Masters for Hire

by Ginger Voight

  His eyes locked with mine, that darkening gaze of tawny green that melted me all the way down to my toes. I knew in that instant what he was asking. This wasn’t just some job for a week where we’d part ways and never see each other again. He wanted a promise that it wasn’t going to end–that we’d see each other again, that we’d find a way… that it wasn’t over.

  It was everything I’d always wanted, and everything I thought that I feared. Spending the whole day without him, however, had scared me a hell of a lot more. Without hesitation I nodded. “I promise.”

  He kissed me again, long and slow.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There was a moment, just a small one, just after I woke up that following morning, that I thought the events of the previous night had been a dream. That I had wanted Devlin Masters so much that I had conjured him up, like some kind of spell.

  But as I made out the contour of his body lying next to me in the darkened room, my heart soared. He was there. And he was mine, for another few days at least. I snuggled against him. We were both naked so there were no barriers for my hand as it slipped under the covers, drifting lower to that morning erection pitching a tent under the sheet. God, I wanted him. All the time, I wanted him. My hand circled his shaft, and it jerked against me as it began to fill my palm. He shifted slightly in his sleep.

  I kissed my way down his impressive chest, across that tight abdomen, over his tattoo, inching lower and lower until I could worship that growing cock properly. It was so fucking beautiful, especially when it was hard.

  And it was mine. All mine.

  He moaned as I took him into my mouth at last. I teased him mercilessly until he finally woke up. He tangled his hand in my hair, pressing me down and encouraging me to bring him some release. “Coralie,” he murmured, which only made me hotter for him. Every gasp, every moan, made me feel more powerful, like a goddess on her knees. I took him right to the brink before I lifted away and straddled him. He reached for a condom from the nightstand, but I shook my head.

  “We don’t need it,” I assured him.

  His eyes met mine. “Yeah, we do.”

  I was on the pill, and had been for a year. I wasn’t worried about that. As far as I could tell he was extremely careful about disease, so I wasn’t worried about that either. I wanted him to know that I accepted him, that I trusted him… that I was more than some forgettable trick.

  I wanted it to be special. I wanted to be special.

  I shook my head more. “No, it’s okay. I want you know it’s okay. I trust you.”

  “Coralie,” he said as he lifted me away, setting me to the side before he scooted to the edge of the bed. I crawled up behind him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. I couldn’t get close enough. Everything about Devlin only made me want more, which is why I wanted to ditch the last little barrier between us.

  “I want to feel you, Devlin. Just us, nothing else.”

  “It’s not safe,” he muttered, though he grasped my hands in his. “You need to be safe, Coralie.”

  Suddenly I wondered what he wasn’t telling me. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I test and I practice safe sex and I do all the right things, but this job comes with certain inherent risks, physical and otherwise.” His eyes met mine. “And it would kill me if I hurt you.”

  I caressed his chin in my hand, drawing him close for a kiss. “Fine,” I said at last. “We’ll follow your rules.” I reached across him for a condom. At the last second, he grabbed my wrist to stop me. It was as if he knew that once again I was settling, sacrificing what I wanted to make someone else happy. He was clearly torn how to handle this, since his entire goal this week had been to correct that.

  “I need to tell you something.” I sat back on my heels and waited. “Last night…,” he started, but struggled to find the words. Finally he tore the bandage off. “I went on a date with another client last night.”

  My stomach dropped. “What?”

  He gulped as he stood up, and I had to fight myself from looking at his rock hard erection before he tugged on his underwear. “I thought our week was over. I honestly planned to make them give back all your money. So I needed the work. Like I told you, it’s a numbers game.”

  “I see.” My voice strangled in my tightening through. “Did you sleep with her?”

  His voice was soft. “Yes.”

  I turned away. Though I knew it was the price of doing business with an escort, it hurt to hear it all the same. I wanted to be special, and after all our time together, I actually believed that I was. “So you slept with her and then came here to sleep with me.”

