MASTERS FOR LIFE
Book II of the Masters Saga
By
Ginger Voight
© 2015 by Ginger Voight
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Just a little taste…
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?”
I paused by the side of the bed. “It looks like you think you’re going to tie me to this bed.”
“I don’t think I’m going to tie you to the bed, Coralie,” he said. He turned to face me. “I know I am.”
My stomach dropped. “I don’t think so.”
He rounded the bed to approach me. “Why not? That’s what my good girl has always wanted, isn’t it? A walk on the wild side with an alpha male, who would take her in hand and make her submit.” He stood right in front of me. I could smell the booze on his breath. “A bad boy who would take all her choices away, so she doesn’t bear any responsibility for all her naughtiest desires. You need the baddest of the bad for a job like that, darlin.’ Someone a little…,” he trailed off as he leaned even closer, “unpredictable.”
I shivered in spite of myself. His fingers chased the goose bumps down my arm. “We didn’t cover everything in Vegas, did we? We left a few stones unturned. Let’s turn them over. You know nothing would turn you on more than to be tied to this bed, at my mercy.”
Again I shivered. “Devlin.”
“For the rest of the night, until I tell you otherwise, you will call me sir,” he instructed as his eyes met mine. It was a potent look that welcomed no argument.
“Devlin,” I tried again, this time a little sharper. He responded by stepping closer.
“I said,” he repeated slowly, taking my chin in his hand, “you will call me sir.”
My eyes widened as his mouth descended on mine. Despite the light bondage and submission he was suggesting, the kiss was positively gentle. He teased my mouth apart with his lips, probing my mouth just lightly enough to make me melt against him. And he knew what kind of power he had over me the minute I kissed him back.
I was a junkie. And he was my fix.
He wound his hand in my hair and pulled my head back so he could explore my neck. “That’s my girl.”
***
CHAPTER ONE
It only took me two weeks to determine once and for all that time was a relative thing.
It was something I probably always knew deep down, I just never really thought about it before. I shrugged it off the way most people shrugged it off, a sort of “time flies if you’re having fun,” kind of thing. Good things were always over in a flash, while the bad things jammed the pause button, passing each minute frame by annoying frame. You felt like you were in slow motion while the whole world was being fast-forwarded. The same amount of time could inch by like mud until something good happened again to reset the clock.
Two weeks. Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours. More than one million life-changing seconds. Same amount of time, but the weight of that time depends entirely on how it was spent.
As it turned out, two weeks spent in Las Vegas, with one of the sexiest men on the planet, was plenty of time to turn a life upside down.
And I should know.
It happened to me.
Coralie Masters here. It was Coralie Cabot when we first met a couple of weeks ago, when I was whining about a chaotic life where I never seemed to get what I really wanted. It only took two weeks to get everything I had spent a lifetime pining over, but funnily enough, this threw my life into even further turmoil. I skipped gaily past chaos right into calamity.
Or at least that’s how it all felt in those first confusing moments after I woke up that Tuesday morning in early June, in the unfamiliar apartment that belonged to my new husband, Devlin Masters.
I often wondered if everyone got a chill when I said that name, or if it was just me. I kind of always assumed it was everyone, particularly women, since giving women a thrill had been Devlin’s particular specialty. You see, Dev belonged to an elite group of men who made it their priority to fulfill the fantasies and desires of women, simply because they got paid very well to do so. And one didn’t simply become “elite” by accident. If ten thousand hours was all it took to “master” anything, my new husband had more than enough time under his belt honing every trick of his trade. Over the past three years, he had gotten being anything and everything to all women down to a science.
Well, maybe not all women. Just the ones who paid big bucks for the privilege.
Yep. I married my male escort, which sounded a lot crazier than it felt. If you had spent any time at all with him, you would understand why I did what I did. There was a reason Devlin could charge hundreds–thousands–of dollars for his time. It wasn’t just because he looked good, though he did. It wasn’t just because he knew how to fuck, though he most certainly did.
It was because he truly was a master at his craft, adapting himself like a chameleon to meet each and every specific need for his coveted clientele. He had a keen instinct how to make any girl feel like the only girl in the world, and in this modern age that skill was money in the freaking bank. Many successful modern women simply didn’t have time to date, rolling the dice on some stranger to see if he could fulfill her or satisfy her. She wanted to get hers and was willing to fork out a little dough to make sure that happened.
He must have slept with hundreds of women in the three years he spent escorting. He had already told me that it was a numbers game, and I knew that he had some very big bills to pay, so it was easy enough to do the math and calculate statistics and probabilities.
I could never get him to tell me exactly how many women there were, of course, because according to his non-negotiable rules, he didn’t talk about the specifics of his business. Not even with his wife, as it turns out. But I could do the math. I knew how much money he had, and roughly how much he spent, so the basic arithmetic was easy enough to calculate.
