Saving Sara (Masters of the Castle) (18 page)

She didn’t say
“to me,” but they both heard it anyway.

“Nothing that involves a match,” he assured. “Trust me.”

He was the second Dom to say that to her in the last two days. Sara twisted to look away, feeling none of the light-hearted laughter of only a moment before. Her heart was pounding now. Each breath was coming right on the tail of the last. She tried to slow it and control it.

“Look at me, Sara.”

She didn’t want to. He could read her too easily. She turned her head, letting his dark eyes capture hers once more.

“Can you trust me?” Jackson asked.

That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it?

Sara had no idea how she should answer.

Jackson took the stairs slowly, offering up his arm for support and giving Sara plenty of time to negotiate on her stiff leg. Something told him she probably didn’t need it, but this support wasn’t just for her physical limitations. It was for the mental ones, too, and there were a lot of those. He could see all the little doubts she wouldn’t give voice to piling on top of her, but she kept moving, her limp quite pronounced as she took each step.

She would have preferred, he knew, to spend the rest of her vacation in his apartment, and the selfish part of him wouldn’t have minded that. It was her last day. Tomorrow he was going to have to let her go. There was nothing he’d rather do than spend the day with her in his bed playing Master and submissive games, rocking her sexy little world over and over until she couldn’t walk tomorrow without feeling the effects of it. No, he wouldn’t have minded that at all. But another part of him, a bigger and slightly more desperate part, couldn’t help wondering if he could just reintroduce her to something that made her remember how overwhelmingly right their attraction had been three years ago, then maybe, just maybe, tomorrow’s goodbye wouldn’t have to be a permanent one.

Reaching the bottom first, Jackson looked around. It was crowded—the dungeon always was—but the packed stations were even worse than normal today. Most of the scene stations were already occupied, but no one was playing with fire. That was good. No Robert, either. That was even better.

Holding onto Sara’s hand, Jackson backed up to the wall to let another couple squeeze past him on their way up the stairs and out. Ducking her head so she wouldn’t have to look at them, Sara pressed in close to him. She was rubbing her leg, more a nervous reaction than a result of the old injury. He didn’t for a second think she was exaggerating how uncomfortable taking stairs were for her. Having made love to her now many times over, having touched every inch of her with his hands, mouth, teeth and tongue, he was aware that, texturally, that section of scarring on her hip was the worst and it went deep into the muscle. The more she tried to work that leg, the tighter the twisted flesh became. Rubbing seemed to help her loosen it again, but since prolonged touching also hurt, she usually didn’t rub it long.

“Are you all right?” he asked, giving her the verbal nudge she seemed to need to get moving again.

“Yes.” Sara gave her leg another squeeze and then took that last step down to the bottom landing. She held his hand tightly, worrying her fingers in his as she shot nervous glances back in the direction of her last visit here.

“Come on.” Jackson tugged her hand, leading her in the opposite direction.

The room had the same gloomy overcast atmosphere adopted by fetish dungeons just about everywhere. The music was thumping and the talking seemed a constant rumble. It wasn’t as deafening a din as could be found in the average nightclub, but it wasn’t a library, either. He took her to the far back, where a row of private “torture” chambers was located. There were nine, each closed off from the dungeon proper by a heavy medieval door with barred windows and “unoccupied” signs switched over on all but two of them. Master Dominic ruled here. Jackson couldn’t see him, so it was either his day off or he was occupied in one of the rooms.

Jackson glanced through the barred window of one of the two empty chambers, but it struck him as not much different from letting her hide out in his apartment. As much as he wanted to keep her to himself, he didn’t want to allow that, either.

Still, an open station was an open station. He made a face, but just as he was about to take Sara inside, he noticed an A-frame opening up. The couple currently occupying it was just finishing up their scene—the Dom in black leathers briskly wiping down the leather padding and restraints, while his submissive sat as if stunned on a nearby chair. Even from here, Jackson could see she was still flying high in subspace, waves of endorphin-filled pleasure bringing her slowly back down into the here-and-now. Her Dom paused often during cleanup to touch her, checking to make sure she was okay, brushing her hair back from her face and bending to whisper in her ear.

