by Zara Cox
Her gaze slides from mine and her head bows. “I know what we agreed. I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know.”
I stare at the top of her head and I grapple with the need to probe deeper. I remind myself the many reasons why I don’t want to be pulled into her shit. Or anyone else’s.
But I can’t get the thought of her willingly throwing herself into the freezing ocean out of my mind. And I know what she just said, and the powerfully intimate cloud of sadness building round her, is the reason for her actions that night. I don’t want to think about what would’ve happened if I hadn’t been there, if she’d succeeded. My chest starts to burn, and I heed the warning to get the fuck off the subject of her not being alive.
But I still want to know what she means.
“Keely, tell me.”
“I can’t,” she says, and there’s no apology or hesitation in her voice. “I won’t.”
I let it go. “Fine. Are you staying?”
She raises her head. “Do you want me to?”
I shove hard at the ninety-five per cent. “Yes. Very much.”
A single nod of acquiescence. “Then I will.”
My fingers slid up her arms and into her hair, then I’m kissing her. I’m not gentle with it. I know her pain threshold now and I mean to straddle it hard. The pressure in my head decreases when she moans into my mouth and strains closer. My hand slide down her body to grip below her ass. It’s all the urge she needs to jump up and curl her legs around my waist.
I stumble with her out of the kitchen and into the living room. I have a keen sense of direction and I know where the furniture is located, but I’m heady from kissing her and I don’t want to risk Keely getting hurt from one of the many bizarre sculptures Cassie left dotted around the place, so I reluctantly raise my head.
“Seven, lights please.”
“Of course, Mr. S. What mood would you prefer?” A sultry voice fills the air.
Keely’s eyes widen in the semi-darkness.
“You still have all your settings?” I ask.
“Updated to zero one hundred eastern standard time.”
“Good, let’s go for Fuck Mood Three Point O.”
My mouth twitches at Keely’s shocked gasp.
“Right away, Mr. S.”
A second later, the room is bathed in black and gold streams of light. They train on the large double wide sofa in the center of the room.
Keely’s gaze swings from the sofa to my face. “You’ve trained a robot to provide you with mood lighting to suit you during sex?”
“Careful, you’ll hurt her feelings if you call her a robot,” I whisper in her ear as I carry her to the sofa and lay her down. A soft gold spotlight frames her face and she looks almost angelic. I stare for a moment longer, enthralled by her stunning beauty.
“Oh? What is she, then?”
“We’ve never really discussed it.” I pull back, and when she eases her legs from my waist, I grip her knees and spread her wide. “I think she believes she’s a cross between my physics professor and my assistant.”
“And her name?”
I smile and pull the T-shirt over her head. “She’s named after the sexiest alien ever to grace a TV screen, of course.” My dark mood evaporates as I stare at her body. The lighting isn’t hitting her quite right, so I snap my fingers.
“Yes, Mr. S?” Seven responds.
“A dozen more gold beams around me, please.”
“Right away, sir.”
Black light turn to gold and washes over Keely. She gasps and looks up at me with awe.
“Wow, consider me well and truly blown away, Mr. S,” she says with exaggerated bats of her lashes.
I lower my head to kiss her. “Now that I know what really turns you on, I mean to impress you with my very big and very clever brain.”
Her hands slip between us and she finds my cock. “Not just your big brain, I hope.”
My mouth leaves hers to trail down the side of her neck. Her smell intoxicates me, makes me want to glue myself to her skin forever. “Everything big that takes your fancy is yours.”
She giggles and I adore the sound. “So what else does Seven-of-Nine do?”
“Amongst other things, the usual—liaising with housekeeping services, temperature regulation, security.” I debate whether to reveal the finer details of Seven’s role. “She also keeps an audio file of every conversation that contains my voice.”
Keely’s stares up at me for a few seconds before she jerks upright. “Are you saying she recorded us in the kitchen?”
“Yes. And when you stroked me off by the front door. And when we rowed. When I spanked you. When I encouraged you to suck my cock in the shower.”
