by Lexi Blake
She didn’t want to say. “I wasn’t thinking of anything. I often do that.”
“No, you don’t,” Nat said with a sigh. “You’re always thinking, always worrying. I wish you would trust me enough to talk to me.”
She shook her head. “As an extension of my Master, I need to watch what I say.”
“Yes, you do,” a masculine voice said. Mason walked into the room carrying a tray of wine and cheese. He set it down.
“Mason,” Tara began, her voice a warning.
Mason wasn’t having it. “No. She’s my submissive for the short term, Tara, and we’re going to clear up something right here and now.”
Nat’s spine went straight and Kitten knew she had only minutes before Nat got in serious trouble. She’d spent so much time protecting Kitten, it was second nature, but Kitten had to show her she didn’t need protecting. Not from her new Masters. She forced back her fear and gave Mason a sunny smile. “Of course, Master Mason. I am eager for your teaching.”
“And that’s your ‘don’t rock the boat’ face.” Nat took a deep breath and she and Tara exchanged disappointed glances.
She wasn’t going to cry. They simply didn’t understand her. This was the life she wanted. She wanted to please her Masters and that was all.
“Well, I’ll rock the boat,” Mason said, getting down on one knee. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be here, Kitten, but I will teach you this. Look at me.”
She’d known she was making a mistake and she’d done it anyway. Curiosity always did kill the cat. She’d done the crime so she would do the time and she wouldn’t gossip again. She forced her eyes up to his. “Yes, Sir.”
“You are not an extension of me. You are not an extension of Cole. You are Kitten. You are you and this is exactly what scares Cole off. It isn’t because he’s waiting to see if you behave perfectly. He doesn’t expect that. What he does expect and want and need is a woman who can choose. He needs to know that you choose him, and not because Julian sent you off with him, but because he’s worthy of your trust and devotion. He can’t get that from a robot. He can’t get that from a woman who mindlessly obeys.”
Now the tears were there, right on the cusp of her eyelids. “I chose to sign the contract.”
“Did you? Or were you afraid that there wouldn’t be anywhere else for you to go?” He held a hand up. “Don’t answer now. I don’t know that I want to know the answer at this point.”
“What if what I want is to obey? What if I make the choice to obey? Shouldn’t you honor that?” She wasn’t sure why they had to make it so damn difficult. Irritation welled up inside her.
A sad expression crossed his face. “You can’t make the choice once and then never again. A relationship, a real relationship, changes and grows, and you have to make that choice every single day. I’m afraid you’re here because it’s easy and you want a contract to force the world to make sense to you, but it’s nothing more than a piece of paper. It will fail you at some point because it was written by humans and we fail. I don’t want you to fall apart when it fails you.”
Because he had. He’d fallen apart when he and Cole had.
When her relationships ended with her previous Masters, there had been no grand emotion. She’d simply moved on to the next. There had been no sex and no chance of any, of course, but shouldn’t she have felt something? Shouldn’t she have fallen even a little?
She was terrified to fall in love and yet what would it mean if she didn’t? She’d never been in love. Wasn’t it worth the risk? But Mason was right. It couldn’t be love if she was merely an extension of someone else.
She had to be more.
She nodded. “Then I’ll be me. You should know I have a penchant for gossip.”
He brought his thumbs up and wiped away her tears. “I can live with your flaws, gorgeous girl. I can’t live knowing I’m nothing but someone to serve, and neither can Cole.”
They wanted to know her. The real her. The trouble was she wasn’t sure who that was yet. “I will try.”
He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “That’s all I ask.” He got to his feet. “Now what’s this about gossip? I have to leave the boring Doms. They don’t gossip at all.”
Tara had tears in her eyes. “Mason, I missed you.”
She put her arms out and walked to give him a hug.
Mason hesitated for a moment, but then his arms came up. “I didn’t think anyone would want to see me.”