Studying the A-frame, Jackson pulled Sara closer and wrapped his arms around her. With her back against his chest, he bent to her ear. “What do you think? Want to take a walk with me down memory lane?”

She tensed, her arms tucking in around her stomach as she hugged herself. He angled his head, trying to catch a peek at her face, relieved when he saw it wasn’t fear so much as wanting haunting her features as she stared at the A-frame.

“I haven’t done that since Shadowbrook,” she confessed.

Perfect.

He rubbed her stomach, then her shoulders, and leaned in to whisper in her ear. “Deep breaths, baby girl. I’m going to go help him clean his station. When I’m done, I want you to come take your position while I find a good flogger. You and I, we’re going to take a first-class trip to heaven.”

She breathed in, excitement and trepidation both lighting her face. “Okay.”

Giving her shoulders and back a brief massage, Jackson left her there and went to help clear the other couple off the equipment he wanted. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one to spot the opportunity to claim a not-yet vacated station. He barely beat another man to the A-frame, receiving a dirty look for his efforts, but he got there first and that was all that mattered.

“Go take care of your submissive,” he said, tugging a disposable wipe from one of two boxes near the station. “I’ve got this.”

The leather-clad Dom looked up at him in surprise. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.” Jackson summoned up one of his most disarming smiles, but the other man had already tossed his wipe in the garbage and turned back to his starry-eyed submissive. An attentive Dom who knew how to give good aftercare: Jackson didn’t know the man, but he liked him instantly.

Helping his dazed submissive back into a silky slavegirl dress, the Dom pulled her to her feet. He held her, one arm slung around her waist while her knees wobbled. Her back—exposed by the low cut of her costume—was bright pink and latticed by only a handful of welts, but she was smiling and moving with the same somnambulistic slowness of a woman lost in the afterglow of deep orgasm. Guiding her stumbling steps, her man laughed at something she must have said under her breath
, and together they disappeared into the crowd.

Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw Sara move closer. She stopped to stand at the very edge of the station, still looking at the cross. There was no trace of her earlier nervousness anywhere about her. A softness had taken over her expression. Obviously, her memories of the time he’d had her on a cross, just like this one, were pleasant ones. Her corset was too stiff to show the little peaks of her nipples, but Jackson was willing to bet they were stiff little buds thrusting out against the fabric, rubbing against the confines with every breath that filled her chest and
making the rounding of her soft breasts that much rounder.

The old proverb was right: the eyes really were the windows to the soul, and in Sara’s, he saw a wanting so deep and primal that it pulled at him. His groin grew hot and tight. His cock stirred. He held out his hand and she came to him, her soft lips parting as he slid his fingers back along her cheek, combing them past her ear and into her long blonde hair. He loved the feel of wrapping those soft tresses around his palm and wrist. He loved the way her eyes closed and her whole body seemed to mold against him, softening submissively when he closed his fist in the tangles at her scalp and brought her mouth to his.

He kissed her, partly because he wanted to rob her of her awareness of all the people around them, both the voyeurs and those already deep in scenes of their own, and partly because he just couldn’t help himself.

“You are for me,” he breathed into her. “No one else matters. For as long as we are in this space, it’s just you and me. Take off your clothes, Sara. I want you to take your position on the frame and wait for me. You’ve been a very good girl, baby. This is going to be nothing but fun for both of us.”

He kissed her, letting his passion reaffirm that last thought. He could feel her trembling now, soft in his arms, with a smattering of goosebumps breaking out over her skin, though he knew she couldn’t be cold. The dungeon was always kept just a little warm, specifically so naked submissives would not be uncomfortable. Still, Jackson stroked his hands up and down her arms, but one look in her eyes told him cold wasn’t what she was feeling.

Good. Her senses were heightening, her eyes just a little unfocused. She was getting her head where it needed to be to submit to his whip. A soft-tailed flogger—that's what he would use. This was all about pleasure and reward.

