Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle)

by Maren Smith

  So here he was, chopping chicken, heating oil on the stove and composing a mental reminder to have a word with Connie once Sara was gone. Connie was a switch with a serious aversion to paddles. Right now, there was a paddle in his bedroom closet just a-calling her name. If she got out of that conversation with less than sixty bottom-blistering strokes, he wasn’t worth the Dom leathers he intended to wear while he dispatched them.

  “Can I put some clothes on yet?” Sara asked, slicing up the last of the bell peppers behind him.

  “Nope.” Jackson had just finished cutting up the chicken. He had a pan with oil and spices heating on the stove already. He reached over to give the pan a gentle shake. “The more you keep asking, the longer you’ll go without.”

  “I’m a little cold,” she hedged.

  He glanced back at her. The temperature in the apartment felt comfortable enough to him. Her bottom was still hot-lobster red and probably would be for most of the night. A soft blush suffused her cheeks. It had spilled down her throat onto her chest and her nipples were standing, but not because of cold.

  He turned back to the stove. “Want me to warm you up again?” he offered, stirring the meat into the oil.

  Her soft blush deepened and the steady chopping cadence of her knife faltered. “No, thank you.”

  Jackson smiled. “I could call down to the kitchen and request a piece of ginger root.”

  Her flush grew significantly hotter then, but she also started to smile. “No, um…really, thank you.”

  “I’m fairly sure I have some Ben-Gay in the bathroom.”

  “Ben-Gay?”

  “Yeah, great for treating sore muscles when I over-exercise. But in this case, a nice, deep pussy massage might be equally enjoyable.”

  “For who?” she burst out, laughing, her eyes wide.

  “Me,” he admitted. “A clitoris slathered in Ben-Gay isn’t going to enjoy being touched by anyone or anything for at least ten minutes, but since there are a good many things I intend to do to you tonight that you’re not going to wholly enjoy, why not start with heating ointment?”

  She stared at him, her eyes huge, her breath held and, he knew, not only because of trepidation. “Oh my God.” She turned back to her food. “I forgot how devious you are. You know,” she swung back around, shaking the paring knife at him like a scolding finger, “you think it’s funny now, the thought of smearing that stuff on my…” She squirmed, unable to make herself say it; how cute. He smirked as her blush deepened and shook the pan again, shifting the cooking chicken. “You’ll change your tune fast enough if you get any of that stuff on your…” She wiggled her little knife in the general direction of his zipper. “You’ll change your mind, I guarantee it.”

  “You think so?” he inquired, almost as if he weren’t interested in the direction this conversation was heading.

  “I wasn’t issuing a challenge,” she said quickly, then added, “but, yes. Put that stuff inside me and you’re pretty much shutting down Disneyland before you get to ride the rides.”

  Jackson chuckled. Covering the chicken, he flipped the stove off and shifted the pan onto a back burner. “Start the picante,” he told her, and left the kitchen.

  She followed him, but only as far as the arching doorway. “I said I wasn’t issuing a challenge.”

  “And I said start the picante,” he called back, and vanished into the bathroom. Digging through the medicine cabinet until he found what he wanted, he re-emerged with a tube of ointment tucked into his palm and a latex glove, which he was already trying to squeeze on over one big hand. That was the problem with being a big man. They never made latex gloves big enough. He did manage to get this one on without ripping it, however, and when he rounded the corner and entered the kitchen, Sara took one look at the glove and forgot all about the onion she was peeling for the picante.

  “Come here, Sara.” He smiled, but it didn’t seem to reassure her much.

  “You’re crazy.” She backed from him, one hand raised to keep back his inevitable advance, and yet she laughed when he did.

  “Am I?” Jackson crossed the kitchen, pausing at the sink only long enough to uncap the tube and squeeze a very small amount of white ointment onto his fingertips.

