Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle)

by Maren Smith

  “I wish I had my shawl,” she said, trying to cover the worst of the scars on her left shoulder behind her hand. Her hands were too small, although in this outfit that hardly mattered. Anything short of a blanket wouldn’t have covered everything that needed it.

  Jackson rubbed his hands again, but he wasn’t looking at the door anymore. Now, he was looking straight at her. “Mention that shawl one more time and I’ll take your tunic away. You can do your talking to Master Marshall bare-ass naked.”

  She glared at him. “You wouldn’t.”

  He looked at her.

  He absolutely would, and that look said so.

  She bit back a sharp comment and let the matter of the shawl drop. “I forgot how—”

  “Authoritative?” he supplied.

  “—much of a jerk you can be,” she finished.

  “That’s Master Jerk to you.” He smirked. “And there was a time when you liked that about me.”

  She remembered. She kept her mouth shut about that, too.

  “Tell me,” Jackson said before the silence between them could grow too pronounced. “How are things going between you two?”

  She glared again. “Why would you ask that?”

  “It’s not obvious?”

  “No.” She looked away.

  He chuckled. “You always were a rotten liar. Some things never change.”

  “I never lied to you.”

  “Sure you did.” The smirk became a genuine smile and Jackson leaned in close to her. His voice dropped seductively low. “No,” he purred for her ears alone. “Please, no. I don’t want a spanking. Don’t touch me there, Jackson, please. That hurts.”

  His smile broadened when she blushed and she quickly looked away, unable to hold his gaze. It wasn’t hard to recognize that conversation. She tightened her thighs, squeezing them together as if that alone could stop the low throb that came pulsing to instant life between them. Heat stole up into her face, burning her cheeks from the inside out.

  Grinning, Jackson leaned in closer. “Except that it didn’t hurt, did it, Sara? I seem to recall you came so hard for me, you left my hand drenched in salty-sweet pussy juice. My fingers dripped with it. It coated my cock better than any lubricant and when I shoved into you, baby girl, I sank right in all the way up to my ba—”

  The door to Master Marshall’s door banged open, sending Sara leaping to her feet as if the bench were a stovetop. When Robert came stalking out, Sara moved instinctively to join him, hoping like hell she wasn’t blushing as fiercely as she thought she was. “Robert!”

  He stopped abruptly, jerking back a step and throwing up both hands to ward her away even as she reached for him. For just a second, it looked as if he were going to shove her. Perhaps he only meant to keep her from touching him. Either way, it stopped her cold in the middle of the hallway.

  “Robert?”

  Behind her, Jackson stood up. Robert barely looked at either of them, and for a long time, no one moved.

  “R-Robert?” Sara barely kept from reaching for him again.

  He looked at her then. Fiercely. Angrily. He shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I’ve tried. I really have, but you make it so fucking hard. And I just can’t anymore.”

  Stunned, Sara dropped her hand. He…he couldn’t be breaking up with her, could he? Right here, in the middle of a public hallway?

  Robert shook his head once and some of the anger softened, but never fully disappeared. He stepped around her, shook his head again and walked away.

  This was supposed to be the vacation that reunited them as Top and Bottom.

  Sara turned in a slow circle, watching the back of him jog down the stairs to the main floor before disappearing into the Victorian crowd. She couldn’t move. Even after he was gone, she just stood there, staring, unable to believe he would just leave her. Not like this. Surely not.

  A hand touched her elbow.

  “Sara,” Jackson said. Somehow he even managed to sound sympathetic. “I’m sorry.”

  Yeah, sure he was. Pulling out of his grip, feeling almost wooden in a way, she walked into Master Marshall’s office and quickly shut the door before Jackson could follow her.

  * * * * *

  Jackson sat on the bench in the hallway, elbows braced on his knees, hands folded between them, staring down at the floor without seeing anything except the way Sara had looked when Robert (aka Dickwad) washed his hands of her, right here, in the middle of the hallway. He hadn’t even had the courtesy of pulling her off to someplace private first. Nope, he’d shredded her dignity and self-esteem in front of Jackson and whoever else had been passing by at the time, and then he’d just walked away.

