by Zara Cox
I can barely breathe when Mason unhooks the knot and ties the chain around my waist. The opposing textures of cold metal against my hot skin chases goose bumps over my body.
When the metal drapes over my hip, he holds one clamp to my lips. “Make this wet for me.”
Keeping my gaze on his, I suck the peg into my mouth and swirl my tongue around it. A faint flush darts over his cheekbones and feminine power fills me, even though I know it won’t be mine for long.
It vanishes the moment both clamps are wet and he crouches behind me. “Your nipples are so perfect for this,” he whispers. “Hell, your whole body is perfect for however I choose to fuck it.”
“Does that please you, sir?” I’m amazed at how easily the word falls from my lips now. I may not know the ins and outs of being a true submissive, but this is a learning curve I’m okay with.
“It pleases me, kitten. Very, very much.” His tongue trails up the side of my neck and I tremble hard.
I cry out as the teeth of the clamp pinches my sensitive bud. Pleasure follows and my pussy grows wetter. By the time Mason places the second clamp on my other nipple, I’m halfway to coming. I look down at myself and the sight of the silver dangling from my breasts and across my body nearly sends me over the edge.
“See how beautiful you are?”
I shake my head. “I’m not beautiful.”
His hand glides down my spine to grip my ass cheek, hard. “Are you disagreeing with me?”
“Umm...no, sir.”
“What, then?”
“I’ve always thought I’m okay to look at, maybe even pretty. Beautiful isn’t...quite me.”
He pauses his ministrations. “So you are disagreeing with me.”
My eyes squeeze shut, and I curse silently with frustration. “Maybe a little. Mason, please.”
He slaps my ass hard. Pain and pleasure spiral in opposite directions. “You’re forgetting yourself, kitten.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“You’re beautiful. Say it,” Mason growls.
I feel a little ridiculous for starting this argument, but I’m caught in it now, and the quickest way I can get the orgasm I crave is to give in. “I’m beautiful,” I mumble.
That half-assed attempt earns me another smack. “You want to try saying it like you believe it?”
“I’m beautiful,” I say louder.
“Again.”
“I’m beautiful!”
The mattress shifts and I look down to see his head between my knees. I almost come right there as his dark gold eyes and strong hands worship my body.
“You’re beautiful,” he rasps. His tongue licks up one inner thigh and down the other. “You’re so fucking beautiful.” He flicks my clit and stars burst before my vision.
“I’m beautiful,” I repeat, daring to believe it a little.
He cradles my ass in his hands and brings me down hard on his mouth. I loved the device Mason clamped on my pussy the first time we fucked on the yacht, but it’s nothing compared to the skill and texture of his mouth and tongue on my cunt. And when he hooks his fingers and pulls on the chain attached to my nipples, I’m a ball of pure sensation, cannoning down the slope toward bliss.
“Oh God!”
My orgasm bursts on me before I’m ready, but I ride it with sheer abandon. When convulsions rip through me, I roll my hips in rough, ecstatic undulations. Mason lets me fuck his mouth, until my shudders die down, then he rearranges me over his body.
He plunges into my clenching sheath while I’m still twitching, and the fireworks erupt again.
He fucks me like he owns me, which I guess he does until we part, and I hang on for dear life.
We’re both bathed in sticky sweat and come by the time the sun rises. I can barely move, and all I do is purr as he pets me into sleepy bliss.
From our brief time together, I know Mason Sinclair isn’t a heart and flowers guy. So when he pushes back my hair and raises my head so he can look in my eyes, I’m prepared for a rasped command, or punishment for an overlooked slight. What I get instead strangles my breath in my throat.
“You’re fucking beautiful, kitten. Nothing that happened to you was your fault. Wanting to explore your sexuality is nothing to be ashamed about. I know there’s more to what happened to you.” My residual pleasure takes a nosedive, but he shakes his head. “I won’t force you to tell me. But what I know is more than enough to make me pissed off that you think you don’t have anything to live for.”