Leaving her to prepare herself, he walked off into the crowd. The dungeon proper was fairly long, a series of adjoined rooms with multiple exits, a hidden elevator, several secret passages, an oubliette for the serious game players, nine private rooms plus two more anything-goes aftercare rooms, three sets of men and women’s bathrooms and one clearly-marked implement-return station lined up along the wall. After use, each implement had to be checked to make sure it was sanitary to return to public use. If not, it was sent home with the user as a memento and replaced with something brand new. The station itself was manned twenty-four hours a day by an employee (never a client) whose sole job it was to inspect every item as it was returned. It was a bottom-of-the-ladder job—the sort of thing usually assigned to new hires and Little Maids while they were still learning the ropes and the rules. If there were a more tedious and boring position in the Castle, Jackson couldn’t for the life of him think what it was. And it was for that reason that some truly sadistic Masters sometimes used it as a punishment. As Jackson approached the counter, he suspected that might be the case here.

He smiled one of his rare and genuine smiles and folded his arms to lean against the counter. “Hi, Hannah.”

The petite brunette on the other side pretended to be too busy inspecting her way through a short stack of paddles to look up at him. “Hi,” she said, sulking.

Unlike previous attendants, she was not dressed as a Little Maid. Rather, her sheer white garment was that of a pampered Gorean slave, little more than a drape of silk that covered her breasts in front and another draped in back to cover her bottom. Sam must have been in a mood. She was even wearing the locking steel slave bands around her neck, wrists and ankles.

“Having a hard day?” He tried to hide his amusement with sympathy, but Hannah saw right through it.

She flashed him a mutinous glare and, just as quickly, averted her eyes back to the paddle she was wiping down. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she grumbled. “You’ll take his side.”

“Probably. Sam usually has a pretty level grip on what he deems appropriate.” He wondered if Sam ever felt shaken out of perspective when it came to Hannah.

Hannah’s frown deepened. She jumped up from where she was sitting and snapped away from him on the pretense of putting the paddle away on its hook. She stood there, facing the wall for a time, but when she finally turned back to him, some of her irritation had faded into despair. She came back to her chair and slumped down into the seat, picking up the next implement, a heavy flogger, without interest. She picked at the long tails.

“What happened?” Jackson coaxed.

“I told him no.” She gave him a sidelong look and then sniffled. “Apparently, I don’t get to do that, except under certain circumstances of which this morning was not one.”

“Ah.”

She slid him another disgruntled look. She also sniffled again, but if she was looking for sympathy, she was crying to the wrong Dom. “He’s going to cane me.”

Jackson tsked. Hannah was his friend, but then, so was Sam. No way was he about to get into the middle of this.

“I hate the cane,” she said, more to herself than to him.

“Sounds like an effective punishment then.”

“Oh, I knew it! I knew you were going to side with him!”

Pushing back off the counter, Jackson came around to her side. He dropped a kiss onto her bowed head, selected two floggers off the wall—one a soft suede and the other only slightly more serious—and then patted her shoulder. “You can always say your safeword.”

The look she shot him couldn’t have been any more incredulous if he’d instead suggested she cane Sam. “Are you serious? I can’t do that!”

“Why not?” he challenged.

“Because!” she snapped, throwing the flogger on the desk in disgust. “I screwed up, so I deserve it, right?”

“Wrong,” Jackson snapped right back, “and you know better than that, too. So try again.”

She withstood his censuring frown for only a few seconds before the defiance she was trying so hard to rally withered into, for Hannah, a rare show of defeat and bewilderment. Although quick with a smile, she almost never let her real feelings show. Now however, as he stood looking down at her, he saw a measure of fragility steal over her. She tried to pretend preoccupation with the tails of the flogger again, but gave up after combing her fingers through it only once.

“Look around,” she finally said, her shoulders sagging. “Look at all the women here.”

Jackson didn’t need to look around; he saw them all the time. He kept his gaze locked where it needed to be—on Hannah, while in the back of his mind, for some strange reason he found himself back in that hospital in California, sitting at the edge of Sara’s bed, holding her good hand in his while he promised to take care of her. He saw
, too, the way she had looked back at him. Though she’d nodded and tried to hide it with a smile, underneath it was the same look Hannah was giving him now.