Oh yes, many things. And they all started with his alter ego. “I’m fine. Where are we off to?”
He put his hand behind my head rest as he turned his head to back into the street. “A little drive.”
“A drive? In a snowstorm?”
One corner of his lips kicked up. “My SUV has four-wheel drive, and I’ve been driving in the snow for years.”
Neither of those things made me feel much better, but it wasn’t because I questioned his ability to handle the roads, it was because I’d really rather not be stuck in an enclosed space with him right now. Six hours wasn’t enough time for me to figure out how to merge Cade and Master Z in my head, and decide how to deal with them both. I needed to get my mind off of it. “How was your week?” I asked. “I haven’t really heard from you.” Which technically, was true, but I’d heard from Master Z repeatedly, with an abundance of flirty naughtiness and references to sex on tables in dark rooms. My personality and Mistress A’s were fairly similar. I felt like our two identities fused well together. But Cade and Master Z seemed like they were on completely opposite ends of the spectrum. They were both alphas, which was a parallel, but Master Z seemed more uninhibited than Cade—or maybe he was just more vocal about it. Maybe he’d done that by design so it wouldn’t tip me off, but it made me wonder who the real person was—Cade, or his guise?
“Good,” he answered. “School was busy, but I’m excited it’s Friday. How was your week?”
“Good,” I echoed back. “Busy with school. Went on a date.” Normally I wouldn’t have mentioned something like that. I wasn’t the type who liked jealous partners, and we weren’t even in a relationship. But I wanted to see how he’d react to the news since he’d been my freaking date!
His eyebrow arched. “Did you?”
I ran my tongue over the inside of my cheek. “Uh huh. Super-hot guy. He really wanted to have sex. I could barely keep my hands off him.”
Cade’s lips started to quirk up, but he schooled his features immediately. “Some men don’t know how to be seductive.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Some men like to give a girl what she wants.”
He gave me a sidelong glance. “Some girls don’t know what that is.”
I took offense to that. If there was one thing about me that had been consistent for the last five years, it’s that I knew exactly who I was and what I wanted.
“Some men,” I said, my gaze like a laser on him, “are actually two people.” I was done with the charade and wanted answers.
He kept his eyes on the road and didn’t respond.
I tried to keep my voice level, but really I wanted to scream. “At what point, do you think, you were going to tell me that you’re actually Master Z?”
His expression didn’t change, like he’d been expecting the question to come up at any moment. I was frustrated he’d waited for me to piece it all together, and that I’d had to bring in a third party when he could have asked me about it as soon as he realized Mistress A and I were the same person…which he had to have realized long ago since he’d been flirting with both me and Mistress A ever since. Cade wasn’t the type to date more than one girl at a time.
“I’m not sure,” he answered, totally calm and like he wasn’t worried that he was sitting next to someone who was on verge of becoming stabby at any moment, “but it would have been soon.”
“Mmmm,” I said, an irritated note to my tone. “And how long have you known I’m Mistress A?”
He exhaled a long breath and bit his lip before glancing over at me. “I started to suspect it at Courtney’s house warming party.”
My mouth fell open and I couldn’t form words for several seconds. “Courtney’s party?” Including the party, he’d seen me a total of three times at that point, and had only had two actual conversations with me. “You didn’t even know me then!”
He lifted a shoulder, unapologetic about his mystery solving talents. He should be a damn detective instead of a lawyer moonlighting as a sex advice blogger. I realized the blog had made me busy and self-involved, but damn. My observational skills needed some work. “Syd talked about you all the time. I hadn’t met you, but I knew a lot about you based on what she’d said. Like the fact you dated a lot, you liked sex, and you weren’t ashamed of it. I completely respected those things. Then at the party, Mistress A was brought up and your body language changed. You shrank back a bit like you didn’t want to be noticed, and you were less outspoken in the rest of the conversation. I thought it was interesting, so I started noticing. Every time I was around and Mistress A was discussed, you did the same thing, folding in on yourself and becoming quieter. Then there was the news about you quitting your job, as well as the posts that seemed to mirror things I knew were happening in your own life. Not to mention the box of sex toys on the table. Some of those instances, like hiding what you were working on and being constantly aware of your word choices, were actions I identified with from being Master Z. But one of the biggest tip-offs was the fact that you brought up not wearing panties repeatedly—both as Brynn and Mistress A—and then included the no panty preference in your response post to Master Z. Still, I wasn’t absolutely sure until we were at the Sin and Sass party.”
Dammit, dammit, dammit! I thought I’d been so careful, but Cade had singled me out as easily as Syd. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to keep this a secret like I thought I would. The realization put me in a foul mood. I folded my arms across my chest and glared out the window at the falling snow.
“You did a good job hiding it, B. I only knew because I’m good at observation.”
“That really doesn’t make me feel any better.”
He glanced over at me, a smile playing at his lips. “Don’t be upset. It’s not like I told anyone. I knew how important your secrecy was to you. I still do. Your identity is safe with me…and I hope mine is safe with you.”