Adorable heat flares into her face. “Mason!”
“Calm down.” I press her back onto the seat. “I won’t keep the recordings.”
The look in her eyes says she wants to trust me, but she doesn’t. Because we’re not there yet. And I don’t blame her. I don’t know if I want her to trust me. I certainly don’t trust me.
“You want me to destroy it now?”
She sucks in her lower lip and nods.
“Okay. Seven?”
“Yes, Mr. S?”
“Delete audio files from nineteen hundred today.”
“Permanently?”
I look into Keely’s eyes. “Yes, permanently. And turn off audio until I instruct otherwise.”
“Understood. Deleting files.”
I suck her lower lip into my mouth, then nip it with my teeth. “Happy?”
Her hands wrap around my back and her nails dig in when I transfer my attention to the pulse in her neck and lick it. “Fuck me now. Then I’ll be happy.”
A groan rumbles from my chest. “Take me out, baby. Stroke me with your clever, eager little hands.”
She complies and pushes down my black sweatpants. My eager cock springs into her waiting hands, and she pumps me with unabashed vigor.
“Like this?”
“Yes, just like that.” I take her mouth again, more desperate than I was a second ago. I can’t think straight. I want to take my time with her, savor her. But something about Keely drives me wilder, leads me straight to the edge and dangles me over it. I thicken in her hands, and she gasps against my mouth.
“Fuck me, Mason. Fuck me hard.”
The red haze that washes over me is all-encompassing. Despite having come three times already, my whole body is caught in a tsunami-sized wave of unexpended lust and ready to crash.
Sensation dovetails into my groin. I’m more than ready to drive into her.
I hook one arm beneath her leg and pull it high. “You ready?” I croak.
“Yes. Give it to me, please. Fill me.”
I watch her gold-washed face, absorbing her every reaction as I drive my cock into her. Each sound she makes dials up my eagerness to learn more about what pleases her. I’m heavily invested in giving her what she wants.
Her mouth drops open on a soundless scream as she sucks me into her tight and hot cunt. “God yes, just like that!”
“Fuck, Keely. Fuck.”
I pull out and surge back in. She shudders beneath me as her back arches and eyes roll. I fuck her harder, faster. I bring my face to hers and drink in her every expression.
I’m a slave to that desperate, slightly crazed look in her eyes, the breathless panting that tells me she can’t get enough of me. I want to fuel it, stroke it so it has no choice but to engulf us both.
Her nails dig into my ass and I give her more. Her delirious pleasure feeds mine and I feel the tightening in my balls.
“God, that feels so good,” she moans.
“Take it, baby. All of it.”
“Yes, yes.”
One hand cups my face and a part of my brain scrambles backwards at the intimacy. The fight it takes not to pull away cools me down long enough to prolong her pleasure. I slide my hand down her sleek back and tease her asshole.
I wait till she breathes out
and plunge my finger inside her ass. Her insides clench hard around me. Stars explode across my vision and it’s all I can do to hold on.
“Oh God, I’m coming, Mason. Oh.” Her breath locks in her throat, and she begins to unravel in a series of convulsions that is spectacular to watch.
Her tight sheath milks me, and I feel the detonation from the soles of my feet.
“Shit, I’m there, baby. I’m going to fill you up.”
Her broken cries release me from the precipice, and I plunge into pleasure. My cock throbs with furious spurts as I flood her insides. Her arms welcome me, and we tremble skin to skin.
When we can breathe without panting, I gather her up and climb the stairs to my suite.
Foregoing the shower, we collapse into bed.
“That was amazing. Thank you,” she says in a drowsy voice.
I kiss her forehead, but don’t respond. A few minutes later, her sweet, heavy weight tells me she’s fallen asleep.
My gaze fixes on the ceiling, and I ignore the panic flaring through me. I feel raw and exposed and I don’t know how to cover myself up. I try to shut myself off, but the bolt won’t connect.
I remind myself that I have nothing worth salvaging inside so it doesn’t matter if the floodgates tear me wide open.