My gaze drops.
“Look at me, Keely,” he demands.
I reluctantly comply.
“You’re beautiful. And you have a hell of a fucking lot to live for. If nothing else, prove to the bastards who violated you that you’re not broken.”
“How can I, when I don’t know who they are?”
A shadow shifts through his eyes, a molten rage that he tries to hide. But I see it, because that rage lives within me too. Rage for what was done to me. Helpless rage that I can’t fight faceless ghosts.
“You may not know who they are. But they obviously know you or they wouldn’t be trying to pull you down. Do you want to give them that satisfaction?”
I shake my head.
“Then promise me you won’t try to pull that shit you did in Montauk, or anything similar, again.”
“Mason—”
“No. Promise me!” His face hardens, and although he’s beneath me, his dominance overpowers me.
I swallow, and nod. “I promise.”
Hazel eyes probe mine for a full minute before he brings me in for a long, wet kiss.
“Good. Now we can begin the day properly.”
I draw in a shaky breath. “I have to work, Mason.”
“Not till this afternoon. And not until I’ve fed you and introduced you to some other carnal delights.”
Despite my scrambling emotions, my blood quickens. “Oh? What have you in mind for me, sir?”
A wicked smile spreads across his face. “Pancakes and waffles. Then a visit to the lower deck.”
###
Four hours later, I’m dressed in a sexy little sundress, Mason in a dark T-shirt and jeans and we’re sitting on a wide balcony, eating breakfast. When his phone buzzes, it’s face up, so I can’t miss the name that pops up.
Cassie. His ex-wife. The blueberries I’m chewing turn a little sour.
I look from the phone to his face when he continues to ignore it.
“I can give you privacy if you want to answer it?”
He stuffs half a waffle in his mouth and stares at me across the white-lined table. “No.”
“No, you’re not going to answer it, or no you don’t need privacy?”
“No to both.”
“Okay.” We eat in silence, until the silence becomes too loud. “Why?”
He sighs. “Because I was married to her. Which unfortunately grants her a little insight into which buttons of mine to press for the desired response. When I’m within contactable distance, she finds ways to push those buttons. And I’m wired to respond in a certain way. One that never bodes well for either of us.”
“So by ignoring her...”
“I’m saving one of us the need to check into a facility at the end of the month for emotional distress.” A hard, wry smile curves his mouth and I lose my appetite. “See? I’m turning over a new leaf.”
“Why not uproot the whole tree and lose her number?”
He gives me a sad smile. “I’m a sadist?”
“You asking or you telling?” I quip.
“Crap, I’m losing my powers if you can’t tell.”
I reel a little as I stare at him. The intense, brooding man I met in Montauk is still very much present, but I dare to imagine I see another side to Mason Sinclair, one that entices gentler creatures, like his ex-wife to their doom. But what if it’s a side that’s genuine? And needs bringing out more. By me.
I shake my head at my insane line of thinking. “Seriously, why leave her dangling?�
�
All laughter fades from his face, and he links his hands over his stomach. “Because we’ll always share an unbreakable connection.”
My heart pounds, its roar filling in my ears. I bite my tongue until it bleeds, then I ask anyway. “Your son?”
Emotions flit over his face, before it settles on a poisonous sadness that rakes white-hot coals across my ravaged soul. “My son.”
Before I know it, I’m standing. Rounding the table to slide into his lap. He doesn’t move his hands to accommodate me, and I know I’m risking a hell of a lot by pushing where I may not be wanted. But the compulsion is stronger than I can handle.
I tuck my head into the crook of his shoulder and cup his rock-hard jaw. “Tell me about him.”
“No, kitten.”
“Please, Mason. Tell me.”
He shakes his head and tension spears from his body into mine. I’m glad it locks us together, because now there’s no escaping me.
“Thinking of it doesn’t put me in a good place. Telling it will make it worse.”
The warning is clear. But I’ve kicked danger in the nuts before. I didn’t come out well, but the kicking felt good. “I can take it.”