I mumbled an agreement, and sat in silence, thinking about the situation I’d managed to get myself into and mad at myself for allowing it to happen. “If you suspected it was me that early on, what made you decide to start the Master Z blog?”
He took a deep breath. “Syd and I had talked about Mistress A when the blog first became popular. She made a comment that she wanted to know who the mystery blogger was. The more I read Mistress A’s posts, the more I respected her—” he paused and glanced over at me, “—you. And I also wanted to know who she was. Mistress A was passionate, smart, and funny. I opened the blog right before I began to suspect it was you. I didn’t start Master Z to combine forces with Mistress A, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope it would happen. Men and women have a completely different thought process about things. If you can get in each other’s heads and try to understand where the other person is coming from, it can make or break a relationship. I thought having a male and female perspective on the same subject would be helpful.”
I couldn’t deny his points, and after my initial anger at Master Z’s blog had died down, I’d thought similarly. There were always articles in women’s magazines with men giving women advice, and articles with women giving men advice in men’s magazines. At some point, collaborating wouldn’t be a bad idea…I just needed to wrap my head around everything else first.
“I should be a lot madder at you than I am,” I finally said.
“Frankly, I’m surprised you’re not. I thought I’d need riot gear when you found out.” I punched him in the shoulder for that and he grinned. “Why aren’t you more mad?”
I lifted a shoulder. “I’m not sure. Maybe because we’ve already had the fight about you stealing my blog posts and ideas. We just did it as Mistress A and Master Z.”
“But I kept the truth from you.”
I raised a brow. “You’re a brave man to remind me of that.” I shook my head, thinking about it. “I kept the truth from you, too—though I didn’t know you were Master Z. Still, I’d be a hypocrite if I got mad at you for protecting yourself when I’ve been doing the same thing.”
We kept driving, me still staring out the front window, and noticing Cade look over at me periodically. We’d been riding in silence for so long that his voice startled me when he said, “One thing I can’t figure out.”
I gave him a look. “There are so many things you have no clue about, it’s not even funny.”
He tilted his head toward me in concession. “That’s fair.”
The silence filled the car once again until I said, “What can’t you figure out?”
“Why the ‘A’ in Mistress A?”
I’d chosen the A after one of my favorite goddesses. “Aphrodite. Goddess of pleasure.”
“And love.”
“I cared more about the pleasure part.”
He smiled and shook his head. “I knew there would be meaning to it; I just didn’t know what it was.”
“I initially chose Scarlet, but it was taken.”
“Why Scarlet?”
The real reason was that my favorite Scarlet was ruthless, used men to get what she wanted, and was a force of nature. She embodied everything I wanted to be—or everything I’d thought I wanted before I met Cade. I amended the full reason and said, “It’s based on my favorite Scarlet in literature. I like women who go after what they want, and aren’t afraid to speak their mind, regardless of consequences.”
He nodded. “That makes sense. It’s one of the reasons I like you, too.”
I looked over at him, seeing him through a different lens now that I knew both of his sides. I liked what I saw, and wanted to learn more. “What about Master Z? What’s the reasoning there?”
“Master because I’m an alpha and like being the dom in relationships. Z because it’s the last letter of the alphabet. I like the finality of it, and that it’s an uncommonly used letter.”
“It’s not uncommon in porn,” I pointed out.
He grinned. “We should watch some of that. Together.”
Heat immediately coiled between my legs at the thought of watching people have sex, and viewing it with the two personalities I’d been wanting to get naked with for months. “Now sex is on the table?”
He gave me a look. “You had that option at dinner the other night.”
I rolled my eyes. “You wouldn’t have followed through.”
“You’re wrong.”
I blinked, totally taken off guard. “You’ve been dragging this out and not letting us have sex for months, but you would have been fine with a diddle in the dark on a restaurant table? What the hell, Cade?”
“Cade’s been dragging it out to get you more invested and build a relationship. Master Z had no qualms. I was trying to get you to meet up with Master Z from the beginning. If you’d agreed to it earlier, we could have had sex a long time ago.”
I just stared at him. I had no words. Until I did. “But I wouldn’t have even known it was you!”
“Probably not at first.”
I shot him a lethal glare. “Oh, I would have been so fucking pissed.”
“You’re pissed anyway. I was willing to take the risk.”
I shook my head, running all this new information through my mind again. I felt like I was on information overload. “I still can’t believe it was you all along! You were at the party as both Cade and Master Z! When you threw me over your shoulder and dragged me out of the party, you were wearing something completely different than Master Z had been!”
“I changed clothes.”
“Master Z’s hair was black!”
“You’re not the only one who can put on a wig.”
“Master Z’s eyes were green!”
“Contacts.”
“Master Z’s voice was different.”
“I disguised it.”
I shook my head, thinking back to all of the times I should have figured out it was Cade, but didn’t. “You, the buttoned-up lawyer who seemed almost as anal about following rules as Syd, weren’t anywhere near the top of my list of guys who could be Master Z.”
His brows shot up. “Who was?”
“I seriously considered Collin.”
He laughed a lot. “I don’t know him well, but I wouldn’t have placed bets on people thinking it was him.”