I remind myself that this is only temporary. Nothing is happening here that won’t right itself when I’m back in Roraima. I breathe deep and open my mind to the dense and wild silence of the Amazon.
All I smell is Keely’s warm body and intoxicating scent.
On the ceiling of my mind, big red numbers count down loudly from ninety-five. When it reaches sixty, I growl fuck you, close my eyes and bury my face in Keely’s hair.
Chapter 18
Keely
I jerk awake in the middle of the night. I’m disoriented for a minute in the pitch blackness. When memory hits, my flash wide eyes.
I’m alone.
When I put my hand on his pillow, Mason’s side of the king-sized bed is cold. I try not to freak out at the crazy thoughts swirling through my head. After what happened to me six years ago, I’ve never fallen asleep with a stranger. And although he told me a few eyebrow raising, deeply personal things last night that I suspect very few people know, he’s still a near stranger. Which makes falling asleep in his bed, in his house, a stupid thing to do. I move around in the darkness and turn on the bedside lamp, then make sure I’m really alone in the room.
There may be a perfectly good reason why Mason’s not here. Maybe he woke up with a crazy idea for another contraption or sexy robot assistant, and he just had to get on it before he lost it. I get like that sometimes.
Or maybe he’s an insomniac. Seriously, there may be a thousand different benign reasons why he’s not in here with me.
Chill, Keely.
I sit up and look around the stylishly minimalist room. Nothing in here tells me what time it is. My purse and phone are both downstairs so there’s no way to check. I slowly lie back and put my head on Mason’s pillow. His scent fills my nostrils, and I smile at the delicious aches in my body.
After my five-month long dry spell and a good few years of mediocre sex, I’ve well and truly hit it out of the park with Mason.
He’s given me the sort of sex women wrote in girly fonts in their diaries and brag about to their less lucky girlfriends over cocktails.
Bethany is going to get an earful the moment I’m out of earshot of Mason Sinclair and his sexy, eavesdropping robot.
Crap, the robot...
I jerk the covers over my nudity when I realize Mason only mentioned audio files earlier. I never though to ask him about cameras. Surely he wouldn’t do something so intrusive?
Reassuring myself doesn’t work, especially not when my mind throws up our conversation in the kitchen. The cold and clinical testimony of his deliberate cruelty toward his family sends another shiver down my spine.
The man who’d fucked me so thoroughly on the sofa was the kind of man to gossip to girlfriends about. The man in the kitchen was capable of just about anything. Including secretly recording our sex for whatever purpose he might choose somewhere down the line.
The thought disturbs me enough to send me out of bed. Since my clothes are still in the wash, I grab a cashmere blanket from the bottom of the bed and wrap it around my shoulders.
Mason had given me a brief tour after our shower earlier, but the mansion is immense, easily big enough to accommodate five families, and I get hopelessly lost several times before I decide to give up. Making my way back to the central staircase, I hear a sound coming from a room at the end of the second floor hallway.
I approach quietly, not wanting to disturb Mason if he’s working. Lights flicker from beneath a heavy closed door, but I hear the sound of faint laughter before it stops. I bite my lip and toy with retreating back to bed. The clock I passed in one of the many hallways read three a.m. Early morning haunting hour, and I decide that whatever Mason has gotten out of bed for is none of my business.
I start to turn away, but the repeated sound of laughter stops me. A child’s laughter, joyous and unfettered. A few seconds later, it cuts off again.
My heart pounds as I put my ear to the door and shamelessly eavesdrop. The irony doesn’t escape me that I’m doing the same thing I ripped into Mason for doing the first time we met. When the door swings an inch inward, my heart jumps into my throat. I freeze and wait for Mason’s inevitable appearance and the reciprocal ripping to follow.
Nothing happens.
Fuck it.
I refuse to cower behind the door like a naked, cowardly thief. I knock lightly. “Mason?”
Nothing but silence greets my knock. I take a deep breath and push the door open wider.