Tara shook her head. “Dummy. We all worried about you. We loved you, Mason. Don’t leave again. No matter what happens. You weren’t an extension of him, either. You’re Mason and whether you’re with Cole or not, your friends love you.”
Mason stiffened and then relaxed, and when he turned back to her, Kitten could see Mason was holding back his emotions. He reached out and held Tara’s hand for a moment. “All right. I won’t lose touch again. Promise. Now let’s do what subs do and drink wine and gossip. I have years of club gossip to catch up on.”
He sat down between her and Tara and within moments every woman had a glass in her hand and they were all fawning over him.
“I think that one’s a keeper,” Nat whispered in her ear as Mason and Tara started talking about mutual friends.
His arm went around her shoulders and Kitten realized she might be getting in far too deep.
* * * *
Chase Dawson whistled as Mason disappeared through the door that led to the kitchen. “Yond Mason has a lean and hungry look.”
Only that pretentious bastard would quote Shakespeare at a time like this. Though he had to admit he’d rather thought the same thing. Mason wasn’t Cassius and Cole certainly didn’t think of himself as Julius Caesar, but he did wonder if Mason wasn’t planning some form of revenge. “He seems to think I had something to do with him not being able to find another job.”
Darin’s eyes narrowed. “Well, we all know that, Cole. You couldn’t expect him not to find out.”
Ben Dawson was his brother’s more reasonable twin. He held out a hand. “Let the past stay in the past.”
“No,” Cole said suddenly. Something was going on that he did not understand. “I want to know why Darin is looking at me like I’m the bad guy here. I understand that I caused him to lose his job. I wasn’t thinking particularly clearly at the time or I would have made arrangements. I certainly didn’t blackball him from every law office in the Metroplex.”
Chase was the one staring at him now. “That’s not how I heard it. I find that interesting.”
Chase also found serial killers, bombs, and snipers interesting. It didn’t make Cole want to delve further. He wanted to look to the future. “What’s interesting about it? Gossip is often wrong. You should know that.”
Chase’s face lit up. “Ah, but I don’t think it was gossip.”
Ben frowned. “What do you mean?”
“He means the letter exists,” Darin explained.
Gossip was going to be the death of him. “Who’s seen this letter?”
“Finn got a call from a law firm asking him about an e-mail from you. The man at the firm in question was supposed to interview Mason and he canceled after receiving your e-mail,” Darin explained.
“Did Finn see it?” His blood pressure was starting to tick up. “Is this why Julian seems to think I’ll hurt Kitten?” It made sense if Finn had been telling tales to his Master. “Perhaps I should have a talk with Julian about his sub’s lies.”
“I don’t think that would go well,” Ben said.
He was at the point that he couldn’t give a flying fuck if it went well. Mason had heard some nasty rumors about him and he wanted them stopped. If they were going to have any kind of a shot at starting over, he needed for Mason to believe he hadn’t ruined him.
Was he truly thinking about trying again? Who was he kidding? It was all he could think about.
Chase held a hand up. “If there’s an e-mail out there, I can find it. I can put the question to bed once and forever.”
<
br /> “I thought we were here to talk about Mason’s accident.” Ben leaned back in his chair. “I don’t want Chase running down rabbit holes. We’ll lose him and I need him on this. I don’t agree with the findings of that police report. I went out and checked Mason’s car. I’m with Darin. I think this was deliberate. He was hit at least twice. From the impact points, it’s clear the person who hit him had an unobstructed line of sight.”
Chase reached for his Scotch glass. “It’s going to take Ben a while to run skip traces on all of Mason’s clients. They are wide and varied and run the gamut from truly terrible to evil as fuck. The one thing they all had in common was having barely enough money to hire a cut-rate lawyer instead of going with the public defender.”
Mason wasn’t a cut-rate anything. How had he ended up in that pathetic little building? Cole had visited Mason’s workplace the day before while Mason had been sleeping. He claimed he was feeling better but mostly what he’d been able to do was eat and sleep. Cole had to damn near order him to take a couple of Advil so he could rest.