That Tuesday morning found me curled up beside him, under the protective blanket of his arm around my waist, in a bed where I could safely assume countless women before me had lain.
My stomach hurt just to think about it.
I sighed as I reached for my phone on the nightstand. It was a little after seven in the morning. Two short weeks before, I would have been waking up in my old room in my father’s Bel Air estate, preparing to get to work twenty minutes early so that I could earn my keep as a productive member of the Cabot’s team. My loyalty had never wavered, even though the fine department store my family owned had very little use for consumers like me. I had never been a size 0-6 like most of our models, mannequins, employees and customers.
Regardless, I was expected to walk within the rigid lines someone else had drawn for my life, and for twenty-three years, I had done exactly that.
But then I met Devlin Masters, and two weeks later I was displaced from my home and had likely signed way my right to eventually run my company as the one true Cabot heir.
Because my impulsive decision effectively mucke
d up this perfectly planned life, I knew I had a lot of things to fix over the coming days and weeks. I probably wouldn’t be allowed to go back to my job, or my home, until I managed to patch things up with both my father and my spurned ex-boyfriend, Oliver Lavoie, who just so happened to be vice president of my family’s company, i.e., my boss.
Both of them had treated my surprise marriage like a betrayal. Maybe it kind of was. I mean, I escaped for a week in Vegas with my best friend, Lucy Lyon, under the guise of a personal vacation. Just a fun little getaway between best friends before Lucy returned home to marry her great love, Gus Dunleavy.
Little did they know I had helped plan her own elopement while we were there, and, oh yeah… spent the week fucking my brains out with a gigolo.
I wasn’t the first who had done such a thing. I certainly wouldn’t be the last. I could have written all of it off as “what happens in Vegas,” if I hadn’t, you know, actually married said gigolo and had to bring him home to meet the fam.
This was the nagging little detail that blew my whole normal existence apart just like a pipe bomb.
Two weeks was also all it took for me to realize that was inevitable either way. What Father and Oliver couldn’t know is that what they saw as a betrayal, I saw as a prison break.
I was happier with Devlin than I had ever been, and I knew anything less was settling, even if it might have been more conventional, more appropriate, or more socially acceptable. Now that I had had a taste of the extraordinary, going back to anything ordinary was impossible. The genie was out of the bottle and it wasn’t going to go back in. I wasn’t going to put it back in. I had settled for ordinary far too much in my short life. There was no going back to the same old status quo, whether I was married to him or not.
And since it didn’t matter either way, I opted to stay where I was happiest, despite its unconventionality. Who in their right mind would have settled for boring old convention when they could have Devlin Masters instead?
I ran my hand along the defined contour of Devlin’s bare arm. Every memory of being in those arms flashed in my brain, one right after the other, like a movie montage. I couldn’t help but shiver as I thought about every kiss, every moment really, that we had shared. It had been a whirlwind romance, but it was a romance nevertheless.
And best of all, I got to be the star of that movie. Devlin Masters had made sure of that.
I leaned closer to kiss his neck, which still smelled like his cologne. I had a primal reaction to it now. Every time it filled my nostrils, that meant that Devlin was nearby. Exciting things always seemed to happen whenever Devlin was nearby. I trailed the tip of my tongue along his neck towards his shoulder and across that massive chest. He stirred in his sleep, turning onto his back, giving me an all-access pass to the rest of his body.
It took far less than two weeks to figure out that was my favorite amusement park.
He murmured as his hand snaked into my hair, pressing me further down his body until I was greeted by his morning erection. It was a temptation I didn’t have to deny. My tongue curled around him as I took him into my mouth, and he let out a soft sigh.
“Coralie.”
It made every nerve ending catch fire whenever he called me by my given name, instead of CC, like everyone else had always called me. Right from the start, he had claimed a part of me most had abandoned.
I rewarded him by taking him even deeper into my mouth, sinking onto him with a murmured sigh of my own. I felt him tremble underneath me, which made me feel just like a goddess. He was mine to do with as I pleased. This particular Tuesday morning all I wanted was to satisfy him like only I, as his wife, now could.
Thanks to our week in Vegas, I knew how to do exactly that.
His free hand clamped down on the sheets under us, a white-knuckled grip to keep his control as I employed every trick he had taught me. It didn’t take very long at until he practically begged for mercy. He hated to come before I did, but I didn’t care. I wanted him to lose control. I wanted him to be as powerless beneath me as I had proven to be beneath him. I was relentless as I drove him to the brink of his restraint.
“I need you,” he finally muttered. “Coralie.”
It wasn’t a request. He used his grip on my hair to pull me up to face him. His mouth covered mine in an instant. I straddled those strong thighs and he locked me into those intensely green eyes. “I need to be inside you. Now.”