  “I didn’t mean to sleep with you,” he corrected. “At least, that’s what I told myself. Maybe I hoped you’d be here in our room when I dropped off the dress. I could have sent it by courier if I wanted. But I think I wanted to see you more.”

  “I see,” I repeated again as I scooted off of the bed to dress.

  “Then I saw you in that dress and you looked every bit as amazing as I remembered. I knew I was lying to myself. I wanted to be with you. I hated going on that date yesterday. She wasn’t you. She wasn’t fun. It wasn’t special. And for the first time in three years, all I could think about was the person I really wanted to be with, which wasn’t fair to any of us.”

  His words were nice and all, but all I could hear resounding in my brain like a room full of cymbals was that he had slept with someone else. He might have been thinking about me, but he was fucking her. And that fucking hurt.

  #FML #FML #FML

  “Why are you telling me this, Devlin?”

  He rounded the bed to take me into his arms. “Because seeing you with that asshole last night nearly pushed me over the edge. Because his hands on your body made me want to rip his goddamn throat out. Because whether you pay me or not, I’d rather be with you than anyone else. And because fucking without a condom is a level of intimacy I haven’t indulged since I started escorting. And I’m certainly not going to start our relationship based on a lie.”

  Start? Relationship?! I gasped as I looked up at him. “What are you saying?”

  He cupped my face in his hands. “Of course I want to be with you, no barriers. I want to be with you all the time, with nothing but your company to compensate me. There’s a reason I needed to push you away yesterday. You’re bad for business, Coralie.”

  “Devlin,” I started, but he put his finger across my lips.

  “I have someone I want you to meet.”

  After we dressed, and I sent a cryptic text to Lucy to explain my absence, Devlin drove me to the northwest part of town, where we finally parked in front of a place called Sonora Wind Assisted Living Center. The antiseptic smell assaulted me like a slap in the face as we walked silently into the sterile building, where Devlin stopped to sign in at the front desk. The nurse gave him a big smile.

  “Good morning, handsome. Didn’t expect to see you here again today.”

  “You know me, Flo. I’m like a bad penny. You never know where I’ll turn up.”

  “Go on now,” she dismissed with a wave of her hand.

  “How’s she doing?”

  Flo sighed. “She had another seizure after you left yesterday. But she seems in pretty good spirits today. We even got her laughing earlier.”

  I could tell the news was bittersweet for Devlin. He held my hand tightly all the way down the hall towards a darkened room marked A. MASTERS.

  My stomach gurgled with dread as we entered the depressing room, where the curtains were drawn tight. A curled figure lay huddled underneath a handmade quilt upon the adjustable bed, and the rusty red hair was stark as it fanned out against the white bed sheets.

  Devlin pulled me around to sit in one of the two chairs beside the bed. “Hey, Mama,” he greeted, and my eyes swung to his in shock. “I brought someone I want you to meet. This is Coralie Cabot. Coralie, this is my mother, Aileen Masters.”

  The shrunken woman’s cloudy green eyes
found mine. She attempted to speak, but it came out garbled. I cleared my throat. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”

  “Mama has been living here for three years,” he said softly, slowly and with a pointed look.

  And just like that, the puzzle clicked right into place. This was why he worked as an escort. Care at a facility like this, for someone as clearly disabled as his mother, couldn’t come cheap. So he found a way to take care of her. And nobody knew the sacrifice he had to make… until now.

  “What were you thinking, Coralie?” he had yelled at me the day before. “They don’t know what I do for a living, and you want to just waltz over there like some pimping fairy godmother?”

  I squeezed his hand in mine, to let him know I understood.