He laughs, and the sound is a cruel, sadistic one. “I seriously doubt that.”
I raise my head, anger fighting with compassion. “You can’t praise my courage in one breath, and belittle it in the next. Tell me if you want to, or don’t, but don’t be cruel about it.”
I start to rise, but his arms shackle my hips. I’m thrown back against him and my hand falls on his chest. His heart pounds beneath my open palm, and I raise my gaze to see the seething self-flagellation in his eyes.
“It’s not a good story,” he says, his voice a mangled pain-filled rumble. “It’s a very, very bad one.”
“I know. Tell me anyway.”
He shuts his eyes and drops his forehead to the top of my head. He’s going to refuse. I know he is. A part of me doesn’t blame him. Another part of me refuses to stay in the dark. “Tell me his name.” He’d asked the same of me in the dark of night. I’d earned this little right.
“Toby.” The sound is ripped from his throat. “His name was Toby Callum Sinclair.”
I absorb that, and curl into his chest. His heart continues to pound with the weight of mournful memory, and I keep myself wrapped close about him, this man whose pain calls to me like an addict to narcotics.
We stay like that and seconds turn to minutes. To an hour.
Above us, seagulls caw in the sky, a reminder of where we are. I look up at him and his eyes are closed, but his breathing is rough, harsh. He’s caught in a blizzard of savage memory, and I put him there.
I cup his frozen jaw. “Mason, I’m sorry.”
He gives a broken groan. My arms slide around his neck, and I hold him tighter. Another shudder rips through him. He groans again, and tears squeeze through his shut eyes and tremble on his lashes.
“He was five when he was taken. Just five fucking years old,” he whispers.
Chapter 27
Keely
I freeze. “Taken?”
He remains silent, his eyes still squeezed shut.
My mind tries to grapple with the many interpretations of what he’s saying. In the end, I blurt out. “How was he taken? Who took him, Mason?”
A hard swallow moves his throat. “I’d done some work for the government when I was in college. It was all top-secret shit...writing code for satellites that helped win some obscure war I had zero interest in. A few years later, they came back, asking for my help again.”
His jaw is so tight, I’m surprised it hasn’t cracked, and for a moment, I’m afraid that’s as much as he can say. But then his lips part with a savage twist and he continues.
“They offered me a fuck load of money to alter one of my security algorithms, but I refused.” Again, he pauses, but this time whatever dam has held him back seems to have cracked open and the words spill from him in a flood of heat and pain I feel ripping through his rigid body.
“They waited a few years, then offered more money. Cassie and I were married by then. And Toby... God, my son would never want for anything. What the hell did I need more money for? But now I was interested in the world he would grow up in. If altering a simple code could help catch a few bad guys, then I was in.”
He sighs and it sounds like his soul is squeezing from his lungs in a tormented rasp. “They wanted me to work in a lab somewhere in the bowels of some faceless building in the middle of nowhere. I said, hell no. I was Mason Sinclair, the third. If they wanted my program, they had to do things my way, which included not taking me away from my son for weeks on end.”
I want to move, to stroke his agonized face. To kiss his tormented lips. But I’m frozen, afraid if I move it will tip the balance and he’ll stop his soul-bleeding confession. So instead, I feel the heavy beat of his heart and try to ignore the racing of my own.
“We tussled over that a bit, and reached an agreeable arrangement. They would send a junior analyst to live with me and learn the code in case I became compromised.” He stops, and shakes his head. “I said yes.”
He shudders and his grip shifts, releasing my frozen state. “And this analyst...he just...took your son?”
“He was great with Toby,” his voice rumbles on, an arid recounting. “They got on like a house on fire. I never suspected a thing. Peterson had been living with us for a couple of months. The day I...that day, he offered to take Toby for ice cream. He’d done it a bunch of times before. I was in the middle of writing code. I barely looked up to say goodbye to my son. I didn’t even realize what the time was until Cassie came home and asked me where Toby was.”
