist against the small of his back; he smacked her up-turned bottom, winning from her a gasp and immediate surrender. Give and take—that’s what good, working relationships were made of.
“We’re going to eat your lunch,” Sam called, grinning, which neatly stopped Jackson about halfway to the exit. He came stalking back to the table, turned and hunkered down.
“Get the plate,” he told Sara.
“Put me down,” she said tightly. “I can walk.”
“In about three seconds you won’t be able to sit, never mind walk. Do as you’re told. Get the plate.”
She made a seething, growling sound in the back of her throat. She also picked up the almost-forgotten plate of alfredo.
“Silverware,” he reminded, and she reached for those, too. Sam quickly plucked both knife and fork back out of her fist.
“Trust me,” he chuckled. “You’d rather eat with your fingers than let her hold either of these right now.”
He was probably right.
“Nothing better than lunch and a show,” Marshall said, as Jackson hupped her a little higher on his shoulder and then headed for the door again. The Master of the Castle raised his hand, offering a slight wave. “Nice meeting you again.”
“If they can keep from killing each other, they’ll make a cute couple,” Hannah said, breaking into the first of her two pudding cups. “I love it when a man goes all Neanderthal like that.”
Sam snorted. “That’s not what you said the last time I did that.”
“It’s not as much fun when you do it.”
“I hope she’s all right,” Kaylee said, watching them go.
“She’ll be fine.” Marshall patted her knee. “Eat your lunch. We have fifteen minutes now before we have to make our scheduled tour of the Castle grounds.”
She made a face.
“I think I’m feeling faint,” she replied, using the same tone.
“I believe science has recently concluded that vigorous spanking can often help, if not completely cure, fainting spells,” Sam interjected helpfully.
Kaylee flushed. “Dang it.” She thunked her elbows on the table and picked at her plate. “Spanking helps everything around here.”
Smiling, Marshall tossed Sam a conspiratorial wink. “Must be something in the water.”
CHAPTER TEN
Sara was on the verge of tears by the time Jackson wrangled his apartment door open and carried her inside.
“I want to go home,” she said, and was completely disgusted with him (and herself, frankly) because it came out sounding sulky and whiny and childish beyond belief.
“Don’t drop the noodles,” was his reply, and damn him if he didn’t sound faintly amused while he did it. First he was yelling, and now he was laughing at her? Feelings of helpless frustration surged. Sam had been wise to take the knife and fork away from her. As mad as she was right now, she probably would have stabbed Jackson in the butt with one or even both of them.
Well, ha on him. She’d been steadily dropping noodles and bits of shrimp like an Italian version of Hansel and Gretel, practically from his first step out of the dining hall. There wasn’t even half a plateful left, and drips and spatters of alfredo sauce decorated the backs of his pants all the way down to his boots.
Carrying her straight to the table, Jackson turned around. “Put it down.”
Her hands shook, but she did as she was told. She even managed not to slam the plate.
Turning away from the table, he put her down next, lowering her gently until her feet touched the floor. Sara managed to keep all the bad she was feeling locked tight inside her, right up until he faced her and she saw his rueful smile.