  Walked away. Like she didn’t even matter. How could he do that? Jackson couldn’t begin to understand it. In the back of his mind, he tried to guess what Marshall might have given him—another room, another submissive—some good time little girl with a ready smile, someone uncomplicated, someone who had come here geared to fuck and suck and submit because she wanted to play the game.

  That wasn’t Sara. Sara didn’t do this for games. She did it because deep down inside her, she needed this. She needed to feel overwhelmed by the will of another. She needed to feel herself bending, yielding, submitting, and damn but he wanted to be the one compelling her to give in. Her submission back at the Shadowbrook Den had been so beautiful, so complete the one and only time they’d played together. She’d been a fucking fantasy brought to life beneath his mouth and hands. Wanting to please him had been like breathing to her, so instinctive and necessary.

  At the time he’d thought if he could Top her once, he might have a shot at some kind of relationship. A steady couple arrangement would have been his preference—he’d always been something of an optimist that way. A Master/submissive contract within the Den, if only at the munches—would not have been ideal, but he could have lived with that. But something had scared her and, after that one time, Sara had refused to let him Top her again. He had no idea what he’d done wrong.

  A couple walked by—the female in nothing but high heels and a leash, the Master in only a pair of red leather breeches and spike-studded wrist cuffs. Jackson watched them walk downstairs, heading for the Rainbow Room, and felt again that hard knot that had gripped his gut way back in Shadowbrook, when he’d stood on the sidelines, surrounded by flirtatious subs and watching while Sara let herself be topped by someone else. Oh, she’d always come to sit beside him both before and afterward, laughing, talking, smiling as if nothing were wrong. But she never did let him scene with her again and she never gave him a reason why.

  Then the fire had happened.

  Sherman Nelson. He could still remember the man’s name. He’d been new, but it wasn’t his first time fire fleshing and to be honest, it wasn’t fair to blame the man. Fire play was exactly that; it was playing with fire, and like the old adage said, people could get burned.

  God, he could still remember the smell. The screaming. The wild look on people’s faces as they’d come racing out into the smoking area, where he’d been tapping out his pipe. By the time he’d got in there, the fire was out, they had her untied from the table, ambulances were on the way, Sherman had third-degree burns on his hand from trying to extinguish her, and Sara…

  His gut clenched all over again.

  A woman plopped down on the bench beside him—petite, dark haired, pretty in a spoken-for sort of way—and bumped his shoulder soft and playful with her own.

  He made himself smile. Good ol’ smiling Jackson. He tipped himself and bumped her shoulder back. “Hey, Kaylee.”

  “Hey. How’s it hanging?”

  His smile wasn’t quite so forced now. “Little to the left. You?”

  “Little to the left,” she quipped back.

  Jackson liked Kaylee. He’d pretty much liked her right from the start, back when she’d been a scared little newbie searching for her niche. That Marshall himself had taken her under his expert wing had surprised no one; that the expe
rienced Master had fallen for her practically instantly had. So, ha. Happy endings happened in this sort of place after all. Jackson was happy for them. Really, he was.

  “You look good,” he said. The Master’s Lady both personally and professionally, these days she dressed the part. Her gown was a deep crimson, cut through with trims of gold and topped with a jet-black, velvet corset. It cinched her already-tiny waist and completely flattened her breasts, forcing both rounded globes up until they perched precariously on the verge of popping out over the top. Yeah, she looked good and she knew it. Too bad it wasn’t her breasts he wanted right now to see. “Here for the new girl?” he asked.

  Kaylee nodded, watching people filter into the next class—The Ins and Outs of Fisting. “Someone said she had a panic attack in the dungeon. I don’t suppose she was paired with Master Dominick? I can definitely understand the freak-out if he pulled out his, you know.” She made a whip-cracking motion and the appropriate sound effect.

  Jackson’s smile grew even more. Mouthy little vixen. “She was in the dungeon proper. Master Dominick wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity. Which is good, really. His pride still hasn’t recovered from you.”