Mason finally opens his eyes and I see the black, irredeemable despair, which fills them. “It was one in the morning. My son had been missing for over eleven hours, and I’d had my head buried up the ass of some goddamn coding.”
Just like he’d asked me stop talking when the crush of words became too much, I want the words falling from his lips to shrivel up and die. I don’t want the image of that beautiful boy on the cinema screen in Monte Carlo to alter in any way. But then I remember the sound Mason made when he watched his son’s image. The sound of a defeated soul preparing itself for the seventh circle of hell. It’s that sound, and my impossibly arrogant need to free him from it, that makes me speak now. “What did you do?”
“The usual—calls to the police, followed by calls to heads of every law enforcement department, threatening to kill each and every one of them if they didn’t dedicate every single resource to finding my son. The less brave ones promised me jail time once Toby was found. I threatened some more, even managed to get a few incompetent assholes fired.” He exhales and I swear I see the flames of hell leap in his eyes when he looks at me. “Seven days, Keely. He had Toby for seven days.”
The vice around my chest strangles my lungs. “You found him?”
His mouth compresses into a blade. “I’d been building Seven as a side project at the time. I altered her parameters and programmed her for the sole purpose of finding Toby. She pinpointed a mile radius of his location on the seventh day, to some farm in Virginia. But...we were too late.”
Oh God. I pull him tighter into my warmth, but he’s statue-still and chilled despite the sunshine surrounding us. “Mason.” I say his name, not to prompt him into any sort of action or response, but to let him know I’m there. “Mason. Mason.”
I give in to the urge to kiss his cheek and feel the blood flow beneath his skin. I’m encouraged that there’s life beneath the petrified sorrow and rage. I trail my mouth to the corner of his mouth and kiss his frozen lips. I don’t get a response, but I’m not dissuaded.
“Mason.”
He jerks his head back when I try to deepen the kiss. I recognize his need to purge, and I place my head on his chest again, my thoughts calmed a little by the rhythmic beat of his heart.
“He took him, Keely. Right from underneath my nose.
So you see, you’re not the only one who was fooled into ignoring the warning signs. I’ve had a long time to think about those signs.”
My fingers glide into the hair at his nape in a gesture of inadequate comfort. “What signs?”
“Peterson was a schizophrenic. He’d hidden his condition with medication while he’d been under scrutiny at his job. If I’d known about it, I would have been more cautious, but instead I dismissed his sometimes erratic behavior as embarrassment because he wasn’t learning the code fast enough. Truth is, he’d stopped taking his meds. By the time I found him two months later—”
My head snaps up. “You found him?”
Mason lowers his head and his gaze connects with mine. The raw barbarity stops my breath, but it’s nothing like the sadistic smile that curves his mouth. “Yes, I found him.”
“On your own?”
“Yes.”
My throat has gone desert-dry, but I try to swallow anyway. “What did you do?”
His eyes are so dark they’re almost black. Every single moment of danger—latent or otherwise—which I’ve felt since meeting Mason, fuses into that moment. That look. And although I know it’s not directed at me, my insides still congeal with fear.
“I made him pay,” is all he says before he surges to his feet with me still in his arms.
His phone starts to ring again, and he turns away from it.
“Mason.”
He strides through the room to the door before he sets me on my feet. “It’s noon. We have an appointment downstairs,” he replies, his voice a sharp blade, punctuating the air. He yanks open the door and pulls me after him.
“Wait!”
He slams to a stop and crowds me into the wall. “I can take it—those were your words to me. True or false?” His hot breath washes over my face as he bends his knees and looks into my eyes.
“True,” I exhale.
“Good. I’m going to hold you to that.”
Our trip down the elevator to the lower deck is conducted in a cracked silence, foaming with sex and despair, rage, and tortured sorrow. Mason doesn’t hide his erratic breathing. The sound fills the small enclosure, fills my every pore, until I’m breathing in synchrony with him. His head turns and his gaze meets mine.