Suddenly a thought struck me. “Your tattoo!” I gasped, everything clicking into place in my head. I’d only seen it for a few seconds while his shirt was undone the day he’d ripped my tank top to shreds, but it was in the exact same place as the shadow-faced guy in the photos on Master Z’s site. “Oh my God! That’s really you in the photos on the Master Z website!”
He shifted, leaning his leg against the door and shook his head. “I’m not that dumb. It’s a model. I wouldn’t have risked using my own pics on the site. Even cutting my face out, it still would have been too easy to identify me.”
“But you have a tattoo in the same spot.”
He winced, like he was remembering something unpleasant. “Kind of. It’s a scar that I later had incorporated into a tattoo.”
I looked down at his side, like I’d be able to decipher the tattoo/scar through his shirt. “That’s a strange place for a scar.”
He pressed his lips together, a vein near his temple starting to twitch. “I got it in a car accident when I was sixteen.”
I caught my breath and had to exhale before saying, “You were okay though, obviously.”
He grimaced again. “I was. But my passenger wasn’t.”
I inhaled a rattled breath, pieces of the Cade puzzle falling into place. That explained so much. His commitment to live life without fear, and his feelings about making the most out of life because it’s short. Going through a trauma like that changes you, especially if you feel like you hurt someone else too. Guilt is an incredibly toxic emotion. “I’m so sorry, Cade. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you, but I’m sorry you had to go through it.”
“It’s okay. I’ve come to terms with it. I had a lot of counseling.”
That made sense as well. He seemed to know a lot about therapists, and had analyzed me on his own. If he’d spent time in his own sessions, he’d have a better understanding of that than someone who had never participated in therapy.
The car slowed as we turned a corner, and then pulled into the driveway of a modest-sized rambler. The home was gray brick with black shutters and a large garage. It looked like it sat on at least an acre of land. “It’s actually part of the reason we’re here.”
I pushed my brows together, confused. “Your accident is?”
He nodded, looking sightlessly off into the distance. “The person in the car with me was my sister.”
Tips and Tits: The Word from Mistress A
Sex with Strangers
I’ve written about fantasies before, but have recently been introduced to the popularity of anonymous sex. There are entire websites and apps dedicated to people finding other people who want to meet up to get hot and dirty…and no, I’m not just talking about Tinder and Grinder. The entire point of these encounters is sex. Only sex. Nothing else. With a complete stranger. If names are used at all, they’re usually fake. I’ve talked to a number of people who have tried this. Most say the appeal is that it makes the sex seem exciting and dangerous. The majority of participants never have sex with the same person more than once. Mistress A is a judgment free zone, but I do have concerns. Number one being that we’re pro safe sex at Mistress A, and partakers in anonymous sex aren’t likely to go over their sexual histories before humping-up. I also can’t help wondering what happens if your anonymous sex partner suddenly becomes your restaurant server, neighbor, or boss? That’s next-level awkward. I’ll try almost anything once, but I might be careful about this one.
“I was driving to get ice cream with my sister, Ivy, on a Friday afternoon. She was in the passenger seat. We were at a stoplight and the light turned green. I started to go through the intersection when another car came through going about fifty miles per hour. The car hit the passenger side.” I gasped, immediately putting myself in Cade’s place. I
f I’d been driving with a passenger and then been in a horrible accident, I would have never forgiven myself. The fact that it was his sister, who he cared for deeply, must make that guilt even worse. I would have felt responsible for the rest of my life. I reached over, placing my hand on his leg, a tiny gesture of support as he continued, “The car was unrecognizable. It looked like a pile of metal. Ivy was covered in blood, glass, and shards of metal. I reached over for her, trying to make sure she was okay. I kept yelling at her to wake up, but she was unresponsive. They said I was going into shock. I don’t remember much except me yelling and crying. I truly thought I’d killed her. They kept telling me they had to take me to the hospital and I was screaming for them to let me stay. I felt like it was all my fault, and I needed to stay there to help her—like being there would be able to ensure she came back to life.”
I squeezed his leg, my heart breaking for the teenager who had gone through something so traumatic. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Cade. Your light was green. The other car hit you.”
He took a few deep breaths as he stared out the window. I felt like he was watching the scene replay in his mind, and hoping he could change the outcome. “I know. And that’s easy to see now, but at the time, I just felt helpless. I had a broken arm, two broken ribs, and some of the metal had punctured my side, causing internal bleeding. They took me into surgery and I had no idea if my sister would be alive when I came out.”
I felt awful for Cade, and what he’d gone through. It would be hard at any age, but especially at sixteen. The fact he was still driving a car and didn’t have PTSD was a miracle. I reached over to give him a hug and try to comfort him. Reliving such a difficult moment was not easy.
He hugged me back in a way that made me feel like I was holding him up, steadying him. “She lived,” he said. “Barely. It took the emergency responders over ninety minutes to cut her out of the car. She had internal bleeding they almost weren’t able to stop, a broken leg, broken arm, and three broken ribs.” His voice caught before he said, “And she was paralyzed from the waist down.”
Chasing Brynn (A Tempting Novel Book 2) Page 22