  “Oh my God,” she said again, as he rubbed it to saturate the latex. She tried to duck past him, but he caught her by the nipple of one breast, which not only stopped her escape, but brought her arching up onto her toes with a squeak. In one step, he had her backed up against the wall again.

  She slapped her hands down to block his access to her pussy, beautifully bare and smooth.

  His smirk grew. “Put your hands on your head.”

  Her breathing quickened. She looked down at his hand, where he kept rolling the ointment around and around the tips of his fore and middle fingers. She looked up at him uncertainly. He never took his eyes off of hers and he didn’t repeat himself. He simply waited until, only a twitch at first, she raised her hands and laced her fingers behind her neck.

  His grip on her nipple softened. He rolled it, stroking with his thumb, the same lazy motion he kept making with his ointment-wet fingers. Her mouth opened, her chin lifting just a bit when he moved in closer. The medicinal scent of the Ben-Gay was in his nose. He could feel her shakily exhale, her breath the softest whisper against his lips right before they touched hers. He drank her sigh straight from her mouth, releasing her nipple to mold her perfect breast in his palm. Her squeak came only a half second later when he slipped his ointment-slick hand between her tensing thighs and cupped her pussy.

  He slathered the majority of the ointment on her soft outer labia, but he didn’t waste it all there. He moved in and he knew the instant she began to feel the heat because her squeals heightened in pitch and began to come with every breath. He spared her nothing, touched every line and fold of her quivering sex and sank his fingers all the way up inside her before withdrawing to roll her clitoris in the tainted juices of her own burning body. Her mewling cries were an aphrodisiac he couldn’t get enough of, and they were only growing as the heat of the ointment built and built without mercy.

  “Oh no!” She threw her head back against the wall, eyes closed, panting expressively, but her hips kept riding his fingers. She winced but never once tried to escape his touch, not even when her cries escalated into full grunting moans. These were fuck-me sounds, growing louder as her face contorted in expressive discomfort. Her whole pussy would be on fire now. He fucked her with his hand, slapping his gloved fingers in and out of her hard and fast.

  “Oh!” Her hands clamped onto him, her sharp little fingernails digging into his shoulders like claws.

  The worst of the heat, he knew, would not last long. He made the most of the hell while it lasted, rubbing, squeezing, slapping and fucking her, stretching her open with two fingers, and then three, and then finally all four just to hear the full-throated animal groans falling from her with every panting breath.

  God, those cries. She was a woman so lost in her own pleasure that she didn’t care what she sounded like or how loud she was. For one small window in time, she didn’t care about the scars on her body. Nothing in the world mattered to her but him and the bonfire of burning he was fucking her body with.

  She was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen, ever held, ever pinned up against the wall, and the driving urge to bury his hard and throbbing cock as deep as he could reach inside of her became a need too great to think beyond.

  Flipping her around, Jackson slammed her belly-up against the wall and covered her back in an instant. He kissed her, hungrily filling all his senses with the smell and taste of her—her shoulder, her neck, her hair. He sucked her earlobe into his mouth and the whole of her little body writhed and wriggled against his, her gasps turning wanton as he nipped. He ripped the glove from his hand and tore open his pants, barely remembering to fish the condom from his back pocket before shoving the cloth down out of his way.

  His cock sprang up between them, hot against his b
elly, hard and insistent as it sought to lie in the valley of her buttocks. He ripped the condom wrapper with his teeth and got the condom on. He angled down between her legs, finding the entrance now smeared with Ben-Gay, so hot, so unbelievably tight.

  His groans mingled with hers.

  “Yes, yes!” She scraped the wall, raking at the paint with both claw-like hands. “Please, God, fuck! Please!”

  He sank in slow, stretching her gently until he felt that first ring of muscle give way. He would have filled her gradually, but all that ended when she shoved her hips back and impaled herself on as much of him as she could get inside her. That first animal grunt of both pleasure and pain was his absolute undoing. He surged into her after that, slamming her back up against the wall until his hips were slapping against her ass and she was flat against the paint, unable to find the leverage to shove back any more to meet him.