  “Aw,” she grinned. “Poor baby.”

  “Ha! I’ll be sure to tell him you said that.”

  “I’ll plead the fifth.”

  “You’ll plead all right.”

  Her grin grew, a soft and pretty blush stealing up into her cheeks as she playfully bumped his shoulder again. “Tattle tale.”

  “Mouth.”

  “Sadist,” she countered.

  “And proud of it,” he agreed. Yeah, he liked Kaylee. She was a good friend and a fun submissive, though he hadn’t personally played with her. In the few months since she had begun to live here, the Castle’s most prominent Master had developed something of territorial bone in regards to his Lady. These days, she was the one Marshall chose to summon whenever a problem submissive needed a little extra taking care of—the shy ones, the novices, those collapsing into sub-drop while waiting for the bus to come (sometimes even spending hours with them on the phone after they’d gone home), and in particular the ones who had trouble finding a comfortable little niche to fall into. Hard to believe, looking at her now, that Kaylee herself had been one of those once.

  “The dungeon proper, huh?” She lightly tapped her fingers against her knee, her brow puckering as she ran through a mental list of anything that might be considered scary down there. Judging by her expression, she was having trouble coming up with one. “Hm. Different strokes, I guess.” With a final soft grunt, she stood up. “She’s waiting for me, so I guess I ought to get in there.”

  “Be nice to her,” he said as Kaylee circled past him, heading for the door. “She’s a friend.”

  “I’m always nice,” Kaylee returned, pausing only just long enough to flash him a strange look. “Just how friendly of a friend is she?”

  “I plead the fifth,” he returned, dryly.

  “You’ll plead all right.” She burst into giggles and jumped to get out of his arm’s reach, but there was no evading his swatting hand.

  “I’ll have you over my knee yet,” he warned, while she laughed. His amusement was a transitory thing, and before he could help himself, Jackson caught her wrist. “Hey,” he said, a note of seriousness robbing him of his smile. He lost all perspective where Sara was concerned. It bothered him to realize that. “I mean it. Be nice.”

  Kaylee gave him another strange look, and then squeezed his fingers. “I’ll take really good care of her, Jackson. I promise.”

  When she went inside, he was again stuck in the hall alone, watching as the fisting class slowly filled up and wondering in the back of his mind just how hellish the next few days would be when he was walking these halls on endless rounds, knowing somewhere in one of these rooms Sara Abrams was writhing, moaning and crying out to the touch of another man.

  Jackson shifted restlessly, trying not to put a face he would instantly hate onto that nameless other Dom. Marshall would make sure he was a good one. Hell, he might even be someone who worked here. Sam, maybe. Maybe not. These days, Sam was good for short sessions only. The scene whores and pain sluts both loved and dreaded being sent to him, but when nighttime fell, he went home to Hannah. And that was just that.

  Who did that leave? Not Dominick. Hell, no. Sara wasn’t a pain slut. There was no way Marshall would pair her to the Dungeon Master. Grimsley? Emerson? He had trouble imagining Sara decked out like a Catholic schoolgirl and parroting French spank-me phrases between switch strokes in the Castle “classroom.” Switches weren’t her turn-on anyway. Leather, on the other hand…

  Unbidden, memories of the first time he’d seen her took him. God, she’d been so beautiful—blindfolded, wrists bound, hoisted a good four inches off the ground by a motorized suspension system and left to dangle with that spreader bar between her ankles keeping her so vulnerably open to sight and touch. He couldn’t remember the name of the man who had partnered her then, but he remembered what he’d thought at the time: Lucky Bastard. That was it. The grand sum and total of all the coherent thought he’d been able to string together as he’d watched that scene unfold.

  Lucky Bastard had used his belt, lashing her ass—the soft, round curves of her gently-swaying ass—only sporadically. The rest of the time, he’d simply caressed her—her face, letting her smell the leather; her breasts, her nipples pebbling into tight little peaks; her belly, the muscles flinching and trembling as he caressed his way lower and lower, dipping in between her legs to dampen the entire supple length of his belt in the arousal that positively dripped from her. Tell-tale spattering drops had decorated the floor beneath her, growing into a slight puddle conjoined with the sweat that had rolled off her skin even before Lucky Bastard brought out the vibrating wand.