  He leaned back so his mother wouldn’t hear. “She’s been in what they call a minimally conscious state for about four years. Her ex-husband, and our stepfather, was an abusive alcoholic. He couldn’t hold a job. He couldn’t support the family. We were evicted out of at least three places before I moved out the second I turned eighteen. I just couldn’t take it. And she wouldn’t leave.” He sighed. “She didn’t know he was abusing Darcy for years. No one did. Not until that day Mama walked in on him, when he had his hands on Darcy’s body, forcing her to…,” he trailed off with a clenched jaw. He couldn’t even say it. “Mama flew at him with both fists. They struggled and he punched her, which sent her reeling backwards from the second-story apartment, over the balcony toward the asphalt below. It cracked her skull,” he added in a strangled voice. I took his hand in both of his as I listened, tears welling in my eyes.

  “There was swelling, and then she was in a coma. They didn’t think she’d come out of it. For months we didn’t know. That pig ended up thrown in jail, but his buddies bonded him out. Apparently he figured the jig was up anyway. He ended up swallowing a fatal handful of prescription medication, washed down with a fifth of whiskey, before anything could go to trial. The only good thing that came out of his horrible life,” he muttered, before taking a deep breath as he stared at her. “Finally she started to come out of come. She even responded to things like my sister or me, or the doctor, or photos, or music… especially music. The piano,” he added with a wistful smile that broke my heart. “But she’ll never be the same. She’ll never recover. They’re just… maintaining her for however long she lasts. She could live for years or die tomorrow. Nobody knows.”

  “Oh, Devlin,” I whispered as I kissed his fingers softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  He looked at me. “What I did last night wasn’t for me, Coralie. It was for her. It’s all been for her.”

  I touched his face with my hand. “I understand.”

  He nodded and kissed my hands long and soft. He turned on the radio next to the bed, where she could listen to soothing classical music. She smiled at him, which shattered what was left of my heart.

  He didn’t say much more than that until we were in the car, heading back to the hotel. He kept my hand in his; bringing it to his lips often to kiss my fingers, as if reassuring himself I was still there. “I came back to Vegas the second I could, working as a dealer at a casino for a good year, trying to balance all the bills. Darcy worked two jobs, running herself right into the ground so we could pay for Mama’s care. She’s always harbored so much blame, even though none of it was her fault.” That seemed to wound him most of all. “Needless to say, it has not been cheap. So when my first client offered me a thousand dollars for a night of fun, I thought maybe I’d found the answer.” He stole a glance my direction. “She was the one with all the promises for Darcy, to help her sell her clothing so she didn’t have to juggle two jobs while taking care of Mama. I fell in love with her for that,” he admitted quietly. “I thought maybe…,” he trailed off, and then he sighed. “Turned out to be just another pipe dream. I was just another fantasy for my benefactor, who got a lot of mileage out of this idea she could save us, like we were orphans who needed her. But real life gets a little too real sometimes, and that’s bad for my business, too. When she dropped me cold, I still had big bills to pay. Bigger, actually, since we finally found a good place to care for Mama. So I ended up at an agency, and the rest–as they say–is history. I’ve bounced around to all kinds of cities, creating an elite clientele with definite rules to protect me, and to protect them. And until a week ago, it had all worked according to plan.”

  “A week ago?” I echoed.

  His eyes met mine. “When I met you.” My heart stopped. “You’re the first person I’ve ever brought here, because you’re the first person I needed to understand why I do the things that I do. I never cared about that kind of shit before. I was who I was without apology. I did what needed to be done, and that was all anyone could ever ask of someone. But every time I look at you, I want to be everything I pretend to be. I want to be worthy of you, and I’m just not.” His declaration rendered me speechless. “Because of that, I can’t make you any promises, Coralie. I wouldn’t even try. I can’t even give you your goddamned check back,” he added bitterly. “But I can’t stay away from you either. And I don’t want to. So before we take the next step–if we take the next step–I needed you to know the truth. About everything.”

  It was in that moment that I fell hopelessly and completely in love with Devlin Masters. It didn’t make a lick of sense, I knew, but it was beyond me. Whether we had a week, a day or an hour, I wanted to belong completely to him however I could.