  He had to get deeper, better angled. He had to thrust, and he had nothing sturdy to grab onto. Hooking his arm around her waist, he jerked her off the wall and threw her down over the nearest section of counter instead. He grabbed her hair, winning another animal cry when he yanked her head back and slammed into her now, as hard as he could manage, all the way up to his aching balls. His hot, aching balls. Fiery hot, even.

  Shit. The ointment. It was on him now, too.

  Jackson didn’t stop. It was heating, searing into him as thoroughly as if he were cooking his balls and now the whole underside of his shaft on the stove right next to the pan of chicken. That little bit of Ben-Gay was enough to take him through a good fifteen minutes of sheer, unadulterated hell, but Sara made it worth the trip. The tight heat of her body amplified the burn until it had seared through every tender nerve ending. His cock felt seared by it, but he couldn’t stop. He took her until they were both shouting, both burning, both shuddering one right after the other in fiery convulsions so agonizing it was hard to believe they could be orgasms. Heaven and hell, intertwined.

  It hurt, but it was beautiful.

  * * * * *

  Sara awoke to a room filled with soft snores. At first, she couldn’t remember why the bedroom, lit by streams of bright morning sunlight that spilled in around the heavy black window draping, was so unfamiliar.

  She was naked, her wrists were cuffed together, and there was a warm, heavy arm draped around her waist. It wasn’t Robert’s arm. It was too big to be Robert’s. Thighs like tree trunks were pressed up against the backs of her legs. A very solid length of morning wood was nestled between her buttocks, pointing up toward the small of her back.

  Heat flooded upon her instant recognition of it. Of the ointment he’d smeared into her, there were no lingering effects that she could feel. No more heat. No tenderness. Only a vague stickiness between her thighs when she squeezed them together, as if she could hold onto the way it had felt when he’d been inside her, not just in the kitchen when he had…had…She flushed hot all over again. It had been a long time since anyone had shoved her up against the wall like that. Gentleness and love-making, they both had their place. But sometimes, a girl just wanted to be plowed into the plaster. Jackson was a good plow-er. He was…wow. Just wow.

  Guilty thoughts of Robert surfaced in her mind. Robert had been wow, too. Just in different ways. He’d always been gentle with her in bed. Careful of where he touched her. Tender. He wasn’t much for anal, either.

  No point in making comparisons, though. It didn’t matter anymore. Somewhere on the floor below them, Robert was probably sound asleep with his arm around some other woman. Sara shut that thought from her mind. That relationship had been sinking for a while now. When she left here and had the time to really think about it, then it was probably going to hurt more. Right now, though, she just didn’t want to dwell on it.

  Moving slowly, carefully, she picked up Jackson’s arm and slid out from under it. She was almost able to sit up when his snores suddenly ceased, becoming a single, deeply drawn breath. His eyes cracked open, and then he hooked his arm back around her waist and drew her snugly down to lie with him again.

  “I’m going to bust your ass,” he mumbled. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I have to use the bathroom,” she whispered.

  He grunted once, considering that, then swore under his breath. “Me, too. Fine.” He released her, giving her bottom a sharp slap. “You have five minutes, and then I’m coming in after you. What time is it?”

  She glanced at the clock on his bedside table. “Just after eight.” She slipped naked from the bed, her bare feet padding whisper-soft from area rug onto hard stone and back onto another area rug as she crossed from the bedroom into the bathroom.

  “Buses don’t come until noon,” she heard him mutter just before she shut the door. “Your ass is mine for another four hours.”

  His tone made her shiver. She almost locked the door. Her finger hovered over the button for half a second before she changed her mind. She worked really hard at not examining her reason for why, but she was standing at the shower with her fingers held under the warming spray when Jackson meandered into the bathroom in nothing but his boxers.