The outer edges are shrouded in darkness, but the center of the room is bathed in sky blue light reflected from the screen. My gaze skates across what turns out to be a cavernous cinema room to the single occupant in a large club chair.
Mason is seated upright, staring dead ahead at his screen, a remote clutched in his fist.
“Mason?” I try again.
He doesn’t respond, but my instincts tell me this isn’t one of his mind-fuck silences. He has no awareness that I’m there.
My gaze darts to the screen, and I see a freeze frame of a boy of about five or six with dark brown hair. His head is turned away from the camera, but I see the curve of cheek and chubby chin, and it’s clear he’s laughing.
My breath catches as Mason lifts his hand and points the remote at the screen. The picture jerks through frozen slow motion, and the boy’s face gradually swivels toward the camera.
He’s gorgeous, with warm hazel eyes, a button nose and mischievous expression. He’s missing one front tooth, but his smile is so broad it almost splits his face. My insides twist painfully as I stare at the screen.
A sound rips through the room and cuts like a knife through me, drawing my attention back to Mason. With each frame, I watch his face morph into a mask of raw agony.
But that’s not the only expression on Mason’s face. My heart stops as I read the other emotion: murderous, incendiary rage.
The boy’s face fills the screen and Mason presses the button to hold it.
I’m not sure how long we all stay frozen. My brain tries to grapple with the myriad reasons for the naked anguish blanketing him and the tears filling his eyes. None of them are good, and I’ve known enough anguish of my own to accept that in this case, Occam’s Razor will prevail. I’m staring into the heart of a worst case scenario, and I die inside as I stand there, knowing I can’t offer the man who saved me from an icy death anything worth a damn.
When I finally force my legs to work, I retreat silently and make my way back to the bedroom. I lie awake, torn between sneaking downstairs to hunt down my clothes so I can make a quick, cowardly getaway, and waiting for Mason to return. I’m not sure what I’ll do when the latter happens, but it seems like the better thing to do. Creeping away in the middle of the night
because I don’t want to confront potentially heart-shredding revelations reeks of self-preservation, and I’m well within my right to do so, especially in light of my actively fleeing my own secrets.
But leaving feels wrong.
I stare at the exquisite crown moldings that decorate the ceiling, my hands gripping the sheets hard enough to cause my palms and knuckles to scream out in pain. I don’t let go because I don’t want the pain to go away. I don’t want to swap this superficial pain for the one that lies seeping poison beneath the surface of my mind.
But it’s already rising.
I see his face. The cutest nose. His tiny, perfect hands. Eyes of indeterminate color framed by the most perfectly tipped lashes. I remember the absurd thought I’d had looking into his eyes. How glad I’d been that they were nothing like mine. Because then he wouldn’t see into mine, wouldn’t know the dark, horrific thoughts lurking in my heart, eating away at the fierce love I’d felt for him the brief time I’d held him in my arms.
He’d screamed as the thought had grown. Loud enough to attract concerned nurses to find out if he was okay. I’d wanted to join in the screaming, shout that of course, he wasn’t okay. How could he ever be?
How could I?
Come to think of it, I may have screamed. Because that blessed pinprick had taken everything away to a land of fluffy clouds dripping red rain. And by the time I woke again, all was well. My mind was as empty as my arms, and the only thought that caused me the briefest discomfort was which shade of Jello to have.
Pressure builds in my head and chest and I jerk to the side. My breath explodes from my lungs in sickening gulps as I try not to cry out. But one sob emerges, followed by a dozen before I force myself to stop crying. I have no right to tears. I have no right to grief.
How can I, when I gave my own child away seconds after he was born?
###
Sunshine pours through half-open curtains the next time I open my eyes. My face is tight from dried tears, and I’m still alone in Mason’s bedroom.
I debate whether to take this turn of events in my stride, like the tough take-no-shit Brooklyn girl I’ve falsely projected all these years, or curl into a pathetic ball and feel sorry for myself. I suck in a breath and opt for the former. I’d known coming into this that it wouldn’t be sustainable for more than one or two brief encounters, three tops.