  Anything else was settling. And I’d done that enough in my twenty-three years to last a lifetime. For one week I could have everything I ever wanted, just because I wanted it. And I wanted this man more than I had ever wanted anything in my entire fucking life.

  When we got back to the hotel, I led us to our waiting hotel suite, where I took all of the condoms on the nightstand and put them in the drawer.

  We wouldn’t need them anymore.

  He said nothing as I walked into his arms and kissed him as lovingly as I could. He lifted me onto the bed, where we undressed each other amidst kisses and soft moans, but no words. They were no longer necessary. This time when I straddled him, he didn’t stop me. Our eyes locked and held as I slid down onto him, accepting him into my body at last, no limitations, no safeguards–no barriers.

  He pulled me down for a passionate kiss, his hands gentle on my body as we luxuriated in each other. By the time we came, I knew we had done more than merely reach an orgasm. In a moment of blinding brilliance, we had truly become one. For the first time in my life, I knew what it meant to make love.

  I wanted to tell him that, but it was impossible. I couldn’t add to his burden. Instead I showed him how I felt with every kiss and every touch. We created our own little world that nothing could infiltrate, even the incessant buzzing of my phone on the nightstand. Devlin finally reached across me to grab it. It was Lucy, of course. He opened up the camera app to take a selfie of us together, a close-up of our faces as he kissed me on the hair. It was an amazing shot, one that suggested that we were a young couple in love, and instantly became my favorite photo of myself ever.

  He then sent the photo to Lucy. “That should shut her up,” he grinned.

  I laughed. “You don’t know her very well. I give her ten minutes before she’s breaking down our door.”

  He chuckled before he turned back to the photo. “God, you’re beautiful. How’d I ever get so lucky?”

  I snuggled against him. “Right place, right time?”

  We laughed and he lazily scrolled through my photo album on my phone, opening photos I had taken the past spring at our chateau in France. “Speaking of right place, right time,” he said as he swiped through the photos. “Are you at a castle or something?”

  I chuckled. “It’s our family home in France.”

  “Family home? It has a mote,” he pointed out, which made me laugh more.

  “And a chapel. And a vineyard. It’s been in our family for nine generations. Mother and Father married there. Mother is buried t
here,” I added softly. “We used to spend our summers there, up until Mother died. Now it serves mostly as Father’s shrine to the love they shared. He can hardly bring himself to go, but I usually go there at least once or twice a year.”

  His eyes sought mine. “Maybe next time I can go with you,” he said softly.

  “It’s a date,” I said as I kissed him. And, like clockwork, we heard the pounding on the door of our suite. I disentangled myself and reached for my robe. “Better cover up. She’s going to come bounding in here like a wired cocker spaniel.”

  I swung the door open to Lucy, who held up her phone, displaying the photo, with a look of shock on her face. “What. The. Actual. Fuck?”

  “Hi, Lucy!” Devlin called from the other room.

  She immediately brushed past me to race in the bedroom, where she promptly pounced right on the bed. “You’re back?!” she squealed before she hugged him. Fortunately for all of us, he had covered himself.

  “I’m back,” he assured.

  I crawled into bed beside them. Lucy was still trying to process it all. “What is the deal with you people? You change the game every time I go to bed. One day no dress, next day perfect dress. One day no Devlin, next day I get this,” she said, holding up the photo. “Just do me a favor. If you decide to get married, do it on Thursday. I know I’m having two weddings but this one is kind of special to me.”

  “How about Friday?” he teased before he sent me a wink. She gave him a playful punch before she dragged herself from the bed with a sigh.

  “Well, however it happened or what happens next, you both need to get dressed and get ready for our big day. Rehearsals at four. Dinner at six. Strip club for combined bachelor/bachelorette party at eight. Be there,” she commanded with a firm wag of her finger. “Otherwise I’ll blink and you’ll be married with kids and buying a sheepdog or llama or some shit. Jesus!”

  We laughed as she stomped through the suite and out the door. He pulled me close. “Did I happen to mention how much I like your friend?”