I needed the same thing. I slid down on top of him slowly, luxuriating in every delicious inch. He grabbed both hips in his hands to guide me up and down his rigid shaft. Like a man possessed, he bucked up to meet every thrust, finally releasing himself way sooner than I knew he wanted to. But he couldn’t help it, and secretly I gave myself a gold star for bringing my sexy husband to his knees.
Husband. I still couldn’t believe it.
He flipped me easily onto my back. “Your turn,” he promised with a sexy smirk, but I shook my head.
“I have to get ready for work.”
His mouth thinned into a grim line. “I see,” he gritted before he turned away. I touched his arm.
“You have nothing to worry about,” I promised, though there was no way I could predict how Father and Oliver would behave now, not after the events of the last couple of days. Oliver went from Good Guy to Masher in ten seconds flat when he had practically manhandled me in my office the day before, trying to claim his ownership about a year too late.
“I should come with you,” Dev decided as he got up from the bed.
“Of course,” I agreed, though I wasn’t entirely sure about that either. He had been livid the day before, when he had figured out what Oliver had done. It reminded me of the night in Vegas, when he had rescued me from a drunk at the slot machines, the one who made the mistake of putting his hands on me.
I didn’t know much about Devlin Masters, but I did know one thing. He did not like to share. I wasn’t sure where that possessive or jealous streak came from, but I supposed we had time to figure things out. A lifetime of time, in fact. That’s what being married meant.
It also meant compromise, so I didn’t argue as I followed him into the bathroom to shower and change.
That was where we ran into the first snag. I didn’t have anything suitable to change into to go to work. Father didn’t allow me to wear outside designers, which he considered every bit as much of a betrayal as marrying a complete stranger out of the blue. I had no clothes at Devlin’s place, much less anything suitable to wear to work.
I certainly couldn’t wear what I had worn the day before. I may have been a newlywed, but I knew such a thing would be treated as some kind of walk of shame anyway. People seemed to get a little touchy (and judgy) when it came to a woman blatantly enjoying any kind of sexual liberation. I was supposed to hide being a fully realized sexual creature, right? Not just flaunt it in everyone’s face.
I mean, how dare I?
Worse than wearing the same clothes, I didn’t want to wear anything for sale at our store, either. Of the thousands of pieces we sold, only a dozen or so styles were in my size. Of those, maybe two or three pieces actually flattered me like I liked.
Despite how many new conflicts I juggled, that old standby pissed me off worst of all. I was down in the mouth as I wrapped myself in a big, fluffy towel. “I guess I’ll have to get a few things from the store and just change there.”
Devlin already knew how much settling for anything pissed me the hell off. He also had appointed himself as my white knight, ensuring that I would never have to settle for anything again. He studied me for a long minute before he said, “Come on.”
I followed him from the bathroom back into the bedroom. He opened up the door to the huge walk-in closet, heading straight for the chest of drawers that sat right in the middle. On the top was a big cardboard box, where he began pulling out several pieces of clothing.
I could tell immediately that every single piece had been designed by his sister, Darcy. The way they flowed, the
material she used; I could tell without even trying them on that they would fit to flatter in a way no other clothes I could find at Cabot’s could.
I didn’t have to ask him where he got them. Instead, I posed another, more curious question. “Why do you have a box full of your sister’s clothes?”
He sighed as he leaned against the drawers. “I fulfill my client’s fantasies, remember?”
I lifted up the sunny yellow top to my torso. “And it’s just a coincidence it’s in my size?”
His eyes never left mine. “No, Coralie. It’s not a coincidence.” I leaned back against the drawers as I waited for him to explain, which he did without on speck of apology. “I had Darcy send me a package of size-14 clothing within an hour of getting your first email.”
My mouth dried up instantly. “What? Why?”
He sighed as he turned back to the box to pull out more clothes. “I told you before. It’s my job to give women what they want most.”
“But how did you know that included clothes?” I persisted.
He flashed me that smirk. “All women love to feel pretty in their clothes, Coralie. You know that.”
“So… wait,” I said as my brain scrambled to compute this startling new data. “You knew who I was when I sent the email?”
He inhaled slowly and exhaled even slower. “I researched you the minute I had a first and last name,” he admitted at last. “I research everyone. It helps to start a few paces ahead. I scope out a potential client’s social media, dig up any relevant articles or information on my more notable clients. I gather all available information before I initiate contact, so I can develop a plan of attack from there.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Interesting choice of words.”
He shrugged. “Like I told you before, a lot is riding on that first date.”
I thought back to how insecure I felt when he had originally drilled me about my dress size, something he now admitted to knowing all along. “Why did you bother asking me my dress size if you already knew it?”
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