  Morning wood, piss hard-on—whatever you wanted to call it, on Jackson it was just as impressive as the rest of him. Funny how, in a dungeon setting there was no such thing as shyness, but in the intimacy of a morning after, in a bathroom with a man she considered to be her best friend, she blushed like a schoolgirl and quickly looked away.

  “Is it okay to take the cuffs off?” she asked.

  “No. They can get wet. Go ahead. Get in the tub.”

  Apparently, morning-after shyness was not a “guy thing.” Jackson had no issue with bellying up to the toilet while she was standing there. Yawning and lifting the lid, he finagled his uncooperative cock out of his boxers and struggled to bend it into the right direction. Sara scrambled into the shower and drew the curtain so she wouldn’t have to watch. She was embarrassed enough for both of them just having to listen to it.

  All too soon, she heard the toilet lid descend again. He yawned again, and then dropped his boxers completely. His shadow splashed across the plastic curtain an instant before he pushed it open and slipped in behind her.

  It lurked right on the tip of her tongue, the urge to say something completely stupid, like, “What are you doing?” But when he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her back against his chest, it became too obvious for words. Under the warm streaming water, he nuzzled the side of her throat. He was so warm, so solid, and his arms around her held on as if she were the dearest of friends…as if he might even love her.

  She wrapped her arms over his as he began to sway with her under the gentle spray. His hands wandered, following the dip and curve of her stomach to her hips. She enjoyed each tender caress right up until his hands parted and each wandered across her hips to find the opposing curves. The first time his palm skimmed from smooth skin onto scarred, she tried to block his hand, encouraging without words for him to return to the unmarred parts of her that she didn’t mind him touching.

  “Stop that.” He caught her wrist and forcibly pulled her hand out of his way. Capturing her wayward arm in his right hand, he pinned it across her belly before returning his left to her left hip. His caresses remained soft. It still felt loving; only now it was restraining, too, and didn’t feel quite as good as before.

  She tried to relax, but she couldn’t hold still. He moved his hand up and down her side before branching out to touch other places. Her breasts grew heavy, her nipples peaking and throbbing when he cupped and groped them, squeezing gently in a milking motion that made her whole body tingle. But he didn’t linger there for very long. Before she could fully relax, his touch had returned to her left side and that tingling turned back into crawling. She couldn’t hold still. She tried, but the longer he insisted on touching the bad side of her, the more she squirmed until she just couldn’t take any more. She all but knocked his hand away.

  He turned her abruptly and shoved her up
against the shower wall. He caught both her wrists, pinning them both to the tiles above her head. He locked them there in the uncompromising grip of one hand and returned the other to her damaged side.

  “Does it hurt?” he demanded, flattening himself against her.

  His dark eyes were cool and hard and impossible for her to meet. The sexiness of the situation had completely died, leaving her feeling nothing but ashamed. “No.”

  “Then stop it. I don’t fucking care. For the next four hours, you are still mine and I will touch you however and wherever I please. Do you understand?”

  “Not there!”

  “Yes! There and anywhere else I desire!”

  “It’s ugly!”

  He bruised her thighs when he shoved his knee between them and forced her legs apart. She caught her breath when she felt it butt up hard against her sex, lifting her straight up against the wall until her tiptoes barely kept contact with the bottom of the tub. He pressed all of him against as much of her as he could, pinning her to the tiles, his controlling hold on her absolute.

  “Is that why you ran away?” he demanded. “The only parts of you that you are allowed to think ugly are the parts I say, because mine is the only fucking opinion that matters, do you get that? Look at me, Sara.” He grabbed her chin, his grip rough as he tried to force her gaze to his. “Look at me, damn it!”

  She snapped her eyes shut. Disobedience, at this point, was so much easier than having to face what she knew she’d see if she complied. She heard the anger in his sharply drawn breath and felt his fingers on her chin tighten. Abruptly, he let her go. She almost fell it, happened so fast.

  Taking the shower head off the wall, he shoved it into her hands. “Wash yourself.” Slapping the curtain aside, he left the tub.