  Yeah, Jackson thought. It was safe to say he’d wanted to play with Sara right from the very start.

  Right on the heels of that thought came an even more unpleasant idea: Parker. That was the man Marshall would match her to: Master Parker, who specialized in private roleplay one submissive at a time in that damn cottage on the very outskirts of the property. He was the medieval farmer, the cowboy on the homestead, the woodsman with his grateful Little Red Riding Hood—though, truth be told, he made a far better wolf. He was the mountain man with nothing else to do but sexually torment a girl and keep her for days on the orgasmic verge. He was Adam to anyone who ached to play Eve in a cottage where, for all intents and purposes, they were the only two people in the world.

  God. Jackson bent forward, bracing his elbows on his knees and running his hands back through his dark hair. He could just see Sara hanging suspended from those rafters, blindfolded and moaning with the pungent scent of leather all around her. He could see the dark coil of Parker’s belt caressing her pale skin and lashing lines of pink across her bottom one sensual stroke at a time. His hands clenched into fists. His gut had tightened so hard it felt like he had a midriff full of rocks.

  The door opened and Jackson turned in his seat to watch Sara and Kaylee emerge. Sara looked as if she’d been crying. Flashing Jackson a sympathetic look, Kaylee slung a comforting arm around Sara’s small shoulder and led her away.

  “I know it doesn’t seem so right now,” she was saying, “but he’s right. Just give it one more try and if you still feel like this in the morning, I promise, if there aren’t any available seats on the bus, I’ll drive you back to town myself. Just promise me you’ll give it a try, though. Master Kade is a really good Dom. I’ve seen girls fight, literally fight—screaming, spitting, hair pulling, bare-breasted—heck, bare-assed even, oiled down and everything, no fooling we’ve got a pit in the basement for just that purpose—and all for just one night of his undivided attention. The man is gorgeous personified. I swear he’ll curl your toes with a word and a look.”

  Kade was going to top her?

  Jackson sat frozen, a slow bubbling fury growing in the pit of his stomach, filling h
im up inside until it had become a roiling boil of temper he almost couldn’t control. The urge to launch himself off this bench and search out Kade became overwhelming. Kade was his friend; right now, Jackson wanted to hurt him so badly he could taste it, coppery and metallic, like blood on his tongue.

  So. The situation was settled. He could go back to work now, knowing Sara was in good hands. Kade’s hands. God help him.

  Jackson stood up. He had to go back to work. He’d woken up this morning never expecting he’d ever see Sara again, so really, there was no reason he couldn’t put her from his mind now. Pretend she wasn’t here. Pretend he’d never received that call or seen her huddled like a wadded-up tissue on the floor of the men’s bathroom. Nothing from this moment on had to be any different from what it had been a few hours ago, before she’d dropped so unexpectedly back into his life.

  Except that, no matter what he did for the rest of the day, when it came time to roll himself back into bed, he would go with images of Sara in his head. He would see her with Kade’s hands moving over her body, twisting at her nipples to wring the wanton gasps from her lips and stroking between her legs to feel for himself that growing saturation that Jackson would have given his left nut to bury himself in. Kade’s goddamned hands catching at her clit, alternately pleasuring and punishing until she was incapable of holding still for him. Until she was mindless in how much she wanted him.

  Kade was going to fuck her.

  Jackson could barely see the wall directly in front of him. All he wanted to do right now was kill his friend.

  He should go back to work, but Jackson didn’t. He watched until Sara was gone—she hadn’t looked back at him, not one time—and then he got up and walked into Marshall’s office.

  The Castle’s most sought-after Master was sitting at his desk, reviewing notes in Sara’s file and making a few new ones in the margins of her application. Shaking his head once, he crossed out a line, and then shook his head again, only glancing up for a second when Jackson quietly shut the door behind him. “What a mess.”