The offices of Benedict and Wright were a dull beige, the carpet weathered and worn. Mason’s office was nothing more than a dreary cubicle. Cole couldn’t see him sitting there. There had been no plants or pictures or books beyond some legal tomes.
If he hadn’t recognized Mason’s handwriting, he would have said it wasn’t his desk at all.
It was as though all of Mason’s light had been negated.
“I want to know if there’s a letter.” He made his decision quickly once he really looked at the evidence. He’d been going off his own truth, believing Mason had only been trying to hurt him, had either listened to rumors or made them up himself.
But what if Mason honestly believed that Cole had ruined his life? What if someone had purposefully tried to hurt him? It was unlikely, but he needed to know. He suddenly needed to be able to prove to Mason that he hadn’t destroyed him. Would never.
“You didn’t write that letter,” Darin said, looking at him with respect for the first time in years. Had they all believed he would be so cruel?
Why wouldn’t they? He’d said he loved Mason one day and thrown him out the next without listening or trying to hear him out. “No, I did not. I didn’t write the letter, but I did hurt him. Look, I have to try to make this right and that starts with figuring out if there is a letter and where it came from. I set everything up for Mason when we split. He should have been quite comfortable. He should never have been forced to take a job that put him in danger. He would never have been on that road a few days ago.”
“You can’t know that,” Ben shot back.
Chase shrugged. “But it’s a pretty good bet. He was on his way to the office. Which is a hellhole, by the way. He wouldn’t have been defending low-level drug dealers. You see the problem with low-level drug dealers is that they know mid-level drug dealers, who know high-level drug dealers.”
“Ah, the vice ladder,” Darin said. “You think someone was trying to ensure one of Mason’s clients didn’t cut a deal? Why not simply take the client out? Why go through the lawyer?”
“I can think of any number of reasons,” Chase explained. “If they want to keep the asset, but they want to make sure his mouth stays closed, going after his lawyer might teach him a lesson. Mason might know something he shouldn’t. He might have pissed someone off. He’s lost several cases in the last year.”
Ben held up a file. “He lost them because his clients were totally guilty. He managed to get reduced sentences on a couple, but there are some crazies out there who could blame him for the fact that they went to jail.”
He hated the entire idea that Mason had been working for criminals. “So what you’re telling me is there are multiple reasons to be worried that someone tried to kill him. Do you think the threat is still out there?”
Chase shrugged. “I think he’s fairly safe as long as he’s on the grounds of your estate.”
Cole snorted at the thought. “I’ve never been able to keep Mason caged. The minute he feels better, he’ll want out. I’ve got a plan in place to take care of his house, and he doesn’t know it yet, but he’s not going back to his job.”
Ben frowned. “Do you think that’s a good idea? He just came back into your life. You can’t pick up where you left off. You need to take a step back.”
If he did, he would likely lose Mason forever. “I did this the wrong way already. I can’t back off. I have to make up for what happened to him. I’m not going to push him. I’m merely going to give him a safe place to stay.”
“So you’ve changed your mind about Emily?” Chase asked, his face a polite blank.
No one had liked Emily. Now that he had some distance, he could see plainly he’d placed Mason in an impossible position. He’d let his stubbornness cost all three of them. “I think Mason made a mistake. He was irresponsible, but I was, too. I still love him. I was wrong to shut him out, but I’m not sure he can forgive me.”
“He’s planning something,” Chase said, his eyes going to the window where Cole could plainly see Mason chatting with the ladies. He was sitting beside Kitten, his arm around her shoulder.
“Yes, I’m worried he is.” Mason could hold a mean grudge. “I’m worried he’s plotting some form of revenge.”
“Best to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, huh?” Darin asked.
“No. It’s not that.” How did he make them understand? “If we’re going to have any kind of a shot at this, one of us has to bend. One of us has to try to have a little faith in the other, and I think that has to be me this time. I burned him before. If he burns me, well, I have to hope I survive the fire.”
“And Kitten?” Ben asked. “You’re willing to risk her, too?”
“He would never hurt her. He might come after me, but she would be off-limits.” He was one hundred percent sure of that. He wouldn’t even think of giving this a shot if he wasn’t certain Mason would be kind to her. “He might attempt to take her away from me, but he won’t hurt her.”
“I don’t know that she should be placed in a position where she’s forced to choose,” Ben said quietly.
Cole would have agreed a couple of weeks ago. One of the things Mason had forced him to rethink was his position on pushing Kitten’s boundaries. For most subs that meant sexual boundaries, but for Kitten they were all emotional and personal. “She has to start making her own decisions, and I don’t mean deciding to sign a contract and then giving up all free will. Mason is going to start to gently push her toward independence.”
“And if she can’t handle it?” Chase’s hands were steepled over his chest and those intelligent eyes of his were laser focused on Cole.
“She can. She’s stronger than she thinks. She survived, but there’s more to life than surviving. I like her. I think she’s the perfect woman for me and Mason, but she has to be more than our lover, more than our sub. She’s smart and capable and kind. There’s a place for her outside the walls of my home. We have to push her to find it.”
“Thank god,” Chase said with a groan. He stood up and held a hand out. “Julian wants to make sure she’s safe, but I think she needs more. I didn’t think you would be the one to give it to her.”
Was he supposed to say thank you? “I’ll take care of her and so will Mason. If war breaks out between the two of us, know that I intend to mitigate the damages. I’m not going to make the same mistake again. I hope that spending time with me softens Mason, and finding out who wrote that damn letter might help enormously.”
“I’ll get on it,” Chase said, shaking his hand. “I’ll work on the letter from a few years back. Darin is checking into DPD’s records on the clients Mason defended, and Ben is lying around looking like a himbo.”
Ben shot his brother the finger. “Fuck you. I’m trying to get sun. Just because you want to be pasty white doesn’t mean I have to be.”
“You’re trying to show off your three chest hairs in an attempt to make our wife drool
. Ain’t happening, buddy,” Chase shot back.
Darin rolled his eyes and stood. “They’re useless now. Wanna grab a beer? The ladies and Mason are perfectly safe from everything except the Dawson twins’ never-ending arguments.”
The Club was below, a quick elevator ride away. He hadn’t spent time in the bar without a sub in forever, but once it had been a home away from home. When the dungeon was closed, the bar was still available to members. He’d spent many an hour having a beer and talking with friends.
And then he’d been alone.
The Dawsons were getting in each other’s space, throwing down smack.
“The quicker, the better, my friend.”
Darin grinned. “They won’t even notice we’re gone.”
He followed his old friend into the condo and wondered if—after all these years—he might get his life back.
Chapter Nine
Two days later, Kitten watched her playmate as he dove into the deep end. That was the way she was beginning to think of Mason. He was her playmate. Master Cole had bought her a friend.
She had to keep herself from clapping her hands together because Mason Scott was the best thing to happen to her in forever. Her boredom was gone because nothing was boring around Mason. He had a way of making even the most ordinary of activities thrilling.
“Are you coming in, gorgeous girl?” He rested his arms on the side of the pool, those gray eyes winking at her.
He was the gorgeous one. “I’m not a good swimmer. I think I’ll lie here and watch you.”
He pouted but it made him more handsome. “Come on. You can’t leave me in here all alone.”
At least she had an answer for that one. “I’m not sure you should be in there in the first place. The doctor hasn’t cleared you for strenuous activity.”
“The doctor would tell me that if I feel fine, I should probably be fine. It’s been a week. I’m still a bit achy, but the faster I allow myself to get back to a normal routine, the better.”
“Does that mean you’re going back to work?”